The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  She gave a neck rub to a steelworker who’d been on the pile since the first day. The weather had turned, a cold wind gusting from the west, and she felt suitably punished, shivering in her light windbreaker until Jerry lent her a sweater. She suddenly wondered how it was, since he appeared not to change clothes for days on end, that his head and face remained so clean-shaven. And, for that matter, when and where he slept.

  She returned to the loft at seven the next morning, just in time to wake the kids and get them ready for school.

  She heard Russell in the shower, then the crackle and pop of squabbling from the children’s room. It was way past time to get them their own rooms.

  “What’s the problem here?” she asked, sweeping in on the battle.

  “He hit me.”

  “I did not. She hit me first.”

  “Good morning,” Russell said plaintively, standing in the doorway with a towel around his waist as she helped them pick their outfits. She was trying to convince Jeremy it was too cold for short sleeves.

  She had them at the counter eating cereal by the time he emerged fully dressed, skulking like a stray dog at the edge of the family circle.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said to the kids, heading to the bathroom.

  Out of long habit, she didn’t think to lock the door. A moment later, Russell burst in on her. “Jesus, Russell, I’m peeing.”

  “We need to talk.”

  She wiped herself hastily and stood up, her fury renewed. “We’ll talk when and if I ever feel like it.”

  “Did you read the E-mail I sent you?”

  “I glanced at it,” she said. “I didn’t find anything there that made me feel better about the fact that you’d been fucking some slut for two years.”

  “I’m so sorry, Corrine. I love you. I promise you I’ll make it up to you, whatever it takes.”

  “I don’t know if you can. I really don’t. Now get out of here and let me have some privacy.” His hangdog expression really pissed her off—as if he somehow thought he was the one who’d been trespassed against. “Just tell me one thing,” she said. “I want to know what she could possibly have that I don’t.” Aware, as soon as she said this, of what a clich it was, how much she sounded like the victim in some horrible Lifetime movie.

  “Do you really want to know? Because she’s not you. She’s different. That’s all. Not better. Different. Because—maybe you’re right, maybe she is a slut. And you’re not. You’re my wife.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she said, pushing him out the door and locking it behind him.

  When she finally emerged from the bathroom to join them in the kitchen, Storey looked at her quizzically. “Mommy, were you crying in there?”

  “No, honey, I just got something in my eye.”

  “You look like you’ve been crying.”

  “Mommy’s been working down where the big fire is,” Russell said, “helping feed the rescuers. The smoke gets in her eyes.”

  She thought then of that old song they used to play over and over, the Bryan Ferry version, how Roxy Music’s Avalon had been their album.

  “Mom, you are crying,” Storey insisted.

  “I’m fine, honey.”

  Jeremy’s face balled up in response to his mother’s distress, tears now coursing down his cheeks.

  “Now Jeremy’s crying.”

  She took him in her arms. “It’s all right, honey. Mommy’s just tired.”

  He finally stopped sobbing on her shoulder. “Are the rescuers going to save the people?”

  “They’re trying, sweetheart. We’re all trying.”

  “Celia’s dad is still missing,” Storey said.

  “Celia?”

  “Celia the Fluffy,” Jeremy said.

  “He woke up twice last night with nightmares,” Russell said.

  This transparent appeal to her motherly instincts, the thinly veiled protest against her work at the soup kitchen, infuriated her so much that she retreated to the bedroom, before she snapped at him in front of the kids.

  She tried to sleep after Russell and the children had left, but her anger had transmogrified into a nagging buzz of guilt. She was a very bad person. A terrible mother. Lost and damned. Because even with the image of her son’s contorted, tear-streaked face fresh in her memory, even as she planned her afternoon and evening with the children, hoping to keep the cracks and fissures from undermining their world, she kept anticipating her reunion with Luke, conjuring the look of recognition in his eyes as he glanced up from the grill or the warming trays and saw her walking toward him, an image that continued to play in her mind—after she woke and dressed, as she watched the children play in the park, as she held their mathematics flash cards, as Storey repeated a question she’d failed to hear the first time, and as she bathed them while Russell dined down the street at Odeon with an Italian publisher. What kind of mother had she become, checking her watch as she read to them? It wasn’t the minutes to their bedtime so much as the hours until midnight that she was counting. And after she’d finally put their water glasses beside their beds and kissed them good night, she couldn’t concentrate on Rushdie’s new novel, about a gaudy fin de sicle New York that no longer existed, or on the news, which was all about the terrifying reality that had replaced it.

  What powers of dissembling had she suddenly acquired that allowed her, when Russell returned that evening, to discuss the children and ask about his day without summoning up any hostility whatsoever, now that she was counting the minutes till she would see Luke? Russell was almost comically relieved at her civility. Reviewing the schedule for the next day, the mundane details of school drop-off, pickup, and dinner, he demonstrated the earnestness of a dutiful student. Corrine explained that the kids had a play date uptown with Washington and Veronica’s kids; she would drop them off after school and he would pick them up at six. He nodded eagerly, repeating everything with the zest of someone addressing the logistics of an adventure holiday. His eagerness to believe in the status quo almost touched her heart, but if she softened toward him a little at that moment, it was only because her mind and her heart were elsewhere.

  The burned-plastic stench washed over her yet again as she walked down Broadway. The more closely she approached, the more acutely she felt the presence of the dead—a kind of psychic static. So palpable was this impression that she sometimes feared she might see them, wafting luminously through the canyons of the Financial District. She stopped and glanced behind, feeling a tingling chill on her arms and the back of her neck, though the night was warm and still, and imagined she could feel a current of sadness and regret sweeping up Broadway. What would they tell her if they could speak? Would they advise her against her present course? Or was it a mistake to anthropomorphize the dead? Who was to say they shared our concerns or emotions, or those of their former selves? Perhaps it wasn’t their sadness she felt, but only her own.

  Luke’s absence from Bowling Green the previous night suddenly took on an ominous significance. He might have spent the last thirty-six hours with Sasha. He might have slept with her. Surely she had come to her senses and realized what she risked losing. Corrine knew that after all his trials with Sasha, a little tenderness and affection would act on him more powerfully for having been so long withheld. She imagined Sasha as one of those brilliant coquettes who operated on the belief that male desire was inflamed by competition. Whereas Corrine was disgusted by Russell’s infidelity, she wondered if Luke, with the instincts of his gender, might not be incited by Sasha’s, seeing her as more valuable by virtue of her being desired, his honor vindicated by reclaiming the prize that had been stolen from him. And whatever Luke said about Melman, the mogul’s status, along with the assumption that he could have his choice of women, would reflect a kind of greater glory on the object of his desire and make her seem all the worthier of fighting for. Even if he had withdrawn from the game, Luke had spent his adult life playing in the same league as Melman; she knew these guys, she’d worked along
side them, and when it came down to it, they all respected the player with the biggest pile of chips. They competed for the same trophies. Was Luke really any different?

  After she’d first met Luke, she’d found Sasha’s photo, svelte in Badgley Mischa, arm in arm with Alec Baldwin on the party page of an old copy of New York magazine. Her first impression had been critical: Her prettiness seemed too conventional to qualify as beauty. But as she came to know Luke and listened to him talk about Sasha, her image had acquired a certain retrospective vivacity and mystery in Corrine’s imagination. The night before, she had casually asked Casey Reynes about Sasha, knowing they were friends, and the intelligence thus gathered seemed sinister in the light of Luke’s absence later that night. Everyone in Casey’s circle believed that Sasha and Melman were having an affair, that she’d started exercising her considerable powers as soon as he separated from his wife. But the latest scuttlebutt had Melman flying to Palm Beach, and there was talk of reconciliation.

  As she entered the penumbra of light emanating from the ruins, she drew back from this line of speculation, as if awakened by the drone of heavy machinery and the gnashing steel teeth of the heavy grapplers, and asked herself what business she had judging Luke or worrying about his marriage—as if she were free to offer herself. How had she gotten so far gone?

  Approaching the bronze bull, she tried to quell her sense of anticipation by telling herself that it was good to know her heart was still pliable enough to have been quickened by this brief encounter with romance. It had been a rejuvenating exercise, this little flirtation of hers. But it could only be fantasy. And she congratulated herself that it hadn’t gone any further, that she hadn’t done anything she could later regret. Whatever course she decided to pursue with regard to her marriage shouldn’t depend on any outside influence. Let Russell be the one to carry that burden of guilt.

  She spotted him in front of the tent, smoking a cigarette, talking to Captain Davies. Relieved to find nothing new in his demeanor or his posture, she stopped at the edge of the fence to watch him unobserved. She would have liked just then to take a picture of him. Even more than the cheerful cop, he seemed to project an air of command, to be ready to take charge if he was needed.

  As she walked toward him, he caught sight of her and broke into a smile, Davies turning to follow his gaze. Luke swiped his hand across the lower half of his face, a nervous gesture she’d noticed before. One of those little tics—like the way he chewed his cuticles—which, with repetition, became a part of her picture of him.

  “You’re back,” she said.

  “I’m back,” he replied.

  She was afraid she was blushing. “I got your note.”

  “I needed some sleep.”

  “I hope you got some.”

  “I need coffee,” Davies said, rolling his eyes. He lumbered off to the tent, clanking at the hips.

  “Did I miss anything?” Luke asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Did you?”

  “What do you think?”

  She could feel her facial muscles spazzing into a stupid smile. Her transparency annoyed her and, in turn, made her annoyed at him. “I think… I thought maybe you decided it was time to go back to your real life.”

  “I’m not sure I have one.”

  “You have a wife and a daughter.”

  “That’s true.”

  “God, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just mad at myself for being so happy to see you.”

  “I’m happy to see you, too. Should I be mad at myself?”

  “Don’t you feel guilty?”

  “Not really. Well, maybe a little. No, actually that’s not it. But I think I just feel, I don’t know—if I felt a little less happy to see you, if you were just some chick I met at the soup kitchen, that cute girl from Ralph Lauren, for instance, then it wouldn’t really matter.”

  “I was ridiculously disappointed last night when I realized I wasn’t going to see you.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I suppose I should go sign in and make myself useful,” she said.

  “I was just going to drive up to Balthazar to pick up some hot food,” he said. “Jerry left me his car, and we’ve got a couple hours till the shifts change. Why don’t you join me?”

  The cop at the on-ramp to the FDR waved them through. Luke slowed down and lowered his window. “You guys need anything here? Coffee, sandwiches?”

  “I don’t guess you got any hot calzones in there?”

  “We’ll pick one up.”

  The highway was deserted. With the windows up, the car smelled a little too lived in—a funk composed of body odors and food residues both fresh and ancient. He turned off on Houston, driving west, past Rivington, where Jeff used to score his heroin at a bodega Russell had taken him to the morning they did the intervention, allowing him a final hit before they carried him off to rehab. Past Katz’s Delicatessen, where she’d become nauseated one afternoon at the sight of all that opalescent pastrami and corned beef. Past Nice Guy Eddie’s, where she’d once danced on the bar and Russell had gotten into a fight with a guy who wouldn’t leave her alone afterward. Long ago, in another life, she’d been a girl who danced on bars. Suddenly, she felt as if she could do it again.

  They parked directly in front of the restaurant, one of Russell’s favorite haunts, a place where he entertained his out-of-town writers, because even if they hadn’t heard of it, they were likely to see famous faces and feel they were indeed at the center of the universe, that their editor was a player. Although he’d rather die than admit it, Russell was proud to have the private number, to be able to get a table at short notice, or, better yet, a booth; she remembered him pouting and fretting one night when he’d failed to command one of the booths along the far wall; further irked that they were occupied by people he didn’t recognize.

  At present, a little before one in the morning, the place was half-full of anonymous hipsters. Luke announced their mission to the matre d’, the dark one with the goatee who always put her in mind of Lucifer.

  “Do you suppose we’ll ever go to Paris together?” Luke asked, looking around at the worn silver mirrors, aperitif ads, and distressed tin ceiling.

  “I think it’s possible,” she said, surprising herself.

  “I suppose it’s a clich,” he said. “Like that picture by Doisneau, the kiss on the street.”

  “It’s only a clich if you’re jaded.” Falling in love was a clich, she realized. It had all been done before, and it looked absurd from the outside.

  “I don’t feel jaded,” he said.

  “Me neither.”

  “Oh shit.”

  She followed his gaze across the restaurant.

  “It’s Sasha,” he said.

  She was sitting in a booth with someone Corrine thought was a rapper turned actor and a slim, glossy blonde who looked as if she might have gotten lost on her way to Le Cirque, although Corrine had to admit that everyone pretty much went everywhere now, uptown or down—the borders had gotten porous, at least until the eleventh, when the word downtown had acquired an ominous new meaning. Even from this distance, Sasha was impressive; she had a kind of luminous presence, which made the other blonde at the table look like the Chinatown knockoff version of Upper East Side Barbie.

  “Let’s just make a discreet exit,” Luke said.

  “You don’t even want to say hi?” asked Corrine, who was curious, and also amused at Luke’s discomfort—even as she was daunted at the prospect of actually confronting this glamorous creature.

  He shook his head, placed a hand on her shoulder, and steered her toward the door.

  After two busboys had helped them load the food in the Pathfinder, Luke stopped a few blocks down on Spring Street at Lombardi’s Pizza. She stayed in the car while he banged on the door, waving at the man who was sweeping up. Whatever he said seemed to do the trick, and he returned to the car to say the guy was making up a batch of pizzas and calzones.

  “She’s really q
uite beautiful,” Corrine said.

  “I suppose so,” he said. “Eventually, it becomes one more thing that you fail to notice, or else it becomes another item on your secret list of grievances. The fact that it allows her to take so much for granted. The disparity between appearance and reality.”

  “It must be a relief, hanging out with a middle-aged housewife like me.”

  “Honestly, I think you’re more beautiful than she is.”

  “Now I’m not going to believe anything you say.”

  He took her shoulders in his hands and shook her gently. “I promise you I’m going to tell you the truth. I have and I will.”

  “I’m sure you mean that,” she said, “but you may be too nice to tell the truth all the time. It’s too brutal sometimes.”

  “Then let’s make a pact to be brutal to each other.”

  She checked his eyes for the glint of facetiousness but couldn’t find it. “Okay,” she said. “Brutal it is.”

  “Do you think everything will just go back to the way it was?” she asked, as they drove back down the FDR, the Brooklyn Bridge floating brightly against the dark sky.

  “It’s hard to imagine,” he said. “But I suppose eventually it will.”

  “It just doesn’t seem possible.”

  “The town I grew up in,” Luke said, “is one of the sleepiest, most picturesque burgs you could hope to find. Think Mayberry RFD. It was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Thousands died in the course of a few hours. My great-great-grandmother’s house was a field hospital and she had hundreds of wounded under her roof that night. There were four dead Confederate generals laid out on her porch out of the fifteen who fell that day. Nearly fifteen hundred soldiers are buried in what used to be the family cemetery, fourteen hundred and eighty-one to be exact, and they say that my great-great-grandmother wrote a letter to the mothers of every single one of them. When I was a kid, I used to count the bloodstains on the floorboards.”