The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  “Don’t you think that changed her?” Corrine said. “I’d guess she never felt the same way about gardening or letter writing again. And what about you? You haven’t forgotten—even a hundred and fifty years later.”

  “We had fewer distractions, in the South. New York doesn’t have a collective memory.”

  She didn’t want things to be the same, didn’t want to go back. She wanted to be with him here in the car, picking up a calzone for a cop manning a checkpoint, just looking at him, watching his eyes modulate from gray to blue and back again. She reached over and ran her fingers through his hair, which was far softer than it looked.

  “Do you think we’ll ever feel guilty,” she said, “that if this terrible thing hadn’t happened, we never would’ve met? I mean, what if some supremely powerful being came to you and said that you could wave your hand and everything would be as it was on September tenth. What would you say?”

  “I guess I’m glad I’ll never be faced with that dilemma.”

  “But what if you were?”

  “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “I think about that. It’s terrible. I think I must be a terrible person.”

  “I think you’re a very good person.”

  “If I were a good person, I’d know what I’d say.”

  “Don’t think about it, then.”

  “I try not to. I try not to think about a lot of things, but I do.”

  “Maybe you should just try to live in the moment.”

  “I do try. But I can’t help thinking.”

  “I know.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to go deliver these calzones. Then we’ll go back to Bowling Green. After that, we’ll improvise.”

  “Would it be terrible, after that, to drive up to your studio?”

  Half an hour later, they were standing outside the building, a brick town house with a peeling layer of battleship gray paint, stippled with ivy. He unlocked the front door; she followed him up the creaking stairs to the third landing.

  The room was conspicuously neat; she wondered if he was fastidious by nature or if he had anticipated her visit. The sleigh bed seemed to take up half the room, the broad white expanse of the fluffy duvet hovering, seemingly taut with suspense. A water glass, two prescription bottles, and a stack of books crowded the candle stand beside the bed. A sofa and two leather club chairs with worn and cracked arms formed a horseshoe around the fireplace. His books and papers were spread across the trestle table that served as a desk; the sleek black Aero chair stood rigidly at attention, facing the PC.

  “Cozy,” she said.

  “Hey, you could be a Realtor.”

  “Thanks, that’s my greatest fear.”

  After he took her coat, she walked over toward the bed as if to show she wasn’t afraid of it, though she was. She was, she suddenly realized, terrified. When she’d imagined this moment, she had pictured them stumbling up the stairs in a passionate frenzy, kissing and groping, pausing between floors to undo buttons, whereas, in fact, they’d ascended the staircase as if approaching the lair of a dragon, silent and grave, struggling upward under their separate burdens of anxiety and guilt, the wooden stairs and the banister creaking portentously beneath their weight.

  She examined the books on the candle stand with a semblance of rapt attention, barely able to read the titles. The Samurai Film, Auden’s Selected Poems, The Corrections. “I think if I were ever going to write a novel, I’d call it The Mistakes.”

  “We haven’t done anything yet,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean this. I just meant in general.”

  “Can I get you a drink?” he asked.

  “God, yes.”

  “Vodka, scotch, white wine?”

  “Yes. I mean, whatever. All of the above. White wine.”

  “All right.”

  “No, vodka.”

  “It’s in the freezer. Do you still want ice?”

  “No ice.” She sat down on the bed, hoping to ground some of its charge.

  He carried over two drinks, handing her one, and sat down beside her on the bed. He raised his glass, touching it to hers. “You have to look me in the eyes when you toast. The idea is that all the senses are involved—hearing, touch, taste, smell, and vision.”

  She glanced at him and looked away. “My senses are all a little paralyzed at the moment.”

  He kissed her on the lips, a little too insistently, thrusting his tongue between her lips.

  She pulled away. “I just don’t know if I can do this.”

  He nodded. “I don’t know if I can, either.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Have you ever done this before? I mean, since you’ve been married? I’m sorry, it’s really none of my business.”

  “No, that’s okay. I want it to be your business.”

  “So? Have you? I mean, besides the Chinese hooker?”

  “Almost. Once. Not really.”

  She laughed, gratefully, his equivocation seeming hilarious.

  “Well, another prostitute story—you’re going to think it’s my specialty. I went to something called a Turkish bath in Tokyo when I was there on business. One of my clients took me. I didn’t really know what to expect. He instructed me what to do. I told myself it was part of the etiquette of doing business. You go in this private room with a bath. The hostess washes you with, you know, with her body. She soaps herself up and lathers you up and down. Then when the first phase is over, she asks if you want the hon ban. The real thing.”

  “And did you get the real thing?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “You were too guilty.”

  “Well, yes and no. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d been given the choice. But she announced early on, ‘Gaijin wa okii, na,’ or something to that effect.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that the foreigner was too big.”

  “Well, you certainly know how to pique a girl’s curiosity.”

  “I’m sorry to say it’s the only time in my life I’ve elicited that comment.”

  “That’s very sweet.”

  “How about you?”

  “Nothing to worry about there,” she said. “I’ve never been told it’s too big.”

  He blushed. God, where was her reserve and decorum tonight? She felt her own cheeks reddening.

  “I mean, have you ever—”

  “Cheated? Just once. Well, a few times… with the same man.”

  “What happened?”

  “He died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not because of me. What is it Rosalind says in As You Like It? ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’”

  “I’m not sure I believe that.”

  “I don’t think you believe that, either. That’s one of the things I like about you. For a guy who spent half his life on Wall Street, you seem ridiculously romantic.”

  He looked as if he wasn’t sure this was a compliment. “Actually, our offices were in midtown.”

  She swallowed the rest of the vodka, wincing at the cold fire in her throat. “Would you mind if we just lay down with the lights out and talked for a while? I’m so tense right now, I’m afraid if you touched me the wrong way, I’d explode right here. I’d just be this flesh and blood smeared on your walls.”

  He got up and turned off the lights, leaving just enough of a residue of streetlight for her to observe his rangy, athletic body in silhouette as he stripped down to his boxer shorts. She climbed under the covers like a virgin, only then removing her shirt and jeans, lifting the duvet as he slid in beside her, placing his arm beneath her neck.

  “Sometimes,” she said, curling up into the taut, musky, yielding mound of muscle beneath his clavicle, “I find myself thinking about how close you were to being in Windows on the World that morning.”

  “I think about it al
l the time. Such a small, fluky thing—changing the time of that breakfast. Does it mean anything? Was I saved for something better? And what about Guillermo? How can I ever…” He left the thought hanging.

  “Do you consider yourself lucky?” She felt him nodding.

  “Until recently, I took it for granted. But now I realize I’ve always been lucky. Sure, I’ve worked hard, but I was given everything I needed to do well, through no virtue of my own. I think I’ve relied too much on my luck, and to believe in luck after a certain age becomes a form of cynicism. And of course it’s a finite commodity, isn’t it? We all run out of it eventually. Anyone who makes a lot of money inevitably imagines success as a function of shrewdness and hard work. For some reason, we call them ‘self-made men.’ The only people you ever hear acknowledging their luck are the poor suckers who’ve seen so little of it that they’re absurdly grateful to have caught a glimpse. The paraplegics who say they feel lucky to have survived the car crash. The concentration camp survivors who lost their entire families.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m glad you changed the time of your breakfast.”

  She kissed him, a casual gesture that suddenly turned serious as he parted his lips and pulled her toward him. As she explored his mouth with her tongue, her hands explored his body, squeezing his meaty shoulder and moving down the smooth skin of his back as he stroked her face and neck and breasts, until eventually she lost track of her own physical boundaries and imagined her body and his deliquescing in the warm liquid of pleasure. She loved the smell of him, a pungent musk growing stronger and more insistent as they groped and kissed. She must have responded to it from the start. No one ever talked about smell, but she sometimes thought it was probably the most important thing.

  For a moment, she became aware of his strangeness as her fingers discovered the unaccustomed contours of his cock, which, as she explored it, became almost immediately familiar, as if she had encountered it long ago and only forgotten until now. She knew him and it was part of him and it was no surprise that she would love this, too.

  She thought she had lost this desire—no, it was more that she’d never even found it until now. She’d never felt such craving, such desire to be possessed and filled, never known she had so much desire inside of her, so urgent a need….

  Something primal and alien was stirring within her: Strange pleas, cries like those of a wounded creature, sounded within her and possibly escaped her lips. She pushed herself toward him, again and again, and felt herself approaching that familiar yet elusive destination more rapidly than she ever remembered, racing toward that moment when she would finally break through and absorb his body fully into her own; with each thrust, she seemed to be moving closer and closer to him, even as she found herself stopped short, thrown back into herself as her pelvis collided with his, until finally all at once the membrane that separated them burst, and she possessed him entirely and then lost track of him and of her own body as she hurtled weightless through space… before returning to find herself beneath him, his warm body holding her to the earth.

  She lay there, pinned, grateful that he hadn’t moved, glued to him by a film of cooling sweat, wanting to bear his weight forever.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was kind of… rushed.”

  “Sorry? Don’t be sorry. That was unbelievably nice.” How could he even imagine he had to apologize?

  “I was afraid I was the only one who felt that way.”

  “Really?” Oh God, she thought, hating the neediness in her voice.

  “Really.”

  She felt him shifting his weight, starting to leave her. “Don’t move yet. Please?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just stay for a minute. I want to feel you on top of me a little longer.”

  “All right. I’d like that, too.”

  “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”

  “No. I just, as a man, I don’t know. You feel the need to perform.”

  “That would imply a certain self-consciousness, a certain emotional remove.”

  “I wasn’t removed. I was, well, moved.”

  “I suppose everything might be simpler if it had been lousy.”

  “It would, wouldn’t it?”

  “I know I should feel guilty, but I don’t.” Even as she said it, she began to feel the melancholy of leave-taking, the immanent reckonings in the morning light. “If you think this is just a passing thing… if it’s already passed, I think you better tell me now. I could live with that. I could go back to my life.”

  “If you can, then you probably should.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  She lay in the dark, waiting for his answer, waiting even as she wished it might never arrive, that she might just lie there in a state of suspension, having neither to think nor to choose.

  24

  Having abbreviated a business dinner in order to present a case for reconciliation and forgiveness to Corrine, Russell was disappointed to return and find Hilary, who’d been boarding with her cop friend for the past week, on the couch, reading a magazine while images from Afghanistan flickered on the television screen.

  “Corrine’s at Casey’s,” she said, glancing up from her magazine.

  “Did she say if she’d be back tonight?”

  “She’s going directly downtown. Said she’ll see you in the morning.”

  He nodded, storing away the elaborate construct of pleas and arguments he’d been assembling throughout the course of the day.

  “In case you’re wondering, she wouldn’t tell me anything, but I gather you fucked up big time.”

  Looking at her lying like an odalisque on the couch, it occurred to him he’d once feared that she might be the cause of his downfall. It seemed a little rich, getting upbraided for sexual misconduct by Hilary.

  “Whatever it is, I hope you can make it right,” she said. “I didn’t go through all of that just to see you two break up our little family in the end.”

  That summer, they were still renting the place in Sagaponack, a wood-shingled nineteenth-century farmhouse within hearing range of the surf, cocooned within a mature privet hedge that curtained off the view of gargantuan new houses, which, after a brief hiatus early in the decade, when the economy had tanked, were rising anew in the potato fields around them. It was the summer of ’94. The Polanskis, who rented to the Calloways, had worked the land for almost two hundred years, gradually selling off the edges of the farm and becoming wealthy in the process, sending their children to the same colleges attended by the children of the urbanites who’d bought the subdivided lots, while still cultivating a few exorbitantly valuable acres of potatoes. Russell and Corrine had helped steer their daughter to Brown, and Corrine wrote Mrs. Polanski little notes during the year, chatty bulletins from the big city, but after renting the house for a relative pittance for the past seven years, Russell suspected they’d become almost as anachronistic as the farming operation—a sentimental indulgence on the part of the owners, who chose not to modernize the house or the bathrooms or to raise the rent to market value. Even so, the Calloways had come up with the twenty thousand for the season only by selling the last of the stock in Bernie Melman’s Magnumedia Corp., shares Russell had accumulated in his failed attempt to take over Corbin Dern. If they pursued their elaborate and expensive scheme to become parents, which would cost at least that much, he didn’t see how they would be able to rent again, especially since Corrine had quit her job to focus all of her energies on getting pregnant. Their income would be cut in half precisely when their expenses doubled.

  He would miss the house, if not the increasingly frantic social schedule—the premieres, benefits, and the catered affairs with valet parking, which had gradually supplanted the casual clambakes and potluck dinners of an earlier Hamptons era. If anything, the high season in this summer colony was becoming more exhausting than the urban frenzy they were supposed to be escaping.

  As August approached, the calendar b
ecame even more densely inscribed with cocktail parties and casual dinners for eighty—which was part of the draw for Hilary, who arrived in mid-July. Many of her fellow fashionable Angelenos—directors and actors and the chefs and hairdressers who served them—were now spending August here on the South Fork of Long Island, making Hilary’s sacrifice on behalf of her sister considerably less onerous, whereas Corrine seemed to have chosen the time and the place for their mutual project based on quaint notions of rural serenity, fertility, and marine tidal rhythms.

  July was devoted to synchronizing the menstrual cycles of the two sisters, August to massive hormone injections. Russell was taking the month off in order to act as the hypo master, Corrine having a lurid fear of needles, not trusting herself to administer the deep intramuscular injections to her sister.

  When it became clear that they were going to have to resort to unconventional measures to become parents, Russell had drawn the line at adoption. “Call me vain, superficial, whatever,” he’d said, but he didn’t want to raise a child to whom he had no genetic connection. If the kid grew up to be a mass murderer, “at least they wouldn’t be able to blame someone else’s genes.” Having set this limit, Russell was staggered at the lengths to which Corrine was prepared to go to have kids. “Is that even possible?” he said when she first proposed the idea.

  “Absolutely,” she replied.

  They were at home, eating Russell’s spaghetti vongole, watching the carnage in Bosnia on CNN. Russell didn’t doubt that she had it figured out; for the past two years, she’d become an expert on fertility and obstetrics. Two miscarriages and one failed round of in vitro had only made her more determined—some might say desperate—to have a child.

  “What if the kid gets Hilary’s IQ and your mother’s insatiable thirst for distilled grain products?” Russell said, avoiding reference to Corrine’s father—a chilly and distant figure who’d decamped from the family home twenty years earlier and started a new family.