Bright Lights, Big City

by Jay McInerney

  Michael orders the shepherd’s pie. You wave the menu away. You talk about the past and the present. You ask about the twins, Peter at Amherst and Scan at Bowdoin. Having already discussed your travails at the magazine, including your recent ferret gambit, you ask Michael about his business-restoring old houses-and he tells you it’s going well. He’s working on a derelict carriage house in New Hope.

  “I’m going to hire out some grunt work. Maybe you’d be interested. At least it’s a change of scene. Say, three or four weeks of work.”

  You tell him you’ll think about it. You are surprised that he would offer. Michael has long considered you incompetent. By the time he was twelve he was bigger than you. He shaped an ethic of engagement with the physical world under which your aptitudes and accomplishments were suspect.

  You drink and talk. Under the spell of alcohol your differences recede. You and Michael and Peter and Scan and Dad stand against the world. The family has been fucked over, but you’re going to tough it out. Forget that slut Amanda. The doctors who couldn’t save your mother’s life and wouldn’t tell you what was going on. Clara Tillinghast. The priest who, at your mother’s deathbed, said, “We’ve seen some beautiful deaths with cancer.”

  After many drinks Michael says, “I need a little air.” On the way back to the apartment, you stop in on a friend who happens to have a spare half for the low, low price of sixty dollars. You feel that you are basically through with this compulsion. This time you just want to celebrate crossing the hump. You are a little drunk and you want to keep going, keep talking.

  You should have told us, Michael says, sprawled out on the couch in your apartment. “I mean, what’s a family for?” He bangs his hand on the coffee table for emphasis. “What’s family for?”

  “I don’t know. You want to do a few lines?” Michael shrugs. “Why not?” He watches as you get up and take the mirror from the wall. “What was bad for me,” he says, “is at first I’d see her the way she was toward the end, all wasted and thin. But now I have this image I keep with me. I don’t know when it was, but I came home from school one day-this was after you’d gone to college-and Mom was out back raking leaves. It was October or something and she was wearing your old ski team jacket, which was about six sizes too big.” He stops. His eyes are closed and you think maybe he has passed out. You shake some coke out onto the mirror. Michael opens his eyes. “I remember the way the air smelled, the way Mom looked in that jacket with leaves in her hair, the lake in the background. That’s the way I remember her now. Raking leaves in your old ski team jacket.”

  “I like that,” you say. You can imagine it. She wore that jacket for years. Once you finished high school you didn’t want any part of it and she took it up. You’d never really given it a thought, but now you feel good about it.

  You cut eight lines. Michael begins to snore. You call his name and then you get up and gently shake his shoulder. He turns his face into the cushions. You do two of the lines and sit back in the chair. A year ago tonight you were up until daybreak, sitting beside your mother’s bed.

  You thought you would faint when you came home the last time, three days before she died, and saw the ravaged form. Even the smile had shifted. After months of waffling, the doctors had admitted there was not much they could do, and agreed she could stay at home if the family would attend her constantly. When you got home, Michael and your father, who had traded twelve-hour shifts for a week, were exhausted. For the last seventy-two hours, you took the night shift, midnight to eight. You gave her the morphine injection every four hours, and tended as best you could to the symptoms of the disease.

  When you first saw her, even after Michael had warned you, you wanted to run away. But the horror passed, and you were glad you could do something for her. You were glad you could be with her. But for those last hours you might never have really known her. The last few nights she was not sleeping at all, so you talked.

  “Have you ever tried cocaine,” she asked that last night.

  You didn’t know what to say. A strange question from a mother. But she was dying. You said you had tried it.

  “It’s not bad,” she said. “When I could still swallow they were giving me cocaine with morphine. To ease the depression. I liked it.”

  You mother, who never smoked a cigarette in her life, who got loopy on two drinks.

  She said the morphine was good for the pain but made her drowsier than she wanted to be. She wanted to be clear. She wanted to know what was happening.

  Then she said, “Do young men need sex?”

  You asked what she meant by need.

  “You know what I mean. I should know these things. I don’t have much time and there’s so much I’ve always wondered about. I was brought up to think sex was an ordeal that married women had to endure. It took me a long time to get over that idea. I feel sort of cheated.”

  You always thought your mother was the last Puritan.

  “Have you slept with a lot of girls?”

  “Mom, really,” you said.

  “Come on. What’s to hide? I wish I’d known a long time ago that I was going to die. We could’ve gotten to know each other a lot better. There’s so much we don’t know.”

  “Okay, there have been some girls.”

  “Really?” She lifted her head up from the pillow.

  “Mother, I’m not going into details.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s, well, embarrassing.”

  “I wish people wouldn’t waste their time being embarrassed. I wish I hadn’t. So tell me what it’s like.”

  You began to forget the way she looked then, and to see her somehow as young, younger than you had ever known her. The wasted flesh seemed illusory. You saw her as a young woman.

  “Do you really enjoy it,” she asked.

  “Sure. Yeah, I do.”

  “You’ve slept with girls you’re not in love with. Isn’t it different if you’re in love?”

  “Sure, it’s better.”

  “How about Sally Keegan? Did you sleep with her?”

  Sally Keegan was your high school prom date. “Once.”

  “I thought so.” This verification of her intuition pleased her. “What about Stephanie Bates?”

  Later, she said, “Are you happy with Amanda?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “For the rest of your life?”

  “I hope so.”

  “I was lucky,” Mom said. “Your dad and I have been happy. But it hasn’t always been easy. One time I thought I was leaving him.”

  “Really?”

  “We were human.” She adjusted her pillow and winced. “Foolish.” She smiled.

  The candor was infectious. It spread back to the beginning of your life. You tried to tell her, as well as you could, what it was like being you. You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why. You talked about your first day of school. You cried and clutched her leg.

  You even remembered how her plaid slacks felt, the i scratchiness on your cheek. She sent you off to the bus—she interrupted here to say she wasn’t much happier than you were—and you hid in the woods until you saw the bus leave and then went home and told her you had missed it. So Mom drove you to school, and by the time you got there you were an hour late. Everybody watched you come in with your little note, and heard you explain that you missed the bus. When you finally sat down you knew that you would never catch up.

  “Don’t you think everyone feels a little like that?” Then Mom told you she knew all along about the hot-water-on-the-thermometer trick, but let you pretend you were sick whenever you really seemed to need it. “You were a funny boy. An awful baby. A real screamer.” Then she grimaced and for a moment you thought
it was the memory of your screaming.

  You asked her if she wanted the morphine and she said not yet. She wanted to talk, to be clear.

  The window behind the headboard showed a glimmer of gray. In the other rooms your three brothers, your father, and your Aunt Nora were sleeping. Amanda was in New York.

  “Was I worse than Michael and the twins?”

  “Much worse.” She smiled as if she had just conferred a great distinction upon you. “Much, much worse.” The smile twisted into a grimace and she clutched the sheet in her fingers.

  You begged to give her some morphine. The spasm passed and you saw her body relax.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  She told you how unbearable you were as an infant, always throwing up, biting, crying through the night. “You’ve never been much good at sleeping, have you? Some nights we had to take you out in the car and drive around to get you to sleep.” She seemed pleased. “You were something else.”

  She winced again and groaned. “Hold my hand,” she said. You gave her your hand and she gripped it harder than you would have imagined she could. “The pain,” she said.

  “Please let me give you that shot.”

  You couldn’t stand to see her suffer much longer, felt you were about to collapse. But she told you to wait.

  “Do you know what this is like?” she said. “This pain?”

  You shook your head. She didn’t answer for a while. You heard the first bird of morning.

  “It’s like when you were born. It sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what it’s like.”

  “It hurt that much?”

  “Terrible,” she said. “You just didn’t want to come out. I didn’t think I’d live through it.” She sucked breath through her teeth and gripped your hand fiercely. “So now you know why I love you so much.” You were not sure you understood, but her voice was so faint and dreamy that you didn’t want to interrupt. You held her hand and watched her eyelids flicker, hoping she was dreaming. Birds were calling on all sides. You didn’t think you had ever heard so many birds.

  In a little while she started to talk again. She described a morning in a two-room apartment over a garage in Manchester, New Hampshire. “I was standing in front of a mirror as if I’d never really seen my own face before.” You had to lean down close to hear. “I felt strange. I knew something had happened, but I didn’t know what.”

  She drifted off. Her eyes were half-open but you could see she was looking somewhere else. The bedroom window was filling with light.

  “Dad,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Mom?”

  She was silent for a time and then, suddenly, her eyes were wide open. Her grip relaxed. “The pain is going away,” she said.

  You said that was good. The light seemed to have entered the room all at once.

  “Are you still holding my hand,” she asked.

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Good,” she said. “Don’t let go.”

  HOW IT’S GOING

  The apartment has become very small. Michael snores on the couch. Your head is pounding with voices of confession and revelation. You followed the rails of white powder across the mirror in pursuit of a point of convergence where everything was cross-referenced according to a master code. For a second, you felt terrific. You were coming to grips. Then the coke ran out; as you hoovered the last line, you saw yourself hideously close-up with a rolled twenty sticking out of your nose. The goal is receding. Whatever it was. You can’t get everything straight in one night. You are too excited to think any more and too exhausted to sleep. If you lie down you are afraid you will die.

  The phone goes off like a shrill alarm. You catch it on the second ring. Through the noise and cryptic epigrams you gather that it is Tad, that he wants you to meet him at Odeon. There is a party. Your presence is requested. You tell him you’ll be there in ten minutes.

  You throw a blanket over Michael and a jacket on yourself; check your nearly empty wallet, then close and lock the door. When you hit the street you begin to jog. At the door of the Sheridan Square all-hours bank office you insert the plastic card which a sign tells you is your passport to banking convenience. When the buzzer sounds, you pull the door open and step into a room the color of an illuminated swimming pool. A specimen in camouflage combat gear stands at the cash-machine as if he were playing a video game, body English in his every motion. If he doesn’t hurry up, you think, I will have to kill him.

  Finally he turns to you and throws up his hands. “Fucking computers. They ain’t gonna take over the world at this rate. This goddamned Citibank unit-it couldn’t take Staten Island on a Sunday morning. Go ahead, try your luck.” This neo-guerrilla sports a button which reads: I’M NOT AS THINK AS YOU STONED I AM.

  Not at all confident that your fellow late-night Citi-banker is capable of operating the equipment, you preserve the hope of imminent cash. You step up and read the message on the screen which welcomes you in Spanish and English and asks you which language you prefer to do your banking in. You decide on English; nothing happens. You press the button again. Eventually you try all of the buttons on the console, which keeps flashing the same hearty greeting. You are not the kind of person who beats on recalcitrant vending machines. Nevertheless, just this once, you would like to put your fist through the video screen. You jam the buttons down into their sockets, raise your foot and uselessly kick the wall. Words vile and violent pass your lips. You hate banks. You hate machines. You hate the idiots outside on the sidewalk.

  With your last five you stake yourself to a cab. You begin to feel better once you’re in motion.

  As you pull up to Odeon, Tad is coming out the door with his friend Jimmy Q from Memphis. Luckily, Jimmy has a limo. You climb in. Jimmy gives the driver an address. The Caddy floats over the downtown streets. You can tell you are moving only by the passage of lights across the tinted windows. Some of the lights have dim halos and others spill crystalline shards into the night.

  The car stops in front of a warehouse. You hear the party throbbing like a helicopter above the deserted street. You can’t wait to get up there. You drum your fingers on the doorframe as you wait for the elevator.

  “Take it easy,” Tad says. “You’re wired to detonate.”

  You ask whose party it is. Tad provides a name he claims belongs to the heir of a fast-food fortune.

  The elevator door opens directly into the loft, which is roughly the size of a Midwestern state and at least as populous. There are windows on three sides and mirrors on the fourth. A bar and buffet is set up at one end. The dance floor is down at the other end, somewhere near New Jersey.

  At the bar, Tad introduces you to a woman, Stevie, who wears a slinky black gown with a scalloped hemline. She is very tall. Long blond hair, tasseled white silk scarf wrapped around her neck. Stevie says, “Do you dance?”

  “You bet.”

  You take Stevie’s hand and make for the dance floor, where you add yourselves to the confusion. Elvis Costello says pump it up when you don’t really need it. Stevie carves sinuous figures between the beat. You do your patented New York Torque. The music is just about loud enough to drive everything between your ears down through the spinal column into your bones, and possibly you can shake it out via your fingertips, femurs and toes.

  Stevie puts her arms on your shoulders and kisses you. When she says she has to go to the Ladies’, you head for the bar to get drinks.

  Tad awaits you. “Have you seen our friend?”

  “Which friend?”

  “Your formerly deceased not-yet-ex wife.”

  You look up from the bottles and scan the immediate vicinity. “Amanda?”

  “Sure enough. The face that launched a thousand trips to Bloomingdale’s.”

  “Where?”

  Tad puts his hand behind your head and directs your gaze to a group near the elevator. She is standing in profile, not twenty feet away. At first you think this is just a close resemblance, then she lifts her
hand to her shoulder and begins to twirl a strand of hair between the tips of her fingers. Her agent used to tell her she’d ruin her hair that way. There is no doubt.

  Not now, you think.

  She’s wearing toreador pants and a silver flak jacket. Beside her, a Mediterranean hulk in a white silk shirt emanates a proprietary air. As you watch he smiles at something Amanda has said, and reaches over to squeeze her ass.

  Au contraire, Pierre. Sexual Abandonment in spades.

  The man looks like he was carved by Praxiteles in 350 B.C. and touched up by Paramount in 1947. You wonder if the physique is functional or cosmetic. How well would he respond if you ripped his ears off?

  “Who’s the greaseball?” Tad says.

  You reach down for a bottle and pour yourself a large drink. “Must be lucky Pierre.”

  “I’ve seen him somewhere.”

  “Gentlemen’s Quarterly.”

  “No. I’ve seen him around. I know it.” Tad nods his head up and down, as if trying to dislodge a memory. “I saw him at a party. Note the coke spoon dangling betwixt his hairy pecs.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “He wasn’t with Amanda. Some other bimbo.”

  Stevie returns from the bathroom. “Here’s the dancing fool,” she says.

  “I don’t need to dance to be foolish.”

  Tad says, “Batten down the hatches, Coach. She’s coming at you.”

  Sure enough, here’s Amanda.

  She says, “Ciao, hello,” and before you can react she kisses your cheek.

  Is she out of her mind? Doesn’t she know that you desist from strangling her only through the exercise of heroic restraint?