White Fur

by Jardine Libaire

  Every time a chrysalis broke, Jamey took that glass jar to Central Park, and let the butterfly go. Sometimes the Painted Lady Monarch walked the shoulders of his little blazer before dusting its oily wings enough to fly.

  The nanny was bored to death. But Jamey didn’t let that stop him from infatuation, seeing butterflies in his sleep, doodling spots and legs and thorax, talking about butterflies to anyone who would listen.

  “Dinnertime!” Cecily sings.

  Jamey joins Cecily and the kids at the table for coq au vin, but Alex never makes it. Jamey leaves after pantomiming a goodbye to his dad in the office, and his dad pantomimes his regret about the length of the call.

  On the street, he tosses the envelopes—to weddings, summer balls, twenty-first birthdays on yachts, engagement parties at Point O’ Woods—into the nearest trash can.

  Walking home from work that week, Jamey impulsively buys a Polaroid camera at a RadioShack on Broadway. The sales guy has a silver cap on his canine tooth, and breath to kill an elephant. He calls Jamey “my man” over and over.

  Jamey photographs a dog pissing in the street, and a red mannequin in an out-of-business shop. The flash burns the night like an X-ray, and everyone looks.

  He knocks on the apartment door, and when Elise opens it, he presses the button. She’s startled, then captivated as they watch the square develop into her face.

  He looks at it longer than she does, at something in her eyes and mouth, something willing yet resolute.

  They go eat dumplings on Bayard Street, walk back hand in hand. Asian gangsters smoke foreign cigarettes and barely register this American couple; there’s a gridlock of energy, conversations, arrangements, and tension on this block, as on every block. Elise and Jamey don’t figure in, and they glide by like extras in a movie.

  At home she picks up the camera and walks backward to the bedroom, snapping a picture of Jamey.

  “Come here,” she says.

  She’s kneeling on the bed.

  “Take down your pants,” she says.

  He undoes his belt, and she reaches with one hand to do the rest. She manages to take a picture, and they laugh at the awkwardness.

  He grabs the camera, and she lies, naked, on the bed, and smiles calmly.

  In moments that would make other people shy or awkward, she becomes supernaturally natural.

  He shoots her lying there.

  They pick a gladiola from the vase, pose it between her legs. He takes a close-up.

  Elise sets a brooch from Martine’s jewelry box on his breast and shoots that—it looks like the gold pin goes through his skin.

  Jamey manages a shot while they have sex. He seems half robot, half man—a bedroom centaur.

  The film gets pushed out with a succinct noise.

  Afterward, they spread the pictures on the floor: cloudy, shady poems of bodies, a lyrical record of love. That’s us, they think silently.

  “But I don’t want anyone else to see them,” she says.

  “We could burn them,” he suggests after a hesitation.

  They go to the roof in their pajamas with a matchbook. Under the constellations and a thin scythe of moon, they set fire to each Polaroid, starting with a corner. The images get distorted first, as if the bodies are returning to some primordial shape closer to the soul.

  They save one: her legs spread with the flower between them. It’s impossible to tell what it is. The pale globular shapes are part animal, part blossom.

  The photo is like the dream that someone had in a dream: doubly inaccessible.

  Jamey wakes up in a nest of sunshine this Sunday morning. He feels like a fire is burning in him, and all of a sudden, the wood will shudder and shift, send up lazy sparks. Something in him is getting rearranged, or destroyed.

  At the Ground Zero Gallery, she tells him she never went to an art opening before. This exhibition is graffiti paintings, and everyone’s high, rambunctious. Jamey and Elise are bumped around the mad crowd, and their eyes get shot up with Technicolor stuff.

  It’s nice and late, the sky a damaged purple, when they squeeze out.

  She walks beside him, hooded sweatshirt off and hanging from her head, T-shirt tucked into jeans. She’s holding his hand, swinging it, then slowing down, dragging him to a stop as if he were rushing the night away.

  Sometimes she stalls to light a smoke, grimacing over the Bic, its flame reflected in her gold necklace, then she resumes her streetwise lope—pigeon-toed—a gait he’s become addicted to watching. Addicted?

  They have nowhere to go tonight. Nothing to do.

  And that’s heaven. Heaven? he thinks.

  But it is, to wander and explore, to play, to talk with this girl….

  Tonight—seeing her laugh, head tipped back with abandon, with sarcasm, with pleasure—he’s struck by bizarre lightning.

  Diamonds of heat prickle his face: You idiot. This is all you need. This is all you ever wanted. You just didn’t know it. You prideful dickhead. You blind piece of shit. You retard.

  “What?” she suddenly asks.

  He must be grinning like a lunatic.

  He shrugs and keeps smiling, refuses to tell her.

  She smirks awkwardly, intuiting he’s happy for some reason that has to do with her, and she walks with an extra-clumsy strut.

  It’s like a daydream he forgot to have. It’s like he forgot to daydream at all. It’s like he never wanted anything, but only thought and fretted about what he should want, what other people wanted him to want. He’s a brat all of a sudden now, turned back into a child, and he wants four, no five no six no seven lollipops from the deli. He’s going to waddle away with them, through traffic, hearing no one call his name. He’ll go lie in a field of toys and video games. The babysitter can go to hell. His teacher can get fired and cry. He’ll suck on candy and watch airplanes make their silent way across the sky.

  That night, in bed, he says: “I want you to stay all summer. I don’t want you to leave.”

  She laughs, with old-fashioned joy. “For real!” she squeals. “For real for real?”

  “For real for real,” he says.

  Right before she falls asleep later, she murmurs it one more time: “For fucking real for real…” She sleeps like the devil, basking in victory, smiling while she dreams. Her exhaustion is the best kind. I did it. The words hover over the bed—a crown of golden hearts, spinning in infinity.

  JULY 1986

  Elise walks Buck in the early-morning light. He sniffs overflowing metal cans before lifting his leg. She smells trails of nightlife, of narcotic musk tracks left by party people roaming from one after-hours club to the next. The darkness, just a couple hours ago, seemed so invincible to the night crawlers, but the sun turned out to be stronger, and the poor insects were flushed into the street, black sunglasses on, shoulders hunched in a grenadine-red suit against light.

  The New York Times is on doorsteps, a sack of ideas and facts, the city’s brains and tongues gutted by masterful hands, arranged into sausage.

  The cobblestones shine; horse phantoms clop over them still. And how do you know this turd is human shit? The deli bag that wiped someone’s ass is crumpled next to it, and a cloud of wounded pride hangs dense as flies.

  She shoots the breeze with the bagel man, and the guys who loiter on Broadway and Prince don’t whistle anymore but wave instead. This is her neighborhood now.

  She brings home a cheese Danish and coffee, and puts them on the kitchen table in a graph of sunshine. She’s draining her coffee when she senses a disturbance, and she flinches.

  “Hello?” says a woman who just let herself into the loft.

  She has long, dark, lustrous hair in a blue leather headband, and a dress with asymmetrical shoulders. Her eyes are incredulous and her mouth is resigned; the two features creating one meaning, the way Chinese characters are built.

  Elise is dumbstruck, swallows in a hurry. “Hi.”

  “And you are?” says the woman.

  Elise clears h
er throat. “Elise.”

  “Am I supposed to know you?”

  Elise can hardly think. “I’m with Jamey, I’m his girlfriend.”

  The woman hesitates and then holds out a thin hand to shake. “Martine. This is my home.” She gives a stoic and un-warm smile. “I never heard about a girlfriend so forgive me for not calling first—I assumed Jamey would be at work.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Elise says nonsensically.

  Martine is holding a bottle of Champagne that she can’t hide, with a navy grosgrain ribbon. “Well, this was meant for Jamey,” she says tightly, and puts it on the counter.

  Elise nods, not sure what she’s supposed to do. Apologize? Leave? Is the Champagne not meant for Jamey anymore?

  “Don’t mind me,” Martine says acidly, “I’m just going to pick some things up and I’ll get out of your way.”

  Buck wanders toward them, a soiled panda bear in his mouth.

  Martine looks at Buck. She glares at Elise.

  “I’m going to walk the dog,” Elise says.

  Martine is silent for a moment. “Fine.”

  Elise gets a leash on him and vanishes, walking a full block with her hand over her mouth, barely breathing.

  “Oh fuck,” she whispers when she finally sits on a West Fourth Street bench, in front of a basketball game.

  She thinks of the ice in this woman’s voice.

  After a while, Elise realizes she locked herself out again.

  “Goddammit!”

  At five, she stands with Buck outside the building. The street burns under the July sun, which acts like it will last forever and not vanish one day in September, with no warning, the way it does every year.

  Who else but Gretchen should come home?

  “Let me guess,” she says gleefully to Elise.

  Elise makes a wistful smile and follows Gretchen up the stairs. Elise is grateful, but she has a feeling Gretchen likes girls, and Elise worries about getting into debt. Everybody wants something, don’t they?

  “Come in,” Gretchen says, and this time she means it.

  They enter the huge loft, a spatial variation on Martine’s, drawings and photographs taped to the walls, the furniture arranged as if people, late at night, huddled to discuss Marxism or Rothko or volcanoes here—who knows. Nothing ordinary could be debated in these formations.

  “Keep me company while I cook.”

  She asks Elise about her life as she takes things out of the fridge.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jamey.”

  “Where’d you meet?” she says, cutting shallots.

  “New Haven. We were neighbors. It’s funny cause we’re definitely from different worlds.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  Elise shrugs. Buck is lying at her feet, and she rubs his tummy with her toes. “Money. High-class family.”

  “You got class, girl.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Class isn’t money.”

  “Well, the woman who owns the apartment came in today, and—”

  “Martine?”

  “Yeah.”

  Gretchen laughs shortly. “Oh, she’s a cunt.”

  Elise can’t help but grin. “Whaaatttt?” she asks with pleasure, drawing it out.

  Gretchen wipes her hands on a rag. “You think she even likes this building? Someone told her it was cool to live here. That woman has no soul. What, did she make you feel unwelcome?”

  “Well, she’s letting Jamey stay there, but she didn’t know about me. Think she was surprised. Surprised some ghetto bitch is sleeping in her bed.”

  “You’re not a ghetto bitch.”

  Elise shrugs.

  The women look at each other. Elise is uncomfortable, stares at the floor. Gretchen takes mercy and changes the subject. When Elise hears Jamey coming up the stairs, she thanks Gretchen and flees.

  “Hey!” she says. “I forgot my keys again.”

  They kiss, and enter the dark loft.

  Jamey usually comes home and immediately turns on every lamp, but Elise can sit all evening without light. To Jamey, this darkness is sinister.

  She throws herself onto the couch now, the city roiling beyond the open window, and she rakes under Buck’s chin. Jamey curls next to her in the grayness. He fears this half-light, when artifice’s power blinks off and the natural world—in its capriciousness—reigns, but it feels right tonight.

  “Martine came by,” she informs him.

  His heart double-beats. “Really.”

  “She didn’t seem too happy finding me here.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Not much. That was the problem. I just let her look at me like I’m nothing.”

  Elise has a thousand talks with Martine from this day on, in her mind. The two women face off like gladiators. They bang foreheads. I don’t know who you think you are, it often starts.

  And this French succubus hangs over Elise’s bed, waiting for her to fall asleep.

  Or Elise is standing in the bathroom, putting on mascara, and suddenly Martine will be in the mirror too, in her stupid blue headband, like a scene from a horror movie.

  Fighting is an inevitable necessity. Like God or rain or illness, it will happen; it’s not a matter of if but when. It’s beautiful, the ugliness of it, and girl fights are especially awkward and unredeemable aesthetically. There’s no boxer’s punch, no fast feet. There’s strength and intention, hatred communicated with nails, with teeth, box cutters. Hair in the eyes, or caught in the mouth, girls move and heave like fat animals even if they’re skinny. They grunt and squeal inside, not audibly. It’s oddly silent, a mute disaster.

  Elise wishes she could have done battle and moved on.

  Alex’s secretary calls to schedule lunch on Saturday for Jamey and his father. What a surprise!

  When Jamey gets to the New York Yacht Club’s gilded lobby, Alex is jangling coins in his pocket.

  “Hey there, Charlie,” Alex says to a man passing.

  To the people Alex reveres he gives an operatic hello and stretched-arm handshake. The people he despises get a happy punch on the shoulder. His oldest, closest friends get something melancholy, distracted.

  “Jamey,” he says sternly, hands on hips.

  Alex studies the menu even though he knows it by heart. He has to order carefully because his stomach is tricky. He goes to doctors in Switzerland, Japan, California who prescribe seaweed and other regimens, but Jamey can always tell ten minutes into a meal when Alex is preoccupied.

  “Look, Martine told me there was a girl in her loft when she stopped by the other day.”

  “There was. There is. That’s Elise, she’s staying with me.”

  “She’s staying with you.”

  “She’s my girlfriend.” Jamey aims his heart-shaped face at his father and doesn’t let himself look away.

  “Your girlfriend who you’ve not mentioned nor introduced to anyone.”

  “If you want to meet her, maybe we could all go out to dinner.”

  “James. I’m not sure how to say this, so I think I’ll just say it directly. Martine told me about Elise, and to be honest, this whole thing has me concerned.”

  At the next table, the sommelier uses a pince-nez to look at a decayed label before uncorking it.

  “Martine and Elise barely spoke. What could concern you?”

  “Listen.” Alex painfully folds his napkin and begins his speech. “Certain people see the world as small. They’re directed by fear, Jamey. They get what they can, when they can, because in their experience, not much is coming their way. Their life is hard, and that breeds a certain attitude. Do I think these people should be helped? Absolutely. They deserve all the help they can get, and I think it’s most helpful to teach them how to do for themselves. Do I think someone like that makes a good companion to my son? I don’t, Jamey. It doesn’t add up. They’ve been beaten down. They have certain instincts, trust me. Guy goes into prison. He comes out, he knows exactly what to s
ay to get by, to get over. It’s survival; he’s living in hostile environments. He learned to cry at his parole hearing. And he’s learned even better skills to rob you blind when he’s freed. It’s a cycle. They’re caught in a cycle. You can try to get them resources and programs, give some of these kids from certain neighborhoods some scholarship money. But usually? Known behavior is hard to get rid of, Jamey. Instinct wins. It’s not their fault.”

  Jamey stares at Alex with mouth agape. “What are you talking about?”

  “I think you understand.” Alex takes a big sip of wine and surveys the room, the maritime paintings and boat models lit by golden lamps.

  “No one gave Elise any scholarship money, I can tell you that.”

  “Well, let’s also talk about how challenging it is, even in this modern world, which isn’t really racist anymore, thank God, for you to be in a mixed affair.”

  “Dad. Elise is white. Her skin is white, that is, which is what I think you’re talking about.”

  Alex looks flustered. “Is she? Forgive me, then. Martine gave me the impression that Elise is—”

  “She didn’t go to Yale. Is that what you mean?”

  “Look, I don’t know what’s going on. I do know that I love my Jamey-roo. I’ve got meetings in Stamford and the car’s waiting. But this was a good talk—we nailed it, I think. Right?”

  “You’ve really enlightened me,” Jamey says sarcastically.

  Alex is so used to his son being nonconfrontational that he either doesn’t register or can’t acknowledge Jamey’s bitterness. “But um, you do need to fix the situation.”

  Alex gets up and clumsily rubs Jamey on the head.

  Jamey sits at the empty table and stares at red tulips. All around him, men tell stories over oysters, laugh, order another gin. Jamey washes his hands in the Old World bathroom, and then leaves, dazed with rage.

  Walking down the street, he questions everything—why he’s doing this, why she’s doing it. He sees her in Newport, opening the jewelry box. He almost loses the will to keep walking. Is he naïve?