Bright Lights, Big City

by Jay McInerney

  She kisses Tad with the same formal benevolence. Tad introduces Stevie to Amanda. You can’t even believe this is happening. Shouldn’t someone say what a nice party this is?

  “Is that your Italian stallion?” Tad says, nodding in the direction from which Amanda has come. “Or your Greek peak? Your French mensch? Or some other species of wetback?”

  “That’s Odysseus,” Amanda says. “My fiancé.”

  “Odysseus,” Tad says. “Odysseus. Right, the Greek.” You wish Tad would shut up.

  Amanda smiles at you as if you were an acquaintance whose name she is eager to remember. Won’t she at least berate you for trying to trash her fashion show?

  “So, how’s it going?” she says. You stare at her, craving a glimmer of irony or shame in her big blue eyes.

  “How’s it going?” You start to laugh. She laughs too. You slap your thigh. She wants to know how it’s going. A very funny question. Hilarious. Amanda is a riot. You are laughing so hard that you choke. Stevie slaps your back. As soon as you catch your breath you start laughing even harder. Amanda looks alarmed. She doesn’t know how funny she can be. You want to tell her she’s a barrel of monkeys but you can’t speak. You are laughing. People are pounding your back. It’s funny. People are funny. Everything’s so funny you could die laughing. You can’t breathe. You can’t even see.

  “Drink,” Tad says. He is holding you up with one arm and holding a plastic cup with the other. “Let there be space,” Tad says to the faces around you. You don’t see Amanda’s.

  “What’s the matter,” Stevie asks.

  “He’s epileptic,” Tad says. “I know how to handle this.” She retreats, understandably.

  “I’m not epileptic,” you say.

  “No, just an emotional quadriplegic.”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” you say. “How’s it going? Can you believe she said that?” You start to laugh again.

  “Take a breather, Coach.” Tad deposits you in a Mies van der Rohe chair. “You think that’s funny,” Tad says, “wait till you hear this.”

  “What?”

  “Odysseus, right? You remember who he is?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “I finally figured out where I saw him before.”

  “With his hand on Amanda’s ass.”

  “No. Listen to this. I have this account at the agency. No need to name names. But there’s this old babe in Atlanta who runs a company and comes up to New York two or three times a year for a face lift and free meals on the agency’s expense account. Naturally, she expects company for the evenings. So we provide this service through a little outfit called ‘Dial a Hunk.’ Male escort service, very top drawer. And when I say escort I am being uncharacteristically discreet. Anyway, about a year ago we dialed a hunk and voila Odysseus.”

  “Don’t try to cheer me up.”

  “It’s true. I had to go out with these freaks two nights running, and needless to say the Allagash Express was derailed. The agency paid for his services, which definitely did not include witty conversation.”

  When you start to laugh, Tad says, “Careful.” But it’s under control.

  “Dial a Hunk.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Dial a Fucking Hunk.”

  “Now that,” Tad says, “is funny. The wily Odysseus.”

  “Amanda’s finally got the right number,” you say, wishing you found it funnier. You wish this laughter could lift you out of your heavy body and carry you beyond this place, out through an open window and up over the city until all this ugliness and pain were reduced to a twinkling of faraway lights.

  “I don’t know,” you say. “Actually, it’s not that funny. It’s just pathetic.”

  “Don’t pour good sympathy after bad,” Tad says.

  “Where’s Stevie?”

  “That’s another sob story. You want to steer clear of that, Coach.”

  “Why?”

  “Stevie, aka Steve, had his third operation a few weeks ago. Convincing, isn’t he?”

  “You expect me to believe that?” You replay images of Stevie in your mind. “Bullshit.”

  “Would I lie? Ask Jimmy Q if you don’t believe me. What do you think the scarf around the neck is for? You can’t remove an Adam’s apple.”

  You have no idea whether Tad is serious or not, having been taken in by him on numerous occasions. Your curiosity about Stevie’s chromosomes is by now exhausted. It is too late in the night to care.

  “I was going to tell you.”

  “Thanks.” You stand up.

  “Take it easy. Coach.” He puts his arm around your shoulders.

  “I just realized something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You and Amanda would make a terrific couple.”

  “I suppose that means that you get Odysseus all to yourself.”

  “Later, Tad.”

  A set of bedrooms is tucked away in a corner of the loft. The first two rooms are full of coke fiends and earnest conversers. The third is free, and a phone sits on a table beside the bed. You find the number in your wallet.

  “What time is it?” Vicky says after you identify yourself. “Where are you?”

  “It’s late. I’m in New York. I just wanted to talk.”

  “Let me guess; you’re with Tad.”

  “I was with Tad.”

  “It’s a little late for a chat. Is something wrong?”

  “I just wanted to tell you my mom died.” You hadn’t meant to be so abrupt. You are moving too fast.

  “Oh, God,” Vicky says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was… when?”

  “A year ago.” The Missing Person.

  “A year ago?”

  “I didn’t tell you before so I wanted to tell you now. It seemed important.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. It’s not so bad. I mean, it was.” You can’t manage to say what you mean. “I wish you could’ve met her. You would’ve hit it off. She had hair like yours. Not just that.”

  “I’m not sure what to say.”

  “There’s something else I didn’t tell you. I got married. Bad mistake, but it’s all over. I wanted you to know, in case it makes a difference. I’m drunk. Do you think I should hang up?”

  In the ensuing pause you can hear the faint hum of the long-distance wire. “Don’t hang up,” Vicky says. “I can’t think of anything to say right now, but I’m here. I’m a little confused.”

  “I tried to block her out of my mind. But I think I owe it to her to remember.”

  “Wait. Who?”

  “My mother. Forget my wife. I’m talking about my mother. I was thinking today, after she found out she had cancer, she was talking to Michael and me… “

  “Michael?”

  “That’s my brother. She made us promise that if the pain became unbearable we’d help her, you know, end it all. We had this prescription for morphine so there was this option. But then it got really bad. I asked her and she said that when you were dying you had a responsibility to the living. I was amazed she said that, the way she felt. And I was just thinking that we have a responsibility to the dead- the living, I mean. Does this make any sense?”

  “Maybe. I can’t tell, really,” Vicky says.

  “Can I call tomorrow?”

  “Yes, tomorrow. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Your brain feels like it is trying to find a way out of your skull. And you are afraid of almost everything. “I’m fine.”

  “Get some sleep. Call me if you can’t.”

  The first light of the morning outlines the towers of the World Trade Center at the tip of the island. You turn in the other direction and start uptown. There are cobbles on the street where the asphalt has worn through. You think of the wooden shoes of the first Dutch settlers on these same stones. Before that, Algonquin braves stalking game along silent trails.

  You’re not sure exactly where you are going. You don’t feel you have the strength to walk
home. You walk faster. If the sunlight catches you on the streets, you will undergo some terrible chemical change.

  After a few minutes you notice the blood on your fingers. You hold your hand up to your face. There is blood on your shirt, too. You find a Kleenex in your jacket pocket and hold it to your nose. You advance with your head tilted back against your shoulders.

  By the time you reach Canal Street, you think that you will never make it home. You look for taxis. A bum is sleeping under the awning of a shuttered shop. As you pass he raises his head and says, “God bless you and forgive your sins.” You wait for the cadge but it doesn’t come. You wish he hadn’t said anything.

  As you turn, what is left of your olfactory equipment sends a message to your brain: fresh bread. Somewhere they are baking bread. You can smell it, even through the nose-bleed. You see bakery trucks loading in front of a building on the next block. You watch as bags of rolls are carried out onto the loading dock by a man with tattooed forearms. This man is already at work so that normal people can 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 haven’t eaten since… when? Friday night. As you approach, the smell of bread washes over you like a gentle rain. You inhale deeply, filling your lungs. Tears come to your eyes, and you feel such a rush of tenderness and pity that you stop beside a lamppost and hang on for support.

  The smell of bread recalls you to another morning. You arrived home from college after driving half the night; you just felt like coming home. When you walked in, the kitchen was steeped in this same aroma. Your mother asked what the occasion was, and you said a whim. You asked if she was baking. “Learning to draw inferences at college, are we,” you remember her asking. She said she had to find some way to keep herself busy now that her sons were taking off. You said that you hadn’t left, not really. You sat down at the kitchen table to talk, and the bread soon started to burn. She had made bread only two other times that you could recall. Both times it had burned. You remember being proud of your mother then for never having submitted to the tyranny of the kitchen, for having other things on her mind. She cut you two thick slices of bread anyway. They were charred on the outside but warm and moist inside.

  You approach the tattooed man on the loading dock. He stops working and watches you. There is something wrong with the way your legs are moving. You wonder if your nose is still bleeding.

  “Bread.” This is what you say to him, although you meant to say something more.

  “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.

  “Could I have some? A roll or something?”

  “Get outa here.”

  “I’ll trade you my sunglasses,” you say, You take off your shades and hand them up to him. “Ray-Bans. I lost the case.” He tries them on, shakes his head a few times and then takes them off. He folds the glasses and puts them in his shirt pocket.

  “You’re crazy,” he says. Then he looks back into the warehouse. He picks up a bag of hard rolls and throws it at your feet.

  You get down on your knees and tear open the bag. The smell of warm dough envelops 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.

  Jay McInerney

  As a prolific writer of numerous novels, Jay McInerney burst into the literary scene with his first book Bright Lights, Big City, in 1984. This would be the first of many books set in the backdrop of Manhattan, where McInerney worked—starting as a fact-checker for The New Yorker Magazine—throughout his luminous career.

  Bright Lights, Big City, which was loosely based on his own life starting out in this glamorous city, with its jet-setting club scene in the 80’s, was later made into a movie starring Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland and Phoebe Cates. McInerney wrote the screenplay for this movie, which, despite its star cast, did not receive the acclaim and attention of the book upon which it was based. Once McInerney was catapulted into the world of editors and contracts, he began writing a steady stream of novels about the city and its characters. His writing life was set in motion with Ransom, which came out in 1985, followed by Story of My Life, in 1988, and Brightness Falls, in 1992. As he dated models and lived the nightlife, he used the city and its people as fodder for his books, writing The Last of the Savages, in 1997, Model Behavior, in 1998 and How it Ended, a series of short stories, in 2001. He began writing about one of his favorite subjects, wine, with the book, Bacchus and Me—Adventures in the Wine Cellar, in 2002. His next book, The Good Life, got mixed reviews in 2006, and later that year he published his wine writings in A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine. He became the wine columnist for House and Garden Magazine, choosing to write as someone who was not a complete wine expert.

  “I wanted to write about wine in a funny way—with the point of view of someone who knows something about wine, but not everything about it,” he said in an interview in Salon Magazine by Dwight Garner written about twelve years ago, when he was 40.

  In Garner’s interview he said, “McInerney is sometimes thought of as a satirist, because he writes about the social scene that is a frequent subject of satire, the Manhattan Wasp haute bourgeoisie.”

  McInerney recently married for the fourth time, to publishing heiress Anne Randolph Hearst of Bridgehampton, in November of 2006. Hearst is well-known for hosting gala events at her Bridgehampton estate, where she held a fundraiser for the Riverkeeper organization, an environmental (clean water) group led by Robert Kennedy, Jr. At this event, held in the summer of 2005, Kennedy attended with his wife and gave an award to Lorraine Bracco for her involvement in the group.

  McInerney’s third wife was jewelry designer Helen Bronsford of Nashville, with whom he had twins (Maisie and John Barrett McInerney III) by a surrogate mother in 1995.

  His second marriage was to Merry Reymond, from 1983-91, and his first marriage was to Linda Rossiter, a half-Japanese fashion model, in 1979. For four years, he also lived with fashion model Marla Hanson.

  McInerney was born on January 13, 1955, in Hartford, CT, to a corporate Vice-President, and grew up in a privileged family. He lived almost half his childhood in Europe. He later attended Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where he graduated in 1976. He also studied writing with Raymond Carver in Syracuse.

  Although he has endured harsh criticism throughout his writing career, mostly from his New York critics who know him, McInerney has been quoted as saying he feels he is better received outside New York, where he feels he’s been “overexposed,” in both his social and writing life.

  But despite the harsh critics, he was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1998 for Oustanding Writing for his screenplay of the movie, Gia, starring Angelina Jolie. In 1999, he was also nominated for this same screenplay by the Writers’ Guild of America. McInerney has been called, “the 80’s version of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” to which he responded that he hoped he wouldn’t have the same luck as Fitzgerald, a heavy drinker who died at 44.

  McInerney has been quoted as saying, “There’s always been a personal element to my critical reception as a writer—people say I’m too much of a public figure—too successful. My relationship with the press is an odd hall of mirrors.”

  McInerney divides his time between Manhattan, where he meets with his Random House publisher, and the Hamptons, where he relaxes in between parties and social events. He is presently off to Europe. His books are available in local bookstores or at www.Amazon.com. For more information, check his website at www.jaymcinerney.com

  ***

 

 

 
(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share