Nicotine

by Nell Zink

  She falls asleep over the book. One moment she is reading, and the next she is waking up late in the evening, wondering where she is. From the kitchen she can see reddish light and hear voices—a vague, soft conversation that rises into laughter and back again. An unzipped sleeping bag covers her, no idea whose. She reaches out and feels the reassuring solidity of the DJD on all sides. A cat disengages itself from her hair. She realizes it has been serving her as a warm cap. “Mew,” she says in greeting.

  She pulls the cat down to chest level and presses it against her heart. Not sadly, but for pleasure. For the first time since Norm’s death, the night brings her no grief and no terror.

  The reason is obvious. It doesn’t make her feel like a fool for missing it before—more like Eve driven from Eden. Of course she feels fine. It’s like being small. She’s back in Manaus, and the babysitter has tucked her in on her cot with the mosquito netting and is talking to friends over mocha in Portuguese, and her kitty Boni is in her arms.

  She likes it. It works. No tension. No love. She nestles down into the mattress and soaks it up: the softness underneath her, the steady murmur of voices, the purring of the animal.

  She wants a cigarette, but she doesn’t want to stand out on the sidewalk to get it. She hugs the cat and falls asleep.

  AT SIX IN THE MORNING, Jazz writes to Matt:

  That’s such a coincidence, because I too am a hard worker who makes garbage disappear without a trace! To my knowledge I have no work on display in Saddle River or Princeton either one. Want to fuck someplace private? I have some ideas.

  He replies within ten minutes with a room number on a high floor of a luxury hotel on the Paulus Hook waterfront, asking her to meet him there at five o’clock the same afternoon.

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE morning, with the cat squarely on top of her head, Penny awakens on the DJD from dreams of flying.

  Feeling so at home in a strange place lends her an unaccustomed cockiness. She uses her cell phone to write a short e-mail to Patrick, asking about his mother, Norm’s wife before Amalia.

  She receives his reply an hour later. She reads the first paragraph, gets up, wraps herself in the sleeping bag, and sits outside on the front porch to read the rest.

  She knows Patrick’s usual writing style—terse and controlled, masterly at condensing major life events into bite-size texts, like his response to Norm’s death (“Requiescat”). This mail by contrast seems breathless, as though he had been saving up a long time to say things that now emerge offhand and casual because that’s the one tone he can assume without triggering his urge to keep control.

  Hey P., I’m on Mindanao. Great weather, wish you were here. It’s weird you should ask that or maybe just that it took you so long and you ask only now that Norm’s gone. But I guess he never talked about it, so why would you even be curious.

  You know the story how your mother came on the scene, the wild street kid my age, Matt was older (16). Mom was great with her.

  How can I describe Mom? Really pretty and sweet. Maiden name Katie Donaldson, from Murray Hill, her family had a little RE empire there (2 bldgs), she was a travel agent and that’s how she met Dad. (Look thru his stuff for cute pix!)

  So to make a long story short your mother sexually was a pushover. Like you could say “put this in you (whatever it was) and I’ll give you an M&M.”

  Here Penny briefly doubts Patrick’s veracity, but only while she associates the story with her father. As soon as she tries to visualize Norm using M&M’s to buy sex from a child, she knows what’s coming.

  She’s smart now but in 1985 she was diff and a certain 16 year old figured it out fast. I was not into it & Dad was MOST DEFINITELY not. He ended up spending all his covering her ass,

  All his what? What exactly did it take to stop Amalia from submitting to Matt for candy? Promises of love? She asked about her father’s first wife, and now she’s getting the primal scene.

  It was a massive effort and conflict. Mom got stressed out and said she was taking off (from Cartagena, Dad was volunteering with this Drs w/o Borders type thing) to this fishing village to chill out on a houseboat. and that was IT. She got in a taxi and that was IT. GAME OVER. NEVER another trace. No word, no witnesses, no more lives for Mom!!! Like she turned into air and flew away.

  Except we both know that isn’t how peoples bodies disappear, so it was also like HELL. Even just thinking about it is HELL.

  The part about how reluctantly bodies die strikes her intuitively as true. The HELL part, she tries to imagine and can’t.

  She can’t put herself in Patrick’s shoes, or anybody else’s in this story. Patrick and Matt, whose mother vanishes. Norm, searching for a kidnap victim without a ransom note. The starving swineherd turned candy whore. There is no way to parse the emotions of any of them.

  Her mother’s stories come back to her with hints at how Katie may have ended up. Lucky enough to be raped by the paramilitaries she farms and cooks for, unlucky enough to be dead. She never connected those stories with her mother’s life, always assuming Amalia was too young to be talking about herself. Now she still doesn’t know if the stories have any relevance, and if so, to what. She only feels grateful that nearly everyone in the house has left for work, so she can keep reading Patrick’s letter.

  Dad kept A. and sent her to school. I think he adopted her in Colombia but she had a different ID in America (fake papers) so he could marry her (I heard about the wedding afterward).

  That line makes her feel a little dizzy.

  I don’t know and (as you can imagine) it’s hard for me to think about, because it was her that led indirectly to Mom being gone.

  Now maybe you know why I live so far away!!!

  I like you a lot, truly I love you, I even love Mats but I love Mom more and it was hard losing her that way. Now after 30 years she’s definitely dead and for the probate A. said she will make it official. I have this fantasy A. does due diligence and finds her right away, which is pathetic because Dad already tried everything! He tried so hard. Not gonna happen.

  Well, they’re together now.

  Take care little sister. Your loving brother

  Patrick

  So Patrick is waiting for news of Norm’s death to draw a runaway Katie out of the shadows. A crazy fantasy he cops to—he’s not ashamed—knowing it can’t happen. Her name will never be besmirched as a mother who abandoned her family (not that it’s conceivable, or is it?), and he’ll inherit her property free and clear because Norm is finally gone—Norm, traitor to his sons for marrying the interloper who killed Katie. Or not marrying her. She rereads the paragraph. She can’t tell. It’s confusing.

  P.S. I’ve got plenty of money and my GF/fiance is loaded (Thai/French), we’ll probably get married so please don’t sweat the financial stuff, take whatever you need (if A. lets you have it!)

  Penny reads the mail many times over.

  She pushes it up and down with her index finger, rereading every word—especially “fake papers” and “adopted.”

  Her anger and resentment crystallize around the postscript. They attract stray emotional metastases that had been wandering her body since her father’s death. Why does Patrick combine an offer of money with an attack on her mother? Does he think she loved Norm for his money?

  She senses that Patrick does not regard Amalia as a member of the family, because she shares none of his genes.

  She remembers what Norm said about her ovaries when he was dying—that he could see his grandchildren through her abdominal wall, in effect that he owned something inside her body—and in a stress-induced flash she sees, like one of those galactic clouds in outer space, the zillions of spermatozoa he must have created and distributed and discarded every day of his youth.

  She experiences a sudden conviction that men are not members of the family. They are corn tassels whose pollen is borne away on the wind. They want their sons to be corn tassels. Their daughters are earth.

  Patrick’s letter proves it:
everyone in her family has always deferred to Matt. Even Norm. Even Katie! Because when your son is fucking the malnourished street whore, you don’t practice stress reduction by leasing a houseboat!

  The letter shows that she has never really known her brothers, her father, or her mother. Her family is a train wreck. The runaway train of devotion and commitment, reduced to a pile of scrap. No casualties, because no passengers. They bailed on this train long ago.

  She feels a dull will to salvage what she can—a little money, maybe?

  After nearly an hour she texts back: Did Katie have family? Patrick replies, Not anymore. Parents and older sister w/no kids. Penny: So you guys inheriting apt bldgs in Murray Hill or what? Patrick: Already did, in 2007. Sold just in time! Penny: And the summer place??? Patrick: You can use it whenever. Good night

  An eccentric who lives at DJD—a devotee of energy efficiency and solar cells, dressed in a one-piece footed sleeper, a Dartmouth varsity crew letterman known to all as Sunshine—finally pushes the screen door open and asks Penny if she wants some cocoa for breakfast. She looks up at him in silence, eyes red and dry. He grasps her shoulder with his mittened right hand.

  “I reacted all wrong,” she says. “Somebody nice sent me an intimate personal e-mail, and I wrote back asking for money!”

  He says, “That’s solicitation.”

  “I don’t mean somebody I’m dating. I mean a family member.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Wherever money gets involved, dignity becomes impossible.” He pushes his hood back, possibly to hear her better, possibly to expose his attractive face and hair.

  “That’s not true,” she says. “Money plus dignity is a piece of cake, if it’s a lot of money and it’s yours.”

  “Nobody owns money. It’s a medium of exchange, with a value assigned by a corrupt system. You have to reject it.”

  She decides not to ask whether it’s possible to own apartment buildings or summer places on the Hudson. She could hit a nerve, given the centrality of real estate in the squatter community. Instead she accepts his offer of cocoa. They sit together on the porch for a while, not saying much.

  SHE WALKS HOME TO TRANQUILITY. Slowly, flat-footed, with her hands clasped behind her back, carrying her shoes and socks. Her leggings are scrunched up to her knees. The day is warm.

  It seems to her that her way of walking is new. When has she walked like this before? She can’t recall an instance. The smooth, bare concrete feels pointy under her feet. Needles of pain shoot up her shins as she walks. She likes being barefoot in the city, filth and all, and she likes that her hands are touching each other where she can’t see them. She feels a sense of self-sufficiency. Alone, but not unfortunate. An orphan, but not in danger. Alone with her senses. She feels fine.

  She wonders whether some of her recent suffering may have been strategic—calculated to attract Rob’s sympathy. Or was she just trying to find a reason to love him less shallow than love?

  She shakes her head in mystification. It’s right there on her shoulders where it’s always been, but she knows too little about it. Right now she suspects it’s up to no good.

  She mounts the porch, past the bean vines and tomatoes in buckets and the pots of herbs, and says hello to Rufus and Stevie. She continues upstairs to her room, strips, and walks naked to the shower a floor below with nothing on but the thin leather band she wears around her right upper arm and the two thongs with bone amulets around her neck.

  The shower tiles have a dark green transparent glaze. The floor is painted glossy white, and the bath mat is an antique—lint-free, long-staple cotton in generous, curling loops. After her shower she stands on the bath mat, rubbing herself with a rough towel. She scrubs her body until it glows pink. Back in her room, she coats her limbs with sandalwood massage oil and cleans her fingers on the ends of her hair. She puts on a smocked top, cutoff booty shorts, and flip-flops, and heads over to Nicotine.

  When she arrives, it is four o’clock, and Jazz is sitting in the kitchen with Rob, smoking a homemade cigar. She wears a metallic blue minidress over a footless black lace catsuit.

  “You look nice!” Rob says to Penny. “I love your legs.”

  “And you look like you have a date,” Penny says. “Jazz, I have to tell you something. Do not do this. I found out from Patrick. He’s an abuser. He started having sex with my mom when she was thirteen. And that’s if she was really thirteen. Maybe she was eleven.”

  “He’s probably your biological father,” Jazz says.

  “Oh! Oh!” Penny cries, covering her eyes with her hands and leaning forward. “Do not be that gross!”

  “What? Did you fuck him? They say incest is best—”

  “Don’t take her seriously,” Rob says. “She’s just getting in her femme fatale mode. It’s an act. It gets her all randy, but for us it’s always like yecch.”

  “Is he coming over here?”

  “No,” Jazz says. “Some hotel.”

  “Then why isn’t there a For Sale sign in front of the house?”

  “Maybe he can’t get erections at hotels, and we’ll be back here tomorrow.”

  Penny sits down. “You’re amazing. I look up to you. I respect the way you enforce your sexual freedom. I really do. But.”

  “But what?” Jazz asks.

  “But Matt!”

  “What’s it to you, anyway?”

  “He’s my brother!”

  “Skip the clan lore,” she says. “Tell me how much time you’ve spent with this man in your life, and whether you ever liked him.”

  “He’s always been there.”

  “I mean in the flesh.”

  “At Christmas, mostly, and a couple times in the summer, plus he got involved after Dad died.”

  “That’s not a brother. That’s a stranger.”

  “Also I dislike him more than anybody I ever met in my life.”

  “Q.E.D. Rob is way closer to being your brother.”

  “Then you don’t know shit about brothers. We can’t all choose our relatives like the Rainbow Family.”

  “You like your other brother!”

  “I barely know him either, but I know he’s not swine.”

  Jazz laughs. “Swine,” she says. “That’s exactly it. The morals of a razorback in the body of an Armenian king. He makes me completely insane. And”—she leans toward Penny, touching her bare knee—“it’s not anything you have to worry about. It’s outside time and space.”

  “Wow,” Penny says. “That is so fucked-up.”

  “If I didn’t know you, I’d say you were asexual,” Rob remarks.

  Penny hisses, “Having a sexual ethic doesn’t make me frigid.”

  “To me, eroticism is transcendent,” Jazz says. “It has a will of its own. It’s not a sport with rules and referees.”

  “Having rules doesn’t make it a game!”

  Into the seething silence of the kitchen wanders Anka. She flings a plastic cereal bowl and tablespoon into the sink. “Hey, Penny!” she says over the clatter. “You look nice! Did you get a haircut?”

  Penny shakes her head, and Rob says, “She’s having an adrenaline rush.”

  “It suits you,” Anka tells her. “I always think of you as kind of morose and critical, and today you look all perky.”

  Penny moans. She opens her mouth to explain to Anka about Jazz and Matt and maybe even Rob, then closes it.

  “You know I paint sometimes,” Anka adds. “I ought to sketch you and capture this moment for eternity. Right now I need to do Jazz’s eye makeup, but when we’re done, come upstairs and let me sketch you.”

  After Jazz leaves—her eyes rimmed in upswept liquid blue—Penny goes upstairs with Anka, who shows her portraits of people she knows: Tony. Rob. Jazz.

  Tony is a stolid, homely face like a Rembrandt portrait, knobby nose, knobby background. Rob stands in sunlight, hair almost white, red plaid shirt, hands in pockets. Jazz looks up at the painter like a four-year-old, all innocence and eyelashes. Penny laughs out lou
d.

  “I know,” Anka says.

  Penny feels a rush of confidence in Anka. Not that she finds her terribly interesting, but her own bitter mix of love, anger, knowledge, and skepticism toward Rob and Jazz—especially Jazz—seems to her right then a mark of intelligence and sensitivity, and Anka seems to share it.

  “So tell me about yourself,” Anka says. “Just sit in my chair and look out the window, and tell me some story.”

  She sits in a tattered armchair and says, “A story. I can tell stories.”

  “What kind?”

  She shifts her weight. “Anything you want. There’s no better way to manipulate people. Like my parents, shanghaiing me into getting a business degree with tales of the financial and intellectual independence I’d be having. I only learned one thing. How to make things up. Every number tells a story. Probably nothing tells a story better than numbers. Put in some statistics, and people will believe anything.”

  “Turn back to the right a little bit.”

  “Why isn’t Jazz’s nose broken in that picture?”

  “That only happened to her year before last. She got drunk and fell down the stairs and crashed into the wall. She said she was tripping on cognac.”

  Penny tries not to smile, because there is nothing funny about people getting hurt.

  “Don’t smile,” Anka admonishes her. “Concentrate on something. Breathe from the diaphragm. That’s what makes your face look nice—when you forget you even have one.”

  JAZZ SWAYS ON THE HOTEL room’s windy balcony, wearing her elaborate outfit, looking across an old quay to the Hudson and smoking. She hears the door latch turn over and turns to look at Matt, who stands immobilized in front of the king-size bed, gazing down at the metal object nestled in the center of the duvet: a semi-automatic pistol.