How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,151

gotta get going. I'll call you later.”

He was walking out the door. I couldn't help trying to picture that room, even though it would look pretty much like all the other hotel rooms along the campaign trail, like one of the many rooms I snuck into in Fran-conia or Nashua, in Cedar Falls or Gastonia—those rooms that conveniently seemed to have no personality and no history, with a vinyl-covered ice bucket flanked by two cellophane-wrapped plastic glasses—without ever really wondering too much about all the people who had been there before us, about what had happened in these rooms. Maybe every room deserves its own bronze plaque, if we only knew. I would never see that room at the Hampton Inn in Dubuque, but I couldn't help wondering if he would remember it, out of all the hundreds of hotel rooms that year, as the place where he traded his soulmate for something he loved more.

2008

The March

Corrine had agreed to meet Washington and Veronica at the diner on Fifty-second Street, a place they'd come for hamburgers on Saturday or brunch on Sunday when they were living in the neighborhood back in the eighties. It had been more than a decade since she'd set foot there, and the glazed apple pies and coconut cakes under their plastic domes seemed like museum displays from the distant era of her lost youth. But now it was jammed with cops—she hadn't seen this many uniforms since her days at the soup kitchen downtown, feeding cops and firefighters and san men and the steelworkers who had come together in the smoking ruins. She'd gotten to know several cops then, but the cohort here today seemed less benign, their faces tight, closed and bolted against fraternization. That moment of solidarity, of strangers comforting one another in the streets, of stockbrokers hugging firemen and waving to cops, had already faded into history. The citizens of the metropolis were changed, though less tangibly than they might have imagined or hoped back in the time of anthrax and missing-person posters. They had, most of them, been given a glimpse of their best selves, and told themselves they wouldn't forget, or go back to the old selfish, closed-in ways. But then they'd gone back to work and the rubble had been carted away and the stock market had recovered. You woke up one morning not thinking about that terrible day, not remembering it had happened until perhaps seeing the tattered remains of an old poster on your way to lunch. And it felt good not to think about it all the damn time.

She stepped outside to wait. Already, at ten-thirty, the street was jammed with people bundled against the cold and carrying signs. ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE PEACE A CHANCE. A little kid holding one that said WAR IS TERROR and his sister in a red snowsuit with her own sign: DRAFT THE BUSH TWINS. Russell had stayed home with the kids, who were working on a play for her birthday. While he shared Corrine's feelings about the imminent war, Russell was not a joiner. “I don't march,” he'd said earlier that morning, showing the same kind of contrarian pride he sometimes brought to his traditional refrain of “I don't dance.”

Looking south down the sidewalk for Washington and Veronica, she felt her chest tighten as she picked out a familiar figure—the loose, loping stride beneath the camel polo coat, the flopping sandy forelock, a garment bag hanging on his shoulder like a vestigial wing. She waited, paralyzed at his approach, and watched the changes ring on his unguarded visage as he recognized her, the rapid modulation from shock to wistful chagrin that preceded his public Isn't-this-a-pleasant-surprise mien.

“I might've known you'd be here,” he said as he kissed her cheek.

“Actually, I was just thinking about you,” she said, a statement that to her ears sounded false in its implication of surprising coincidence; it would have been true on almost any given day, despite the fact that they hadn't seen each other in more than a year—not since that snowy night in the plaza outside the New York State Theater when they'd both been on their way to see The Nutcracker with their respective families. By now he had occupied more time in her thoughts than he had in the flesh. They'd exchanged e-mails and he had called from Tennessee and left a message five months ago, on September 11.

“I mean, I was thinking about those days downtown, at the