How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,112
had a goddamn fork in my hand. Poor baby, you're bleeding. I'm so sorry.” She showered him with apologies and first aid, and even after the Robertsons had left, she maintained an air of concern and contrition. For his part, Liam was too frightened to confront her. He only hoped that she'd gotten it all out of her system at once. Maybe now they could go on as if nothing had happened.
Back in L.A., he told Lanie that it was over between them, citing the pregnancy, and she seemed to understand. In retrospect, he found it remarkable that communication between a man and woman with a sexual history could be so straightforward.
A few nights later, they were crashing a script, four of them working in the office till midnight, when they decided to move to his hotel suite, where they could order up a room-service supper. Liam was in the bathroom when the phone rang, and he rushed out in a panic. He knew who was calling.
Lanie was still holding the receiver. “Hello?”
He grabbed the phone away from her and heard only the dial tone. It was three-ten in the morning; it wasn't hard to guess what Lora, if it had been Lora, was thinking. There was no way of verifying the incoming number on the hotel phone.
“What's the matter?” Brodie asked.
He dialed his home number in Brooklyn. After a half dozen rings, he heard his own voice explaining that no one could come to the phone right now. “Honey, it's Liam. Listen, I thought you might have called just now and I wanted to make sure everything's okay out there. We're all here just finishing up on the script for tomorrow, me and Brodie and Issac and Lanie. I guess you're asleep. Just wanted to make sure everything was okay. Big kiss.”
He called throughout the day, but Lora never answered. When he still couldn't reach her the following afternoon, he told his colleagues he had an emergency and caught the red-eye to New York.
15.
She was in bed with Jeremy when he came in at seven. She said she wasn't feeling well, that she had cramps and was bleeding.
“Are you all right?” he said, breathlessly.
“Not really,” she said.
“The baby?”
“There is no baby.”
“You had a miscarriage?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not a miscarriage.”
Having arrived all tense and alert, he seemed to deflate before her eyes, slumping to the foot of the bed. “How could you do this?”
“It's just a procedure,” she said. Of course, she knew it was more than that to him. To him, it was a mortal sin.
“It's a life,” he said. “Is this what happened the last time, too? You were punishing me?”
“Punishing you for what, my love?” Despite the pain, she managed a bright smile. “I just wasn't ready for another child. I didn't think we were ready.”
“But you know how I feel about this,” he said. “How am I supposed to live with you after this?”
“Of course you'll live with me. With us—your wife and son. What else would you do? You know I love you, honey.”
2008
Sleeping with Pigs
“Wait a minute,” my shrink says. “Stop. Go back. Did you say in the bed?”
I nod cautiously. Actually, my mind was drifting off on a tangent. Even as I was droning on about my failed marriage, I was wondering, not for the first time, why she had a picture of John Lennon in her office and whether it was an Annie Leibovitz. You know, the one where he's in a sleeveless New York City T-shirt with his arms crossed.
“The pig was sleeping in the bed. With you. In the marital bed. With you and your wife.”
“Well, yes,” I say.
“You've been coming to me for more than a year, trying to come to terms with your guilt about the breakup of your marriage, and this is the first time it's occurred to you to mention that the pig was sleeping with you in the bed?”
I can see her point. I don't know why I didn't mention it before. It was actually a big point of contention at the time. On the other hand, I was behaving so badly by then that I didn't really feel I was in a position to make demands. Blythe used to have all kinds of jokes about sleeping with two pigs. No, actually, it was the same joke over and over. Plus, McSweeney's my surname and she liked to call me McSwine.
“Was this a nightly occurrence? How long did it go on?”