White Fur

by Jardine Libaire

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I can’t believe your father would do that. Was that him on the phone?”

  “He paid someone to do it, I’m sure.”

  “I would of told you anything if you had asked. Fuck all-a you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You better be. You know what? Go sleep on the couch—I can’t even be near you.”

  He gazes at her—she lies down and won’t return his look. He slinks onto the couch but can’t sleep.

  She eventually turns off the light again.

  The August morning blazes like petroleum through SoHo streets.

  Elise and Jamey sit in silence on the magenta loveseat and drink grapefruit juice.

  Suddenly Jamey gets up, rubs his neck, deciding. “Let’s go celebrate your record.”

  She tries to interpret his expression; he looks like one of those smug, bored baby-faced Cali boys who drive Mercedes sedans with big trunks for shopping bags—that’s their virility.

  “I have a stupid idea,” he tries again. “Just come with me, okay?”

  They take the subway, hanging onto the pole as the car heaves and bucks. The door doesn’t quite close, and the girl in the Salems ad has a black Magic Marker gap in her teeth.

  Uptown, they walk in off the steamy street, and Elise and Jamey swivel their heads to take stock of the store, expensive air shining them.

  Crude transactions are done in muted, eloquent tones.

  An old woman gets her shoe heel stuck in the escalator pleat. Her spun hair tall as a fruit basket, she almost topples, but a gang of sport coats saves her.

  “What are we doing here?” Elise asks.

  His cousins always played the Tiffany’s game, where they’d crowd around the baby-blue catalog, and every girl picked one thing on each page.

  “Playing a game,” Jamey says.

  He puts his hands over her eyes, and they walk awkwardly toward a bank of glass cases. She grins, blindly holding her hands over his.

  “All right, point your finger, and whatever you point to is yours,” Jamey tells her.

  “What?” she says in a childish voice.

  The counter man has dyed hair and a snarl like an aristocrat, although he probably still lives with Mother in Lindenhurst. He glances to the door to make sure security is watching—and they are.

  “Should I assume you two are having fun?” the salesman asks in a careful voice.

  “Sure,” Jamey says.

  Elise puts her finger to the glass and Jamey releases her eyes. It’s a floral moonstone-and-ruby pin.

  “It’s a grandmother pin,” Jamey says.

  “I love it,” Elise says, because it’s psychedelic.

  The salesman uncomfortably asks: “Would you care to see it?”

  Jamey shakes his head. “Just put it in a box, please.”

  The man clears his throat. “Will this be cash or credit, sir?”

  “Credit.”

  The man’s eyes flick to security again, but he slowly wraps the pin in a baby-blue felt bag.

  Elise scowls at the man. “What’s your problem?”

  “Elise,” Jamey says, smiling.

  “That will be four-thousand five-hundred ninety-nine dollars, please, sir.”

  Jamey hands him a platinum Amex. The man looks at the name on the card, clears his throat.

  Returning the card, he smiles, sensual with apology. “Thank you, Mister Hyde,” he purrs.

  She sticks the pin on her leather baseball cap, and turns the hat sideways, blows a bubble and cracks her gum, busting through the door into the world of sunshine and true, stinking, boiling air.

  He’s going to do it. Just as other ideas lately have shed onion skins to reveal a wet heart, this one is impossible to parse any further. He’s taking her to Theodore’s christening—a monumental Hyde family convention.

  Morning simmers in the loft like golden milk on the stove.

  “Is that what you’re wearing?” he asks.

  “What’s wrong with it?” She looks at her denim miniskirt, red tank, gold necklace.

  “We’re going to a church.”

  She shrugs and shakes her head, meaning: So?

  “Don’t you want to maybe do long sleeves, or a longer skirt?”

  “I don’t have the outfit you’re thinking of, Jamey,” she says harshly.

  “Elise—it’s a bunch of conservative, gossipy ladies.”

  She slumps on the bed. “I could borrow something of Martine’s?”

  Jamey shrugs. “Why not?”

  They hijack her closet, handling clothes delicately at first, but then Elise spins and models, throwing castoffs on the chair.

  Jamey watches her. She pouts in tight white Azzedine Alaïa, twirls in the Sonia Rykiel sundress, grabs her tits in a Chanel jacket.

  “Fuck, I dunno,” she says, surveying the mess.

  “You look good in everything,” he says honestly.

  She smirks, like: Shut up. But she’s infected with his hopefulness.

  They’re almost late, but dressed to the nines. They enter the massive bronze doors, and walk into the church. Pink granite pillars hold up the arches on each side, and a Tiffany glass dome sends jeweled light onto the altar.

  Everyone else is pleated into grass-green blazers and whale-print skirts. They all move like bees in a hive, buzzing for Bats and Binkie.

  “James, darling!” says Aunt Jeanette.

  Jeanette’s popular in the family. Powder-blue suit worn like a field-hockey uniform. Freckles on her tan, athletic hands. All the family traits of sociability and charm are there but unpollinated by entitlement. She’s a perfectly benign ambassador from the family, and he introduces her to Elise.

  “Well, hello, Elise.” Jeanette beams, her face convulsed with extreme delight. In another culture, she might look insane, but here—this is grace.

  At the center of the crowd, the baby—Theodore Stanhope Hyde—is five months old, born at New York–Presbyterian.

  His mother wears a canary-yellow shift. Black hair in a chignon. Her bum is still a little wide, and she grins at her husband, Jeb, who has the baby over his shoulder. He bobs slightly to the left and to the right as he talks about the US Open to Cousin Marshall.

  And the king and queen arrive, make their way up the African-marbled floor between pews.

  Binkie leads in a rose-pink Oscar de la Renta suit, her raspy whisper doled out in endearments and greetings. Occasionally her voice catches fire in a cackle. Well, hello thuh-r, sweetheart! Binkie’s fun, even in God’s house.

  Tall Bats has a way of looking into the eyes of whoever he’s talking with, then gazing out, to make sure everyone is safe—from train bandits, bad weather. Bats is not actually handsome. His face is wide, mouth and eyes like a stretched rubber doll, skin turning watermelon-pink when he drinks or plays golf or goes shooting, and his nose is almost porcine. He combs his yellow-white hair, once dark like Jamey’s, in the side-part he’s had since he was sixteen and taking Mary Blixworth out for a milkshake. A shard or two falls over his forehead.

  Women follow him like cats after a fishmonger—tails raised, chins elevated. Intelligent women giggle and sip Champagne with head tilted down and eyes girlishly tilted up. Even now, in his late sixties, hands covered with sunspots, he’s the object of longing looks from Sacred Heart girls on the subway. He can get away with halitosis, and drunken finales to formal dinners, and the odd nasty comment. Even the maid who has to bleach his hemorrhoid-bloody sheets has a crush.

  People hardly talk about his bad behavior, as if they live in a dictatorship and everyone’s a spy. He swims at the club every morning in Manhattan, and in East Hampton, he swims the ocean—his eyes cold and impenetrable as the Atlantic in March.

  Everyone keeps talking in stained-glass-lit groups but they’re waiting to see if Bats singles them out for a hug, or a wink and a wave. They have to be ready—but can’t look like they’re waiting. So Bats moves through the distracted crowd.

  When he fi
nally makes it to the baby, a pulse of love beats in the room.

  Bats is shown his grandson—the parents beam, their mouths vulnerably open. Bats tsk-tsks, shakes his head: Fine specimen, his expression says.

  Jamey watches, rolling the engraved program tight and sweaty.

  And now Bats heads toward Jamey—slowly—talking to people on the way.

  Elise should be a Dartmouth lacrosse star whose granddad went to Groton with Bats, and she should be bronzed from the Vineyard, lips opaquely shiny from Chapstick. So happy to meet you, Mr. Hyde!

  But no! Jamey is pushing forward the real Elise, in a couture dress, shins bruised from basketball, cornrows latticing her lean head, feet wedged into slingbacks.

  Elise who never graduated high school, never got her teeth fixed, never heard of a country club, never flew on a plane, never attended a christening like this, never met a man like Bats.

  “Elise, is it,” Bats says, eyes twinkling.

  “Yeah,” she says, face drawn into unprettiness by a determination to do this thing right.

  “Well, it is a pleasure,” Bats says, and Jamey knows the verdict.

  Elise thinks it’s going well.

  That turns Jamey’s stomach.

  They slowly move into rows, sit on the carmine cushions. Elise wants to hold Jamey’s hand, but doesn’t. The priest speaks, but the baby’s bleating makes a spectral fan of sorrow in the dome.

  The two girls in front of her, hair Pantene-shiny and French-braided identically, are up to something. Jamey’s actually watched these cousins braid each other’s hair in the sun-rooms of mammoth apartments, like monkeys picking bugs with love.

  They giggle now.

  The girl next to Elise is leaning away—almost imperceptibly, her face stoic, a caricature of politeness. She smoothly moves her purse from next to Elise to her other side.

  One of the girls in front sneaks another look back, and then glances at her pew mate, and they go into a paroxysm of stifled mirth. The girl next to her tightens her face, almost grinning but not, and then Elise realizes that she, Elise, is the joke.

  Elise, burning like white stone, made of nothing that isn’t pure and right. Gold earrings and man’s feet, and the ill-fitting Valentino sheath, blue eyeliner. Truer than the Holy Spirit.

  Her blood freezes.

  She stands up.

  Jamey tries to meet her eyes as she brushes down her dress.

  She murmurs at the girl next to her: “Fuck you.”

  The girl blanches.

  He watches Elise walk down the aisle, chin up, shoulders back.

  No one turns, but everyone is attuned to her departure.

  Jamey’s face is hot. He picks at his nails. He doesn’t go after her, thinking he should stay and repair what he can, protect the idea of her, see what he might save.

  Elise was six, her mom was working a double shift, and Jeri-Lynn was watching the kids and smoking dope with two guys from the Bronx—Danny and Rat had come out to the “countryside” because they’d done something. Danny’s acne made his face looked mauled. The radio was loud and no one could hear the baby wailing except Elise, who whined around Jeri-Lynn’s knees, worried: Dawn’s crying in her crib. She need her bottle, Jeri-Lynn.

  Help me get this thing out of my fucking face, joked Danny, and the two guys dragged Elise into the closet in the bedroom, laughing. Rat, a scrawny guy with a ponytail, blew smoke in her face. Stay put.

  None of this was out of the ordinary. No! she yelled. I don’t want to!

  What makes this day sting in her cellular memory is what happened next.

  She got quiet seeing Danny’s expression.

  He pulled down his sweatpants and pissed on her, and then he closed the door. The wetness felt hotter than her skin, and she sat in the dark as it cooled, and she stayed quiet this time, and a new dimension to her was born, a space carved inside her to be filled with emotions all through her life.

  Tanning Junior High. When twelve-year-old Elise came out of the bathroom stall, Mary Gonzalez was dabbing on lipstick. Elise heard Mary’s brother got shot a few nights ago, paralyzed from the neck down, and she smiled uncertainly at the girl in the mirror.

  “I like that color,” Elise said.

  Mary grinned. “Wanna try it?”

  Elise took the tube, and glided it on. She made a smile.

  Mary laughed in a practiced way. She even clucked as she put the lipstick into her fringed purse. “Shit, girl. Nothing gonna help you. You. Are. A. Dog. You know that, right?” Mary was still smiling, talking to Elise in the mirror. “You’re the ugliest girl in the whole fucking school.”

  Elise watched Mary toddle out the door on spike-heeled boots. Normally Elise would have punched someone who said that.

  Instead, Elise’s blood froze and her skin got mottled. She tried to look okay as other girls came in, smoking and shrieking, and Elise kept washing her hands with her head down. She somehow slipped out of the fluorescent-lit room, and walked down the hall, not looking into anyone’s eyes, breaking out the door into the autumn day and moving briskly with no direction, just getting away, just getting off the school property. Was she crying?

  She realized she was, and then she was sobbing, hurrying past the Laundromat, the deli, a junkyard, and she needed to go somewhere to be alone and she finally found her way, walking toward the dam, where she could be above the rushing dirty water.

  She sat on the matted grass and let her jeans get damp from the soil, and cried like a mixed-up and stranded runaway, the descent of water just out of reach behind the chain-link fence, but the water was there, crushing and sizzling, icy and sad. She was telling me the truth, is the only thing that Elise was thinking. Someone finally said it out loud.

  She peered into her Maybelline compact. The hard-lined eyes, the long jaw, studs in her ear, greasy hair. You’re an ugly fucking cunt, she told herself, face screwed up in a monstrous way.

  The sky was an incandescent backdrop, and she felt a physical phenomenon she would never forget. It was a cracking, a separation. She was finally and irreparably removed from the pack, the gang she never understood or belonged to, that she ran with to look right, that she tried to join. You are on your own, kid, she thought, and she could barely catch her breath because there was so much heartbreak to this, such devastation.

  But then, after an hour of sitting there and letting this news run through her, she also started to feel—up there on this crest of earth, its tall dead wildflowers tangled with Kleenex and gum wrappers and plastic straws and bird shit—she felt free.

  When he gets home, after making milky, distracted small talk with family, and telling everyone Elise had a stomachache, and they pursed their mouths with compassion—Poor thing, I hope she feels better—he finds her on the couch with Buck.

  “Well,” he says, uncomfortably. “That sucked.”

  Elise is glaring at Geraldo.

  “I understand your leaving,” he tries. “I wish we could have handled it differently.”

  Elise turns red eyes at him. “You know what sucks? You do.”

  She gets up and throws herself on the bed, the headrest vibrating.

  After a moment, he approaches, biting his lip, cufflinks winking as he puts hands on hips.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

  He lies on the bed, spoons her, kisses her sweaty neck.

  Apparently that’s not the right thing to do.

  “What are you doing?” she moans, pushing his hand away. “Get offa me.”

  She cries, sobbing.

  “What?” Jamey asks stupidly.

  “What? How come you let me walk out by myself?”

  “I didn’t even know what you were mad about!” he tries, his voice shrill.

  They’re sitting up now, disheveled and mad.

  “You couldn’t feel what those people thought of me?”

  “I mean—”

  “You didn’t see the way they looked at me? Are you fucking blind?”

  “No one said
anything but nice things to you, Elise,” he says weakly, without conviction.

  Her jaw drops.

  Suddenly she’s hitting him—he grabs her wrist and she bites his forearm as hard as she can, tearing his shirt, breaking skin—

  He manages to contain her, holds her down on the bed, and breathes I’m sorry into her hair, over and over.

  “You’re saying I’m crazy,” she weeps.

  “You’re not crazy,” he admits. “You’re not.”

  “Why would you say that?” she sobs.

  “I’m not saying that now, I won’t say it ever again,” he tells her, over and over.

  They don’t even eat dinner that night; they just eventually fall asleep. Jamey dreams in a jittery, jagged way, a bandage taped onto his arm. Elise snores, nose stuffed from crying, her eyeliner smeared.

  When they wake, they seem hungover though neither drank. He makes breakfast, takes care of her like she has the flu. He watches her eat toast and drink juice, her face swollen, and he asks her what else she needs.

  He thinks about an exchange between Bats and a friend once on the salty porch of the Newport house, a conversation he always tried to forget. Jamey was on the other side of the screen door when he overheard Bats say: I didn’t blame Alex at first, she’s a looker. His friend said: Yeah, no offense, Bats, but every good family can use a showgirl or stewardess in the bloodline once a decade, spruce things up. They laughed together. Bats sighed: Truth in that, Harold, truth. Doesn’t mean he had to go marry a Jew.

  It’s a dark Saturday, and Elise and Jamey go to the Museum of Natural History.

  They gawk at the whale model hanging from the ceiling. A Japanese family tilt their heads back too, exclaiming in their own language, pointing.

  A stuffed monkey family stands in a fixed jungle environment, the parents holding their kids’ hands. Elise slings her arm over Jamey’s shoulders and points her lollipop at the world inside the glass.

  “Happily ever after.”

  In another room, she runs her hand down a bear’s arm. “So soft,” she murmurs.

  “Hey you,” snaps a guard. “No touching the animals.”

  “Sorry,” she says with aggressively fake contrition, and the guard makes a surly mouth.