How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,103

before bringing the kids in.”

“That's dreadful.” Mom turns to Doug. “Is that true?”

Doug nods sadly.

“The worst are the self-mutilators,” says Brooke, rising out of her marijuana-induced stupor to do a brief promotional spot for her beau. “Can you imagine having a ward full of desperately ill and injured people to tend to, and having to spend two hours on some guy who, tell them about the thing yesterday …”

“Well,” says Doug, “I wish I could say it was a unique case, but in fact we've seen it before. A patient arrived on the ward yesterday under his own power, clutching a towel to his groin. We estimate he lost more than thirty percent of his blood.”

“Don't tell me,” says Dad.

“Fortunately, I guess, he hadn't fully severed his penis. He seems to have lost—”

“Stop!” Dad shouts. “Is this any kind of dinner-table conversation?”

I don't know, I think I agree with my father, although I can't help feeling a twinge of sympathy for Doug, the outsider.

“Doug,” says Mom, “are you sure you wouldn't like a teeny bit of Champagne?”

More Beverage Notes

One factor that Frank Prial doesn't take into account about holiday potables is their combustibility. When long-separated members of the same family are soaked in spirits and rubbed together, explosions almost inevitably result. This year it happens after I ask Mom how she met Dad. It's a story I haven't heard in years, certainly never with the kind of vivid dramatic detail she gives it this afternoon.

Boy Meets Girl, Spring 1955

“We used to think Williams boys were so square,” she says, the stem of her Champagne flute pinched lightly between age-spotted pointer and thumb. “And, of course, they were.”

A curmudgeonly harrumph from my father, still dressed in the square-college-boy uniform of his youth—blue blazer, blue oxford button-down shirt and regimental tie, his pink-pickled face unlined by the tussles of commerce or metaphysics.

“We used to think Bennington girls were artsy-fartsy dykes,” counters the former captain of the debating team.

“And the Williams boys were so very tolerant of diversity,” Mom continues, winking at us. “But we had to admit they were very good-looking.” She smiles sweetly at my father. Beneath the sun-and-nicotine-cured skin, she is still girlish, pale blue eyes childishly bright, her hair long, just as she wore it at Bennington, the gold now ghosted with silver. “I drove down with Cassie Reymond and some other girls. Cassie was an actress, and she went to New York, and last I heard she was married to that actor who was in that wonderful play—what was it called—about the, it wasn't with Richard Burton but somebody like that?” She looks hopefully at my father, who coughs impatiently into his hand.

“Camelot?” proposes Doug.

Oh, do shut up, Doug.

Beside us, a Japanese family: father, mother, two solemn preteen daughters in severe white blouses and pageboy haircuts.

“Anyway, we got there, and it was awful, all these fierce, shy, hungry boys in their nice J. Press suits and their crewcuts, ready to pounce. We drove down in Cassie's car, thank God, but there was a bus that arrived from Smith or somewhere like that, someplace frilly and proper, maybe Holyoke, I don't know. Anyway, this bus came in just as we pulled up, and the boys were waiting outside it. They'd formed a kind of gauntlet, or gamut. What is it? I can never get those two things straight. Is ‘gauntlet’ the glove you throw down when you challenge somebody to a duel, or is that ‘gamut’? Anyway, this was the other one.”

“‘Gantlet’ is actually the word you're looking for,” says Doug. “I think,” he hedges, for modesty's sake.

Here at the St. Regis they serve the fancy, lumpy kind of cranberry sauce with real berries, but I prefer the cheap, jellied kind. I seem to be the only one paying any attention at all to the food.

“Toward the end of the dance I spotted your father hovering. He was dressed exactly the way he is now. Could that be the same tie?” My father looks down at the neckwear in question, pennon of some lost regiment of the King's Army, and shakes his head. “He was kind of cute square,” Mom continues. “And, oh, I remember—he was wearing white bucks.”

“Not I,” said my father, but I could see he was starting to enjoy this. “Tan bucks, maybe.”

“You were. That was almost the cutest part about you, your nervous white feet. He kept circling us, getting a tiny bit closer each time, all nonchalant and pretending not to notice me. Well,