The Last of the Savages

by Jay McInerney

  He paused, examined the tip of his cigarette. “After you called I flew to London. Did what needed doing. And I never told him about me and Cheryl. And now I don’t guess I ever will.”

  We filled the library with smoke. We talked business. Will was up to something Utopian and profitable which I couldn’t really understand—giving computers to kids from L.A. street gangs, teaching them to program and make music. Sony was throwing money at him, he said, and he’d convinced them to kick in another million to help keep his free clinic in Mississippi up and running.

  For the first time in years I heard the old enthusiasm in his voice as he described how computers were going to free us all from the web of corporate power and democratize our atrophied political structures. This was essentially the same vision he’d been espousing since prep school—only the weapons were new. Kids already live in this wired world, he said. Then he asked me what it was like, having kids.

  “It’s great,” I said, trying not to sound too enthusiastic. “Also a huge pain in the ass.”

  “I guess you know we can’t,” he said.

  “There are always options,” I said.

  He fell into one of his reveries. “Do you think it’s genetic,” he asked suddenly.

  “What’s genetic?”

  “What you’re … well, whom you’re attracted to?”

  “You’re asking if my daughters are likely to be dykes?”

  “No, of course not. I just wondered if there was anything—”

  “That made me”—I hesitated to admit what I had only to Lollie—“attracted to men?”

  After his revelations, and after a moment of reflexive panic, I realized that if I was in fact Will’s best friend I couldn’t hold back on him now. Or maybe I’d finally come to terms with my own nature. I told him that there was no single event, no aspect of my relationship with my father and mother, that nicely explained this part of my emotional composition, only a gradual realization. Perhaps I felt to an unusual degree the anxiety that accompanies sexual awakening, the foreignness of women. Matson didn’t really influence me, though he must have recognized what I was reluctant to admit to myself. I certainly didn’t choose this preference and in fact I have been fighting it most of my days. But I could honestly tell Will that my life is not a total sham, that I have felt desire for men and women and that, in my own way, I am happy with Stacey, if not sated.

  Will listened attentively, without judgment, and I found myself almost giddy with relief to finally unburden myself to my closest friend.

  Later, conducting a tour of my apartment, I pointed out the Matisse, his wedding present, over the mantel. It was an odalisque, from his Moroccan period, hardly more than a foot square, in a massive gilded bib of a frame.

  Will examined it with interest. “It’s good to know where some of the money went,” he said. Our most valuable possession, it had been dumped with all the other presents on the Colchesters’ dining room table. He didn’t remember it.

  “So here you are on Park Avenue, Patrick. Is it what you hoped it would be?” There was something ominous in his scrutiny, that relentless, unblinking stare, those charged longueurs. “I guess I want to know—does it make you happy?”

  I shrugged. “When you say ‘happy,’ ” I said experimentally, “you mean ecstatic.” This sounded true and even significant as soon as I said it. “You mean something bigger than I think we’re capable of sustaining.”

  “Hell, maybe repression and conformity’ve made you happier than me.” He smiled ironically. “Maybe I was wrong all along. I mean, look at me.”

  “You’ve already left behind a bigger footprint than I ever will.”

  “Will Savage, Bigfoot. Large, hairy and elusive, possibly mythical.”

  “And this is Caroline’s room,” I said, switching on a light to illuminate a divided realm of stuffed animals and pictures of handsome young thugs. Though I poked my head in here almost every day, I looked at the room with sudden amazement, unable to believe that it really belonged to my daughter. Will, too, seemed slightly awed. He examined the posters for Green Day and Boyz II Men and rubbed his hand along the nubbly pink bedspread.

  “Do you know who her favorite band is,” I asked.

  “Pearl Jam?”

  I shook my head. “The Doors.”

  “No shit.” Will seemed pleased. He studied the room carefully, as if it were the lair of an alien creature that he might presently encounter.

  “I have something I want to talk to you about,” he said, picking up a stuffed elephant in overalls. “A favor to ask.”

  “Whatever it is, you got it.”

  “You haven’t heard it yet,” he said, squeezing the elephant.

  XXIV

  The equilibrium I have achieved is the antithesis of everything Will has believed in, a refutation of the liberation theology embedded in all those popular songs. And now the feel-good dogma of carpe diem is beamed into our homes by the corporate purveyors of goods and services, who bought the rights to his message, slimmed it down and mass-produced it. But are we any better off for it?

  Inevitably, by virtue of not immolating himself in his own flame, Will has drifted slightly closer to my point of view. Does this mean that in the end I have won? If so, it is a melancholy victory that might to some eyes too closely resemble defeat. I think of my ancestor Donnell Ballagh O’Keane, who fought with Tyrone in the war against the English but who later changed his allegiance so far as to be knighted by James I. And yet, for all his adaptability, he spent the final years of his life a prisoner in the Tower of London.

  Our desires are infinite and insatiable; it is only by mastering them that we stand a chance at happiness. Or if not happiness, then peace, for the pursuit of happiness seems to me a cruel and frustrating creed in the end, a terrible scam perpetrated on our callow polity. With few exceptions—Matson at Yale, a brief vertical encounter in the back room of an adult bookstore and another at a rest stop on the Merritt Parkway—my outlaw inclinations have been suppressed.

  I, too, want to hear the gypsies play and the mermaids sing; I want to drink the magic tea and walk barefoot on the beach in Bali, watch the bronzed dancers dance for me. But I am not strong enough to invent a role for myself outside of convention, and I have watched others who have tried come to grief—Felson in his bad suits and his holy day yarmulkes. Even Will, as robust as he is. What many would call cowardice I style wisdom. If Don José had left Carmen’s hands tied and turned her over to the dragoons, married little Micaëla …

  That night several years ago, Will was back in his hotel before eleven. I realized later that this might be the last intimate conversation I would have with my best friend. Now we live for our families. He and Taleesha have a son—eked out with the help of the highest reproductive technology. We talk about the kids, about estate planning. When we talk, which is less frequently than we might like. The signal, shaping events of our lives are probably behind us. Speaking for myself, I have outgrown the turbulent emotions. Or at least I hope, I pray that I have.

  I’ve started going to church again—part of a middle-aged quest for significance, I suppose, and a strategy for curbing the dangerous urgings of the flesh. One afternoon not so long ago, I had a strange epiphany in a doctor’s office. Lying back on a vinyl recliner with my chinos around my knees, I experienced a powerful intimation of immortality, as if my soul for an instant vibrated to the music of its source. Not that I can say with certainty what I believe—only that I want to believe. I think of something the astronomer Martin Rees once said: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Still, I’d be grateful for a sign. As I wait patiently for grace, I pray for my best friend as well as for myself, even though his faith, if unorthodox, has always been deep.

  Two years ago this spring, on one of the happiest days in my all-too-sober life, I stood godfather to Will’s child in a church in Santa Monica. A shaven-headed Buddhist roshi stood beside me in an unofficial capacity while the Episcopal minister presided. Ta
leesha’s father stood at the altar with us, along with old Jessie Petit, who by then was using a walker. Stacey stayed home with the girls. We have reached a tacit agreement on the subject of Will, as on so many other issues. Unless Stacey should suddenly surprise me—and I would be the first to admit it’s possible—I think our marriage will endure. However, I decided not to tell her, at least not yet, that I am the biological father of Robert Johnson Savage.

  I admit I was stunned and gratified that night at my apartment when Will asked me. I tried dutifully to summarize the hazards of the plan, even as I treasured the honor of his request. A few months later, during a business trip to Los Angeles, I consummated our long, strange friendship—and caught that fleeting glimpse of the cosmos—alone in the darkened office of a fertility clinic in Westwood.

  After the christening ceremony, there was lunch on the beach at Will’s and Taleesha’s new home in Malibu. The old cement mixer was parked out front, a permanent installation which the neighbors were suing him to remove. Half the surviving rock stars of the past three decades were parading across the lawn, clutching children and soft drinks, tamed or perhaps just tired. Somehow the young women, the nannies and personal assistants and girlfriends, looked almost exactly like the girls of my youth—rail thin, with long straight hair and tie-dyed shirts. I don’t know, I don’t have much of an eye for fashion, but it was eerie, as if in some way nothing had really changed—as if the world hadn’t aged, only we had.

  At the center of the gathering was Will, running to fat again, sweating in a black braided military jacket and black collarless shirt, puffing like FDR on his long cigarette holder, making concessions neither to the climate nor the march of fashion, defiantly upholding the traditions of an era that didn’t believe in tradition. His hair is still long, though it has started to march up his forehead, and he dyes it now, a surprising piece of vanity, along with his beard. That day he put me in mind of some great Georgian rakehell who discovers to his surprise that he has survived into the Victorian era. After lunch, I saw him sneaking a joint in the driveway with one of the nannies.

  I sat on the porch with Taleesha, admiring the expensive Pacific while she nursed their handsome beige baby. Will’s other idea for a name, she informed me, was Muddy Waters Savage.

  I laughed. “Very catchy. I’m glad wiser counsel prevailed.”

  “I told him the kid would have enough to contend with as it is. And of course he pretended not to know what I was talking about.”

  “If it makes you feel any better,” I said, “I’ll take the blame for every rotten thing the little monster does.”

  “I’m not worried,” she said, lifting the baby away from her breast to burp it. “Will won’t ever tell you,” she added, “but you know how grateful he is.”

  I’m sure Will’s thankful to be absolved of the curse of his own lineage, just as I’m delighted to find myself a retroactive member of an old southern family and the natural father of my best friend’s son. Is it possible we all get what we wished for? None of us have yet figured out how to comprehend this mutation of the traditional family which we’ve concocted. Then again, it probably can’t work any worse than the original model. I do sometimes worry that Will might come to resent me. Certainly Cordell Savage has not yet come to terms with the fact that his only grandson is half black: and to this day he doesn’t know that the child is not, precisely, his grandson. And who knows if young Robert will hate us all, when he is finally told how he came into this world. Will he combine our strengths, this mulatto boy, or be divided against himself? Looking hopefully that day into his light blue eyes for some trace of my blood, I wondered whether a child of two races might redeem the original sin of our heritage. Or whether, at least, he might be happier with who he is than we were.

  After the last guests had gone I took a long walk down the beach with Will, who smoked a joint and held forth on the digitalized, postcorporate future when each of us would take control of our destiny—or, rather, when our children would. On the sunny edge of the continent, laved by the saline breeze off the Pacific, two thousand miles from the Civil War killing grounds of Tennessee and six thousand miles from the Yorkshire estate where Cordell Savage lives with his third wife, it seemed possible that afternoon to start fresh, to take twelve steps into a brave new life. If we log on to the Internet, eat the right foods and exercise religiously, surely we will forget our differences and begin to love one another. But then the riots break out again in the City of Angels, just a few miles south of this paradise, and sons stand trial for shotgunning their parents.

  I think of Will pointing a shotgun at his father. And I ponder those weird hobbyists who dress up in the gray and the blue and shoulder muskets and regimental colors to reenact the battles of Gettysburg and Manassas. Our ghosts walk among us—soldiers and hippies, slaves and tyrants, moaning their griefs and rattling their sins like chains. Robert Johnson Savage will have no choice but to grapple with them. I can only pray that he fires no weapons in that contest.

  After flailing so awkwardly against my own modest heritage, I know that my only contribution to the great tides of destiny will be to relay the message of my genes. There be giants … and there be the rest of us, drifting in schools with the dark currents beneath the waves. Passing the midpoint of a lifetime of small triumphs and failures, of pursuing false idols and common virtues, I see that cleaving to Will was the single daring and unpredictable choice I allowed myself along the way. If this has been the story of Will’s life, more than my own, that is because he has lived.

  Will wanted to liberate us all; no doubt he’d inherited a taste for lost causes. Yet there have been times—swaying at his side backstage in Boston; racing the wrong way down a predawn street in Memphis; cruising with the top down across the hot skillet of the Mississippi Delta in search of the blues—when I knew, at least for a little while, what it was like to feel free.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 1997

  Copyright © 1996 by Bright Lights, Big City, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  Portions of this work were originally published in Esquire.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  McInerney, Jay.

  The last of the savages : a novel / by Jay McInerney.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76323-5

  I. Title

  PS3563.C3694L37 1996

  813′.54—DC20 96-2112

  Author photograph © Mary Entrekin

  Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.0