How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,25

young bohemians in TriBeCa, had opened to mixed reviews and closed after an eight-week run.) Somewhere in the screenwriting process, the story had acquired a new complication, when the dying mother confides in her sensitive son about her affair with his father's best friend.

In fact, Dad's best friend lived in San Francisco, as Brian was quick to point out later, but still, it made us wonder. Mom had been popular with most of the men in our parents’ circle of friends, and one husband, Tom Fleishman, had always seemed almost comically smitten. Now we started to question if it was really a joke, the way Fleishman had always mooned around Mom, or whether Brian had really been the recipient of some deathbed confession. Everyone in town had the same question, including Katy Fleishman, who called Dad in a fury after seeing the movie in September, demanding to know what he knew, and it soon became the talk of the country club. The play had been a distant rumor, but the movie was right there next door to the Pathmark store, in the Regal Cinema multiplex, which had replaced the old downtown theaters where we'd watched Jaws and Summer of ‘42. And it was more successful than some might have hoped, buoyed by the performance of Maureen Firth as the wife and mother. The movie played at the Regal for seven weeks. Everyone we knew went to see it.

Brian had warned us, to some extent. On the one hand, he assured us, his vision hadn't been compromised. On the other hand, accommodations had been made, nuances flattened, whispers amplified, subtexts excavated with a backhoe and laid bare. In the play there was a rumor of infatuation.

None of us, Foster excepted, had been invited to the premiere in L.A., or rather, we'd all received a phone call from Brian, who had mentioned in passing “a big industry ratfuck” and said, “I'm not even sure I'm going myself.”

And none of us knew quite what to say after we'd seen it. Brian wrote Dad a letter, assuring him that the alleged affair was strictly a Hollywood plot device and had nothing to do with reality. Dad called Foster in New York and was repeatedly reassured. Mike called Brian, threatening to kick his ass, and while the conversation was hardly conclusive, Brian swore that the affair was just a sensationalistic fiction, and it seemed as if maybe we had all had our say by the time Thanksgiving had come around. We were hoping against hope that the issue would just go away; in an unprecedented move, we even decided to water down the vodka just to keep Dad from getting too maudlin.

And for the first time since any of us could remember, it looked as if we might pass a relatively peaceful Thanksgiving, having made it all the way to the pumpkin pie without major fireworks. But despite the watered vodka, we could see Dad's eyes glazing over with melancholy reminiscence.

“I must have let her down somehow,” he said during a lull in the discussion of the Patriots’ season.

All of us were smart enough to pretend we hadn't heard this remark, but Aidan's fiancée was still new to the family.

“Let whom down, Mr. C?”

“Carolyn. I must've let her down. She must have needed something I couldn't give her.”

“But why would you think that?” Jennifer asked.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Mike said, throwing his napkin down on the table. “Look at what you've done, Brian. Now he actually believes it.”

“Dad,” Brian said, “I told you: It never happened. It's fiction.”

“It's slander,” Mike said. “I still can't understand why the hell you'd drag our mother's name into the gutter like that.”

“It's not our mother. It's not her name. It's a character in a movie.”

“A character based on our mother.”

“I just must have failed her,” Dad said, oblivious to the conversation around him.

“Dad, listen to me. It never happened. I'm sorry. It's my fault. I shouldn't have written what I wrote. It was the director's idea, a cheap plot device. It isn't true.”

“I always thought it was harmless,” Dad said. “They used to talk at parties, and I knew they had things in common. Your mother had so many interests, art and theater, and I couldn't really talk to her about those things. I knew she and Tom talked. But I thought that's all it was.”

“That is all it was,” Brian said. “At least so far as I know.”

“I know she told you things,” he said to Brian. “Things