The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  She looked at him suspiciously. “You’ve met someone, haven’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  She continued to study his face. “Because you’re trying to push me away, just when we should be drawing together. I’m just as shaken as you are. I’ve been having nightmares. Has it ever occurred to you that I might need you more than the people downtown? Why won’t you let this be a fresh start? Eveybody’s reevaluating their lives. Asking themselves what really matters.”

  “At our age, fresh starts are harder to come by. History accumulates. Just because we’ve been attacked, that doesn’t give everybody a clean slate. I can’t just forget everything that’s been going wrong with us just because we’re scared about the future.”

  She knelt in front of him and put her arms around him, kissing his neck, teasing his earlobe with the tip of her tongue. “Maybe I can help you forget,” she whispered. “It’s been too long.” Her right hand moved from his shoulder to his lap, reaching for his zipper.

  “Much too long,” he said, feeling somewhat revolted. “I’ve been waiting a long time for you, and now you’ll have to wait for me.”

  When she pulled his zipper down, he pushed her hand away.

  “Fine,” she said, rising to her feet. “You go hang out in the rubble with the good girls. We’ll be in Sagaponack.”

  She turned and left the room, leaving him to regret his intractability as he wondered if perhaps she was capable of changing after all, if she might be ready to come back to him just at the very moment he’d given up on her, as he savored the unfamiliar taste of marital guilt.

  20

  The stillness of 3:00 a.m. was sullied by a conflict among the volunteers over who would make the next trip to the site, half a dozen of them engaged in a tug-of-war over a shopping cart loaded with supplies.

  “You can go next time.”

  “Who put you in charge?”

  “Why don’t we all go?”

  “We can’t all go. It’s supposed to be two people. That’s what Jerry said. They’re not putting on a fucking show.”

  “Well, I’ve been here for seven hours.”

  “We all have. Besides, I have a cousin who’s missing in there.”

  “Funny you didn’t mention it before.”

  “What was I supposed to do, announce it to everybody?”

  “Hey,” Luke said, stepping into the melee. “Let’s remember why we’re all here,” he said, seizing the overturned coffee urn. “We’re talking about a mass grave. How about a little fucking respect.” Appalled to the point of wanting to slap somebody, he was also conscious of performing for Corrine, to whom he hoped to appear a figure of stoic dignity, a lone ranger of the downtown canyons. No better than the rest of them, obviously.

  At the end of the shift, he walked her to within a block of her door. In the bright light of the morning, just short of the corner of West Broadway and Worth, he pressed her against a doorway and kissed her. She struggled to break free even as she succumbed, and he could tell that her shame at this transgression and her fear of discovery were compounding her excitement.

  “We can’t,” she said, pulling free of him and running to the corner before turning and coming back to kiss him once more….

  He was still giddy with the memory when he walked into the apartment and saw Sasha coming down the hallway. He tried to remember what day it was—thinking the two of them were still supposed to be in the Hamptons.

  “I didn’t expect you back so early,” he said, hearing a note of guilt in his own voice.

  Her face was pale and drawn, her left eye twitching. “I tried to call you,” she said.

  “My battery’s dead. What is it?”

  “Luke, please don’t be furious with me.”

  “What’s happened? Where’s Ashley?”

  “I just left her.”

  “Left her where?”

  “Lenox Hill.”

  “The hospital?”

  She threw herself at him and clutched the open collar of his shirt.

  “Oh, Luke, I had no idea.”

  “The fucking hospital?” But if she was in the hospital, he reasoned, feeling Sasha’s tears on his neck, didn’t that mean she was still alive?

  “An overdose,” she sobbed.

  He tried to absorb this information as he led her to the living room, reviewing the recent past for signs and clues. Ashley took drugs? Surely he would know. He lowered Sasha to the couch and sat beside her.

  “But she’s… alive.”

  Sasha nodded, wiping her eyes.

  “I thought you were in the Hamptons,” he said, as if by poking holes in this story he might demonstrate its absurdity.

  “I was. But at the last minute, Ashley wanted to stay in town with Bethany.”

  “You went out alone? You left her here?”

  Her expression then was so frightened and vulnerable that he could almost imagine forgiving her everything in advance, even as he considered the implications of Sasha going to the Hamptons without Ashley. She would hardly have gone out to be alone, not being the sort of girl who believed in the virtues of solitude and reflection.

  “And she stayed with Bethany?” He felt as if he were quizzing a child.

  She nodded. “I didn’t know the Traynors were out of town.”

  “You didn’t even check with Mitsy?”

  “I trusted Ashley.”

  He chose not to challenge this self-serving assertion, wanting to get to the point.

  “Bethany called me around three a.m. She was hysterical. She said Ashley was sick and they were taking her to the emergency room.” She sniffled and tried to compose herself.

  “What kind of drugs?”

  She shrugged. “A little of everything. That’s what they told me at the hospital.”

  “A little?”

  “I guess not.”

  He suddenly imagined something worse. “You don’t think it was deliberate?”

  She seemed shocked. “Why would Ashley want to kill herself?”

  “You haven’t talked to her?”

  “Of course I have. I got there by four. She just kept saying she was sorry.”

  “How did you get in to the city so fast?”

  She looked down at her hands, spread open on her knees. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t suppose it matters,” he said.

  His bitter tone seemed to rouse Sasha to her own defense. “I tried to call you. I didn’t know what to do. All that mattered was getting to the city as soon as possible. So I called the only person I knew who had a helicopter at his disposal.”

  “You’re right,” he said, realizing he might well have been kissing Corrine while his wife was frantically calling. “I wasn’t there when you needed me.”

  She took his hand and pressed it to her cheek.

  “I suppose we need to line up some place for treatment.”

  “I was thinking Silver Meadows. Gini Danvers just got out a few months ago. She had this huge Vicodin problem and she said it’s genius.”

  He was accustomed to hearing this superlative applied with italicized enthusiasm to shoes, restaurants, new exercise regimens. But in this context, it pissed him off. To his mind, Silver Meadows was the therapeutic equivalent of Round Hill, Hobe Sound, or Saint Barth’s, a venerable facility in Connecticut for the treatment of neurotic ailments from which the rich had always suffered.

  “Just because your fucked-up friends go there doesn’t mean it’s the best place for Ashley. Maybe we could break the mold just for once and do what’s right for her, instead of what the local narcissists are doing. That’s what got us where we are now.”

  Luke was relieved that she was asleep when he found her in the hospital. He wanted to forgive her, and to love her in the old way, but even as he gently wiped a string of saliva from her cheek, he kept seeing a mask of lust superimposed on her gaunt unconscious face.

  Later, as he slept in the chair beside her bed, he saw again the woman of hi
s nightmares, Our Lady of Ground Zero, struggling free of the body bag he held in his arms, faceless beneath the bangs of her dark hair, while the firemen laughed and laughed. When he woke, stiff-necked and basted with sweat, Ashley was regarding him fearfully from the bed.

  “You were squirming and whimpering in your sleep,” she said.

  “Nightmares.”

  “I’m sorry, Dads.”

  He nodded. “Help me understand.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “What happened?”

  She laughed bitterly. “What didn’t?”

  “How long have you been doing drugs?”

  “You have no fucking idea what my life is like.” She rolled on her side, turning her back toward him, jerking the IV tube in her left arm and rattling the hardware on which it was suspended.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” He sighed, sat in the chair, and waited. If not for the digital readout on the cable box—12:16—he wouldn’t have had a clue what time it was.

  “It’s all so…” She seemed to despair of going further.

  “So what, honey?”

  “I don’t know. Just like for example, I’m finally in the upper school, and I’m thinking things will be less stupid and juvenile. But the day before classes start, there’s this really stupid initiation where the senior girls make us do all this weird shit—I was locked in a dark closet for like an hour; then I had to call up some boy I didn’t know and say dirty things into the phone and then pretend to give a blow job to a banana in front of all the other girls and the seniors—it’s kind of stupid, but it’s this big tradition at Sprague. I’m kind of amazed the school lets them do it, actually. And then we had to put on these hideous clothes and smear toothpaste in our hair and they made us up to look like cheap hookers and we had to walk fifteen blocks down Third to this place called Manolo’s, which is famous for serving anyone who’s not in diapers, and we did shots of sambuca in the back room and put spaghetti in our bras. It’s all kind of lame, but it’s this tradition, and the girls who don’t do it—all the upper-school girls will ostracize them and make their lives miserable for the next few years. So we go along with it, and it actually felt kind of cool getting through it and it wasn’t that bad. It’s all about belonging to a tribe, and not getting pushed out into the jungle, where you starve to death and the hyenas eat you. My friend Kelly—you remember her—she didn’t show up for the initiation, even though she said she would, and now I’m worried about her, because all the other girls were cool, and if the seniors put out the word, then we probably won’t even be able to hang out with her. It was just so dumb of her. I mean, it’s pretty fierce in my class—we’ve got all these alpha girls like Bethany and Amber and Katrina. Veronica Hanes didn’t come back to school this year. They basically drove her away. I told you about her—she was the one who was like really, really pretty, beautiful, I guess you’d say. She used to get home after school and dump out her purse and she’d have like ten business cards—these guys would just come up to her and give her their cards, not just photographers and model scouts but these horny businessmen. Her parents finally got a driver for her, some Polish refugee who drove her around in this beat-up station wagon. But the thing is that the cool girls just turned on her last year. It’s like she was too pretty, and she was also a really talented artist, but she just never quite fit in. So suddenly Bethany and Amber decided to shun her, and Katrina actually cut off half her hair one day in the locker room. I mean, can you believe it? And finally she couldn’t take it anymore—she transferred to Spence, which we just found out when we went back to school.”

  She stopped abruptly, just as he was becoming lulled by the rhythm of her voice. He sat up and said, “Are you saying you did drugs to fit in?”

  She sighed in exasperation. “No, not really. I don’t know what I was saying. I guess I was saying, Who wouldn’t want to escape all of this shit?” She started to sniffle. “Everything’s changing, everything’s falling apart. I wish I was still lying on the beach. I wish I was still lying on the beach and I was six years old and nobody had died and the summer still lasted forever. It used to seem like it did, just on and on and on, and nothing bad ever happened.”

  21

  Corrine almost skipped the party. None of this ever would have happened, and Russell’s life certainly would have been different, and better, if he hadn’t twisted her lightly downed and freckled arm, which, he couldn’t help noticing at the time, was lately dry and almost powdery to the touch.

  “It will do us good to get out,” he’d said. “Besides, Hilary must have gotten bored with policemen, because she called up this afternoon and offered to baby-sit.”

  “I’m sorry, it just seems weird,” Corrine replied. “I’m not in the partying mood. I don’t see how anyone could be.”

  “Well, the poor girl didn’t plan on spoiling a national tragedy by having a book party. She’s not going to sell eight copies. The least we can do is lend a little moral support.”

  “Fine, you go.”

  “You know Nan—it’s her book. You like her.”

  “I like her fine, she’s great, but I certainly don’t loom so large in her universe that she’ll notice if I’m not there.”

  “I’ll notice. I want you to come with me.” Oddly enough, this was true. He was acutely conscious of the bifurcation of their social life in recent years. After the kids were born, they’d started to go out separately, ostensibly to take turns baby-sitting. He didn’t want to do that anymore. If something else happened, he said, he didn’t want to be apart from her on the other end of town, one of them trapped in a building or a subway car full of gas or biotoxins. He suddenly found himself afraid to be alone, even for short periods of time, whereas she seemed somehow more independent.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m not going if you’re not.”

  “Don’t be a martyr. Go. Take Hilary.”

  “I don’t want to take Hilary. What would she do at a book party? I’d have to spend an hour and a half explaining to her what a book is.”

  “You know she’s writing a novel. And if I’m not mistaken, Washington seemed kind of interested, in his perverse way.”

  “Yeah, and I’m starting a hedge fund. I am not taking Hilary. I want to take my wife.” Having expected her to appreciate his change of heart, his new uxoriousness, he instead felt as if he’d returned home after a long journey, only to find the house empty.

  “Oh God,” she said, with an exasperated sigh of acquiescence. “What am I supposed to wear?”

  The checkpoints had been moved down from Canal Street to Chambers, ending the siege of their neighborhood, although the fact that the southern tip of the island was still sealed off reduced the flow of cabs uptown. At the corner stood one of Verizon’s mobile phone–transmission vans, which had actually improved cell service in the area.

  They waited for several minutes in silence before Russell spotted a cab down the avenue. Corrine had deliberately underdressed, wearing her least sexy jeans and a little TSE cashmere top, to make a statement: She might be at the party, but it was under protest and she didn’t feel remotely festive.

  “Do you ever think about Jeff?” he asked, after they were settled in the cab.

  “You mean lately?”

  “I’ve been thinking about him a lot the last couple weeks.”

  “I suppose it’s not surprising,” she said. “It’s like an earthquake that suddenly uncovers these ancient ruins. The sediments of memory all stirred up.”

  “Did I ever tell you I forgave you?” he said.

  “I’m not sure you did. I’m not even sure how I feel about that.”

  He looked over, surprised, but said nothing.

  They drove several blocks in silence, long enough to signify that the subject had shifted, not away from Jeff but from the infidelity.

  “I think it’s partly because of Jim,” he said.

  “What is?” she asked after a couple of blocks.

  It
seemed to him she was being intentionally obtuse. Maybe she was punishing him for making her go to the party.

  “I mean, Jeff was my best friend, and Jim kind of took his place. Not that you can make the same kind of friends after you’re thirty. And they both got taken away in a kind of mass catastrophe.”

  She nodded.

  “Not that it was the same. I mean, obviously there was a self-destructive aspect to Jeff’s death.”

  “Well, duh,” Corrine said. “Shooting smack and fucking every coke whore in town qualifies as high-risk behavior.”

  Russell was shocked at her vehemence. Whatever happened, he wondered, to the hazy, romantic glow of memory? “I can’t help wondering about Jim,” he said finally. “Not that he was self-destructive the way Jeff was, not that he really stopped to calculate the actuarial risks of running into a flaming disaster zone. But I don’t know, maybe if his marriage had been happier, if his career had been in better shape, maybe he wouldn’t have been quite so…”

  His voice trailed off. He didn’t like hearing what he was saying.

  “Precipitous?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I think he was just a good guy, with a good heart, who was following his instincts.”

  Why did he sense a rebuke hidden in this remark?

  As they climbed the stairs of the town house—occupied by a prominent literary power couple, a writer and an editor whose enduring marriage was a source of wonder in the publishing world—Russell called Corrine’s attention to the lower door, just below street level.

  “That’s Gay’s office,” he said. “He gets up every morning, dudes himself up in one of his bespoke suits, has breakfast, waves good-bye to Nan, puts a hat on his head, and a coat, depending on the season, then walks out this door and down the stairs to the lower door and into his office. A ritualistic preparation for his workday, a kind of symbolic commute.”

  “That’s what you always say when we come here.”

  The party was a somber affair, even by the relatively tame standards of contemporary publishing events, absent the kind of vicious gossip and social swordplay that usually enlivened such gatherings. Everyone on best behavior. Guests were directed outside to the back garden, where a tent had been set up. The turnout was better than Russell would have expected. He realized that they were all probably grateful to have an excuse to convene. Even though the grapevine had long since accounted for everyone in their community, the guests seemed to be reassured to see one another in the flesh. Russell found himself greeting everyone with genuine warmth and affection, most especially the editors with whom he had feuded and the writers he had rejected or bad-mouthed in the past. The usual business chatter had been largely supplanted by current events—the likelihood of war, Judy Miller’s anthrax scare, the narrow escapes of friends, the miserable business prospects. Claiming to be acquainted with one of the principals, Dave Whitlock told Russell the story about the Trade Center guy who, after his regular Tuesday-morning tryst at the Plaza, called his wife at eleven o’clock to assuage his guilt and was confounded by her hysteria and relief. Russell glanced nervously at his wife’s stony face as Whitlock paused for dramatic emphasis: “‘Where are you?’ asks the wife. ‘In my office,’ he lies, while his mistress puts on her makeup in the bathroom.”