How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,133

as he raced down the Henry Hudson Parkway, he felt a welcome sense of moral clarity. His righteousness was only bolstered by the miraculous parking space a few spots down from the entrance to her building on Ninety-sixth Street. He couldn't believe she would actually write a letter to his wife. Was she out of her mind? he wondered as he held down the buzzer for 4F.

Her voice over the intercom sounded tentative. “Who is it?”

“It's me,” he said, his hand clutching the doorknob.

“Come on up,” she said in what seemed to him a false singsongy tone, buzzing him in.

Julie could see that her gambit had backfired as soon as she opened the door. He ignored Cocoa, her longhaired dachshund, who swirled affectionately around his ankles.

“How dare you?” he said.

She claimed that she'd done it as much for him as for herself, that she knew he wasn't happy with the status quo.

“ I was perfectly happy with the status quo,” he said, no longer needing to maintain the fiction that he was trapped in his marriage and desperate to be with his mistress. He no longer had to pretend that only fear of his wife's unpredictable behavior and compassion for her precarious emotional state kept him from leaving her. Not that Carly couldn't be unpredictable and volatile, but he'd never really intended to leave her. He could see that clearly now. He was about to have a baby with her.

“But you said—”

“I said a lot of shit. I said what you wanted to hear.”

It had been more than this, of course; but she had broken the rules, had violated the sanctity of his marriage, and now he wanted to hurt her.

She appealed for compassion and forgiveness, but all her justifications and her tears failed to move him. Her mascara ran, collecting in the little wrinkles and crow's-feet around her eyes, lines that he'd never noticed before. Looking away from her, he was confronted with the evidence of his folly, framed pictures of the two of them—in front of the Rodin Museum in Paris, on the beach in Montauk and in this very apartment, standing amid the bronze Buddhas, ceramic dragons, hexagonal shards of quartz and amethyst. Incense was burning in a little bronze urn on the coffee table. Julie was a believer in meditation, pyramids and crystals, whereas Bryce was feeling very Catholic at this moment. With all the zeal of a newly reformed sinner, he rejected her pleas for forgiveness. Strangely, he felt most sorry for Cocoa, who couldn't possibly understand why his old friend was giving him the cold shoulder. He was genuinely moved by the dog's doleful expression.

His confidence and his clarity ebbed as he approached his own driveway. If only Carly were the screaming and crying type, he might be able to imagine an eventual diminution of the crisis. But as it was, he had no idea what to expect.

Daisy greeted him at the door, rubbing her head against his shin. He crouched down and rubbed her head, scratched behind her ears. Daisy thrummed with appreciation and followed him as he reconnoitered the first floor. Carly was sitting in the sunroom, looking out over the back lawn. The fact that she was neither reading nor knitting didn't seem like a good sign.

He knelt down before her, took her hand in his, and laid his head on her rounded belly. “I don't know what to say—except that it's over. I'm so sorry.” As he waited for a response, his head on her taut tummy, he felt Daisy massaging herself on his calf.

“This can't go on,” she said.

“It's done,” he said.

“She's got to go.”

“I've taken care of it.”

“I can't have this in the house.”

“It was never in the—”

“Not in my condition.”

Confused now, he looked up at her, at the lips drawn so thin and tight across her face that it was hard to believe they'd ever kissed his, and then followed her gaze down to the floor, to the dead robin on the carpet.

He could hardly contain his relief as he jumped to his feet, ready to deal with this discrete and tangible problem. He'd picked up dozens of dead birds in his long association with Daisy, whom he'd discovered as a kitten in the garbage room of his building on Ninth Street seven or eight years ago, when he was living in his first apartment in the city. It was the work of a moment to pick up the robin by its tail feathers, swing open the