How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (40 page)

Afterward, she wrapped herself in the bedspread and walked out to the deck. The sky had turned gray in the east and the dark surface of the ocean was stippled with silver sunlight. The coke was wearing off, and her eyeballs felt as if they were being pricked with tiny needles. She hated herself.

Eventually, A.G., in his paisley boxer shorts, holding a cigarette, joined her on the deck.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“I don't know.” He took a drag. “Probably the correct thing.”

“What's the correct thing?”

“It's what we do when we don't know what the right thing is.”

He put his arm around her and held his cigarette to her lips. She inhaled greedily, as if she believed the smoke could save her, the ember blazing and crackling between A.G.'s fingers before it faded and dimmed within a cocoon of gray ash and he tossed it away, the last sparks dying on the dewy lawn below.

2008

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author of seven novels and two collections of essays on wine, Jay McInerney is a regular contributor to
New York, The New York Times Book Review, The Independent
and
Corriere della Sera
. His short fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy
and
Granta
. In 2006,
Time
cited his 1984 debut,
Bright Lights, Big City
, as one of nine generation-defining novels of the twentieth century. He was the recipient of the 2006 James Beard Foundation's M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, and his novel
The Good Life
received the Grand Prix Littéraire de Deauville in 2007. He lives in Manhattan and in Bridgehampton, New York.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this book was set in Simoncini Garamond, a modern version by Francesco Simoncini of the type attributed to the famous Parisian type cutter Claude Garamond (ca. 1480-1561). Garamond was a pupil of Geoffroy Tory and is believed to have based his letters on the Venetian models, although he introduced a number of important differences, and it is to him we owe the letter that we know as old style. He gave to his letters a certain elegance and a feeling of movement that won for their creator an immediate reputation and the patronage of Francis I of France.

Composed by Creative Graphics
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Printed and bound by Berryville Graphics
Berryville, Virginia
Designed by M. Kristen Bearse