How It Ended

by Jay McInerney

  1986

  Putting Daisy Down

  Life was good. It was one of those April mornings when the warmth of the sun on your skin seems miraculous after the deep freeze of winter and you can almost feel the hair on your arms turning golden, the vivid physicality heightened by the lingering trace of a hangover. Bryce was two over par and he'd just hit the green on thirteen with his six iron. The super-naturally verdant fairway was fringed with cheerful yellow forsythia, some of which concealed the ball Tom McGinty had just hooked with his five wood.

  Bryce was playing with the big boys—Tom, Bruce Pickwell and Jeff Weiss. That night, at the club dance, they would share a table with their wives, and after dinner Bryce would be officially welcomed as a member of the club, something he'd been working toward for the past two years.

  “What the hell?” Tom said, shading his eyes, looking back down the fairway at the cart barreling toward them.

  Bruce removed his finger from his nose and crossed his arms over his chest, girding for confrontation. “Looks like—”

  “My wife,” Bryce said as the cart bounced ever closer, the baked skin on his arms tingling with a sudden chill. Even from a distance there was something in her posture, and the speed she was traveling, that spelled trouble.

  “Carly,” Tom said. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  Ignoring the greeting, she jumped out of the cart and marched over to Bryce, holding a lavender envelope in one hand, the other clutching her swelling belly, just visible beneath her pink warm-up suit. Glaring at him, she held the envelope at arm's length, between thumb and forefinger, until he took it from her. Her stony visage told the story, even if he hadn't recognized the stationery and the handwriting, the ropy loops spelling out his wife's name and their home address.

  Without a word, she turned and drove away. The men watched silently until the cart finally disappeared behind the rise of the thirteenth tee, and then resumed their play, Bryce's partners respectfully somber, their fraternal compassion compounded in equal parts of selfish relief and empathetic dread. Their goodwill seemed only to increase as his game fell apart.

  “That's a bitch,” Jeff said, patting his back, when Bryce missed a three-footer for par on fourteen.

  Bryce drove to Julie's apartment on the Upper West Side directly from the course. He was fond of her, and might even have convinced himself he loved her at one point, but she'd just committed an unpardonable offense, and for the first time in months, underneath the anger swelling into rage as he raced down the Henry Hudson Parkway, he felt a welcome sense of moral clarity. His righteousness was only bolstered by the miraculous parking space a few spots down from the entrance to her building on Ninety-sixth Street. He couldn't believe she would actually write a letter to his wife. Was she out of her mind? he wondered as he held down the buzzer for 4F.

  Her voice over the intercom sounded tentative. “Who is it?”

  “It's me,” he said, his hand clutching the doorknob.

  “Come on up,” she said in what seemed to him a false singsongy tone, buzzing him in.

  Julie could see that her gambit had backfired as soon as she opened the door. He ignored Cocoa, her longhaired dachshund, who swirled affectionately around his ankles.

  “How dare you?” he said.

  She claimed that she'd done it as much for him as for herself, that she knew he wasn't happy with the status quo.

  “ I was perfectly happy with the status quo,” he said, no longer needing to maintain the fiction that he was trapped in his marriage and desperate to be with his mistress. He no longer had to pretend that only fear of his wife's unpredictable behavior and compassion for her precarious emotional state kept him from leaving her. Not that Carly couldn't be unpredictable and volatile, but he'd never really intended to leave her. He could see that clearly now. He was about to have a baby with her.

  “But you said—”

  “I said a lot of shit. I said what you wanted to hear.”

  It had been more than this, of course; but she had broken the rules, had violated the sanctity of his marriage, and now he wanted to hurt her.

  She appealed for compassion and forgiveness, but all her justifications and her tears failed to move him. Her mascara ran, collecting in the little wrinkles and crow's-feet around her eyes, lines that he'd never noticed before. Looking away from her, he was confronted with the evidence of his folly, framed pictures of the two of them—in front of the Rodin Museum in Paris, on the beach in Montauk and in this very apartment, standing amid the bronze Buddhas, ceramic dragons, hexagonal shards of quartz and amethyst. Incense was burning in a little bronze urn on the coffee table. Julie was a believer in meditation, pyramids and crystals, whereas Bryce was feeling very Catholic at this moment. With all the zeal of a newly reformed sinner, he rejected her pleas for forgiveness. Strangely, he felt most sorry for Cocoa, who couldn't possibly understand why his old friend was giving him the cold shoulder. He was genuinely moved by the dog's doleful expression.

  His confidence and his clarity ebbed as he approached his own driveway. If only Carly were the screaming and crying type, he might be able to imagine an eventual diminution of the crisis. But as it was, he had no idea what to expect.

  Daisy greeted him at the door, rubbing her head against his shin. He crouched down and rubbed her head, scratched behind her ears. Daisy thrummed with appreciation and followed him as he reconnoitered the first floor. Carly was sitting in the sunroom, looking out over the back lawn. The fact that she was neither reading nor knitting didn't seem like a good sign.

  He knelt down before her, took her hand in his, and laid his head on her rounded belly. “I don't know what to say—except that it's over. I'm so sorry.” As he waited for a response, his head on her taut tummy, he felt Daisy massaging herself on his calf.

  “This can't go on,” she said.

  “It's done,” he said.

  “She's got to go.”

  “I've taken care of it.”

  “I can't have this in the house.”

  “It was never in the—”

  “Not in my condition.”

  Confused now, he looked up at her, at the lips drawn so thin and tight across her face that it was hard to believe they'd ever kissed his, and then followed her gaze down to the floor, to the dead robin on the carpet.

  He could hardly contain his relief as he jumped to his feet, ready to deal with this discrete and tangible problem. He'd picked up dozens of dead birds in his long association with Daisy, whom he'd discovered as a kitten in the garbage room of his building on Ninth Street seven or eight years ago, when he was living in his first apartment in the city. It was the work of a moment to pick up the robin by its tail feathers, swing open the French door and fling the thing out into the yard.

  Turning back to his wife, he found her regarding him with a distaste bordering on horror. “You picked it up with your bare hands,” she said.

  “I can wash them.”

  “I can't believe you picked it up with your bare hands. Don't imagine for a minute you're going to touch me with those hands.”

  “I was just about to—”

  “I can't have this. I simply can't. I won't live with this.”

  “She's just being a cat.”

  “It's unsanitary. It's a health risk for the baby.”

  “After I wash my hands, I'll shampoo the rug.”

  “That won't help,” she sobbed, lifting her hands to her face. “It's not enough.”

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  “It's your cat,” she said. “You figure it out.” She lifted herself from the couch with that new, slightly labored motion he had noticed of late, an exaggerated series of pushes and lifts whereby she seemed to be anticipating a larger and more pregnant future, cradling her tummy to support it, although in this case the gesture seemed not only protective but also defensive, as if he constituted a possible threat to the fetus.

  The guys in his foursome didn't seem surprised by Carly's ab
sence from the club that night, although they eagerly corroborated the alibi.

  “You remember that first trimester, honey.”

  “Kate was puking like a freshman pledge.”

  “Don't remind me.”

  “Actually,” Bruce's wife said, “I was lucky that way.”

  “Still,” Bruce said, “it wasn't like you felt like going out every night and painting the town.”

  “Speaking of which,” Jeff said, “let's get another round here.”

  The windows of the master bedroom were dark when he pulled into the driveway. He congratulated himself on his stealth and silence when he stepped into the guest room, which is where he awoke the next morning, on top of the duvet, fully dressed. A baby bird was lying on his chest, Daisy sitting beside him on the bed, the proud huntress.

  “Oh shit,” he said. He'd almost forgotten this hazard of the suburban springtime—the baby bird menace. Even with arthritis, she could still catch the fledglings. In his muddled state, he couldn't quite separate out the different components of the guilt that was oppressing him—about the affair, about Daisy's murderous habits, about having overindulged the previous night. Had he come on to anyone at the club? No, not really; he was clean on that score.

  Bryce flushed the bird down the guest room's toilet, wondering if he hadn't closed the door the night before, or if Carly had opened it that morning. He showered in the guest bath and crept down the hall to their bedroom, where he fortified himself with four Advil and two Zantac, then dressed and girded himself for the inevitable confrontation.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper.

  “Good morning,” he said, sitting down across from her.

  She stood up from the table, cradling her belly, and busied herself at the sink.

  “You always try to sound bright and chipper when you're hungover. As if that will somehow fool me.”

  He didn't feel quite bright and chipper enough to think of a response to this. On the other hand, he was happy to keep the focus on the lesser sin of drinking. “Kate and Serena send their love,” he said.

  “That's ridiculous,” she said. “They don't even know me.”

  “You met them at the Winter Frolic,” he said.

  “The Winter Frolic.”

  “Well, anyway.” It was a little weird, how everything at the country club sounded like high school. A few years ago, when he still lived in the city, he would've sneered at the previous night's event. The term Winter Frolic would have been a source of mirth. Everything about it would have aroused his urban cynicism.

  “And I suppose last night was called the Spring Fling.”

  He was about to refute this charge before realizing he couldn't.

  “Rather appropriately for you,” she said.

  He went to the refrigerator in search of liquids.

  It hadn't been his idea to move out of the city. At least not entirely. He'd been happy enough in the one-bedroom on Columbus. But Carly began complaining about the friction of urban life. First it was the dry cleaner's losing her Marc Jacobs top. Then the guy in the wine store who kept hitting on her, which was totally plausible—she was a beautiful woman, after all. Plus the garbage trucks at three in the morning and the homeless guy who followed her in the park. After the planes had crashed into the towers, she'd had nightmares for months. Wasn't that the sequence of events that had led to their finding themselves in the suburbs? The idea had already been raised before that day, inextricably related to the decision to have children. They would have needed to find a bigger place in the city anyway, as she'd pointed out. No, it definitely hadn't been his idea. But he had wanted to alleviate the anxiety and dissatisfaction that seemed to have taken hold of her even before that terrible day in September.

  Somehow, three years before, they'd both believed that marriage would be the cure for a malaise they'd never named or spoken about, for the dark moods that descended upon her and the memories of childhood deprivations—most particularly her vanished father. Later, it seemed that graduate school would be just the thing. Moving to the suburbs was, as he saw it, the latest attempt to make her happy. If he hadn't discovered golf, he would have hated it out here, almost an hour from Grand Central. The pleasure he discovered in the game raised his tolerance for certain cultural clichés, although he maintained enough of his urban-hipster sensibility to forswear the kind of brown-and-white footwear that looked like saddle shoes, as well as certain shades of pink and green. And he was probably the only guy at the club with a Celtic cross tattooed on his left shoulder. And what would they think if they knew about Carly's tattoo? Even he had been a little shocked when she first proposed it.

  Much as he would have loved to escape to the green refuge of the course that morning, he knew he had to cancel his game. The problem then became how to get through the rest of the day without a confrontation.

  Carly went to the stove and returned with a plate, which she dropped on the place mat in front of him. “Your breakfast,” she said.

  On the plate were two raw eggs, two strips of raw bacon and two pieces of white bread.

  A chilly truce prevailed through the afternoon. He trimmed the boxwoods, something he'd been promising to do for two weeks, and later took her to the Barnes & Noble at the mall, where she picked up a book called Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy.

  That night, they sat in the den together and watched The Sopranos and then The Tudors, a ritual that suddenly seemed fraught with peril. Carly tended to take her movies and TV shows very personally, to generalize the behavior of individual characters. As a married man, Bryce didn't want to be represented by Tony Soprano and Henry VIII. When Tony had been sleeping with the Russian babe back in season three, Bryce somehow got blamed for Tony's behavior. “You guys are just slaves to your dicks,” she said. And, yes, okay, he'd been guilty as charged back then. Fortunately, Tony wasn't screwing anyone this week, although, astonishingly, he killed his nephew Christopher.

  “I can't believe he did that,” Bryce said. “I mean, how could he do that?”

  “He was a hopeless drug addict,” Carly said.

  “Well, yeah, but still.”

  “Not to mention a cold-blooded killer.”

  “I guess.”

  Bryce was comfortable dealing with the major crimes and mortal sins of others. He tried to remember whether adultery was a mortal sin. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife. It didn't seem like it should be right up there with murder. Carly didn't have much to say about Tony's latest offense, but she pitched a fit when Daisy jumped up on Bryce's lap. “Get her away from me!” Under normal circumstances, Bryce might've stuck up for his cat, but tonight he put her outside without protest.

  Shortly after Anne Boleyn professed to be insulted by Henry's offer to make her his one and only royal squeeze, Carly said she was going to the kitchen to get a snack. Bryce said he'd see her upstairs.

  He raced through his ablutions in the master bath and managed to slip between the sheets and pick up his book before she ascended the stairs. For a moment, as she paused in the bedroom doorway, he was certain she would challenge his presence there, but when he finally allowed himself to look up from his book, she was standing in front of the mirror, rubbing her belly and observing her reflected image, as if trying to verify and fathom the great mystery of her condition.

  Ten minutes later she climbed ponderously into the bed beside him. “I can't have Daisy dragging mice and birds all through the house in my condition,” she said.

  “She's a cat,” he said. “That's what cats do.”

  “I can't have it.”

  “Maybe we can keep her inside for the next few months.”

  “No,” she said. “She has to go.”

  “Go?”

  “I'm having a baby, in case you haven't noticed.”

  “You want me to give her away? She's been with me for ten years.”

  “She's had a good life. You said yourself she's getting old. Didn't the vet just tell you she had arthrit
is?”

  “You want me to put her down?” He could hardly believe it. But when he looked over at her, her face had a hard glaze of implacability, with which he was all too familiar.

  “I don't think this is too much to ask when I'm carrying your child.”

  “Maybe I could find a home for her.”

  “If you can't do this one thing for me, after what you've put me through …”

  Seeing the tears welling in her eyes, he realized she was serious and he understood that it would not be enough to find another home for Daisy. “Don't cry,” he said, sliding across the bed to take her in his arms. She tried to pull away, but eventually she buried her head in his shoulder, sobbing inconsolably.

  He could have tried to find a home for her—that was what haunted him later. But he was genuinely sorry for his betrayal and felt bound to honor Carly's wish, cruel and unnecessary though it seemed to him. This, apparently, was the price of his transgression.

  He postponed it a few days in the hopes that Carly might soften, but he could feel the tension whenever Daisy entered the room, and then again at bedtime. After he found a baby chipmunk in the hallway, he called and made an appointment for the following day.

  He gave his name to Susanna, the vet's receptionist, a freckled blonde, whose normally bouncy manner was appropriately subdued on this occasion; it was she who'd given Bryce the appointment after he'd explained its purpose.

  Despite his previous diagnosis of arthritis, the vet was somewhat reluctant. “We've been getting good results with glucosamine,” he said. “Unless you think she's been suffering.”

  “I really think it would be best,” Bryce said.

  Given the choice, he opted to stay with Daisy and hold her to the end. The vet shaved a patch of fur on her foreleg before injecting her. Bryce would never forget the way she looked at him as the vet inserted the needle into her vein. She hissed in protest and tried to squirm out of his grasp, as if she knew what was about to happen. It was over in seconds. Daisy relaxed in his arms as the light faded from her eyes. He felt her exhale and then she was suddenly heavier in his arms.