“Elise, can you help me for a second?” he says in his giant booming voice that has the formality of a radio announcer but is warped.
When she comes out to the sidewalk, she finds Lex standing with a dog.
The hound strains the rope; a kerchief tied around his neck signals that someone loved him, even if his ribs show. He flinches as Elise tries to pet him, and bares shiny onyx gums.
“O’Harris got picked up a couple nights ago, and he ain’t getting out, but I can’t take care of this fella of his. I wannu but I can’t.”
The dog pulls, and Lex restrains him. Elise crouches in the winter light, holds pizza crust to his mouth.
Marianne watches, wisps of white hair standing up on her head from the excitement.
Eyes dark and wet, he snatches the food, attacks it on the pavement. His patchy fur is tawny, with black outlining his ears and snout and paws.
“He’s a hungwy widdle one,” Marianne says.
“What’s his name?” Elise asks.
“Jessie, but he’ll take whatever name you got.”
Jamey’s banking on Annie, who always makes things better.
And the next morning, Annie prances into the hotel lounge, with luggage and chauffeur, to meet Tory and Jamey. Apple cheeks and donkey teeth. A washtub torso and rooster legs. Nice round breasts that have lasted, without work. Dallas Annie, get your gun!
“Look at my Jamey.” Annie smiles, and rocks him with a hug full of perfume and Hermès scarf and gold necklace. “I’m so happy.”
Annie met Tory when they were young at a big party thrown by Warren Beatty. Somehow Tory and Annie ended up in a room with a glass ceiling, banana plants, a hot tub, and a couple bikers. Annie swallowed the Quaalude, but Tory shook her head. Oh, not tonight, she said, fumbling with a cigarette, and Annie realized she was scared. Leave her alone, she said. The biker unbuttoned Tory’s dress, and Annie threw her drink—BAM!—blood and vodka–orange juice ran down his forehead—Oops! she peeped, hand over mouth, like a silent-era blonde. Later the two girls lounged in Annie’s penthouse suite and giggled.
Annie, heir to Hanesworth Oil, with a face carbon-copied from her CEO dad and a bank account the size of a small country’s GDP, fit snugly with this creature who was impeccable on screen and disastrous in life. They never left each other’s side.
At the hotel bar, the ladies drink martinis, eat peanuts, talk about PETA, the Italian Alps, Miami Vice, artichokes, their friend Jerry, their enemy Helen, Armani’s spring line, and cats.
Then Annie turns to Jamey: “Your mama tells me you’re in a very interesting relationship. Now, do I get to meet her?”
“Yes, tonight—she’s coming to the screening,” he answers.
“Stupendous!” she cries in her bright-as-Texas-sunshine voice. “What’s her name, darling?”
“Elise.”
“Elise what?”
“Elise Perez.”
“She’s not at Yale, is that correct? You met her outside of school then?” Annie pops a peanut into her glossy mouth.
“I met her outside of school, yes.”
“Well, I couldn’t be more excited. And you know, I’m truly of the mind that everyone needs to stretch their parameters, see what’s out there.” Annie’s looking at Jamey but addressing Tory. “And if you end up right back where you started, with someone a little bit more like yourself, you at least know why.”
The theater is full, people are turned away. The curtain parts, and Jamey looks around at the light and dark shapes playing on faces. The story seeps through everyone’s forehead and into the subconscious, creating a dream inside. There’s a rustle of a slacks leg being crossed, a cough drop unwrapped. Rows of people breathe in these moving pictures like they’re smoke.
The dinner after is a VIP group of Yale film scholars, another NYC director, and Annie and Tory’s friend Tristan, who drove in from Litchfield. Jamey is introduced to everyone he doesn’t know, embraced by everyone he does know, and he’s left to introduce Elise since his mother simply isn’t doing it.
Annie greets Elise with a debutante smile and a church hug.
“Sorry,” Tory says to Elise when they have to ask the waiter for another chair. “I forgot you were coming.”
That’s when Jamey notices Elise’s posture change, her chin tilting, face hardened one tiny degree.
“I loved being reminded how solid that film is,” says one of the scholars, dripping a forkful of risotto.
“Right?” says Annie, the MC, stirring up praise.
The group murmurs complex statements.
Elise doesn’t wait long. “Jamey said Jack Nicholson was supposed to come,” she says to the table.
Silence, and Tristan tinkles the cubes in the glass.
Annie says, “Oh, Jack, he’s probably tied up in some hotel room in Bangkok with a hangover,” and the table laughs.
Except Tory, who looks at Elise as if seeing her for the first time.
Elise eats her pork chop, wide-eyed.
“Tory, can I ask you what your next project is going to be?” a professor inquires.
“I’m choosing,” Tory says. “There’s not a lot of great material out there.”
“Can I ask a question?” Elise says. “What was it like when you were famous? Did everyone want your autograph?”
Tory now looks like she’s about to come across the table, WWF-style. “I was just asked for my autograph at the screening.”
“Oh, really!” Elise says.
“Really,” Tory answers.
“That’s cool,” Elise says with a straight face. “That they still ask.”
Jamey looks down, watches his hand play with his napkin, hiding his amusement, his amazement.
“I mean, thank God they don’t stalk you like that guy did—remember, in Cannes?” says Tristan. “In ’78? That was like unreal.”
“Oh my dear lord, I do remember that!” Annie says, her hand on her forehead. “That was a great year at Cannes, though, wasn’t it?” she says.
Normally, a person exits backward, like a geisha, for Tory. But Elise throws her napkin on her plate, zips her jacket.
“Nice to meet you all,” Elise says. “I got to get up early!”
She allows herself to look at Tory with clown-crazy eyes, flashing raspberry-red lights. “Good night, Tory. It was a pleasure.” Then leaves.
Jamey and Elise walk the dog in eager but ineffective sunshine. The sores on the dog’s back are scabbing already, and his ribs aren’t as brutally visible. Now he smells of White Rain shampoo.
“I can’t think of a name!” Elise says.
They walk by a school playground shrieking with kids.
“I loved this one book, Call of the Wild, about a dog named Buck,” Jamey says finally.
“Buck!” Elise kneels to look the dog in the eye. “Do you wanna be Buck?”
They wander into the park, neon green with new buds and leaves.
Sitting on the bench, Elise zips her fur, puts on mirrored glasses. Jamey rubs Buck under his chin.
He needs to apologize, and explain his mom.
Elise waits, her face gentle, like a bell open for ringing.
He tries. “Tory is—she’s funny. She’s always been such a—performer,” Jamey says, biting his lip, reaching for something truer.
But he fails.
Elise waits, and waits, then nods almost imperceptibly. She looks away.
They sit there a long time, freezing, ankles and knees locking, but they don’t want to leave. It’s cold, the day giving up without a fight.
“It would take more than that, Jamey, to scare me off,” she says, without looking at him. Her face and neck turn scarlet. “I’m in love with you.”
Then she stares right at him.
“Well, I like you a whole lot too,” he says in his funny voice.
He focuses on throwing the stick for Buck, who doesn’t chase it, because he chooses this moment to shit behind the leafless bush.
Jamey watches with a bizarrely bland smil
e, like an old man observing ships drifting into a harbor. He’s stricken with terror and prays for the afternoon to end.
One more night, he thinks.
Annie rented the penthouse suite at the hotel, and gathers his mother’s admirers there.
“Hi, babe!” Tory calls out to Jamey as he walks in.
“Hey, Tory,” he says.
Then Tory shows how when she’s good, she’s the greatest, and she and the crew go on a run of fun.
The hotel room is full of folks, talking, drinking Mumm out of paper cups. Tory smokes, sitting on the floor with her impeccable posture, the gang of disciples around her. A few are straight, two gay, a couple in between, none more beautiful than her, most of them broken, half parasitic and half delightful.
She asks them questions so rude she must be kidding, and they pretend to be offended, and try to figure out if she’s joking at all.
She’ll throw a grenade of gossip into a silence, or hand out candy in the form of praise and affection—when it’s least expected. She riles them all up, churning a pile of puppies, tickling and pushing them away, pulling them gently back by the ear.
“Oh my god, I’m so demanding!” she says. “Why do you people put up with me? I’m like—I need this, I need that!”
“We love you!” they say.
“Look at you guys. You’re all goddamn beautiful.”
There’s a group sheepishness.
The room groans like a cruise ship forever changing direction, seeking the sun.
“I mean,” Tory says, “Look how beautiful Annie is. Look.”
Everyone coos at beautiful Annie.
“Annie, let’s go skiing! Can we?” Tory asks like a girl to a boy.
“Anything you want, sweetie pie,” Annie says, lying on the rug, getting drunk.
“Come to Vail,” says Tristan, “ ’cause me and Toby are there all month.”
They’re all talking about how fabulous Vail is.
And Jamey knows by bringing up this story, he’ll ruin the night.
“Remember when you left me there, Mom?” he asks, smiling.
When Jamey was five, she and Alex—divorced but sharing custody then—muddled a handoff in Vail. When she arrived at her friend’s house in Santa Fe and found out, she almost threw up with cold fever. She thought Alex had the kid, Alex thought she had the kid.
She called the hotel. Where is he? Okay, give him some ice cream. You have a pool; take him swimming, for God’s sake! I’ll be there soon. Just tell him that.
Her friend Marie asked what was the matter; her husband walked up behind her with a tray of drinks. Nothing, I’ll be right back, Tory said, even though Vail was a six-hour drive. She couldn’t bear to tell them. She squeezed her keys so hard walking to the car her hand bled on the white leather steering wheel.
She drove through aspens and snow, and they were one piece—the trees and the land—a single whiteness.
Alex told the story whenever he toasted Jamey on his birthday and reminisced about his son’s “madcap” childhood. Tory never joked about it. That drive to Vail took a couple years off her life, although the way she talked to the hotel staff and even to Jamey when she got there would have convinced anyone it was nothing but a god-damn inconvenience.
Now she looks at him, and waves him away. “Jesus, I shouldn’t have gone back for you,” she jokes, and the group whistles shrilly, oh là là!
“You’re so cruel, darling,” says Evan, purring in his leather pants next to her.
“I can’t help it,” she says throatily, provocatively.
Jamey sneaks out when the group is hitting their peak of tipsy, catty hysteria, the boys trying on Annie’s scarves in the mirror, Terry and Sylvia having a serious talk in the corner, and Tory floating in the center of the ring, cigarette poised near her lush naked mouth.
Jamey is supposed to meet Tory the next day but he’s in Elise’s bed, happily stoned on fucking, eating graham crackers, and getting crumbs in the sheets.
Next door, Tory rings the doorbell, and waits on the sunny porch in her white jeans and trench coat. When Matt answers, she pushes her chin up and her tiny breasts out.
“Matty! So good to see you.”
She hugs him briskly and strides into the house.
“He should be home by now. But please make yourself comfortable—or take a look around,” he adds, since she’s already on her way up the stairs.
As she comes downstairs, she asks if he has any vodka.
“I don’t mind going out and getting some,” Matt says in a panic of etiquette, pulling at his Polo shirt like he’s hot.
“You’re sweet. Get Stoli if they have it.”
She lounges in their living room, looking through magazines, smoking. When Matt comes back and pours her a drink, she scans his face and sighs. “You dear boys. You have it so easy, you’ll never know what it feels like to make it on your own.”
Matt rushes to agree: “That is a problem.”
“I got to see what I had in me, you know? I had to prove myself.”
“Totally, I agree.”
She asks about Elise.
“It can’t last,” Matt says.
“He’s just acting out, right?”
“Definitely. They have nothing in common. And it’s good timing that the school year is over, almost, and he’ll be gone for a while, you know?”
“If that’s what it takes, sure!” Tory says, recrossing her long legs.
Matt awkwardly checks his watch. “I don’t know why he’s not here yet.”
Now Jamey watches from Elise’s window as his mother’s shoe kicks the air. He’s an hour late. No shirt, just corduroy pants. Deodorant wax smeared through underarm hair. His mouth parted as he stares. He’s enthralled.
Elise joins him at the window.
They watch Tory leave finally, and she waves to Matt, who sees her off. The Jaguar toots out lavender exhaust and slides into the city.
Elise plants kisses on Jamey’s back, and she runs her hand up his neck to his jaw, rubs his lip with her finger, until he sucks her finger, and then they’re on the mattress again, and she says Oh God with each thrust as if she can’t take any more when all she wants is more.
He spent time on movie sets as a kid, before his mother’s manager decided he was too distracting—Tory blamed the manager entirely when she gave up custody.
He did throw a rock at his mom during shooting when he was four or five, an out-of-character act of defiance. A seamstress with a dirty tan and bleached hair was assigned to take him to a burger joint. He cried, and she gave him two ice-cream sundaes, and he stared at them, dumbfounded, while she smoked. Two! she kept saying. You can have two. Look at you. You’ve got two sundaes, sugar. Her voice throaty and gruff. He could see the dark oyster pearls of her molar fillings when she yawned. He ate both and threw up.
His favorite people on those sets were the animal handler, Dominic, and his collie, Starlight, good memories in a sea of strange ones. Dominic told stories about wild hogs in Texas and a church burning in Vermont.
Jamey was an extra too. He had a speaking part in Bad Hand. He’s the kid at the gas station when Lorraine and Jessup are on the run. Jamey’s character says: Hey mister, where’d you get such a fast car? and his mom’s character, Lorraine, says to Jessup: Jess, let’s go. We can’t be wasting time. But when the Shelby Cobra peels out in a storm of dirt, Lorraine forlornly watches the boy from the car window, as if she already knows how the story ends.
MAY 1986
May’s unrelenting rain paints a sheen on houses, daffodils, cars in the slick streets, umbrellas. Everyone at Yale is finishing exams, barely sleeping, coming apart, wearing shirts inside out, and staring into space.
Jamey decides to finish the year as right as possible. He runs across campus in the monsoon, handing in papers, his hair wet—a messenger delivering well-intentioned and pointless letters.
The sun shines onto graduation, making a rainbow over the lawn. Mosquitoes arise from fountai
ns and birdbaths and rooftop lakes. He and other underclassmen slouch on the sidelines, with button-downs rolled up at the sleeves, to watch the ceremony. Students in black gowns sweat, standing in the bright yard as the speaker tells them they are the future, they are the great minds of their generation, they will steward grace and dignity and knowledge into modern society.
Which may be true of many graduates, but Jamey looks at some of the people he knows best in this crowd: Andrew Chesterton, who tried to fuck a drunk, unconscious girl last weekend in a Volvo parked behind his house; Molly Easley, who has a two-hundred-dollar-a-day cocaine habit; and Brady Fitzgerald, who shoved half a frozen bagel up Jacob Murotzky’s ass in a hazing ritual.
He tries to fish the word greatness out of his brain like a fly from milk but it sticks to the glass.
Restless, Elise takes Buck out. He walks without a leash, already loyal, and glares at anyone who gets close—his black snout seems sinister, but he wouldn’t bite unless someone strikes first.
She throws him a tennis ball on empty basketball courts, sometimes until dusk, stopping because suddenly they can’t see each other.
She likes the mystery of that changeover, those fifteen minutes of sundown when the streets and trees and people and parked cars are delicate and immediate, every sound and smell and movement amplified by the lowest light or the lightest darkness. Even a city that’s broken and dirty can, in that time, be divine and intimate.
Elise and Jamey eat breakfast at the diner, rain pinging on the metal roof. Her sweatshirt tag stands up, and her hoops dangle as she reads the menu.
“Yeah, I’m leaving in a week and a half,” Jamey finally says.
“That soon?” Elise asks, as if she’s been thinking of anything else.
They’re both weirdly formal.
“So, what is your plan?” he asks, using the side of his fork on his pancakes.
“Well, the lease is up end of May. Robbie’s headed to Miami, Caspar hooked him up with a hotel job.”
“Are you renewing the lease?”
“Nah. Can’t afford it. I might not stay in New Haven,” she says. “I dunno.”
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