White Fur

by Jardine Libaire

  But it’s…the way they lie in each other’s arms, the way they sweat, the way they laugh and whisper, the way they sleep and dream together. Right?

  He walks with hands in pockets, face collapsed into a disappointment. He’s disoriented, capsizing like a tiny sailboat in a big wind.

  When he gets home, she’s sprawled on the couch, and WKCR is playing Ornette Coleman. The sun is a brutal glowing heat in the window. Buck is curled into Elise’s stomach, and loves her too much to greet Jamey. The dog wags his tail instead.

  “Yo,” she says. “What’s up?”

  She’s just listening to strange notes and chords ricochet around the space, putting Cheez Whiz on crackers and feeding one to the dog and then eating one herself—

  And he believes in her.

  “Nothing,” he says, smiling, throwing his keys on the counter.

  Hungry for dinner, they leave the loft, listening to how their footfalls sound together down the stairs. As the building door closes behind them, they get that New York City exhilaration of launching into the unknown.

  It’s immediate; they’ve arrived into the night, into the intimacy of strangers, the second they step outside.

  They walk up Broadway; Jamey wants to go to a sushi place he heard about. They pass a spectrum of human beings: pierced, shorn, manic, grounded, painted, torn, distended, shriveled, innocent, guilty as sin, foreign, local, young, old, dying, regressing, growing. Jamey in his seersucker slacks and Elise in her gold hoops and overalls are citizens too.

  He stops next to a record store, under a tree, to kiss her.

  She smiles when he’s done.

  They see a cat on a stoop, and the cat sees them. The cat moves his head to watch certain people pass, showing his inner ears—iridescent with membrane.

  A group of club kids pops out of a door. They’re birthday cakes of sex. Ludicrous fairy-tale animals on the run. Clowns made of drugs. The cat won’t look at them, won’t feed their egos; he licks his paw instead.

  At the restaurant, Elise takes a Polaroid of a tiger fish in the tank.

  “Is it just raw fish?” Elise asks, looking at the menu.

  “No, we should get edamame, some miso soup.”

  “You order. I trust you.”

  Elise puts tuna in her mouth like taking communion of some religion she doesn’t follow. It tastes like a girl at a juvenile program in Massachusetts, and Elise flashes back to bunk beds, drills, the girl, that time—and then it’s gone.

  Jamey convinces her to try eel.

  She spits it out, and they laugh, and cry, and toast again.

  “Let’s get another one,” she says of the empty sake pot.

  They remember paying the bill, scribbling a tip, finding the door, then careening down the street.

  Make out against a building, sneakers in poisoned grass, a rat, Whoa, whoa, one moans, they stagger on, making out in the street, twisting together like a couple in the rain but it’s not raining.

  They fall, lie there, as if to sleep, laughing so their rib cages stutter up from the asphalt, holding hands, and someone gruffly says Get off the street, and there’s streetlamps for moons, glass in the tar.

  Jamey’s been drunk, of course, but mainly he avoided it when everyone around him was bingeing and crashing cars. Yet tonight is a good roughening up. Jamey, I’d like you to meet indignity.

  They manage a photo of the ceiling when they get home.

  Masser-piece, Jamey will say after looking at it blearily for a long time.

  This is how it feels to sleep in your shoes. You’re supposed to take them off. You should have brushed your teeth, said your prayers, kept your hands out of your pajamas. If you die before you wake, I pray the lord your soul to take. I pray the lord your toys to break.

  Jamey’s not even cognizant when he makes it to his knees and lifts the toilet lid, just in time. His stomach muscles work of their own volition. He breathes and spits in between.

  He crawls into bed. Elise shakily sits and pees, and then understands they had sex without taking out the tampon. The cotton plug is jammed, and her trembling fingers work a while to remove it. Her eyes are hot and wet when she gets back in bed.

  Jamey smiles miserably, roughly throwing one arm onto her shoulder.

  “It’s not funny,” she says.

  He grunts. After a moment, he asks into the pillow: “Why don’t we just decide it’s funny.”

  “What’d you say?”

  He moves his mouth. “Why don’t we choose to make it funny?”

  She considers, nauseated and curious. “All right.” She presses against him, so they can feel as bad as each other, or make each other feel better.

  They start to have sex, with no foreplay—just rancid kissing and rough fucking—but he has to stop, cross-eyed, to keep from vomiting.

  “But it’s funny,” Elise says slyly, eyes winking in a blur of makeup.

  He holds up his finger. “Please don’t talk,” he pleads, knowing if he laughs, it’s over. His body has gone wild, sick and aroused, and he can’t figure out what to commit to. The madness of the situation is awesome.

  He watches, smiling, with nothing better to do.

  In Martine’s kimono, she’s pretending to be a sex slave, pressing her palms together at her chest and making up gong-ringing fake words, stuttering across the floor as if her feet are tiny, not gigantic.

  When the game gets old, her real posture takes over, and she sits with legs spread on a kitchen chair dragged to the window so she can smoke into the night sky.

  “So in line at the bodega this morning, this girl was ahead of me,” Elise says. “She had crazy long blond hair, and white lace-up stiletto boots? But she turned around, right, and there’s black stitches from her mouth up her cheek.”

  “Did you ask what happened?” Jamey says, because Elise usually feels no shyness in these situations.

  “No, I just thought: Little sister, I feel for you. Who knows. Sometimes we have to see what life is doing to us, it has to be physical to be real.”

  Jamey adores the shooting stars of her mind, the powdery galaxy of her thoughts. Her intelligence isn’t organized the same way his is. She never finishes more than a few pages of a book, but loves to talk about what she read. She thinks in wild gardens, and his thoughts are espaliered into an introduction with a thesis, then supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion.

  She waits now for the Empire State Building to flicker on, and then makes a childish yelp and points it out.

  He’s aware Elise is moving around the city every day, roaming, with no professional design for her future. She apparently put in a job application at a hair salon, and they’re going to call if something opens up, but she doesn’t want to go to beauty school. And she spends afternoons at the record store on Broadway, where guys scratch on turntables, and she nods to the beats and asks them questions about DJing. But that’s it—she listens and keeps her hands in her pockets, talks shit, laughs. This kind of aimlessness, according to how Jamey was raised, is a sin. She’s supposed to have elaborate ambitions.

  But why? The girls he knew who were on their way to conquer Wall Street, or run art galleries, or start PR firms—were they really going to improve the world so much? He grew up thinking you’re supposed to work till your eyes bleed, be exhausted all the time, get money, get houses, get prestige, do good, be important, be busy, get on the board, run out of time, cancel lunch with friends, run out of gas. Why? Why did he believe them when they said that? Why did he believe anything they said?

  Four in the afternoon. Gretchen hollers to Elise from the stairwell, unable to knock because she’s got bags in her arms. There’s a dinner party tonight and Elise is helping cook.

  Gretchen’s potbelly swells her corduroy shorts. She cooks with rabid and decadent accuracy.

  She asks Elise to mince the garlic.

  Elise coarsely chops cloves on the board.

  Gretchen grabs Elise’s forearm. “What the fuck are you doing?” she laughs. “Mince
means tiny pieces. There you go.”

  Gretchen wipes her cheek with her shoulder when her flour-covered hands aren’t free, chewing her lip as she reads the cookbook.

  She teaches Elise to pick the membrane and veins from the sweetbreads.

  “You’ve got the perfect tools for the job there,” Gretchen says, indicating Elise’s neon-pink curved rhinestone nails.

  “This is so-o-o-o nasty,” Elise finally says, smiling.

  Gretchen laughs, stomping her feet. “Oh man. I like you.”

  When Jacek arrives home, he gives Gretchen a hug, and she gets gooey eyes. She acts like a teenager, her body somehow becoming girlish and slight.

  “Jacek, this is Elise,” she says.

  “Very pleased to make your acquaintance.” He smiles, chewing a black licorice rope.

  Elise is flabbergasted at her wrong ideas. It takes her ten minutes to process the truth: Gretchen loves Jacek.

  Gretchen doesn’t need anything from Elise.

  Jacek opens a dark Mexican beer and talks about Britton, who got a teaching post in Umbria but has been lying in bed with depression for the last month.

  “Delilah’s going over to be with him,” Jacek tells Gretchen.

  “Well, that’s good at least,” Gretchen answers, forehead furrowed.

  “You guys are from here?” Elise blurts out, overwhelmed by how natural and secure they are.

  “Michigan,” Jacek says. “I came to school here when I was a kid.”

  “I moved from Nebraska to be with this guy.”

  Elise thinks about Gretchen’s journey. How she was raised up, by a hot-air balloon of a heart, and she floated over fields and hills, chubby ankles hanging in the sky, across the many miles.

  Jamey appears with a chilled bottle of Sancerre.

  “Finally we meet the mystery man!” Gretchen says happily.

  Guests arrive—Jemma, a woman in a bronze lamé jumpsuit who is otherwise casual, looks unbathed, unconsidered; Timor, a small man with a bow tie and an air of extreme compassion; Estella, an older lady with a modern architectural haircut and Italian accent and gnarled hands heavy with gloriously unusual jewels; Sam, a man in white overalls who brings Gretchen and Jacek library books on Nova Scotia.

  “Jamey and Elise are staying at Martine’s place while she’s gone,” Gretchen explains.

  “Dear God, thanks be that she is gone,” says Timor, and then looks apologetically at the couple.

  “No need to censor yourselves!” Jamey’s throaty, wayward laugh gets everyone’s attention, as always. “We already battled with her.”

  Elise does a razor-sharp imitation of Martine’s heart attack when she caught Elise in her loft, Ohmygod, who on Earth are you, and they all cackle. The group makes fun of Martine relentlessly—buying whatever art a dealer tells her to buy, chatting them up in the hallway when she’s high on coke and then ignoring them the next day, pulling her chinchilla tight at the neck and putting on massive glasses.

  “She used to hang out with Carolyn Von Terrire,” says Jemma.

  “The girl slumming with Jean-Michel, the girl who ODed?” asks Sam. “That was sort of heartbreaking.”

  A dinner party is the oldest experiment. Trap a bunch of souls in a room. Faces move like painted moons, rising and setting, as talk blows in from the east. The thunk and freckles of a hand slammed down on the table in laughter, the noise of a long night unscrolled like a map. Madeira and Roquefort. Paper towels for napkins. The maroon wall telephone rings: next round of folks on their way!

  At dinner, Jemma grills Elise on her thoughts about life.

  Elise finally and clumsily sums it up as: See what comes your way.

  Jemma says, “You’re a cool kid, baby.”

  “You grew up where?” Sam asks, listening in.

  “Bridgeport. The Turnbull houses.”

  “And you’re still alive,” he says bitterly. “No thanks to Ronald. Half the population might as well be crossed off these days.”

  Elise is a little flush with wine. “We don’t exist out there, it’s like—war. Families with babies living up against a bunch of sociopaths who don’t give a fuck.”

  The room is silent.

  “Sociopaths?” Jemma asks finally.

  “Half the people in the houses aren’t human,” Elise says antagonistically.

  “Everyone is human,” Jemma says soothingly.

  “What the fuck do you know about it?” Elise asks. “They’re addicted, they’re zombies, humiliated to death. Or they’re making money off it.”

  “Sorry, I understand now,” Jemma says quickly.

  “You do?” Elise says, heating up for a fight. “Spend a lot of time out in Bridgeport?”

  Alert! Alert!

  “Elise, I think she means she understands that she doesn’t understand,” Sam says smoothly.

  The group survives that sinkhole, and deftly finds new subjects.

  Later, Elise says to Jemma: “I didn’t mean to be like that. I just don’t like people talking about something they don’t know, and being all correct about it.”

  “I totally get it,” Jemma says, properly terrified of the discussion starting up again.

  “Okay, good,” Elise mumbles, apologetic and also still wanting to argue, but letting it go.

  By the end of the night, Gretchen’s teeth are stained gray with wine. She guffaws and stamps her feet as she tells a story to Jacek while he washes dishes, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

  Over dessert—port wine and braised peaches—Estella squints at Jamey.

  “You’re the kid in Bad Hand, aren’t you,” she asks.

  “Yup.”

  “Tory Mankoff’s son,” Estella says. “I knew her, back in the day. Must be wild being her kid.”

  “I would hardly know,” he jokes. “I see her once a year. Which is fine.”

  Jill and Crane show up, in the middle of an argument, moving to a corner to hash it out. The table is dirty with foreign cigarette packs, sticky glasses, abandoned threads of talk about de Kooning and Kathy Acker and spaghetti westerns.

  Elise licks her stinking fingers—she never had cheese like that. More plates are piled in the sink for a wash, and Sam takes over, cigarette hanging from his teeth too as he talks and scrubs. Someone’s neon-pink stilettos are jumbled in the corner.

  Two blond children are putting a paper crown on the cat in a beautiful nighttime project the cat patiently tolerates. Jamey keeps looking at the pits toothpicked in jelly jars on the kitchen windowsill, sprouting roots and leaves. He’s having a lovely time, he really is, but he’s separated from the group, including himself; he’s a ghost hanging in the corner of the ceiling.

  Then he looks at Elise, who is uncertain but fascinated by everyone, she’s learning them, understanding them, and she joins in, laughing, unafraid now. He loves when she forgets to hide the anarchy of her bottom teeth. These people are above his people, certainly in their minds. They’re anti-snob snobs.

  Elise is thinking she and Jamey were invited as curiosities, but everyone in the room is a curiosity—that’s the currency of this crew. It doesn’t offend her. Everybody wants something after all—why shouldn’t they?

  His dad calls him at work.

  “I’m calling to touch base,” Alex says perfunctorily. “Make sure you took care of things.”

  Jamey doesn’t answer, rolls his eyes, plays with the straw in his Schweppes ginger ale can on the desk. “What does that mean?”

  Alex stalls. “Did the girl move out?”

  Jamey’s face heats up. “No. Why?”

  “Why? Because that’s what we agreed on.”

  “We never even mentioned it.”

  “Martine wants her gone,” Alex says after a moment.

  “Well, then, I’ll move out too,” Jamey says, testing him.

  After a moment, Alex clears his throat: “I guess you should.”

  Head reeling. “Wow. Okay. Just because this woman decides to judge someone she met for th
irty seconds—”

  “The deal was for you to live there, not some stranger,” Alex rushes to explain.

  “That’s not it,” Jamey says quietly, touching the rim of his desk.

  “Look. If Bats hears about all this, Jamester—he’ll be unhappy. Do you understand?”

  Like Bats has anything to do with anything. Ever since Jamey could remember, Alex told him he was the favorite grandson—Bats asked how Jamey was doing at lacrosse camp, at Race Week, on his SATs. Alex reported it like Jamey should be proud—because Bats didn’t look out for other grandchildren this way.

  “Dad, Elise is a harmless—”

  “Just be a big boy, okay?” Alex sounds weary, like this girl he’s never met has exhausted him simply by existing. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  In the middle of that night, Jamey wakes from a vision and recognizes it as a memory.

  It starts as a blister of honeysuckle—he’s a kid, running though a garden, playing hide-and-seek, it’s a summer party in the Hamptons. The dogs don’t know what’s happening but they love it anyway. There’s a luxury, a July paradise, the kind of time kids get lost in, when an hour lasts a year. But now Jamey remembers seeing his dad’s silhouette by the pool, drinking with other men, as Jamey went inside to get a lemonade. He remembers noticing his dad’s shadow was shorter than the others, and he had a visceral sense his father was weaker than the rest, and that he was more dangerous as a weak person with a lot of power than a powerful person with a lot of power. Jamey knows he didn’t know that truth in words back then, but he knew it in a deciphering of silhouettes on a lawn whose green is turned turquoise by eastern light, the salt and chlorine, some mingling of blood and dusk and threat….

  AUGUST 1986

  The streets are hot, the sky is hot. The loft is hot no matter how many fans oscillate. Jamey’s also on fire, livid—he’s never been this pissed. Elise sees it in his eyes.

  It feels really, really good.

  Thus begins their spree, Jamey using his Platinum Amex to playfully stick needles in his father’s heart.

  Elise and Jamey go to the Odeon one sweaty, sticky evening, lured by its orange-red neon sign. They walk into a star grid of tables—is that Harvey Keitel? Paulina Porizkova? They’re guided through downtown algorithms to a booth under a hanging globe of light.