How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,57

in the front seat. Twos are potentially dangerous, so I decide I'll show my flag and talk to them myself. I tell Marilyn to stay put, then saunter over to the car. The driver has to open the door because the window won't roll down. Two small Hispanics in their fifties. “Twenty-five apiece,” I say, nodding toward Marilyn. “And you stay on this block.” Finally we agree on forty for two.

I wave Marilyn over and he climbs in the backseat, and I'm just leaning back against the building, lighting a smoke, when Marilyn comes howling and tumbling out of the car, crawling furiously as the car peels out, tires squealing on the cobblestones. Marilyn flings himself on me and I hold him as he sobs. “Es mi padre,” he wails. “Mi padre.”

“A priest?” I say hopefully.

He shakes his head violently against my shoulder and suddenly raises his face and starts apologizing for getting makeup on me, wiping at my jacket, still crying. “I ruin your jacket,” he says, crying hysterically. It's all I can do to convince him that I don't give a shit about the jacket, which started out filthy anyway.

“Are you sure it was … him?” I say.

Gulping air, he nods vehemently. “It the first time I see him in three years,” Marilyn says. He's sobbing and shaking, and I'm more than a little freaked-out myself. I mean, Jesus.

Finally, when he calms down, I suggest we call it a night. I make him drink the rest of the blackberry brandy and walk him back to the dock in the grainy gray light. As the sun comes up behind us, we stand on the edge of the pier and look out over the river at the Maxwell House sign. I can't think of anything to say. I put my arm around him and he sniffles on my shoulder. From a distance we would look like any other couple, I think. Finally I suggest he get some sleep, and he picks his way across the rotting boards back to the salt mountain. And that's the end of my career as a pimp.

A year after this happened, I went back to look for Marilyn. Most of the girls on the street were new to me, but I found Randi, the former Globetrotter, who at first didn't remember me. I do look different now. He thought I was a cop, and then guessed I was a reporter. He wanted money to talk, so I finally gave him ten, and he said, “I know you. You was that crackhead.” Nice to be remembered. I asked if he'd seen Marilyn and he said Marilyn had disappeared suddenly: “Maybe like, I don't know, seems like a year ago.” He couldn't tell me anything else and he didn't want to know.

About a year after that, I spotted a wedding announcement in the Times. I admit I'd been checking all that time—perusing what we once called the “women's sports pages”—like an idiot, occasionally rewarded with the picture of a high school or college acquaintance, and then one fine morning I saw a picture that stopped me. Actually, I think I noticed the name first; otherwise, I might not have stopped at the picture. “Marilyn Bergdorf to wed Ronald Dubowski.” It would be just like Marilyn to name himself after a chic department store. I stared at the photo for a long time, and though I wouldn't swear to it in a murder trial, I think it was my Marilyn—surgically altered, one presumes—who married Ronald Dubowski, orthodontist, of Oyster Bay, Long Island. I suppose I could have called, but I didn't.

So I don't really know how that night affected Marilyn, if it changed his life, if he is now officially and anatomically a woman, or even if he's alive. I do know that lives can change overnight, though it usually takes much longer than that to comprehend what has happened, to sense that we have changed direction. A week after Marilyn almost had sex with his father, I checked myself into Phoenix House. I called my parents for the first time in more than a year. Now, two years later, I have a boring job and a crummy apartment and a girlfriend who makes the rest of it seem almost okay. I'd be lying if I said there weren't times I miss the old days, or that I don't breathe a huge sigh of relief when I climb on the train after a few hours spent visiting my