“Where would you go?”
She shrugs. “Anywhere but home.”
“You have money saved?”
“You’re fucking hilarious.”
“What if you end up without a place to live?” Jamey asks.
She laughs, but not meanly, swipes egg bits with a long-nailed finger to lick. “What would you do if you had no roof, and you had no money?” she asks. “You’d figure shit out.”
“Me?”
“Where would you sleep?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Everybody has to sleep.”
“I’d find a park,” he says, amused. “Sleep on a bench.”
“Where everyone can see? Cops see you? Sleep under the bushes. Until you make friends.”
Silence.
“Have you slept under bushes?” he asks.
“Oh my God,” she says, annoyed, and drains her orange juice.
He puts money on the table and gets up, does a fake yawn-and-stretch to seem casual, his shirt rising to show hip.
Of course he thinks about inviting her to New York City this summer. He dreads being alone in the downtown loft a family friend is letting him use, but he can’t combine her world with his, for her sake. Gasoline and fire.
When he thinks about asking, he gets woozy, like a kid who can’t see the road over a dashboard.
He should use this natural juncture for farewell. But if she lived with him (tucked away—a secret playmate), the summer could be different.
When did I get so creepy? he wonders.
“Why don’t you come with me for a few weeks?” he says one night, turning off the light and getting under the sheets.
Did I just say that? He’s instantly high like he sucked helium.
“To New York?” her voice asks in the dark.
“Yeah. I’m staying downtown. Working at an auction house.”
“What’s that?”
“They sell people’s belongings.”
“We call that a pawn shop, brother.”
“What options do you have?” his voice asks, and he feels too aggressive.
Elise grins but he can’t see. Her voice is quiet: “Of course I’ll fucking come with you.”
When Jamey was little, he was driven alone in a limo from the Hamptons to the city, or vice versa, and he’d look up, and there was always some kid on the overpass above the LIE, face pressed into the fence, crude blue sun streaming around her silhouette.
He was afraid of those kids—or threatened—not for what they could do to him. They couldn’t touch him, let alone see behind his smoked windows. It’s that he thought they knew things and he knew nothing. He was star-struck by how sad they were, how little they had, what they went through, what they saw.
And now he’s opening the limousine door wide, patting the leather seat.
Elise and Robbie go dancing at the Anvil one last night.
They spend hours getting dressed, drinking rum-and-Cokes, jumping and jiving around the house. Robbie’s wearing a silver tank top and Elise has on overalls, a black leotard, and gold chains. They leave the house without jackets because the jackets will get stolen, and they both shiver, ecstatic, as they walk.
The club is empty when they arrive, and the dance floor is calling their names. They get down, hold nothing back, lost in the shudder of strobe lights and beats. Robbie’s lovers show up, and they sweat as a tribal group, never taking a break.
“I love you, honey!” he shouts to Elise.
“I love you! Yo, I want good things to happen for you, Robbie—hear me?” she yells.
“I know good things gonna happen for you, Leese!” he screams among laser beams while the DJ nods to the record.
The guys pack. The radio plays classic rock and commercials for New Haven car dealers and sports bars as Jamey and Matt put books and desk chairs on the curb, and dump food into garbage bags.
Jamey remembers moving in—the rooms had been quiet with autumn light and shadows, mattresses bare and closets empty. The house was a question, and it got an answer.
Matt and Jamey sit on the porch when they’re done. Matt sips a large Pellegrino and smokes a cigar, and the spring sunset is vivid. Matt’s off to Zurich in a week, to assist on a trading desk.
“You should be coming with me,” Matt says as if he’s joking. “With my bedside manner and your brain, we could destroy Wall Street, smash it to smithereens.”
“You’ll do just fine,” Jamey says, knowing Matt’s fantasies are real. “And I’m locked into Sotheby’s.”
“Which is a great job. If you have a vagina.”
“Ha.”
“Well,” Matt says after a moment, without looking at Jamey. “It was a good year.”
“It was,” Jamey says, appreciative of Matt’s attempt to connect. “A weird year.”
“I mean…” Matt says, shrugging, but leaves it at that.
Jamey has the opportunity, like with Thalia at the pool, to stay friends, to make the other person comfortable, to apologize.
They sit in silence instead.
In the past, Jamey did ridiculous things to keep Matt company—like standing in the empty VIP section where Matt wanted to be even though the fun was outside, or approaching a pair of girls Matt wanted to meet, who looked vacuous and sadistic. Jamey owed Matt, who discreetly—all their lives—got Jamey invited on Matt’s family trips, took him to concerts (front row and chauffeured), made Jamey sit with the Dannings at school functions.
Matt told Jamey’s stories as if they happened to Matt. When Jamey got a surfboard, Matt got the same one. When Jamey wore a tomato-red Polo shirt, he looked louche, edgy, and accidental. When Matt wore that exact shirt, he looked like someone who desperately wanted to look louche, edgy, and accidental. None of that bothers Jamey. But Jamey has reluctantly and bitterly accepted that his friend isn’t going to be a good person when he grows up.
Jamey’s hitting the city first, and Elise will meet him in a few days. They say goodbye at dawn. Elise insists on coming down to the street—the sky is still dark, no birds.
She holds him, and he smiles as they pull apart.
“I’ll see you really soon,” he says. “Right?”
She nods, and stays there till brake lights flare at the end of the block.
Climbing the stairs, Elise tells herself to stop worrying. It’s a done deal. She’ll see him soon.
But what if he just never calls? She lullabies herself to sleep for a couple disoriented hours: It’s a done deal, it’s a done deal. Closing her eyes—he presses her mind from the inside out. Opening her eyes—the silent apartment makes her sick.
The sun comes up, thick like cheap butter, as his car rolls down the Merritt Parkway, passing a linden tree in bloom, then a horse chestnut tree on the brink.
The loft on Crosby Street is care of Martine, whom his father dated after he divorced Tory and before marrying Cecily. A beauty editor for French Vogue, Martine lives in Hong Kong, Paris, and NYC, and she was too young when she dated Alex years ago, and is now too old for Jamey but has always looked at him in a certain way.
He’s never seen the place, but SoHo is good and far from the Manhattan where he grew up.
He parks on the wide, empty cobblestone street.
The building’s super is Giacomanni, who has a twisted head like he’d been wrenched from his mother’s loins by a barbarian—and an old Little Italy accent. He wears a dusty jumpsuit and lets Jamey into the loft.
“This used to be a lightbulb factory,” Giacomanni tells Jamey while unlocking the door.
They enter a white hangar whose floor is scarred with sunlight. The king bed is in one corner, and a dinner table that seats twenty stretches down the middle of the room. A Julian Schnabel painting takes up a wall. A birdcage dangles from the ceiling (which is a confusion of pipes), and Jamey realizes it’s a piece of art from the signature scrawled on its base. But he still makes sure there is no bird.
“Here’s the key,” says the man, and nods as Jamey tha
nks him.
Jamey sees his dad the next day for lunch on a South Street Seaport pier.
“Jamey-roo!” his dad says, pulling his son’s earlobe, sitting down.
Alex barely has time to eat, late like the boarding-school boy he’ll always be—making chapel by a second, his coat misbuttoned, eyeglasses askew.
“Hey, Dad, good to see you,” Jamey says, nervous Alex will detect something.
They’re sitting in wind laced with brine and oil, drinking beers among suits. Alex’s car is waiting downstairs and he has to “make it quick,” which is one of his phrases.
“So, how’s the loft?” Alex asks.
“Amazing. Thanks for your help with that.”
“And the job?”
“Starts tomorrow.”
“Still not sure why you took a girl’s job, Jamey—”
“Come on, it’s not—”
“Well, if you’re the only fella there, I guess you get your pick of the lot.”
“Not my agenda.”
“You’re putting off your career, which I don’t understand.”
“At HMK? Well, it will come soon enough. How are you?”
Alex rants about the Stockholm office, and Cousin Hallie in East Hampton and the boat issue, and then he tells a story involving Xavier and a bicycle and a frog.
Alex asks for the check before they’re half done, crams cheeseburger into his mouth, and rubs Jamey’s head.
“Glad you’re here, Jamester,” he says, and disappears.
Jamey wonders what he feared, since Alex has never noticed anything about Jamey’s life.
He gets another beer. He’s been coming to the Seaport since he was little, eating pickles from the Fulton Market barrels, watching waves swirl up the docks. He used to visit Bats at the HMK headquarters on Rector Street, where Jamey was walked through executive offices like a child king in line for the throne.
On his way back to the loft, Jamey watches three sparrows fly through a chain-link fence without pause. How the fuck do they do that? He smiles, and keeps walking.
Jamey wakes to sunrise covering him like a hot blanket.
He shaves in the sink, thrilled by the gigantic and unfamiliar space. He knots his tie and clasps his watch. Steps into the morning a new man.
Takes the 6 train to Fifty-Seventh and Lex, and then walks east, then up York Avenue, as he’s early, and it feels good to see the million faces, the grubby sidewalks, the river shimmering to his right.
His job is assisting Clark Woodford, an asexual buyer from Virginia who wears Ben Silver periwinkle suits and tortoiseshell glasses, and who loves Jamey at first sight.
“Well, well, well, nice to meet you,” Clark says. He seems young but certain signs—stained teeth, loose skin on his tanned hands—put him older.
“You too, sir.”
“Oh, God, not sir, anything but sir.”
Everyone seems affected by New York’s fresh May flowering, the petals cracked open in the middle of the night so you wake up to hope and possibility.
This office is titillatingly new to Jamey, ripe with Hermès cologne, duck rillettes at lunch, magazines from Italy and Japan on desks. He hopes to lose himself this summer, to hide among the etchings and furniture and jewels. At HMK, he’d be out there in the clearing, out on the bald plains of finance, where he’d be called to fight, to choose sides. All that.
Stella walks him from floor to floor of the Sotheby’s empire, introducing him to everyone, and he shakes many hands. He’s a racehorse paraded through barns, and they make a fuss—This is Jamey Hyyyddde—so belittling! By the end of the day, he’s skanky with fatigue, his mouth in a state of rigor from smiling. Two girls watch him, giggling, scheming pornographic social-ladder dreams.
Jamey hangs suits in the closet, and folds T-shirts and jeans into empty drawers.
Onyx earrings, with gold backings, gleam in the soap dish. Martine must have taken them out in the bath—they look like black soap bubbles.
Jamey is intrigued and repulsed by bathing where other people have bathed. The ceramic basin has a perfume to it, of water and skin and lavender. A non-American smell.
He reluctantly imagines Martine there, her dark hair coiled into a chignon, in a Cubist fan of images. She’s there and not there. He’s fantasizing and also repelled. She pisses in that toilet. She plucks her eyebrows in that mirror.
The closet is foreign and adult too. Shoeboxes line the floor: Balmain, Mugler. The clothes have been worn; there is fragrance, pedestrian life, days and nights aromatically accordioned into the slacks and dresses.
The cookbooks are in French, with transparent ovals where oil seeped through the paper. The refrigerator door is crammed with fish sauce, Worcestershire, grapefruit marmalade from Spain.
Jamey arranges for D&E Car Service to get Elise and Buck on Saturday.
When that morning comes, he paces the floor, moving through the exotic hour of anticipation.
He sees the black car pull up below the window, and feels sick with anxiety.
“You made it!” he says, greeting her on the sidewalk.
Everything she owns is crammed into a cheap suitcase she bought at the Salvation Army. Buck pours out of the backseat, nails clicking unfamiliar cement.
“Hi,” she says.
“Welcome.”
They’re both shy and ecstatic.
He’s never lived with a girl! Notions of domestic life always grew on his horizon like lichen, furry bumps of children, money, furniture, cars, second homes, trips, dogs.
But Elise eclipses the woman from Jamey’s future, the lady in tennis whites flashing her diamond as she drinks orange juice fresh-squeezed by a maid. A woman Jamey never quite believed in anyway.
Elise doesn’t say anything fake and grand when he shows her around the minimalist loft; she just asks: “Where’s all the stuff?”
They sit on the gold-plugged magenta sofa and Buck laps from a china bowl.
“What do we do now?” she asks.
“Whatever we want.”
“Should I get a job?”
“I mean, if you don’t know where you want to be after this, then maybe not?”
She nods, understanding. He doesn’t want anything permanent.
“But I’ll miss you every day,” she says, trying not to seem weak.
“We can meet for lunch sometimes?”
She can’t help seeming sad, and fidgets with her necklace. He’s worried, like a new dad with a crying baby that seems hungry but won’t take food. What should he do?
That night they just lie together before having sex. Her thighs around his hip—rough fur against his skin.
The whites of his eyes—electric milk—his tongue is hot, her mouth is hot, she feels his jaw, strokes his neck, and this is when doubt reverses and charges along the golden train tracks, hooting and hollering, like a machine once stalled but conquering this territory again.
It makes him sure she should be here.
But she’s uncomfortable. They sleep fitfully, wake up in pale light. They make coffee, and he gives her grocery money—if she wants to shop, he adds, terrified it sounds like giving orders.
“What should I get?” she asks, trying to read clues for what he wants from her.
“I don’t know. The basics, I guess.”
She knows enough to know their basics aren’t the same. When she arrived, there was stinky cheese and black bread and Pellegrino in the kitchen.
She goes to Key Food, whose windows are plastered with white pages of purple or red block letters: Chicken, $3.99, or Milk .99. She buys cold cuts, spaghetti sauce, an iceberg lettuce head, soda.
She balances the bags on her hip as she unlocks the building. She hasn’t seen other people, only intuits a cat across the hall, an electronic keyboard somewhere.
“Yeah, Buck,” she says when he greets her. “That’s my boy.”
She puts things away, a trespasser in a stranger’s cupboards—stealing inverted.
The clouds part for a d
emure sun.
She stacks Jamey’s change on the table and thinks of her mom counting change to Angel like a cashier. When Angel was doing well, he’d throw extra dollars to her. She bought the girls used roller skates, laid out feasts from Kentucky Fried Chicken, paid off debts to neighbors for formula and diapers.
When Angel was locked up, she’d use the money his friend delivered for whatever she wanted, like a kid’s birthday party, because he wasn’t there to yell about it. Denise bought the mega-cake at Carvel, and ordered a dozen metallic balloons.
Now Elise is so anxious for Jamey to come home, she paces, and Buck whimpers. When she finally sees Jamey down there on the sidewalk (the way he walks, he’s not like anyone else), her knees almost fail, and her face turns white with passion.
In the morning, he says goodbye, and she stands at the threshold in a T-shirt. She seems to have the power of a great bird—like a heron or a swan—to lift into the sky with just one swift and glorious flap of the wings.
Her lunch is an egg-salad sandwich and ginger ale, but while washing up, she drops the glass. She keeps Buck away as she picks up pieces.
“Why’re you so clumsy,” she moans.
It’s this stupid loft. She feels shitty here, so she takes Buck for a walk, but every time he lifts his leg, she waits for a shopkeeper to yell. Women walk by, stupendous with tall shoulders, stilettos, briefcases. Elise dodges them and gawks.
And when she comes back, she realizes her keys are in the jean jacket in the bedroom.
And it starts to pour.
She and Buck huddle under an awning next door. Rain seeps into her high-tops.
A guy unlocks the building, avoids looking at her, and pulls the door shut.
Elise fumes at herself.
A woman with freckles, grocery bags twisting off her fingers, rambles up like a mailman in Denmark who’s delivered letters in the snow for decades.
“Aren’t you staying here?” asks the woman.
“Yeah,” Elise says, mortified.
The woman unlocks the front door. “Go ahead.”
Elise mumbles a thank-you. “Can I take a bag?”
“Sure.” The woman is panting a little. “You’re on three too, right? You can get into your place?”
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