“I’ll just wait in the hall,” Elise nods, awkward.
“I’m Gretchen,” the woman says.
“Hi.”
“And what’s your name?” Gretchen finally asks.
“Oh, Elise.”
In five minutes, Gretchen gives Elise a mug of tea. Winks. Closes her door.
Elise hopes Gretchen isn’t looking out her peephole, and she stares at her own feet. What’s wrong with you? she thinks scornfully. You’re out of practice. She knows very well how to accept love from strangers.
Once he gets home every night, she stops freaking out and trying to guess what he wants, and just savors every minute they get to spend together. A Chinese food menu is slipped under their door so they order from there. They watch a show about gorillas on PBS. They eat powdered cookies she bought at one of the Jewish bakeries. She puts her wet finger in his asshole as she sucks his cock, and he comes in a great epiphany.
Elise looks through the house one day when she’s bored. In the bedside-table drawer, under the almond hand creams and white Cartier fountain pens and notepads from hotels in Japan, she finds a tiny vial of cocaine. In the bookcase is an album of photos, people looking serious in dark, tailored clothes—they seem grown-up in a terrifying way. Martine’s dildo is in an underwear drawer, but Elise doesn’t know what it is at first. Even the sex toy is couture. Pale glass with gold beads—it looks like an angel’s penis, or like something that fell out of a museum and landed here, among the palest pink slips and bottles with French prescription labels. Elise cradles it like an egg, then places it back in its nest.
Clark holds the idea of sex away from himself like it’s a baby who just pissed its diaper. He often drinks martinis at lunch, and after that his mouth is sort of askew, his grin hanging like a door off one hinge. He sometimes speaks terrible German or even worse Italian on the telephone, and is really fun—to everyone but Edna the intern.
Clark sends Edna on coffee runs. She’s an art-history wunderkind from Vassar. When she leaves, he mutters under his breath for everyone to hear: Little exercise can’t hurt anyone.
Summer employees aren’t supposed to lunch with senior staff, but Clark always brings Jamey along. Normally favoritism would make someone unpopular, but in this office, where Clark is king and the code is beauty and cynicism, it makes Jamey popular. They eat Dover sole and drink Chablis at La Grenouille, suck down chilled oysters at the Plaza, sip milkshakes at Rumpelmayer’s in the Hotel St. Moritz.
The offices are domestic with Oriental rugs, mahogany desks, maritime art, and Arabian textiles on the walls. The staff are dealers who get high on their own supply. A silk curtain hangs between office and showroom floor, between artifice and reality, the buyer and the bought, the pitch and the truth. The auction operation seems to Jamey an upending of civilization, all the articles that normally convene to create homes are spilled, removed, undone from their worlds, separated from one another.
Ever since Lady Esperanza Von Laighton Phillips was rumored to have a cough, Clark has been daydreaming about her estate, and once her obituary ran, it was Christmas and his birthday rolled into one. The trucks are arriving today, and he’s even managed to excite Jamey about the incoming crates of sterling silver and ceramics and oil paintings.
Clark is over the moon; he loves objects as if they were alive. He loves the chain of people who loved the objects, the story of ownership and inheritance. He’s good, too, with grieving families, like a morgue keeper who can slide the rings off a corpse’s fingers in one chic swipe.
Saturday morning: cinnamon rolls and black coffee with the windows open. Elise is putting on her shoes to walk Buck when Jamey sees the holes.
“You need new shoes!”
“They’re fine,” she says.
“Stop lying,” he says, half-kidding.
At Henri Bendel, a guard welcomes them into the chocolate-brown-and-white canopy.
They see their twins in the mirrored walls: a man in lime-green shorts and espadrilles, hair tousled like he just walked out of a Paris disco all-nighter, and the girl, tapping a long nail on the escalator railing, rhinestone jeans creased, braids pulled back in a rubber band so her eyes are catty.
“What else do you need?” he says casually.
Jamey’s in a funny mood. This thing he always had—money—was never anything besides an abstract truth, but today it’s a silk trick pulled from his wrist. He has accounts and credit cards (which are massive but tiny compared to the trusts) that no one watches; he could buy a house, and the family’s manager wouldn’t blink.
“Try something on at least,” he chides. “Humor me.”
She awkwardly collects jeans, looking at him over the racks with a twisted smile of discomfort and glee.
Jamey sits on a loveseat while she’s in the changing room.
“Is thut Jamey Hyde?” trills a voice.
Alastair Waddingford’s mom appears in a trench coat and massive sunglasses.
“Hi there, Mrs. Waddingford.”
“You know you must cull me Joan,” she says. “How ah you, darling?”
“Never better,” he answers while his mind bursts in a constellation of social connections, the friends and friends of friends Joan will tell about the girl she saw with Jamey Hyde at Bendel’s—if Elise comes out right now.
“Are you in New York awl summer, darling?” she asks.
“Pretty much. How about you? What’s the family got planned?”
She turns coy, mewing to him about this and that.
“Is that right?” he says occasionally.
His voice has a soothing, loving, everything-will-be-okay growl to it, like the favorite uncle who spends half the cocktail party in the kids’ bedroom telling stories, lulling the children into dreams, capable of this magnanimous and lazy lavishing of his adult time in a nursery seeing as he has no hope for his own life, and can give it all away.
She bats her lashes.
But what would normally be for Jamey a sugary cotton-puff of nothingness has an allure of fear to it—not unpleasantly. He doesn’t want Joan to meet Elise.
And he does want them to meet.
But Elise doesn’t come out in time.
“Toodle-oo!” Joan says, swaggering off in Ferragamo flats.
A rare Japanese print collection hangs in one of Sotheby’s galleries. Jamey’s working late, with no one around, so he calls Elise.
He turns on the lights, and they walk around the exhibition, and he points to favorites. The room feels like a garden at night, ripe with mountains and birds and chrysanthemums, and they’re alone in it.
“You like them?” he asks.
She half smiles at Jamey, her upper lip shadowed with peach fuzz, eyes limpid, and shrugs. “Yeah, I love them.”
He’s so awkward, she thinks, trying to figure out how to include me when no one’s looking. Another woman would be insulted, but Elise is touched, and thinks it’s tender. Neither of them wants to leave, and they keep moving around the room, looking at paintings they already looked at. It feels pretty silly.
They amble through Washington Square Park on a bright afternoon, the trees reflecting green onto their skin.
A man in a denim hat hisses: “Little smoke, little horse, got some white.”
They walk past him, faces down, holding hands.
Sitting at a sidewalk café, she can tell he’s going to ask her finally.
“You don’t do drugs at all?” he asks, as if asking what she’ll order for lunch.
She thinks for a second how to answer. “Yeah. I’ve done some. Have you?”
“Not much. What does ‘some’ mean?”
She can’t help smiling uneasily. “Do you want to be hearing all this?”
“Hear what?” he asks, spinning a fork in his fingers.
“We never talk about our past.”
“We don’t?”
“I always want to but you never do.”
He’s quiet, accepting the accusation while maintaining eye contact.<
br />
“I’ve done drugs,” she tells him, moving things forward bluntly. “And seen every drug being done. That’s probably not something we have in common, right?”
“Depends on what you mean.”
“Do you understand where I come from?”
“Bridgeport.”
“Subsidized housing in Bridgeport,” she clarifies. “No offense, but it’s a different galaxy. And you know, my mother had me real young—”
“How old was she?”
“Sixteen! And her mother, well, that woman was evil. Messed up in the head. She drank. She was sick. So my mother was in the streets as a kid. My dad was some homeboy from San Juan, didn’t speak English, he was sent upstate and got killed.”
“You didn’t know him?”
Elise shakes her head. “Never met him.”
Skinheads play soccer down the middle of the street, but Elise and Jamey pay attention to each other.
“So we grew up with not much, that’s for sure. We lived crammed into these housing units. My mother had kids with two other men, men who never stuck around. Everybody I knew, everybody I looked up to, they all did drugs to some extent. Not counting one or two people. Cocaine, heroin, smoking herb. With their children, all day, all night sometimes. You understand?”
Elise lights a cigarette.
“I took care of the younger kids ’cause of being the oldest,” she continues. “My mother had two jobs and I did the housework. But when I was ten, she got in a car accident, which put her on this medicine, which she had a problem with once the medicine was done, and then one day—she’s a junkie, shooting dope. Angel starts coming around then, ’cause he’s a junkie too. And I’m the one getting kids to school, cooking beans for dinner, begging money off neighbors for baby formula.”
Jamey ignores a dog who sniffs his shoes, and the owner pulls it away.
“Angel beat the shit out of my mother, and she beat him too, for real. He beat us kids—you know, and I’d try to get him to focus on me. Then one day him and me, we had it out, and he put a knife on my throat. I went fucking crazy, and I did everything I never did before.”
“Good lord.”
She raises her eyebrow: “I don’t want any pity from you. I’m just saying.”
“No pity,” he agrees.
She breathes smoke through her nostrils, and continues. “So, yeah. I was trouble from twelve to fifteen, barely living at home, I neglected those children, I left my mother on her own, I was selfish, and no one could stop me.”
She flicks her cigarette onto the street, flicks her braids over her shoulder.
“Then?” Jamey asks.
“I was fifteen. Living with this man, Redboy, he was sort of redhead black—his family’s Caribbean. He was older, you know, he introduced me to things. We did all kinds of shit. He was a mad soul—furious, you know? He taught me about love.”
“That sounds…I’m not sure how that sounds,” Jamey says, coming off paternal and regretting it.
“Naw, trust me, it was…He—”
Here she tears up, quickly—
She wipes a tear with her long nail and tries to collect herself.
“I really cared about him,” she tells Jamey, her voice yolky.
“Was he—what happened?”
Elise looks down the street, eyes big and glassy. “Poured gasoline, lit hisself on fire.”
“Why?” Jamey asks, incredulous.
“He was doing PCP for days. I couldn’t find him, nobody could. Turns out he locked hisself into a Holiday Inn in Hartford, and the police try and get him out, ’cause he was making a ruckus. TV news got it on tape, so we had to see it later even though I didn’t want to. He finally come out the door at dawn.”
“He burned to death?”
“Truthfully? He hated the world he got born into, and he was gonna get out no matter what.”
Tears are smeared on her jaw, and he touches her hand on the table, and she pulls her hand away to light a cigarette.
“Then Angel got locked up, he got four years, and Donna Sierra died. My mother was gonna fall apart. So I went home. And me and Redboy, we had been doing drugs together, but I stopped. My mother went on methadone, and Angel was out of the picture, so we got back into order as a family.”
Jamey feels useless.
She stares at nothing with red eyes, smoking.
But then she gives him a quarter smile.
Dusk. Blue shadows in the loft. They’ve been having sex for hours. He went down on her as soon as they got home, on the floor, making her come twice before they found the bed.
They’re standing. Lily-white, he gleams in the mirror, and she holds his waist from behind, staring at their reflection over his shoulder.
He used to glance at his body like catching someone’s eye and looking away fast to discourage conversation.
His cock twitches up as she rubs his stomach. He watches, hypnotized by the cardinal sin of staring. He’s here: dimple, arm, eye, foot. This is James Balthazar Hyde, and a woman’s warm body is pressed against his back so he can’t run.
In bed, they smoke and talk.
He asks about her first sexual experience. It’s like he suddenly needs to know everything.
“Guess it’s storytime today,” she teases. “I seriously was wondering when you’d want to know me.”
“Come on,” he says defensively.
She shakes her head, meaning never mind.
He pulls her braids off her face, arranges them on the pillow.
“Well, I heard people fucking my whole life,” she finally answers, “which is an education all by itself, trust me.”
“I’m sure.”
She pulls the sheet off her lower legs because she’s hot. “When I was eleven, me and my friend played hooky and met these guys at 7-Eleven. No one talked about what was gonna happen, and to be truthful, how did we know what we were about to do? It’s just what you did.
“So we go to this empty house. It was burnt up and all graffitied, but it was like a hangout for kids in the neighborhood. We smoked a joint, probably. And then my friend and the guy she was with go over to one area, and me and this guy hang out on the couch.
“And the guy I was with couldn’t get hard. But he told the whole school I couldn’t give head. So I of course had to set him straight. I ended up having an abortion when I was thirteen, another one at fourteen. I had let my friend Monique convince me I couldn’t get pregnant if I douched with soda right after.”
“Who was your first love?” he asks.
“Redboy. What about you?”
This is the moment he’s dreaded, when he says out loud: I’m an alien, I can’t love anyone. He grits his teeth.
“Nobody.”
“Tell me who!” she says.
“No one.”
She pulls herself up so she can look into his eyes. And then she rests her head on his chest, and they listen to night traffic and street voices and dogs howling. He waits to be ashamed.
“No one yet,” she whispers instead.
The next day, she gets out of the shower and listens to the echoes that fill the apartment—different notes and chords in the morning. She wants to go out, play a part in the story of the city. She’ll walk Buck into a radiant turquoise world.
No amount of roaming around town will satisfy her today, and she’ll be wanting more hotel taxi lines, more hot-dog-cart fumes, more car horns, more newspaper stands, more dog piss, more, even more!
Something’s changed; she feels different.
She buys a coffee with a couple quarters and sits in the park. She fools everyone, and always has, letting her mouth fall open (untended, obviously dumb), and never blinking her eyes, which are mean, simple marbles, one-dimensional and lightless. Her shoulders hunch, the long masculine hands uncertain where to rest or hang. But she’s tracking, computing, and either discarding or accepting factors other people barely notice. Her costume—the gray jeans, the fake-gold E on a chain—doesn’t blend in and doesn’t stan
d out. Her awkwardness is strategic, turning people away in boredom or discomfort before they register the vague, haughty, delicious joy she takes in being alive.
He didn’t want to leave the loft Sunday for this Bedford horse-farm wedding but his absence would have triggered questions. The bride walks between hundreds of white chairs in a field while the groom awaits, the sky touching everyone with quicksilver light.
Jamey says the same things over and over: Sotheby’s, fantastic, Clark Woodford, SoHo, Martine Boulton-Locque, amazing, sure, yes, let’s, fantastic, I’ll tell them you say hello, that would be fantastic, amazing, sure, yes.
He drinks Champagne. Horses in a corral look on suspiciously, manes and tails braided for the occasion. The bride, with puffed-up sleeves and elbow gloves, glows from attention.
A bouquet soars through the air. Men in suits and sunglasses, ankles bare and vulnerable like women, stand in groups, ruined from coke at the party last night. A buttermilk-white 1936 Cord Phaeton rumbles up the dirt road to fetch the couple, and Jamey is amused to see the exquisite machine trundle through shit.
He brings home tuberoses from his table for Elise, who fell asleep on the couch waiting. Even though he closes the door quietly, she wakes herself up. She’s devout about making love every night, no matter if she’s barely awake, or if he has a Champagne headache—which seems to go away within minutes anyhow.
When he gets up to piss around four a.m., he sees Elise smoking by the kitchen window. She hugs one arm across her ribs, and sometimes looks at the cigarette between drags like she has a complex relationship with it. He doesn’t realize she’s scheming, and she’s so intent she doesn’t notice him.
Another night he goes to Dorrian’s for early gin-and-tonics with Webster and Vanessa, who then beg to see his loft so persistently he says he doesn’t feel well and must go home immediately. How much longer can he do this? Vanessa watches him go, standing in Dorrian’s doorway in her pink gingham shirt, the uniform of certain spies.
At Sotheby’s, a netsuke collection comes in from a British doctor who lived in Japan, and Jamey organizes the tiny wood and bone sculptures for appraisal.
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