One day, a nun offers her banana bread in a napkin and a can of cream soda.
“Oh, wow,” Elise says. “That’s really nice of you.”
“I see you playing here,” the nun says. “You’re a strong girl.”
“Seriously, thanks,” Elise says, the ball between her pigeon-toed feet as she eats—she needed this kindness.
The woman’s face is turtle-like in the short tuck of her nose and the bleary, innocent eyes. She wears gray orthopedic shoes, and when she waddles back to the church, her beads sway.
Elise bikes through neighborhoods she doesn’t know, skirting the campus, taking in its massive mismatched buildings, the castles, the hospitals. Mainly she cruises residential areas, watching a mom zip her girl’s jacket on a stoop, smelling garlic in butter through a window, riding over empty dime bags.
At night, she dances with Robbie at the Anvil, where the music is thunderous and morbid, and they can each afford one drink, which they nurse over the hours.
One day she goes to their diner. She doesn’t really expect to see him, but her stomach is still twisted as she waits to be seated, eating a mint filled with yellow goo. At the table she picks at her cheeseburger and fries and lemonade.
She’s always been an outsider. She isn’t clearly black or white or Puerto Rican, and the world where she grew up was easier if you were one thing or the other, or if you claimed one thing or the other, which she could have done but never did.
Elise didn’t bond with other kids; parents watched her on a playground—throwing rocks into a bucket or talking to herself on a swing—and said: Elise got to do it on her own, always. And when she started running away at thirteen, Denise would hiss when they got her back: Why you think you can just fucking do this? Makes me crazy, Elise. You’re not on your own yet, girl. You belong to me. You stay put. Hear me?
Jamey is trying to be alone. But his mind is flooded with a psychedelica of sexual positions, fantasies invading like an army of Elises who blow kisses, snap the waistbands of their panties, strut, suck the straw of a million milkshakes, curse, and grin. A regular pinup parade of this girl in her red negligee and white fur and black sneakers, smoking, staring with irresistible boredom in her dead eyes like a killer.
He has trouble sleeping, but hates admitting it so he petulantly lies in bed, arms crossed in the dark. When he was a kid, his mom’s assistant gave him sleeping pills, and taking them sends him back to groggy and frightened nights in half-lit hotel rooms or a producer’s pool cottage in California or Portugal, so he leaves them alone.
Maybe I just need to define terms better, he tells himself one morning. Yeah, that’s it!
On the phone, he feels twelve, but a twelve he never was. He should be chewing gum, baseball in mitt, cartoons squeaking and honking in the background.
“Hey,” he says slowly.
“What’s up?” she asks matter-of-factly.
He’s thrown off by her tone. “Um, wondering if you want to have lunch.” Silence. “I miss that grilled cheese!”
“You miss the grilled cheese, huh?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
When they get there, they try to hug but make a mess of it. She pulls away before he can tell she’s trembling.
Seated, he says: “I’m thinking that—we can hang out. But this time it’s clear—”
“We’re not girlfriend-boyfriend.”
“We’re obviously something to each other.”
“We’re just gonna fuck,” she says.
He gets wide-eyed. “You’re in an eloquent frame of mind.”
“Sounds great,” she says, and taps the menu. “Turkey club.”
“Okay then.”
“And I gotta have onion rings.” She looks around the diner like she’s bored.
Sunlight illuminates dust in her bedroom, garishly exposes every stipple in the carpet.
She strips like she’s getting in the shower. Tells him to strip too. She runs nails over his naked, daylit arms, his chest, his groin, looking him over while ignoring his eyes.
She licks her palm, then kisses him while reaching down and stroking him with an economical rhythm. She puts her hands on the bed, and looks over her shoulder. “You fuck me,” she says. “Come on.”
He’s harder than he’s been in his life, swollen, and thick at the base. She’s so wet her inner thighs get slimy. She rubs her clit and comes in a series of bucks, before he does. She pulls away and sits on the bed.
“Jack off on my tits,” she directs.
And he does. She watches, unflinching.
She wipes translucent cream off her nipple to lick.
He stretches out on the bed but she puts on her clothes.
“I’m not in a mood to lie around today, Jamey,” she tells him gruffly.
“Oh. Okay.” He dresses in a daze, dark hair falling to his nose as he looks to button his shirt.
Kissing him and folding her hand in a goodbye at the top of the stairs, she goes back into the apartment. Only then does she let herself sink onto the bed, exhausted, grinning at the ceiling. She rolls over and takes a deep breath of him from the sheets, closes her eyes.
Aaaannnndd they’re back! Together almost every night, under cheap blankets. He sleeps with his back to her but doesn’t mean anything by it.
They’re making bacon and eggs when he says his mother is coming to town.
“You have things in common,” he says.
“Like what?”
“You’re both…feisty.”
“I’m feisty?” Elise asks, grinning. “What’s she look like?”
“You’ve seen her.”
“Where?”
“In movies!”
“She’s famous?” Elise asks, nibbling bacon grit off the spatula.
“I thought you knew that. Tory Boyd Mankoff.”
No reaction.
“She was in The Canyon?” Jamey prompts. “And Polanski’s The Father’s House.”
“What’s Polanski?”
“Or…you must have seen Star City. She’s the card dealer. She finds the body. She has sex with Peter Fonda in the elevator.”
“That’s your mother?” Elise sits on the counter and looks at Jamey with giant eyes.
“Yup. Yale is showing a retrospective of Abernath films, and she was one of his muses,” Jamey says.
Elise stares at the ceiling. “I can’t believe you had to watch your mom fuck that guy.”
“It wasn’t real.”
“Sure looked real, let me tell you.”
Tory is supposed to meet Jamey for breakfast, but changes it to lunch, then calls to say she’s an hour late. Par for the course.
When she pulls up, he can see through the car window her long straight hair, and he knows she’s as tough and skinny and glamorous as she ever was.
He gets into the ivory Jaguar, entering its force field, sinking into leather.
Tory looks at her son, the way she does.
Suddenly his shirt is too tucked in. His hands can’t find rightful places on his knees so he crosses his arms. His mouth, eyelids, teeth palpitate with wrongness.
“Hey, babe,” she says with a casualness that makes him feel his self-consciousness is self-created.
The light changes. They’re off.
“How you doing?” he asks.
He made a lightning decision between How are you (formal) and How you doing (mistake).
“How’m I doin’?” she asks, in a godfather-of-the-mafia impersonation.
Her face is straight, but then she grins at him. “How’s life?” she says, without answering.
“School’s great,” he says. “Yeah. Been a great semester.”
As he rambles, Tory takes a Merit Light from the soft pack between her skinny white-denim thighs. She lights it, cracks the window with the cigarette in her mouth and eyes half-closed against the smoke.
“This is such an ugly city,” she interrupts.
“It is,” he agrees.
“I’ve missed you,”
she says without looking at him, which is how he knows she means it.
“Missed you too,” he says.
“You’re coming to the screenings?” she asks girlishly.
“Tory, of course.”
She tosses the cigarette and rolls up the window.
Red light at Haney Square, where the vacant department store stands. A dead tree comes out of the sidewalk, a deflated balloon caught in its branches.
At lunch, she tries, as usual, to find out what Alex is doing—since they haven’t spoken in about eight years. “So! I hear HMK has a massive lawsuit from some Japanese company.”
Jamey fills her in with what sound like top-secret details but are not. He knows how to do this to both parents, head tilted forward, shoulders slumped back, tapping the table with his fingers—generously indiscreet. Whoever he’s talking to always stares like his mouth is smeared with honey.
Then they chat about Jack Nicholson coming tomorrow, about the documentary she’s funding on Moroccan schools for girls—Wait, no, girls in Istanbul, is that it? They changed it on me—shoot, I can’t remember—and various parts she’s been offered in films that are in various stages of possible production. Jamey stifles a yawn.
“I’m just in one of those periods, James, when there’s so much being thrown my way. I can’t commit to anything and everything someone begs me to do.”
Even as a kid, Jamey knew that his mother’s thinking so hard about acting, studying lines, being absentminded, was acting. Her trailer was a curated mess, with fan letters and cigarette packs and banana peels everywhere.
But she couldn’t act all the time. Her dark moods were renowned, and genuine.
In her hotel room now, skin creams and homeopathic pills and clothes exploded everywhere, she presses the phone’s red light as Jamey talks; a woman says Jack is unable to make the screening and wants Tory to know he’s sorry.
Jack is sorry….
Oh, there had been benevolence till now. A playfulness in the air.
Now Tory evades Jamey’s eyes, touches her hair in the mirror.
“What am I even wearing?” She laughs rabidly.
Jamey’s stomach twists.
Instantly Tory turns sulky and wants to go shopping.
“Um, sure,” her son says, racking his brain for stores. New Haven is not exactly Paris.
He should call Elise to put off dinner tonight, since his mother will now be especially dangerous. But he’s never alone with the phone.
Tory and Jamey are drinking wine when Elise knocks on the door. She’s wearing acid-washed jeans and the white fur. She got her nails done for tonight: burgundy with gold lightning streaks. Great!
He sees shock on his mom’s face.
Reflected in each of his mom’s eyes is a tiny ghetto demon who waves her hand and bites her bottom lip.
“What’s up!” Elise says.
His mom is speechless.
“Tory, this is Elise. Elise, my mother, Tory.”
“Hi,” Elise tries again.
Tory seems to decide this is not a joke and she should proceed. “So nice to meet you,” she says haltingly.
“I didn’t know who you were!” Elise says. “I mean, Jamey had to tell me you were who you are. You know what I’m trying to say?”
“Um,” Tory says. “I think I do.”
“Well, it’s cool to meet you.”
“Yes. Thanks. Cool to meet you too.”
Tory doesn’t speak in the front seat of the BMW. Jamey knows why.
Jamey tries to ask Elise harmless questions.
“So you had a good day?” he says, looking at her in the rearview.
“We got a shipment of dead angel fish, but that happens.”
Tory’s eyes widen.
“And Lex had pneumonia, we found out, which is why nobody’s seen him recently. But he’s doing good now.”
Jamey doesn’t follow this up either.
“Lex is a friend?” Tory asks Elise and Jamey.
“Not really,” Jamey says.
“He’s not not a friend,” Elise corrects.
“He’s a homeless guy,” Jamey explains, which doesn’t help anything.
“Ah, I see,” Tory says.
At La Maison, the host warmly greets Tory and Jamey, then looks too long at Elise. While the others check coats, she pulls her fur tight.
“So where do you hail from, Elise?” Tory asks as they look at menus by candlelight.
“Do you mean where do I come from? Connecticut.”
“Where in Connecticut.”
“I kind of grew up all over the state.”
“So you’re not from anywhere.”
“Well, Hartford, New London, Bridgeport.”
“What do your parents do?”
Jamey shoots his mother a look, but she won’t make eye contact.
“I was never, like, in touch with my dad. But. My mom’s done every sort of job there is, practically.” Elise tries to laugh.
Tory smiles in a small, controlled way. “I love how you grew up everywhere, and your mother has done everything.”
Elise tries to laugh again, her face damp. “Well, not everything,” she says.
“I guess that’s good,” Tory answers as if they were conspirators. “I’ll have another Stoli,” she says to the waitress with warmth so theatrical it’s actually designed to be understood as insincere.
Jamey orders escargot, and Elise looks at the round plate bubbling with butter.
“Want one? It’s a snail,” he can’t help but add.
“What?!” Elise says, the slug poised on its tiny fork in her hand.
Jamey tries not to smile. “Protein. It’s good for you.”
Elise pops it in her mouth, grimaces as she chews. “Oh my God. Disgusting.”
Tory baby-sips her potage aux pommes, watching.
This is going so badly, Jamey almost wonders if Elise is playing it up.
Tory turns to her son. “Well, James. Perhaps I should have been checking in with you more frequently this semester.”
Tory was never supposed to be a mother.
Her own parents joked that she came out of thin air—two alley cats mated and had a Siamese kitten: Victoria.
She was fourth out of ten kids. From the age of five she said lines along with TV actors.
Tory even wondered if anyone famous had come through their Indiana town around her conception. But she had her dad’s skinny legs, his thin mouth, and the eyes that misled people into thinking she was tender and emotional.
The baby brother, Benji, had a harelip, which the small-town doctor took a crack at fixing. Tory dragged him around like a toy, a stuffed rabbit whose ears were dark from getting teethed on. She played mommy, bossing him with ludicrous affection. It was her first good role.
Having a real baby was different.
The labor lasted thirty-three hours. Alex came from his cousin’s engagement party at Tavern on the Green with scotch on his breath, held her hand as she cried in the hospital bed.
And she cried. (This girl he met at a Beverly Hills party, a seemingly feral seventeen-year-old in flared jeans and gold wedges. The torchlit garden burned around her that first night as she blew cigarette smoke out like opium, daring him.) She roared like a dying tiger till the body slipped from her bloody thighs.
When Jamey was three months old, Bats made Alex go to London for a few weeks to oversee a merger.
Tory, left on her own, stood in the doorway to Jamey’s nursery one night. The hall light lit the infant’s eyelashes. She was supposed to think he was beautiful. He made her hurt, on a cellular level. Tory didn’t realize her cigarette had burned to the filter, or that her cheeks were wet.
Into a Gucci duffel she tossed a nightgown, a pack of smokes, a curling iron, a couple scripts. She never used that curling iron, but felt the bag would be too light without it—this was her logic in the moment.
She didn’t decide on a hotel until she was in the cab.
“The Carlyle,” she
said.
A couple hours later, Teddy the doorman got a call from Mrs. Hallock. The Hyde baby’s crying, and—pause—it doesn’t sound like anybody’s at home there. Teddy let himself into the apartment, called Binkie, and rocked the baby in his arms. She was at the Goodyears’ dinner party on Seventy-Seventh Street, and her silver gown crinkled as she made necessary phone calls in their kitchen. Surprise, surprise, her eyes said to Balthazar as she exhaled cigarette smoke.
Weston Briarcliff, a trusted family friend, was dispatched to the Carlyle once it was determined Tory checked in there. A night nurse was hired on the spot. Binkie braced herself for calls from tabloid hacks, but nothing.
And so it went, almost every night. Tory left, checked in to the Carlyle, Weston went to give her a martini and bring her back eventually, but now round-the-clock nurses watched Jamey.
Binkie could handle anything. An Astor, a debutante, a Daughter of the American Revolution, a Southerner, a Northerner, Binkie had bet horses with gangsters and shot doves with diplomats and flirted with presidents. Binkie ruled Palm Beach, a gravelly voiced hostess who remembers you like your Manhattan stirred, and knows you’ll be fired after Christmas bonuses—she probably advised Bats to do it.
She had no sympathy for Tory, who had more trouble having a son than Binkie had losing hers—the first James Balthazar Hyde drowned in a sailing accident in the Bahamas at the age of nineteen.
Binkie took to her bedroom then, corpselike herself in French handmade-lace coverlets, a gin and soda on her bedside table, its ice melted and the lime pulp hanging in the liquid like tadpoles. Pink light through drawn curtains stained Binkie’s friends, who talked to the help since Binkie was silent. She looked at the wallpaper for one week, as if counting fleurs-de-lys, mute. Then she got up and never spoke of that Jamey again.
This afternoon’s sun is high-pitched, the sky as cold as glass. Lex opens the store door partway, sticks in his big, damaged head.
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