The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  Luke nodded toward Ashley. “Just a splash,” he said.

  When the glasses had been poured, Luke raised his own and held it aloft. “To a merry Christmas,” he said, “and a happier New Year.”

  “A-freaking-men to that.” Sasha raised her glass high, smiling gamely. They all clinked glasses. After sipping, Sasha tipped her glass toward Luke. “And I’d like to propose a toast to my husband,” she said. “I’m sorry, Luke.”

  He was taken aback. She seemed to be apologizing for everything that had led up to this bad lunchtime theater; he wasn’t sure he was prepared for that, especially given what he’d been preparing to say to her. It would have been easier if she’d continued to behave in character.

  Luke excused himself to go to the men’s room, noticing, on the way out, that Melman’s seat was empty, although his wife and daughter were still seated; only as he was pushing the men’s room door open did the likely explanation become obvious. There was nothing to do but take up a position at the vacant urinal beside the mogul, who at first failed to register his identity, staring straight ahead at the colorful mural depicting a Rubenesque flapper bent from the waist, the skirts of her dress lifted above her ample hips, peeing in an unlikely trajectory into a goldfish bowl several feet away while her dapper morning-coated consort did the same from the other side.

  Unzipping, Luke turned conspicuously to his left and stared, an act of aggression sustained and blatant enough that Melman reflexively turned his torso away and concealed himself even as he snapped his head toward the voyeur, his outrage modulating to confusion and then embarrassment when he recognized Luke—directing his attention downward, aborting his mission, and hastily arranging himself for an exit.

  Melman yanked the flush and turned away while the attendant flipped the taps of the sink and held out a towel for him.

  “If those hand towels come in different sizes,” Luke said, “he’ll take the smallest.”

  Luke glanced over his right shoulder to see Melman tossing his towel to the floor, grabbing for the door before the attendant could manage to get around and open it for him. When the door had finally wafted shut, the man stole a glance at Luke, shaking his head in amazement.

  “Childish of me, I know,” Luke said. “But the man fucked my wife.” After washing his hands and drying them thoroughly, he left a fifty in the tip basket. “That’s for the both of us.”

  “Merry Christmas to you, sir. I’m sorry for your troubles at home.”

  “Thanks,” Luke said. “But the New Year’s looking much happier.”

  31

  To descend the stairs beneath the tattered awning and muscle through the double doors of Evelyn’s was to leave behind the social contract along with the crisp, lung-prickling air of a December afternoon and to enter a kind of permanent twilight in which an extramarital affair—or even a conspiracy to sunder and rearrange the components of two families—seemed like a minor breach of etiquette. Or so Corrine liked to imagine, thinking this the perfect place for an assignation. Luke had said that he could meet her downtown and she’d immediately thought of this place, scene of half-remembered debauches as well as several stolen hours with Luke before he decamped for Tennessee.

  Inside, she blinked and waited for the interior to resolve itself from the murk, two milky faces at the end of the bar turning like lilies toward the flash of daylight as she entered. The frat-house stench of stale beer and cigarette smoke washed over her, a skyline of premium bottles glinting above the dark, pitted plane of the bar. Corrine took a stool near the door as the ghostly bartender, with skin as gray as his hair, materialized in front of her. She didn’t really feel the need for alcohol, but neither did it feel appropriate to order a soft drink. “Heineken, please.”

  Behind her, the susurration of the door announced his arrival; he paused, framed in the entryway, his face in shadow, a few renegade wind-whipped strands of hair tipped with the golden residue of daylight from the street.

  His face was chilled and scratchy when he crushed her in his arms, and she rooted in the folds of his cashmere scarf for the scent of him before pressing her lips to his as he lifted her off of her feet; seeking the essence of their kiss—a kiss she had seemed to recognize that very first time, like some memory from a distant, golden age, the familiar earthy taste of him beneath a sweet, vinous residue. She felt like a princess awakened by a magical kiss—as if she’d been sleepwalking through the weeks since she last had seen him.

  “I was so nervous,” she said after he lowered her to the floor. She pulled her head back to look at him, finding the reality even more satisfying than the image in her memory. The boyishness of his face and his grin emphasized by the sophisticated counterpoint of the expensive-looking shirt and bright red tie. It was as if he had somehow perfected himself in his absence.

  “Me too.”

  The nicest phrase in the language—had she said that to him once? No, but she’d thought that. QED. Me too. “I wondered if it would be different.”

  “But it’s not.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  He took off his big drapey camel coat, the one she’d pictured him in ever since the trip to Nantucket, and folded it over the stool.

  She smiled. “I was almost hoping it would be different.”

  “I know.”

  “But I’m glad it’s not.”

  “You look beautiful.”

  “So do you. I’ve never seen you in a suit. You look very, I don’t know, very Cary Grant.”

  “An illusion created by a skilled tailor.”

  In her eyes, he was one of those men who redeemed the idea of the suit, which emphasized his masculinity even as it somehow underlined his superiority to the lumpish herd of the facelessly uniformed. Strange to imagine that this is what he would have looked like for most of his adult life—all those years before she’d known him. She thought about all the other women who had looked at him in a suit—on the street, in conference rooms, across the lobby of a hotel in Paris or Hong Kong. When he removed his jacket, she ran her hand across his chest.

  “I’ve been waiting to feel the Christmas spirit,” she said. “Seeing you in your stripy shirt with your tie like a big red ribbon—you look like a present waiting to be unwrapped.”

  “Precisely the effect I was hoping to achieve.”

  “I don’t know how I’m going to get through the holidays,” she said. “It seems so hypocritical just going through the motions, the rituals of Christmas and family harmony. And I’m so self-conscious, I feel like everything I do and say now could have some enormous consequence later. I keep thinking, Should I be supernice, or—”

  “I know.”

  Trying to think of a gift for Russell, for instance, was paralyzing her. What was an appropriate gift for a husband you were about to leave?

  The bartender drifted over and hovered; Luke pointed to her Heineken.

  She held it to his mouth, licked the stray flecks of foam from his lips. “Now I wish I’d let you get that hotel room,” she whispered.

  “Friend of mine has a little place around the corner on Patchin Place.”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “No?”

  “Where’s your friend?”

  “Out of town.” He fished in his pocket and came up with a fresh-cut brass key on a carabiner, dangling it before her like a forbidden delicacy.

  “Pretty damn sure of yourself, aren’t you?” She drew her head back in a mock pose of offended dignity.

  “It was just a thought.”

  “I like the way you think.”

  The bartender placed a sweating green bottle on a coaster.

  “Shall we?”

  Leaving a fifty on the counter, he winked as he slipped the two Heinekens in the pockets of his coat—the boyishness of the second gesture just about balancing out the grandiosity of the first—and held the door open for her.

  Outside, bedazzled by the daylight, she groped for her sunglasses in her purse. He took her arm and walked her
west on Ninth Street toward Sixth Avenue through the chilly, vivid air of the December afternoon, her awareness heightened by the cold and by the perfect transparency of the flat light in which the facades of the nineteenth-century town houses seemed as precisely etched as architectural models, in which at any moment she might herself be exposed in her illicit and naked happiness, drinking a beer like a teenager, to the scrutiny of a friend or an acquaintance. She didn’t care. She almost hoped she’d see someone she knew, then suddenly worried that there must be some flaw in what should have been a self-sufficient state of bliss, because otherwise she wouldn’t feel the need to flaunt it. She felt selfish and vain, realizing that even as she floated above the concrete on the arm of her man, envying no one and, in fact, pitying all around her, some part of her secretly courted the envy and admiration of passersby.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You looked worried.”

  “I was just worrying that there was something wrong with feeling this happy.” He looked at her as if she were loony.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You are.”

  The pout she served up to him was essentially theatrical, the reflex so familiar that she didn’t know at first why this little exchange felt strange, then realized that it mimicked a thousand she’d had with Russell over the years—Luke’s expression of fond exasperation almost identical to Russell’s habitual reaction to what he called her “earnest non sequiturs.”

  “Now what?” he said, looking down at her. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “It’s just… nothing.”

  He engulfed her shoulder with his gloved hand and pulled her closer. She was afraid he was going to try to kid her out of her mood—already she could picture herself drawing farther away as he tried to jolly her up.

  “Tell me,” he said, passing Balducci’s windows with their stacked wheels of Parmesan and aging sides of beef, the sky opening out above Sixth Avenue. “We have too much at stake not to be honest with each other.”

  Dodging a jogging young couple in matching warm-up suits, the man pushing a bundled infant on one of those tricycle rigs, the name of which she tried to remember. They’d once bought two of them, used them all of five or six times—now collecting dust in the closet dedicated to good intentions and unrealized ambitions. That’s right: a baby jogger.

  Luke held the beer bottle to her lips as he steered her gently up the avenue.

  “I wish I could come to you all fresh and dewy,” she said. “Without all this history. I’m suddenly afraid I don’t have anything new and original to bring to you. How many people can you love in your life? I wish you were my first love.”

  “I don’t think it’s very logical to wish your history away, since I love you the way you are now.”

  “Middle-aged, married, with children?” She didn’t know why she was playing the devil’s advocate. Part of her wanted to postpone this kind of reckoning, to simply savor his presence. But suddenly it felt as if they’d largely managed to avoid facing these most salient facts.

  “You love your children; therefore I will love your children.” He was guiding her gently across Sixth, his arm under her elbow.

  As much as she welcomed the sentiment, it terrified her to hear it expressed. “Are we really going to do this? Change our lives?”

  “I am.”

  “It seems impossible now to imagine living without you,” she said, passing through the chilly shadow cast by the hulking, fortresslike Jefferson Market Library. “But it seems just as impossible to leave. What I was thinking of back there, when you asked me if I’d seen a ghost—you sounded exactly like Russell.”

  He was silent as they finally came to a halt in front of the iron gate of Patchin Place—a narrow mews of dollhouse tenements, vaguely connected in her mind with Greenwich Village poets.

  Looking into his eyes, seeing his sadness, she was overcome with a kind of tender remorse, which transmuted, almost immediately, into desire. She reached for his shoulders and kissed him with a carnal hunger as surprising to her as it seemed to be to him.

  They stumbled into the alley, clutching each other and kissing, Luke fishing in his pocket for the key as he pressed her up against the door of one of the little gray houses, turning the key in the lock while probing her mouth with his tongue, pressing his body against hers until the door yielded and they staggered into a hallway. She took her bearings long enough to notice a kilim on the floor of the front room and to pull him down on top of her as he wrestled her coat from her shoulders and tugged at her panty hose while she unzipped his fly and freed his cock, imagining herself as a rutting creature with neither history nor memory, with no obligations beyond the imperatives of her own instincts and desire. At some point, she realized the rhythmic thump she was hearing was her head banging on the floorboards. She felt as if she were drifting in and out of her own body.

  When at last he collapsed on top of her, she gradually began to regain a sense of her surroundings. His hot breath, a warm smudge of saliva from his cheek on her shoulder. Three white strands in his brown sideburn, and dust swimming in the remnants of the daylight above her. She stroked his hair back across his ear and heard the clink of the iron gate and footsteps in the alley; she wondered if they were visible through the front windows, but, pinned as she was, she couldn’t turn her head. The footsteps passed on by, the turning of a key, the click of the latch next door as clear and proximate as if she’d had her ear pressed against the door. The musty smell of the place, pierced with the pungent tang of sex.

  When he pulled out of her and rolled onto his side, she was filled with a sense of loss. She listened as the tempo of his breathing slowed, as the light suddenly dimmed, and on a sudden inspiration she extracted herself from his arm and the wreckage of her clothing and twisted around, taking him in her mouth. This was something new, something that hadn’t been worn out with repetition, that she’d never done before, never wanted to taste herself fresh on anyone’s cock, and indeed it was strange but also weirdly exciting, this commingled essence of his own juices and hers. She felt incredibly wicked sucking him, Luke groaning and cupping her head in his hands.

  The second time was like an entirely different act, a gentle merger, his breath in her ear like the lapping of waves, and when she came, it was a gradual deliquescence rich with tenderness and melancholy.

  “I wish I could just lie here and watch the night fall.”

  For a few minutes, she suspected he’d fallen asleep, until he raised himself on his arms and looked down at her.

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Nothing really,” she said. This was not exactly true, but she wasn’t quite ready to contemplate her other life. “Some friends coming over.” All at once, she felt terrible lying to him. It was the first time she could remember being less than truthful with him. In fact, they were going to The Nutcracker, but it seemed profane to speak of her family in this setting; she couldn’t quite reconcile the separate realities of Sugar Plum Fairies and blow jobs. She stroked the hair back away from his face. “You?”

  “About the same.”

  “I should probably think about getting up soon,” she said, testing an idea utterly at odds with her inclination.

  “Should I let you up?”

  “I don’t really want you to.”

  He bent down and kissed her and then rolled away, sitting up beside her.

  She found herself lying in a small parlor with a lumpy slipcovered couch, a couple of Shaker chairs with woven seats, a rattan coffee table populated with half a dozen incarnations of the Buddha in bronze and wood. Two bookshelves sagging with faded paperbacks. Crude, colorful school of de Kooning canvases adorned the walls.

  “Who’s your friend? Last of the action painters?”

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “The house? It’s adorable. I’ve always looked in from the street and wondered about these places. I feel like Djuna Bar
nes is going to knock on the door any minute and ask to borrow some gin, or e. e. cummings to say, ‘Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.’”

  “I’ve leased it, with an option to buy.”

  It took her a moment to absorb this and sort through the implications.

  “If you like it.”

  “If I like it?”

  “It’s got four rooms upstairs,” he said. “And it’s a ten-minute walk to school.”

  For a moment, she wondered which school he was talking about. “You mean St. Luke’s?”

  “Am I freaking you out?”

  “A little. Just give me a few minutes to catch up.” She looked around with a new eye, trying to see herself living here. The two of them—no, the four of them. Or was it five, with Ashley? What was he thinking?

  “It needs work, obviously. It wouldn’t even be ready till late spring. I need to redo the kitchen and the bathrooms. Come see the rest of it.”

  “Oh my God, Luke.” She leaped on his back and made him carry her up the stairs, eager to give form and shape to her misty vision of this future, projecting herself and her children into these rooms, almost believing it possible, and wanting desperately to believe, but unable to imagine the in-between… the tears, the bewilderment of the children, the meetings in lawyers’ offices and the sorting of possessions, the sad cardboard boxes stacked beside the bedroom door.

  Standing in the mews half an hour later in the flat afternoon light as he locked the door behind them, she stared at the misty cloud of her own breath and prayed for a sign.

  With his arm around her shoulder, they walked over the cobblestones to the gate. She wished he would say something, specifically the one thing that would dispel all her doubts.

  Ahead, in the shadow of the old women’s prison tower, a flash of red and then another—two Santas marching up Tenth Street, one fat and the other skinny. Approaching the street, she spied two more and two more behind them, one showing what she supposed was Desert Storm camo beneath his red coat and talking on a cell phone, one carrying his red-and-white hat in his hand. A cavalcade of Santas, ten, fifteen, more than twenty in all, some festive and springy of step, others dragging their tails behind them, one visibly drunk, tacking between the edges of the sidewalk, half a dozen shades of red represented in their costumes—scarlet, ruby, and vermilion. Here was a Santa with bright ermine fur trim on his coat, and another with a ratty browning fringe. One balding pinkish Santa wore jeans and carried a bulging red sack slung over his shoulder. Several were appropriately portly, while a gaunt, sickly-looking one marched beside a beanpole who appeared to be pregnant.