How It Ended

by Jay McInerney

  “I really appreciate it,” I say.

  “Call me sometime.” He closes the door, climbs over the gate and walks off down the road.

  Driving back to the house, I feel kind of bad for Frank. I mean, he doesn't get the story and he doesn't get laid. He turned out to be a pretty decent guy. And I can't help wondering how far Tom would go to keep us out of the papers. Would he still say he wants me more than he wants to be president? Would he screw somebody to protect our secret? Like, for instance, his wife?

  When he calls an hour later the wine's wearing off and the sun is setting and I am sinking into a swamp of doubt.

  “What happened?” he says. “Did you get rid of him?”

  “Sort of,” I say.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He's gone for the moment.”

  “What did he ask you? Did my name come up? Please tell me you didn't say anything.”

  “I told him you fucked like a stallion.”

  “Jesus, Alison.”

  “Of course I didn't tell him anything.”

  “Thank God.”

  His tone is really pissing me off.

  “Listen,” he says, “I'll call back in five minutes.”

  But instead it's Rob who calls back and asks me what happened with Frank. “I handled it,” I say, and when he insists on details I tell him I'll give those to Tom, then hang up.

  When Tom finally calls I've had almost an hour to brood.

  “Sorry,” he says. “We got a call from Fox and I had to run down to the affiliate for a live feed. So what happened with the blogger? Please tell me we don't have a problem here.”

  If he'd just asked about me, or sounded concerned and sympathetic, the conversation might have gone in a whole different direction. “I don't know,” I say. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “He wants to come back for dinner.”

  “What the hell? I hope you told him to go fuck himself.”

  “I could have, but that would've pretty much guaranteed a highly incriminating post on his blog tomorrow.”

  “What the hell does he want?”

  “I could be wrong, but I think he wants your girlfriend.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I'm saying I think he wants me more than he wants the story.” When he doesn't respond, I go, “Tom?”

  “Did he say that?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What did he say exactly?”

  “Well, I can't recount the whole goddamn conversation verbatim. But he made it pretty clear he was interested. And he basically kind of indicated that if I wasn't interested in him then he'd take that to mean I was involved with somebody else.”

  “What do you mean, he indicated?”

  “I'm summarizing like ten minutes of back and forth. I'm interpreting.”

  “You told him you were involved with somebody else, right? We agreed that Rob's our cover story.”

  “He knows Rob's not straight. I mean, come on, Tom.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to get rid of him.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Does he have anything solid?”

  “He claims he has a source for us getting caught in the shower in Manchester.”

  “Then why doesn't he just go with it?”

  “He may.”

  “You really think he likes you enough to kill the story?”

  “It's possible. He wants to come over here and cook dinner for me tonight. What do you want me to do?”

  “I don't know, I have to think about this. Let me talk to Rob.”

  “You're going to talk to Rob about this,” I say, incredulous. “I don't want to know what Rob thinks, Tom. I don't care what Rob thinks. I want to know what you think. I want to know what you want me to do.”

  “Shit, Rob's at the door and I'm late for the VFW.”

  “What do you want me to do about Mr. Below the Beltway?”

  “I don't know. You're going to have to handle this one, honey.”

  “I don't know what that means.”

  “It just means you should do whatever you think is best.”

  “You mean whatever I have to do.”

  “I have tremendous faith in you, darlin'. I love you. I know I can count on you.”

  Up until that moment, I'm still hoping. But the way he says he knows he can count on me—that tone of voice, that public speaking inflection he uses in his speeches—it broke my heart. Even the way he said “darlin'” was stage southern. It wasn't an endearment so much as an imitation of an endearment.

  “Alison, honey, I gotta get going. I'll call you later.”

  He was walking out the door. I couldn't help trying to picture that room, even though it would look pretty much like all the other hotel rooms along the campaign trail, like one of the many rooms I snuck into in Fran-conia or Nashua, in Cedar Falls or Gastonia—those rooms that conveniently seemed to have no personality and no history, with a vinyl-covered ice bucket flanked by two cellophane-wrapped plastic glasses—without ever really wondering too much about all the people who had been there before us, about what had happened in these rooms. Maybe every room deserves its own bronze plaque, if we only knew. I would never see that room at the Hampton Inn in Dubuque, but I couldn't help wondering if he would remember it, out of all the hundreds of hotel rooms that year, as the place where he traded his soulmate for something he loved more.

  2008

  The March

  Corrine had agreed to meet Washington and Veronica at the diner on Fifty-second Street, a place they'd come for hamburgers on Saturday or brunch on Sunday when they were living in the neighborhood back in the eighties. It had been more than a decade since she'd set foot there, and the glazed apple pies and coconut cakes under their plastic domes seemed like museum displays from the distant era of her lost youth. But now it was jammed with cops—she hadn't seen this many uniforms since her days at the soup kitchen downtown, feeding cops and firefighters and san men and the steelworkers who had come together in the smoking ruins. She'd gotten to know several cops then, but the cohort here today seemed less benign, their faces tight, closed and bolted against fraternization. That moment of solidarity, of strangers comforting one another in the streets, of stockbrokers hugging firemen and waving to cops, had already faded into history. The citizens of the metropolis were changed, though less tangibly than they might have imagined or hoped back in the time of anthrax and missing-person posters. They had, most of them, been given a glimpse of their best selves, and told themselves they wouldn't forget, or go back to the old selfish, closed-in ways. But then they'd gone back to work and the rubble had been carted away and the stock market had recovered. You woke up one morning not thinking about that terrible day, not remembering it had happened until perhaps seeing the tattered remains of an old poster on your way to lunch. And it felt good not to think about it all the damn time.

  She stepped outside to wait. Already, at ten-thirty, the street was jammed with people bundled against the cold and carrying signs. ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. A little kid holding one that said WAR IS TERROR and his sister in a red snowsuit with her own sign: DRAFT THE BUSH TWINS. Russell had stayed home with the kids, who were working on a play for her birthday. While he shared Corrine's feelings about the imminent war, Russell was not a joiner. “I don't march,” he'd said earlier that morning, showing the same kind of contrarian pride he sometimes brought to his traditional refrain of “I don't dance.”

  Looking south down the sidewalk for Washington and Veronica, she felt her chest tighten as she picked out a familiar figure—the loose, loping stride beneath the camel polo coat, the flopping sandy forelock, a garment bag hanging on his shoulder like a vestigial wing. She waited, paralyzed at his approach, and watched the changes ring on his unguarded visage as he recognized her, the rapid modulation from shock to wistful chagrin that preceded his public Isn't
-this-a-pleasant-surprise mien.

  “I might've known you'd be here,” he said as he kissed her cheek.

  “Actually, I was just thinking about you,” she said, a statement that to her ears sounded false in its implication of surprising coincidence; it would have been true on almost any given day, despite the fact that they hadn't seen each other in more than a year—not since that snowy night in the plaza outside the New York State Theater when they'd both been on their way to see The Nutcracker with their respective families. By now he had occupied more time in her thoughts than he had in the flesh. They'd exchanged e-mails and he had called from Tennessee and left a message five months ago, on September 11.

  “I mean, I was thinking about those days downtown, at the soup kitchen. This whole thing …” She waved her arm to indicate the milling crowd with their signs. “For me, it all kind of loops back to that time. The demonstration—the war.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “At least that's the question, isn't it? They'd have us believe that what happened back then justifies their war.” He sighed. “I didn't know this was happening, actually. The march, I mean. I was just on my way to the airport and I kind of waded into this thing. I was staying up the street at a friend's place.” He pointed behind him, as if to lend credence to the claim. “We sold the apartment as part of the separation agreement.”

  She tried not to react to this last phrase, the confirmation that he'd parted from his wife.

  “You're heading back to Tennessee?”

  He nodded. “Ashley's really settled in—she's going to a girls’ school in Nashville and seems to love it.”

  “That's good.”

  “Your kids?”

  “They're fine. They're great.” It seemed important to emphasize their well-being, since the children, after all, had probably been the fatal obstacles to their romance.

  “How's your mom?” It felt as if she was staging these remarks for the benefit of unseen observers, but she didn't know how to break out of the formulae of polite conversation.

  “Well, that's the other thing,” he said. “Not so good. She's been ill. Cancer.”

  “Oh my God, Luke. I'm so sorry.”

  “It's been rough, but the prognosis is somewhat encouraging.”

  “She must be glad to have you there.”

  He shrugged and pushed his hair off his forehead—a gesture so familiar, it made her feel faint. “Making up for lost time.”

  “Good for you. Are you working?” He'd been between things back when they were working downtown at the soup kitchen together, trying to decide what to do with the second half of his life.

  “I'm running a little fund.”

  “What about the book?”

  “Oh God, I'd almost forgotten about that. Maybe someday. And you? What about the screenplay?”

  She told him about the actor who'd optioned it, without adding that the option had just expired the week before.

  “That's great. I'll be watching for it at the Cool Springs Multiplex.”

  The strained formality of this exchange was exhausting her. She had been ready to change her life for him, and for the last year she'd been struggling to convince herself they'd done the right thing.

  For better or worse, the arrival of Washington and Veronica rescued them from the peril of intimate revelation. Corrine made the introductions, realizing as she did so that they'd been present outside the theater the night when their affair had effectively ended. Seeing her with her husband and children had awakened his conscience, and dampened his ardor. He'd told her later that he couldn't bear to be the reason for her breaking up her family.

  “Sorry we're late,” Veronica said. “Traffic on the Hutch. Then we had to find parking.”

  “The perils of the suburban couple,” Washington said, still embarrassed at being yet another commuter—that, too, a result of the attack. They'd started looking at houses in Connecticut the week after.

  “You look great,” Veronica said to Corrine.

  “So do you.”

  “I'd better get on out of here and try to find a cab,” Luke said.

  She didn't want him to leave; as awkward as this public posturing might be, she'd hoped they might find a few more minutes to talk. Suddenly she was afraid they'd never see each other again.

  They stood for a moment on the sidewalk, the bitter cold infiltrating the soles of her shoes, uncertain of the form their parting should take.

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek, the brush of his unruly forelock across her face excruciatingly familiar. If she'd had any doubt about his state of mind these last few minutes, she saw now that he was as miserable as she was. He managed a rueful smile before turning away and walking west. She watched as he slowly disappeared into the flow of the converging marchers.

  “What's with all the fucking heat?” Washington said, nodding as four cops exited the coffee shop. Sullen, wide-bodied white guys girdled with hardware, pulling up their pants and avoiding eye contact with the civilians, they exuded the grim camaraderie of an army in enemy territory.

  Corrine shook her head. Nothing seemed real to her right now, her resolve evaporating along with an animating sense of indignation about the war soon to take place six thousand miles away.

  “I don't like the look of this shit,” he said. “Maybe you should make your own damn sign: MY SISTER MARRIED A COP.”

  For a moment she didn't know what he was talking about; then she realized it was true. Her sister had married a cop, another improbable result of that improbable time.

  It was reassuring being a part of a crowd, surrendering to its volition. They merged with the throng flowing east toward Second, marching beside a sign that said FREEZING MY ASS OFF FOR PEACE. The air was cold enough to show their breath as they pressed forward, trying to see up ahead. The Roosevelt Island tramway rose up in the distance. Corrine got clunked by a CHILDREN AGAINST WAR sign being carried by a little girl right behind her. Maybe it would have been good, she thought, for the kids to see this.

  Luke had been stricken at the sight of her twins outside the theater that night. She'd seen it in his eyes. At that moment she'd known this chance encounter had doomed them, though they'd struggled to recover from it for several days of agonized discussions. It wasn't rational really, since he'd known from the beginning about her family. In fact, the plan had been to tell their spouses after Christmas.

  When they finally reached Second Avenue, the march turned north, although their destination, the UN, was some ten blocks south and east.

  Washington was jumping in the air, trying to get a look ahead. “Why the fuck are we going uptown?” he said.

  “They've blocked Second,” a kid in a tasseled ski hat explained. “We have to go north and circle back down.”

  “That doesn't make sense,” Corrine said.

  “It makes lots of sense,” Washington said, “if they're trying to keep us away from the UN.”

  At times the sound of car horns was deafening. The marchers overflowed the sidewalks, filling in the gaps between vehicles like mortar, blocking the traffic aimed in the opposite direction. This was now completely unreal.

  A voice from a megaphone was directing them to proceed north.

  “They're trying to scatter us,” said the man beside her, whose EMPTY WARHEADS sign featured caricature heads of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, each one of them open, the crowns of the skulls rising on hinges.

  “I like your sign,” she said.

  “They're trying to keep us from getting there, the bastards.”

  “Is this fucked-up or what?” Washington said.

  Veronica said, “I'm glad we didn't bring the kids.”

  “Hey, it would've been educational,” Washington said. “A lesson in the trampling of our motherfucking constitutional right of assembly.”

  “Why are they doing this?”

  “A Republican governor and mayor sucking up to our president is what's going on,” Washington said.

  Corrine and Veronica fel
l into step behind him, having barely spoken in two or three months.

  Veronica squeezed her glove. “How are you?”

  “Fine. The kids are great.”

  “And you two?”

  “Well, Russell took me to Bouley last night for Valentine's.” She wondered where, and with whom, Luke had been last night—if there was someone in his life now, a question she'd been afraid to ask: a childhood sweetheart, some southern girl with pouffed-up hair and a syrupy accent.

  “Washington cooked his famous Szechuan chicken and we opened a bottle of sparkling cider.”

  “That sounds nice.”

  “It sounds boring. But boring is better than all-nighters and strange panties, I guess. I don't know, I hate the commute and I miss the city, and those stay-at-home moms are just clones. I can't make up my mind which scares me more—the possibility that my kids won't be accepted by their peers or the possibility that they'll grow up just like them.”

  Corrine, meanwhile, was wondering if Luke was happy, and if she wanted him to be. Yes, of course she did. Only she wanted him to think of her and to wonder sometimes, as she did, whether they had really done the right thing after all.

  At Sixty-third Street they were greeted by a phalanx of cops, a line of barricades blocking the street. A red-faced policeman with a crescent scar on his cheek pointed his billy club north.

  “What's the point of pushing us uptown?” Corrine asked him.

  “Just keep moving,” he said.

  The next street, when they reached it, was also blocked off.

  “Hey, man,” Washington said, “we live on this block.”

  “We need ID,” the cop said.

  “Officer, I don't understand,” Corrine said. “We're not trying to cause any trouble. We're just exercising our constitutional right of assembly and free speech.”

  “Just keep moving.”

  Washington took her arm and eased her away from the barricade.

  “Why are they doing this?” she demanded. “Why are they being like this? They don't act this way at the Saint Patrick's Day parade.”

  “Exactly,” Washington said, his hand still on her arm.