Story of My Life

by Jay McInerney

  I call Dean again and get his machine. Story of my life.

  I don’t want to be around to spoil the tender moment, Alex meeting Jeannie for the first time, so I fish out another quarter and call up Whitney to have a drink with her. Then I go back to the apartment and tell Jeannie I’ll meet them later for dinner, but Whitney and I get really blasted and I keep trying Dean and getting his machine and so finally I go, okay, two can play that game.

  The next morning I call up the apartment, I’m hungover as hell, and I check to make sure they’re awake, I don’t really feel like walking in on them when they’re rolling around in bed, and Jeannie answers the phone all giggly like a newly minted ex-virgin or something and she says, Alison, come on up for breakfast, which is a zany idea, I don’t think anybody’s ever eaten breakfast in our apartment before. But then I remember, Alex loves the big breakfast production number, eggs and bacon and toast, the works, he’d cook up a storm most mornings, scramble five or six eggs just for himself, I’d be sitting there moaning over coffee and I’d say you’re such a pig, Alex, and he’d say, I need my eggs if I’m gonna keep my baby satisfied.

  I wonder if he said that to Jeannie.

  I’ve got to say this is bugging me a little. Okay, I admit it. The funny thing is, I couldn’t even stand the idea of sex, of having men touch me, until Alex.

  He greets me at the door and gives me a big hug and even after everything it’s good to feel his body and I know that I can forgive him, whatever happened it’s no big deal, he’s still there for me somehow, a way that Jeannie can’t touch. He looks great, tan and dark and beefy. Jeannie kind of peeks out from the bedroom.

  So, I go, when Alex finally lets go of me.

  So what? says Alex.

  You know, I say.

  Jeannie says, I’m not the kind of girl who kisses and tells.

  Right, I say, can I remind you who you’re talking to here, I’m like your best friend and roommate, the one you always tell about your so-called kissing.

  Let’s eat breakfast, Jeannie says.

  We decide to go out for a walk, Alex has never really seen New York, so we take him to Bergdorf’s and make him buy us both some perfume. Then we go to Trader Vic’s and have a couple of scorpions, we tell Alex about our wild weekend at the Plaza and then me and Alex tell Jeannie about the time we went to the Fontainebleau in Miami and flooded our room. Thinking about the weekend in Miami gives me a great idea, flooding the room wasn’t half of what we did. Let’s go to Forty-second Street, I say, and Alex is totally up for it, Jeannie’s not so sure but she’s really careful about showing it because she doesn’t want it to suddenly become me and Alex again, she wants to stake her own claim.

  So we walk down to Times Square. We’re walking down Fifth and after a while Alex goes, what are all these people doing collapsed in heaps on the street? I guess we’ve been passing a lot of bag ladies and bums, and I’m like, I don’t know, they’re everywhere, and Jeannie goes, we’ve got a guy who sort of lives under the awning of our apartment building, which is true. When Alex sees the big black guy with the ski parka and the seeing-eye dog selling pencils out in front of Saks he stops and starts in on this big conversation, asking the guy where he’s from and stuff. Jeannie’s sort of embarrassed but I think it’s cool, this is what I love about Alex, he’s such a nut. Finally he buys a pencil and gives the man two bucks.

  Alex is the total tourist, he sees the Empire State Building way down Fifth and he’s like, wow, let’s go up, and he’s amazed when Jeannie and I say we’ve never been up it. So we promise we’ll take him but first we go into this sex shop on Forty-second over by Port Authority after dodging all the drug dealers and pimps and Japanese tourists. There’s five or six guys drooling over the magazine racks and they all sort of freak out when Jeannie and I walk in. Jeannie freaks out a little herself, she can’t help looking like a nice girl from Princeton, New Jersey. Alex and I go over and start checking out the magazines, showing each other pictures and reading the titles. I pick up Young Girls and say, I’m going to buy this for my father.

  And Alex says, yeah, really.

  I can tell he’s getting into being with me, we go back too far and too deep for Jeannie to understand and she’s beginning to get a little upset about it.

  I drag Alex over to the counter and make him check out the sex toys with me. The counterman is looking at us like he’s afraid we’re from Neptune or something. We start asking him to show us the stuff and how they work and what the features are. Meanwhile the perverts are slinking out of the store, they can’t take it.

  Finally we decide to get the four-pack vibrator sets, one for Jeannie and one for me, it comes with a battery pack and four attachments, the Super Stud, the French Tickler, the Rear-Ender and the Old Faithful. Alex pays. Anything to make my girls happy, he says.

  We take Alex to Sardi’s for a drink, we’re trying to make sure we don’t miss any of the touristy things to do. Alex wants to see some stars but the bartender tells us it’s too early. The stars come out at night, he says and laughs like this is a great piece of wit. He’s not bad-looking, though, maybe thirty, looks a little bit like Christopher Reeve. I don’t even have to ask if he’s an actor, you can tell from the way he talks he’s been taking voice. He’s overdoing the whole chest thing. We show the bartender our new toys and he gives us a free drink. When we’re leaving he asks for my phone number, so I give him the Midnite Escort Service number, I memorized it for these kind of occasions.

  Then we take a cab over to the Empire State Building and pay our two bucks and wait around in the lobby for the elevator with all these like families, moms and kids. Once we get on the elevator it smells like milk, I kid you not, and some little red-headed boy grabs my knee and gets gum all over my jeans. Freckle-faced, he looks like something out of a peanut butter ad. Another little kid starts bawling. I don’t know, they talk about this maternal instinct, I can’t say it’s ever really hit me, but then I don’t think it ever hit my mother either. I think she was just too lazy to put in her diaphragm some nights.

  The ride up makes me really nauseous, my stomach gets left behind on the lower floors. We have to change elevators to get to the very top. Alex has his arm around Jeannie. She’s telling him about her job and he’s looking fascinated. It’s really amazing the things we pretend to be interested in when we want to sleep with somebody. Sometimes I think conversation between girls and guys is all just foreplay.

  To take my mind off how nauseous I’m feeling I say, hey Alex, what are the three great lies?

  It’s weird, he comes up with the same two I already know, except his second lie is a little different than my version, it goes, I promise I’ll pull out before I come, you can bet the moms in the elevator are really freaked out by this conversation. But he can’t think of the third one either.

  Finally we get up to the observation deck and pile out of the kiddie capsule. I’m really dizzy. Jeannie and Alex rush over to the fence to look out, there’s like this chicken wire all around the platform and blue sky beyond. The chicken wire’s so nobody will jump, I guess, and it reminds me of this thing I saw in a book of photos from Life magazine, this picture of a car parked on the street, the roof of the car molded around the body of a girl who’d jumped from the Empire State Building. She was wearing a long billowing skirt that fanned out like a huge lily across the top of the car, the kind of dress you’d wear to a ball or a fancy dinner, she was lying face down so you didn’t necessarily figure out what was wrong at first, it was as if she was resting or floating in a pool, a girl without a trouble in the world. . . .

  I don’t look, I stand right in the middle of the observation deck and throw up.

  9

  Derby Day

  Thank God I never slept with Tom Walker. That makes at least one guy in the room.

  We’re over at Tom’s place for his Kentucky Derby party and the past is coming back to haunt me. The gang’s all here. I mean, I can handle it, no problem, but the guys are all acting
weird. I never said I was a virgin, did I? Somebody tell me if I’m wrong.

  I come with Dean, and Chuck Harnist is here, and he’s jealous of Dean anyway, Chuck starts making these cracks like saying he’s redecorated his apartment and then going, Alison, you remember how ugly it used to be, don’t you? The ceiling, for instance? And Dean says something about redecorating Chuck’s face—for a smart guy Dean can act just like a dumb guy sometimes. But Dean’s got troubles, the bond market’s going to hell or something and he’s really worried.

  So Chucky’s with some girl he must have met in Las Vegas, although actually she’s from Texas, even her lips look like they’ve got silicone implants. Her name’s Tina, but she tells me her friends call her Teeny, and she kind of looks at her chest when she says this and she laughs and jiggles her tits and that pretty much tells you more than you’d ever want to know about her.

  And I go, yeah? Chuck’s friends call him Teeny, too, but they’re not kidding.

  And she goes, wow, really? What a coincidence! And Chuck turns a nice salmon color and gives me this lethal look.

  And then who shows up but Skip Pendleton, just the guy I wanted to see, and amazingly he’s not with anybody. I mean, for Skip this is news, this is practically gossip, you know how some men wouldn’t think of going out of the house without a tie, well Skip wouldn’t think of showing up at a party without at least one vacuous bimbo on his arm. And he wears the girl for the same reason as the tie, for decoration. Maybe there’s somebody here he wants to nail. I don’t know, the only unattached women are Didi, Jeannie and Whitney and they’re all my friends and wouldn’t let him touch them with a ten-foot pole. Well, maybe with a ten-foot pole . . . I remember I read somewhere that outlaw guy John Dillinger had one that was about a foot and a half long and it’s preserved in the Smithsonian or someplace. Now that’s what I call the Washington Monument.

  Skip is giving me these looks, which I do not appreciate at all, these fuck-me eyes. And he’s acting really strange with Dean, talking down to him like he’s a kid or something, lecturing him about horses and race track society, which is really bugging me. Jesus. My old boyfriend, Alex, he told me this thing that guys say about girls—find ’em, fuck ’em, fight ’em, forget ’em. So if that’s what guys say, how come these guys— these so-called men—can’t fuck me and forget me? I mean why do they all have to act like crazy Latins afterwards, hot tempers and long memories.

  Anyway, Jeannie and I are sort of friends again, but I’m still pissed off at her and unless I can come up with some money soon I’m screwed. The big news on Jeannie, though, is that she’s madly in love with Alex. I knew this would happen. Apparently they screwed twenty ways till Sunday—Alex and Jeannie—and Jeannie figured out what she’d been missing. So now she’s in lust with Alex, she thinks it’s this great romance but I hate to tell her, Alex has this problem with his attention span and I don’t think Jeannie’s going to be able to keep him interested past yesterday. Meanwhile we’ve still got this money problem. Francesca’s going to loan me a thousand, she’s the best, but I still need at least a thousand more. She’s at some celebrity derby party but she’s supposed to meet up with us later.

  Didi’s boring the shit out of everybody talking about rehab. Cousin Phil actually managed to drag her in the other night. The way he did it was by keeping her up for two days, feeding her so much coke that she felt even worse than she normally does. Then he let her sleep for a few hours, then woke her up and wouldn’t let her go back to sleep till she promised to go in the next day and talk to the shrink. Phil says the preop cost him about a thousand bucks in blow and three days’ work, but Didi’s parents are going to pay him back. So now she’s seeing this shrink in the afternoon and going to group therapy at night. It’s really great, I mean, here she is, more or less awake in the middle of the afternoon, and she’s talking about her drug problem and how she’s got to stop. She talks about it all night long, in between lines. It’s a start, I guess.

  From my point of view the only thing good that’s come out of Didi’s rehab is that she doesn’t look quite so good as she used to, she doesn’t necessarily look like a sex goddess the last few days, even though she’s still doing drugs it’s like something crazy has gone out of her eyes, the tension’s gone from her body and it’s sort of defused her looks or something. I don’t know, maybe it’s my imagination, but the guys aren’t really flipping out over her today like they used to.

  So Becca shows up at the last minute, right before post time. She’s already called about eighteen times just to let us know that she’s coming, finally she dances through the door in this micro lycra red dress—just a sheath really, perfect for that 3:00 A.M. nightclub appearance, but like even I wouldn’t be caught dead walking around in this thing in the middle of the day. But the boys love it and it gets so quiet for a minute you can hear the sound of tongues dropping and saliva splashing on the floor.

  Becca’s dragging some preppy guy in her wake, all neat and tidy in his blue blazer and bright green pants, but he seems a little dazed. This must be Everett, pigeon of the month, the poor son of a bitch. He looks like a harmless version of Skip. I hope to God for his sake he’s hanging on to his gold card for dear life, has his stock certificates locked in the safety deposit box.

  Hey y’all, Becca goes, doing her southern girl thing for the occasion. Who’s winning? she says. What quarter is it? I just love these sporting events. They’re so sweaty.

  All the guys laugh. Am I like missing something, or is this funny?

  The prep goes, hi, I’m Everett, but nobody gives a shit. Everybody’s colliding and tripping, trying to give Rebecca a seat and get her a drink. Becca’s obviously wired and it’s only like three in the afternoon or something. Really sick. I wonder how much she’s got.

  We’re all sitting around Tombo’s loft drinking mint juleps in front of this big projection TV. Tom owns a gallery or something, I don’t know, he’s from Kentucky. Big ugly canvases on the wall, wacked-out Italian furniture, great bathrooms though, both with phones, I could easily live in the big one. Maybe he needs a roommate. Somebody young, blonde and beautiful to answer his phone. Two out of three, anyway—I used to be pretty good-looking, way back in the olden days before Becca walked in the room.

  I don’t know, lately I’ve had this fantasy about moving in with Dean, you know, but I just couldn’t see giving up my independence like that, it would practically be like marriage and anyway he’s never asked.

  Becca takes me aside and says, I can get you three thousand for the pearls.

  And I’m like, not for sale.

  Why not? she goes. You never wear them.

  And I go, Gran was the only one in our whole family I ever liked. Gran and Pops.

  Don’t be a bitch, Alison, she goes, I’m trying to help you here.

  Who’s buying them? I say.

  And she goes, just a friend.

  I ask her if she has any blow and she says she just ran out but she’ll try to get some more.

  Right.

  Becca’s lie reminds me of this story I heard from a friend of mine who’s a musician. He’s working on an album with, let’s just say this Famous Blind Musician, right? My friend’s a session man, plays great guitar. So he’s been up half the night laying down tracks with the FBM and meanwhile every half hour or so the FBM walks over into the corner and snorts from a vial—doesn’t even bother to leave the room. Like, I don’t know, because he can’t see nobody else can? And after a couple times of this my friend goes up and says, hey man, can I have a blast? Because, you know, he’s tired and all and they’re working together all night. So the FBM says, blast of what? And my friend is like, a blast of that blow. And the FBM goes, I don’t do drugs. Even though he’s holding it right there in his hand. But I don’t know, he’s blind, so it’s not like my friend can point to it and say, there! Well, this happens two or three more times, and the FBM keeps saying he doesn’t have any. So the next time this happens, my friend finally goes up and taps the
spoon as the FBM’s putting it in his nose and says, if you don’t have any drugs what’s this? And the FBM goes—hey, you’re right, what can I say? So he offers my friend some and eventually my friend says, why did you say you didn’t have any? And the FBM goes, what can I say? This shit makes you lie.

  Meanwhile, Skip’s asking Tom if he has Trivial Pursuit and Tom says he doesn’t and Skip goes, that’s too bad, and then Whitney jumps in and says, yeah, I love that game, and just because I know that Skip takes like this great pride in his Trivial Pursuit skills I go, Whitney is a really good player, and Skip says he’s the best—the macho asshole—and Whitney, she went to Yale or someplace like that, she says, someday we’ll see and Skip goes, I’d kill you. What a total jerk. I mean, as if we care, for one thing.

  Shh, quiet everybody, Tom goes. We’re coming up on post time. This old boy takes his derby seriously. Or at least he pretends to. I don’t know, I think it’s just a way of having a little bit of identity, you know? Like wearing suspenders all the time or collecting art or something. I mean, it seems like everybody’s always doing something to impress everybody else. Anyway, he’s got all these complicated bets going with the other guys and they’re all acting very serious and involved, even Dean. The weird thing is, I don’t think he even knew the Kentucky Derby was happening until yesterday when I invited him to this party.