How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,99

Checked out Sunday and we're not showing anything since.”

“Can you work on that for me?”

“Sure. Meantime, how about Kiefer Sutherland? He's right here in town.”

“Who I really need to find is my girlfriend.”

“Actress?”

“Model.”

“Supermodel?”

“Just model.”

“Model, non super. Name?”

“Philomena Briggs.”

After a search, he says she's not in their database.

Finally, a Message from Phil

“Hi, it's me. You there? … Guess you're out. I'm rushing to get a plane. We're off to L.A. to finish up. I'm not sure about the schedule. It's nuts. Call you when I know where I am. Big kiss.” This message on my machine when I return from dinner. It's the tone of voice which is so disturbing. A false, heightened breeziness. The words strung together on a thin wire of nervous gaiety.

Collin's Reaction

The narrator has been able to suppress his anxiety until this moment. But hearing her voice, he knows that his suspicions were well founded.

Fruitlessly he dials the Chateau Marmont, the Sunset Marquis, the Four Seasons, the Bel-Air, the Bel Age and the Peninsula. Maybe it's not too late. Maybe if he can reach her in L.A., he can stop her from doing what he fears she has already done. Between calls he searches all the drawers for cigarettes—which he gave up a year ago—and finally finds a pack of horribly stale Newports that someone left in the apartment. He lights one from the stove and thinks, Wait a minute, who smokes Newports? No one he knows. And Phil has never smoked. Jesus, she's been entertaining black guys in the apartment? No—wait, it could be a girl who smokes New-ports. One of Phil's friends. What friends? Who are her friends? He realizes that Philomena has very few girlfriends. Suddenly it seems dangerous to have so few friends. Who is your boyfriend supposed to call when he can't find you? Collin remembers something his sister once said: “Beware the woman who doesn't like other women; she's probably generalizing from her own character.”

Flashback

“Why don't we ask Katrinka and her boyfriend for dinner?”

“You ask them. The three of you can go out. Or better yet, just the two of you. You and Katrinka.”

“I thought you liked Katrinka.”

“I used to. Till I found out she was a liar.”

“What did she lie about?”

“Lots of things.”

“Like what?”

“Like she said you were coming on to her, trying to get her to meet you and stuff.”

“She said that?”

“Uh-huh.”

At this point Collin was hard-pressed to speak up in Katrinka's defense. In fact, it had seemed to him that she was always flirtatious, and he had been aware at the time that he was not actively discouraging it. And so he did not really want to probe any deeper into the matter. And once again the two of them, Collin and Philomena, dined à deux.

Panic

The cigarette tastes so bad he immediately lights another one.

On a sudden inspiration, he rushes back to the bathroom and searches the cabinet beneath the sink, then the bedside table, then her lingerie drawer, scattering panties and bras to the winds. He looks under the bed, and in the soap dish in the shower, and finally admits that her diaphragm is not in the apartment.

Collin dials his sister, Brooke. Perhaps he hopes she will convince him that his fears are groundless.

She can only say she is sorry, though her concern is genuine enough to provide a momentary balm.

“I sit down,” he says. “Then I stand up, and if I could I'd climb the goddamn walls and hang from the ceiling, but that wouldn't be any good, either. I don't want to be in the apartment another minute, but I don't want to leave in case she calls, and I don't want to be alone, but I can't think of anybody I could stand to be with, and I can't stand myself.”

“Why don't you come over here?” Brooke proposes. Mercifully, she does not remind him that there are people far worse off than he is. Until recently she was doing postgraduate work in quantum physics at Rockefeller University, but she is on an extended hiatus, crippled by depression and an acute sensitivity to human suffering. She still has nightmares about Bosnia. Collin's sister is like one of those bubble children born with a defective immune system; she does not possess that protective membrane which filters out the noise and pain of other creatures. She is utterly porous. She told him recently that the average weight loss among adult residents of Sarajevo after seven hundred days of siege was twenty-five pounds, thereby giving her own