The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  Ever since Luke had called the Parks commissioner and won the soup kitchen a stay of execution, Jerry considered him a master of the juice. Now he was calling chefs and matre d’s to round up food that Jerry picked up in his Pathfinder, driving back and forth across the checkpoints. A hundred steak dinners from Smith & Wollensky. Fifty penne pomodoro from Lupa. Eighty burgers from Union Square Caf. Lamb chops Scottaditti from Babbo. Jerry, meanwhile, had conjured other basics, cases of Sterno, long underwear, hard hats, ice, and coffee. Feeding a stream of transit cops, sanitation workers, welders and salvage guys, and once in a while a couple of firemen. They were like ghosts, in another place even when they stood in front of the coffee urns.

  Luke joined Captain Davies and Jerry on the cobblestones of Bowling Green, where they were taking their ease in green faux-leather office chairs requisitioned from One Broadway, across the street. To the northwest, the night sky glowed yellow, illuminating the columns of smoke and steam.

  “If this keeps up, I’ll have to retire next year,” Davies said. “And so will a lot of the guys. All this fuckin’ overtime, eighty-, ninety-hour weeks, I won’t be able to afford not to. Retirement pay’s pegged to your last year’s take-home, and I’m never going to have another year like this again. You don’t have any choice.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad,” Jerry said. “Work on your fishing. Spend time with the family.”

  “Bad for the fish,” Davies said. “Bad for the force, too, losing half their senior officers. And I’m not sure my wife’s really thrilled about it, either. Last thing she wants is me underfoot all day.”

  “Since I stopped working,” Luke said, “my wife’s been furious. She doesn’t know what to do with me. I thought I was going to become a real family man. Took up cooking—which turns out to have come in handy this week—but she didn’t appreciate that at all. ‘We’re surrounded by the greatest chefs and caterers on the planet,’ she says, ‘and you have an MBA in corporate finance, and you’re suddenly going to buy an apron and puzzle out the mysteries of coq au vin?’ She thinks I’m trying to show her up. Accused me of invading her space. But I’m not sure she even knows where our kitchen is located.”

  “I read somewhere,” Davies said, “that in Polynesia, somewhere like that, the men sleep in one big hut and the women sleep in another.”

  “What about sex?”

  “Sex? What sex? I’m a married guy.”

  “I hear everybody’s fucking their brains out uptown,” Jerry said. “There was an article in one of the papers today.”

  “At least something good’s coming out of this,” Luke said. “Post-traumatic sex.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Major Donahoe, a pink-skinned, silver-haired insurance adjuster who commanded a National Guard contingent camped out in Battery Park. “I don’t know how you boys do it down here in New York. I was up at the Armory on Lexington Avenue, where they got that Center for the Missing yesterday, and you know how warm it was, all those skimpy halter tops and T-shirts and short shorts. Jesus Christ, we got some women in Syracuse, least we call them women, but they don’t look a goddamn thing like that. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if you got a whole ’nother species down here that you’re keeping to yourselves. Planet of the Babes. Another one on every block. What percentage of the chick population down here is in the fashion-model business? I mean, you must have passed some local legislation against fat and ugly. Shipping the losers upstate in the middle of the night. Come on, admit it. I don’t know how you boys can stand looking at all that pussy all day long. I’m pretty sure it would drive me crazy. I know it would sure as hell drive my wife crazy, with me spinning my head in every direction like a drunken owl. All this outrageous trim, I think I…”

  The thought died as Corrine approached across the cobblestones.

  “Don’t mind me,” she said.

  Donahoe just nodded and tilted his head toward Corrine. “Hey, I rest my case.”

  At three, Luke rode out on the Cushman with Corrine and a Guardsman into the night, stopping at several checkpoints to hand out sandwiches and sodas, finally coming to a halt at the edge of the pile, a chaos illuminated by banks of spotlights floating in the air, where huge grapplers loomed in the smoke and gnashed their teeth like dinosaurs, dipping and lifting their heads with forty-foot beams clenched between their jaws, jets of flame spurting into the air in the wake of the debris. Tiny figures clambered up and down the jagged slopes of the wreckage, antlike lines of men stretching across the rubble, which extended out of sight in the distance.

  Luke was mesmerized by the filigreed beauty of the exoskeleton of the south tower, its Gothic arches rising eight or ten stories above them, strangely lacy and delicate and comforting in the unnatural movie-set light. As they sat in silence trying to take it in, he felt his body go cold, a tingling in the extremities of his hair and a sinking in his gut. It was the same place he’d seen that first day, and yet different. The relief operation infinitely more complex, mechanized and specialized, no longer animated by hope. He was looking at a mass grave. When he turned away and looked at Corrine, he saw tears coursing down her cheeks.

  “Everyone says it’s so small when they see it on TV,” she finally said.

  He shook his head.

  “Actually, it’s huge,” she said. “It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  14

  When the National Guard came through, men from the north with lusty appetites and small-town manners, Corrine couldn’t help feeling old and unattractive as they thank-you-ma’amed her, saving their banter for the younger girls. After they’d wiped out the sandwiches, Jerry called his friend Nick at the Salvation Army, looking for cold cuts, but they had nothing to spare. Checking with Meals on Wheels, he was told the truck wouldn’t be back downtown until the next afternoon, when the main offering would be five-gallon bags of baked-bean soup. So, with five volunteers on hand, Jerry decided to drive uptown for supplies. The donation can out front held twenty-seven dollars and change.

  “Would you mind riding along with me?” he asked Corrine.

  “No, I’d love to.”

  They were just heading for the Pathfinder when a black Suburban with a WTC Relief pass on the windshield pulled up on the curb beside the green and the driver called, “Yo, Jerry.”

  He hopped out, a wiry little man in an NYFD T-shirt, and sauntered over, black ostrich cowboy boots splaying out beneath his jeans, another laminated pass bouncing on his chest.

  He exchanged manly hugs with Jerry, their cheeks brushing first one side, then the other.

  Jerry turned to her. “Corrine, this is my friend Dino.”

  The man made a courtly little bow. “A pleasure.” Then he looked at Jerry. “Just thought I’d check out your operation.”

  “Nothing much,” Jerry said. “Just a tent or two and a couple of tables.”

  “Hey, don’t be so modest. This is very impressive, what you done here. A very good thing. So show me around.”

  “What you see is what you get.” Jerry ushered him into the tent. “This is Katie, Svetlana, and Cynthia.”

  They all nodded cheerfully.

  “Hey, girls. It’s a wonderful thing you’re doing here.” His tone suggested that his sanction and blessing were somehow official, as if he were speaking from a position of authority. He took a Styrofoam cup and helped himself to a cup of coffee, which he sweetened with two sugars and two packets of Sweet’n Low, holding the empty envelopes up in front of Jerry’s nose. “You should get some Equal, the stuff in the blue packs. This shit is carcinogenic.” He examined the tray of sandwiches and lifted the lids of the warming trays to check the hot entres, then took a seat at the picnic table and glanced around as Corrine replaced the lids.

  “So how do you pay for this shit?” he said.

  “Mostly donations. I’m a little out-of-pocket.”

  “That’s no good.” Dino reached into his pocket, peeled a hundred-dollar bill off his roll, and handed it Jerry, who waved it away. />
  “Take it, go on.” He shook a Camel filter out of his pack and tapped it against the table. “You should do a little fund-raising. You got your five oh one c three?”

  “Come on, Dino, we got three coolers and a coffee machine here. What do you think, I’m the fucking Red Cross?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. You could expand, serve the community better with some real funding. Get some gas, some kitchen equipment. Tell you what, maybe I’ll drop the forms off the next time I’m in the neighborhood.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Dino.”

  “Hey, it’s no problem. Like I said, I can take care of it for you.”

  Jerry nodded glumly.

  “Keep up the good work,” he said as they embraced outside the tent. “I’ll see you soon.”

  They watched him drive away, waving, and climbed into the Pathfinder. “Is he from the fire department?” Corrine asked.

  Jerry laughed through his nose.

  “He’s more like the one who starts the fires.”

  “What fires?”

  “You don’t wanna know.”

  “That was a good idea about setting up a nonprofit.”

  “Corrine, believe me, Dino doesn’t know the meaning of nonprofit and he’s never had a selfless thought in his life.”

  “So he’s the—”

  “He’s the one who dictated my perjury.”

  Corrine was dumbstruck to think that anyone would try to exploit this tragedy on a systematic basis, but of course she was notorious for her navet. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “What I’m not gonna do is set up any five oh one c three,” he said.

  TriBeCa was still locked down, so they took the FDR up to Fourteenth and drove across to the Food Emporium on Union Square, where Jerry double-parked right out front. “Charity has its perks,” he said, tapping the WTC Relief pass on the dashboard. “Just ask the Red Cross officials in their BMWs.”

  “You don’t seem to like the Red Cross much,” she said.

  “They been on my shit list ever since they refused to barter for coffee. I was offering three cases of Sterno. The bitch told me she needed invoices, said they had to go through official channels. And how many millions pouring into their coffers in the past week?”

  Jerry saw himself as a guerrilla of the relief effort, trading respirators for propane, scrounging up forty pounds of buffalo wings from a buddy who managed some West Side sports bar. This forced retreat into the traditional economy for cold cuts obviously seemed faintly distasteful, a failure of ingenuity. He resented these uptown forays, these glimpses of a city insufficiently mindful of the crisis.

  Inside the door of the Food Emporium, he grabbed a shopping cart and wheeled straight to the deli section, right up front, casting a covetous eye on the squarish pink hams and yellow cheeses, the logs of salami, and the big turkey breasts in their fishnet brassieres, while Corrine took a number.

  “Look at all that,” he said, nodding toward the glass. “We could stock the tent for a week—even two. Except we’d need refrigeration. Actually, we need it anyway, I gotta call that woman at student services at NYU—what was her name—see if she could hook us up with some.”

  After all the hours spent downtown at the relief station, Corrine felt like an alien in this extravagant, brilliantly lit intersection of supply and demand, amazed to discover the old consumer rhythms were still intact.

  An old lady with a four-footed cane pressed her face against the glass in front of them.

  “How’s the roast beef today?” she asked. “Is it lean?”

  “Very nice,” said the fat man in the hairnet behind the counter.

  “Because I don’t want it unless it’s lean.”

  A nasal voice piped up behind them: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, lady, just get the roast beef.” The complainant was a twitchy youth in a warm-up jacket and camo cargo pants, his sneer adorned with a wispy nimbus of facial hair. Jerry turned to stare at him and was still staring when a second counter attendant called out his number.

  “What’s on special?” Jerry asked. “I got a lot of hungry rescue workers downtown.”

  To Corrine, this sounded a little self-righteous, but maybe he was angling for a discount.

  “We got the turkey breast on special at four-ninety-nine.”

  “Give me ten pounds of that.”

  Corrine could almost feel the kid seething behind them as the deli woman patiently shaved slice after slice of white meat, the big ovoid slowly disappearing into the whirling blade. When she removed the butt end and said, “Let me get you a fresh breast,” there was a groan from behind them. After she’d weighed out the two towering stacks on the scale, she said, “Let me just print up the total.” She winked at Jerry, her cheeks as pink as the ham in the case. “And then if I was to slice an extra pound or two and just kind of seal it up with the rest, I don’t think the manager’s gonna know the difference.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” the adenoidal voice protested.

  “You’re very kind,” Jerry said to the woman. “And after that,” he said, with what seemed to Corrine a certain malicious relish, “I think I’d like five pounds of Virginia ham.”

  “Oh, fuck me!”

  Jerry turned slowly, seeming to expand in volume as he did so. Corrine had always thought she wouldn’t want to see him really mad and now she was certain of it. There was something wounded and angry in him.

  “I’m feeding people who are digging day and night down at Ground Zero. What’s your emergency?”

  “Well, aren’t you fucking special.”

  For a man his size, he had a very quick right hand. She was pretty sure she heard the sound of his knuckles glancing off the kid’s cheekbone, and something else, a cracking sound, just as the kid went down, wobbling and sinking to his knees.

  “All right,” said the fat man behind the counter.

  From the knot of customers around the deli counter came the sound of hands clapping. Jerry took a bow.

  The kid was writhing on the floor, holding the bloody remains of his nose. “You fucking prick,” he muttered. “I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Jerry turned to the deli lady. “That was five pounds of Virginia ham, if you don’t mind.”

  The boy struggled to his feet, slowly straightened himself, his right hand cupped beneath his nose. “You bastard,” he honked, or at least that’s what Corrine thought he said.

  “If I really was a Jew bastard,” Jerry said when they were back in the car, “I would have kicked his fucking anti-Semitic ass right out the door. You heard that, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe,” Corrine said. “It could have been.”

  “Maybe kicking him was a mistake,” Jerry admitted.

  Certainly, Corrine thought, that was where he had lost the sympathy of the crowd, which surveyed him with a collective horror when he finally looked up to draw breath.

  “I don’t know, I’m just so goddamn angry. Jew bastard, you bastard—what’s the difference?’”

  Corrine shrugged. “I thought you were Italian?”

  “My mother was Jewish.”

  She wondered if the punk at the supermarket knew that the faith passed matrilineally.

  15

  The doorman let him in. The loft had always seemed strangely uninhabited—like a show house, a model unit, a generic late-model, postartist SoHo loft. Very little of Guillermo was visible from the doorway, just vast expanses of white wall and walnut floor, with intermittent mesas of dark wood and outcrops of beige and taupe upholstery. Partly, this was a deliberate strategy; he liked to do up a place and then flip it, which strategy called for a certain impersonal, Olympian mode of decor and tended to minimize the possessive imprint. The open kitchen was equipped with restaurant-quality stainless-steel appliances, of which only the Sub-Zero refrigerator had ever served its intended platonic purpose. Luke wasn’t sure which would be creepier, if he’d been overwhelmed by a sense of his friend’s presence and spirit, or this—that he
didn’t really feel it at all, Guillermo having left so little of himself behind here in his ostensible final earthly abode. He’d bragged to Luke about spending $300,000 just gutting and decorating the place, and that a friend at Cond Nast had promised him a spread in House & Garden, which would help Guillermo sell it at a massive profit. But then he heard from a kid whom he described as “a former trick,” who worked in the art department and whom he’d run into recently at Boy Bar, that the magazine’s design director was reluctant, having asked, after his scouting tour of the loft, “What’s the caption, ‘Another fag with too much money’?” What had hurt Guillermo the most about this remark was the fact that he prided himself on his robustly masculine taste. He had been aiming for a sort of cultivated hetero look, not least because he entertained clients there, and had envisioned his apartment in the mold of an early sixties bachelor pad, the kind of place where the Hathaway shirt man entertained Pan Am stewardesses. Of course, he’d hired a decorator, but he’d micromanaged the details himself, choosing the art and the fabrics, many of which had been shipped from Italy and France, and believed the result to be quirky yet somehow classically modernist. The old wine press from Tuscany in the corner beside the bar, for instance—what was faggy about that? Guillermo had wanted to know. There was nothing blatant or formulaic in the place, as far as he could see, no nudes by Mapplethorpe or Herb Ritts, no fussy handbag collection—so he had raved to Luke a few weeks before.

  At least the bedroom had a few visible traces of the owner—pictures in ebony frames on the ebony dresser: his parents and his sister and a single picture of his freckled all-American wife, a memento of the failed experiment; and, much to Luke’s surprise, one of the two of them shirtless on the deck of a yacht in Gustavia harbor, Luke potbellied and flabby beside the lean and sculpted Guillermo. The room was immaculate, the bed made. On the bedside table, a volume of Deepak Chopra and a copy of Underworld, the virgin spine of which cracked smartly when Luke paged through it. In the drawer, a vial of Ambien and one of Viagra, as well as a Lufthansa sleep mask. In the mausoleum of the master bath, resisting the urge to catalog the extensive collection of pharmaceuticals, he found what he was looking for—a toothbrush and a hairbrush, although, like everything else in the apartment, they bore no sign of use.