The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  “There’s no such thing as a perfect couple,” she said.

  “My point exactly.”

  “Ah, so that was your point. I was wondering.”

  “Marriage is difficult,” he said. The arrival of the waitress seemed to cheer him; he waved the hovering figure in, like one of those guys with flashlights beckoning a 747 forward on the runway, watching his drink as it was lowered to the table, as if to make sure it didn’t fly away. “She’s a professional,” he said after she left.

  “Who, the waitress?”

  “She does parties after hours for five hundred an hour.”

  “How is she?”

  “I’m not into that kind of thing. Though I’ve been to some of the parties.”

  “I hear you’re into leading ladies,” Corrine said.

  “To direct an actress, you have to put her on a pedestal, make her into a goddess. You have to fall in love with her a little so the audience will fall in love with her a lot. It’s what you might call an occupational hazard.”

  “At least you’re well compensated for it.”

  “Some of these crazy bitches—not nearly well enough.”

  Erhardt had a vast repertoire of scowls and facial tics with which he carried on his own side of the conversation when forced to dam the torrent of his own speech and listen; unlike most of the directors of his generation, who seemed to believe that beards conferred on them a certain intellectual gravity, he’d always been clean-shaven, and thus unable to mask his impatience with the generally misguided and imprecise opinions of his interlocutors.

  “So, Jim said you were interested in talking about The Heart of the Matter.”

  “Already we’re talking business.”

  “As opposed to what?”

  He sighed, threw his arms over the back of his chair, assuming the lecture position. “You know, Greene divided his fictional output into two categories, one of which he called ‘entertainments.’ And the story that eventually became The Heart of the Matter was originally conceived as one of these, a kind of suspense puzzle, this upside-down procedural in which the crime and the criminal were known and the mystery, for the reader and the criminal, lay in identifying the detective who was pursuing him. And of course you’ve got the skeleton of that structure in the novel as written, Wilson, the not-so-secret operative spying for the Home Office on poor old Africa hand Scobie. But eventually old Graham decided to go a different route and write a novel, with all the complexity and moral ambiguity that that word implied for him. Which is a long-winded way of saying that The Heart of the Matter doesn’t exactly qualify as the kind of entertainment that plays in Peoria. Not exactly boy meets girl, loses girl, gets girl back.”

  Corrine tried to model her face into that of a good student absorbing instruction, although she was familiar with the contents of this speech.

  “Neither are any of your films,” she said.

  “Who was it who described the three-act structure as boy meets girl, boy and girl get into a pickle, boy gets pickle into girl.”

  “You?” She was beginning to wonder about the agenda. What exactly were they doing here?

  “Okay,” he said after a revivifying swallow. “I’ve been thinking about this book for years. I love the idea, but I’ve got some questions right from the start. Let’s just put aside the whole Catholicism can of worms for a moment. We’ve got Scobie, the honest policeman in a corrupt colonial African hellhole. Too honest to be trusted by his careerist drone peers. His wife, Louise, a nag and a drag, whom he’s too decent or too passive to shed himself of. Do you think he loves her?”

  “He loves her in a way.”

  “You’re equivocating,” he said, waving to Abel Ferrar across the room.

  “He pities her.”

  “Exactly. The problem I have is if you make her too pathetic, which I think Greene does, and, as I say, you’ve been incredibly faithful to the master, then you eventually lose patience with Scobie. Instead of being noble, he just looks like a fucking masochist. If you make her too sympathetic, of course, then you tip the balance of sympathy away from him when he starts to fuck the little shipwrecked girl.”

  Corrine’s sympathy had always been with Scobie, whose nobility broke her heart. That’s what made her want to do the movie—his fierce, unforgiving morality, his refusal to put his own needs or desires first. An honest policeman forced to compromise his honesty for the sake of his wife’s happiness… trapped between two women… trying, impossibly, to do right by both of them and finally acknowledging the impossibility.

  “There were times,” she said, “writing the script, when I measured Russell against Scobie and almost hated him. Russell, I mean.” Why was she saying this? she wondered, looking at the residue of her most recent glass of wine, remembering suddenly that the screenplay had been Russell’s idea—he was the one who’d suggested it to her. But she definitely had Cody’s attention. He’d stopped squirming in his seat and was leaning forward to listen. “Because I couldn’t imagine him, in the same situation, being as tortured as Scobie. True, he had been unfaithful to his wife, but he hated himself for it, and finally killed himself because he couldn’t bear to let either one of them down.”

  “No, no, no. He killed himself because he’d committed a mortal sin. It’s all about his relationship with God. A Catholic God. I’ve got some real problems with Scobie’s Catholicism. But it’s crucial. The women are just place markers, ciphers, empty vessels of neediness. Scobie is—”

  “Don’t insult Scobie. I love Scobie.”

  “You love him because his erotic map, if you can even call it that, is essentially female. He’s a chick. He needs to be loved; he needs to be depended on. It’s the dependence of the two women that binds him to them, his need to be needed. Their essence is irrelevant.”

  “That’s a pretty sexist reading.”

  “Oh, please. And here I was just beginning to think you had an original mind.”

  “I’m not a knee-jerk feminist. And I don’t have much use for either of the women.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “The women are black holes of neediness.”

  She wasn’t sure whose point had been won here.

  He noted her confusion. “What I’m saying is that this is actually a fairly special case. Scobie doesn’t love the way most men love, and he doesn’t cheat the way most men cheat.”

  “Why do most men cheat?” she asked. “I’m curious.”

  “Why ask me?”

  “Because you’re such a perceptive observer of human nature. And you’re a man.”

  “Because we yearn for the unknown.”

  “Strange pussy.”

  “If you will. Because men are romantics. Scobie’s not. He’s a realist. Don’t laugh. You think I’m kidding?”

  “How do you define romantic?”

  “Unrealistic expectations. A yearning for the infinite. Dissatisfaction with the actual. The actual being the familiar. The body of the woman you’ve already slept with. When you fuck a strange woman, you’re searching the void for meaning.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Surely you’ll admit that women are the realists. Let me give you an example. Right now, I have a yearning for a bottle of burgundy. Long ago, back in, oh, probably 1993, I had a bottle of ’71 La Tache, and I’ve been trying to recapture that bliss ever since. I’ve swilled dozens—nay, hundreds—of bottles of similar stuff in the last decade and paid thousands and thousands of dollars for the privilege, and not only have I never recaptured the glory of that experience, most of the stuff tasted like rotgut—thin and bitter and ungiving, the vinous equivalent of Greene’s portrait of pruney old Louise. But the next time I’m faced with a wine list, I’ll order burgundy, hope triumphing over bitter experience, still seeking that primal and quite possibly illusory ecstasy of the ’71 La Tache.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Corrine said. “The last time Russell asked me how I was feeling was 1993, but I keep talking to him anyway, hoping to recapture that
experience.”

  “How about a bottle of wine?” he said.

  “That’s about the last thing I need.” She looked at her watch. “I have two kids at home. I have to get up at seven.”

  “Don’t hide behind that maternal thing.”

  Trying to attract service, he waved both of his arms over his head.

  She’d already had more to drink tonight than she had in years, but she was sort of enjoying this, partly because she was drunk. And how often did she have a chance to get drunk with a fucking legend? On the other hand, she didn’t want to get so shitfaced that she’d find herself in an awkward situation.

  He excused himself to go to the men’s room. When he finally returned, he pulled his chair up directly beside hers and threw his arm around her, exploring with his hand.

  “Thanks, that’s my left breast,” she said. “I’ve been looking for it all night.”

  “If I said yes right now, would you go home with me and the waitress?”

  She tried to gauge whether this was a joke. His gaze was glassy and intense through the thick frames of his glasses. “I thought you weren’t into that kind of thing.”

  “I lied.”

  “You’re serious?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “You’re saying, if I fuck you and the waitress, you’ll direct my screenplay?”

  “That appears to be what I am saying.”

  “What’s to prevent you from changing your mind in the morning?”

  “I won’t. I give you my word, right here.”

  “Flattered as I am, I don’t believe you’d base your decision on whether or not I fucked you. And if you did, I could hardly trust your judgment. Could I?”

  “You underestimate your own attractions.”

  “I think you’ve got me mixed up with my younger sister.”

  “No, her attractions are very superficial. I know. I’ve been there.”

  “You must feel very special.”

  “It would be interesting if I had an option check in my pocket. Just to see if you’d be tempted.”

  “We’ll never know, will we?”

  “I enjoy posing these moral dilemmas,” he said.

  “Are they often successful?”

  “I’m usually disappointed,” he said, “to discover how easily and cheaply people will sell their souls. I actually admire your integrity.”

  “So that was a hypothetical,” she said, throwing him a rope.

  “It might have been,” he said, not deigning to take it.

  Good save, she thought. She wasn’t entirely certain how serious any of this had been. Directors as a class were congenitally manipulative, and Erhardt was obviously a real mind-fucker, but somehow she wasn’t all that offended.

  “Did you get Jim to call me over here just so you could hit on me?” she asked, genuinely curious. In a strictly theoretical sense, she found the idea kind of amazing.

  He paused to consider this, then shrugged. “Motives are usually mixed, don’t you think?”

  Riding home in the cab, she decided that she was more flattered than offended. It seemed to have been a very long time since she had seen herself as an object of desire. The night before, after she was in bed, she’d felt a stirring of the old impulse, which had been dormant for many months, if not years. She’d put down her book and rolled on her side, stroking Russell’s hip. He’d grunted appreciatively. But when, after a few moments, he failed to put down his manuscript, she’d retreated to her own side of the bed. Sex had become a yawning chasm between them. Once upon a time, they’d had the freedom of each other’s bodies—knowledge that had since been lost along the way. Like all married couples of long duration, they’d experienced the ebb and flow of physical intimacy, though by now the tide had been out so long, she’d begun to doubt its return. After all this time, she felt awkward and self-conscious and she didn’t know how to return her body to him. Every sexless day that passed made it more difficult to resume the old intimacy. At one time, before the kids came along, they’d had sex every morning—a routine established after they had found themselves too tired at night.

  She sensed acutely that it was her own fault. From the time she’d been pregnant, she hadn’t wanted to be touched. And she definitely hadn’t wanted to be touched after the children were born, feeling defective in the wake of their radically premature birth—why hadn’t she been able to hold them longer? Or rather, it wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to be touched—she hadn’t wanted to be fucked, which was, to Russell, the point of touching. Physical affection was, in his mind, foreplay. He didn’t seem to have any use for the sort of tenderness that didn’t lead to orgasm. And this fact made her more reluctant, more resentful. She’d felt herself tensing up whenever he stroked her arm or kissed her ear—because she knew that these gestures were not ends in themselves. And he, in time, had started to withhold them.

  Who knows, she thought as she paid the driver and climbed out, almost tripping as her heel slipped from the curb, pausing to look up at the huge monoliths looming above her… after all this time, he may have stopped wanting me. It occurred to her that she wasn’t growing any younger. She was still thin; her tits were still more or less in place, not least because there wasn’t that much of them. But she was almost forty-two. What if she started wanting him again, only to discover he no longer wanted her?

  She’d watched him as if from a great distance… lying on his back on the far side of the bed, his manuscript hovering above his face. It all seemed so sad and foolish. Lying two feet from her husband, and wanting him in the old way, she’d felt as shy as a virgin. The white sheet between them like a blank page she couldn’t find the words to fill.

  PART TWO

  That Autumn

  6

  Ash Wednesday. The debris—the paper and sooty dust—had surged up the avenues and stopped at Duane Street. Staggering up West Broadway, coated head to foot in dun ash, he looked like a statue commemorating some ancient victory, or, more likely, some noble defeat—a Confederate general, perhaps. That was her second impression. Her first was that he was at least a day late. Yesterday morning, and well into the afternoon, thousands had made this same march up West Broadway, fleeing the tilting plume of smoke, covered in the same gray ash, slogging through it as the cerulean sky rained paper down on them—a Black Mass version of the old ticker-tape parades of lower Broadway. It was as if this solitary figure was re-enacting the retreat of an already-famous battle.

  He paused to lean against a Mercedes coated with the same dust, a yellow respirator dangling from his neck like a talisman, the creases of his face highlighted by the gray powder. She thought somehow that for all his dishevelment, he looked familiar, though she couldn’t say why.

  His knees showed through the ripped legs of what until recently had been a pair of dress slacks. The hard hat looked anomalous, and indeed, as he tilted his head back, it fell to the curb, exposing a dark tangle of hair, streaked with the ubiquitous talcy ash.

  Corrine approached slowly, afraid she might scare him, a little spooked herself—the street and sidewalks deserted, as if they were the last two people on earth. “Are you… all right?”

  Corrine held out a bottle of Evian; she was just about to give up, when he raised his hand and reached for it. Both his hands were raw and bloodied, seeping wounds still wet beneath the dusty grime.

  After draining the bottle, he seemed to take note of his surroundings, turning his head in both directions before finally looking back at Corrine. He stared at her for an uncomfortably long interval, like someone untrained in the social graces. “You’re the first person I’ve seen,” he finally said.

  She supposed he was in shock or something. She detected the molasses residue of a southern accent. Seen sounding almost like sane.

  “Unless I’m imagining you.”

  “No, no,” she said. “At least I don’t think you are. It’s hard to tell, though. What’s real, I mean.”

  “Can you still smell it here?” he ask
ed.

  “The smoke?” Corrine nodded, looking up at the milky plume that arced south by southwest above the office buildings of Broadway.

  “Have you been… digging?”

  He wet his lips and looked back down in the direction from which he’d come. “I was supposed to meet my friend Guillermo at Windows on the World.”

  She nodded encouragingly. “Yesterday?”

  “Was it yesterday?” He seemed to be puzzling out the time frame.

  “Tuesday.” She realized she’d sidetracked him. This might be the first chance he’d had to tell his story. For the past twenty-four hours, they’d all been telling their stories—accounting for their whereabouts and testing their own reactions in the telling. “The eleventh,” she said.

  “The morning of the eleventh. I got down there just before nine. I was supposed to meet Guillermo at eight, but I left him a message saying I couldn’t make it.”

  “You were lucky,” she said.

  He nodded slowly, as if considering an idea that hadn’t occurred to him before. “I called him late the night before and left a message canceling. Not canceling—postponing. Until ten. But I never followed up. The thing is, what happened was, I had a fight with my daughter that night, and I was coming downtown to meet my accountant at nine—his office was in the World Financial Center. But I just didn’t feel like waking up that early, so I left him a message. Postponing the breakfast. But who knows if he got it? Eight o’clock yesterday morning.”

  She nodded tentatively, trying to take in the details. Sirens wailed from the direction of the West Side Highway. A Boston terrier with a white mask dragged its owner into view around the corner on Duane Street. They looked like a pair of bandits—the dog with its white mask, the owner with red kerchief fastened behind his head, concealing his nose and mouth. She should probably be wearing something herself, she realized.

  “When I got out of the cab,” the ashy man was saying, “people in the plaza were looking up and pointing. I didn’t really think about it, not until I was in the elevator of my accountant’s building. Somebody said there’d been an explosion in the tower. I was in the accountant’s office, reading the Journal, and I suddenly thought, Wait a minute, maybe Guillermo didn’t get the message. He might not have checked. I tried to call him on his cell phone, and then Number Seven was evacuated. I’m calling him over and over as I’m walking down the stairwell from the twenty-seventh floor. Then I’m on West Street, looking up at the smoke, and redialing him when I saw the jumpers. That’s the last thing I remember, bodies raining down on the plaza. Falling slowly and then suddenly exploding like rotten fruit on the concrete.