How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,134

French door and fling the thing out into the yard.

Turning back to his wife, he found her regarding him with a distaste bordering on horror. “You picked it up with your bare hands,” she said.

“I can wash them.”

“I can't believe you picked it up with your bare hands. Don't imagine for a minute you're going to touch me with those hands.”

“I was just about to—”

“I can't have this. I simply can't. I won't live with this.”

“She's just being a cat.”

“It's unsanitary. It's a health risk for the baby.”

“After I wash my hands, I'll shampoo the rug.”

“That won't help,” she sobbed, lifting her hands to her face. “It's not enough.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“It's your cat,” she said. “You figure it out.” She lifted herself from the couch with that new, slightly labored motion he had noticed of late, an exaggerated series of pushes and lifts whereby she seemed to be anticipating a larger and more pregnant future, cradling her tummy to support it, although in this case the gesture seemed not only protective but also defensive, as if he constituted a possible threat to the fetus.

The guys in his foursome didn't seem surprised by Carly's absence from the club that night, although they eagerly corroborated the alibi.

“You remember that first trimester, honey.”

“Kate was puking like a freshman pledge.”

“Don't remind me.”

“Actually,” Bruce's wife said, “I was lucky that way.”

“Still,” Bruce said, “it wasn't like you felt like going out every night and painting the town.”

“Speaking of which,” Jeff said, “let's get another round here.”

The windows of the master bedroom were dark when he pulled into the driveway. He congratulated himself on his stealth and silence when he stepped into the guest room, which is where he awoke the next morning, on top of the duvet, fully dressed. A baby bird was lying on his chest, Daisy sitting beside him on the bed, the proud huntress.

“Oh shit,” he said. He'd almost forgotten this hazard of the suburban springtime—the baby bird menace. Even with arthritis, she could still catch the fledglings. In his muddled state, he couldn't quite separate out the different components of the guilt that was oppressing him—about the affair, about Daisy's murderous habits, about having overindulged the previous night. Had he come on to anyone at the club? No, not really; he was clean on that score.

Bryce flushed the bird down the guest room's toilet, wondering if he hadn't closed the door the night before, or if Carly had opened it that morning. He showered in the guest bath and crept down the hall to their bedroom, where he fortified himself with four Advil and two Zantac, then dressed and girded himself for the inevitable confrontation.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper.

“Good morning,” he said, sitting down across from her.

She stood up from the table, cradling her belly, and busied herself at the sink.

“You always try to sound bright and chipper when you're hungover. As if that will somehow fool me.”

He didn't feel quite bright and chipper enough to think of a response to this. On the other hand, he was happy to keep the focus on the lesser sin of drinking. “Kate and Serena send their love,” he said.

“That's ridiculous,” she said. “They don't even know me.”

“You met them at the Winter Frolic,” he said.

“The Winter Frolic.”

“Well, anyway.” It was a little weird, how everything at the country club sounded like high school. A few years ago, when he still lived in the city, he would've sneered at the previous night's event. The term Winter Frolic would have been a source of mirth. Everything about it would have aroused his urban cynicism.

“And I suppose last night was called the Spring Fling.”

He was about to refute this charge before realizing he couldn't.

“Rather appropriately for you,” she said.

He went to the refrigerator in search of liquids.

It hadn't been his idea to move out of the city. At least not entirely. He'd been happy enough in the one-bedroom on Columbus. But Carly began complaining about the friction of urban life. First it was the dry cleaner's losing her Marc Jacobs top. Then the guy in the wine store who kept hitting on her, which was totally plausible—she was a beautiful woman, after all. Plus the garbage trucks at three in the morning and the homeless guy who followed her in the park. After the planes had crashed into the towers, she'd had nightmares for months. Wasn't that the sequence of events that had led to