The Last of the Savages (30 page)

When I finally called Aaron it was ostensibly to ask for his intern’s phone number. I didn’t mention the other matter.

“Stacey? Sure. Hey, if that’s your thing, be my guest.”

Actually, I thought it might be my thing. Having learned from Aaron
that she liked the opera, I called and invited her to
Il Trovatore
at the New York City Opera. By happy coincidence, it turned out to be one of her favorites.

“My father took us to see it when I was six,” she said with sudden animation. “I loved the ‘anvil’ chorus. And I was so terrified about the gypsy witch who gets burned—I grew up a few miles from Salem, so witch burning was kind of a recurring theme in my childhood.”

“So you’ll join me?”

“That would be nice,” she said, almost inaudibly.

Not counting Taleesha and Lollie Baker, this was to be my first real date in more than three years.

Lollie was in the city in those years—one of those florid southerners who seem to transplant so well to the pavement of the Upper East Side. She’d left Bennington in her junior year, and by the time I arrived she appeared to know everyone in Manhattan. She wrote famously scathing book and movie reviews and had spent years working on her first play. We would meet once a month or so. She took me to Gino’s and Elaine’s and El Morocco and half-a-dozen places I would never have seen the inside of otherwise. Occasionally I had to carry her back to her apartment—two soaring, frescoed rooms in a converted mansion between Madison and Fifth. I slept on her couch more than once. On those occasions when she served as my escort for business-related social functions—fund-raisers or dinner at a partner’s apartment—she conscientiously restrained her exuberance. Until I met Stacey, I didn’t seem to have time for romance, and for some reason Lollie remained fond of me. Perhaps it was nothing more than the fact that people like Lollie need an audience, a role to which I seem all too perfectly suited.

One Saturday night I was settling into bed with a novel when she called from Elaine’s, which was in my neighborhood. Though it was past midnight she insisted that I come meet her immediately. I demurred, or rather, I tried to demur; but Lollie was a world-class bully and she was also drunk. “I’m with a bunch of dead people. I mean, honey, we’re talking literally. Corpses. They’re starting to stink and rot.
I absolutely insist that you come down here and rescue me.” And with that she hung up.

When I arrived, she was sitting at the bar clutching a snifter of brandy. She insisted that I accompany her to a sex club downtown, a place so notorious that even I had heard of it.

“Why would you want to go there?” It wasn’t that I was devoid of curiosity; quite the opposite. My carnal desires were as vivid as anyone’s—I daresay more vivid—but I was unwilling to pay the price of their fulfillment. Better to suffer one’s fantasies than to risk their grotesque translation into reality.

Lollie squinted as if to get a clearer view of the moron she had mistakenly called for assistance. “
Why
would I want to go? Because it’s
there.
Because it should be amusing. Because life is fucking short, sugar, and I want to see as much of it as possible.”

“Isn’t it a gay place,” I asked.

“That’s why I need you,” she said.

“No way,” I said. “That’s not in my job description.”

“Come on, Patrick. It’ll be a hoot.”

“For you, maybe.”

“I was thinking
you
might like it.”

I felt as if I’d been slapped, but I maintained my composure. “What would possibly lead you to that conclusion?”

“Well, I don’t see any of us girls catching your eye. It’s like you and Will—”

“What about me and Will?” Now I was furious.

“He can’t get it up for white girls and you can’t get it up for
any
girls.”

When she was drinking Lollie sometimes turned nasty, but this was more than I could tolerate. I stood up. “I’ll see you later,” I said, trying to sound less upset than I felt. I was hardly aware of leaving the restaurant. Before I knew it, I was striding down Second Avenue, a fine snow falling around me. Within moments, I heard Lollie running after me.

“Patrick, wait.”

I kept walking, propelled by my anger.

When Lollie finally caught up, she took me by the arm and turned my face toward hers. “Patrick, I’m sorry.” I could see she was near tears. “I didn’t mean it.”

“What part didn’t you mean?”

“I’m just so damn drunk and lonely is all.”

I was still angry—as only the guilty can be angry—but I wasn’t about to leave her there on the street. I flagged down a cab and gave the driver her address after we got in. Lollie was still clinging to my arm, sniffling, but neither of us said anything as we rode crosstown to Fifth. I stared out the window at the snow falling like mist on Central Park.

At her building, I declined her invitation to come up for a drink, waiting until she was inside before I paid the cab and sent it off. Walking east, I watched the snowflakes fall in the lighted canyons between the dark apartment buildings, disappearing on the pavement at my feet. Passing cabs slowed down and then accelerated away from me, tires hissing on the wet street. In the uncharacteristic silence I was deeply conscious of the lives suspended in slumber behind the brick and brownstone, thousands of my fellow creatures stacked in rows like books on a shelf. Or rather—because I imagined them all in pairs—like matched objects: creamer and sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers, all locked away snug and safe for the night in their conjugal cabinets, together. And I was filled with self-pity because I could only imagine myself alone, an unmatched cup in a discontinued pattern.

Chilled with loneliness, I turned and walked back to Lollie’s place.

“It’s me,” I said into the intercom.

She greeted me at the door in a wildly festive kimono. I was grateful that she didn’t question my reappearance, but merely held out her arms and enfolded me in her cushiony embrace.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I can’t stand myself.”

“Well, I love you, if it helps.”

“Do you think I could stay tonight?”

“Sure,” she said. She gestured toward the bedroom.

I shed down to my boxers and crawled beneath the quilt on Lollie’s bed. Suddenly I was exhausted. Lollie dropped her kimono and crawled in beside me. She stroked my head, and I pulled her closer. When she kissed me, I realized that I loved her too, though I did not desire her, much as I might have liked to pretend that I did. My most fervid cravings pointed in another direction. And yet, admitting that I didn’t desire
her and knowing that she accepted me as I was freed me of the fear of her carnality, and her judgment. And oddly, that freedom allowed me to want her. I found myself kissing her back and finally, with no discernible transition, making love to her.

It’s a familiar trope that you can’t sleep with a friend without ruining the friendship, but we disproved it that night and on several other occasions. Some nights I needed her, and on others she likewise turned to me for comfort. If sometimes we stopped short or faltered in the middle, it didn’t matter. With Lollie I was somehow able to disregard the terrible awkwardness of physical contact between foreign bodies. And I was able to advise her without extreme prejudice about the other men who jumped in and out of her bed. Our own soothing interludes aside, she told me she liked it rough. And that Will, at least in her sole encounter with him, was surprisingly passive. And gradually I told her my own closely guarded secrets, which, lurid as they might be, were largely speculative. To my relief, Lollie was less shocked at my depravity than I was myself.

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.

S
aul 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.