How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,81

stars, besides running his own investment firm. He's had an incredible life, lived with that model who's on the cover of Cosmo all the time and then—”

“You hate people like that, Laura.”

“Eventually he started going to Colombia to buy quantity himself, so he gets busted and put in jail in Cartagena. But within two weeks he has these mercenaries blow up the jail and smuggle him out of the country. Anyway, I think you'd like him. He's really smart.”

“If I told you about this guy, you'd say he sounds like an asshole.”

“He's charming. And besides, I admire his courage in coming here. That takes even more guts than breaking out of jail.”

“Sounds like love.”

“No,” she said. “Except insofar as he reminds me of you.”

“That's one of the things I've missed about you,” Jared said. “The way you use insofar as in conversation. Or ergo. We don't get that out in L.A. much. Anyway, I've never been to jail or to Cartagena, either one.”

“'Bout time we headed up for lunch,” said Dorene.

On the walk up the drive to the main house, they were joined by some of Laura's housemates. Eric, whom Laura had mentioned several times on the phone, was a gentleman of sixty and a professor of religion at Yale. He was not visibly depressed or sedated.

“Has Laura told you she's our best basket maker,” Eric asked.

“I'm an arts and crafts hero,” Laura said. “I'm thinking of opening up a crafts boutique after I get out of here. Call it the Basket Case.”

After they moved through the cafeteria line, Laura introduced Jared to those seated around the table.

“Just arrive today?” said Tony, a young man with a scimitar-shaped scar across his throat.

Jared nodded, his mouth full of cold, tough veal.

“Where are you, Wharton House?”

“I'm just visiting,” Jared said.

“He's my husband,” Laura explained.

“Oh, I see.”

Jared wondered if the man was perhaps making a point by pretending not to know who he was.

The talk around the table was of the food and pharmacopoeia—prescribed dosages of antidepressants and lethal dosages of self-administered medication. Connie, a recently admitted middle-aged housewife—blond and seemingly cheerful—had tried to kill herself with Valium, thirty of the five-milligram yellows. But she threw up, and everyone told her it wouldn't have done the trick anyway.

“Thirty of the blues might possibly have done it,” Jared added, eliciting a fairly general agreement around the table. “Thirty Seconals would do the trick. But for real sledgehammer results, Dilaudids are your best bet. Thirty of those would kill you and your two best friends, plus their household pets.” That got a laugh. “Three thousand in the water supply would take out a medium-size city.” Then in Ronald Reagan's voice, he said, “The hell with nuclear weapons, you damn Commies, we got the neuron bomb.”

Everyone laughed except Laura, whose eyes he avoided.

Jackson, a Unitarian minister, told how he had closed his garage door, climbed into the Oldsmobile, inserted a tape in the cassette player and hit the ignition. When the tape turned over for the second play and he found himself still conscious, if nauseous, he gave up and went back into the house.

“It was a new car, a 1988,” he said. “The new emissions-control systems are so good, you can't even kill yourself.”

“What was the tape?” Laura asked.

“Pachelbel.”

“Good choice. I love his chaconne.”

“Thank you, Laura.”

Laura's approach to the world had always been slightly skewed. Was that a function of the imbalances that had landed her here, or just her charming eccentricity? Jared loved her, was still unable to divorce her after almost two years of separation. Sometimes he suspected he was afraid to let go because she was the only person who wouldn't allow him to reinvent himself completely, turn himself into something bright and shiny and superficial. So many old friends had been replaced by new ones. Laura was perhaps his last chance to remember and preserve the best of what he had been. On the other hand, was success such a crime? Everybody changes, so why did she insist that he was both selling and destroying his soul? At worst, he was just visiting Babylon on a round-trip ticket. Which reminded him.

“Gotta make a quick call,” he told the company. “Keep the veal patties cold for me, guys. I'll be right back.”

Jared was directed to a phone booth, where he used his credit card to call Lonnie's New York number. He listened through ten rings, then another ten. Strange, he thought, that Lonnie didn't have his machine turned on, but he probably