How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (3 page)

You approach the man on the loading dock. He stops working and watches you. You feel that there is something wrong with the way your legs are moving.

“Bread.” This is what you say to him. You meant to say something more, but this is as much as you can get out.

“What was your first clue?” he says. He is a man who has served his country, you think, a man with a family somewhere outside the city. Small children. Pets. A garden.

“Could I have some? A roll or something?”

“Get out of here.”

The man is about your size, except for the belly, which you don't have. “I'll trade you my jacket,” you say. It is one hundred percent raw silk from Paul Stuart. You take it off, show him the label.

“You're crazy,” the man says. Then he looks back into the warehouse. He picks up a bag of hard rolls and throws them at your feet. You hand him the jacket. He checks the label, sniffs the jacket, then tries it on.

You tear the bag open and the smell of warm dough rushes over you. The first bite sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.

1982

Smoke

That summer in New York, everyone was wearing yellow ties. The stock market was coming into a long bull run; over plates of blackened redfish, artists and gourmet-shop proprietors exchanged prognostications on the Dow. And on the sidewalks noble dark men from Senegal were selling watches, jewelry and fake Gucci bags. No one seemed to know how or why these Africans had come to town—certainly not the police, who tried with little success to explain in English the regulations governing street vendors and finally sent out a special French-speaking squad, who received the same blank smiles. It was a mystery. Also that summer, Corrine and Russell Callahan quit smoking.

Russell Callahan was not one of those wearing a tie. He had worn a tie to work his first day at the publishing house and sensed suspicion among his colleagues, as if this had signaled aspirations to a higher position, or a lunch date with someone already elevated. The polite bohemian look of the junior staff suited him just fine, and abetted his belief that he was engaged in the enterprise of literature. On clear days he saw himself as an underpaid hack in a windowless annex of a third-rate institution. After two promotions he presided over a series of travel books composed of plagiarism and speculation in equal parts. The current title,
Grand Hotels of America
, was typical: He and his associates plundered the literature in print, sent letters requesting brochures and then wrote colorful and informative descriptions designed to convey the impression of eyewitness reporting. Certain adjectives became severely dog-eared in the process. The words
comfortable, elegant
and
spacious
encountered outside the office made Russell feel queasy and unclean. In May, a month after the current project had been launched, two years after he'd started work, he'd been assigned a college intern, an eager young woman named Tracey Wheeler. As a mentor, he found himself assuming the air of a grizzled veteran, and Tracey's enthusiasm helped to focus his cynicism about his job.

Corrine worked as an analyst in a brokerage house. If she had been a man, she would've had an easier time of it her first year. She nearly quit on several occasions. But once she became comfortable with the work, she found that the men around her were vaguely embarrassed by the old cigars-and-brandy etiquette, and vulnerable to the suspicion that she and her female colleagues possessed a new rule book. Gifted with mathematical genius and a wildly superstitious nature, she found herself precisely equipped to understand the stock market. She felt near the center of things. The sweat and blood of labor, the rise and fall of steel pistons, the test-tube matchmaking of chemicals and cells—all the productive energies of the world, coded in binary electronic impulses, coursed through the towers of downtown Manhattan, accessible to her at any moment on the screen of her terminal. Corrine came to appreciate aspects of a style that had at first intimidated her: She started playing squash again, and began to enjoy the leathery, wood-paneled, masculine atmosphere of the clubs where she sometimes lunched with her superiors, under the increasingly benign gaze of dead rich men in gilt frames.

Corrine and Russell had met in college. They were married the summer of graduation, and in New York their East Side apartment became a supper club for former classmates. As a married couple, the Callahans were pioneers of the state of adulthood, but they were also indulgent hosts. They put out crystal with dinner and weren't appalled if a piece of stemware got smashed toward morning. Men who had found Corrine daunting in college, when she was an erotic totem figure, could now flirt with her safely, while women often confided in Russell, drawing him into the bedroom for urgent conferences. He had been known as a poet in college, his verse tending toward the Byronic. Now people who'd hardly known him at school fished up from the yearbook file of their memories words like
sensitive
and
artistic
when his name was mentioned.

A Memorial Day party had reached the stage at which the empty glasses were becoming ashtrays when Nancy Tanner drew Russell into the bedroom. As she tugged him by his fingers, he watched the thick tongue of blond hair licking the back of her shoulders and the edge of her red dress, and remembered again something he'd thought of earlier—that he'd actually slept with her one night in college.

“I guess you've noticed I haven't exactly been myself tonight.”

She sat down on the bed and looked up at Russell, who thought that Nancy had been exactly herself, trolling her scooped neckline under the eyes of his friends, her laugh audible from any corner of the living room.

“My stepfather just went into the hospital with cancer. It's really got me down.”

“That's rough.” Russell didn't know what else to say, and Nancy seemed to be bearing up anyway.

“He used to take me to the Museum of Natural History. I always wanted to see the Eskimos, and I'd think how nice it would be to live in a little round igloo. I was a pretty ugly kid, but he'd call me his ‘beauty queen.’” Actual tears were welling in her eyes, and Russell began to believe that she was genuinely upset, and to feel guilty for having doubted it.

“I haven't told anybody,” she said, reaching for his hand, which he surrendered. “I just wanted you to know.”

“I find it hard to believe the part about your being an ugly kid,” Russell said, finally summoning some conviction. She wasn't nearly as good-looking as Corrine, he reminded himself, impressed with his own loyalty.

She stood up and dabbed at her eyes with her free hand. “Thank you, Russell.” She leaned forward and kissed him. In temperature and duration, it was a little beyond what the situation called for.

“Do you have a cigarette,” she asked when she drew away.

In the hallway, Bruce Davidoff was pounding on the bathroom door. Seeing Russell, he said, “Twenty minutes they've been in there.” Back in the living room, Corrine was talking with Rick Cohen, cupping her hand in front of her to catch the ashes from her cigarette, nodding vigorously, her smoky exhalations dissipating like contrails of her rapid speech. He liked to watch her at parties, eavesdrop on her conversations with other men. At these times she seemed more like the woman he had proposed to than the one with whom he watched the eleven o'clock news.

“Symbols work in the market the same way they do in literature,” Corrine was saying.

Frowning earnestly, Rick Cohen said, “I don't quite follow you there.”

Corrine considered, taking a thoughtful drag on her cigarette. “There's, like, a symbolic order of things underneath the real economy. A kind of dream life of the economy that affects the market as much as the hard facts, the stats. The secret urges and desires of consumers and producers work up toward the surface. Market analysis is like dream interpretation. One thing stands for another thing—a new hairstyle means a rise in gold and a fall in bonds.”

Rick Cohen nodded to mask his incomprehension. Russell moved toward the kitchen to check out the wine situation. Except for Corrine, the perfect hostess, who was splitting the difference, it seemed to him that the publishing people were all talking about the stock market and the financial people were talking about books and movies. By the end of the night everyone would be talking about real estate—co-ops, condominiums, summer rentals in the Hamptons. Igloos on West Seventy-ninth Street.
Spacious, comfortable, elegant
.

After the last guest had been shoveled into the elevator, Corrine and Russell sat on the couch in the living room and had a cigarette before turning in. Russell put a side of Hank Williams on the stereo to wind them down. Corrine said, “God, I'm tired. I don't think I can keep this up.”

“Keep what up?”

“Everything.” She stubbed out her butt and winced at the ashtray. “We've got to quit smoking. I feel like I'm dying.”

Russell looked down at the cigarette between his fingers, as if it might suddenly show overt signs of hostility. He knew what she meant. It was a nasty habit. They had talked about quitting before, and Russell had always believed that someday they would.

“You're right,” he said. “Let's quit.”

To mark the end of the smoking era, Corrine insisted, they should hunt up all the cigarettes in the apartment and break them into pieces. Russell would just as soon have waited till morning, but he got up and joined her in the ritual, leaving one pack in the pocket of a blazer in his closet for insurance.

As they were loading the dishwasher, she said, “Phil Crane was hitting on me tonight.”

“What do you mean, ‘hitting on’ you?”

“I mean he made it pretty clear that if I was interested, he was, too.” She sounded sad, as if she'd lived in a world where until tonight infidelity hadn't existed.

“That son of a bitch. What did he say?”

“It doesn't matter.” She then added she was sorry she'd mentioned it, and made him promise he wouldn't say anything to Phil.

Later, in bed, she said, “Have you ever been unfaithful?”

“Of course not,” he said, and then remembered kissing Nancy Tanner in the bedroom.

Russell had first caught sight of Corrine at the top of a fraternity-house staircase, leaning forward over the banister with a cigarette in her fingers, looking down at a party that until that moment had seemed to Russell the climax of his recent escape from home and parents. He'd been drinking everything in sight, huddling with his new roommates, getting ridiculously witty at the expense of girls he was just working up the courage to talk to. Then he saw Corrine at the top of the stairs. He felt he knew her, everything essential in her character, though he'd never seen her before. He stifled his first impulse, to point her out to his roommates, not sure that they would see what he saw. Russell believed in his own secret aristocracy, a refinement of soul and taste, which he had learned to keep to himself, and which much later he would almost cease to believe in. Later he would realize that most of us believe in our ability to read character from physiognomy. But now, while she ignored him from her aerie atop the staircase, he read intelligence into her eyes, breeding into her nose, sensuality into her lips, self-confidence into her languid pose. As he watched, a boy he recognized as a campus icon appeared on the landing behind her, along with another couple. She turned, and though he couldn't see her expression, though they didn't touch, the air of familiarity and possession between the two was unmistakable; and then both couples disappeared from view, retreating to the real party, the actual center of the world, an action that suddenly revealed the event on the lower floor to be a beer brawl, a congress of the second-rate.

The social and academic accomplishments of his first semester, unknown to Corrine, were committed in her name. He didn't have to sleuth hard for news of her, since she formed part of the group everyone talked about, which made her seem more desirable and less accessible, as did her liaison with Dino Signorelli. Signorelli was a basketball star and a druggie, a formidable combination. Tall, lanky and slightly bowlegged, he was alleged to be good-looking, although Russell disputed this judgment as he bided his time. He had four years.

Second semester, Corrine was in his English class, and without ever actually meeting, they became acquainted. At registration the next fall he ran into her coming out of the administration building and she greeted him as if they were friends. It was a hot September day. Russell admired the tan slopes of her legs, imagined that he could feel radiant heat from the waves of her long dark hair. He kept waiting for her to say good-bye. She kept talking.

They talked through lunch at the inn, filling the ashtray and emptying beer mugs. They talked about everything, but he couldn't stop thinking about her mouth, her lips on a cigarette, the clouds of smoke that she exhaled seeming to him the visible trace of inner fires. Still smoking and talking, they found themselves in Russell's dorm room, where they suddenly fell on each other—a crisis of lips and tongues and limbs that somehow stopped just short of the desired conclusion. She was still going out with Dino, and he was involved with a girl named Maggie Sloan.

Their romance fell dormant for two years, till Corrine called up one night and asked if she could come over. She said she'd broken up with Dino, although she had failed to make this clear to Dino, who began calling up and then coming over to shout drunken threats across the quad soon after Corrine had holed up in Russell's room. Although he was worried about Dino, Russell savored the atmosphere of siege, which lent an extra dimension of urgency, danger and illegitimacy to their union. He broke up with Maggie Sloan over the phone. Crying, Maggie appealed to the weight of tradition—the two years they'd been going out. Russell, with Corrine at his side, was sympathetic but firm.

Outside the dorm, it was a prematurely cold New England fall; red and yellow leaves slipped from the trees and twisted in the wind. For three days they left the room only to get food, staying in bed most of the time, drinking St. Pauli Girls, smoking Marlboros and talking. Russell had been a party smoker before, but Corrine smoked heavily, and he gradually caught up with her. They smoked before bed, after making love and then in the morning before they got out of bed, while Corrine told Russell her dreams in minute detail. Her imagination was curiously literal. She remembered everything—what people had been wearing, inconsistencies and illogic that seemed to surprise and annoy her a little, as if she expected dreams not to be so dreamlike. Her view of the waking world, though, was somewhat fantastic. Certain dates and names were fraught with unlikely significance for her, and, much more than Russell, the class poet, she believed in the power of words. When, after a week, Russell asked her to marry him, she made him solemnly promise never to use the word
divorce
, even in jest.

He might have taken her acceptance of his proposal to be impulsive, her renunciation of Dino to be precipitate, but he'd been in love with her for three years.

The campus seemed to split down the middle over the issue. Some sided with the new couple, some with Maggie Sloan and Dino, whose senior basketball season was visibly affected. He became a loud and dangerous regular at the pub, and one night, while Corrine and Russell were at a movie, watching French people smoke cigarettes and cheat on each other, he trashed Russell's room. Corrine and Russell developed a repertoire of Dino jokes. The day of their wedding, in June, two weeks after graduation, Dino was in a car wreck that landed him in the hospital for three weeks. Two years after graduation they heard that he was working as a representative for a feed and grain distributor in South Dakota.