How It Ended: New and Collected Stories by Jay McInerney

sings “Simple Love.” I feel a tingling buzz that's like the first wave of a coke rush.
    What can I say. It turns me on watching Susan turn other men on. Is that so hard to understand?
    I settle in at a table where I can occasionally glimpse them through the crowd. Susan eventually spots me and maneuvers her partner closer so I have a better view, then starts making out with him. I mean really sucking face. This guy can't believe his luck. Which is, strangely enough, just how I feel.
    But then, just to torture me, she drifts back into the sea of bodies until I can't see either one of them anymore. It's making me crazy. I wait a few minutes, then circle the place, but I can't see them anywhere. What the hell? I look everywhere. Did she take him out to the parking lot? On a sudden inspiration I bolt for the men's room. Sometimes she trash-talks about doing some guy in the men's room because she knows it's a turn-on in theory, but in real life that's a taboo, one of the boundaries we've established. When you're playing outside the regular borders, it's important to have rules and boundaries. We've learned that the hard way.
    I stop at the men's room door and take a deep breath, trying to compose myself, to think what I'll do if I find them in there. I push the door open. A couple of good old boys in Stetsons, propping themselves up against the urinals. No one in the stalls, which is a relief, I think.
    I finally find her at the bar, alone, sucking down a margarita.
    “So?”
    She shakes her head. “Let's get out of here.”
    In the car, she says, “He told me he wanted me to meet his mother.”
    “He must get a lot of pussy with that line.”
    “Actually, I think he was serious.”
    “So where to?”
    “Let's go to Tini's,” she says.
    “You sure?” I'm still sober enough to feel some trepidation about Tini's. The last time we were there, somebody got stabbed, although we didn't actually see the fight.
    “If we're going to go for it, let's just go for it.” Her earlier diffidence seems to have evaporated. “Turn it up,” she says, when “Mr. Bright Eyes” comes on Lightning 100.
    It's early for Tini's, but the Friday-night house band's already playing. We settle in at a table and order drinks. Mostly old drunks and a few friends of the band so far. A fat mama in a gold bustier calls out, “Tell it!” and “Play it!” in between choruses. It would be easy to imagine these losers are playing the same song over and over, the same twelve bars on an interminable loop, but every once in a while a lyric emerges or the guitarist cuts loose and at some point I make out Sonny Boy Williamson's “Fattening Frogs for Snakes.”
    Then I see him approaching, rolling like an aspiring pimp, gold chains bouncing on a voluminous white T-shirt. He grabs the empty chair at our table and flips it around, then straddles the back of it. He's not much more than twenty, if that, very dark-skinned.
    “I seen you here before,” he says.
    “That's possible,” I say.
    “Yeah, I seen you all right.”
    “I'm Susan, and this is Dean.”
    It's true: I remember him. We partied with one of his friends.
    “I'm dry,” he says.
    “What are you drinking,” I ask.
    “Yac and Coke.”
    “I'll get you one.”
    “Hennessy,” he says, getting cocky.
    I look over at Susan to see if it's okay. You need to have signals; you've got to be able to communicate. But she seems fine. In fact, she seems more than fine, with that blurry, lascivious look on her face. How the hell much did she drink at the Corral anyway?
    I'm waiting at the bar, listening to “Little Red Rooster,” when I hear three little pops. It's like the witnesses always say when you see them on the eleven o'clock news; it's like firecrackers, or maybe somebody snapping a whip outside the door, so I don't even think about it until a young guy with a reddish Afro in a puffy black parka comes running in the bar, shouting, and even though I can't make out a word of what he's