Bright Lights, Big City (14 page)

You’re not sure exactly where you are going. You don’t feel you have the strength to walk home. You walk faster. If the sunlight catches you on the streets, you will undergo some terrible chemical change.

After a few minutes you notice the blood on your fingers. You hold your hand up to your face. There is blood on your shirt, too. You find a Kleenex in your jacket pocket and hold it to your nose. You advance with your head tilted back against your shoulders.

By the time you reach Canal Street, you think that you will never make it home. You look for taxis. A bum is sleeping under the awning of a shuttered shop. As you pass he raises his head and says, “God bless you and forgive your sins.” You wait for the cadge but it doesn’t come. You wish he hadn’t said anything.

As you turn, what is left of your olfactory equipment sends a message to your brain: fresh bread. Somewhere they are baking bread. You can smell it, even through the nose-bleed. You see bakery trucks loading in front of a building on the next block. You watch as bags of rolls are carried out onto the loading dock by a man with tattooed forearms. This man is already at work so that normal people can have fresh bread for their morning tables. The righteous people who sleep at night and eat eggs for breakfast. It is Sunday morning and you haven’t eaten since … when? Friday night. As you approach, the smell of bread washes over you like a gentle rain. You inhale deeply, filling your lungs. Tears come to your eyes, and you feel such a rush of tenderness and pity that you stop beside a lamppost and hang on for support.

The smell of bread recalls you to another morning. You arrived home from college after driving half the night; you just felt like coming home. When you walked in, the kitchen was steeped in this same aroma. Your mother asked what the occasion was, and you said a whim. You asked if she was baking. “Learning to draw inferences at college, are we,” you remember her asking. She said she had to find some way to keep herself busy now that her sons were taking off. You said that you hadn’t left, not really. You sat down at the kitchen table to talk, and the bread soon started to burn. She had made bread only two other times that you could recall. Both times it had burned. You remember being proud of your mother then for never having submitted to the tyranny of the kitchen, for having other things on her mind. She cut you two thick slices of bread anyway. They were charred on the outside but warm and moist inside.

You approach the tattooed man on the loading dock. He stops working and watches you. There is something wrong with the way your legs are moving. You wonder if your nose is still bleeding.

“Bread.” This is what you say to him, although you meant to say something more.

“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.

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

“Get outa here.”

“I’ll trade you my sunglasses,” you say. You take off your shades and hand them up to him. “Ray-Bans. I lost the case.” He tries them on, shakes his head a few times and then takes them off. He folds the glasses and puts them in his shirt pocket.

“You’re crazy,” he says. Then he looks back into the warehouse. He picks up a bag of hard rolls and throws it at your feet.

You get down on your knees and tear open the bag. The smell of warm dough envelops 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author of seven novels and two collections of essays on wine, Jay McInerney is a regular contributor to
New York, The New York Times Book Review, The Independent
and
Corriere della Sera
. His short fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy
, and
Granta
. In 2006,
Time
cited his 1984 debut,
Bright Lights, Big City
, as one of nine generation-defining novels of the twentieth century. He was the recipient of the 2006 James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing and his novel
The Good Life
received the Prix Littéraire at the Deauville Film Festival in 2007. He lives in Manhattan and Bridgehampton, New York.

ALSO BY
J
AY
M
C
I
NERNEY

AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES

BRIGHTNESS FALLS

As he maps the fault lines spreading through the once-impenetrable marriage of Russell and Corrine Calloway, and chronicles Russell’s wildly ambitious scheme to seize control of the publishing house at which he works, Jay McInerney creates an elegy for New York in the 1980s. From the literary chimeras and corporate raiders to those dispossessed by the pandemonium of money and power,
Brightness Falls
captures a rash era at its moment of reckoning and gives reality back to a time that now seems decidedly unreal.

Fiction/978-0-679-74532-7

THE GOOD LIFE

Corrine and Russell Calloway have survived a separation and are wonderstruck by young twins. Luke McGavock has postponed his accumulation of wealth in an attempt to recover his sense of purpose. But on a September morning, brightness falls horribly from the sky, and people worlds apart suddenly find themselves working side by side.

Fiction/978-0-375-72545-6

THE LAST OF THE SAVAGES

Patrick Keane and Will Savage meet at prep school just as the 1960s are reaching lift-off velocity. Patrick is Irish Catholic and already plotting his ascent into the upper class. Will is a renegade from a patrician Southern family who has dedicated himself to “freeing the slaves”—wherever he may find them—by means that range from controlled substances to the blues. Over the next thirty years, Will and Patrick will remain friends even as they pursue radically divergent destinies—and even as they harbor secrets that defy our categories of rebellion and conformity. A triumph of honed wit, X-ray observation, and bravura storytelling,
The Last of the Savages
is Jay McInerney’s most engrossing and emotionally satisfying novel to date.

Fiction/978-0-679-74952-3

MODEL BEHAVIOR

Connor McKnight’s chic ennui is fast flipping into high anxiety as he struggles to keep his life intact. He has temporarily shelved his Akira Kurosawa biography in pursuit of an interview with an elusive young actor which will secure Connor’s job. His model girlfriend left him, and his sister is wasting away in anorexic seclusion. His best friend has balanced his sanity on the publication of a new story collection and the fate of his Irish terrier. Connor is left to seek refuge in a vodka bottle, and consolation from a beautiful topless dancer, only to find that nothing can protect him from the fate that unfolds before his eyes.

Fiction/978-0-679-74953-0

RANSOM

Living in Kyoto, Christopher Ransom seeks a purity and simplicity he could not find at home and tries to exorcise the terror he encountered at the Khyber Pass. Supporting himself by teaching English to eager businessmen, he finds company with impresario Miles Ryder and fellow expatriates in a blues bar that accommodates the drifters pouring through Asia in the years immediately after the fall of Vietnam. Increasingly, Ransom and his circle are threatened by everything they thought they had left behind.

Fiction/978-0-394-74118-5

ALSO AVAILABLE:
BACCHUS AND ME

Jay McInerney on wine? Yes, Jay McInerney on wine! The best-selling novelist has turned his command of language and flair for metaphor on the world of wine, providing this sublime collection of untraditional musings on wine and wine culture.

Wine/978-0-375-71362-0

A Hedonist in the Cellar
, 978-1-4000-9637-4

VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com

New from

Jay McInerney

How It Ended
New and Collected Stories

This collection traces the arc of Jay McInerney’s dazzling career over nearly three decades.

“
How It Ended
reminds us how impressively broad McInerney’s scope has been and how confidently he has ranged across wide swaths of our national experience …. Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger were ‘Voices of a generation.’ So is McInerney.”

—Sam Tanenhaus,
The New York Times Book Review

Available in hardcover from Knopf
$25.95 • 352 pages • 978-0-307-26805-1

Please visit
www.aaknopf.com

A Vintage Contemporaries Original, September 1984

Copyright © 1984 by Jay McInerney

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Portions of this work were previously published in the
Paris Review
and
Ploughshares
.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Index Music, Inc. for permission to reprint an excerpt from the lyrics to “Cross-Eyed and Painless” by David Byrne and Brian Eno. Copyright © 1980 Bleu Disque Music Co., Inc., Index Music, Inc., and E.G. Music, Ltd., by permission of David Byrne and Brian Eno.

All of the events and characters
depicted in this book are fictional.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McInerney, Jay.
Bright lights, big city.
"A Vintage original"—
I. Title.

PS
3563.
C
3694
B
7    1984 813′.54    84-40074

eISBN: 978-0-307-76321-1

Photograph copyright © 1984 by Jerry Bauer

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