How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,42

returning, haggard, with tales of nightclubs and parties populated by dirty debutantes. He tried to explain the difference between downtown and uptown to me. I was content to stay in D.C., which was more than worldly enough for me. Occasionally I would have a beer at a neighborhood pub and attempt to impress ambitious young women in Talbot's suits. Though I didn't know it at the time, it was the heyday of the Pill, after Roe and before AIDS. I had a few dates and a brief, awkward romance with a Georgetown student who was interning in Senator Kennedy's office, during which I managed finally to shed my virginity at the age of twenty-three. But I wasn't very good with women. I think I was too earnest, even for serious young ladies with Phi Beta Kappa keys and Bass Weejuns who'd come to the Capitol to serve their country.

When the senator announced to the staff that he was going to make a run for the White House, we were ecstatic. We would all rise with him. But more than that, we believed in him, though by then I'd learned that heroes have a few warts. We all knew he'd had an affair with one of the assistants, whom he later placed in the office of the senior senator. And one night when I went back to the office late to retrieve some papers, I saw him emerge from the inner office with a disheveled female reporter. His face was flushed and glistening with a film of sweat. They were both giggling, until they spotted me and hurriedly donned their coats, the senator wishing me a curt good night.

Neat, housewifely Doreen had come to the office for the announcement. She smiled and hugged us, seeming more like the candidate's spinsterish sister than his wife. I couldn't help wondering what the campaign really meant to her. Bad enough to be the wife of a senator. But maybe he was a victim, too, married early to a woman he'd soon outgrown. She must have looked much different to an orphan at the state university than to a rising U.S. senator. After she left, several of us overheard Joe Cleary lecturing him from inside his office. “Goddamn it, you've got to keep it in your pants, or you're going to fuck the whole thing up,” he roared. I couldn't make out the senator's response. Cleary was a tough old Boston politico who'd worked for Kennedy and alongside Castleton since his congressional days. Shambling red-faced out of the office, he turned to me and asked if I knew the three b's. “The three whats?” I said, looking up at the craters and exploded veins on his broad, florid nose. I was afraid of him, of his caustic whiskey breath with its whiff of decomposition and corruption. He seemed to me the antithesis of the new political order we were trying to create. “Broads, bribes and boys,” he said, then ran his sleeve under his nose. “Sooner or later …” Cleary shook his head and left the office, the sentence unfinished. I was glad to see him go. Although I might have concurred with the sentiment, it seemed out of place on this special day, the dawn of an era. I was full of liberal indignation at his crude and chauvinistic term for women, a word I'd certainly never heard on the senator's lips.

“What about booze?” Trey said from the next desk over, and we all had a good laugh.

I volunteered for the campaign staff. Within days I was on the plane with him to Iowa. Those first few months we were romantic underdogs, tilting at grain silos and cooling towers, drawing on a modest fund of skeptical goodwill. But the senator was charismatic, and if we could get five hundred people in a room, four hundred of them walked out believing. More often, though, it was forty. On one occasion four citizens came to hear him speak at a public library, one of them a reporter from the local weekly. But he reached out to those four as if they were convention delegates, turning his chair around backward and sitting among them, lingering to chat with the blue-haired librarian, who blushed and fussed with her hair as though sensing her womanhood for the first time in a decade. And the way I looked at it, that was five more in our column. Late at night, awash in lasagna indigestion and Trey's snoring from the next