How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,161
of those he and Eve had known. He had no idea what he wanted to do. After graduation he went to China to teach English, which he envisioned as a kind of romantic exile. The following year he enrolled in business school, and then, after a grueling year as an analyst at an investment bank, he found his calling as a closer—the guy who entertained the clients and held their hands as they signed the checks.
“So she broke your heart and drove you to banking?”
“I don't suppose it was quite that simple. I've probably simplified it in retrospect. Mythologized it in my mind.”
“So how does this lead us to the present? To your imminent nuptials?”
He shook his head and chopped up more coke. “I don't know. I guess it just seemed like time.” He folded the coke and chopped it again.
“That's it? It ‘seemed like time’?”
He shrugged. “She's a nice girl, from a good family. You know, we have a lot in common. So, what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Have you ever been in love?” He was rubbing his face as if to wash off a spot—a tic that was terribly familiar to her.
“Once,” she said, taking a cigarette from his pack and holding it to her lips while he lit it.
“Tell me about it.”
“You know most of the story,” Ginny said. “You were there.”
“I was there?” He seemed determined to be obtuse.
“You were the one.”
“Jesus. Are you—”
“Yes, I am serious. All those years, all those nights. I couldn't help it. I knew it was supposed to be fun, but I fell in love with you.”
“I didn't know.”
“You don't remember the last night we spent together?”
“Not exactly.”
“You asked me to marry you.”
“I did?” He looked horrified.
“You did. You asked me to marry you and you told me you wanted me to have your babies. We stayed up all night planning our future. We were going to spend our summers in Provence. And the next day you said you'd come to my parents' house for Thanksgiving. But later that same day you said you had a late meeting on Wednesday and you would take the train up to Bedford Thursday morning. And that was the last I ever heard from you.”
He slumped back on the couch. “That was terrible, really the worst— I know. I just didn't know what to say to you.” He leaned forward and snorted another line. “I was going to go up to Bedford. Except I went out for a drink that night. And I met a girl. And one drink led to another. And the next thing I knew, it was noon the next day and we were finishing the last of the coke. I couldn't very well face your family in that condition. And, you know, letting you down like that … I knew I needed to call and apologize, but somehow I couldn't.”
Well, at least now she knew what had happened. She bent over the coffee table and snorted another couple of lines. “It used to kill me to see you at parties,” she said finally, “and you acting so casual, as if nothing had happened. With some babe on your arm. For a long time I hated you.”
“I guess I can't really blame you,” he said. “I wish there was some way—”
“Make love to me,” Ginny said. In her own mind, she wasn't being sentimental so much as practical. She felt he owed her that much at least. Either it would be as good as she remembered it or it wouldn't, and she would've gotten it out of her system.
Up in the bedroom, he was smart enough, or considerate enough, to kiss her long and hard before he began removing her clothes. In the middle, for all his skill, and all her desire to be transported, she began to come back to herself and feel awkward and sad. And after what seemed like a very long time, she just wanted him to finish. She realized now that what she'd really wanted was to believe that he still wanted her and that he cared enough for her to betray his future wife.
Afterward, she wrapped herself in the bedspread and walked out to the deck. The sky had turned gray in the east and the dark surface of the ocean was stippled with silver sunlight. The coke was wearing off, and her eyeballs felt as if they were being pricked with tiny needles. She hated herself.
Eventually, A.G., in his paisley boxer shorts, holding a cigarette, joined her on the deck.
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“I don't know.” He took a drag. “Probably the correct thing.”
“What's the correct thing?”
“It's what we do when we don't know what the right thing is.”
He put his arm around her and held his cigarette to her lips. She inhaled greedily, as if she believed the smoke could save her, the ember blazing and crackling between A.G.'s fingers before it faded and dimmed within a cocoon of gray ash and he tossed it away, the last sparks dying on the dewy lawn below.
2008
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author of seven novels and two collections of essays on wine, Jay McInerney is a regular contributor to New York, The New York Times Book Review, The Independent and Corriere della Sera. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy and Granta. In 2006, Time cited his 1984 debut, Bright Lights, Big City, as one of nine generation-defining novels of the twentieth century. He was the recipient of the 2006 James Beard Foundation's M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, and his novel The Good Life received the Grand Prix Littéraire de Deauville in 2007. He lives in Manhattan and in Bridgehampton, New York.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this book was set in Simoncini Garamond, a modern version by Francesco Simoncini of the type attributed to the famous Parisian type cutter Claude Garamond (ca. 1480-1561). Garamond was a pupil of Geoffroy Tory and is believed to have based his letters on the Venetian models, although he introduced a number of important differences, and it is to him we owe the letter that we know as old style. He gave to his letters a certain elegance and a feeling of movement that won for their creator an immediate reputation and the patronage of Francis I of France.