How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,108

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 Her fellow pedestrians seemed skittish, the brusque, purposeful tunnel vision of the natives having been replaced by a new caution that made everyone seem like tourists.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