How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,58

parents, or that it's a gas being straight all the time, but still I'm grateful.

You think you're living a secret and temporary life, underground, in the dark. You don't imagine that someone will drive up the street or walk in the door or look through the window—someone who will reveal you to yourself not as you hope to be in some glorious future metamorphosis, but as you find yourself at that moment. Whatever you are doing then, you will have to stop and say, “Yes, this is who I am. This is me.”

1992

The Debutante's Return

The call came at six in the morning, as she was returning home from a party that had lasted far too long, if no longer than several others she'd recently attended. This one had started at a nightclub on Fourteenth Street and ended on a rooftop in SoHo. She counted ten rings while she was fumbling with the locks on her apartment door, and another two before she reached the bedroom. Messed up as she was, she had a pretty clear idea of what the call would be about.

“You best come home,” Martha said. “You mama done had another stroke.”

She didn't remember the rest of the conversation. She was sitting on the bed with the telephone cradled in her lap when a strange man appeared in the doorway. “Nice place,” he said. “You got any vodka?” Apparently, she'd brought him home with her. He was wearing a pearl gray fedora and a white silk scarf. She was surprised to find herself with a man in a fedora, and even more surprised at the sudden impulse to tell him not to wear it indoors.

She led him to the kitchen, opened the freezer, and handed him the frosty bottle of Absolut. “Take it,” she said, maneuvering him out into the hallway. Before he quite knew what was happening, she'd pulled the front door shut and locked him out.

Somehow, this time, she knew the party was over, that she was finished with all that. But she had second thoughts when she arrived that afternoon at the Nashville airport, where everyone seemed fatter and slower and the air was shockingly sultry with humidity. Stepping off the plane was like being enveloped in a steaming-hot towel. She remembered once again why she'd fled north in the first place.

She looked frailer than ever in the hospital bed, with onion-paper skin and protruding bones. One side of her face seemed to be frozen. “I'm here, Momma,” Faye said when her mother's translucent eyelids fluttered open.

“Bunny, it's you.”

“It's me, Momma.”

“You look tired. Where's your father?”

“Daddy's not here, Momma. You're in the hospital.”

“The hospital? But won't he be worried?”

“We're all worried about you. You gave us a scare. Now get yourself better so we can take you home.”

“Who's feeding Bugsy?”

It took Faye a moment to recall Bugsy, a wheaten terrier run over when she was four.

“Martha's taking care of everything back home.”

Faye moved back into her room in the so-called New House, a Tudor pile her grandfather had built in the twenties after subdividing the old family property. The old house, aka the Big House, completed a few years before the Union army took over the city and dispossessed her great-great-grandparents, was now a museum. Its replacement, Faye's childhood home, had once stood in splendid isolation on a sea of bluegrass, but in recent years the suburbs had engulfed the property, now a mere five acres, with ranch houses and split-levels. Her brother was all in favor of selling it, but their mother insisted on staying put, and Faye had strenuously defended her position, yet given this new turn of events, she didn't know that she could hold him off much longer. In fact, it soon became clear that he'd already begun taking the place apart.

Martha cataloged the missing pieces. “Mr. Jimmy come in with a U-Haul last night and took away three carpets, a chifforobe, the dining room table and all the chairs. He say Miss Jordan ain't gonna be givin' no dinner parties nohow.”

Faye was glad she'd already decided to stay, knowing it would take all of her strength to protect her mother and to keep her brother at bay. They'd already had the nursing home discussion, and Faye adamantly refused to see her mother shut away like that. Her memory might be failing, but she had Martha to take care of her, and it wasn't as if they lacked the resources to keep the house running. While she sensed this debate would