The Last of the Savages

by Jay McInerney

  Every few weeks Lollie would declare that the theater was dead and threaten to move to Los Angeles to write for the movies. And I, sprawled on her bed, would patiently talk her out of it—the corporate lawyer making a passionate case for artistic integrity. I read the drafts of her first play and later forgave her when I recognized myself in her second, which ran for seven months at the Lortel down in the Village. We rented a house together in Bridgehampton that summer, and Lollie organized a small clambake one night for Jack Dupree and his wife, who had a huge spread on Dunemere Lane in East Hampton. Jack was the head of the executive committee at my firm, and a very important ass for me to kiss. He drank most of a bottle of Dewars and howled at Lollie’s jokes; after they had left, she told me how he’d cornered her in the kitchen. “Copped a feel,” she said, “then tried to perform a mouth to mouth tonsillectomy.” It was part of her indisputable charm that she was more amused than amazed.

  That fall I took her out to dinner at ‘21’ to celebrate the acceptance of her first play at Playwrights Horizon. Suitably seated in the front room of the saloon after Lollie had refused an inferior table in the middle room, I confided in her my anxiety about making partner. I was in my seventh year. The coming year’s review would determine whether I made the cut. Those associates who were not invited to join the firm began to take on the aspect of eunuchs. Everyone knew the story about the lawyer at Cravath Swain and Moore who had to be dragged from his office in a straitjacket after learning that he’d been passed over. My record, thus far, was excellent; I was billing almost three thousand hours a year and had sat on any number of stupid committees, entertained Jack Dupree and served as summer associate liaison; my annual reports had been good—the last two years I had scored eight out of eight points. But I was not particularly adept at office politics, and even a single dissenting vote at the annual partners’ meeting was fatal. Somehow I didn’t think I’d sucked up enough. And the phrase “partner material” implied a narrow range of social and behavioral variables. Partners were old boys. They played golf. They drank scotch. And they tended to be married.

  “Better order another damn Dewars,” Lollie advised.

  “Maybe I better start thinking about another career.”

  “Hell, I’ll marry you,” Lollie said exuberantly enough to attract the attention of several adjoining tables. Even when she wasn’t excited Lollie’s voice tended to rattle the glassware.

  Putting a finger to my lips, I whispered back that I might take her up on her offer if I didn’t pass the next review.

  “You don’t think I’m serious. I mean it. We’d probably do better than most married couples. We could keep our own apartments and have dinner every Thursday night. That’s pretty much my dream marriage anyway, if you really want to know. All I’d ask is enough notice to find another date if you couldn’t make it for Thursday.”

  She persisted in describing the advantages of the arrangement, and then a bottle of champagne arrived, compliments of a couple across the room who believed they’d witnessed a betrothal. A well-tailored Park Avenue pair in their fifties, they waved to us as the waiter opened the bubbly.

  I raised my glass to them, and then to Lollie. “To us.”

  “To fucking us.”

  Our benefactors stopped to congratulate us as they were leaving. Before I could stop her, Lollie had convinced them to sit down for a glass of champagne.

  “Well, just for a minute,” the Chanel-suited wife said. “It’s our anniversary, actually.”

  “Twenty-two years,” her husband added. Although probably a year or two younger, his wife looked somewhat older than her husband against the backdrop of prosperous businessmen dining with their second wives and younger dates. But in their patrician serenity they seemed precisely matched, as if over the years their marriage had transmuted into a blood relation. It did not take long to discover that she had been to Miss Porter’s some years before Lollie and he had preceded me at Yale. My initial unease was replaced by a feeling of security; I felt myself slipping easily into the fiction of our engagement. Half persuaded that we could pull it off, I savored the irony of proving my establishment bona fides by entering into an unconventional marriage.

  “I want a big tacky wedding,” Lollie said when I dropped her at her door. “Twelve bridesmaids in pink taffeta and a dress with a train stretching the whole length of the church. And of course I will insist that you drink champagne out of my slipper and unhitch my garter with your teeth.”

  The next morning, waking up with a hangover and a somewhat refreshed sense of reality, I dismissed our little fantasy. But Lollie called me at the office to say her offer was still good.

  A few weeks later I met Stacey, and Lollie embarked on a liaison with a married New Yorker editor. Three months after I started dating her, I proposed to Stacey at a bistro in the Village. Short courtship, long engagement; what with one thing and another, we set a date fourteen months in the future. Meanwhile Stacey accompanied me to firm picnics and happily served as hostess when I dutifully entertained the partners and their wives. Three weeks before my wedding, after a tense afternoon in my office while the partners met upstairs, I received a phone call from Jack Dupree informing me that I was now a partner myself.

  XX

  Saul Felson’s funeral was held at Temple Emmanuel on Fifth Avenue. I don’t know how we all got through it. A reporter for one of the local tabloids lobbed desultory queries at the mourners as they entered, chiefly pertaining to Mr. Felson’s proclivities. When he spotted Davidson, our most prominent partner, he scuttled across the sidewalk and asked if the firm had a policy regarding the sexual preference of partners. Trudging up the steps, Davidson refused to lower his snowy head to acknowledge the man’s presence.

  Felson’s wife and his two teenaged boys sat grave and immobile as statuary in the front row. The partners took up the first three rows on the opposite side from the family, showing the colors—a somber phalanx of expensive blue and gray suits. The rabbi dutifully praised the deceased’s devotion to his family and his myriad contributions to the community, yet all I could think of—all anyone could think of, surely—was what Felson had been doing in that grubby hotel room. But we’re all deeply schooled in suppressing our emotions—the Jews and the Irish Catholics as well as the genuine WASPs in our white-shoe firm. We drink scotch; we play golf; we are married. The law is the exoskeleton which contains the squishy offal of our animal nature and viscid passions. Control and conformity are our mantras, and they had served us well up to this point. Felson, however, had stepped outside the boundaries.

  I wanted to say something to Mrs. Felson, but couldn’t find a suitable opportunity. Under the circumstances, the family had decided not to compound the awkwardness with any further gathering of the bereaved.

  My wife attended the service, though I told her it wasn’t necessary. Stacey is a conscientious person, strict in her observance of the decencies, whether a thank-you note or a visit to the hospital. Some years ago, she left her job at Chase Manhattan to devote herself to the kids and to a literacy program in Harlem; if this seems old-fashioned I can only say that her selflessness is genuine; her charities are chosen not for their social cachet, but from the heart.

  “Of course I’m going,” she said, the night before, as we sat at the kitchen table. “He was your colleague.” And suddenly, unexpectedly, my eyes blurred with tears.

  “Are you all right,” she asked, her forehead suddenly creasing with concern. She reached across the table and put her hand over mine.

  In fact, I felt as though I were drowning in a flood of sadness, though I hardly knew for whom—Felson, his wife and kids, Stacey or myself. My lawyerly distance from my own life seemed, if only for a moment, to have deserted me.

  “What is it, Patrick?”

  When I could finally speak, I said, “You’ve been a great wife, Stacey.”

  The day after my engagement to Stacey had been announced in the Sunday Times, my secretary buzzed me during a closed-door confere
nce. “I’m sorry, Mr. Keane. It’s a Mrs. Cordell Savage. She insisted it was urgent.” Indeed, it was hard to imagine a casual call from Will’s brittle mother. Calling to congratulate me on my marriage might not be out of character for her, but it would hardly qualify as urgent. With no small sense of dread, I picked up the line.

  She wasted no time on the pleasantries.

  “Patrick, it’s about Will. You must come down here immediately.”

  “Is he all right,” I asked.

  “Of course he’s not all right. Why do you suppose I’m calling? I can’t even get him on the telephone, all those crazy people around him, and I’m not well enough to go down there myself. I just hope he’ll listen to you.” Even now, as she was calling on my aid, she was clearly exasperated that such a blunt instrument as myself might actually be efficacious in such a delicate family matter.

  I immediately rescheduled the week’s appointments and booked myself on the afternoon flight to Memphis. I considered calling Taleesha but ruled it out until I could deliver a firsthand report. It had been months since I’d spoken to Will, which was in itself a bad sign; I’d heard he was having business troubles. Lester Holmes had been killed recently in a shoot-out; the Times had actually run a small obit. According to Mrs. Savage, Will had barricaded himself in his office, surrounded by armed minions, and refused to come out or to let anyone else into the building. Things had gotten so bad that old Jessie Petit had walked away, telling Will he wouldn’t stand by and watch him kill himself. It was Jessie who’d gone to Mrs. Savage.

  Memphis was hellishly steamy. After checking into the Peabody I changed into jeans and knocked back a drink at the bar. Seeing the ducks in the fountain reminded me of how many years had passed since I first came south with Will. I wondered if any of them had survived from my last visit, years before. How long does a duck live, if it doesn’t get shot? How long, for that matter, would we keep on splashing in our respective ponds before they took us up the elevator to the roof once and for all?

  At the pharmacy I bought half-a-dozen packages of Contac cold capsules and a small box of baking soda. My clothes were drenched with sweat as I approached the Gothic facade of Will’s building with its lurid gargoyles. Two black men in army fatigues and wraparound shades lounged inside the door, both wearing shoulder holsters with automatic pistols.

  “Delivery for Will Savage,” I said.

  “Leave it,” hissed one of the men.

  “This isn’t the kind of delivery I can leave.”

  “Orders is nobody goes up.”

  I held up two plastic bags, one full of capsules and the other white powder.

  “You ain’t the reg’lar.”

  “He called me and said bring it up personally.”

  “Got enough shit up there to kill a elephant already.”

  The two sentries looked at each other, and through some telepathy which passed the impenetrable lenses of their glasses decided to let me up. The speaker jerked his head to indicate the door behind him. I hiked up a long wooden stairway. Opening the door on the first landing, I glanced into a large studio, empty except for a microphone stand and the shattered remains of a grand piano, which seemed to have been attacked with a sledgehammer; sprung strings swarmed out of the black wreckage in exclamatory coils. Assaying the next flight, I climbed toward the insistent bass notes that reverberated through the stairwell.

  When I opened the door on the third-floor landing I was stunned by the tsunami of music—one of those lugubrious late-seventies synthesizer bands that new wave and punk was supposed to have already killed off: King Crimson, maybe, or Yes. Jack Stubblefield was standing in the middle of the rough-planked floor, his head rolled back, eyes closed, whipping the air with his limp tresses. At first I thought the noise was somehow emanating from his electric guitar; then I realized that it was a shotgun he was strumming. A football game was playing on a big TV set across the room. As the song climbed toward a garish crescendo, Stubblefield windmilled his right arm furiously across the stock of the gun. When the final chords had died away, several phones were ringing; Stubblefield shook himself off like a wet dog, lifted the gun to his shoulder and pointed it at an overhead light. Then he saw me.

  “Goat boy,” he said.

  “It’s Patrick.”

  “I know who you are.” He walked over and turned up the volume on the television. “You’re not a football fan, are you?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  He snickered. “No, I guess you wouldn’t be. You’re never going to understand the South if you don’t understand football.” His jaw was moving quite independently of the demands of speech and his eyes were starting to look dangerous. “Are you a Capricorn,” he asked.

  “Where’s Will,” I asked in as delicate a tone as I could manage. I jumped when another phone started to ring.

  He raised the gun suddenly and pointed it at me. “Ever heard about the goat and the stallion?”

  I shook my head slowly, carefully.

  “Say you got a really high-strung stallion, you know, one of those wild boys wants to kick the stall apart—well, you put a goat in the stall and he’ll calm right down. Old Jessie told me that.” He paused. “And guess what?”

  I shrugged cautiously.

  “I thought of you,” he said. Lowering the gun, he planted the barrel on his own toe. “You know what I’m saying?”

  “Where’s Will?”

  “He’s achieving Rainbow Body.”

  “Is he in the building?”

  “You’re not fucking listening to me, man. I hate it when people don’t listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “See, the being who is going to attain Dzogchen Rainbow Body, you got to be left alone in a cave for seven days. Nothing left but the nails and hair by the eighth day. I reckon Will’s been up there about a week now.”

  Stubblefield abruptly raised the gun and walked toward me until the barrel was inches from my chest, his eyes vitreous as marbles, face glistening with a sheen of sweat.

  “What you got there?” He was looking, insofar as he was looking anywhere, at the bag full of baking soda.

  Cautiously, I extended my hand.

  Laying the gun down on the floor, he crouched down to examine the contents.

  I ducked back into the stairwell and took the stairs three at a time, then thrust my shoulder against the door at the top of the landing. The first thing I picked out of the cavernous darkness was Will, in three-quarter profile, sitting at a desk, a bottle of cognac on one side and a mirror piled with white powder on the other. The desk was a dark, elaborately carved library table replete with griffins and unicorns and mythological beasts. From beyond the grave big Bukka White was singing “Fixin to Die.” I did not take this as an auspicious sign.

  If Will was aware of my entrance, he gave no indication. I approached as you would a wounded buffalo.

  “Who died,” he asked without looking up.

  “No one yet,” I answered. “At least not that I know.”

  “Presumably that includes me.”

  “Looks like you’re working on it, though.”

  Finally looking up at me, he took a swig from the bottle. “Lester’s dead and my brothers are dead, so why not me?”

  “It isn’t for lack of trying.”

  “That what you think I’m doing?” he said after a long interlude. “I’ve just been living faster than you. Besides, this is just one plane. I’m not afraid to move on to the next.”

  “What happened to Lester,” I asked, easing myself into an armchair across from him. It seemed like a good idea to keep him talking; and for me, hearing Will’s familiar voice, edgy and hoarse as it was, somewhat alleviated the weirdness of the situation.

  “What happened to Sam Cooke?” Will said. “What happened to the Scottsboro Boys? He got shot.” He dipped the long curved nail of his little finger, grown out, I supposed, for this purpose, into the pile of powder, raised it to his nose and inhaled. “I hadn’t seen old Lester
in more than a year. He turned on me. Claimed I was ripping him off. Called me a white devil. Shit, I carried his lazy ass the last five years. Got him off with probation after he shot some pimp.” He nodded toward the mirror. “He had a little problem with the powder. Maybe he owed the wrong folks money. Or maybe …”

  He left the thought hanging. Looking around, I could begin to make out the features of the room. Will was sitting directly beneath the apex of a pyramid-shaped skylight made of tinted glass and steel which extended perhaps another story above the roof of the building. Daylight was otherwise pretty effectively banished by the blackout shades which covered the tall windows. On the wall behind the desk was an intricate diagram. At one edge of the posterboard was the name JAMES EARL RAY, from which locus dozens of lines branched out to other names. On the other edge of the diagram, connected via several routes through four or five names, was CORDELL SAVAGE.

  On the floor nearby were several jars full of liquid. A Tiffany lamp burned dimly on a table at the far end of the room, just barely illuminating the front end of what appeared to be an automobile.

  “Is that a car,” I asked.

  “Cadillac. Former property of the King himself. Colonel Parker gave it to me. Sixty-five Coupe de Ville. Had a bitch of a time getting it up here. That’s another one, Elvis. He’s dead. Course he died back in ’58 or so. The pod people got him. So, you want a drink?”

  “Not right now.”

  “A line? No, of course not.”

  I’d never seen him so strung out before, and it was beginning to scare me. “Talk to me, Will.”

  “You want me to pour my heart out while you sit there all sober and straight, judging me.”

  “I’m not here to judge you.”