Clark assigns Edna to assist: “Ed, help out Jamey, however he sees fit. He’ll tell you what to do, ’kay?”
They spread the fawns and dragonflies and rats on the conference table.
Edna holds one in her plump, butterscotch-freckled hand: “Tagua nut?”
“If you say so,” Jamey says earnestly. “Screw what Clark says—you’re in charge.”
She considers him, and her lips turn up at the corners. “You know what, Jamey Hyde? You’re full of shit. You could have said that when Clark was in the room.”
She walks out, her green plaid culottes stuck in her ass crack.
Jamey’s bloodless for a few minutes, until Clark arrives.
“Holy Mary, you’re pale,” Clark says. “Did you make little Edna vewwy angwy? She just marched off!”
“Did she leave the floor?”
Clark shrugs happily.
Sometimes when Jamey’s falling asleep at night, Clark stomps into his mind, and stands there with hands on hips, spectator shoes splayed in a demented ballet pose, and he grabs Jamey’s jaw and says: Honey, you can sleep when you’re dead. Or he shakes him by the shoulders in a pantomime of child abuse and says: Pour Daddy more Champagne, chop-chop, don’t be shy and don’t be stingy.
“Shoot, I’m going to see if I can find her.”
Jamey runs out, to Clark’s uncomfortable amusement.
Why does Jamey work to please Clark? All his life, Jamey’s hustled to make people feel good, so they don’t feel stupid or guilty for whatever stupid or guilty thing they just said or did. No one asked Jamey to be the policeman and pastor of egos. Why does he think this is his obligation? Clark is fabulous in many ways—he can make a rainy Tuesday at the office into a circus, complete with gossip and candy and afternoon Pimm’s Cups. But he’s also a prick. Why shouldn’t Jamey tell him so?
Jamey can’t find Edna, and he stands with hands on his hips at York Avenue and Seventy-Second Street, under ever-changing and fast-moving white clouds.
Elise and Jamey agree on a ravioli craving and walk toward Paolucci’s, a red-sauce joint on Mulberry Street.
They pass the junk shop, and Jamey points to the tattered harlequin puppet, the torn Bible, the bleached and vanishing maps in the window.
“My brain is full of things like that,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“From work.”
“Your job is weird.”
“My job is ridiculous.”
They eat lavishly, slowly, and drink red wine at a table outside. They have cappuccino afterward, which Elise never had before they started eating in Little Italy, and she loves it, pours sugar on the foam and licks it off like a cat. She watches Jamey sip his espresso and look around—he’s lost and determined at the same time, eyes always roving.
She suddenly feels so good, she gets flushed.
“I’ll love you till the day you die, Jamey,” she says, cupping her hands to light a cigarette, hiding her face.
“Who says I’ll die first?” he jokes.
“I’m tougher, I’ll last longer,” she says back, smiling. Then she gets serious. “To be honest, I’d rather die before you.”
She takes a deep drag, and they both watch the smoke as she exhales, quiet. Nobody has said anything about her continuing to stay at the loft—Jamey said a few weeks when he invited her—but she doesn’t feel like he’s about to kick her out or anything. Still, as they sit here in the bright spangled Manhattan night, she wonders how to make him love her.
Goddammit, what’s it going to take?
JUNE 1986
One morning she watches him eat Corn Flakes, and says: “I’ll make dinner tonight.”
She might as well try this ancient route to the heart.
He knots his tie. “Great.” He smiles.
Leaning against the couch, legs bare, she’s drinking coffee. Even though she washed her face last night, traces of makeup darken her eye sockets.
He suddenly wants her, and he shouldn’t be late for work but they do it quickly, against the couch, standing, grunting, and he leaves with face flushed, a figgy musk reeking from his armpits.
She stands naked at the door, kisses him goodbye, and he thinks about it all day—how the door was cracked, how anyone could have seen her.
She looks through Martine’s cookbooks: crème fraîche, veal stock, herbes de Provence.
“What the fuck?” she murmurs.
At Grand Union, she wings it from memory.
And she can be seen through the lazy and sullen crowd of shoppers, a girl with cornrows and a basketball jersey, head turned down with some kind of dignified everyday precision, looking through grapefruits under a fluorescent light. She’s examining the bumpy hides, the rash, the strange color that isn’t pink or orange, myopic but also aware of the world like a cat is when it focuses on one thing but is really focused on everything. She’ll choose a fruit and move on to peppers, and she smiles as she pushes the cart—at no one, briefly, at this hour, this task, at herself.
Back at the loft, she empties bags and turns on Howard Stern.
“Buck. You wanna help?”
Martine’s copper pans just seem old and battered to Elise, but she sets them on the stove. Outside, taxis honk at cars, buses grind, people shout across the street while the sun ricochets off mirrored buildings.
She cooks a Puerto Rican feast, like her aunt used to do sometimes. Bright-yellow rice, a roasted pork shoulder, the green sofrito, plantains caramelized to a crisp at their edges.
The air comes in the window, its sweetness cooling, like a cake just taken from the oven. It’s a perfect summer night. She waits.
The phone rings.
“I got to meet these friends tonight,” he says unhappily. “I can’t get out of it.”
“Really?” she asks.
“I’ve said no too many times, I don’t have any excuses left,” he says, then feels funny about what he just said. “You know?”
“Yeah,” she says, her voice hollow.
“I’ll see you around ten or eleven,” he says, and she realizes he forgot about dinner, or didn’t understand what she meant when she said she was cooking, and she could tell him now, but her voice catches, and she barely says okay.
At Dorrian’s, Jamey drinks greyhounds with Brent and Walter while girls with charm bracelets and madras blazers lean in to talk to him, their alcohol-and-Dentyne breath tickling his ear. It’s fun to be here but only because he has a secret. Otherwise it would be boring.
A dull ache throbs in her rib cage. She should have spoken up—he’ll feel bad when he realizes the one night he spontaneously chose to do something was the night she made a real dinner. A proud woman would throw a tantrum, toss the food, and leave the candles to burn down like in the movies. A vengeful woman would get drunk, call someone else. But Elise lovingly and carefully packs the rice and plantains into dishes, covers everything with aluminum foil, to be brought out and reheated when he comes home.
In the morning, realizing what he’s done, he insists on eating it all for breakfast, with a scrambled egg. He grins, telling her it’s so good, as she sits in her T-shirt and watches him devour the food, her face spiked nicely with amusement, and she smokes her cigarette on the other side of the table.
When they can’t sleep, they lie on the sheets, trading tales in the dark.
These are tiny stories that they never told anyone else—smudges of incidents, not worth repeating before but now important.
He watched a woman on a horse, and the horse stepped into a wasp nest. The bodega owner on her block always gave the kids a Swedish Fish; Elise heard shots—then saw blood run into the sidewalk seams….
On a NOLS trip in Wyoming, a girl went over a cliff, and her body was helicoptered out. Elise helped Monisha lock her cheating boyfriend into a motel room by nail-gunning the door closed.
Andy Warhol came to his tenth birthday party.
The drunk hibachi chef on her seventh birthday fell onto the grill, burn
ing his hands.
His mom gave him a puppy for his eighth birthday, and his father gave it to another family three months later.
Her mom taught her to swim in the metallic-cold lake where her mom swam as a kid. During drowning drills at the yacht club, he and Matt saved each other. She sometimes went to a public pool whose surface rippled with a rainbow of Afro-sheen. His friend grew up in a penthouse apartment with its own tiny movie theater.
She draws figure eights on his belly with her finger.
Each time one finishes, they say: You still awake?
Yeah, I’m awake.
What can she do besides cultivate a daily schedule? Make coffee for him and say goodbye in the early light, watch Good Morning America (red skirt suits with black buttons, concealer on the man’s face, potted flowers in the window), take a shower and pick out clothes, put on eyeliner—which takes a mighty long time, the way she does it.
She smokes her menthols on benches, squinting at people passing. She finds a hair salon that braids hair the way she likes it. Sometimes she shoots hoops if she finds an empty court, and if someone’s there, they alternate shooting, moving in sundial curves and not speaking, and throwing the ball back if it bounces to the wrong owner.
She wonders if she should get a job, if Jamey wants her to now that she’s staying longer than a month. She peeks into shops. She asks if they’re hiring, but she acts odd, nervous, and they think she’s shoplifting. In a thrift store, she touches a row of slips the colors of wine coolers, puts her hand into one to see the silhouette of fingers through fabric. She rubs the zipper of a motorcycle jacket, silently composing words about working here to the Japanese man behind the counter. Her body produces an attar of insecurity, and he looks at her with suspicion. He even sighs loudly, meaning: Fish or cut bait.
Fuck, this lack of confidence is bad for business, she knows that. She’s been here before. What girl in love doesn’t know this territory? Don’t get weird. Chin up.
She eats McDonald’s in Washington Square Park, and leaves the cup and crumpled yellow wrapper on the sidewalk when she’s done, stretches, yawns, and lopes home.
Elise was so shy as a kid, but at ten, she found a friend, Phara, from Haiti. The girl got dumped with some relative after her parents faded into trouble. Phara’s smile was curved and cherry-red, and she talked to everybody. Even at eleven, she worked the sidewalk or the playground or the bodega. Tagging along, Elise saw the world open like a flower.
Phara talked to strangers.
After Phara left a year later, deposited into another random home, Elise forced herself to do it. To talk. Other girls watched and sneered: You’re not Phara, and you never will BE her, so give it the fuck up. But Elise practiced, somehow knowing curiosity would be the key to her life.
Walking Buck today on the piers, she surveys the hustlers ambling, or sunbathing in coconut oil. One dude in army boots and tiny denim shorts hands out flyers. This is a frontier.
She moves through the invisible net of power dynamics and mating signals.
No one meets her eyes but they aim their own eyes as close as possible without making contact—I don’t want you—but I’m not looking at the ground or the sky like I’m ashamed.
Tugboats groan on the river.
She walks close enough to one guy—in parachute pants as thin as rice paper—that he has to see her.
“Got a light?” she asks.
He looks confused.
“I mean, an actual light,” she explains, taking out her cigarettes.
“Sure,” he says gruffly, his voice heavy with interrupted conquest.
He flicks a Kelly-green Bic.
“What’s her name?” he asks.
“It’s a he. Buck. Like from the Jack London book.”
The guy smiles, cracks his gum. “I loved Jack London. When I was a kid, in school,” he adds cheerfully.
“I never read any of his books,” she says, taking a drag. “But my boyfriend talks about them.”
“Read John Barleycorn. Fucking outstanding.”
“I will. Thanks, man.
“Anytime.”
She waves, giddy now. “Have a good day.”
“You too,” he says, resuming position like a mime going back to work.
She hangs out the loft window, the way everyone did where she grew up. She’s inquisitive, runs her fingers over the street like reading Braille. Who’s shouting down an alley between apartment buildings? Whose pit bull sits in the auto-body shop window there, pale eyes wise in the caramel face?
This is how Elise prays, how she gets keener, how she bows.
The music from that man’s car, as he wheels down the street, is it opera, some Italian immigrant stuff? Blue smoke comes out his window, and she sees his fat hand as the huge Cadillac passes, he’s older, belting out the lyrics, cigar held high.
What makes him so happy?
She likes to imagine his house in Queens, his wife, a parakeet in a cage, a gold-framed mirror, fake roses in a vase, veal parmigiana for dinner….
They go to Balducci’s and buy French goat cheese, fresh-squeezed juice, English muffins, lemon curd, rib-eyes, Champagne grapes, fresh pasta from Italy, a case of Perrier bottles, a bouquet of orange roses, romaine salad, cooked shrimp with cocktail sauce, bagels, and capers.
Elise thinks she heard wrong when the cashier says the total, but Jamey doesn’t seem surprised. Elise stares at him bug-eyed as he hands over the cash.
On the way to work in the morning, Jamey gives a dollar to a homeless man; he never used to do that. Not because he thought he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t figure out his motivation for charity, and that drove him nuts. Did he want to be seen as good? Did he want to be admired and thanked? Did he want to control the man by giving him money?
Now he doesn’t care about the reason and hands out coins all the time.
This man, he’s seen him before: he resembles a bodybuilder in rags, with muscles veined like worm-eaten rock.
“I fear not,” the homeless man says to no one, as if practicing for the stage. “I know not.”
The old Jamey would have walked away, but now he lets himself watch.
The man traipses from one persona to another, changing shape and color, shining under the morning sun. The man is President Reagan, now he’s Ulysses, he’s a baby, he’s a corpse, he’s a drug addict, he’s a preacher—he’s a piece of meat through which pass the divinities and rascals of human imagination.
Tonight it’s dinner at his old home. Jamey thought about bringing Elise to meet Alex and Cecily and the kids, but decided he’d just tell them about her first. One step at a time.
Jamey arrives at his childhood block: there’s the gold lobby table in the corner building, arthritic Mrs. Grant walking her Yorkie, Town Cars idling along the curb.
Marvin opens the door and Teddy sits behind the desk.
“What’s up, Teddy!” Jamey says.
“How you doing, James.”
“Long time.”
“Too long, young man.” Teddy smiles broadly—meaning: Do not hug me while I’m on the clock.
Upstairs, Cecily is arranging giant, falling-over peonies. White petals razor-cut with red.
“How good it is to see you,” she tells him.
Xavier and Samantha play with wooden trains on the parquet floor, their sibling-talk unintelligible and calming.
“We’ve missed you,” she says, kissing his cheek.
Cecily’s a very good wife. After Tory, Alex found someone benign. His friends warned him about Tory, then rode her fame with him, then rejoiced when things went sour, pranking Alex by taping articles to his desk on the “divorce of the decade.”
“I ran into Caroline Stallworth at a party, and she said she hadn’t seen you around this summer. Where have you been hiding?”
Cecily’s face is round as a plum, and she waits guilelessly for an answer.
“Oh, I’ve been, you know, laying low. Just getting the hang of this job, and, yeah.”
> She nods. She’s from powerful Seattle shipbuilders, but the Pacific Northwest humility plus Scandinavian disaffection cuts through prestige, and she’s not like East Coast empire daughters, even if she is as wealthy.
She takes a man at his word.
“Well,” she says, looking at a stack of envelopes. “You have a number of invitations that have come to the house.”
“Ah, thanks.”
The kids stand on chairs to peel potatoes or snap the ends off beans. You monkeys, she calls them when they squabble, or she tells them, with a measure of sweet and stern in her voice, to go play nicely in another room.
At Palm Beach last winter, Jamey walked into a bedroom where the three of them were napping, tangled on a king-sized bed with a banana-yellow coverlet. They were in dried bathing suits, Solarcaine in the air, books on the floor, and visions cast on walls: Peter Rabbit played with a hungry caterpillar, girls stood in straight lines with umbrellas while a bird flew around looking for his mother.
Alex runs in, newspapers shoved under his arm.
“Want a beer, Jamey-roo?” he says, hugging his other children.
“Sure,” Jamey says.
“I’ve got to make a call, Cece,” he says. “Back in a flash, don’t wait on me.”
While his dad talks to London, Jamey looks through the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the same volumes (now somewhat outdated) he loved as a kid. The dog-eared “Butterfly” section reminds him of the hatchery he created in the guest room when he was nine. Glass jars lined up on the Louis XV bureau and on the bookshelves—with caterpillars inside and enough leaf to make a cocoon.
Jamey now reads a line he’d highlighted in awe back then: In the chrysalis, the caterpillar must disintegrate into pure liquid, with no form at all, and no parts, before its cells start to realign themselves, as per the imaginal discs, and develop into a new creature: the butterfly.
His science report got a gold star, and the teacher wrote a note home that most children don’t have the “exemplary patience” to complete an experiment like this.
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