How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,132

“Do you know that this would have been enough evidence to convict me of witchcraft in the seventeenth century?” she says.

I do know, because she has told me several times, but I say, “Really?”

“It's what they call an ‘auxiliary nipple.’ A devil's teat. Proof that I've been suckling demons.”

“Rules of evidence have advanced a little since then,” I say cheerfully.

“Wouldn't it be strange if in former lives you were a prosecutor at the witch trials and I was a witch?”

“I'm on your side, Tory,” I say, putting my arms around her. As her face disappears against my chest, I see that she is looking not at me but at some region inside herself. “Everything will be all right,” I say. I can still see the sadness in her eyes and mouth. “We'll have children together.” Maybe I say it because I want to sleep with her sisters and I feel guilty about it, or because she thinks that, like her father, I'll leave and I'm afraid she's right.

Lying there after Tory has fallen asleep, I conjure up the image of Bunny and Tory sleeping side by side on this same bed, and think about how I felt then, how I wanted to crawl between them and have both. What I really imagined, seeing these two women who look so much alike, was a single woman who was Tory leavened with Bunny's careless grace. As I drift toward sleep, I superimpose Mary's face, which in the liquor-store parking lot seemed fearless and flushed with sexual anticipation, and to that I add Carol's womb. Then I see Ginny alone in the bed in which the four of them had been conceived. And I think of my own mother, who is dead, and my father, whom I haven't seen in eight months, and imagine myself as a pinprick of life, floating whole in the dark, before all of these divisions and divorces and separations.

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