How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,98

beat after she heard that I was living with a model named Phil. Another point in my favor was what I wore to my interview, a vintage Brooks Brothers gray flannel hand-me-down from my father; Jillian thought that I was fashion-forward enough to have anticipated the return of the three-button sack suit. She has since discovered her mistakes.

My contract is up in two months, and no one has approached me about renewal. In fact, my office was recently converted to storage space. I send in my copy via modem from my apartment: vanguard of the virtual office.

More on Phil

I met Philomena in Tokyo, on the Ginza Line between Akasaka-mitsuke and Shimbashi. I couldn't help noticing her, of course, the only other gaijin in the subway car, a head taller than the indigenous population, clutching her big black modeling portfolio to her ribs, nervously tossing her coppery hair. I was trying very hard not to stare. “Do you know which stop is Ginza,” she asked. I looked up from my copy of Heike Monogatari, all innocence, my expression one that was meant to say, Whatever in the world leads you to assume that I speak English? At the same time I was thinking, Oh, Jesus, please don't get off the train and walk out of my life—you're the most gorgeous creature I've ever seen in it.

She was in Japan building up her modeling portfolio and her savings account. Aside from her modelish appearance, I was charmed by what seemed to me—after five years in Japan—her archetypal Middle Americanness, the curious alloy of wide-eyed curiosity and other-side-of-the-tracks street savvy. In that stranger-in-a-strange-land context, I, in turn, must have cut a rather striking figure, being able to order food right off the menu, count, ask directions and, when necessary, shout insults. Which is to say, I doubt she ever would've shacked up with me in the States. But in the context of adult males known to Philomena, I was practically a saint, just by virtue of nonviolently hanging around. Her father disappeared when she was three, and of her mother's several boyfriends the best that she could say of her favorite was that he was passed out most of the time. She has never really told me the worst of it, and I'm sure I don't want to know. Whenever Philomena, standing in front of the full-length mirror at five minutes to eight, tells me that she hates going out anyway, not to mention all of our so-called friends who are really only my friends, and that she is absolutely not attending the opening/screening/première/party/dinner/wedding or whatever occasion has forced her to confront the imagined shortcomings of her wardrobe and her body, whenever she ignores my pleas for sexual relief or says, “Nobody really cares about anybody except themselves”—at these times I remind myself that she is still in a bad mood from her childhood. But this behavior did not manifest itself until we had been together for a year. And by then she was a relatively successful fashion model in New York, where such comportment was a professional prerequisite.

She moved into my tiny flat in Roppongi. We slept on a single futon that we laid out on the tatami floor each night and folded up each morning. Recently escaped from my official Ph.D. studies, I was keeping carcass and spirit together by teaching English and writing movie reviews for the Japan Times and the Tokyo Business Journal. Two evenings a week I took the train to Shinjuku and conjugated English verbs with Japanese businessmen:

I dump.

You dump.

He dumps.

We dump.

You all dump manufactured goods below cost on the American market in order to gain market share.

On my free nights, I bought mordant pickled vegetables, anthropomorphic ginger root, fat, white, talcy sacks of short-grain rice, shiny fish and skinny chickens with feet. I turned on the automatic rice cooker when I heard Philomena's key in the door. We made love when she returned home, and sometimes again after we had rolled out the futon for the night. We were always screwing in those days. Jesus, it was wonderful. Then we moved to New York, which is to monogamy what the channel changer is to linear narrative.

Celebrity Searches

I call Celebrity Searches. “Can you give me a current location on Ralston, Chip?”

“Still checking,” the voice says after a long wait. Finally: “We show him in his Malibu house up until Thursday last week, then we pick him up last Saturday at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco.