Bright Lights, Big City

Michael is hungry and the narrator is thirsty. They go the Lion’s Head, where Michael confesses that he never liked Amanda and thought she was phony. He asks if the narrator would’ve married her if their mother hadn’t been sick. The narrator ponders this and thinks that he probably married Amanda to make his mother happy, though his mother never pressured him to marry. He realizes, too, that he never really began to grieve the loss of his mother until Amanda left. His mourning for Amanda is really his mourning for his mother.

Michael tells the narrator that he should’ve told the family about his marital woes. The narrator offers Michael a few lines of cocaine, and Michael accepts. While the narrator prepares them, Michael recalls how gaunt their mother became at the end. One October before she died, he saw her in the backyard, raking leaves. Her old ski jacket looked “about six sizes too big” (163). The narrator cuts eight lines for himself and his brother to share. He recalls how he used to look after his mother from midnight to eight o’clock in the morning. He gave her a morphine injection every few hours. During his mother’s last night alive, she asked the narrator if he had ever done cocaine—a question he was afraid to answer. She told him that she had done it and liked it, unlike the morphine, which made her drowsy and loopy. Then, she asked if the narrator had “slept with a lot of girls” (164). She confessed that she had been raised to think that sex was a chore she would have to endure as a married woman.

The narrator tried to describe his life to his mother, and she shared with him memories of his early childhood, such as when he held on to her leg on his first day of school, refusing to let her go. When she sent him to the school bus stop, he instead hid in the woods nearby. His mother later found him and drove him to school. There were also the instances in which he feigned illness by dipping a thermometer into hot water. She knew what he was doing but would, occasionally, let him stay home when he seemed to need her attention. She tells him that he was never much good at sleeping. He asks if she would like the shot, but she refuses it, wanting clarity and her ability to talk. She compares the excruciating pain to that of his birth. The pain was made worse, she noted, by her sense that the narrator didn’t seem to want to come out. She didn’t think that she would live through her labor. This, she says, is why she loves him so much. 

The phone rings in the narrator’s apartment. It’s Tad, who wants the narrator to meet him at the Odeon. From there, they’ll go to a party. The narrator goes to the nightclub and sees Tad with his friend Jimmy Q—a visitor from Memphis. Jimmy has a limo. He gives the driver the address while Tad and the narrator climb in. The limo stops at a warehouse. Music throbs from above. When they get to the party, they head to the bar, where Tad introduces the narrator to an attractive blond woman named Stevie “who wears a slinky black gown” and a “tasseled white silk scarf wrapped around her neck” (172). The narrator asks Stevie to dance. After their dance, Stevie kisses the narrator and says that she has to go to the ladies’ room.

When the narrator goes back to Tad, the latter asks if he’s seen Amanda who happens to be standing with a group of people near the elevator. She’s standing beside a man—“a Mediterranean hulk”—who squeezes her behind (173). Amanda soon goes over to the narrator and Tad and greets them in Italian. She tells them that the man she’s with is named Odysseus and he’s her fiancé. When she asks the narrator how things are going, he begins to laugh and she follows suit. When he begins laughing hysterically, she becomes alarmed and leaves him. Tad then tells the narrator that he’s figured out where he’s seen Amanda’s fiancé before: He once hired him from an escort service to entertain a client from Atlanta. His ad agency paid for Odysseus’s services.

The narrator wonders now where Stevie is. Tad advises him to avoid Stevie, whose name was Steve. Steve “had his third operation a few weeks ago” (176) but wears the scarf to hide her Adam’s apple. The narrator excuses himself to an empty bedroom and calls Vicky, who guesses that he’s with Tad. The narrator tells her that his mother died a year ago. He also says that he was married. Vicky is unsure of what to say. The narrator admits that he’s tried to stop thinking about his mother, but he must remember her. He also confesses that he and his brother Michael promised her that, if her pain became unbearable, they would assist her in committing suicide with her prescription morphine. The narrator then asks if he can call Vicky tomorrow. She agrees and advises him to get some sleep. If he can’t, she says, he should call her.

At dawn, the narrator gazes out at the outlines of the World Trade Center’s twin towers at the tip of Manhattan. He’s not sure where he’s going, but he doesn’t have the strength to walk home. Suddenly, his nose starts bleeding. He walks to Canal Street and looks for a taxi. He sees a homeless man sleeping under an awning. When he passes, the man sits up and wishes for God to bless him and forgive his sins. The narrator turns the corner and picks up the scent of bread, despite his bloody nose. He realizes that it’s Sunday morning, and he hasn’t eaten since Friday night.

The scent of the bread reminds him of coming home from college after driving for much of the night. He walked in and found his mother baking bread, which she had burned, as she always did. Nevertheless, she cut him two slices. The bread was “charred on the outside but warm and moist inside” (181). The narrator walks toward a tattooed man who is unloading the bread from a loading dock. The narrator asks him for a roll. The worker waves him off. Then, the narrator offers to trade his Ray-Ban sunglasses for a bag of rolls. The worker tosses the hard rolls at the narrator, calling him crazy. The narrator gets down on his knees and tears the bag open. He’s overcome by the scent of the warm dough. His mouth is dry, causing the first bite to stick in his throat. He starts eating again, but more slowly, as though he were relearning how to eat.