Meeting Cormac McCarthy's Girlfriend
In the early 1990s, my wife and I used to take an annual trip around the American Southwest, one of our favourite parts of the United States, and indeed of the world. We would check in at the Biltmore hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, wherein those days a room could cost upwards of $300 a night. The next morning, we’d drive up through Flagstaff to Second Mesa and stay at the Hopi Cultural Center, which had rooms to let at, as I recall, $7. America, Land of Contrasts.
One year, before we embarked, I called our friend Cormac McCarthy and suggested we meet up when we were there. Sure, he said, in his polite and softly spoken fashion, that would be a pleasure. He was living in El Paso at the time, which was a bit too far south for our reach. Well then, he said, he would come up to Santa Fe, one of the stop-off places on our route. Yes, indeed, I said, and we could have lunch at our hotel, La Fonda, which does the best margaritasin all of the Southwest.
Wonderful.
“And I’ll bring my girlfriend,” Cormac said, as he was hanging up.
There were still some weeks to go before we travelled and, most evenings over dinner, our conversation came back inevitably to the enigma of “Cormac’s Girlfriend”: who, and what, would she turn out to be?
Cormac was in his sixties at the time, and a handsome fellow still, though gnarled like the stump of a lightning-struck tree. We had already decided that the only plausible consort for him would be a blonde d’un certain age, someone hard-livin’, hard-drinkin’, hard-cussin’. To this projected person, we gave the name Lauren, as in Lauren Bacall.
We arrived in Phoenix in early autumn, though you would never know it, as Arizona does not go in for seasons and the sun shines all day long, to the point of tedium. We had our ritual sybaritic night at the Biltmore, then some dream-time among the Hopis — a fine, plump and friendly people. We took our first and, as it turned out, last look at the Grand Canyon. We stood on the edge of that vast hole in the ground, shook our heads — “That’s the Grand Canyon, all right,” my wife said — and then went off to the nearest bar to spend a happy afternoon discussing, well, Cormac’s Girlfriend.
La Fonda was crowded that weekend. Lots of Barbies in Stetsons and cowboy boots and their slow-talking, slow-walking escorts, ditto. This was pre-Trump America; people still said “howdy” to each other and smiled at strangers. The missus and I had a fortifying margarita at the bar then squared our shoulders and headed to the dining room. Cormac and Lauren were also staying at the hotel, and now a waiter came over to our table to tell us that Mr McCarthy had just telephoned to say that he would be with us shortly.
“I’m nervous,” my wife said. “Are you? Isn’t it ridiculous?”
After a couple of minutes, Cormac appeared. It may surprise his readers to know that he was not a very tall man — broad-chested, and wide at the shoulders, but not tall. As he walked in the door, we assumed that the young woman by his side must be a daughter we had not heard of.
“This,” Cormac said, with a shyish smile the like of which I had never thought to see on that craggy Mount Rushmore face of his, “is my girlfriend, Jennifer.”
She was not Lauren Bacall; she was not anything like Lauren Bacall.
We had first met Cormac a few years previously, in Dublin. When Blood Meridian appeared in the mid-1980s, I had given it an enthusiastic review — it is an extraordinary novel — which he must have seen, although he claimed not to read reviews. One day, he telephoned me out of the blue to introduce himself and to say he was in town and would I care to meet? I remember wondering how he had got my phone number. With Cormac, there were many unknowns.
Next evening, I arrived early at the Shelbourne Hotel and stood in the bar watching the door. I suppose I expected a John Wayne figure: big, rangy and vaguely dangerous. The man who walked in was of medium height, stocky, wearing a tweed overcoat and a matching tweed hat. He might have been a Wall Street broker come to Ireland on a fishing holiday. And he was shy. Who’d have thought? He ordered a Coca-Cola. No, he didn’t drink.
“Used to,” he said, with a wry smile. “Yeah, I used to.”
He was halfway through his Coke when my wife joined us, and instantly he turned from fly-fisher into Southern gent, with a lazy smile and warmly intimate words. I could see that she was as surprised by him as I was. Could this be the man who in Blood Meridian invented Judge Holden, one of the most baneful characters in modern fiction? Could he be the writer who in the same novel described that horrifying Comanche raid? Could he be the creator of Lester Ballard, the lonely serial killler in Child of God, perhaps his finest novel?
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” my wife said later on.“You of all people should know that writers never resemble their work.”
And now here we are in the dining room of La Fonda, meeting Cormac’s girlfriend at last. She did not resemble Cormac’s Girlfriend, not as we had envisioned her. She was 26 or so — at least 5ft 10in, pale as porcelain, willowy with short dark hair — and beautiful in some curiously elusive way. She was also intelligent, funny and not in the least in awe of her — the word cannot be avoided — boyfriend.
It was a jolly lunch. Cormac was touchingly attentive to his Jennifer — and she was very much his — and more relaxed than I’d ever have imagined he could be. For her part, she teased him in the affectionate way only a lover can do.
Life never runs out of surprises.
At four o’clock, we had to leave, as we had other friends to meet later on, in Albuquerque. As we left the dining room, my wife hissed at me out of the corner of her mouth, “He’s finished.” I asked her what she meant. “Look at him, for God’s sake — he’s happy.”
Some years later, Cormac married his Jennifer and they had a son. I fell out of touch, as is often the way in these things. I assumed he had gone on being happy. The books he published around that time, All the Pretty Horses for instance, seemed to me to mark a falling-off. I began to think that my wife had been right, after lunch that day at La Fonda.
Then, in 2006, came The Road, one of his bleakest and most savage novels. I phoned Sonny Mehta, his editor and mine at Knopf, and told him how surprised and impressed I was by the new book, which I considered a triumphant return to form.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Simple,” Sonny said. “The marriage failed.”
John Banville won the Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea. His most recent book, The Drowned, is out now. This piece appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Esquire, out now
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