The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  “I’m just a country lawyer, bro. But I say wait and see how you feel when the dust settles. You’ve had a lot of shit come down the last year or so—starting with Dad getting sick. Unless you really think you can’t forgive her.”

  “I can forgive her. I’m enough my father’s son in that regard. But that doesn’t mean I can live with her.”

  “Look, it’s not exactly like I’m rooting for Sasha. You think it’s been easy all these years? We put up with her for your sake. We know what she thinks of us.”

  He stood up, wobbling slightly, and raised his glass to some unseen entity. “We’re just simple middle-class, small-town folk who don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground. Yokels. You know who you married, bro? You married Jolene Cheatham. You went all the way to New York fucking City to find a girl just like the goddamn wife of our mother’s supposed lover.”

  Luke sat up straight, indignant, then checked himself. “Whatever happened to Jolene?”

  Matthew took a long swig of the brandy and reached for the decanter on the side table. “Have a dividend,” he said.

  Luke smiled. This was their father’s term for a top-up, a piece of period slang that, for some reason, they both found hilarious.

  “After her husband shot himself, you mean? She moved to Atlanta and married some poor sap who develops shopping centers. After old Duck went bankrupt and embezzled from his bank trying to pay her bills and assuage—now there’s a word for you—assuage his guilt about sleeping with our mother. Don’t tell me you’re actually ready to talk about this?”

  “Is that what you think happened?”

  “It’s what everybody thinks,” Matthew said. “The collective judgment of the community. It’s part of local lore. The biggest scandal since what’s-her-name stabbed her husband with that samurai sword. The minister’s wife and the banker. I always thought that was one of the things you were so eager to leave behind.”

  There was some truth in this, and he’d sometimes imagined that it gave his biography a certain veneer of tragic romance.

  “Shit, I always thought you knew more than I did.”

  Luke found himself staring at a row of trophies, tiny figures brandishing golf clubs and footballs.

  “Well, hell, whatever happened, Dad stuck it out with Mom and she stuck it out with him. I like to think she did it for us. We moved on, didn’t we?” He clapped his arm around Luke’s neck and embraced him bearishly. “Some of us further on than others of us.”

  Duck Cheatham’s forebears had been among the first settlers of the area, having come across the mountains from North Carolina in the early years of the nineteenth century, the losing side in some fierce doctrinal schism within the local Presbyterian church. In the early years of the next century, Duck’s grandfather had reestablished the prosperity of the Cheathams, which had evaporated in the war, by selling burial insurance to sharecroppers and factory workers around the mid-south region for a small Nashville company that eventually became the ninth-largest insurer, with him as president, and bought his grandfather’s house from the descendants of the carpetbagger who had purchased it after the war, a redress of historical injustice that was viewed with regional pride. Everyone knew this history and Duck was well liked for wearing it, and his family’s wealth, lightly. He had been sent north to prep at Deerfield and gone on to Williams, where, it was reported, he’d fallen in love with an Irish Catholic girl he met at a Mount Holyoke mixer. Neither family approved of the match, and after graduation he was called back to work at his father’s bank, where he brooded on his options until he received a letter from his beloved announcing her engagement to a cousin of the Kennedy clan. After six months, during which he destroyed several automobiles and famously set fire to a suite at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis after a night of revelry—episodes that seemed out of character for the formerly sober and studious Duck Cheatham, if not for southern young men of means in general—he started dating a Vanderbilt girl he allegedly met at a bar in downtown Nashville. This, along with the fact that she modeled for a regional agency and her humble origins—her father owned a used-car dealership in Louisville—was more scandalous to some Middle Tennesseans than car wrecks or hotel fires. His parents were among those who didn’t entirely approve of Jolene Colcott, but they feared they’d depleted their reserves of arbitrary parental authority and suspected they had only themselves to blame. So they swallowed their reservations and paid for the wedding, with its 350 guests, rather than trust the great event to the taste and budget of Jolene’s middle-class parents.

  Jolene Colcott, for her part, could hardly believe her luck, although it didn’t take her long to accustom herself to the privileges and honors pertaining to the Cheathams. Everyone had to admit she knew how to dress the part, with her statuesque figure and her mannequin training; she made regular forays to Atlanta and even New York to outfit herself for the Swan Ball and the steeplechase and for the parties she threw at the Greek Revival mansion they bought—the old Hoover place—shortly after the wedding. And even her detractors would acknowledge, over tea at the Belle Meade Country Club, that she restored the place beautifully, stocking it with French and English antiques she’d purchased in New Orleans and Boston, Paris and London.

  Jolene was determined to take advantage of every opportunity previously denied her. Duck settled in to work at the bank and Jolene became pregnant with the first of their two children. She also threw herself into the social life of the community, attempting to teach her neighbors what she’d learned on her trips to Europe. As if engaged in some fierce Darwinian battle, she tried far harder than was necessary to win the hearts and minds of Middle Tennessee, losing more than a few in the process.

  The annual party the Cheathams threw before the steeplechase was legendary for its extravagance and odd innovations—such as serving the salad after dinner instead of before. It was at the Cheathams’ that many of their neighbors first tasted Brie, although, unlike the salad, Jolene served it as an hors d’oeuvre, whether out of ignorance of Continental custom or in deference to local sensibilities. It was also here that many were introduced to the work of such artists as Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Jim Dine. The pride of their collection was a late Picasso, Le Djeuner sur l’Herbe. As a young man, Luke studied this drawing on many occasions, shocked and thrilled at the nudity, trying to interpret the transaction between the two primary figures by studying the expressions on their faces. Were they about to have sex? Or had they just had it? Was this drawing related in some way to the book Naked Lunch, which he had seen in a Nashville bookstore but had thus far been afraid to purchase? And who was the other figure behind them? Why were there three naked people?

  When he saw this picture, Luke was struggling to emerge from his father’s conventional Episcopalian worldview, dimly sensing a hidden pantheism in which sex was the connective tissue. Somehow, the drawing seemed to hold the key. And the Cheathams, with their sophistication, were inextricably linked in his mind to this quest for worldly knowledge. More than any of his mother’s friends, Jolene excited his erotic interest.

  The strange pictures on the Cheathams’ walls were a source of consternation in some quarters, but most disapproved on aesthetic rather than moral grounds, finding them not so much obscene as simply unattractive. Ugly pictures on the wall! Salad after dinner! What next? Of course, Jolene, like all avant-gardists, would have preferred that her neighbors took offense rather than finding humor in her collection.

  It would be difficult to say where her aestheticism left off and her materialism kicked in, but over the years, Luke began to imagine himself as the Cheathams’ disciple, if not their lost son: He developed an interest in the arts as well as a taste for luxury, and was never hence quite able to make the distinction between the two, so that his ambitions oscillated between the poles of creation and connoisseurship. He took up painting and later, when Jolene and Duck started taking him to plays, he dreamed of acting and writing, though when he envisioned his future as an artist or an actor, it
was always set in a grand house freighted with museum-quality treasures.

  Duck’s affection for Nora was so obvious that it seemed ridiculous, at least in the Cheatham and McGavock households, to think anything sub-rosa was going on. Their mutual love of the outdoors expressed itself in Saturday-afternoon rides around the countryside and was eventually consummated in their cofounding a land trust to preserve the farmlands and wetlands around Franklin and Nashville. Their love affair might have started before, or perhaps it grew out of the meetings and the field trips that their positions as co-chairs entailed. The environmental movement was still a freakish novelty in the South, where the chamber of commerce mentality was ubiquitous—every new factory or housing development greeted with boosterish enthusiasm by a population that had retained, more than a century after the fact, a collective memory of wartime ruin and colonial occupation.

  Luke was thinking about their shared cause as, with the deliberate precision of the self-conscious drunk, he drove out through the gates of Battleground Meadows after assuring Matthew that he was fine to drive—past the repro artillery, past the tawdry multicolored light of the McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Krystal, Shoney’s, Pizza Hut, Piggly Wiggly, and Kroger, past Logan’s Road House, Circuit City, the Mattress Shack, and the Rite Aid, then through a dark buffer zone into his hometown, circling and saluting the monument in the square to the Confederate dead, whom he decided on the spur of the moment to visit, at what had once been the McGavock plantation.

  He came out of the circle into Main Street with its dark Victorian storefronts, which over the years of his self-imposed exile had become a kind of souvenir mall, specializing in postcards, handcrafted quilts and hand towels, scented soaps and candles. Bearing left at Five Corners, he ran a gauntlet of churches, following the pike out past the railroad tracks, passing a bright white police car parked in the lot of an antique store, staring, paranoid, into his rearview mirror until turning with drunken exactitude into what had once been the entrance to the plantation, now a subdivision alongside the country club. But then the vista opened up and he saw in the moonlight not the house itself but the white-columned porches, free-standing against the invisible brick.

  He stopped in front of the iron fence, behind which the remains were buried, state by state. His great-great-grandmother had supervised their reinterment on her own property the year after they’d been hastily interred on the battlefield, and kept a meticulous log of the names, which after a winter had already begun to fade on the wooden crosses.

  He climbed out of the car, walked carefully to the gate and out among the gravestones, weaving through the narrow alleys separating Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee, each row marked by its state flag, wondering if they had anything to say to him.

  Stepping into a depression where the ground had settled above a coffin, he pitched forward and fell facedown into the wet grass. Rattled but unscathed, he sat up between the white stones and listened, waiting for the dead to communicate. It seemed worth a shot. No one else was going to tell him what to do, and surely these men knew something about duty and honor.

  Night is the beginning and the end. A line from Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” He was pretty certain that’s the way it went. Which suggested there would be no communiqus from the dead.

  First he heard the hollow oval query of a barn owl, later the plaintive bluesy call of a coyote. He flinched when an answering yelp came from within the graves, but gradually as the cry was repeated at more frequent intervals, swelling in volume as he crept among the mossy headstones toward its source, he finally recognized it, just before the couple came into view—the sound of human ecstasy.

  28

  The city hauled away the generator the day before Thanksgiving. Corrine arrived for her shift at Bowling Green to find Jerry taking down the tent with the help of two Guardsmen, the remnants of their provisions and equipment boxed and stacked in a wash of litter and yellow leaves, the aluminum skeleton of the jury-rigged shelter like the day-after wreckage of some sad carnival concession.

  “So much for services rendered,” he said. “They’re shutting us down. Not so much as a ‘Thanks for everything.’”

  Corrine’s regret was muted, largely a matter of sympathy for Jerry as well as nostalgia for the urgent, vivid days of September and the predawn intimacies of October. She was ashamed to admit that she was secretly relieved, that she’d grown tired of fattening and caffeinating bored cops and halfheartedly flirting with the homesick Guardsmen. As crisis had modulated to routine, as the delis and shops in the neighborhood had begun to reopen, as the fires had cooled and the jagged pile had sunk to ground level and the sky began to clear above the office towers and the bare trees in the park, her sense of mission had slowly evaporated. They’d stopped going to Ground Zero a couple of weeks ago, shortly before Captain Davies had returned to his precinct. The volunteers had fallen away one by one, and those who remained felt increasingly redundant. But out of stubbornness or guilt, Corrine had persisted in doing what she perceived as her duty, standing around in the cold, making sandwiches and filling the coffee urn between phone calls to Luke in Tennessee.

  Surveying the remains of his kingdom, Jerry looked angry and bereft.

  “It’s a wonderful thing you did here,” Corrine told him, wrapping her arms as far as she could around his considerable torso. “You should be proud.”

  “Then why do I feel so fucking empty?”

  “It would be hard no matter when it happened. It’s time.”

  “They could’ve at least waited until after Thanksgiving,” he said, as if he’d envisioned some great communal gathering under the tent.

  “I think it’s time, Jer,” Corrine said, then had a sudden inspiration. “Come to my house. I mean, if you don’t already have plans for Thanksgiving.”

  Russell would probably be put out to learn she’d added a stranger to their table, but she couldn’t bear to think of Jerry sitting alone in his apartment on Thanksgiving, and she had a feeling that his girlfriend had flown the coop, if indeed she’d ever been in it. It then occurred to her that he might find a kindred spirit in Judy Crespi, who had become something of a spokesperson for an organization representing the widows of 9/11. Only later did she realize, while she was walking home with her backpack full of peanut butter and jelly jars, that Jerry was a participant in the conspiracy of her secret life with Luke.

  “I thought I was being altruistic,” she said, talking to Luke on her cell phone an hour later as she trudged up Broadway. “But I think unconsciously I also invited him as a kind of surrogate for you. That’s terrible, isn’t it?”

  “I think you invited him out of the goodness of your heart,” he said. “It was the right thing to do.”

  “I used to trust my motives,” she said. “That’s the trouble. Now I don’t know. I want to be a good person and I want to be with you, and I don’t know how to reconcile those two ideas. I feel like Scobie in The Heart of the Matter. I can’t stay and I can’t go.”

  “I know I’ve said this before, but you know, you don’t have to do anything, not right now. Just take care of yourself.”

  “I wish I could take care of you. What are you doing?”

  “I’m sitting on the fence.”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “No, I mean literally. I’m sitting on a three-rail fence out in the pasture, watching my mother work with a pony and an eight-year-old girl with cerebral palsy. Equine therapy. It’s her mission, her calling.”

  “Whereas, unlike your mother, basically, I’m the kind of person who’d be working with the little girl by day and fucking her father by night.”

  “He should be so lucky.”

  “Imagine what your saintly mother would think. I bet she’d think I’m the whore of TriBeCa.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think she’s ever heard of TriBeCa. Anyway, I’m going to tell her about you this weekend.”

  “Oh God, are you sure?” This prospect panicked her, a
lthough she couldn’t say whether she was afraid of his mother’s disapproval or of the idea of a definite step being taken. “Look, I’m just outside the door. I’ll call you later. I miss you.”

  Russell took the Jerry news better than she’d expected, still on his best behavior, as if, even with an imperfect understanding of the actual nature of the threat, he sensed by what a slender thread his marriage was suspended. Like some newly ordained Franciscan monk conducting a campaign of good works and penance, he came home straight from the office most nights, devised games and diversions for the kids, and took them to school in the morning while Corrine slept in. He’d become almost absurdly passive and pliable, the perfect wife.

  Now he was enacting his role of Thanksgiving patriarch with even more enterprise and certainly with more good grace than usual, rising at the crack of dawn on Thursday to start the turkey, an organic monster that he’d special-ordered from Dean and DeLuca and soaked in brine for twenty-four hours, pedantically explaining the virtues of the slow-cooking method when she finally joined him in the kitchen at nine. Two years ago, he’d been equally vehement about the fast-cooking method, lately espoused in the food section of the Times, smoking them all out of the apartment in the process. The memory made her nauseated, as did, at this early hour, the smell of the turkey roasting in the oven.

  “Russell, please. You know I can’t stand hearing you rhapsodize about food first thing in the morning. Have the kids eaten?”

  “Of course.”

  “I hope you didn’t just starch them up with waffles and crap,” she said, immediately realizing how bitchy she sounded.

  “We had oatmeal with dinosaur eggs,” Storey volunteered from the couch, where she was viewing The Little Mermaid for the fifty-seventh time.

  “So, I finally spoke to my rival,” Russell said. “He called here a few minutes ago.”