The Last of the Savages (28 page)

If the city itself seemed luminous at times, my own life was as drab as my standard gray suit. Opera once a month and the museums furnished me with all the beauty I allowed myself. Except for the occasional drink at the Yale or Harvard Club, mine was the New York of solitary coffee-shop meals and Laundromats and subway commutes. While waiting for my Yorkville lease to begin I took a dingy room in the Van Cortlandt Hotel on Broadway, one of the dozens of flyblown weekly rate hostels that used to be such a prominent feature of Manhattan, populated by those either at the beginning of their adventures in the great metropolis or near the ragged end. I shared the bathroom down the hall with a small-time pot dealer who introduced himself as an anarchist; a male dancer; and an alcoholic silent-film screen star who shambled up and down the hall in floppy slippers and a terry bathrobe cursing us all for befouling the WC. Once a month she painted and combed herself into a brittle semblance of her lost beauty and posed in the lobby to wait for the limo sent by a former producer who was either kind enough or sentimental enough to dine with her.

The Van Cortlandt was about as close as I got to bohemia. I soon moved to a one-bedroom walk-up in the far-east Eighties, several critical blocks removed from the Côtes d’Or of my aspiration between Fifth and Park. I continued to go home for holidays, but it was more than a year before I felt established enough to invite my mother down for a visit. She insisted on taking the bus; it was the easiest and the cheapest, she said. So I met her at the Port Authority—not exactly the gateway to the great city that one wished for one’s mother. The homeless and hopeless—then called bums—had not yet become general throughout the city, and the bus terminal was one of their traditional sanctuaries. Panhandlers were epidemic, the narrow end of a wedge of coercive enterprise in that sinister place. After a year, I had developed the gruff defensive street manner of a New Yorker. I would sometimes give out spare change on the subway, but now, in the Port Authority, it seemed smartest not to look at anyone, or acknowledge any request. So I refused
to turn when a small, bundled figure edged into my peripheral vision and said, “Can you spare some change? I’m hungry.” The voice sounded pathetic, but I had already made up my mind. He continued to hover beside me long after I had shaken my head.

Finally the bus arrived; my mother waved from the window. Clearly she had befriended the bus driver, with whom she exchanged a farewell, holding up the other passengers before climbing down to enfold me in her large embrace and claim her suitcase. “Look at you,” she said. I expected her to say how big I’d grown, and I think she was on the verge of it when she caught herself.

At that moment the little man drifted up again. “I’m hungry. Could you—”

“No, we couldn’t,” I said, in a tone that surprised even me. I’d like to think my protective instincts were overengaged on behalf of my mother. She looked at the man and then back at me, stunned at my vehemence. I glanced over at the mendicant with a scowl I hoped would seal my refusal and saw him through my mother’s eyes: a wizened little man with the face of a bewildered child, clearly retarded and now scared, clutching to his chest a shopping bag overflowing with rags and scraps of paper. When I turned back to my mother her expression wrenched my heart. I saw that she was ashamed of me. She was wondering how she could have raised a son who could respond so heartlessly and brutally to one of God’s needy creatures. I think she was too surprised to reach into her own purse, and I was too mortified to repair the damage by giving the poor bastard some money. I took her by the arm and led her away. “A lot of these guys are just con artists,” I said. “You’ve got to be careful.”

My mother never mentioned the incident, but it shadowed her visit to the city. My worldliness was abruptly discredited. The slightly imperious manner I had been cultivating now seemed merely rude. My budding command over waitresses and cabdrivers was gone, though until that moment in the bus terminal I was hardly aware of having become so thoroughly condescending.

She stayed in my bedroom while I slept on the couch, and her company made me realize not only how lonely I had been but also how she
must have felt after I had gone away. I’d felt homesick before, when I first went to school, but never quite so acutely as I did that night in my New York apartment with my mother sleeping in the next room. Eager to show her I was a better man than I had seemed, I tried hard to make her trip a success. For once I was not too sophisticated for a trip to the Statue of Liberty or a meal at Lüchows. And I would like to believe I shed a layer of callowness back then, sloughed it off like a snakeskin. Back at the Port Authority two days later, sending her off, I blushed when she said, “I’m proud of you.”

And now I remember a curious fact—that Felson was drudging in the office on the Saturday I took my mother for a tour, and though I barely knew him she would often ask after him when I called home. “And how’s that nice Jewish man in your office?” And she would always quiz me about Will, though she had yet to meet him.

Busy as I was, I did my best to keep in touch. Will usually called when he was in town—with the Dalai Lama, with Eric Clapton. Though he had a team of lawyers in Memphis, he often consulted me on questions of finance. In ’79, when he needed capital to expand, I arranged a private placement, and much later, when he was spinning into bankruptcy, I arranged the sale of his catalog to one of the major labels.

Unofficially, I kept up through Taleesha, with whom I dined once or twice a month. I felt a sense of custodial responsibility—as if I were keeping her safe for Will—as well as a kind of vicarious thrill of possession: I enjoyed the veiled glances on the street, the secret stares and whispered conversations in restaurants. She took me to the Cellar and Mikels, the West Side hangouts of the black middle class in those years. Flirting with the taboo of miscegenation, I imagined myself in touch with the whole terrible history of race, until Taleesha herself disabused me of my illusion. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she would say, when I blithely ventured too far across an indiscernible border. She did not suffer wise men gladly.

When I think of Taleesha in those days I see her looking out past my shoulder. She always seemed to be scanning the room; the sound of the front door in a restaurant or a bar never failed to draw her attention. She had several good reasons to be in New York, but one of them was
her mother, whose last postcard had come from the city many years before. On the street, she was always searching the faces of the onrushing crowd, although I don’t think she was aware of it.

Taleesha and Will talked almost every day; theirs was a curiously intimate and fond separation. They replayed their failures in exquisite detail, Will blaming himself, Taleesha insisting it was really her fault, though I actually think they were able to stay in love partly because they considered their marriage a casualty of larger forces. The world they lived in was not good enough for their love. And so they mourned their separation, and yet at a distance of a thousand miles they attained a new and previously unimaginable intimacy, comforting each other over their mutual loss by insisting that they still had each other. Free from the erosion of daily life, they were free to paint each other as romantic figures in a great love story. As if in anticipation of that unspecified day when they would be gloriously reunited Will kept her apprised of the most minute details of his business life, and was at any given moment aware of her location in the city. I discovered this one night when he called her at the restaurant where we were having dinner. I thought it must be an emergency, but he just wanted to chat with us, serially, while we leaned our elbows on the reservations book and the captain glared at us through fastidious wire rims.

“He likes to know where I am,” she explained when we were back at the table.

“Don’t you find that a little inhibiting,” I asked.

“But I also find it sweet. If I ever decide to disappear, don’t worry, I know how. It’s a little gift that runs in the family. Maternal side.”

To lighten the mood, or so I thought, I reminded her of the first time we met, or rather the first night I saw her, leaning motionless against the wall at Lester’s house amidst the dervishes. “Will went over and asked you to dance, and you slapped him. I’ve always wondered—what did he say?”

At first she looked blank. I thought she had forgotten until her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. I handed her my handkerchief. “God-damnit,” she murmured, then regained her composure. “He told me … his name was Will Savage and he said he was going to marry me someday.”

“Why don’t you just get back together,” I suggested. “Save on long distance.”

She dabbed at her eyes with her napkin. “He’s a big asshole is why, which you should know as well as I do. And he’s impossible to live with,” she said. “I don’t know who could put up with it.”

“Well, then, maybe you should just divorce him and get on with your life.”

“On the other hand,” she said, “after you’ve lived with Will, everyone else seems kind of …” She shrugged, leaving me to supply the diminutives.

“Oh, thanks,” I complained. “As your date—”

“Oh, come on, Patrick. We’re both here because we love that big bastard. Don’t start acting gallant on me because neither one of us believes it.”

Several years after my visit to London the big bastard came through New York. Through my firm he engaged my services for the afternoon for what was billed as a meeting with his record company. Shortly after lunch he picked me up in a chauffeured Rolls. Only in girth did he resemble a tycoon. The gaunt beauty of his youth had dissipated. His face was puffy, his eyes like twin patches of troubled sky glimpsed through a wild thicket of beard and hair.

“Happy as I am to see you,” I said, “you must be aware that I don’t know anything about the record business.”

“All you need to know is that it’s about as venal and corrupt as Louisiana politics. And bear in mind that attorney-client privilege will absolve you of having to testify about anything you might see or hear today.”

“You’re not planning on killing anyone, are you?”

“If I told you that,” he said, “wouldn’t it make you an accessory before the fact?”

The office suite which was our destination belonged, according to the plaque on the door, to the executive vice president of the label. The secretary was clearly daunted as she announced Will’s arrival. A moment later her boss came bounding out of an inner office—an eager, fuzzy
man in a leisure suit. At least I think that’s what it was—a beige two-piece garment of dubious cut over a white silk shirt open to the sternum. He moved as if to hug Will, then seemed to realize that this was not a good idea. Will was forbidding at the best of times, but he seemed particularly austere at this moment.

Stepping back as if to get a better look at the legend, the executive held open his arms in an expansive welcome: “Will, Will, Will,” he said. “What are you, visiting from Nashville? Memphis, I mean. It’s Memphis, right? Great to see you. Been a long time, man. Too long. You should have called.”

“Tony, Patrick Keane, my attorney.”

Tony didn’t appear to notice that he had not been accorded the courtesy of a surname. In fact he seemed like one of those men—I associated them with the entertainment industry—who didn’t have a surname and considered the whole notion of family names hopelessly Old World and formal. I held out my hand, and this, too, apparently struck him as a quaint custom.

“You want a drink, a joint, a snort,” Tony asked, once we’d settled into his shiny, bland office, decorated primarily with gold records and framed photographs of smiling Tony with his arm around sneering or dazed-looking rock musicians. “Anything you want just name it.”

Will had not taken a seat; now he walked over behind Tony’s desk and grabbed hold of his fuzzy muttonchop sideburn, yanking him rudely to his feet. “What I want,
Tony
, is to throw you out this fucking window.”

“Will, hey, buddy, what’s with the negative vibes?”

“
Vibes?
”

“This bad energy, man.”

“Well, let’s think about this,
Tony.
”

I was nervous, though I must say I admired the way Will had of turning his antagonist’s name into an obscenity.

“You’ve been hitting on my wife is what, making life miserable for her around here. My
wife
, you understand? You’ve been telling her if she doesn’t fuck you her career is dead. You should think twice about using that word
dead
, Tony. It gives crazy motherfuckers like me ideas. Do you know what we do where I come from to guys who fuck with our wives?”

“Will, what’d I do? Hey, a little kidding around, maybe. A little innocent flirting.” Being held at an odd angle by his sideburn didn’t make it easy for Tony to sound casual. “That’s all it was, I swear. What can I say—she’s a good-looking woman. Just a little fun was all. A little kidding around.”

“Are you saying my wife is a liar? I hope that’s not what you’re telling me, Tony.”

Will gave the sideburn another yank.

“Will, I swear to God.”

“You better swear to me, Tony. You better swear to me that from now on you treat my wife with the utmost respect.”

“Absolutely.”

“Because here’s your choice,” Will said, finally releasing him. “You hit on her one more time or make her unhappy in any way you’ll wish I’d thrown you out this window. I’ll follow you to the ends of the fucking earth. And if she even
suspects
we’ve had this conversation I’ll make the renewal of my deal at this company contingent on your ass getting fired. So if you want to stay alive
and
employed I suggest you promote Taleesha right on out of here.”

As awkward as it was to witness this scene, I found myself unprofessionally entering into the spirit of things. Smiling blandly, I shook hands with the vice president as we were leaving. “Tony, a pleasure doing business.” And in what I thought was a very stylish coda, I handed him my card. Accustomed to polite mediation between warring factions, I was exhilarated to observe this raw conflict.