The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  “That’s the third time I’ve heard that story, Whit.”

  “Well, it’s a small world,” he said before drifting off.

  Russell kept close to Corrine’s side as they moved toward the bar, where they were stalled in a clutch of young assistants talking animatedly about the new Franzen novel. Then he bumped into Buck Calder, with whom he always talked about wine, and introduced him to Corrine.

  “Did you hear?” Buck said. “They just stumbled on the wine cellar from Windows. Not a stick of furniture left, but thousands of bottles survived.”

  Russell lost his composure briefly when their hostess came over and, taking his hands, told him how sorry she was about Jim, who’d once optioned a novel by one of her authors. “Will there be a memorial service?” she asked.

  “Officially, he’s still missing,” Russell said.

  “You’ll let me know?”

  “Absolutely.”

  As she drifted off to greet new arrivals, he looked up and saw Trisha, his former assistant, hovering just over Nan’s shoulder.

  Shocked as he was, he couldn’t say he was entirely surprised; somehow, he’d always feared that this moment would arrive and, in waking nightmares, imagined versions of it. Trisha looked gleefully deranged, her eyes boring in on him. His initial panic subsided as he considered that her presence was not so unlikely or necessarily ominous. She was, or at least had been, in publishing; she’d probably come along with a friend.

  He took Corrine’s arm and steered her toward the back part of the garden. Looking back over his shoulder, Russell almost collided with his former boss, Harold Stone, who was standing forlornly beside his wife, clutching a drink, looking more than ever like a great horned owl, with his beaky lips and the unkempt late-life eyebrows that rose into twin peaks halfway up his forehead.

  At this point, Harold was such a monument, you could almost imagine the dandruff on his shoulders as pigeon shit. Russell tried to recall how old he might be now—seventy? A junior member of the old Partisan Review crowd, protg of Hellman and Arendt, lover of McCarthy, friend of Mailer, Bellow, and Roth, mentor to Sontag, he’d more or less invented the trade paperback book, publishing serious work in a format that had previously been reserved for romance and detective novels. His deep involvement with leftist politics hadn’t prevented him from acquiring a modest fortune, just in time to retire with dignity when what remained of Corbin Dern, the publishing house he’d presided over, was folded into a vast multinational empire. The two men hadn’t spoken to each other in years, since Russell had led the attempt to buy the company out from under him in 1987, although they’d crossed paths frequently at events like these. But now Harold greeted Russell with his closest approximation of a human smile, as if he were finally prepared to bury the hatchet. One of the small miracles of the aftermath—although it was hard to be certain, since Harold had always acted as if he considered social grace a sign of intellectual weakness. The smile that Russell conjured up must have looked even more gruesome and artificial as Harold introduced his wife and he, in turn, reintroduced Corrine, who’d met Harold many times, while hoping that the menace at his back would disappear. But as he waited for someone to carry the conversation forward, Trisha appeared, edging into the foursome.

  She stood beside them, holding a glass of white wine, while Harold mumbled something about Afghanistan. When Harold paused to take a sip of his drink, she held out her hand.

  “Hi, I’m Trisha Wilcox. A real honor to meet you.”

  Harold reluctantly extended his hand, regarding her with pained forbearance. Another man would have then introduced his wife, but Harold seemed to feel that he had done more than his duty by accepting her tribute. Besides, Trisha had other priorities.

  “So, this is Corrine,” she said, smiling brightly, “who doesn’t give blow jobs.”

  For a moment, Russell hoped that Corrine’s innate poise, her reserves of patrician hauteur, might carry her through this situation. She examined the interloper, looking her up and down as if she were a dog that had sidled up and started to hump her leg. But as she turned to Russell, her composure crumbled into a look of bewilderment that contained a plea for explanation and deliverance. She might have just been shot, gaping at him and then turning again to look at this unknown petite assassin. When she looked back at Russell, her confusion had been replaced with comprehension. Later, he remembered being impressed by how quickly she had grasped the import and meaning of these ugly words and the situation, giving her credit, in retrospect, for understanding it all in an instant—he had always foreseen her clinging desperately to her fondest illusions.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” Corrine said coolly.

  “I’m Trisha,” she said. “You might remember me answering the phone at the office, although you probably don’t, but either way, your husband has been screwing me for two years.”

  Russell wished to qualify this statement, which was not entirely accurate, and, for that matter, to point out the utter inappropriateness of the moment. It was a time of national mourning, for Christ’s sake.

  “Or perhaps I should say, not exactly screwing,” Trisha continued, “but sodomizing. He was actually quite scrupulous about that, mostly, about not fucking me per se. He has a Clintonian construction on the notion of fidelity.”

  Russell reflexively flinched as Trisha reached into her giant canvas purse. For a moment, he was absolutely certain that her hand was going to come out clutching a pistol, with which she would shoot him. He’d been expecting as much. Her emotional imbalance, her dangerous unpredictability, being somehow an inextricable component of the thrill he couldn’t help seeking again and again, though he vowed each morning after to forswear it. He had even dreamed the scene—a movie premiere, an awards ceremony, which ended when his mistress stepped out of the crowd outside the theater and shot him dead.

  Now, instead of a handgun, she produced a sheaf of paper, folded in half, which she tried to force on Corrine, who recoiled and drew her hands across her precious buoyant breasts—which, Russell realized with a terrible pang, he might never see or touch or kiss again.

  “Maybe you’d like to read our collected correspondence,” Trisha said. “After all, this is a literary event. Just printed-out E-mail, I’m afraid, not quite as elegant as handwritten billets-doux on Russell’s engraved Crane stationery. I was actually the one who taught him to use E-mail, back when I was his trusty assistant. I guess it’s a generational thing. I mean, I couldn’t believe it when they put him in charge of that whole E-book disaster, like Russell even knew what an E-book was. It really used to amaze me that after I’d given him a blow job he’d ask my advice about software. It’s like there’s a whole new reason for men his age to fuck younger chicks—so that they can get help with their computers after they get their ashes hauled. So how about you, Corrine, do you Yahoo?”

  Russell lunged for her arm, but she dodged away. Silence had set in among the partygoers in the immediate vicinity, an audience forming around them.

  She held out the papers. When Corrine recoiled from this offering, Trisha unfolded the sheaf and leafed through it. “Here’s a good one. Oh, definitely one of my all-time faves. ‘My dearest Trisha. I can’t sleep thinking about you. Corrine is asleep in the other room and all I can think about is you on your knees—’”

  Russell snatched the paper away from her. She fixed him with a smile that in other circumstances would have appeared sweet and generous.

  “‘—in a posture of worship and submission,’” she continued.

  “I refuse to listen to this,” Harold’s wife declared, clutching her husband’s arm, although she seemed frozen to the spot.

  “You see, Russ,” Trisha said, “tawdry and badly written as they are, I’ve memorized them.” She surveyed the audience, which seemed to have expanded in the vast silence around them.

  Even as he thought about lunging at her and strangling her, Russell was thinking that Trisha had qualities beyond her complete and abject sluttish
ness and craven surrender to his filthiest desires, that she was remarkably spirited and clever. But this, of course, was a wildly inappropriate thought.

  Trying to imagine what could possibly be appropriate in this situation, he reached out and touched Corrine’s arm, which she drew back as if snakebitten. He watched as she shrank further and further away from him, though remaining for the moment at his side, the habitual forms of twenty years of companionship having become ingrained, even as lines he’d never seen before creased her forehead and pinched the flesh between her cheeks and her jaw.

  Releasing himself from Corrine’s excoriating gaze, Russell turned to Harold, whose indignation was similar to, but more modulated than, his wife’s. The scowl on Harold’s face communicated a sense of outraged chivalry and also, if Russell read it correctly, a hint that he, Russell, this punk who had tried to buy his company, had now betrayed the team and violated the code of his sex by virtue of providing a glimpse, however inadvertently, into the secret room where male lust and misconduct were properly hidden—an expression that reminded Russell of the time, many years before, when he’d burst into Harold’s office, only to find him groping his assistant.

  He might have been better off if it had been a Glock in the bag, Russell realized as he surveyed his life in ruins: the sad bachelor studio in Yorkville, the awkward scheduled weekends with his children, the lonely nights in front of the TV. He could see Corrine receding and fading away as if he were looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope, even before she stormed out of the garden.

  He ran after her, catching her just inside the house and grabbing her arm.

  Her face was a dry savanna, in which he was already dead—a desiccated corpse, skull in a rictus, half-covered in sand. What could he say? That it was the sordid and one-sided nature of the affair that appealed to him? That as his wife, she lacked the allure of the forbidden? That he wanted love but craved the thrill of selfish carnal indulgence? That lust and respect were inevitably, in his psychology, mutually exclusive? It’s precisely because I respect you, honey. Because you wear white La Perla panties with handmade lace and I wouldn’t expect you to submit to my every lurid wish at three in the morning? The fact that all of these propositions were true did nothing now to ameliorate his guilt.

  She pulled her arm away. “I’ll be going down to the soup kitchen tonight,” she said, “so you might as well sleep in the bed and wake up with the kids. I’ll call and let you know my plans tomorrow.”

  22

  The road seemed to grow narrower, until it threatened to devolve into the ancient game trail that had dictated its sinuous course, encroached upon and overhung with rampant greenery, bordered on one side by a stream and on the other by a crumbling stone wall that tumbled down and rebuilt itself alongside Luke’s Range Rover, broached at intervals by a driveway—bright flashes of white clapboard and windowpane showing through the heavy curtain of foliage. He was racing to make it to their appointment on time; as usual, Sasha had been unable to get out of the apartment at the appointed hour and they’d gotten hung up in the early rush-hour coagulation on 95, got off at the New Canaan exit with only twenty minutes to spare, and now were on a deer path, suspended in a green shade from which, it seemed, they might never emerge.

  “The Billingses have a house in New Canaan,” Sasha said, breaking a ten-minute silence.

  “I thought their place was in Southampton.”

  “They use the New Canaan house on winter weekends so they don’t have to schlepp two hours out to Southampton. A lot of people are doing the three-house thing—one place an hour outside the city and another in the Hamptons for the summer. Like the Carmodys just got a place in Locust Valley for the weekends. He joined Piping Rock for the golf. They close the house in the Hamptons in October.”

  “Huh,” Luke said. He couldn’t wait to tell Corrine about the three-house thing.

  “Well, you’ve got to admit it makes a certain amount of sense.”

  “I love the way you say ‘a lot of people,’ as if this were normal behavior. This is why our daughter’s in the hospital.”

  “Ashley’s in the hospital because the Carmodys have three houses?”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  “We made this life together, Luke. You used to be more competitive than anyone. Remember how you almost bought that winery in Chile after Jake Steinman got his in Sonoma?”

  “Well, I hate to disappoint you, but we won’t be getting the winery or that third house anytime soon. We lost a hell of a lot of money in the last few months.”

  After a suitable and seemly pause: “How bad is it?”

  “Frankly, I’m not even sure we can keep the house in Sagaponack.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “You can look at the accounts yourself.”

  “Have you thought about going back to work?”

  “I’m still trying to come up with something useful to do with the rest of my life.”

  “Many people would consider supporting a family to be useful.”

  “Are we still a family?”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  A discreet white sign with green letters marked the entrance to the facility—a vast expanse of jade lawn dotted with white houses in the indigenous late-colonial style, a tiny Palladian chapel, and a smattering of modernist structures. It was Luke’s first look at this place, which might have been the campus of a New England prep school or college, the kind of school they had always imagined Ashley would attend. She’d been transferred from the hospital to the facility in a private ambulance a few days ago. Luke followed the driveway to the densest cluster of buildings, passing a baseball diamond and tennis courts, then parked in the visitors’ parking lot and followed an arrow to the administration building.

  “May I help you?” asked the receptionist, a muscular black man whose biceps swelled the sleeves of his polo shirt.

  “My name is Luke McGavock, and this is my wife. We have an appointment with Dr. Friedlander.”

  Minutes later, they were ushered into the office of Dr. Friedlander, who rose to greet them—a woman of indeterminate age with a lumpish figure and a thick salt-and-pepper coif, dressed in loose-fitting blue jeans and a white oxford shirt.

  “Luke McGavock. This is my wife, Sasha.”

  He sensed a trace of hostility in her cool look of appraisal. Certainly she was not the sort of woman who, in his experience, would warm to Sasha, even though she’d done her best to look subdued; her gray turtleneck and gray slacks seemed to him only to highlight the lean perfection of her expensive figure.

  “Please, sit.”

  He scanned the office for clues to her personality and taste, which were scarce among diplomas from NYU and Johns Hopkins, a wall of bound professional journals, and a desk whose surface was pristine. A single painting hung on the wall: black idiogrammatic slashes against a white ground.

  “Is that a Kline?” Sasha asked, nodding toward the canvas.

  Luke rolled his eyes. Did she really imagine that’s what would be hanging in a doctor’s office?

  “It was painted by a patient,” Dr. Friedlander said without turning to look.

  “Will Ashley be joining us?” Sasha asked. Luke knew she was nervous, but her tone struck him as impatient and imperious.

  “We feel it’s important, especially with a younger patient, to involve the family in the therapeutic process, but we don’t think Ashley’s quite ready for a family conference. In fact, she specifically asked us to postpone your visit. Still, we believe it’s important to fill out certain details of her medical and psychiatric history, as well as that of the home environment.”

  “You mean we can’t see her?” Luke said.

  “At this time, we feel that would be counterproductive to Ashley’s recovery.”

  “I’d just like to go on record as saying she’s not a drug addict,” Sasha said. “If that’s the diagnosis, I think you may need to reevaluate. I’m not in denial about this. She’s
been hanging out with a fast group of girls and obviously they’ve been dabbling. But I think this was more in the nature of a dramatic gesture than a function of any long-term drug abuse or addiction. I mean, let’s face it, we’re all traumatized by what happened in September. I think it’s important to bear that in mind. One of Ashley’s schoolmates lost her father and her own father was down there that morning and has been volunteering at Ground Zero ever since. She’s scared. Hell, I’m scared. Everyone I know is rattled. We’re all drinking too much. I’ve started going back to my own therapist after a year’s hiatus. These are scary times. But I certainly don’t think Ashley has a drug problem per se.”

  The pause that followed this speech stretched into an uncomfortable silence.