The Last Bachelor

merging from the surf, Ginny was amazed to discover A.G. sitting cross-legged on her towel, chatting up her niece. Her first reaction was entirely self-conscious—wondering how she looked dripping wet in her ratty blue Speedo—her first impulse to flee. She hadn't seen him in—what, a couple of years? That night after the Alzheimer's ball, when he'd drunkenlv asked her to come to St. Barts. After a quick inventory of her own imperfections, she noticed his paunch. When had that happened? Watching him hit on her niece, interpreting the casual slouch of his posture as he leaned on his elbow, she decided that what was interesting wasn't the belly per se but his lack of self-consciousness, that he'd probably never stoop to suck it in or even count it against himself when he was tabulating his own defects. He still had the same boyish, timeless shock of blond hair—she was quite sure he'd taken it very much to heart when she told him, early on. that he looked like Robert Redford. She could read, even from this distance, the old sense of entitlement, the ease and confidence as he turned his charms on a beautiful young woman half his age. This is what had always, in her mind, saved him from being a caricature, that he deviated just enough from the type—even if it was only a question of scale. In this case the way that his vanity was larger and more impregnable than that of other middle-aged men who obsessively chased younger women, spent hours at the gym or. failing that, risked herniation trying, at crucial moments of presentation, to inhale that extra flesh around their middles. Perhaps she was reading too much into what could be a simple, innocent tableau, but that loo was A.G.—the fact that he inspired this kind of hermeneutic. This specula­tion on Ginny's part was the work of an instant, the interval between two waves breaking around her ankles. Before the second had retreated beneath her feet she felt angry at herself for the intricacy of her speculation, for caring that much. Wasn't it far more likely that he was a type, and that the supposed complexity was her own embroidery on a standard pattern? Hadn't he disappointed even the modest hopes she'd invested in him?

She had reason to chastise herself again, approaching them, when she real­ized that she was the one sucking in her own stomach, but this was mitigated by the pleasure of seeing his reaction when she sat down beside him and shook the salty water from her hair.

"A.G., this is a surprise. I see you've met my niece."

For a man who prided himself on his composure, he was comically discom­fited, though he made a valiant recovery, kissing her on the cheek, doing his best to convey the impression that he'd practically been expecting her at any moment. He then excused himself as quickly as one with his exquisite manners could. Ginny had the satisfaction of watching him retreat (continued on page 94)

he was the stuo of the well-bred set.

now he's about to take the plunge.

Can he fit in one last fling?

(continued from page 73) down the beach, slightly duck-footed, as he struggled for purchase in the dry sand. Yes, she remembered that, chasing after him one day through the snow in Aspen, seeing his splayed tracks, thinking it made him even more endearing.

"What was that all about?" she asked Lana, who blushed. It was reassuring, somehow, that young women still knew how to blush.

"I don't know. He was like, you know. He was just kind of...." She shrugged.

Well, actually, yes, Ginny did know. But she wasn't feeling entirely collegial toward her niece at this moment, appraising her as she imagined A.G. had, and she conjured a strange conceit—that the concavity of a young woman's tummy was precisely cali­brated to the paucity of her wisdom. God, she was young. Of course Ginny had watched A.G. pick up women who were no older than her niece. But until this moment she would never have thought of her niece—her litde Lana—as having anydiing in common with those girls. "Kind of what?"

"Well, you know. Friendly."

"You mean he was hitting on you."

"Well, he just kind of sat down. Actually, he walked past me a little and then came back and introduced himself. He asked me if this was Gibson Beach, and I told him I wasn't from here and then we just started talking."

"Did he ask you out?"

"Well, he said he was kind of busy this com­ing week but he'd call me next Monday."

Ginny nodded. She told herself it wasn't Lana's fault. She counted to 10. She tried to tell herself she took no pleasure in this, in feel­ing, suddenly, so very worldly-wise. "I expect he is fairly busy," she said, shaking a cigarette from the pack. "Unless I'm very much mis­taken, he's getting married this weekend."

Approaching the house on Gin Lane, the so-called cottage with its sprawling wings, white porches and shingled gray gables, A.G. saw the white tent rising up above the perfecdy squared green privet batdements that sur­rounded the property of his future in-laws. The gates were open. As he drove in, he was presented widi a scene of furious activity. He stopped the car in the middle of the driveway and watched. Painters and window washers on ladders had stormed the big house. Three maids waddled like white ducks up the path to die guest house, bearing linens. Haifa dozen young men who looked like camp counselors were setting up the tables beneath the tent. Gardeners were scattered about the prop­erty, planting and deadheading flowers; still more flowers were coming out of a van from a Manhattan florist. And an anonymous trades­man was taking a leak against the side of the pool house. All of this had been set in motion by his proposal to Pandora Bright Caldwell Kierstead, of Chattanooga, Palm Beach and Southampton, several months before. It wasn't exacdy a spur-of-the-moment decision. He'd actually purchased the ring at Graff more than a month before and carried it with him on two dates with Pandy, somehow losing his resolu-

tion each time. Finally, he'd invited her to One If by Land, which practically forced his hand, notorious as a setting for proposals. Before their appetizers had arrived, two other swains had dropped to their knees in front of their dates. Pandy blushed deeply the first time; the second proposal she pretended not to notice. If she was disappointed that A.G. had stayed seated when he popped the question, she wasn't about to show it.

The announcement, the planning, the registry of gifts...all followed inexorably but somehow insubstantially, like scenes constructed from pixels. A.G. sat in his car in the driveway and tried, at this late hour, to reconnect himself to this series of events. He knew he should feel elated, or scared. Or both. He listened for the chuffing sound of the ocean waves. He wondered why you could always hear the surf from the yard at night but never during the day.

A rabbit rocketed across the driveway and disappeared into the privet, closely pursued by Woofter, the Kiersteads' retriever. The dog barked twice at the hedge before turning away and trotting back toward the house.

Leaving the Meadow Club after her tennis les­son, Ginny Banks caught a glimpse of a scene she never expected to witness: the rehearsal dinner for A.G.'s wedding. She stood at the edge of the doorway, looking in on the assem­bled company. Besides family there was the table of best men—A.G. having assembled a team of five rather than leave anyone out. Tommy Briggs, Wick Seward, Nikos Ment-zelopoulos, Cappie Farquarson and Gino Andreosa. Back in the day, they had all been known as ladies' men. Nikos and Gino were among the last of the old-school playboys in the mold of Agnelli and Rubirosa, race-car-driving Euro sybarites. All of them had even­tually married at least once—most of them twice, although Gino and Wick were currently between. They'd chased, and bedded, many of the same girls, initially women their own age and later their younger sisters'. A.G. was the last of his kind, die last unmarried man of his generation. For two decades he had been a kind of prince of the city, gliding between the social clubs of the Upper East Side and the nightclubs downtown, an intimate of artistic circles as well as the world of inherited wealth. He belonged to the Racquet Club, the Brook Club and the Century Club, was an early investor in a famous Soho art galley and a patron of several literary magazines. He was also a famous lover, a playboy who cut a wide swath through Manhattan and Europe, faith­fully alternating between models and debu­tantes. For years he conducted an affair with a married screen idol while he continued to pursue an international serial dating career. His 40th birthday celebration, which took place on Nikos Mentzelopoulos's yacht, Dio-nysius, inevitably appeared on subsequent lists of Parties of the Decade. Cappie Farquarson went into rehab three days later, and Nikos eventually became involved in two paternity suits, both plaintiffs citing A.G.'s party as the date of conception. A.G. himself managed to escape diese kinds of entanglements, although at some point in the years that followed, his name began to be invoked as a synonym for a certain kind of arrested development He'd

been eligible for so long that he ceased to be plausible. Married couples, seating their din­ner parties, began to think of him as a hope­less case—a quaint relic of their wild youth. "Who can we put next to Celia?" "There's always A.G." "Do we really want to do that to Celia? I mean, even if she hasn't already slept with him, I think she's had enough of the bad boys for one lifetime."

Ginny turned to see Lori Haddad with her daughter Casey in tow, looking in on the scene. "Can you believe this?"

"I'm actually seeing it," Lori said, "but I still don't believe it."

"What don't you believe, Mommy?"

"He's still got 24 hours to leave the coun­try."

"Maybe we're being too cynical."

"Mom, what don't you believe in?"

"Mommy doesn't believe in fairy tales, honey."

"What do you suppose it is about her? I mean, is it just that she happened to be the one sitting in the chair next to him when the music stopped?"

"Well, besides that, she's young and pretty and thin and rich. And she's from his hometown. That seems to count for a lot with these Southerners."

"Good point. So what does she see in him?"

"Well.... He's charming and smart and he has a d-i-c-k the size of Florida."

"That sp------"

"We know what it spells, honey," said her mother, covering her mouth.

A.G. Jackson had grown up on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, although his own father was an emigre from Birmingham, by way of Vanderbilt. As the vice president of the local bank, he was a respected member of the community, although their circumstances were more modest than those of the native oligarchy. A.G. distinguished himself as both scholar and athlete, joined his schoolmates on bonefishing expeditions to Islamorada and for quail hunt­ing at their south Georgia plantations while his father managed their trust funds. A.G. was raised to believe there was no higher tide a man could aspire to than "gentleman," and this Episcopalian epithet was so constantly attached to Jackson pere, often accompanied by the adjective old-school, that his son couldn't help but sense an almost imperceptible undercur­rent of condescension from those whose secret faith was more Darwinian. The old man's rec­titude was in part a reaction to the flamboy­ance of his own father, who'd made and lost two fortunes, one in stock speculation and one in real estate, while he was growing up. A.G.'s father did all he could to temper his son's fear­less and exuberant chararter, so reminiscent of his own father's, while his wife secredy under­mined this program, instilling in him a sense of confidence and entitlement. Her own family was among the first families of Charleston, and she saw no reason to defer to the local gen­try. Her husband would scold her for saying, as she so often did, "Who's the handsomest, smartest little man in the whole wide world?" "Please, Kate," he'd say. "You'll spoil the boy." While A.G. absorbed from his father a respect

for tradition, position and inherited wealth, his mother taught him to believe in his own secret superiority. Their marriage, from his vantage, was a happy one, although his mother some­times believed that she'd sold herself short, that her husband lacked the necessary fire and grit to advance her ambitions.

No family loomed larger in Chattanooga than the Kiersteads. The)' had made their orig­inal fortune in land and later compounded it with an interest in a soft-drink empire based in Atlanta. In the past half century their holdings had spread from the Southeast throughout the country and around the globe. A.G. had gone to school with Burton Kierstead III, a.k.a. Trip, whose father had taken a benign interest in his career, even writing him a letter of recommen­dation to Williams. They stayed in touch after A.G. moved to New York, occasionally dining together when Kierstead was in the city, and the old man sometimes steered some business his way. As a young investment banker, it cer­tainly didn't hurt being acquainted with Bur­ton Kierstead Jr. Trip, meanwhile, married a girl from Savannah, built a house on Lookout Mountain and took an office downtown next door to his father's, which he visited when he wasn't following the salmon from Nova Scotia to Russia, or the birds from Georgia to Argentina. Their friend Cal Bustert, to nearly no one's surprise, burned through his trust fund, bouncing between fashionable resorts and rehab facilities; marrying, spawning and divorcing; wrecking cars and discharging firearms at inappropriate targets, including, finally, himself. A.G. had flown south for the funeral, a somber yet lavish affair that lasted for three days.

Most of their former classmates, after for­ays into the North, settled within a few miles of their parents and married girls they'd known for years. A.G. always returned for the weddings—five of them the year he turned 30—and always brought a different date, and in time returned to stand godfather to the children. He visited his parents on Thanks­giving and Christmas. Only rarely did he bring a girl along for these family holidays, and when he did she was inevitably from

what he called, without self-consciousness, "a good family." But his parents learned in time not to get too attached to any of them.

Despite his increasing success in New York he maintained a deep loyalty to his hometown. Chattanooga, Tennessee, the South—this was part of him and distin­guished him from the mass of rootless Yankees with whom he associated in Man­hattan. He always told his drinking bud­dies in both cities that he would return one day, although as the years passed, it became harder and harder for his friends in either place to take this threat seriously.

Within a few years he was making more money than his father, although he did not announce this fact—except to his mother— and continued to seek his father's advice on matters large and small, although they did not discuss A.G.'s love life.

Ginny was reading in the living room of the little cottage in Sagaponack she rented every August, half-conscious of the wistful susurra­tion of the waves from the beach. The house, which had once enjoyed unobstructed views of the potato fields, had over the years been hemmed in by houses, first by LEGO-like boxes and later by vast shingled mansions that mim­icked the old cottages of Southampton, but at night she could still imagine herself as a lonely beachcomber. Emma Woodhouse was just realizing how badly she had misjudged both Mr. Knightley and her own heart, when the phone rang, startling Ginny. She was hardly less startled by the identity of the caller.

"A.G.?"

"Sorry to call so late. But I know you've always been a night owl."

"If you're looking for my niece, she's gone off to sleep over at a friend's house."

"No, actually I was looking for you. Wanna getta drink?"

"Now? Tonight?" Her watch said 1:45.

"We're not getting any younger."

"Don't you have a big day tomorrow?"

"That's probably exactly why I want to drop by."

She paused. She knew, of course, that she was going to say yes, but it irritated her that she was so pleased at the prospect of his com­ing over. Naturally, he was drunk and prob­ably high. She'd been the recipient of many such late-night phone calk back in the day. She couldn't help feeling an illicit satisfaction in the feet that she was, after all these years, getting another, and on this of all nights. He was prob­ably just feeling sentimental in his cups, but whatever his motivation, she had unfinished business with A.G. Jackson and this might well be her last chance to dose the account.

He was flushed, and his speech, always slower and more elided than that of his Northern peers, was just a little slurrier than usual. But for all the nights they'd partied till dawn, she'd never really seen him lose control of his faculties.

He hugged her just a little longer and harder than he might have in a public encounter. "Hey, little darlin'. I can't tell you how glad I am to see you." She pointed him toward the living-room couch. He set up camp on the couch and proceeded to lay out a pile of coke on the coffee table. "You don't mind, do you? I just need to setde my nerves."

"Oh, that should definitely do the trick," she said. "You're so mellow on coke."

"Well, you know. Old habits die hard."

Though it had been years since she'd done blow herself, it seemed perfectly normal to watch him chopping lines, since that's what they'd always done. Being transported back a decade wasn't such a bad thing for a girl. Plus she was morbidly fascinated with his recklessness on the eve of his wedding. She couldn't help wonder­ing just how far he would push it.

"Is that how you'd describe me? 'An old habit'?"

"I'd describe you as an old...a close friend." He laid out four identical lines with his Soho House membership card. He always prided himself on this little skill.

She sat down beside him and accepted the rolled-up 20. Always the gendeman, letting her go first. She felt a thrill of recognition as he held her hair back while she leaned over the table. And then the other familiar thrill, the chilly tingle in her sinuses that turned warm as it spread out toward the follicles of her scalp.

"Feels like old times," he said.

"Not exactly," she said.

"I can't believe it's been...God, how long has it been?"

"Seven years."

"No way."

"Yup."

"Well, it's not like we haven't seen each other around town."

"No, though you probably would have pre­ferred me to just disappear into thin air."

"Oh, come on, darlin'. Don't be ridicu­lous. I'm always happy to see you." He leaned over and snorted his two lines.

"You weren't so happy to see me today at the beach."

"Well, my best moment."

"So you admit you were hitting on my niece."

"It's a reflex. What can I say, she's a very pretty girl."

"I understand that. What I don't under­stand is tomorrow."

"Yeah, well. I'm not so sure I do, either."

"Don't you think you'd better figure it out?"

"I hardly think there's time for that," he said.

"Are you in love with her?"

"I suppose so. I'm not sure."

"Have you ever been in love?"

He nodded his head and looked off through the bay window, out across the invisible ocean, his eyes turning glassy. She realized with a start that he was on the verge of tears. When she slid across the couch and embraced him he virtually col­lapsed in her arms. "Once," he said.

At Harvard A.G. had fallen in love with Eve Garrigue, who was a class ahead of him and who, by the time they met, had already pub­lished several poems in The Paris Review. He was aware of her legend—brainy, beautiful and hard-drinking—even before he arrived on campus, and he already knew her family, from New Orleans, in the way that all South­erners know one anodier. A.G. had discarded his virginity at 15 and never looked back. At first Eve found his boundless self-confidence absurd—a freshman wooing the most pop­ular woman in the sophomore class—but eventually it won her over. He was precocious intellectually as well as sexually, and he was also a willing student. He wrote her a son­net cycle, 12 strictly constructed love poems modeled on Wyatt's and Shakespeare's. And there was the tribal connection—they had a common set of cultural references and a common enemy in the subtle prejudice of all those who assumed that a Southern accent was a sign of slow-wittedness.

Under Eve's influence A.G. began to write poetry in the runic, oracular manner of Mer-win and Strand; her own was high-pitched and baroque, reminding some of late Plath. Even­tually he gave up verse after realizing that he was a better critic than a poet, and a lesser poet than his girlfriend. He would provide the intel­lectual framework for her creation. In fact he would've done almost anything for her. Accus­tomed to being intellectually and emotionally dominant, he happily acceded to her whims and opinions. He started smoking Gauloises and briefly abandoned the preppy wardrobe of his youth, in favor of colorful long-col­lared shirts and flared pants. Eve, who had a breathtaking figure to show off, hid it beneath drapey vintage dresses and scarves. His devo-tion was extreme; he couldn't believe his luck in finding, so early in life, all the answers to his desires in one woman. They shared a destiny. While they gathered around them a group of friends and admirers, they were often criti­cized for being a universe of two.

They spent their second summer together backpacking in Europe; her family had offered to pay for a deluxe version of the grand tour, but Eve refused their money on principle. They bought Europasses and stayed in youth hostels, dined on bread and cheese and vin du pays and screwed like minks. By day they retraced the lives of the poets and sought out ancient churches. One afternoon in the cool, musty interior of a Romanesque

church near Saint-Paul de Vence, Eve knelt down on the stone floor and gave him a blow-job. It was the most shocking thing that had happened to him in his life, though he didn't say anything, more fearful that she'd think him prudish, and stop before she finished, than he was of discovery or blasphemy.

They worried about what to do after gradu­ation, which would come a year earlier for Eve. Marriage was discussed, but they agreed, or rather Eve assured him, that they didn't believe in it. Finally she decided to go to Columbia for her master's. She'd take the four-hour train ride to see him every weekend, and in the meantime she could scout out Manhattan, a territory they planned to conquer together. Her senior year Eve was invited to be a fellow at Bread Loaf. A.G., interning in Chattanooga at a law firm, couldn't understand the dimin­ishing volume and ardor of her letters and phone calls. She herself was almost impossible to reach. Frantic, he drove one Friday night from Chattanooga to Vermont, arriving at die mountain outpost of literature 16 hours later, just in time to find a tousled Eve walking to breakfast, hand in hand with a middle-aged poet A.G. recognized from dust-jacket pho­tos. Her surprise turned almost immediately to defiance. A.G. punched the poet, knock­ing him down. Eve jumped on his back and scratched his face as a small crowd of aspiring writers looked on.

In his young man's heart he believed he could never forgive her, but she astonished him by refusing to ask him to. Back in Chat­tanooga he waited for the letter or the call, in his mind conducting the dialogue she refused to initiate. How could she? After all diat time, after all they'd been through together. For all his intelligence and eloquence, the senti­ments and even die words were die same as those of all spurned lovers. He spent hours engaged in this furious debate, but his side amounted to the repetition of a simple ques­tion: How could you stop loving me? This was his first experience of rejection. He had never been in love before, and some of his friends wondered if he would ever be again.

At his father's insistence A.G. had taken half a dozen economics classes already, and having finished most of his course work in English, he decided to do a double major in economics. He took up widi a new set of friends, avoiding most of diose he and Eve had known. He had no idea what he wanted to do. After gradua­tion he went to China to teach English, which he envisioned as a kind of romantic exile. The following year he enrolled in business school, and then, after a grueling year as an analyst at an investment bank, he found his calling as a closer—die guy who entertains the clients and holds their hands as they sign the checks.

"So she broke your heart and drove you to banking?"

"I don't suppose it was quite that simple. I've probably simplified it in retrospect. Mythologized it in my mind."

"So how does this lead us to the present. To your imminent nuptials?"

He shook his head and chopped up more coke. "I don't know. I guess it just seemed like time." He folded the coke and chopped it again.

"That's it? It seemed like time?"

He shrugged. "She's a nice girl, from a good family. You know, we have a lot in common. So, what about you?"

"What about me?"

"Have you ever been in love?" He was rubbing his face as if to wash off a spot—a tic that was terribly familiar to her.

"Once," she said, taking a cigarette from his pack and holding it to her lips while he lit it.

"Tell me about it."

"You know most of the story," Ginny said. "You were there."

"I was there?" He seemed determined to be obtuse.

"You were the one."

'Jesus. Are you------"

"Yes, I am serious. All those years, all those nights. Fuck—I couldn't help it. I knew it was supposed to be fun, but I fell in love with you."

"I didn't know."

"You don't remember the last night we spent together?"

"Not exactly."

"You asked me to marry you."

"I did?" He looked horrified.

"You did. You asked me to marry you, and you told me you wanted me to have your babies. We stayed up all night plan­ning our future. We were going to spend our summers in Provence. And the next day you said you'd come to my parents' house for Thanksgiving. But later that

same day you said you had a late meeting on Wednesday and you would take the train up to Bedford Thursday morning. And that was the last I ever heard from you."

He slumped back in the couch. "That was terrible, really the worst—I know. I just didn't know what to say to you." He leaned forward and snorted another line. "I was going to come to Bedford. Except I went out for a drink that night. And I met a girl. And one drink led to another. And the next thing I knew it was noon the next day and we were finishing the last of the coke. I couldn't very well face your family in that condition. And, you know, letting you down like that.... I knew I needed to call and apologize, but somehow I couldn't."

Well, at least now she knew what hap­pened. She bent over the coffee table and snorted another couple of lines. "It used to kill me to see you at parties," she said finally, "and you acting so casual, as if noth­ing had happened. With some babe on your arm. For a long time I hated you."

"I guess I can't really blame you," he said. "I wish there was some way------"

"Make love to me," Ginny said. In her own mind, she wasn't being sentimental so much as practical. She felt he owed her that much, at least. Either it would be as good as she remembered it, or it wouldn't, and she would've gotten it out of her system.

Up in the bedroom, he was smart enough, or considerate enough, to kiss her

long and hard before he began removing her clothes. In the middle, for all his skill, and all her desire to be transported, she began to come back to herself and feel awk­ward and sad. And after what seemed like a very long time she just wanted him to fin­ish. She realized now that what she'd really wanted was to believe that he still wanted her and that he cared enough for her to betray his future wife.

Afterward she wrapped herself in the bedspread and walked out to the deck. The sky had turned gray in the east, and the dark surface of ocean was stippled with sil­ver sunlight. The coke was wearing off, and her eyeballs felt as if they were being pricked with tiny needles. She hated herself.

Eventually A.G., in his paisley boxer shorts, holding a cigarette, joined her on the deck.

"What are you going to do?" she said.

"I don't know." He took a drag. "Prob­ably the correct thing."

"What's the correct thing?"

"It's what we do when we don't know what the right thing is."

He put his arm around her and held his cigarette to her lips. She inhaled greedily, as if she believed the smoke could save her, the ember blazing and crackling between A.G.'s fingers before it faded and dimmed within a cocoon of gray ash, and he tossed it away, the last sparks dying on the dewy lawn below.