The Last of the Savages (29 page)

In the car, Will lit a joint the size of an Esplendido. “Was I was too subtle, counselor?”

Taking a hit on the joint, I said, “I don’t think you can be too subtle with a guy like Tony.”

“You’re probably right.”

Because it had been so long since I’d seen Will, I booked out for what was left of the afternoon, and we toured the bars in the Village, where Will seemed to be known. Taleesha was out of town, which fact had dictated the timing of Will’s appointment with Tony. I wasn’t sure what he’d done was wise, and it certainly wasn’t diplomatic, but I was proud
of him and after I’d had a little too much to drink I told him so. And when I was fairly certain that Will was drunk I described my visit to London. He asked few questions, though I sensed that he was eager for information. He was greatly diverted by the baton-twirling story.

“Is Cheryl still the creamiest piece of cheese from the state of Kentucky,” he asked. “Or was she one of those early bloomers?”

“Pretty as ever,” I said.

“Shit,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to the day my old man wakes up in Belgravia and looks across the Porthault pillowcases to discover that his cheerleader’s done frumped up on him.”

Much later, when we were both very drunk indeed, he rose up suddenly from the bottom of some deep well of reverie. “Have you ever heard the expression, Patrick—‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’? Let’s drink to that one.” And I raised my glass, imagining that he was referring to the loathsome Tony.

Will proposed another toast. “Jessie Petit always says ‘What goes over the devil’s backbone is boun’ to pass under his stomach.’ ”

Cryptic as this was, it didn’t occur to me until years later that he was thinking of his father.

Then we were in his limousine on our way to the Upper East Side. He wanted to show me a townhouse that had been owned by his mother’s father. “He had a private railroad car he took all over the country … railroad track built underground … private spur that went right into his own basement. The old coot would roll right into his own house in his very own railroad car and scoop up a bottle from the wine cellar on his way upstairs.” This seemed preposterously elegant, and I was all for seeing the house. Will had the limo driver prowl along 72nd Street and then 73rd, looking for the house. Finally he thought he recognized a limestone facade between Fifth and Park. Jumping out of the car, he ran up the steps and rang the doorbell.

“Will, it’s two in the morning.”

“Come on,” he shouted from the steps. “We gotta see this.”

The third-floor windows suddenly went bright. Drunk, I sprawled slackly in the limousine. “Let’s go, Will. They’re asleep. Will?”

But he wasn’t about to abandon his quest. The police arrived, it seemed, within moments.

“Break down the door, officers,” Will commanded.

“Had a few drinks, have we?”

Will explained to them about the railroad track. “It’s still under there, it’s gotta be. Wouldn’t you like to see a fucking thing like that?” Standing on the doorstep waving his arms, he looked like one of those wild-eyed prophets such as you see in Washington Park.

“Pipe down, you fucking freak,” said the smaller policeman.

“Pipe down yourself, fucking pig.”

From my vantage in the car I couldn’t follow the exact sequence of events, but it looked as if the smaller man shoved Will against the door and Will shoved back, sending him tumbling backward down the steps. The tall officer dropped Will with his billy club, at which point the fallen officer came back to kick him in the ribs. I leaped out of the car and started up the stairs, stopping on the first.

“You want some of this,” asked the little guy, pausing in midkick to glance back at me.

“You want a five-million-dollar civil suit?” I said. “I’m his attorney.”

A braver man might have thrown himself into the fray, but my remark had the intended effect. The big officer pulled Will to his feet and read him his rights while the little one handcuffed him and glared at me in my lawyerly pinstripes.

I was unable to make bail till the next morning. In addition to resisting arrest Will was charged with possession of marijuana, an ounce or so having been found in his pocket. He was subdued until we got in the car, at which point he began punching the seat in front of him, vowing to wreak havoc on the ruling order.

I was irritable with hangover. “You can’t call a police officer a pig and expect to get a medal.”

“No? You ever hear of the First Amendment?”

“Not my specialty.”

“I can see that.”

“We’re not in Memphis anymore,” I said, a little smugly—the adoptive New Yorker.

Not being a criminal attorney, I referred Will to a Yale classmate
who’d studied at Fordham and served in the D.A.’s office. After his arraignment Will was allowed to return to Memphis; his lawyer informed me he hoped to plead down to misdemeanor possession, drawing a fine and six months’ probation. But prison remained a possibility. He postponed the trial twice. And eventually, quite by accident, I found a way to make Will’s legal problems disappear.

I
t was one of those tropical, malodorous August evenings in the city when I ran into Aaron Greeley for the first time in ten years. I was sitting at the bar of the Yale Club waiting for a client when a hand pressed my cooling, sweat-soaked shirt to my back. He looked much as I remembered him from freshman year—a preppie prince who just happened to be darker complected than most Yalies. He greeted me warmly, and I was happy to pretend that we had parted on the best of terms.

Aaron was now an assistant district attorney; after Yale he spent a year working with Alabama sharecroppers before going to Columbia Law. I wondered what happened to the rage and dogma of ’70, when he and his compatriots had busted up our senate meeting. But then, the same might be asked about the country at large. It all seemed as far away as Gettysburg and Shiloh. Will was the only person I knew who hadn’t changed—still charging the hill, waving the colors.

“What’s happened with your poetry,” Aaron asked.

“Now I write briefs.” I paused. “And you were quoting Huey the last I remember.”

“Yeah, well …” He shrugged. “Working within the system these days. Can I buy a fellow sellout a drink?”

We were still checking each other out, reading the signs. My suit was standard issue J. Press. But Aaron’s double-breasted blue-suit-and-spread-collar-shirt combo seemed very racy to me at the time—too European to pass muster in my office—but he looked better in it than anybody I’d ever seen outside the pages of a magazine. This difference in style might have been imperceptible to most observers, but I wondered if after his walk on the wild side he had become comfortable enough to modify the hard won uniform of the preppie. Or maybe he suspected that within a few years, the tribal dress by which members of the eastern ruling class had recognized its members for decades would be mass marketed to the rest of America, would become just another style to pick off the rack.

“Married,” Aaron asked.

“Not yet. You?”

“Having
way
too much fun, man.”

Aaron said he was late for an appointment uptown, but insisted I come to a dinner party at his apartment the following week. “Just a few friends for spaghetti, no big deal.” This must have been just before spaghetti became pasta. “Bring a date.”

As it happened, both Aaron and Taleesha lived in the same thicket of postwar apartment towers around Lincoln Center.

Twenty minutes early as I staggered up out of the purgatorial subway tunnel at Columbus Circle, I dawdled up Broadway. Waiting at the light two blocks north, I noticed a kid I’d seen on the subway. Actually he might have been my age, but he wore tight jeans and cowboy boots, a T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve. He was regarding me with what seemed to be hostile intent, and my first thought, the instinct of a New Yorker, was to reach down to feel my wallet.

Then he smiled and held up a cigarette. “Got a light?”

I shook my head. He was a curious combination of thuggish and fastidious; his white shirt was immaculate, and his short hair looked like it had just been cut.

“How about a drink?”

I patted my pockets reflexively, not quite sure what I was doing, as if I might indeed have a drink stashed away on my person. Then I realized this was an invitation. “No thanks,” I said, blushing. “I’ve got a date.”

“Lucky guy,” he said.

Stepping out into the street, I was nearly hit by a cab speeding up to make the light. The cabbie slammed on his brakes and hammered his horn. “You stupid shit,” he screamed. I shrugged and jogged to the far corner, feeling incredibly foolish—like a tourist. When I looked back, the T-shirt waved. Suddenly I was struck by the ambiguity of the phrase “lucky guy.” Indignant and shaken, I hurried up Broadway to Taleesha’s building.

“He’s really smart,” I told Taleesha as we descended in the elevator from her apartment. “I think you’ll really—”

“Is he by any chance
black,
” she said. “Is that what you’re
really
telling me, Patrick?” She took my chin in her fingers. “What kind of number are you running here?”

“No number,” I said sheepishly. “I needed a date for dinner with my old roommate. I called you when Lollie Baker said she was busy.”

Taleesha was on to me, but she laughed and agreed to go along for the ride. As an escort, she was eminently suitable, though I had to stand rigidly erect in order to be almost as tall as she was in her heels. A black man sauntering down Broadway turned as we passed and called: “Hey, baby, looking fine.” And indeed she was—regal and unperturbed in a cream linen sundress, despite the wilting heat.

The dinner party consisted of five couples, several jugs of wine, disco music and spaghetti
bolognese.
At one point I saw Taleesha register a Marvin Gaye tune I happened to know Will had produced. “I love this song,” said one of the women at the table, and I wondered if Taleesha would announce her marital connection. When she did not, I became suddenly proprietary.

“A friend of mine produced—”

But Taleesha cut me off. “You really shouldn’t be serving this Gallo wine,” she said to Aaron. “Haven’t you ever heard of the United Farm Workers?” She seemed to have taken an immediate dislike to him.

“You’re absolutely right.” He stared at her with a barely perceptible smile. “However, it was brought by one of my guests, and I thought it would be rude to pour it down the sink.”

“I’m sorry.” Stacey Colchester, a pretty young intern from Aaron’s office, hadn’t said a word until that moment, and now she looked as if she were ready to cry. “I just completely forgot about the boycott.”

“I always forget that stuff,” I volunteered. “What I’m supposed to buy and not buy.”

Taleesha looked at me and rolled her eyes; she might as well have said,
You’re a wimp, Patrick.
But I couldn’t help feeling solicitous of Stacey Colchester, the youngest and most demure member of the party, and wondering if she was Aaron’s date, or just a friend. When she started to clear the dishes after dinner, I jumped up to help her. She was shy, but under cross-examination she revealed that she was from Marblehead, Massachusetts, that she had just graduated from Holyoke, that her father was indeed Judge Colchester of the Circuit Appeals Court, a jurist I had admired since law school. She didn’t know Aaron very well but thought he was “like, a terrific guy.”

“Like one, or is one?” This seemed clever until I said it, when it sounded merely mean-spirited.

“Oh, God, I sound like an idiot. It’s just that I feel so much younger than everyone else and Aaron’s my boss. Are you two good friends?”

“We met in New Haven,” I said, employing the falsely modest euphemism for Yale. “He was my roommate.”

“Doesn’t he just think he’s God’s gift,” said Taleesha later, when I was walking her back to her apartment. “Thinks he could walk from here to New Jersey without using the bridge.”

First thing Monday morning Aaron called me at my office. “Listen,” he said, “Taleesha isn’t—I mean, you two aren’t going out, are you? I mean, you’re just friends, right?”

I laughed. “I didn’t think you two exactly hit it off.”

“She’s definitely feisty,” he said. “I don’t normally go for black chicks.”

“What about Stacey,” I asked.

“Man, she’s just an intern here. My date fell through, so I invited her at the last minute. Stacey’s a good kid, but she’s straight as a fucking arrow.”

“Actually Taleesha’s married to my friend Will Savage.” I could hear resounding silence on the other end. After a sadistic pause, I added, “They’re separated,” then said I had to run to a meeting. I was uncomfortable with the whole situation, but I told him I would call Taleesha and feel her out.

She wasn’t nearly as dismissive as I expected, when I reached her later. “Hell, give him my number if he really wants it.”

“You sure?”

“I’m a big girl, Patrick.”

Feeling belatedly guilty and protective of Will, I decided I would not call Aaron, but he called me again within the week. “So how does it look?” he said.

After I had given him the number he asked me about Will, and I found myself explaining Will’s pending case—resisting arrest, possession. Although I had not intended to ask his advice, and certainly wished to avoid the appearance of a quid pro quo, I suddenly realized that Aaron might be able to help. “Do you think you could look into this for me, see what you can find out?” I had never really stepped into the back alleys behind the paneled chambers of the legal system before. But I was willing to risk offending Aaron if there was the slightest chance of keeping Will out of jail.

“I’ll check around,” he said tentatively.

Three weeks later Will’s lawyer informed me the charges had been dropped. He vaguely attributed this victory to his own connections. But I heard the bravado of doubt in his voice. After hanging up I thought about calling Aaron, but I was uncertain whether it was appropriate to thank him or not. Over the next several days I found myself experiencing an overpowering sense of unreality as I sat through meetings, the world I inhabited suddenly seeming less solid and lawful than I had previously imagined. I would feel the same way years later when I heard about Felson’s murder.