Bright Lights, Big City

The narrator met Amanda in a bar in Kansas City. His first thought was that she looked like a model but didn’t seem to know it. Within a week, they moved in together. During the couple’s time in Kansas City, the narrator visited Amanda’s mother, Dolly, only once. Dolly was a woman “used to trading on her looks and […] loathed and envied her daughter’s youth” (71). During the visit, she chain-smoked cigarettes, flirted with the narrator, and casually insulted her daughter.

When the narrator and Amanda married two years later, neither her mother nor any other immediate family member showed up to the wedding. The only people representing her side were an elderly aunt and uncle. On the other hand, the narrator’s mother, pitying Amanda’s abandonment, eagerly welcomed her to her new family. When his father met her, he asked the narrator if the major differences in their backgrounds might cause problems.

Amanda and the narrator married after living together for two years, largely to placate Amanda’s insecurity that the narrator would one day leave her. He proposed after coming back home late from a party that Amanda chose not to attend. She was furious when he arrived and compared him to the kind of men her mother dated. To make up for his girlfriend’s poor upbringing, the narrator married her. Shortly after they first arrived in New York, Amanda lost interest in attending college. She was a couch potato for a few months until she began listening to people who told her that she could model. One day, she stopped by an agency and, later the same day, arrived home with a contract. Initially, she hated modeling and didn’t take the work seriously until she began making a lot of money quickly.

When she packed for a trip to Paris, Amanda cried, nervous about going so far away. Then, the day before she was due to arrive home, she said that she was staying in Paris. Her career was taking off, and she was no longer interested in being married. She had, after all, been unhappy and was now quite happy. After three days of trying to track her down, the narrator found her at “a hotel on the Left Bank” (75). He asked if there was another man. She claimed that this didn’t matter but, indeed, there was—a photographer. A few days later, her attorney called and advised the narrator to sue for divorce on the grounds of sexual abandonment. Amanda would not put up a fight and they could split their belongings in half, though she insisted on taking the sterling silver and crystal. The car and the joint checking accounts would also go to the narrator.

Several months have passed since those conversations with the lawyer. The narrator hasn’t told anyone in his life about the impending divorce. When people ask about Amanda, he says that she’s well. Now, he’s standing in front of Saks, looking at the mannequin. He thinks of how much she resembled it when she left him. Her stare was just as blank and her lips just as “tight and reticent” (78). The narrator goes back to the office to get the page proofs off of Clara’s desk, but they’re not there. Clara had them delivered to Typesetting.

The narrator goes to a writer’s empty office and calls Amanda’s agency. When someone picks up, he identifies himself as a photographer who’s interested in working with Amanda and asks if she’s in New York. The voice on the other end confirms that Amanda has returned to the city for two weeks. The narrator begins to imagine bloody, vengeful scenes commingled with those of tender reconciliation. Returning to this department, he sees Clara. He hides in the Fiction Department’s men’s room. There, Walter Tyler, the travel editor, enters the room. When Walter asks the narrator how he likes his work, the latter expresses a wish to work in fiction. Walter advises that he write every morning before breakfast and read Hazlitt.

The narrator leaves the men’s room and, while rounding a corner, runs into the Ghost. He greets him and slides past and out of the building. He ends up at a bar on Forty-fourth Street. It’s afternoon when he enters and nearly evening when he leaves. He walks to the Times Square subway station and waits for the downtown train. He sees ads for missing persons everywhere. Then, he hears an announcement that the express train isn’t running. He catches a bus instead. When the bus reaches Thirty-Fourth Street, there’s a fracas at the entrance. A young man wearing skin-tight Calvin Kleins and a peach Lacoste shirt struggles to dig into his pockets for the exact change that the bus driver demands.

Under one of his arms, the narrator sees “a small portfolio and a bulky Japanese umbrella” (86). The bus driver demands that he step aside so that waiting passengers don’t have to stand in the rain. The driver calls the young man “Queenie” and tells him to “[m]ove to the rear” (87). When he jokes that the young man would have no problem doing that, the passenger sashays down the aisle, moving his hips and wrist. The driver calls him back—this time, he refers to the young man as “Tinker Bell”—to get the umbrella that he left. The young man picks it up, brings it gently down on the driver’s shoulder as though he were knighting him, and repeatedly tells him to “turn to shit” (87).

When the narrator arrives at his apartment, he realizes that he left his keys at work. He goes to the super’s apartment, dreading the meeting. The superintendent resents him for never offering cash or alcoholic gifts for Christmas. Thankfully, one of the super’s cousins answers the door and lets the narrator into his apartment. Inside he finds a note from Tad, asking him to meet with his cousin Vicky while Tad goes off on a date with a model named Inge. The narrator isn’t looking forward to the prospect. He imagines that the intellectual young woman whom Tad describes is probably a typically uptight New Englander. Still, he figures that a drink won’t hurt and goes out to meet her at the assigned bar—the Lion’s Head.

When he enters the bar, the narrator spots a young woman standing alone near the coatrack, holding both a drink and a paperback. Her face looks intelligent. The narrator sees that she’s reading Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics and strikes up a conversation with her about it. Suddenly, Tad appears. He shakes the narrator’s hand and kisses the young woman’s cheek. He suggests that they all meet for dinner at 10 o’clock in the evening. Before leaving, he slips a vial into the narrator’s pocket while planting another kiss on Vicky’s cheek. The narrator knows that he won’t see Tad for the rest of the night and wonders if he should invite Vicky back to his apartment to share the cocaine. The pair go for a walk instead. Vicky tells him about her divorced parents and the Tudor-style home in which she grew up in Marblehead. The narrator says that his parents have a happy marriage. The narrator mentions his three brothers, while Vicky mentions her three sisters.

When the pair reach a café on Charles Street, Vicky asks the narrator what Tad told him about her. He insists that Tad hadn’t mentioned much. However, based on what he had mentioned, the narrator expected “a field hockey player with monogrammed knee socks and thick glasses” (95). Vicky minces no words in describing Tad as an ass. She then changes subjects by asking the narrator about his job, which he claims he doesn’t much like. He also confesses that he doesn’t think his coworkers like him either. Vicky says that people covet a job like his. This prompts the narrator to talk about the tedium of factual verification—hours poring over dictionaries, phone books, and encyclopedias. The narrator and Vicky leave and wait for a taxi that will take her back to Tad’s apartment. By now, the narrator has her address and phone number in Princeton. He tells her that he wishes she didn’t have to leave. She agrees and kisses him. He thinks of asking her back to his apartment but reconsiders.