How It Ended

by Jay McInerney

  Brian had warned us, to some extent. On the one hand, he assured us, his vision hadn't been compromised. On the other hand, accommodations had been made, nuances flattened, whispers amplified, subtexts excavated with a backhoe and laid bare. In the play there was a rumor of infatuation.

  None of us, Foster excepted, had been invited to the premiere in L.A., or rather, we'd all received a phone call from Brian, who had mentioned in passing “a big industry ratfuck” and said, “I'm not even sure I'm going myself.”

  And none of us knew quite what to say after we'd seen it. Brian wrote Dad a letter, assuring him that the alleged affair was strictly a Hollywood plot device and had nothing to do with reality. Dad called Foster in New York and was repeatedly reassured. Mike called Brian, threatening to kick his ass, and while the conversation was hardly conclusive, Brian swore that the affair was just a sensationalistic fiction, and it seemed as if maybe we had all had our say by the time Thanksgiving had come around. We were hoping against hope that the issue would just go away; in an unprecedented move, we even decided to water down the vodka just to keep Dad from getting too maudlin.

  And for the first time since any of us could remember, it looked as if we might pass a relatively peaceful Thanksgiving, having made it all the way to the pumpkin pie without major fireworks. But despite the watered vodka, we could see Dad's eyes glazing over with melancholy reminiscence.

  “I must have let her down somehow,” he said during a lull in the discussion of the Patriots’ season.

  All of us were smart enough to pretend we hadn't heard this remark, but Aidan's fiancée was still new to the family.

  “Let whom down, Mr. C?”

  “Carolyn. I must've let her down. She must have needed something I couldn't give her.”

  “But why would you think that?” Jennifer asked.

  “Oh, for Christ's sake,” Mike said, throwing his napkin down on the table. “Look at what you've done, Brian. Now he actually believes it.”

  “Dad,” Brian said, “I told you: It never happened. It's fiction.”

  “It's slander,” Mike said. “I still can't understand why the hell you'd drag our mother's name into the gutter like that.”

  “It's not our mother. It's not her name. It's a character in a movie.”

  “A character based on our mother.”

  “I just must have failed her,” Dad said, oblivious to the conversation around him.

  “Dad, listen to me. It never happened. I'm sorry. It's my fault. I shouldn't have written what I wrote. It was the director's idea, a cheap plot device. It isn't true.”

  “I always thought it was harmless,” Dad said. “They used to talk at parties, and I knew they had things in common. Your mother had so many interests, art and theater, and I couldn't really talk to her about those things. I knew she and Tom talked. But I thought that's all it was.”

  “That is all it was,” Brian said. “At least so far as I know.”

  “I know she told you things,” he said to Brian. “Things she couldn't tell me.”

  “Not that, Dad. She never told me anything like that.”

  “After my operation,” he said, “I was afraid. I was afraid of physical, you know, exertion.”

  “Dad, that's enough.”

  “Are you happy with yourself?” Mike asked as the tears rolled down our father's cheeks.

  “Well, who's for a smoke outside?” Foster said, rising from the table. Although Dad was a lifelong smoker, our mother had, toward the end of her life, insisted that all smoking be done outdoors, a rule that Dad himself continued to observe and enforce after she was gone.

  A half hour after we put Dad to bed, Mike tackled Brian and got him in a headlock, choking him and rubbing his face in the snow. “Tell the truth, goddamn it. What did she tell you? Is it true?”

  “I told you: It's not true. She never told me anything.”

  But nothing could ever quite dispel the doubt for us. Dad might have been forgiven for lying low, but he was determined to show himself on the local holiday party circuit. A week before Christmas, after three cocktail parties, he crashed his Mustang into an elm tree half a mile from the house.

  Mike, who was working in Schenectady, was the first to arrive at the hospital. Dad was in intensive care. Aidan drove over from Amherst, arriving shortly before midnight. Brian and Foster arrived from New York just as the sun was rising and Dad was declared stable. We all spent the day at the hospital and that night traded shifts in the waiting room. Dad looked gruesome when we finally got to see him, his face bruised and puffy and green where it wasn't bandaged, his leg in traction. He was pretty doped up. “Don't tell your mother,” he said when he saw us. “I don't want her to worry.”

  The doctor, who'd tended our mother in her final days, said, “It's the Demerol.”

  “We could all use some of that,” Foster said.

  We moved between the hospital and the house for the next ten days, keeping ourselves busy with Christmas preparations. We found a perfectly shaped blue spruce tree in the woods at the edge of the lake and we retrieved the ornaments from the attic in the old boxes from England's department store, closed years before, with Mom's block letters fading on the cardboard: CHRISTMAS LIGHTS, CHRISTMAS ANGELS, CHRISTMAS BULBS. We avoided talking about what had happened or why, concentrating instead on the practical details.

  The lake had frozen early that year. After lunch on Christmas Eve, we gathered up our gear, called Ricky and Ted Quinlan next door, and trudged down for the annual hockey game. It was Foster, Ted and Aidan against Brian, Ricky and Mike. Brian's team scored two quick goals. Aidan, who had the fiercest competitive streak of any of us, started to get physical. First he hooked Brian's skate and tripped him; then he body-checked him into the rocks of the causeway. Brian returned the favor the next time he came down the ice with the puck, knocking Aidan off into the bulrushes. He came out swinging, and caught Brian in the helmet with his stick. Then he threw him down and knelt on top of him, ripping off his helmet and punching his face. By the time we pulled him off, there was blood everywhere and one of Brian's teeth was protruding through his lip.

  “You bastard,” Aidan sobbed. “You selfish bastard.”

  Brian turned away and limped up the hill, leaving a trail of blood on the ice.

  When we got back up to the house, Brian was gone.

  Dad came home on New Year's Day. Aidan took winter term off from school to be with him, and Mike came over from Schenectady on the weekends. Brian called from New York to check in. Neither the fight on the ice nor his sudden departure was ever discussed again. From time to time, in his cups, Dad would ask Brian about our mother, and he would always insist that both the affair and the confession were completely fictional. Dad once confronted Tom Fleishman at the country club and he, too, denied it. But Dad could never put the question out of his mind, any more than he could walk without a cane.

  Mike and Jennifer had three boys, and he became the youngest vice president ever at GE. Aidan spent a year with the U.S. ski team before marrying Alana and going back to Hotchkiss to teach. Foster, one of the most respected directors in New York, recently married Cassie Haynes, the actress who first appeared at our house as Brian's date. We go down to see his plays from time to time.

  Brian moved to Los Angeles a few weeks after Aidan busted his lip. He wrote a TV pilot based on his second play, and became a producer when Showtime developed the series. We can't help feeling relieved that he's not writing about the family, and Dad watches the show every week. Brian is very well paid for his efforts and has been dating a series of extremely pretty actresses. But it also feels somehow like a cheat, a big fucking letdown. After all these years of having to put up with the idea of Brian as a great genius, of knowing that our mother believed in his special destiny, we feel like the least he could do would be to justify her favor and her hopes. Nothing short of greatness could justify the doubt he cast on her memory. Foster believes that he's doing penance and that he'll go back to his real wor
k someday.

  In the meantime, we haven't all been together at Thanksgiving since Dad's accident. Now, when the leaves turn red and yellow and the grass turns white with morning frost, we feel the loss all over again. It's like we were a goddess cult that gathered once a year and now our faith has wavered. It's not that we couldn't forgive her anything. But our simple certainties have been shaken. Although we will always be Catholics, we long ago gave up on the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We were a coven of Mariolatry, devoted to the Virgin. Brian believed in art, but lately he seems to have lost the faith. We find it hard to believe in anything we can't see or explain according to the immutable laws imbued in science class. We always believed in you, Mother, more than anything, but we never for a moment thought you were human.

  2007

  Third Party

  Difficult to describe precisely, the taste of that eighth or ninth cigarette of the day, a mix of ozone, blond tobacco and early-evening angst on the tongue. But he recognized it every time. It was the taste of lost love.

  Alex started smoking again whenever he lost a woman. When he fell in love again, he would quit. And when love died, he'd light up again. Partly it was a physical reaction to stress; partly metaphorical—the substitution of one addiction for another. And no small part of this reflex was mythological—indulging a romantic image of himself as a lone figure standing on a bridge in a foreign city, cigarette cupped in his hand, his leather jacket open to the elements.

  He imagined the passersby speculating about his private sorrow as he stood on the Pont des Arts, mysterious, wet and unapproachable. His sense of loss seemed more real when he imagined himself through the eyes of strangers—the pedestrians with their evening baguettes and their Michelin guides and their umbrellas, hunched against the March precipitation, an alloy of drizzle and mist.

  When it all ended with Lydia, he'd decided to go to Paris, not only a good place to smoke but also an appropriate backdrop. His grief was more poignant and picturesque there. Bad enough that Lydia had left him; what made it worse was that it was his own fault; he suffered both the ache of the victim and the guilt of the villain. His appetite had not suffered, however. His stomach was complaining like a terrier demanding its evening walk, blissfully unaware that the household was in mourning. Ennobling as it might seem to suffer in Paris, only a fool would starve himself there.

  Standing in the middle of the bridge, he tried to decide which way to go. Having dined the previous night in a bistro that had looked grim and authentic enough for his purposes but had proved to be full of voluble Americans and Germans attired as if for the gym or the tropics, he decided to head for the Hôtel Costes, where, at the very least, the Americans would be jaded and dressed in shades of gray and black.

  The bar was full and, of course, no tables were available when he arrived. The hostess, a pretty Asian sylph with a West London accent, sized him up skeptically. Hers was not the traditional Parisian hauteur, the sneer of the maître d'hôtel at a three-star restaurant; she was, rather, the temple guardian of an international tribe that included rock stars, fashion models, designers, actors and directors—as well as those who photographed, wrote about and slept with them. As the art director of a boutique ad agency, Alex lived on the fringes of this world. In New York, he knew many of the doormen and maître d's, but here the best he could hope was that he looked the part. The hostess seemed to be puzzling over his claims to membership, her expression slightly hopeful, as if she was on the verge of giving him the benefit of the doubt. Suddenly her narrow squint morphed into a smile of recognition. “I'm sorry. I didn't recognize you,” she said. “How are you?” Alex had been there only twice, on a visit a few years before, so it seemed unlikely he would've been remembered. On the other hand, he was a generous tipper and, he reasoned, not a bad-looking guy.

  She led him to a small but highly visible table set for four. He'd told her he was expecting someone, in the hopes of increasing his chances of seating. “I'll send a waiter right over,” she said. “Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.” So benevolent was her smile that he tried to think of some small request to gratify her.

  Still feeling expansive when the waiter arrived, he ordered a bottle of Champagne and scanned the room. While he recognized a couple of the patrons—a burly American novelist of the Montana school, the skinny lead singer of a Britpop band—he didn't see anyone he knew in the old-fashioned sense. Feeling awkward in his solitude, he studied the menu and wondered why he'd never brought Lydia to Paris. He regretted it now, for her sake as well as his own; the pleasures of travel were less real to him when they couldn't be verified by a witness. But he'd taken her for granted—that was part of the problem. Why did that always happen?

  When he looked up, a young couple were standing at the edge of the room, searching the crowd. The woman was striking—a tall beauty of indeterminate race. They seemed disoriented, as if the brilliant party to which they'd been summoned had migrated elsewhere. The woman met his gaze—and smiled. Alex smiled back. She tugged on her companion's sleeve and nodded toward Alex's table.

  Suddenly they were approaching.

  “Do you mind if we join you for a moment?” the woman said. “We can't find our friends.” She didn't wait for the answer, taking the seat next to Alex, exposing, in the process, a length of unstockinged taupe-colored thigh.

  “Frédéric,” the man said, extending his hand, seeming more self-conscious than his companion. “And this is Tasha.”

  “Please, sit,” Alex said. Some instinct prevented him from giving his own name.

  “What are you doing in Paris?” Tasha asked.

  “Just, you know, getting away.”

  The waiter arrived with the Champagne, and Alex requested two more glasses.

  “I think we have some friends in common,” Tasha said. “Ethan and Olivier.”

  Alex nodded noncommittally.

  “I love New York,” Frédéric said.

  “It's not what it used to be,” Tasha countered.

  “I know what you mean.” Alex wanted to see where this was going.

  “Still,” Frédéric said, “it's better than Paris.”

  “Well,” Alex said, “yes and no.”

  “Barcelona,” Frédéric said, “is the only hip city in Europe.”

  “And Berlin,” said Tasha.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Do you know Paris well?” Tasha asked.

  “Not really.”

  “We should show you.”

  “It's shit,” Frédéric said.

  “There are some new places,” she said, “that aren't too boring.”

  “Where are you from?” Alex asked the girl, trying to parse her exotic looks.

  “I live in Paris,” she said.

  “When she's not in New York.”

  They drank the bottle of Champagne and ordered another. Alex was happy for the company. Moreover, he couldn't help liking himself as whomever they imagined him to be; that they'd mistaken him for someone else was tremendously liberating. And he was fascinated by Tasha, who was definitely flirting with him. More than once she grabbed his knee for emphasis, and at several points she scratched her left breast. An absent-minded gesture, or deliberately provocative? He tried to determine if her attachment to Frédéric was romantic, but the signs pointed in both directions. The Frenchman watched her closely, yet he didn't seem to resent her flirting. Then she happened to say, “Frédéric and I used to go out,” and the more Alex looked at her, the more enthralled he became. She was a perfect cocktail of racial features, familiar enough to answer an acculturated ideal and exotic enough to startle.

  “You Americans are so puritanical,” she said. “All this fuss about your president getting a blow job.”

  “It has nothing to do with sex,” Alex replied, conscious of a flush rising on his cheeks. “It's a right-wing coup.” Though he'd wanted to sound cool and jaded, somehow it came out defensive.

  “Everything has to do with sex,” sh
e said, staring into his eyes.

  Thus provoked, the Veuve Clicquot tingling like a brilliant isotope in his veins, he ran his hand up the inside of her thigh, stopping only at the border of her tight short skirt. Holding his gaze, she opened her mouth with her tongue and moistened her lips.

  “This is shit,” said Frédéric.

  Although Alex was certain the other man couldn't see his hand, the subject of Frédéric's exclamation was worrisomely vague.

  “You think everything is shit.”

  “That's because it is.”

  “You're an expert on shit.”

  “There's no more art. Only shit.”

  “Now that that's settled,” said Tasha.

  A debate about dinner: Frédéric wanted to go to Buddha-Bar; Tasha wanted to stay. They compromised, ordering caviar and another bottle of Champagne. When the check arrived, Alex remembered at the last moment not to throw down his credit card. He decided, as a first step toward elucidating the mystery of his new identity, that he was the kind of guy who paid cash. While he counted out the bills, Frédéric gazed studiously into the distance with the air of a man practiced in the art of ignoring checks. Alex had a brief, irritated intuition that he was being used. Maybe this was a routine with them, pretending to recognize a stranger with a good table. But before he could develop this notion, Tasha had taken his arm and was leading him out into the night. The pressure of her arm, the scent of her skin—both were invigorating. He decided to see where this might take him. It wasn't as if he had anything else to do.