The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  “There’s a bridge over Liberty Street. We turned the corner; smoke and flames were everywhere. Everything so weirdly quiet. I’d never been anywhere so quiet in the city. You could feel the death. It was just as palpable as the smoke. I didn’t think anyone could survive. But I also had this completely irrational notion that I would find Guillermo.

  “They say it was a bucket brigade. But the first day, we had no buckets—at least I didn’t see any. We used our hands. We formed a human chain, passing along pieces of rebar and concrete, hand to hand. Everyone just fell into place and started working. Eventually, I don’t know when, we got these plastic buckets. We were going stone by stone across West Street, digging our way across. By the end of the day, I was five feet over the median divider. There were three lines. Somebody had a lock cutter and eventually there were a few acetylene torches. We were cutting rebar, working in the smoke and the dust while the flames licked up from the hot spots. The strange thing was, out of all these thousands of offices, you never saw a chair or a desk or a fax machine or a computer terminal. You never even saw a piece of glass. Everything had been reduced to powder. And that pretty much told me the chances of finding survivors.

  “They found a body ten feet up in front of me. Work stopped while they passed up a body bag. I didn’t see that one, just waited in the line until the bag came back to me. We didn’t have the Stokes baskets yet to carry out the bodies, so it just went from hand to hand. The bag was so small, so light, I could feel that it was only a torso. No arms or legs. I puked into the rubble and then started digging again.

  “Late in the afternoon, Number Seven came down. Suddenly, people were shouting, ‘Run. It’s coming down.’ There’d been lots of false alarms and we’d already run out three or four times, and you didn’t really want to run again because your lungs were aching and the air was like some kind of new element between gas and solid. But this time it was real and I was running down West Street toward Stuyvesant High School.

  “For some reason, I couldn’t make myself leave, feeling like it should’ve been me in there, that I’d never done anything in my life to justify my surviving. And maybe this was the first time in my life I had a chance to do something important. So I went back to the pile and joined a line, and pretty soon a body was found twenty feet away from me. Work stopped as we passed up a body bag and it started to come back. When it got to me, I grabbed it and the zipper broke open and I was looking at a face burned beyond recognition. It was black. I’m not sure how I knew it was a woman, but I was sure it was. And I started shaking. A fireman from Long Island who was behind me in the line kind of moved up to comfort me, try to get me to let go. Because I was holding on to it. For some reason, I couldn’t let go. Finally, I passed the bag on, and ten minutes later I found myself standing in a puddle of blood.

  “We’d find voids, these holes under the debris. That was what you hoped for, what we were all looking for. Voids, pockets of space and air where someone might have survived. That was the worst part for me, when I was at the front of the line—groping into those empty spaces. I felt like a coward; all I could think about was reaching into a void and having a hand grab me. It just seemed terrifying, those holes—like being a kid afraid of the dark space under the bed. Here I am, supposedly rescuing people, and I’m afraid even to reach inside. Those voids are like portals to the underworld. The firemen could do it. But you didn’t talk to them. They were righteous. They were angry. We left them alone. I wished I could be fearless, but I was scared shitless half the time.

  “I found credit cards, wallets, photos; there was a snap of a guy with his head between a stripper’s tits. We passed it along the line. Eventually, all the photos went into a bucket at the end of the line.

  “At one point, I got my legs under a beam, holding it up with my feet so they could search underneath. Somehow, it wasn’t so frightening, sticking my feet in there.

  “After the fumes from the broken gas lines knocked me out, I finally staggered out. I didn’t know which way I was going. I felt dizzy and nauseated. I hadn’t slept. I could hardly see at that point, from the dust. St. Vincent’s had a station set up to wash eyes, and after that I started walking uptown. All of a sudden, this beautiful woman appeared out of the dust and the smoke. And it was you. Whenever I’d closed my eyes, I’d seen that woman without a face. But there you were, giving the world a new face.”

  She could just make out his features, now, more beautiful to her than ever in the dim light from the window.

  “I was so scrambled,” he said, “that when I saw you, I thought for a second maybe I had died back there, that you were an angel. Maybe I’d gone down with the towers or later in Number Seven and the digging had just been an illusion, the Sisyphean afterlife I deserved. I thought maybe you were from the other side and that I’d crossed over. Sometimes I still wonder if it was all just an afterimage, because nothing feels very real to me anymore, except being with you. And if I lose you, then I might as well be a ghost walking through the rest of my life without being able to touch or feel anything.”

  She held him then and listened to the rising sound of his breathing as the light slowly, inexorably filled the room.

  After waking in the afternoon, they took a walk on the beach. He laid another fire and she read to him from the Symposium.

  Later, she fell asleep on the sofa listening to Gram Parsons. When she woke again, the room was dim; the fire had subsided to a pile of embers and she felt a sudden chill of dread. Where was he? She found him out back, smoking a cigarette and gazing out at the sea.

  “I was just going to wake you,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “Ashley’s run away from Silver Meadows. Sometime last night. I’ve booked the last plane for New York.”

  She wanted to comfort him somehow, to take him in her arms, but she sensed that he was already in midair, beyond her reach, searching the ground below for his child.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “We’ll come back,” she said, although just then she feared they never would.

  26

  At La Guardia, Corrine withdrew to a respectful distance as he paced and spoke to his wife. “No news,” he said as he snapped the phone shut.

  “I wish—”

  “I know.”

  He wished he could say something to lift the pall, to salvage and preserve some portion of the pleasure of their aborted escape. He wanted to comfort her, to tell her that there would be other times, that they would resume where they’d left off, but none of this seemed appropriate. All his concern, he realized, should be directed toward his missing daughter. He shouldn’t be missing Corrine, already aching at the thought of her impending absence. She had never looked quite so beautiful; he stroked her chin and examined her face as if she, too, were about to disappear.

  “We should probably take separate cars,” she said.

  “I suppose so.”

  They trudged in silence past the stream of departing passengers, whose expectant faces were as bright as freshly minted coins.

  “You have money?” he asked as they passed the security checkpoint.

  “Of course,” she said. “But thanks for asking.”

  At the taxi stand, he reached out and grabbed the sleeve of her jacket. “Corrine, I don’t want to… I’m worried sick about my daughter. But I don’t want to leave you this way. I can’t bear this feeling that we’re walking away from each other. We’ll find Ashley, but in the meantime I don’t want you to think that the fact that we were together when this happened… I don’t know, that it’s somehow our fault. That it’s an omen. Ashley’s problems—they’re about what’s wrong with me and Sasha. It’s not about us. I won’t let it be.”

  She nodded unconvincingly. “I’m glad you said that.”

  “It’s true, Corrine.”

  “Well, I want you to k
now, in case you change your mind, I don’t know when I’ve ever been as happy as I was this weekend.”

  “Twenty-four hours, actually.”

  “Next time, Mandalay.”

  After several hours of fruitless phone calls and a nearly sleepless night of self-reproach and recriminations, he’d roused himself and, with Sasha, resumed the search. At nine, he called Casey Reynes to explain the situation, and while he might just as easily have spoken with her daughter over the phone, they both agreed he should walk the few blocks to the apartment for a personal interview. “I think Amber might be more forthcoming if you sit down with her,” Casey said, the note of concern in her voice compromised by an undercurrent of conspiratorial zest. “Why don’t you pop round now. She’s not awake yet, but I’m sure she’ll be up shortly. We’ll make a list of all of Ashley’s friends and see if we can’t come up with a lead.”

  Luke couldn’t help feeling grateful for the suggestion, the more so since he’d always considered Casey a vapid socialite. The fact that she was Corrine’s best friend, and that she was privy to their secret, inclined him to revise his opinion and he found himself remembering little acts of kindness she’d performed on Ashley’s behalf, pickups and birthday presents and solicitous notes.

  Standing in front of her building at 740 Park, he thought of how, a year ago, Sasha had informed him of an imminent offering there, and begged him to look at it; even after the apartment ultimately proved to be smaller than their own, on a lower floor with inferior light, she’d urged him to make an offer. But he’d already been thinking of doing something different with his days, scaling back instead of ramping up, so this had been easy enough to refuse. Nor had he been eager to kowtow to the notoriously snobbish co-op board, even though they’d had the good sense, several years earlier, to reject Bernard Melman’s application.

  “Come in, come in,” she said, greeting him as the elevator door opened into her foyer.

  He appraised her with new eyes, finding her appearance less brittle than he expected, the porcelain skin of her—according to Sasha—recently lifted face softer and less the Kabuki mask of jaded sophistication he remembered from the ftes of their thirties. At this moment, it seemed expressive of genuine human concern.

  As the door closed on the elevator’s wizened, uniformed operator, she hugged Luke and pressed her lips to his. “I can’t imagine how you must feel right now.”

  “Thanks,” he said, fighting a sudden wave of emotion. “I really appreciate this.”

  “Excuse the mess,” she said, apparently referring to a neat stack of mail on a trestle table. “Come into my study and we’ll talk. Can I get you some coffee?”

  He followed her down the long hallway; the apartment, like Casey herself, somewhat confounded his expectations, with its folk art and Wyeths, its hooked rugs and tartan prints in unexpected Fauve colors—a look that might have been diagnosed as psychedelic Early American.

  “So,” she said, closing the study door behind them, with a great exhalation of breath, as if they’d traveled vast distances and overcome nearly insurmountable obstacles to find themselves alone at last.

  The room was a shrine to equestrianism—a theme that reminded him, happily, of his mother. A weathered pine bookshelf displayed trophies and ribbons; the walls were shingled with old English hunting prints interspersed with photographs of Casey on horseback. She walked over to the little Hepplewhite desk and scanned the ranks of photographs. “Here,” she said, handing him a faded color picture in a leather frame.

  He recognized Corrine immediately, despite the riding helmet and the fact she must’ve been a teenager, her hair a more vivid carroty shade than he was familiar with, standing beside a younger version of Casey, both of them captured in that transitional stage of adolescence. He gazed at the face, with its smattering of freckles and her thrilling smile, studying it for its predictive qualities, savoring its resemblances to that of the woman he loved, happy to discover that he preferred the latter, which seemed to have gained more in refinement and character than it had lost in freshness.

  “I thought you’d get a little kick out of that.”

  He would have studied it longer had he been alone, but now he returned it to the desk.

  Since she had broached the subject, he said, “I want to thank you for the house. I only wish—”

  “Please,” she said, brushing this away with one sweep of her hand and indicating the love seat with another. “I talked to her last night. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you her heart is with you.” She took a seat beside him. “This may not be the time or place,” she said, putting a hand on his knee, “but I don’t know when I’ve seen her as happy as she’s been these last few weeks. I mean, of course, it’s been an awful time in many ways, for all of us. The fall from hell, really. You know they lost a close friend, Jim Crespi, the film producer. But aside from that, she’s been practically giddy. I’ve known Corrine since she was a girl, but I’ve never seen her like this.”

  Luke suspected he should be appalled by this monologue, but he couldn’t help drinking it in, as if it were the rarest first-growth claret.

  “How’s Sasha?” she asked abruptly.

  “Well, you can imagine—”

  “I feel for her, I really do. But you’ve got to ask yourself how her behavior might have contributed to this. I’m not one to sit in judgment of my friends, but really, Luke, I think she’s treated you shamefully. And it’s not as if kids don’t pick up these things. I always say they’re sponges. I mean, it’s no wonder Ashley’s… having problems; it would be a miracle if she weren’t. Hello! I know you: You can’t help blaming yourself. But everyone knows what a doting father you are. We all see you taking her to school in the morning and picking her up every afternoon.”

  “Well, recently, I might have been. But I used to be in the office before she was awake, and some nights I wouldn’t get home before she was asleep.”

  “That’s what you had to do to support your family. Web’s the same way—sometimes the kids don’t see him for days on end. That’s his job. And it’s my job to supervise the kids—along with a million other things. I mean, sure, we have staff, but it’s not like I don’t make it my business to go to the lacrosse games and help with the homework. I just don’t know if motherhood has ever been such a huge priority for Sasha, and I say this as a friend. Sasha’s beautiful, she’s genius, she’s the Nan Kempner of our generation, blah de blah de blah, but I don’t see her outside the school at eight a.m. And I’m frankly shocked she left Ashley in town that weekend. Amber tried to persuade me to let her spend the night with Bethany, but I knew the Traynors were in Hobe Sound that weekend and—I’m sorry, call me old-fashioned—but I just don’t approve of the idea of unsupervised sleepovers at this age. That’s just Parenting one oh one. At least that’s the way I was raised. I know you thought she was with Sasha,” she added quickly. “Corrine told me. I just don’t know what Sasha was—”

  “Well, be that as it may, she’s devastated over this,” Luke said, feeling compelled, finally, to rise to her defense. “And I really should be getting back. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d really like to talk to Amber.”

  “Of course,” she said, squeezing his knee and rising briskly. “I’ll go get her. I know she’s eager to help in any way she can.” She stood with her hand on the door. “Just between us girls, I’ve heard that a certain someone is definitely going back to his wife. It seems that he’s decided he can’t afford a divorce now that his company’s worth about half what it was on Labor Day. Just thought you should be armed with that information, in case it has any relevance.”

  “Thank you, Casey. I appreciate it.”

  “I’ll get Amber. You sure you don’t want any coffee?”

  He shook his head, wondering how much he wanted this woman—or anyone except Corrine—to know about his life.

  Amber seemed more an illustration of the problem than a possible solution to it. She trailed in behind her mother as if at the end of a chain,
bleary and sullen, slouching languorously against the door frame for support, as though her long and slender legs, almost entirely visible below the hemline of her tiny pink shorts, were not quite up to the job of supporting her.

  “Of course you know Mr. McGavock,” Casey said.

  Amber nodded sleepily.

  “It’s very important that you tell him anything you can think of that might help him locate Ashley.”

  “I really can’t think of anything.”

  “Maybe,” Luke said, “if we could just have a few minutes alone.”

  Amber flashed her mother a panicked look.

  “I know you’re eager to help,” Casey said, taking her hand and tugging her into the room.

  Amber threw herself into the wing chair across from Luke, seeming to relax as soon as her mother closed the door. “I feel really bad about Ashley,” she said, drawing her knees up to her chin.

  “Do you have any idea where she might’ve gone?”

  She shrugged. “I’m probably her best friend, me and Bethany.”

  “That’s why I thought you might be able to help,” he said. “I know you weren’t at the party that night.”

  “Well, I did hear about it.”

  “Was she with anyone I should talk to?”

  She stretched like a cat, unfurling her limbs, and shook her head sleepily.

  “Do you think she could be with her boyfriend?”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “You’re her best friend, Amber. She must’ve told you about me walking in on them.”

  She blushed and clutched her knees closer to her body.

  “If I didn’t hurt him then, I’m certainly not going to now. But I need his name. Please, Amber.”

  “I guess you mean Trey Wilbraham. It’s not like he’s her boyfriend. They just hook up once in a while. He goes to Buckley. But he doesn’t know where she is. I talked to him last night. He hasn’t heard from her since the night of the party.”