How It Ended

by Jay McInerney

  “Hey, babe, it's me.”

  “Liam. Oh my God. Where are you?”

  “At the office. Just out of a meeting. What's up?”

  “Thank God,” she said.

  “What's wrong?”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “Why would I be dead?”

  “Jesus, God, Liam, haven't you heard? Turn on the TV. Look out the window, for God's sake.”

  3.

  Liam arrived at their apartment on Waverly Place ten minutes later—less time than it would have taken him to walk from TriBeCa, but he didn't realize until later that the subway service was knocked out and that cabs had vanished from the downtown streets—so everyone later agreed—within minutes of the second plane hitting. In fact, he'd been a few blocks away at his girlfriend's apartment on St. Mark's Place. They met there every Tuesday morning, between nine and eleven, turning off the phones, doing it exactly twice, and there had been no reason to suppose that the world would be turned upside down on this particular Tuesday. After talking to Lora, he turned on the TV, shushing Sasha as she stepped out of the bathroom, trying to figure out what the hell was happening to his city. His horror was compounded with guilt as he realized how implausible was his claim of being at the office.

  “My God, I can't believe this,” Sasha said, throwing her arms around him as she slumped beside him on the couch. He squirmed free and stood up. He knew it was unfair, irrational even, but somehow he blamed her for what had happened and felt an overwhelming desire to be with his wife. Walking back across the Village, looking up warily at a looming apartment tower on Broadway, he struck on the perfect alibi.

  4.

  Until she actually saw and touched him, Lora couldn't quite overcome her earlier conviction that he'd perished in the disaster, and he seemed just as emotional as he hugged her in the foyer, nearly crushing her ribs in his emphatic embrace. When he finally let go, she saw the tears in his eyes.

  “I thought I'd never see you again.”

  “I was in a screening,” he said. “I had no idea.”

  “I thought I was going to raise our baby alone.”

  5.

  The days that followed were the most vivid of his life. In retrospect, though, they sometimes seemed reduced to a set of experiences that came to sound almost clichéd by virtue of their resemblance to those of their friends, repeated endlessly over numerous cocktails: the mind-numbing hours in front of the television; the sense of disbelief; the missing friends and acquaintances; the nightmares; the acrid electrical-fire smell in the air; the spontaneous weeping, the excessive drinking. And yet they both agreed—as did everyone else—that they'd never been so conscious of the lives of others, of their own turbulent stream of consciousness, of their own mortality. And they discovered that life was never quite so precious as it was in the proximity of death. From that first night they fucked as if their survival depended on it, and with a passion neither had felt in years.

  Liam was mortified at his own infidelity and brimming with the resolve to honor his marriage vows forever more. He'd felt the same resolve three weeks earlier when he learned Lora was pregnant, but somehow he hadn't managed to break it off with Sasha. He kept meaning to, but it seemed like something he had to do in person rather than over the phone or in an e-mail, and then she would greet him at her apartment door, wearing that aquamarine kimono, the mere sight of which aroused him even before she kissed him.

  It was a time of lofty resolutions, of vows and renunciations. He felt incredibly lucky to have escaped this recent peccadillo unscathed, with his marriage intact, although he sometimes wondered if Lora didn't harbor suspicions, and he felt the occasional twinge of guilt about Sasha, who had no one to comfort her in this moment of collective trauma.

  6.

  For her part, Lora was too relieved to have her husband back to inquire too deeply into his precise itinerary that day. She told herself that the clock had been reset on the morning of September 11 and that whatever happened before didn't really matter. But she couldn't help noticing that Liam seemed almost allergic to his cell phone, jumping whenever it rang over the next few days. He also seemed uncomfortable whenever the subject of people's whereabouts that morning arose, as it did constantly in the days and weeks that followed.

  They were inseparable those first few days, staying in or near the apartment, clinging to each other in the aftermath, until Saturday morning, when Liam said he was going to the gym.

  “Maybe I'll go with you,” Lora said.

  He shrugged. “If you'd like.”

  “No, you go ahead,” she said.

  She waited exactly sixty seconds and then followed him out the door and down the two flights of stairs to the double doors leading to the street, the second of which was just wafting shut. It was one of those days when the wind had shifted uptown, carrying the burned-plastic smell of smoke from Ground Zero. Her fellow pedestrians seemed skittish, the brusque, purposeful tunnel vision of the natives having been replaced by a new caution that made everyone seem like tourists. Lora didn't really have a plan, but the gym was only a few blocks away, and if she lost him on the street, she could just turn up, and if she found him there, she'd say she'd changed her mind. She watched him walking west and followed, catching sight of him at the end of the block as he turned left on Sixth—the opposite direction from the gym. She ran up Waverly and saw Liam at the next corner, waiting for the light.

  He crossed the avenue, turned right and went up the steps of St. Joseph's Church, disappearing inside through the big double oak doors. She could hardly believe it. She approached stealthily and stood watching for a few minutes on the sidewalk across the street. She felt almost giddy with relief when she realized this was his secret destination. But her relief was almost immediately replaced by a sense of irritation at how cowardly it was to have lied about where he was going.

  Liam had been raised as a Catholic on Long Island, and they were married in the church where he'd received his First Communion. Their wedding day was the last time she agreed to accompany him to church. The daughter of a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother, Lora had enjoyed a thoroughly secular childhood. A staunch agnostic, she used to tease him about his residual Catholicism, which she saw as a tribal habit, like his fondness for corned beef and cabbage, rather than an active belief system. She supposed it made sense that he would seek out the faith of his childhood now, in this moment of extremis. Part of her envied him this reserve source of consolation, and part of her thought he was weak for surrendering, when the going got tough, to the superstitions of his ancestors. What the hell was he doing in there anyway? It was probably a reflex, like the desire for comfort food and retro music that had swept across the city. She waited for another five minutes and then returned to the apartment, where she flipped restlessly from one news channel to another, watching the towers fall over and over again as she waited for Liam to come home.

  7.

  Liam knelt with his head in his hands, finding the familiar darkness of the confessional, redolent of furniture polish and stale perspiration, unexpectedly comforting. When he heard the wood panel slide open, he looked up to see the silhouette of the priest behind the screen.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been, well, more than a year since my last confession.”

  “How much longer, would you say?”

  “It's been … I think it's about four years.”

  “Go ahead, my son.”

  “I'm not sure where to begin.”

  8.

  When he returned home, Liam seemed like a different man from the twitchy neurotic who'd left the apartment a half hour before. For the rest of the day he exhibited a maddening serenity. Lora wanted to challenge him, to crash his spiritual buzz, if that's what it was, but it seemed peevish to chide him for being in a good mood, and she couldn't think of how to engage him in an intellectual debate without acknowledging that she'd followed him. She took another Xanax, her third of the day.

  “I'm
thinking about going to Mass tomorrow,” he said, while they waited for the check at their local bistro. “I don't know, somehow, with everything that's happened, I think it would be, you know, comforting. Of course you're welcome to join me.”

  “I think it's sweet,” she said, pinching his cheek, “and totally understandable that you can find comfort in your old rituals, but I might feel a little hypocritical suddenly going to church just because I'm feeling emotionally needy. But that's just me. You do what you need to, honey.”

  That night, for the first time since Tuesday, they failed to have sex. Lora wasn't really in the mood, and was almost looking forward to letting him know she wasn't. But within moments of turning off the television set, she heard him snoring from the other pillow. Lora lay awake in the dark, feeling abandoned, thinking about the chaos outside, and the life growing within her. Though she wished she had some kind of faith, after what had happened she was hard-pressed to imagine a moral order in the universe.

  9.

  The churches were packed that Sunday. Liam arrived fifteen minutes early for the ten o'clock Mass and even so he had to stand in the back. He felt the force of Lora's implicit admonishment, along with a kind of sociological embarrassment. Ever since he'd made his way to Stanford, he'd done all he could to distance himself from his heritage and to regard religion as an academic subject. Seeing himself now through the eyes of his friends, he felt ashamed, as if he were standing naked in a room of fully clothed adults, but at the same time he felt the exhilaration of surrender, as if he were a naked infant lying in the sun, absolved of the responsibilities of higher consciousness. For the first time since Tuesday, he felt at home and at peace in his city. He was unexpectedly moved when it came time to exchange the peace of the Lord—a folksy ritual inspired by the Second Vatican Council—which had always seemed artificial to him, the congregants stiffly shaking hands and wishing one another the peace of the Lord, but that day, he found himself clasping the hands of neighbors with special vigor and warmth, looking into their glistening eyes as he uttered, “The peace of the Lord be with you,” the voices of his neighbors swelling and filling the church around him. And when the priest intoned, “Lift up your hearts,” he seemed to feel his own heart swell and rise as he responded, “We have lifted them up to the Lord.” And when, finally, he took the host on his tongue, letting it dissolve on the roof of his mouth, he imagined his inner being infused with light, like a cave suddenly illuminated by a torch.

  After Mass he didn't feel he could return directly to the apartment. It would be like smoking a cigarette after running a marathon. He knew he couldn't face Lora in this state, any more than he'd been able to face Jenny, his last girlfriend, the teetotaler, after doing a few lines of coke. Instead, he tested this new lightness of spirit as he walked down to Canal Street, to the edge of the blue police barricades sealing off the zone of destruction from the rest of the city, and stood with his fellow citizens watching the plume of smoke that rose like a white pillar into the blue sky and tilted off to the east before diffusing into the cumulus over Brooklyn. From this distance it was an incongruously beautiful sight.

  10.

  That night, they walked over to Norman's loft in Chelsea, where everyone was telling their stories. “I'm walking down Greenwich Street and suddenly this plane is practically on top of me,” their host said, passing a joint to Jason, “this huge jet flying just above the tops of the buildings.”

  Jason took a hit. “Do you guys remember Carlos, the guy who used to cook for our parties?”

  “The cute one with the scar above his eye?”

  Jason nodded. “Missing. He was a line chef at Windows on the World.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Speaking of Jesus,” Lora said, “Liam has rediscovered his faith.”

  “What's this?”

  “He went to Mass this week.” Lora walked over and ruffled his hair as if he were a child who'd just done something cute. “Didn't you, my love? I think it's sweet.”

  “That's great,” Jason said.

  “Yeah, really,” Norman said. “I wish I had one to rediscover.”

  “Confession,” Jason said. “That's what I've always envied about Catholicism. The idea that you can go into a little booth and cleanse your soul.”

  “I don't think I could go and tell some stranger my sins.”

  “Oh come on. We Jews have that, too. It's called psychoanalysis.”

  “But it doesn't help. I've talked to my shrink twice this week. What can he tell me? That I have every right to feel bad? That I have survivor's guilt? That I should refill my Paxil?”

  Norman looked at Liam. “Did it help?”

  “I suppose so,” Liam said. He didn't feel he could go into it with this group. It would be like discussing sex with his parents.

  Lora took his cheek in her fingers, putting her face close to his and smiling sweetly, or so it appeared, though he'd come to suspect the sincerity of this particular gesture. “We love you, honey,” she said.

  As soon as he could, he retreated to a neutral distance; at that moment his phone rang and he answered it, happy for the interruption.

  “Liam, it's me,” Sasha said. “Don't hang up. I'm so miserable. I need to see you.”

  He shouldn't have looked to see if Lora was watching him, because she was. “I'm sorry, but you've got the wrong number,” he said, feeling the heat in his cheeks. He turned off the ringer before slipping the phone back in his pocket.

  “The phones are still completely screwed up,” Jason said.

  11.

  “So you've become a believer?” she asked, smiling brightly. It was the second Sunday of the new era and he'd just asked her if she wanted to join him at Mass. He shrugged. “I just … at this particular moment in time, I'm feeling a sense of, I don't know, spiritual yearning. Is that so surprising, really?”

  “If that's what you need, then I think you should by all means go to Mass.”

  “Look, I know you feel differently, but I don't want to argue about this.”

  “Who's arguing?” She reached over and stroked his cheek, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger. “I love you.”

  “Maybe I'm weak, maybe I'm being hypocritical, but just indulge me in this, okay? If you don't want to go, I'll understand.”

  Lora assumed Liam's recrudescence of faith would fade along with the initial shock of that terrifying day. She was kind of assuming the same thing about her own Xanax consumption; she'd cut back again once things returned to normal, but right now it seemed impossible to get through the day without forty or fifty milligrams.

  After Liam left, she turned on the TV again, another escalating addiction that would surely subside in the weeks to come. She was watching the Taliban spokesman, defiant in his black beard and black robes, when she heard Liam's phone vibrating on the coffee table. She noticed that he'd turned off the ringer days ago, but now it was buzzing like a big flat beetle on the glass. She picked it up. “Hello?”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Did he tell you I'm pregnant?” Lora said, then snapped the phone shut and went to the bathroom and took two more Xanax.

  For some reason, she remembered the conversation at Norman's loft. She'd almost forgotten about the whole confession thing, but suddenly she wondered if that had been the point of Liam's new faith: to clear his soul of mortal sin before the next plane hit.

  12.

  Liam's office was inside the restricted zone south of Canal, and for the first week or so he didn't even think about going to work, but then a friend invited him to use his space in Chelsea. He went back to work the second Monday, not that he foresaw a big demand anytime soon for the kind of edgy independent films he produced. When he got home that night, he could tell that something was wrong. His first thought, on seeing her stony expression, was that somehow she'd learned about Sasha.

  “Any thoughts about dinner?” he asked.

  “I'm not hungry.”

  “Shall I cook somet
hing?”

  “I told you: I'm not hungry.”

  “I brought some DVDs from the office. Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Riding in Cars with Boys.”

  “I don't think so,” she said. Tears were pooling in her eyes, though she looked more angry than sad.

  “What's wrong?”

  “The baby's gone,” she said.

  “Gone?”

  The tears were coursing down her cheeks, but her manner was defiant. When he tried to embrace her, she pushed him away and said, “I ended it.”

  13.

  Eventually, in his mind, it seemed, the abortion became subsumed into the narrative of the collective trauma. Liam went out and got drunk that night, but in the succeeding days he seemed unwilling to confront her about her motives, as if he was afraid their marriage couldn't survive the revelation of certain facts. At some point, after telling her that he believed in the sanctity of life from the moment of conception, he made the decision to forgive her, just as she, in turn, forgave him, though neither of them ever acknowledged his transgression. But he had presumably confessed his sin, and she sometimes wondered how he squared his own faith with her action, and her own unshriven state. Apparently, in his mind, she had committed murder. But divorce, too, was a mortal sin. As much as she despised his faith, she kind of liked the idea that Catholicism protected her matrimonial monopoly.

  Most of the noble resolutions of that period gradually faded away, but Liam continued to attend Mass, without making a big deal of it. The fact that he stopped talking about it had convinced her of his seriousness. For her part, she tried not to give him a hard time.