Watching her act like that to security guards (and bossy cashiers and cops), Jamey realizes he’s always been nice to these people. But not because he’s nice. Because they’re beneath him, and above him for being beneath him. But Elise is just a dick back if they’re dicks to her.
The gemstones room! Like standing in a jewelry box with black velvet walls, surrounded by rocks chiseled into luxuries. They gape at all the dazzle.
When they come out, it’s raining so hard the drops bounce back up from the sidewalk.
They stand under the awning and watch the city get pummeled, green leaves falling off stems onto the sidewalk, coffee cups floating in the gutter.
“I’m not going back to school,” he says, hands in pockets. He looks at her with derelict glee.
“What?” Elise asks, incredulous.
“Not going back.”
Elise is elated—and crushed. They’ll blame her, and she knows it.
“How long you been thinking about this?” she asks, hands cupped to light a cigarette.
Jamey looks at the sky. “It’s possible I knew before we left New Haven.”
“Well, Christ,” she says gruffly, exhaling, trying not to smile.
When the rain lightens, they jog to a café and drink cappuccinos, and share a slice of coconut cake. They take turns sketching people sitting at nearby tables on napkins, making cartoons of them, furtively studying bunny teeth and heart necklaces and stoned eyes. Outside, a rainbow appears over the Bronx.
On Sotheby’s stationery, Jamey jots a letter to his dad about not going to school. After he mails it, he grins at the Rolodex, the Limoges teacup, the pale blue telephone on his desk, absorbing his decision. I have to do this in stages, he thinks, and even he doesn’t quite know what he means.
He tells Clark he has to run an errand, and ducks into the first bar he sees on leaving, an Irish pub. It’s three in the afternoon, and a construction crew rolls in. Jamey lets their conversations boom around him.
His dimple deepens as he smiles at his beer.
He told Alex he was taking off the semester to restrategize, so his last year’s course load will be calibrated for his HMK “career.”
Jamey had lied with joy. A ruthlessness burns the tallow around his heart. Maybe it’s one way to become honest.
The men collect under a neon-light bow-tie Budweiser sign, and the biggest guy orders a round of Bushmills.
“Give one to this dude over here,” the guy said, pointing a bruised-black fingernail at Jamey. Then to Jamey: “You gotta drink with us, buddy.”
They all tip their heavy shot glasses, wipe mouths in staggered unison.
The next day, he and Clark are eating takeout Waldorf salads at Clark’s desk, where trinkets are spread on the ink blotter: a crystal swan, a Purple Heart (Clark doesn’t know whose), and an ivory comb, monogrammed, that belonged to Carole Lombard.
“Clark, I wonder if I could work here for September, maybe October. I’m taking a semester off, so I can focus on my future, and I just love working here.” And it’s an easy paycheck.
“How nice to hear this enthusiasm! I suppose so.”
“Great, thanks!”
At the end of the day, Clark and Jamey wait for the elevator.
Clark fluffs the lavender hankie in his pocket. “But you will be going to Yale for spring semester, won’t you, James? You wouldn’t throw away that opportunity, right?”
“I’m sure I will.”
“Great, great,” Clark says, but with suspicion. “You’re not, like, doing drugs, are you? Should I be concerned?”
“No! All’s well,” Jamey says, giving his best smile.
Perhaps he can tell Jamey knows he’ll never go back to school.
Not next semester, not next year. Not ever.
But for once, Jamey doesn’t feel like he has to explain himself to some nanny or proctor or anyone else acting in loco parentis.
Clark smells a rat.
For Elise’s birthday, Jamey conjures up a four-course dinner on a rented yacht, circling Manhattan. She has trouble walking down the pier in high heels and he holds her elbow, and she looks nervously around the sparkling dusky marina.
“Here we are,” he says, and salutes the captain at the boat.
Elise takes off her shoes, and is helped onboard.
“Happy birthday, mademoiselle!” says the first mate.
The table in the cockpit is set with white linens, antique silver, and roses. The water rises in triangles of liquid black licorice. New Jersey blazes away across the river, and a black-tie waiter pours Elise a vodka sour with a cherry—her favorite.
“Can I smoke on this thing?” she asks under her breath.
“You can do whatever you want,” he says. “Tonight’s your night.”
They eat filet mignon, with profiteroles for dessert.
Passing under the bridge, its darkness and echo is an otherworld.
All week she’s been stressing about how his family will look at him playing hooky—she’ll be the culprit.
It’s so beautiful out here—the stink of the river, the baubles of light. She suddenly knows she won’t fight his decision. The family will decide it’s her, that she led him astray, no matter what he says or does now.
And hasn’t she?
SEPTEMBER 1986
On September first, they take up residence in a railroad crib at Second Avenue and Seventh Street.
They read their names on the lease.
“Wow,” Elise says, looking to him for assurance. “We’re doing this, huh?”
“We’re doing it.”
Elise and Jamey walked around for a couple weeks, looking for apartments. Elise taught him it’s as simple as hunting for cardboard signs posted in delivery entrances or first-floor windows, or asking the guy sweeping the stoop if he knew of vacancies.
They were drawn to the East Village. Kids run the blocks, working as lookouts, innocent ambassadors to basements and back alleys. Tompkins Square Park is its own nation of tents, milk crates, bonfires, tattooed people, and dogs that stutter and function in debilitated rhythms. A man jauntily threads through a crowd on First Avenue, T-shirt on his head like a sheik, singing—raised among so many people, at home and on the streets, that he doesn’t see them as obstacles but rather as water or air, a medium to move through, that moves through him too. Holding hands, Elise and Jamey kicked through candy wrappers and avoided dog shit. Then they found this place.
On the first floor, the landlord Mr. Gorowski lives with his wife, who only speaks Polish, so he speaks Polish to her when he’s moved to translate something, and Elise can’t help wondering why he translates the sentences he does and then doesn’t translate anything else. The elderly couple has houseplants and fake flowers in the living room, an indoor garden of metaphysical proportions.
The second-floor apartment is old but scrubbed and repainted, a bathtub in the kitchen, two windows looking into an apocalyptic courtyard, and two windows looking onto Seventh Street. The one thing left by the previous tenant is a dozen airplane whiskey bottles shoved into the toilet tank. A found sculpture of obsession.
The new tenants lie on the mattress, sheets pooling on the floor.
Elise runs her hands through his hair. “Remember how you acted in the very beginning?”
He grunts, animalistically pleased by her massage.
“You didn’t know anything,” she says, pulling his hair now to hurt him.
“Nothing,” he agrees, and turns over on her. He nips her now with his teeth, his breath between her legs.
They do it the old-fashioned way, missionary, but the unfamiliar smells here, the disturbed dust, the hollow drawers, the way air travels from this window around this room, the shush of leaves in the trees, strangers outside shrieking names they don’t know—all of this pinpricks their skin, making this seem like the first time.
They fall asleep, and the afternoon nap feels illicit, against the order of the day. They really don’t know what they’re doing.
Jamey stands at the window, watches evening take over the streets. A stray dog sniffs down the sidewalk, no collar, no owner. Someone waits for something in a tinted-window Chevy, the radio so loud the whole car shudders with the bass. Jamey flattens his hand on the glass, meeting the future.
These days he eats lunch alone, perched on a Fifth Avenue bench, watching kids in uniforms on the next bench. The light moves fast through grand elms above.
One kid has a nosebleed, and boys and girls are nursing him, skipping in circles, taunting him. It’s amazing how fast a society forms around an emergency.
Jamey finishes his sandwich with a bittersweet smile. He’s not in school this September, and he misses it, but not Yale. Not even high school.
He misses third grade. He misses kickball. He misses long division.
He misses Jack London.
She gets to know the neighborhood with the curiosity of an army wife who understands they could get transferred tomorrow. Behind the dry cleaner, a bicycle with no wheels, no chain, and no handlebars is still padlocked to the window bars—a useless torso. Empty whipped-cream canisters have collected under the Kiev’s dumpster.
She discovers the pungency and shadow of this corner, or the green dank tingle of air in the alley, the way kids get acquainted with woods or attics or fields, knowing the molecules and milliseconds of a place. She looks at the red velvet boxes in the jewelry shop window, and the white cat with rheumy eyes, stoned on sunshine, that guards the chains and crosses and medallions.
Oil stains dot the gray tar, like cheetah spots.
She goes to the Third Avenue Cheese Shop. It’s like walking into a chapel that smells of sex. Or a morgue where you feel comfortable. The staff shows a devotedness like miners or nurses. They know their work, having made a commitment that’s private and stoic. They’re beautiful and rank; they’re people with a holy, boozy, creamy, rotting idea of love.
Buck looks at squirrels with a stare that says: I could, but I won’t waste my time. He’s unguarded while playing catch, and bounds around like a fat woman doing ballet. But when the game is finished, he pulls himself together and walks carefully through the streets, sniffing the wind. He looks at her as she unlocks their new building, and his eyes say: Yeah, this is the right place, but just for now. That’s what she was thinking too.
Elise navigates by faith, because she believes in love, has always known it in her bones. When she saw Jamey for the first time, she recognized him, in a way.
Jamey has always wanted to believe he believes in something good, but deep down, he fears he believes in nothing. Without fanfare. He’s not an extravagant and charismatic nihilist. He sees himself as someone who slips through the crowd at Grand Central, or stands in line at Duane Reade, or crosses the street at Mercer and Prince, a sculpted white face whose eyes and mouth are static at moments, inhuman. He might seem to belong, but is trespassing on land that belongs to better people. Love, he thinks, is accidental, fleeting—he can’t possibly deserve it.
Very often, when Elise and Jamey talk in the apartment, drinking coffee, she sits with knees spread, feet tilted on the dirty outer edges of her sneakers, seeming bored and sullen. He’ll falter, sensing animosity. It’s just that she can’t look at him—he’s too much. He’s a prince of this apartment, his eyes black and doubtful, uncertain of the maple burning in the window even while he’s enchanted by the red leaves.
She’s ahead of him, and while she does think he’ll catch up someday, it’s lonely waiting for it.
“Is something wrong?” he’ll ask, shy and concerned.
She’ll look like: Duh, and laugh. “No. Why?”
She can’t force him to know things.
There’s a deli on Tenth Street she likes. The Pakistani cabdrivers, with their burnt-yellow or salmon button-down shirts and creased brown hands, get her drinking tea and eating English muffins toasted with cheap strawberry jam.
Lester owns the deli, and his retarded son Brian does most of the cooking while Lester gossips and handles money. Brian is obsessed with baseball cards, and customers bring them to him. Brian acts like a woman who just got a sapphire bracelet from her lover, squealing and clapping his hands to his chest. Everyone makes lopsided smiles when this happens.
“You got it, Bri,” they say, pleased and embarrassed by his effusive thanks.
The bells jangle above the door; it’s mainly men who come and go. A dollar bill is thumbtacked to the wall, and so saturated with the fumes of grease and coffee and sweat, it must weigh five times its normal weight, and it hangs there like leather.
Old East Village natives come in.
“Gimme a bacon egg ’n’ cheese and a coffee light wit cream,” they say.
Elise can sit here all day, with no sports section in front of her, no notebook to scribble in. She barely listens to the soap operas playing on the TV above the refrigerated sodas, a strange choice of channel but Elise thinks the men are comforted by women being vaguely present, in their chiffon robes, hair body-waved, not demanding anything, gliding into gardens with fountains and through hospital rooms full of lilies.
She brought Jamey here once, and he couldn’t see why she thinks the place is so great.
“See yez ’round,” says one guy, folding the paper under his arm.
“Till tomorra,” says Lester, and he grabs the metal spatula and fixes something, chastising Brian, but he promptly hands it back, kissing Brian on the cheek.
Elise already knew he would kiss his son like that, right then. Her heart is set to the same time.
Jamey’s come to love his sidewalk-bench lunch on Fifth and Seventy-Second, and when he feels in his blazer pocket for a napkin, he finds a valet ticket from a yacht club in Massachusetts, and the nub of a lime Life Savers roll, and a key to something. Like clues to a crime that he still has to solve.
He looks at life around him—a nanny walking children, who are animatedly talking over each other about lions and candy apples, the light filtering through trees and buildings and clouds, the yawning pretzel guy on the corner, and a gray-haired man in a tweed jacket walking a Pomeranian. Jamey receives it all like ocean spray on his face, smoke from a bonfire, pollen on your soul after a day in the garden. He’s roosting in the heart of the city, among human lives, getting stink and oil and spit on his hands. This daily baptism of the city—he loves it. He collects it. Maybe he is gaining on Elise.
Their phone rings and Jamey answers.
“Jamey! It’s Binks, darling. How on Earth ah you?” she purrs.
“Great, I’m great, how are you?”
“Bats and I would love to have you and your lady friend for dinner, Jamey. How would next Thuhzz-day evening work, darling?”
“I think it would be fine,” he can’t help saying. “Sure.”
“I could just tell at the christening that things are amiss. I left the church that day, and this is what was going through my mind: Make things right for my Jamey.”
“That’s—thank you, Binkie. Thank you.”
Binkie—what are you up to? She’s diaphanous, but in a flinty way, like a seashell. Metallic layers. She’s the sound of a martini pitcher stirred with a sterling spoon. The smell of Après L’Ondée and thin cigarettes. She was handed more personality than other mortals, and chemically fertilized in a glasshouse—now her bionic strength allows her to teleport platters of watercress sandwiches from the kitchen to the library, where she’s beating her friend at backgammon. Her own dogs fear her. Her staff never needs disciplining because they live in terror—her authority hums on a subsonic level to all the creatures in the land.
Jamey’s ventured before into her Newport bedroom—the vanity set reminded him of a war throne.
She believes her grandson will do what she says.
Goddamn, she can gossip and growl and coo, and he suddenly understands that her star power—the part of her that really sells tickets—is the abyss between the two Binkies. It’s exciting to experience such a discrepancy, and he knows he’s performed in the s
ame split manner in the past, and it’s a demonstration of control to keep the selves separate. Her public persona and private person are so distant from each other. He can’t help but wonder if they ever meet, and if it’s once a day, or once a year, and what it’s like.
“Jamey?” Binkie says suspiciously. “You sound fah-r away.”
“I’m right here,” he assures her.
Ah, pale yellow roses and Rolaids and gin. Breakfast trays painted with horses and riders. Binkie, the one and only. He can hear her rings clacking on the plastic phone, and he chuckles, envisioning with amusement the bejeweled suntanned manicured grip his grandmother thinks she has on his balls. And she does.
Jamey and Elise are welcomed into the home of Binkie and Bats Hyde, at Fifth Avenue near Sixty-Fourth Street, by a black woman with an eye patch.
Two Westies race down the staircase, and a squid of candles hangs from an iced cake of a ceiling. The silk curtains shine, still and demure like a dress worn by a matron to a ball, pressed against the windows’ sides, and on the dappled, rainy street beyond, headlights and brake lights surge and stop mutely.
It reminds Elise of Gone with the Wind, and she can smell housework done by many hands—polish and cream and soap, the bad breath of a vacuum. This place is a domestic stadium.
Jamey and Elise are quickly separated, like kids at a police station, hauled into rooms for questioning.
But they’re not questioned.
Elise is shown the orchidarium.
“The what?” Elise asks, as she stumbles into this damp atrium.
Pointing to a hot-purple bloom with a hairy gullet, Binkie says: “This is a Venus Slipper. Found in Finland, of course.”
“Right,” Elise agrees.
“This is a Blood-red Odontoglossum. Ecuador.”
Walking through the greenhouse, Elise feels like this woman is drugging her. Binkie puts orchids and more orchids into Elise’s face, then looks into Elise’s eyes to see if she’s succumbing.
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