How It Ended Part 1

How It Ended.

New and Collected Stories.

by Jay McInerney.

PREFACE

Like most novelists I cut my teeth writing short stories, and that's one habit I've never been able to break. I was lucky enough to study under two masters of the form, Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, who were both teaching at Syracuse University when I showed up in 1981 after being fired from The New Yorker The New Yorker for being a very bad fact-checker. Like the Talking Heads, I believed that facts all came with points of view. Whether or not I was correct to conclude that fiction was my metier, I clearly couldn't be trusted with the facts. for being a very bad fact-checker. Like the Talking Heads, I believed that facts all came with points of view. Whether or not I was correct to conclude that fiction was my metier, I clearly couldn't be trusted with the facts.In fact, I'd gone to Syracuse specifically to study with Carver, whose writing I'd revered ever since I read Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? not long after it came out in 1976. I was lucky enough to get Wolff, who had just published not long after it came out in 1976. I was lucky enough to get Wolff, who had just published In the Garden of the North American Martyrs In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, in the bargain. As a teacher, Ray operated on intuition: He saw himself as a nurturer rather than a critic. His greatest gift was to foster the inner editor in each of us, questioning word choice, querying what he considered pretentious verbiage, underlining or crossing out questionable adjectives and sprinkling question marks in the margins. Besides presiding over workshops, he taught a course called "Form and Theory of the Short Story," in which we read his favorite pract.i.tioners: Chekhov, Babel, Hemingway, Welty and the O'Connors, Frank and Flannery. At the beginning of each cla.s.s he would light up a cigarette and ask, "So, what did you think?" Ray's idea of a good session was one in which these were the last words he spoke. When a student from the English department proper challenged him about this methodology, demanding to know why the cla.s.s was called "Form and Theory" when there was little of either, Ray nervously sucked on his cigarette and hunched lower in his chair. "Well," he said after a very long pause, "I guess it's like we read the stories ... and then form our own theories."Toby was far more a.n.a.lytical, and more critical. He would disa.s.semble a short story before our eyes like a forensic pathologist, labeling the various components and explaining how they worked or, as was the case with most of our workshop submissions, why they didn't. Unlike his distinguished colleague, he didn't suffer fools, or their stories, gladly.At Syracuse I wrote "In the North-West Frontier Province," which I sent to The Paris Review The Paris Review. A few weeks later I was astonished to receive a phone call from George Plimpton, its longtime editor, who told me, in that silvery patrician voice, he quite liked the story and was inclined to publish it but wondered if I possibly had anything else to show him. After rereading my old stories and realizing that they were all pretty much derivative c.r.a.p, I found a paragraph written in the second person that I'd scrawled after a disastrous night on the town. This struck me as more original, and subsequently I stayed up all night writing "It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?"-which became my first published story when George brought it out in 1982. At some point I realized I had more to tell about this particular character in this particular voice, and the story became the basis for my first novel, Bright Lights, Big City Bright Lights, Big City. "In the North-West Frontier Province" eventually found a place, as a kind of backstory, in my second novel, Ransom; Ransom; since it seems to me my first successful story, I've included it here. since it seems to me my first successful story, I've included it here.My next novel, Story of My Life Story of My Life, grew rather more organically out of a short story published under the same t.i.tle in Esquire Esquire in 1987. Likewise, "Philomena," published in in 1987. Likewise, "Philomena," published in The New Yorker The New Yorker in 1995, later evolved into the novel in 1995, later evolved into the novel Model Behavior Model Behavior. (Not included here is "Savage and Son," published in Esquire Esquire in 1993, which became the basis for my novel in 1993, which became the basis for my novel The Last of the Savages The Last of the Savages, because it seems to me a novella rather than a short story-a question not merely of length but of scope.)Clearly, I was attracted to the long form, and my short stories-some of them, at least-often turned out to be warm-up exercises. There's psychological as well as practical value in using one as a sketch for a novel; the idea of undertaking a narrative of three or four hundred pages, which might consume years of your life, is pretty daunting. A novel's a long-term relationship. Sometimes it's easier to pretend you're engaging in a one-night stand and see how it feels.On the other hand, at the risk of contradicting myself, I have always been more than a little daunted by the short story. Whereas even a medium-sized novel-let alone the kind Henry James described as a loose baggy monster-can survive any number of false turns, boring characters and off-key sentences, the story is far less forgiving. A good one requires perfect pitch and a precise sense of form; it has to burn with a hard, gemlike flame."Smoke" was written in 1985, shortly after the publication of Bright Lights, Big City Bright Lights, Big City. It was the first outing for Russell and Corrine Calloway, who have reappeared in Brightness Falls Brightness Falls and and The Good Life The Good Life. In between novels I have continued to write stories, seven of which were published in hardcover in 1999 along with the short novel Model Behavior Model Behavior, but since they did not appear in the paperback edition I have included them here: "Smoke," "The Business," "How It Ended," "Getting in Touch with Lonnie," "Reunion," "The Queen and I" and "Con Doctor."It's strange how the retrospective view highlights the temporal signature of certain stories. "My Public Service," which I somehow forgot to include in Model Behavior Model Behavior, was written in 1992, years before Monica Lewinsky became a household name. "The Queen and I" was written at about the same time, when the Meatpacking District was still the center of the industry for which it was named by day, and by night devoted to another kind of meat altogether and populated largely by transs.e.xual streetwalkers and their cruising johns. Those familiar with its current incarnation as Manhattan's glossiest hub of platinum-card nightlife might have a hard time recognizing it here. And speaking of change-I saw no reason not to tinker with these older stories when I thought they might be improved. Nor did I feel compelled to resurrect several stories which seemed, on reflection, to resemble sleeping dogs.The twelve most recent stories, including "Sleeping with Pigs," "Invisible Fences," "I Love You, Honey," "Summary Judgment," "The Madonna of Turkey Season," "The Waiter," "Everything Is Lost," "The Debutante's Return" and "Putting Daisy Down," were composed in something of a sprint from December 2007 through the late spring of 2008. "Penelope on the Pond," which features Alison Poole, the protagonist of my 1988 novel Story of My Life Story of My Life, was also written during this period. (Alison has enjoyed an interesting career as a fictional character: Bret Easton Ellis borrowed her for American Psycho American Psycho, where she narrowly avoids getting murdered by Patrick Bateman, and she subsequently a.s.sumed a prominent role in his novel Glamorama Glamorama. Moreover, the woman who inspired this character has recently achieved a certain real-life notoriety, but that's a factual matter which needn't further concern us here.) Corrine Calloway returns in "The March," which I wrote while I was working on The Good Life The Good Life. And the most recent story here, "The Last Bachelor," was finished in May of 2008, though the first few paragraphs were written in the early nineties and then set aside.As different as these twenty-six stories-written over the last twenty-six years-might be, certain preoccupations and obsessions seem to have endured. But enough of these d.a.m.n facts. I enjoyed writing these stories, and hope you enjoy reading them.Jay McInerney August 2008

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It's probably impossible to acknowledge all of those who have helped inspire, improve and meddle with these stories, written over a span of twenty-six years. Still, it would be ungrateful not to try. Special thanks to George Plimpton for saving me from law school by publishing my first short story, and to Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff for reading and commenting on numerous unpublished narratives that preceded it. Bill Buford, as editor at Granta Granta and later and later The New Yorker The New Yorker, helped shape and polish several of these stories. I owe a debt of grat.i.tude as well to Rust Hills, who nurtured and published many installments of my fiction during his tenure at Esquire Esquire, and to Alice Turner, former fiction editor at Playboy Playboy. Mona Simpson, Bob O'Connor, Donna Tartt, Julian Barnes, Helen Bransford, Terry McDonell, Bret Easton Ellis, Virginia O'Brien, Jon Robin Baitz and Anne Hearst McInerney are among the early readers who have helped to improve these stories. And I feel very lucky and blessed to have had Binky Urban as a reader and an adviser since the start of my career. Finally, Gary Fisketjon has been my closest reader for thirty years, since we were cla.s.smates at Williams College. I showed him my earliest stories not long after we exchanged blows in the name of a romantic rivalry. He's read every line of fiction I have written since then, and I've benefited immeasurably from his advice, even if some of his criticism has reminded me of his right jab.

It's Six A.M.

Do You Know Where You Are?

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are a little fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either the Bimbo Box or the Lizard Lounge. It might all come a little clearer if you could slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. There is a small voice inside of you insisting that this epidemic lack of clarity is the result of too much of that already, but you are not yet willing to listen to that voice. The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two a.m. changes to six a.m. You know that moment has come and gone, though you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there it was possible to cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now are trying to hang on to the rush. Your brain at present is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. They need the Bolivian Marching Powder.

Something vaguely tribal about this scene-pendulous jewelry, face paint, ceremonial headgear and hairstyles. You feel that there is also a certain Latin theme, which is more than the fading buzz of marimbas in your brain.

You are leaning back against a post which may or may not be structural with regard to the building but nonetheless feels essential for the maintenance of an upright position. The bald girl is saying this used to be a good place to come before the a.s.sholes discovered it. You do not want to be talking to this bald girl, or even listening to her, which is all you're doing, but you don't have your barge pole handy, and just at the moment you don't want to test the powers of speech or locomotion.

How did you get here? It was your friend Tad Allagash who powered you in here, and now he has disappeared. Tad is the kind of guy who certainly would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. He is either your best self or your worst self, you're not sure which. Earlier in the evening it seemed clear that he was your best self. You started on the Upper East Side with Champagne and unlimited prospects, strictly observing the Allagash rule of perpetual motion: one drink per stop. Tad's mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that you are missing something, that where you aren't is more fun than where you are. You are awed by this strict refusal to acknowledge any goal higher than the pursuit of pleasure. You want to be like that. You also think that he is shallow and dangerous. His friends are all rich and spoiled, like the cousin from Memphis you met earlier in the evening who refused to accompany you below Fourteenth Street because he said he didn't have a lowlife visa. This cousin had a girlfriend with cheekbones to break your heart, and you knew she was the real thing when she never once acknowledged your presence. She possessed secrets-about islands, about horses-that you would never know.

You have traveled from the meticulous to the slime. The girl with the shaved head has a scar tattooed on her scalp that looks like a long, sutured gash. You tell her it is very realistic. She takes this as a compliment and thanks you. You meant as opposed to romantic. "I could use one of those right over my heart," you say.

"You want I can give you the name of the guy did it. You'd be surprised how cheap." You don't tell her that nothing would surprise you now. Her voice, for instance, which is like the New Jersey state anthem played through an electric shaver.

The bald girl is emblematic of the problem. What the problem is is that for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a garden. New York, the club scene, bald women-you're tired of all that. Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't. You see yourself as the kind of guy who wakes up early on Sunday morning and steps out to pick up the Times Times and croissants. You take a cue from the Arts and Leisure section and decide to check out some exhibition-costumes of the Hapsburg Court at the Met, say, or j.a.panese lacquerware of the Muromachi period at the Asia Society. Maybe you will call that woman you met at the publishing party Friday night, the party you did not get sloppy drunk at, an editor at a famous publishing house even though she looks like a fashion model. See if she wants to check out the exhibition and maybe do an early dinner. You will wait until eleven a.m. to call her, because unlike you she may not be an early riser. She may have been out a little late, at a nightclub, say. It occurs to you that there is time for a couple sets of tennis before the museum. You wonder if she plays, but then, of course she would. and croissants. You take a cue from the Arts and Leisure section and decide to check out some exhibition-costumes of the Hapsburg Court at the Met, say, or j.a.panese lacquerware of the Muromachi period at the Asia Society. Maybe you will call that woman you met at the publishing party Friday night, the party you did not get sloppy drunk at, an editor at a famous publishing house even though she looks like a fashion model. See if she wants to check out the exhibition and maybe do an early dinner. You will wait until eleven a.m. to call her, because unlike you she may not be an early riser. She may have been out a little late, at a nightclub, say. It occurs to you that there is time for a couple sets of tennis before the museum. You wonder if she plays, but then, of course she would.

When you meet the girl who wouldn't et cetera, you will tell her that you are slumming, visiting your own six a.m. Lower East Side of the soul on a lark, stepping nimbly between the piles of garbage to the marimba rhythms in your head.

On the other hand, any beautiful girl, specifically one with a full head of hair, would help you stave off this creeping sense of mortality. You remember the Bolivian Marching Powder and realize you're not down yet. First you have to get rid of this bald girl because of the bad things she is doing to your mood.

In the bathroom there are no doors on the stalls, which makes it tough to be discreet. But clearly you are not the only person here to take on fuel. Lots of sniffling going on. The windows in here are blacked over, and for this you are profoundly grateful.

Hup, two, three, four. The Bolivian soldiers are back on their feet, off and running in formation. Some of them are dancing, and you must do the same.

Just outside the door you spot her: tall, dark and alone, half hiding behind a pillar at the edge of the dance floor. You approach laterally, moving your stuff like a bad spade through the slalom of a synthesized conga rhythm. She jumps when you touch her shoulder.

"Dance?"

She looks at you as if you had just suggested instrumental rape. "I do not speak English," she says, after you ask again.

"Francais?"

She shakes her head. Why is she looking at you that way, like there are tarantulas nesting in your eye sockets?

"You are by any chance from Bolivia? Or Peru?"

She is looking around for help now. Remembering a recent encounter with a young heiress's bodyguard at Danceteria-or was it New Berlin?-you back off, hands raised over your head.

The Bolivian soldiers are still on their feet, but they have stopped singing their marching song. You realize that we are at a crucial juncture with regard to morale. What we need is a good pep talk from Tad Allagash, who is nowhere to be found. You try to imagine what he would say. Back on the horse. Now we're Back on the horse. Now we're really really going to have some fun going to have some fun. Something like that. You suddenly realize that he has already slipped out with some rich hose queen. He is back at her place on Fifth Ave., and they are doing some of her off-the-boat-quality drugs. They are scooping it out of tall Ming vases and snorting it off of each other's naked bodies. You hate Tad Allagash.

Go home. Cut your losses.

Stay. Go for it.

You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, the republic is Italy. All these voices are waving their arms and screaming at one another. There's an ex cathedra ex cathedra riff coming down from the Vatican: Repent. There's still time. riff coming down from the Vatican: Repent. There's still time. Your body is the temple of the Lord and you have defiled it Your body is the temple of the Lord and you have defiled it. It is, after all, Sunday morning, and as long as you have any brain cells left a resonant, patriarchal ba.s.s will echo down the marble vaults of your church-going childhood to remind you that this is the Lord's day. What you need is another overpriced drink to drown it out. But a search of pockets yields only a dollar bill and change. You paid ten to get in here. Panic gains on you.

You spot a girl at the edge of the dance floor who looks like your last chance for earthly salvation against the creeping judgment of the Sabbath. You know for a fact that if you go out into the morning alone, without even your sungla.s.ses, which you have forgotten (because who, after all, plans on these travesties), that the harsh, angling light will turn you to flesh and bone. Mortality will pierce you through the retina. But there she is in her pegged pants, a kind of doo-wop retro ponytail pulled off to the side, great lungs, as eligible a candidate as you could hope to find this late in the game. The s.e.xual equivalent of fast food.

She shrugs and nods when you ask her to dance. You like the way she moves, half-tempo, the oiled ellipses of her hips and shoulders. You get a little hip-and-a.s.s contact. After the second song she says she's tired. She's on the edge of bolting when you ask her if she needs a little pick-me-up.

"You've got some blow?" she says.

"Monster," you say.

She takes your arm and leads you into the Ladies'. There's another guy in the stall beside yours so it's okay. After a couple of spoons she seems to like you just fine and you're feeling pretty likable yourself. A couple more. This girl is all nose. When she leans forward for the spoon, the front of her shirt falls open and you can't help wondering if this is her way of thanking you.

Oh yes.

"I love drugs," she says, as you march toward the bar.

"It's something we have in common," you say.

"Have you ever noticed how all the good words start with D D? D D and and L L."

You try to think about this. You're not sure what she's driving at. The Bolivians are singing their marching song but you can't quite make out the words.

"You know? Drugs. Delight. Decadence."

"Debauchery," you say, catching the tune now.

"Dexedrine."

"Delectable. Deranged. Debilitated."

"And L L. Lush and luscious."

"Languorous."

"Lazy."

"Libidinous."

"What's that?" she says.

"h.o.r.n.y."

"Oh," she says and casts a long, arching look over your shoulder. Her eyes glaze in a way that reminds you precisely of the closing of a sandblasted gla.s.s shower door. You can see that the game is over, though you're not sure which rule you broke. Possibly she finds H H words offensive and is now scanning the dance floor for a man with a compatible vocabulary. You have more: words offensive and is now scanning the dance floor for a man with a compatible vocabulary. You have more: down down and and depressed, lost depressed, lost and and lonely lonely. It's not that you are really going to miss this girl who thinks that decadence decadence and and Dexedrine Dexedrine are the high points of the language of the Kings James and Lear, but the touch of flesh, the sound of another human voice ... You know that there is a special purgatory waiting out there for you, a desperate half-sleep which is like a grease fire in the brainpan. are the high points of the language of the Kings James and Lear, but the touch of flesh, the sound of another human voice ... You know that there is a special purgatory waiting out there for you, a desperate half-sleep which is like a grease fire in the brainpan.

The girl half waves as she disappears into the crowd. There is no sign of the other girl, the girl who would not be here. There is no sign of Tad Allagash. The Bolivians are mutinous. You can't stop the voices.

Here you are again.

All messed up and no place to go.

It is worse even than you expected, stepping out into the morning. The light is like a mother's reproach. The sidewalk sparkles cruelly. Visibility unlimited. The downtown warehouses look serene and rested in this beveled light. A taxi pa.s.ses uptown and you start to wave, then realize you have no money. The car stops. You jog over and lean in the window.

"I guess I'll walk after all."

"a.s.shole." The cabbie leaves rubber.

You start north, holding your hand over your eyes. A b.u.m is sleeping on the sidewalk, swathed in garbage bags, and he lifts his head as you pa.s.s. "G.o.d bless you and forgive your sins," he says. You wait for the cadge, but that's all he says. You wish he hadn't said anything.

As you turn away, what is left of your olfactory equipment sends a message to your brain. The smell of fresh bread. Somewhere they are baking bread. You see bakery trucks loading in front of a loft building on the next block. You watch as bags of rolls are carried out onto the loading dock by a man with a tattooed forearm. This man is already at work, so that regular people will have fresh bread for their morning tables. The righteous people who sleep at night and eat eggs for breakfast. It is Sunday morning and you have not eaten since ... when? Friday night. As you approach, the smell of the bread washes over you like a gentle rain. You inhale deeply, filling your lungs with it. Tears come to your eyes, and you are filled with such a rush of tenderness and pity that you stop beside a lamppost and hang on for support.

You remember another Sunday morning in your old apartment on Cornelia Street when you woke to the smell of bread from the bakery downstairs. There was the smell of bread every morning, but this is the one you remember. You turned to see your wife sleeping beside you. Her mouth was open and her hair fell down across the pillow to your shoulder. The tanned skin of her shoulder was the color of bread fresh from the oven. Slowly, and with a growing sense of exhilaration, you remembered who you were. You were the boy and she was the girl, your college sweetheart. You weren't famous yet, but you had the rent covered, you had your favorite restaurant where the waitresses knew your name and you could bring your own bottle of wine. It all seemed to be just as you had pictured it when you had discussed plans for marriage and New York. The apartment with the pressed tin ceiling, the claw-footed bath, the windows that didn't quite fit the frame. It seemed almost as if you had wished for that very place. You leaned against your wife's shoulder. Later you would get up quietly, taking care not to wake her, and go downstairs for croissants and the Sunday Times Times, but for a long time you lay there breathing in the mingled scents of bread, hair and skin. You were in no hurry to get up. You knew it was a moment you wanted to savor. You didn't know how soon it would be over, that within a year she would go back to Michigan to file for divorce.

You approach the man on the loading dock. He stops working and watches you. You feel that there is something wrong with the way your legs are moving.

"Bread." This is what you say to him. You meant to say something more, but this is as much as you can get out.

"What was your first clue?" he says. He is a man who has served his country, you think, a man with a family somewhere outside the city. Small children. Pets. A garden.

"Could I have some? A roll or something?"

"Get out of here."

The man is about your size, except for the belly, which you don't have. "I'll trade you my jacket," you say. It is one hundred percent raw silk from Paul Stuart. You take it off, show him the label.

"You're crazy," the man says. Then he looks back into the warehouse. He picks up a bag of hard rolls and throws them at your feet. You hand him the jacket. He checks the label, sniffs the jacket, then tries it on.

You tear the bag open and the smell of warm dough rushes over you. The first bite sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.

1982.

Smoke.

That summer in New York, everyone was wearing yellow ties. The stock market was coming into a long bull run; over plates of blackened redfish, artists and gourmet-shop proprietors exchanged prognostications on the Dow. And on the sidewalks n.o.ble dark men from Senegal were selling watches, jewelry and fake Gucci bags. No one seemed to know how or why these Africans had come to town-certainly not the police, who tried with little success to explain in English the regulations governing street vendors and finally sent out a special French-speaking squad, who received the same blank smiles. It was a mystery. Also that summer, Corrine and Russell Callahan quit smoking.

Russell Callahan was not one of those wearing a tie. He had worn a tie to work his first day at the publishing house and sensed suspicion among his colleagues, as if this had signaled aspirations to a higher position, or a lunch date with someone already elevated. The polite bohemian look of the junior staff suited him just fine, and abetted his belief that he was engaged in the enterprise of literature. On clear days he saw himself as an underpaid hack in a windowless annex of a third-rate inst.i.tution. After two promotions he presided over a series of travel books composed of plagiarism and speculation in equal parts. The current t.i.tle, Grand Hotels of America Grand Hotels of America, was typical: He and his a.s.sociates plundered the literature in print, sent letters requesting brochures and then wrote colorful and informative descriptions designed to convey the impression of eyewitness reporting. Certain adjectives became severely dog-eared in the process. The words comfortable, elegant comfortable, elegant and and s.p.a.cious s.p.a.cious encountered outside the office made Russell feel queasy and unclean. In May, a month after the current project had been launched, two years after he'd started work, he'd been a.s.signed a college intern, an eager young woman named Tracey Wheeler. As a mentor, he found himself a.s.suming the air of a grizzled veteran, and Tracey's enthusiasm helped to focus his cynicism about his job. encountered outside the office made Russell feel queasy and unclean. In May, a month after the current project had been launched, two years after he'd started work, he'd been a.s.signed a college intern, an eager young woman named Tracey Wheeler. As a mentor, he found himself a.s.suming the air of a grizzled veteran, and Tracey's enthusiasm helped to focus his cynicism about his job.

Corrine worked as an a.n.a.lyst in a brokerage house. If she had been a man, she would've had an easier time of it her first year. She nearly quit on several occasions. But once she became comfortable with the work, she found that the men around her were vaguely embarra.s.sed by the old cigars-and-brandy etiquette, and vulnerable to the suspicion that she and her female colleagues possessed a new rule book. Gifted with mathematical genius and a wildly superst.i.tious nature, she found herself precisely equipped to understand the stock market. She felt near the center of things. The sweat and blood of labor, the rise and fall of steel pistons, the test-tube matchmaking of chemicals and cells-all the productive energies of the world, coded in binary electronic impulses, coursed through the towers of downtown Manhattan, accessible to her at any moment on the screen of her terminal. Corrine came to appreciate aspects of a style that had at first intimidated her: She started playing squash again, and began to enjoy the leathery, wood-paneled, masculine atmosphere of the clubs where she sometimes lunched with her superiors, under the increasingly benign gaze of dead rich men in gilt frames.

Corrine and Russell had met in college. They were married the summer of graduation, and in New York their East Side apartment became a supper club for former cla.s.smates. As a married couple, the Callahans were pioneers of the state of adulthood, but they were also indulgent hosts. They put out crystal with dinner and weren't appalled if a piece of stemware got smashed toward morning. Men who had found Corrine daunting in college, when she was an erotic totem figure, could now flirt with her safely, while women often confided in Russell, drawing him into the bedroom for urgent conferences. He had been known as a poet in college, his verse tending toward the Byronic. Now people who'd hardly known him at school fished up from the yearbook file of their memories words like sensitive sensitive and and artistic artistic when his name was mentioned. when his name was mentioned.

A Memorial Day party had reached the stage at which the empty gla.s.ses were becoming ashtrays when Nancy Tanner drew Russell into the bedroom. As she tugged him by his fingers, he watched the thick tongue of blond hair licking the back of her shoulders and the edge of her red dress, and remembered again something he'd thought of earlier-that he'd actually slept with her one night in college.

"I guess you've noticed I haven't exactly been myself tonight."

She sat down on the bed and looked up at Russell, who thought that Nancy had been exactly herself, trolling her scooped neckline under the eyes of his friends, her laugh audible from any corner of the living room.

"My stepfather just went into the hospital with cancer. It's really got me down."

"That's rough." Russell didn't know what else to say, and Nancy seemed to be bearing up anyway.

"He used to take me to the Museum of Natural History. I always wanted to see the Eskimos, and I'd think how nice it would be to live in a little round igloo. I was a pretty ugly kid, but he'd call me his 'beauty queen.'" Actual tears were welling in her eyes, and Russell began to believe that she was genuinely upset, and to feel guilty for having doubted it.

"I haven't told anybody," she said, reaching for his hand, which he surrendered. "I just wanted you to know."

"I find it hard to believe the part about your being an ugly kid," Russell said, finally summoning some conviction. She wasn't nearly as good-looking as Corrine, he reminded himself, impressed with his own loyalty.

She stood up and dabbed at her eyes with her free hand. "Thank you, Russell." She leaned forward and kissed him. In temperature and duration, it was a little beyond what the situation called for.

"Do you have a cigarette," she asked when she drew away.

In the hallway, Bruce Davidoff was pounding on the bathroom door. Seeing Russell, he said, "Twenty minutes they've been in there." Back in the living room, Corrine was talking with Rick Cohen, cupping her hand in front of her to catch the ashes from her cigarette, nodding vigorously, her smoky exhalations dissipating like contrails of her rapid speech. He liked to watch her at parties, eavesdrop on her conversations with other men. At these times she seemed more like the woman he had proposed to than the one with whom he watched the eleven o'clock news.

"Symbols work in the market the same way they do in literature," Corrine was saying.

Frowning earnestly, Rick Cohen said, "I don't quite follow you there."

Corrine considered, taking a thoughtful drag on her cigarette. "There's, like, a symbolic order of things underneath the real economy. A kind of dream life of the economy that affects the market as much as the hard facts, the stats. The secret urges and desires of consumers and producers work up toward the surface. Market a.n.a.lysis is like dream interpretation. One thing stands for another thing-a new hairstyle means a rise in gold and a fall in bonds."

Rick Cohen nodded to mask his incomprehension. Russell moved toward the kitchen to check out the wine situation. Except for Corrine, the perfect hostess, who was splitting the difference, it seemed to him that the publishing people were all talking about the stock market and the financial people were talking about books and movies. By the end of the night everyone would be talking about real estate-co-ops, condominiums, summer rentals in the Hamptons. Igloos on West Seventy-ninth Street. s.p.a.cious, comfortable, elegant s.p.a.cious, comfortable, elegant.

After the last guest had been shoveled into the elevator, Corrine and Russell sat on the couch in the living room and had a cigarette before turning in. Russell put a side of Hank Williams on the stereo to wind them down. Corrine said, "G.o.d, I'm tired. I don't think I can keep this up."