How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (4 page)

The morning after the Memorial Day party, Corrine reminded Russell of their resolution, and for the first time since they'd known each other they had coffee without cigarettes. Russell left his first cup unfinished.

Corrine was staring wistfully at her blue Trivial Pursuit coffee mug. Somebody had given them a set of four for a wedding present—Russell tried to recall who it was. “Remember that Campbell's soup commercial?” she said. “Soup and sandwich, love and marriage, horse and carriage?”

Russell nodded. “They forgot caffeine and nicotine.”

“I've heard it helps to drink a lot of water the first few days,” Corrine said. “Cleans out the system.”

Russell got half a glass of water down before he had to leave for work. “We've got to buy you some new shirts,” Corrine said, fingering Russell's frayed collar when they were in the elevator.

“I've got plenty of shirts,” Russell said.

“We can certainly afford a few more,” Corrine replied.

One of us can, Russell thought.

At a little after eleven, Corrine called him at the office.

“How are you holding up?”

“All I can think about is cigarettes.”

“Me, too.”

Talking about it made it easier. Or else it made it harder. They weren't sure, but they agreed to call each other whenever they were feeling weak. Tracey Wheeler, Russell's intern, came over with a set of galleys she had proofread, smoking a cigarette; she must have seen him looking at it longingly.

“Do you want one?”

“No,” he said. “I've quit. At least I'm trying.” He felt sad hearing himself. The words seemed to mark the end of a chapter in his life, and made him feel older, relative to Tracey, in a way he didn't like. It sounded fussy, not at all in keeping with the swashbuckling air he assumed whenever she was around.

After Corrine hung up the phone, Duane Jones, an analyst who'd gone through training with her, came into the office and sat down. Corrine and Duane had made a habit of stealing a midmorning break together. This ritual had developed in part because they had been the only smokers in the training program. The first day of orientation she had done mental caricatures of the faces around the seminar table. Duane was
GQ subscriber, Dartmouth class officer, boxer shorts and jockstraps, lacrosse and skiing
. The fact that he smoked made him seem less buttoned-down. Now they often had lunch together, to the point that Russell was a little jealous. Russell always referred to Duane as “Dow Jones, Industrious Average.” Duane called him “the Poet.” This morning Duane sat down on the edge of the armchair across from the desk and adjusted one of his socks.

“Got any brilliant hunches this morning? Any dreams that might have a bearing on the Exchange?” He took out a new pack of Merits and slapped it against his wrist.

“Put out a heavy sell call on tobacco issues. We quit smoking.”

“Say it ain't so.
You?”

“Me and Russell both,” she said, not certain whether she was being loyal or laying off part of the blame on her husband.

Duane stood up and straightened his yellow tie. “I won't tempt you,” he said. At the door he turned and winked. “But if you change your mind …”

That night, Corrine cooked a deliberately bland meal of chicken, peas and rice. It was the first time they'd eaten at home in weeks. Corrine had read somewhere that red meat and spicy food aggravated the craving to smoke.

“I think we should try not to go out so much for a while,” Corrine said as they ate in front of the television. On a rerun
of M*A*S*H
, Hawkeye was wooing a recalcitrant nurse.

“Have you noticed that on television hardly anyone smokes?” Russell asked.

Corrine nodded. “Moratorium on French movies.”

“Absolutely.”

“And it wouldn't hurt us to cut down on our drinking.”

Russell agreed in principle, even as the ice shrank in his third drink of the evening. After ten hours of not smoking he had arrived home feeling like he'd been beaten up, and had reached immediately for the vodka.

Russell said, “The old soup-and-sandwich theorem.”

“The thing we've got to realize,” Corrine said, “is that you can't have ‘just one cigarette.’ If you break down once, you'll do it more easily the next time.”

“Right.” Russell was trying to watch
M*A*S*H
. Corrine had absolutely no television etiquette. She would talk through the first twenty-five minutes of a show and then ask Russell to explain what was going on. Her questions were a little maddening at the best of times. Tonight he was ready to hurl her out the window. Either that or grab the pack of smokes he'd left in his blazer in the closet.

“Russell?”

“Yeah?”

“Please listen just for one minute. This is important.”

He looked at her. She was wearing her earnest, small-girl-wanting-to-know-why-the-sky-is-blue expression. He normally found this look devastating.

“Did you ever,” she said, “when you were a kid, pretend that something really bad would happen to you if you did or didn't do something? You know, like if you didn't stay underwater till the far end of the pool, then somebody would die?”

“All the time,” Russell said. “Thousands died.”

“I'm serious. Let's pretend, like that, that something really bad will happen to us if we start smoking again.”

“Okay,” Russell said, turning back to the TV.

The next day, Corrine screamed at Russell for leaving his dirty socks in the bathroom sink. He got mad at her when he went to the kitchen and found the cupboards bare: How was he supposed to quit smoking if he couldn't have some toast or cereal to keep his mouth busy? She said the shopping wasn't her responsibility—she certainly brought home her share of the grocery money. Corrine stormed out of the house without saying good-bye, forgetting her briefcase. At the office, Russell bummed a cigarette from Tracey and almost smoked it out of spite, as a way of getting back at Corrine. He finally broke it in half and threw it in the wastebasket.

That night, when Corrine got home, their fight was not mentioned; they were both shy and solicitous, as if helping each other through a tropical illness. They cranked up the air conditioning and collapsed into bed at ten. Russell woke up at seven with a keen sensation of guilt. Corrine was not in bed; he heard the shower running in the bathroom. Gradually he began to recall a dream: He'd been at a party, and Nancy Tanner was beckoning to him from the door of an igloo. The purpose of the invitation was unclear. Russell walked toward the open door. It was surprisingly distant, and with each step he told himself he should turn around and run. When he finally reached her, she held out a cigarette and smiled lewdly.

Corrine came into the bedroom wearing a towel twisted around her head and another secured beneath her arms.

“We've got to do something about this water pressure,” she said, sitting down at the vanity. Lying in bed, Russell could see her face in the mirror as she began to apply her makeup. She caught his eye and smiled. “What are you so serious about?”

“Nothing.”

“I had the weirdest dream last night,” she said.

“What else is new?” he said, glad that she was accustomed to his not remembering his own dreams.

“I dreamed about cigarettes. Sneaking a smoke, like when I was a kid.”

Applying a tool shaped like a miniature toothbrush to her eyebrow, she said, “Have you dreamed about it?” Her eyes zoomed in on his for just a moment, and reflexively he answered, “No.”

“I guess I'm just perverse.”

The next night, Corrine dreamed that she was standing on the sidewalk, waiting for someone. The street was entirely deserted, though it was Park Avenue. Not another soul on the sidewalk, not a car on the street. A black limousine appeared several blocks down, cruising toward her slowly, finally pulling up and stopping by the curb in front of her. The glass was smoked; she couldn't see inside the car. The back window slipped down; a man's hand emerged from the open window, holding out a pack of cigarettes. She looked up and down the street, then climbed into the limo. She couldn't make out the figure beside her in the backseat, but as the car pulled away from the curb, she saw Russell looking down from a window in an apartment building high above the street.

In the morning she didn't mention the dream. Getting Russell's attention had been difficult lately anyway.

That week was the first real scorcher of the summer; the humidity brimmed to the verge of rain, without breaking. Walking to the subway the next morning, Corrine could feel her damp blouse sticking to her shoulder blades. In the station the men in yellow ties looked wilted, the women in their tailored suits defensive, as if they sensed that on days like this the subterranean violence of the city was likely to boil to the surface. She had forgotten to buy a paper, and as her gaze wandered idly around the platform, she suddenly met the eyes of a ragged man staring back at her with malevolent intensity. She turned away, staggered by that look, her mind unreeling images of carnage: muzzle flash, neon blood, filthy hands at her throat, boldface headlines. As the train rattled in, she couldn't help looking again; this time she saw a blank face and lusterless, unfocused eyes behind a tangle of matted hair.

A little after ten, Duane Jones stuck his head into her office. “Still being virtuous?”

She motioned him in and whispered, “Close the door.”

He raised his eyebrows and pulled the door closed.

“Let me have a couple of drags.”

“All this secrecy for a couple of drags?”

“Just light it, will you?”

He shook a Merit out of his pack and held it out to her.

“No, you light it.”

Duane was enjoying this. He fired the cigarette with his lighter and held it out to her. “The idea being that if I light it, you won't have actually smoked a cigarette?”

“Humor me.” She took the cigarette and inhaled deeply, held the smoke in her lungs. “Funny, it doesn't taste like I thought it would.”

“You look great with a cigarette.”

She took another, strictly experimental drag. This was more like what she had anticipated, a reunion clinch with a former lover. But she wasn't going to hop into bed. She just wanted to remind herself that she could live without this one passion. Corrine held the cigarette out to him, fortified with a new resolve. “Take it.”

“I've got more.”

“Take it.”

“Okay.” Duane noted the faint peach impression of Corrine's lips on the filter. He took a drag.

Corrine was sorting papers on her desk, suddenly all business. “I'm going to be here till midnight if I don't get moving,” she said.

“You know where to find me,” Duane said as he left.

The stock market was getting hot; Corrine was working ten- and twelve-hour days. With the advent of Tracey, Russell's workload was considerably lighter, but because of Corrine's job, they couldn't get out of the city much. At first he enjoyed being able to meet friends for drinks, watch TV or read at home without interruption, though as the summer wore on, he began to resent her scrupulous fidelity to her job. One hot night when she arrived home after midnight, he made insinuations, mentioning Duane Jones.

At the office he read the
Times
front to back before settling into his official chores, and sometimes he composed fake guide entries for his own amusement. One morning, as the temperature climbed toward ninety and the air conditioning became less and less a source of relief, he was writing one of these when Tracey came in with a new batch of her own vivid compositions.

“I think I've finished Michigan,” she said. “What state are you working on?”

He read, “ ‘The Yukon Sheraton: charming, individual guest cottages constructed by native craftsmen of local materials; cozy interiors, domed ceilings, blubber heat. Year-round winter sports.’”

She forced a faint, nervous chuckle, and then became pensive. “Do you mind if I ask you something? Don't you think what we're doing is kind of, uh, unethical?”

“Think of yourself as a fiction writer.”

“I just feel funny about it.”

“Why do you think most of the senior staff is alcoholic?” This hard-boiled manner had become reflexive when he was talking with Tracey. He couldn't seem to be straightforward.

An inner struggle was working havoc on Tracey's normally cheerful demeanor. Russell couldn't help admiring the contours of her sleeveless top. “It's just, you're so talented,” she gasped, as if delivering a horrible confession. She looked down at the floor. “I'm being a baby.” She turned and walked out of the office. Russell stared at the door long after she had gone, then left early for lunch.

Lately, Russell had felt a great shroud of gauze enveloping him, preventing him from touching life and getting hold of it. He felt torpid and cloudy, but he didn't know whether this was a function of the oppressive weather, his decision to quit cigarettes or some subheading under “Changes of Life.”

Nicotine withdrawal seemed to dull his mind and sharpen all his senses. The rancid smells of the summer streets had never seemed so acute. The vapors curling from mysterious apertures in the city streets were cruel reminders. Where there's smoke, he thought. He ate four or five times a day. Even his hearing seemed sharper: Noise bothered him, as if he were suffering from an extended hangover. And the women in their summer dresses on the sidewalks excited fantasies more detailed than any he'd experienced since adolescence.

Heading back from the coffee shop, he walked two blocks out of his way to follow a redhead in a yellow halter top. He entertained the notion of striking up a conversation, but then she walked out of his life, slipping smartly into the revolving door of an office building.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he said aloud, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, drawing scrutiny from several pedestrians who seemed ready to offer opinions.

He absolutely had to have a cigarette.

Outside the newsstand, he stopped and reminded himself that he had already betrayed Corrine once today, if only in his imagination. He walked on, smokeless and repentant.

Waiting for a traffic light, he looked over the display of a sidewalk vendor, one of those West Africans he'd read about in the
Times
, and spotted among the wares a cigarette case made out of python skin. Tracey would be leaving soon to go back to school. He bought the case for ten bucks and took it back to work. Tracey was at her desk, eating a bowl of cottage cheese.