He watches her scan pictures, sees her realize the woman in the snapshot there is Nancy Reagan, and that it was taken in the dining room of this house. Elise doesn’t say anything.
His dad as a prep-schooler in a rowing shell, his grandmother on a Technicolor golf course. Many weddings, but not Jamey’s parents’.
“Where’s your mom?”
“Nowhere,” he says. “According to them, she never existed.”
Adults on a sailboat, laughing, off a blindingly white beach. Square-jawed women in gowns with baby-faced men in tuxedos at balls in Manhattan, Boston, London. Children on a ski slope, black trees in the background. Newborns, eyes looking glassily from a bassinet.
How can he explain the Hydes? Their pockmarked DNA, aged like blue cheese, traditions browning like the edges of a sliced pear? They’re more than a family—they’re an institution, a culture, a regime. And he, technically, is a high-ranking member.
The women are smart and lanky—a few exist on Ritz crackers and gin—no one sees them consume much else. The men range from chieftains, eminent rulers—like Bats and Uncle J. P.—to their henchmen, like Alex. The family has legendary parties—whiskey juleps at the Kentucky Derby, summer croquet in East Hampton, and holiday caroling from house to house in Newport. They have backgammon tournaments, and the guests wear herringbone slacks, sipping Glenlivet outside in the cool autumn twilight.
The old cat, Ducky, is pictured here in a grove of peonies, and he represents another facet of the Hydes. He fought a one-cat war with raccoons all his life, his face rearranged after bloody, moonlit altercations, and one yellow eye blinked on top of his head, and his tongue hung out the side of his mouth. He died on a Thanksgiving night, heaved and gurgled at the top of the stairs as the family ate turkey and potatoes dauphinoise. The Hydes didn’t move—they admired his self-sufficient courage, and they admired themselves for being unsentimental. The children helped dig his grave under a holly tree the next morning.
After looking at the photos, they eat cookies in the kitchen, play “Chopsticks” on the piano, and see the view from the third floor—a long dark gleaming glitter of ocean. There are more staircases and hallways and closets and rooms than seems scientifically possible from outside.
This isn’t new to her, being new in a house that isn’t hers. Elise checked off many addresses on her journey. She saw herself in medicine-cabinet mirrors, she slept on couches covered in dog hair and took the dimes and pennies from under the cushions, she nipped a slug of orange juice before she left, she stepped out of buildings and looked left then right and simply moved in a direction so it looked like she had a destination. The lightning fork on the city rooftop gleamed with dirty light as she set out, again and again, newly put forth after getting through a night, rising like a bird into the world.
“I want to see the beach!” she says around midnight.
“Now?” he asks. “You’re insane.”
They grab a blanket and walk, blanket over shoulders, down a path that in summer is hedged by hydrangea blooms. Tonight the plants are sticks.
On the beach she pulls away and tears to the ocean, runs to the surf’s edge, wets her boots at their tips.
Jamey drops the blanket and they race in circles. The moon clarifies the sand’s ripples and the half-buried driftwood and the frilly edge of the Atlantic.
When they stop, she coughs, bending over.
“God is telling you to quit smoking,” he says.
“Yeah, that’s gonna happen,” she scoffs, but she collects his statement of concern like a seashell in her pocket, another souvenir of their future together.
They lie on the blanket and roll into it. He puts his hand under her shirt, she yelps—her torso is blazing. So slim, and so much heat! She slips her icy hands in his sweater, and finds it’s hot there too.
They barely move and yet the sand stirs audibly, minerals turning, squeaking.
Her face painted by the stars. The light sanctifying each curve and lash. He thinks about how human bodies are made from time and space: meteors and blood, lava and brain, plankton and bones.
“Let’s sleep here,” she says.
“It’s way too cold,” he says.
And she could almost sleep in the dunes. It’s about being hardy as well as disobeying conventions like homes and buildings, rooms and beds, addresses, belongings. She left them; she unbraided those things from her identity. She signed off.
“I’m too cold,” he admits.
“You’re a baby,” she teases, and they lie there for a while before standing up, brushing off sand, folding the blanket, and walking back.
He wakes up in the dark, confused—the rooms divide memories into compartments. His father and Cecily in this bed, hungover after their engagement party ten years ago, reading the paper all morning and drinking bloody marys Jamey delivered. In the sitting room, an argument between his uncles over a card game. An afternoon of buttery light in the kitchen, cigarette smoke, a couple visiting from Saudi Arabia—who were they? Someone’s dog cowering in the hedge, in shock after being hit by a car.
He wants to get rid of most of what he remembers, comb through it, toss it, but he feels guilty. His head is packed with tie pins, soda caps, pressed violets. Girls’ things, or things collected like a girl collects things. There’s a feminine side to him, an almost indolent, timid part of his soul. He’s affected so easily. Once in a while, he can feel everything shift one way, and he lurches to the left, seasick on recollection and devotion. An object like a metal spatula—he sees his dad in madras shorts and no shirt at the grill—shimmers now in the far distance like a friendly warning.
The next day, he has to shit but he can’t do it with her around. When they’re in New Haven, he goes to his own house because he can’t at her apartment.
Now he sneaks to the cold, unheated servants’ wing. He yips as he sits on the freezing seat.
And suddenly she’s calling his name through the house. Why? Why now? He’s mortified, and holds his breath. He wipes his ass, quietly stands—She’s near!
He lights a match from a Le Cirque matchbook in the French ceramic dish on the back of the toilet. But he doesn’t want her to hear him flush.
Her voice recedes. He waits and waits, flushes, tiptoes up a back staircase so he can come down the front stairs like he was just out of earshot. His heart is pounding.
They’re reading Smithsonian magazine and drinking beer when Elise hears a noise upstairs.
“This place is haunted!” she says.
This house is haunted, he explains—by a charismatic, manic redhead named Henrietta, who loved gardenia perfume, mystery novels, caramel candies, and her employer: Aaron Balthazar Hyde, Jamey’s great-grandfather. Loved him too much, loved him the wrong way, loved him over and over. Everyone thought her bloated nose and pink eyes were because she missed Ireland, but the worldlier girls saw the slight weight gain, almost imperceptible, just a shifting of the body’s priorities. And one day the girl was found hanging in the bedroom she shared with two maids, her tongue ice-blue.
“To be honest, I’ve heard so many versions over the years, it’s probably not true.”
“But she was real?”
“As far as I know. And he was certainly real.”
“And they had an affair?”
“That’s hard to confirm. She could have said he was the father but it was actually the driver, you know?”
“Or your great-granddad could’ve raped her.”
“Yes,” Jamey says slowly, not sure if he should be defensive.
“Or maybe she was like delusional. Was she definitely having a baby?”
“That could be rumor.”
Elise now pictures this girl arranging daisies in a vase, polishing silver.
Jamey keeps putting her beer on the magazine so it doesn’t water-stain the table. Elise sees old scuffed furniture, but this is an eighteenth-century English sideboard. She twirls her hair with black-tipped magenta nails, a Turner seascape as her backdrop,
and luckily she doesn’t catch his expression. It’s the face he makes when their story sounds like a rumor. What on Earth are they doing?
“You have to open the flue first,” he says, reaching up into the charred space. “Like so.”
He crouches, wedging newspaper cones under an X of kindling and logs. He touches a match to the paper. Fire consumes Jamey’s construction, popping and hissing, and twigs turn molten orange and sizzle into smoke and ash, while the alligator bark starts to glow.
Jamey’s face and neck and hands are yellow as he watches.
They gaze at the fire, throwing on another log whenever the time is right, looking through art books like James Whistler paintings, Edward Weston’s mountains, an Audubon tome whose plates Jamey turns from egret to pelican to raven.
When they go to bed, she drinks a glass of water because she’s parched. She’s deeply dreamy and sleepy. That fire changed the whole house, like it finally got a heart, but the sheets feel extra cold, and they hold each other.
He sips orange juice in the kitchen, and he smells on the glass his own breath—his mouth—in that way that’s usually impossible, even if you blow into the cup of your hand. Nothing has ever made him so aware of mortality. He gets it.
Then, bang! It’s gone again.
He hands her a tartan cape to stay warm, and she looks like a Scottish warrior as they go walking through the lanes. Massive houses are almost visible behind hedges and ivy-covered brick walls, looming, moving as they pass. Once in a while, a bronze square indicates that someone’s home, or smoke chuffs slowly from a chimney into the dark sky.
“I was out in a place like this, upstate New York, for like a week,” she says.
“Oh yeah?” he says. “Was it nice?”
“It was nice, we went swimming, played softball in the town. It was just weird, you know, ’cause I was staying with this family. It was like a program.”
“A Fresh Air Fund sort of thing?” he asks after a moment.
“Yeah.”
They look at each other like: I wonder if we can talk about these things.
“That’s cool you got to go, but yeah, I imagine it was strange,” he says, his tone gently closing this part of the conversation.
He’s thinking of a summer, he was fourteen or fifteen. The Kellogg family down the road hosted a brother and sister from Harlem, Josiah and Kelly (or Kerry? or Cary?), and Jamey ended up bringing Josiah over for a barbecue. Everyone treated the kid well, including Bats and Binkie, asking about his school and his summer. Josiah was tall and spindly, wearing someone’s Izod shirt. But Jamey overheard Bats the next day laughing with his friend Greg Lamar about the Kelloggs. What, they’re Mother Teresa now? Better than the rest? Feeling especially guilty about that IPO, are we, Jeff? Jamey thought about how the maid Lysoled the downstairs bathroom right after the barbecue was done and the guests gone, and he knew someone in his family asked the maid to do that, and he knew why.
“Are you listening to me?” Elise says now, halfway through a story about strawberries and a sunburn.
Walking with Elise is like walking with a hyperactive child, because she turns around and strides backward to talk to him, or runs a few steps forward to dunk an imaginary basketball, or does a Crip Walk with a straight face while he bends to tie his shoe.
But when she holds him around the waist as they stroll, he doesn’t respond with his own arm around her waist, and she eventually lets go. Even though there’s no one looking, he still feels seen.
The morning they’re going to leave, Elise stands at the kitchen window, the T-shirt she slept in falling off one shoulder. A deer has come to the yard to see if there’s anything green to nibble. She’s watching the animal.
The doe steps through the grass, muted by dew, as if moving through a mine field of light and dark. Jamey steps behind Elise, wraps his arms around her waist.
What if, he’s thinking, for the first time. She leans back, easing weight against him. And he feels it as her saying, Yes, exactly.
The deer stops, bites, chews while listening—her big brown eyes not frightened but intensely alert.
Elise is taking one last hot soak when he comes in to brush his teeth—she’s fallen in love with the claw-foot tub and is sad to leave it. She lies back, braids hanging over the ivory edge. Her eyes are closed, goose-bumped knees high.
Then he sees it: threads of blood from between her legs, unspooling in the slow motion of ethereal things.
He knew she had her period; they’d been putting down towels in the bed. But there’s something about this—so delicate and terrifying….
In the car, she bites her nail while he drives.
“So, you wanna drop stuff at your house and come over?” she asks.
“I sort of need to collect myself.”
“Collect what?”
“Get it together for this upcoming week.”
She looks at the highway, the neon signs for Arby’s, for Jiffy Lube. A white van next to them has cheap black letters glued to its side: ST. LUKE’S HOUSE FOR MEN. Beyond, a landscape of suburbs and industry is dark rubble covered with a thousand rhinestones. The stars in the sky are browned out. She uses a fake smile to hold her place in the world.
A couple times, Jamey has the almost comical urge to swerve into the oncoming stream of headlights. He hasn’t felt that in at least a month, and he’s disappointed to feel it again, his hands sore when they get home from gripping the wheel.
When Jamey makes it into his house, he’s weirdly pleased by the clack-clack of a jeans button spinning in the dryer, and the lamps blazing, the furnace on high. He closes his bedroom door, and only then realizes how tired he is after he and Elise had to generate enough humanity between them to battle the cold and empty mansion in Newport. He’s exhausted. Finished.
He thinks about the things they maybe left there—a satin thong in the sheets, Diet Pepsi in the fridge, a People magazine. Drops of bacteria that can grow and change the environment, evolving the empty house.
“So, what time you gonna be here tonight?” she calls to ask the next day.
“Not sure.” He squirms. “I have a lot of work.”
“What work?”
“Schoolwork, Elise. I’m in school.”
“Just come after.”
“I don’t know when I’ll be done.”
“It doesn’t matter. The door’s unlocked.”
“It matters to me.”
“Why? Just wake me up.”
“Goddamn. You don’t give up.”
“I’m sorry, am I hearing that you want me to give up?”
“Elise, for God’s sake…” he says in exasperation but without answering yes or no.
He and Matt get pizza in town, and Matt tells him about hotel-room partying in Aspen and this guy who puked all over the parquet floors, the curtains, the bed, and how they put him in the hall, naked and unconscious, on a room-service tray for the staff to handle.
Matt asks him carefully about Newport, and Jamey answers that it was “relaxing,” the house was “peaceful,” the beach was “beautiful with no one there.”
Jamey didn’t think he was going to do this—there were even moments in Newport when he imagined a murky, quivering future of sorts—but he doesn’t want to see her anymore. He’s playing with a human heart. He needs to stop this experiment. It was an experiment after all.
She calls the next afternoon.
Matt says: “Um, hold on a sec.”
He raises his eyebrows at Jamey, who shakes his head and mouths: I’m not here.
“He’s out right now, but I’ll tell him you called.”
Between his BMW being there on the street and Matt’s politeness, Elise knows.
Actually, she knew before they left the house in Rhode Island, as she locked eyes with Binkie’s portrait one last time. His people have a kind of power she thought only existed in myths. The way the fireplace lit him up, the way he stretched out in the four-poster bed, sheets to his hips—that house doesn’t
want to let him go.
She tries to reach him, sporadically, over the next week. Even Jamey is surprised at how infrequently she calls. Then she stops.
Robbie and Elise are cooking Hamburger Helper and dancing to Madonna, using the greasy spoon as a mike. Get into the groove, boy, you’ve got to prove your love to ME!
They eat, watching Dallas. Elise is holding a cotton ball soaked in hydrogen peroxide to his ear, which he got pierced yesterday.
“So, you throwin’ in the towel?” Robbie asks during a commercial, blue eyes wide.
She shrugs, very uncomfortable. “He doesn’t know how to love anybody. He just has no idea.”
“I mean, he should love you, Leesey.”
Elise smirks at Robbie, grateful, and dabs at his ear. “We got too close on this trip. He has to step back.”
“Yeah?” Robbie says, trying to be supportive.
“This is gonna be”—she can’t look at Robbie when she says it—“a test. He’ll come back. He’ll miss me. I just gotta wait.”
“Why don’t you break out those ninja skills?”
She laughs, drums up some bravado. “I’ll wait like a ninja.”
Robbie smokes schwag, offers the one-hitter to Elise, who says no thanks. He coughs, and they keep watching TV, but Elise is remembering the beach that night, the glittering sky and the glittering ocean divided by one dark line, and how she let Jamey put his cold hands under her sweater, and his hands warmed up.
APRIL 1986
New Haven blooms; dogwoods open their petals of tea-streaked porcelain, and birds tune up like a symphony; rain falls on stone one day, simple white puffs fill an azure sky the next.
Students are euphoric, high on thin sunshine. Tender skin is revealed to the air in golf shirts and knee-length skirts. Kids shiver at the sidewalk café, determined to drink their coffee outside, hunching over notebooks.
Elise sometimes goes to the basketball court on Montague Street that’s annexed to the church. A program for troubled teens uses it when school lets out, but it’s deserted in the mornings. She squints into the frail light as she shoots. Her face is expressionless whether she misses or scores.
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