How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (25 page)

“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 dietary habits a symbolic dimension, but she's been starving herself on and off since the Vietnam War.

When Collin reaches his sister's apartment and sees her face, he comes apart like a three-dollar umbrella in a gale. Brooke scoops up the wrecked steel ribs and shredded black nylon and walks the whole mess inside.

When he has regained his composure, she is boiling water in the former coat closet that passes as a kitchen.

“I didn't know you knew how to boil water,” he says.

“You're thinking of Mom,” she says. “I learned this in prep school. Actually, it's not as difficult as it looks.”

“Just please don't say I'm better off without her.”

“Only because it would arouse your chivalrous instincts. I have no desire to provoke you into defending her.” She looks like the poster child for anorexia, in the oversized Middlebury sweatshirt that Collin gave her about twelve years ago, with her hair swept back in a ponytail, her thin freckled hand resting on the handle of the kettle. If only he were allowed to fall in love with his sister, maybe they could save each other.

“She took her diaphragm, Brooke.”

Brooke sighs, nodding gravely. “Could it be she was just anticipating the possibility that her plane might go down, stranding her in a remote snowbound region with five or six male survivors who might force her to have sex? And, thoughtfully, she didn't want to be pregnant with some nameless homunculus when the snow finally melted and she was at last rescued and reunited with you, her only true love?”

“What about disease, for Christ's sake? If she was so concerned about me, she could have carried a gross of triple-strength condoms.”

“It's possible she packed those, too. God, you smell like Lynchburg, Tennessee.”

“I've been drinking.”

“I'm shocked.”

“It doesn't help.”

“I wish you'd tell that to Dad.”

She hands him a Beethoven mug full of steaming water floating a green herbal-tea bag. Collin slaps his hand against the wall. “I don't understand how she could be so eager to run off and fuck some other guy when I have to beg to get it once a week. It's not fair.”

“I know.”

A Parable

Later, Brooke strokes her brother's hair. “Remember how we could never get Rogue to eat his dog food? Remember the only thing that would get Rogue to eat? Clio. As soon as she stuck her whiskers in his bowl, he went wild. He'd bark and growl and run in circles around the bowl till she'd had her nibble, then he'd rush in and devour every last bit of it.”

Collin takes the point, but is too unhappy to acknowledge it.

“When I talked to you in August, you said you supposed that you should get married but that
you
didn't really want to. Hardly the stuff of sonnets and
chansons
. But now that someone's got his nose in your bowl you're howling. I hate to say it, but this is a guy thing. You boys think you want virgins, but what you really want is to put your peepees where the other peepees have been.”

“Why can't I just marry you,” Collin asks.

A Call from Mom

“Hi, honey. How's every little thing with you?” The annual parental Manhattan pilgrimage commences the day after tomorrow.

“Swell,” I say. Mom has such a dreamy and ethereal disposition that I try not to puncture the bubble. The last, miraculous child of ancient parents, she grew up in an atmosphere of benign and privileged neglect in Charleston, then wafted through Bennington until my father brought her to ground, briefly, after a mixer at Williams. When he graduated, a few months later, they married and moved into my paternal grandfather's house in Florida, where Mom resumed the life she'd led as a child—painting landscapes, tending the garden and riding. One hates to worry her.

“What do you want for Christmas,” she asks.

I can't think of anything I want from central Florida, except maybe a lemon to suck on. “Just your own sweet self,” I say, pouring myself another drink.

A Typical Morning in the West Village

10 a.m.: Collin wakes. Headache. Remembers that Philomena has abandoned him and is waking with someone else. Heartache. Back to sleep.

11:15: Wakes again. Realizes that Philomena is still gone. Guilt at sleeping so late. Crawls out of bed. Surveys disorderly, depraved bed-roomscape. Vows to clean this up. Soon.

11:20: Showers. No shampoo. No soap. No toilet paper. Mental note to buy some. Files it next to yesterday's identical mental note.

11:45: Newsstand for the
Times
and the
Post
. The
Times
because Collin is a serious guy and the
Post
because he's not.

11:48 a.m.-12:30 p.m.: Bus Stop Coffee Shop, consuming coffee, bagel and newsprint. Peace talks in Dayton. Anna Nicole Smith redundantly in a coma. Whitney threatens to dump Bobby Brown unless he stays at the Betty Ford Clinic.

12:48: At his desk examining mail: Gay Men's Health Crisis, Amnesty International, second notice from the phone company, already ten days overdue, and—what's this?—a chain letter received about a week ago:

Chain Letter

WITH LOVE ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE

This paper has been sent to you for good luck. The original is in New England. It has been around the world nine times. You will receive good luck within four days of receiving this letter provided you send it on. This is no joke. Do not send money, faith has no price
.

Do not keep this letter. It must leave your hands within 96 hours. An R.A.F. Officer received $470,000. Jon Eliot received $40,000 and lost it because he broke the chain. While in the Philippines, George Hish lost his wife fifty-one days after receiving the letter. He had failed to circulate the letter. However, before her death he had received $7,775,000.00
.

Please send twenty copies. After a few days you will get a surprise. This is true even if you are not superstitious. Do note the following: Constantine Dias received the chain in 1953. He asked his secretary to make twenty copies and send them. A few days later he won the lottery of two million dollars
.

Dolan Fairchild received the letter, and not believing, he threw the letter away. Nine days later he died
.

Do not ignore this. It works
.

The letter is signed “St. Jude.”

Is this the source of Collin's calamity? He broke the chain? What if he had made twenty copies and mailed them out last week? This shrill imperative improbably strikes home. In his bereaved, pathetic, tenderized state Collin is almost prepared to believe in the capricious and personalized fate assigned to him by this otherwise innocent-looking piece of Xerox paper. “Collin McNab left the letter sitting on his desk. A week after he received it, his girlfriend packed up her diaphragm and disappeared. Two weeks later he was run over by a taxicab.” Maybe it's not too late. Maybe if he sent it out now …

1:43: Calls Chip Ralston's manager in L.A. Secretary puts him on hold. And then over the receiver come the unendurable strains of Rod Stewart's “Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?” After Collin has listened to the song three times, a voice breaks in.

“Collin, how are you? Where are you, in New York? How's the weather? Snowing yet? Sleet? Seventy-eight degrees and sunny here. So how's it going with Mr. Chip? You guys hitting it off okay?”

He explains that it's not going, that he can't locate the greatest thespian of his generation, that his deadline is less than a week away and he hasn't even talked to his alleged subject. Ralston's manager evinces surprise and dismay. He explains that Chip has been terribly busy researching his new role, but he, the manager, will absolutely have Chip call him today. Tomorrow at the latest.

2:45: Shuffles to the newsstand for a pack of Seven Star. He hasn't really started smoking again, just a temporary thing till he gets through this crisis. It comes back to him, though, no question. Inhale, exhale. Like riding a bike. Suddenly worried he might be missing a phone call from Philomena. Hurries back.

2:51 p.m.: No messages.

3:13 p.m.: In an interlude of self-disgust, Collin wallows in shame at the sheer worthlessness of his life. All around him the city hums with purposive activity and commerce while he sinks into a slough of sloth and despond. His life has no purpose and no direction. No wonder Philomena has left him.

Chain Letter, Cont.

Collin McNab left the letter sitting on his desk. A week after he received it, his girlfriend packed up her diaphragm and disappeared. Two weeks later Collin discovered the letter. He sent out twenty copies and his girlfriend returned and said she loved him. It seems she had been hit by a taxicab in a foreign city and suffered a case of amnesia. The day after her boyfriend mailed this letter, she regained her memory and came home. The next day, Collin found a paper bag on the street containing $2,830,520 in cash. They were married a week later and now divide their time between St. Barts and Aspen
.

Miscegenation Speculation

At last something Collin can use: the first high-profile marriage of a Hollywood sex goddess to a Japanese billionaire. Thinking that this particular prospect nicely combines his underutilized background in Japanese studies with his beat as celebrity chronicler, he tries to interest Jillian Crowe in an essay on this subject. Shades on top of her head, she asks, “Collin, darling, honestly, do I look like the editor of
The New York Review of Books
to you?”