Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney Read Free Book Online Page B

how you feel. The lame-duck husband. You’d rather be an eagle or a falcon, pitiless and predatory among the solitary crags.
    “Aren’t you some kind of writer?” Elaine says.
    “I do some writing. I’m sort of an editor actually.”
    “Oh, God,” Theresa says, when you mention the name of the magazine. “I’ve been reading it all my life. I mean, my parents get it. I always read it at the gynecologist. What’s your name? Should I know you?” She asks you about writers and artists on the staff. You dish up a standard portion of slander and libel that would never pass the Clinger’s requirements of verification.
    Without getting too specific you imply that your job is extremely demanding and important. In the past you could often convince yourself as well as others of this, but your heart is no longer in it. You hate this posturing, even as you persist, as if it were important for these two strangers to admire you for all the wrong reasons. It’s not much, this menial job in a venerable institution, but it’s all you’ve got left.
    Once upon a time, you assumed you were very likable. That you had an attractive wife and a fairly interesting job seemed only your due. You were a good guy. You deserved some of the world’s booty. After you met Amanda and came to New York, you began to feel that you were no longer on the outside looking in. When you were growing up you suspected that everyone else had been let in on some fundamental secret which was kept from you. Others seemed to know what they were doing. This conviction grew with each new school you attended. Your father’s annual job transfers made you the perennial new kid. Every year there was a new body of lore to be mastered. The color of your bike, your socks, was always wrong. If you ever go into psychoanalysis, you will insist that the primal scene is not the encounter of parents in coitus: it takes the shape of a ring of schoolchildren, like Indians surrounding a wagon train, laughing with malice, pointing their vicious little fingers to insist upon your otherness. The scene repeated itself in schoolyards across the country. Not until you reached college, where everyone started fresh, did you begin to pick up the tricks of winning friends and influencing people. Although you became adept, you also felt that you were exercising an acquired skill, something that came naturally to others. You succeeded in faking everyone out, and never quite lost the fear that you would eventually be discovered a fraud, an impostor in the social circle. Which is just about how you feel these days. Even now, as you puff yourself up with tales of high adventure in magazine publishing, you can see Elaine’s eyes wandering out over the room, leaving you behind. She’s drinking champagne. As you watch, she dips her tongue into the tulip bowl and slides it around inside the glass.
    A woman who looks vaguely famous glances up from her table and waves. Elaine waves back. Her smile goes sour when the woman turns away.
    “Check that out,” Elaine says. “Silicone implants.”
    “I don’t know. She looks pretty damn flat to me.”
    “Not the tits—the cheeks. She’s got fucking silicone implants to make it look like she has cheekbones.”
    Tad comes back, pleased with himself. “Bingo,” he says.
    It’s somewhere past midnight. Anything that starts now is not going to end at a reasonable hour. You think about slipping out and heading home. All sorts of beneficial effects are rumored to accrue from a good night’s sleep. On the other hand, you wouldn’t mind a taste of that toot. Just enough to boost your morale.
    In a moment you are all en route to the bathroom downstairs. Tad lays out some fat lines on the toilet seat. Elaine and Theresa take their turns. Finally, Tad hands you the bill. The sweet nasal burn hits like a swallow of cold beer on a hot August day. Tad fixes another round and by the time you all troop out of the bathroom you are feeling omnipotent. You