Nicotine

by Nell Zink

  Everyone laughs.

  “I know! It was my baptism of fire. So I go downstairs again and read it perfectly on the first take, in this calm, perfect voice, because instead of pity I feel this indescribable steely anger. This really weird anger, where you realize taking no prisoners means working with anybody and everybody who might help, never judging. That’s the moment when I became a real activist.”

  Penny says, “Wow.”

  “I do not believe cats would do that,” Sorry says. “Maybe it was a typo for rats?”

  “There were no rats in this town,” Anka says. “Because cats.”

  “Or bats?”

  “Vampire bats are South America.”

  “Cats were in league with Satan way before bats,” Penny assures Sorry. “I would know.”

  AMALIA WALKS FROM THE DINNER table to the central island in the kitchen of the house in Morristown. She slowly lowers a juice glass into the sink, rinses it with water, and sets it down without washing it. She stands still, her hand in the sink, looking at her own reflection in the kitchen window. With her left hand, clumsily, she reaches up to wipe her eyes. She sniffles.

  She dries her hands on a dish towel and pulls a disposable tissue from a box. Still blowing her nose, she taps a photo of Matt on her cell phone screen. She waits until his voice mail comes on and hangs up, neither leaving a message nor texting him afterward. She sits down on one of two barstools and stares at her reflection for nearly a minute.

  She walks to the couch in the living room, sits down next to Schubert the cat, and begins browsing the selection of video-on-demand channels. Without choosing a program, she turns it off. She pulls her knees in and lies on the couch sideways. She picks up her phone off the floor and texts Matt: I have to see you. ILY so much it hurts

  Seconds later, the phone rings. Matt is behind the wheel of his Audi A5, stopped at a busy intersection on Tonnelle Avenue. The sedan is surrounded by large trucks whose engines idle as if they were full of rubble. The ambient noise makes him shout to be heard. He yells into the hands-free device clipped to the sunshade in front of him. “You’re sick! Get help!”

  “It’s because of you I’m depressed,” she says.

  “There was never. Anything. Between us. Ever.”

  “Norm saw it,” Amalia says.

  “You’re a crazy, melodramatic bitch,” Matt says.

  In Morristown, Amalia stands up from the couch and walks toward the refrigerator.

  In Jersey City, the light changes, and Matt pulls into the intersection, to his left a double tractor trailer with an open load of scrap metal. The truck signals to turn right, and Matt realizes that a large fragment of waste steel from a die-cutting operation is hanging over the edge of the rear cargo bay, almost scraping his hood. He touches the brake pedal twice and hears tires screech behind him.

  In the phone call, nothing happens, but neither hangs up.

  Finally Amalia takes a pint of ice cream from the freezer and says, “Before he died, Norm asked me to take care of you. I think we both know what he meant. You’re alone. You don’t have anybody. All you do is work. I’m still young.” She rummages through a drawer, looking for a certain teaspoon she likes.

  “Women age seven years for every year a man ages,” Matt shouts. “It’s like dog years.” The light goes yellow with his car still in the middle of the intersection. He has no choice but to turn left, which is the wrong direction for him. “In any case, I don’t need to hear this,” he says. “Mom. Bye now. I love you, Mom.” He passes a Winnebago on the right and narrowly escapes being squeezed against a concrete barrier.

  Amalia eats her pint of ice cream and watches two episodes of Nurse Jackie.

  PENNY LIES FLAT ON HER back in bed, trying to sleep. Her pose reminds her of her father. She turns on her side and recalls his wish to dictate his memoirs. His anger when speech was taken away—his panic—and how stupidly, how idiotically, how much like a complete and total moron she failed to write the letters of the alphabet on a piece of cardboard and let him spell words by pointing.

  The thoughts are like serrated knives in her heart, put there and twisted by the force that powers the universe: love. The same force that prompts her to turn again and lie facedown, fearful and motionless, paralyzed with grief. “I love you,” she says aloud, naming it. Her words reverberate in the springs of the mattress, reminding her of Norm’s last days. His labored breathing, the epoch when he could do nothing else. Breathing and nothing else, each breath more difficult than the one before, waiting in desperation for his heart to fail.

  She turns on the light and sits up against his headboard. She drinks from his water glass. She sees herself surrounded by his furniture. She gets up, gets dressed, and goes out to the sidewalk for a cigarette.

  Half an hour later, she goes back to bed. She thinks of his death for another hour and a half before she falls asleep.

  ANKA KNEELS ON THE FLOOR at Nicotine, surrounded by large glass jars of water-soluble tempera. She reaches out with her dripping red brush and forms the letters TTIP on a sheet of pale blue poster board. She pauses.

  “So what about tee-tip?” she asks Tony.

  “Abdicates workers’ rights. Undermines environmental protections.”

  Anka says she needs something shorter, and he suggests “TTIP SUX.”

  “Present tense is a tactical error,” she says. “Makes it sound like we already lost.”

  “What about ‘TTIP can be stopped’?” Penny asks. “Is that more empowering?”

  “TTIP will fail?” Anka suggests.

  “TTIP will attract Chinese investment in cheap American labor,” Rob says, meticulously pulling the paper off an American Spirit.

  “That’s true,” Anka says. “But I don’t think so.” A lock of her hair falls forward, nearly brushing against the still wet P in TTIP, but she catches it in time. She sits back on her heels to tie her hair in a knot.

  “TTIP, bad trip,” Penny suggests.

  “I like it!” Anka says. “A trip is something you do voluntarily. Nobody makes you do it. And it can go so wrong.”

  “It’s good,” Tony says.

  Anka dips her brush in a jar of water until most of the red has dissolved. Then she immerses it in yellow tempera and adds BAD TRIP to the sign.

  When the cardboard panels are ready—twelve of them—Rob attaches them to laths, using a hammer and carpet tacks. He, Tony, Anka, and Penny agree that they look nice.

  “Are Sorry and Jazz coming?” Penny asks.

  “I don’t know about Jazz, and Sorry’s already there,” Rob says. “Somebody has to sign in for the Blue Bloc.”

  “‘Blue Bloc’?” Penny asks. “Like blue states?”

  “Like smoke,” Rob says. “The reason we’re not allowed to march with anybody else. We might shorten their lives.”

  “Is twelve signs enough?”

  “Twelve is plenty,” he says.

  They eat breakfast—pancakes with defrosted strawberries scavenged from the trash behind a bar—and climb into Rob’s minivan. Overloaded, it lurches from stop sign to stop sign and pitches forward and back after every pothole. Rob turns up the radio because it is playing the Peter Gabriel song “In Your Eyes.” He sings along.

  “This song’s his pop star sign,” Sorry says to Penny. “It was playing when he was born.” They enter the Lincoln Tunnel, and Rob rolls down his window. “Fuck! Stop that! Jesus, Rob!”

  “Diesel fumes and tire dust,” he says. “This is what the nonsmokers are breathing while they scapegoat us.”

  “Close the window!” Anka demands.

  He rolls it back up. The tunnel traffic slows almost to a halt. He scrounges a cup and a pack of cigarettes from a basket under his seat, clamping the cup between his knees. He pulls out a cigarette and peels and shreds it, looking up occasionally, still singing along with the radio. “Thousand churches,” he sings. “Resolution.”

  “Can I get one of those?” Penny says. Anka takes the pack from Rob and passes a cig
arette back to Penny. Sorry lends her a lighter to light it. “Sharing economy,” she adds. She takes one more quick drag and passes the cigarette to Tony. He smokes it and passes it to Anka. She taps the ash into the ashtray, takes a drag, and returns it to Penny.

  “I feel left out,” Rob says.

  “So conform, you dork!” Anka says. “Stop being Mr. Different and Special all the time!”

  “Eating smokes is totally fucking disgusting,” Penny says.

  He continues to prepare his chew while driving the car with his knees. The tunnel is dark and the minivan’s greasy windows make it appear an impressionist scene of a rainy night. Anka holds the cigarette to his lips. He inhales and says, “Whoa.”

  “What do you mean, ‘whoa’?”

  “Freebasing. Too pure.”

  Penny moves up from the right rear of the minivan to crouch between the two front seats. She takes the cigarette from Anka and inhales deeply. Rob turns to look at her.

  “Where’s your seat belt, young lady?”

  She exhales. “I was going to shotgun you, but then I remembered we’re in a traffic jam under the Hudson.”

  “Rear-ending somebody right now would bite,” he agrees.

  Tony suggests she kiss him instead of Rob. She shakes her head and frowns. Her resolve to doubt Rob’s claims of asexuality makes her crush unshakable, plus Tony is, in her view, old and gross.

  “You don’t really want to get close to anybody,” Tony says. “He’s safe romance. Like safe sex without the sex.”

  “You’re not my type,” Penny says. “Too hardworking and ambitious. You remind me of the premed–computer science double majors at my college.”

  “Admit it! You’re asexual!”

  “At least Rob’s a challenge,” Penny says. “Where’s the fun in hitting on you? You’re too easy. When we get to the march, I could pay a hooker five bucks to come on to you, and you’d forget I exist.”

  “Penny, Penny,” Tony says, shaking his head. “You have low self-esteem if you think a five-dollar hooker could get you off my mind.”

  “You are misunderstanding me in a big way,” Penny says. “Low self-esteem would be if I got a crush on you for lusting after me.”

  “I love it when women fight over me,” Rob says, tucking the chew into his mouth.

  “If women didn’t spoil this bastard for doing nothing at all,” Tony says, “maybe he’d give them what they want.”

  “It’s a market,” Anka says. “The heterosexual economy that Rob dominates with his scarcity. You could learn a lot from him, Tony.” To Penny she adds, “You ever read The Gender of the Gift by Marilyn Strathern?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t actually remember what it says, but you should definitely read it.”

  “I remember,” Rob says. “You told me about it right after you finished it. It’s about how capitalism and communism both say labor is value, and it can be alienated, because you’re working for money to make a product to sell to people you never met. Except, the problem is, women are always doing this labor that you can’t separate from them at all. Like birthday cakes and homemade socks and changing people’s diaper nine thousand times. They do all this labor for free because you can’t sell it. You can only sell them. The women.”

  “I’m not sure that’s right,” Anka says.

  “We don’t have slavery, obviously, but a good homemaker adds value to her partner and doesn’t get paid, so same difference. She’s like a natural resource to be exploited. Women are like nature.”

  “You make it sound like a sexist pile of crap,” Anka says, shaking her head.

  “Not at all,” Rob says. “She was saying that Marxism isn’t any better than capitalism, because they’re both based on a world without friendship and love, where everything’s for sale! A male world, basically. Money instead of nature. Welcome to New York.” The minivan emerges into the gray light of the West Side. “So where are we going?”

  “Bowery,” Tony says. “We can park there and walk up to Union Square.”

  “Where there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” Rob continues. “Imagine if women started charging their kids for food. We’d all be up shit creek. Women have to give it away, or society collapses.”

  “Why would a feminist book be about that?” Anka protests.

  “Why not?” Rob says. “This world look to you like the revolution has come and gone? I read there was just another Pew survey saying heterosexuals are ninety-seven percent of everybody.”

  “I bet it was self-identified, professed heterosexuals.”

  “Sure, yeah,” Rob says, speeding up to beat a yellow light. “And they missed the other kind, the ones who don’t know it yet.” He shifts into fourth and catches the green wave. The minivan is bouncing and Penny goes to the rear bench seat to put on her seat belt. “Lots of those at Bible camp.”

  “Very funny,” Anka says.

  “If there were one sexual deviant in the entire US of A, you’d know it,” Rob says. “Because it’s click-bait. And no matter what his fetish was, people would say it’s the tip of the iceberg. But nobody I ever met was the tip of any iceberg. You’re all weird as fuck. I mean, I hope to hell there’s only one of Jazz!” He pulls into the bus and taxi lane to pass a tow truck on the right. “Imagine two of her,” he says. “But she cornered the market.”

  UP IN HER PENTHOUSE DRINKING maté, Jazz hears the doorbell play “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. She gathers her dressing gown close around her and puts out her cigar. The tune is interrupted and begins again. She puts woolen Kyrgyz boots on her bare feet and descends the three flights to the front door. She opens it and sees Matt—a strikingly beautiful man, dressed in a very perfect dark suit of ethereally soft wool with barely perceptible seams and a blue broadcloth shirt so fine it shimmers. He carries a bottle of Martel champagne, still dripping ice water from a cooler in his trunk, and a ten-inch square of focaccia with rosemary and caramelized grapes, wrapped in wax paper. “May I come in?”

  “You may,” Jazz says. “Is that breakfast?”

  “Do you prefer coffee?” he asks. “We can go out.” (He appends this suggestion in case she has company.)

  “No. I’ve been awake for hours.”

  Hearing the “I,” he knows she is alone. Leather boot heels clicking, he follows her through the front hall and up the stairs. The red quilting of her robe sways as she slinks through the house, her body dodging from side to side like a weasel’s. On the third-floor landing, she turns and says, “There’s nobody home. They’re all at a demo against TTIP.”

  “And you?”

  “I wasn’t in the mood.” She continues up the stairs.

  In her room he sets down his gifts and says, “May I help you with your boots?”

  She sits on the foot of her bed and raises one leg.

  He pulls off a boot, and she raises the other leg. He pulls off a boot, unbuckles his belt, unzips his fly, and falls into a modified push-up, hovering above her on his hands and knees on the bed. Her legs are spread and she is smiling. He stands again briefly to take a condom from his pocket and unroll it over his penis. He lets his pants and underwear fall, without kicking them off (he is still wearing boots), and suggests she draw the curtains.

  “No curtains,” she says.

  He looks out and sees, five roofs away, a woman watering potted plants with a green plastic watering can.

  The landscape is a high desert, black and silver, touched with the red of rusting TV antennas and the white of satellite dishes. Storage sheds on the roofs poke up like the hollow hills of Cappadocia. He looks down at Jazz’s face, and lowers his now blind, rubber-encased penis to her vagina. It is soaking wet. “Jesus,” he says, sliding into the hot, wet space.

  Jazz moves against him and begins to cry out. He looks up and sees the woman with the watering can. She is staring. He places his hand over Jazz’s mouth and nose and thrusts into her violently. She squeaks—a muffled, wide-eyed, helpless gasp for air—and the woman with t
he watering can turns away. He grabs two handfuls of Jazz’s hair and tugs her head down into the mattress. He fucks her for seventeen minutes, feeling himself hard and heavy as a stone. He lets himself fall, smothering her with his chest, embracing her tightly with his arms around her waist as he comes.

  They lie still for a minute or two. He says, “Give me a kiss.”

  “Why?” Jazz asks. She pushes her hair out of her eyes.

  He laughs and asks if she’s thirsty. She nods, and he reaches to take the champagne bottle from the bedside table. He rests it next to her ear to open it, his weight on his elbows. The cork flies upward with a pop.

  He drinks only a few sips before announcing that he needs to get back to work. Not seeing a wastepaper basket, he drops the condom on the wax paper wrapping of the focaccia and pulls up his pants.

  Jazz follows him down as far as the landing on the second floor. She says aloud her long, anonymous e-mail address—a string of numbers at an anarchist domain—paying them both a compliment with her confidence that he will remember it.

  ROB PARKS THE MINIVAN ON Bowery and the group disembarks. They walk uptown, holding their placards downward and facing in. They walk like jaded sophisticates, their mission not to change hearts and minds, but to pad out the small cohort of activist groups determined to be publicly identified with opposition to secret trade negotiations. The organizers expect at most eight hundred people. Around thirty will be agents provocateurs enjoying police protection, and another twenty will linger in the designated smoking area where Sorry now stands, finishing a cigarette.

  She leans on a lamppost, at her feet a small portable fire extinguisher. The irregular polygon where smoking is permitted is outlined on the pavers in yellow duct tape. The smoking area is so far from the stage that the small crowd reaches nowhere near it. That makes it easier for the Blue Bloc minivan passengers to see Sorry as they walk up Broadway. She waves.

  Rob waves back. They cross Fourteenth Street—looking both ways to see not oncoming traffic but distant mounted policemen on horses that stand foursquare and still, as though asleep—slowly raising their placards as they approach Sorry. She laughs approvingly at TTIP/BAD TRIP.