White Fur

by Jardine Libaire

  At the tour’s end, Binkie hands Elise her own orchid, writes a gilt-edged note.

  “Instructions. These are temperamental creatures, darling. Ring me if you run into difficulty.”

  Meanwhile, in the wood-paneled salon, Bats is making a presentation of a 1925 Patek Philippe watch, a relic from Great-Grandfather Aaron Balthazar Hyde.

  “Wear it for godsakes, James.”

  Bats believes it’s gauche to buy luxury possessions. They should be won in a bet, or inherited and worn daily—even if they belong in a safe-deposit box. Or acquired and neglected. He loves that the fishing camp upstate is rarely used, the LIFE magazines moldy in its tartan-couch living room. He owns a corn-yellow Beechcraft, which sits in a barn at a friend’s Florida estate, and he thinks of the plane the way a man thinks of a woman he fell in love with on a trip and lusts for because he won’t see her again.

  “Watches weren’t made for sitting in drawers,” he says testily, as if Jamey had said they were made for sitting in drawers.

  At dinner, Elise thinks everyone—staff and grandparents—have the faces of nurses: expressions that combine lonely eyes and very big smiles. They watch as if a dazed and bloody girl is stepping from a car wreck to live a last couple lucid moments. It’s a stoic high point in their manners to interact with her straight-faced, refraining from shock or disgust.

  “And what ah your interests, Elise?”

  “Um, I don’t know. Basketball?”

  What did Binkie mean by saying they wanted something good for us, when she and Jamey talked on the phone? Do they see he loves me? Can they tell we’re good for each other?

  She keeps smiling, because she forgets to smile when she’s nervous, and then people think she’s a cunt. Elise picks at the truffled scallops and spinach soufflé. Jamey shrugs at her; they’re both just waiting.

  The maid who greeted them now bends stiffly to Elise, offering almond cake.

  Elise picks up the flat shovel of a knife, slides a slice onto her plate.

  “What happened to your eye?” she asks, gesturing at the patch.

  A tsunami of silence crashes over the table.

  The maid straightens her back, and says, in monotone: “An operation.”

  And moves to the next guest.

  But a black hole in the night has been rent, and finger bowls and cigarette packs and pearls risk being swallowed into the void.

  They retire to the den, and dogs wing the fireplace like beastly angels.

  Everyone is served sherry on a silver tray, and Elise takes one sip of the sour cough syrup and tries not to spit it out.

  Mr. Graham Smythe arrives, like a spontaneous friend, even though he’s the family lawyer.

  “Ah! Graham, you know my grandson James Hyde,” says Bats.

  “Of course,” says Graham, beaming.

  Hands are shaken.

  “And this is his friend Elise Perez.”

  “Elise, pleasure,” he says, offering his big white hand.

  “I’ll leave you all to it!” Bats says, and does just that.

  Elise and Jamey look at each other as Graham takes papers from his briefcase. Jamey is not the first Hyde to be handled—although the indiscretions usually take place on private and massive playgrounds and are easier to navigate.

  Marital infidelity, drug treatment in the guise of a month-long African safari, or curing someone’s homosexuality condition, Binkie and Bats conquer all.

  “Where shall we begin?” he asks them.

  “I guess I don’t know,” Jamey says in a very careful and even tone.

  “Ah!” he says. “I take it Bats hasn’t explained what he wants us to discuss.”

  Jamey looks at Graham as if daring him to continue. “He hasn’t, no.”

  Graham smiles, wrinkling the corners of his yellowing eyes. “This, I think, could be a solution for the whole family.”

  A maid arrives with Graham’s drink diapered in a napkin. Graham twinkles his eyes at her too, and, after sipping from the crystal glass, earnestly explains. “It’s a little agreement that spells things out clear as day.”

  “It’s a prenup,” Jamey says darkly.

  “It’s much like a prenuptial agreement, yes, and this one”—he clears his throat—“covers cohabitating, as well as being with child.”

  Elise looks to Jamey; she’s embarrassed by whatever is happening. “A pre-what?” she asks.

  Jamey smiles for a minute, sickened, then shakes his head. “I’m not even going to stoop to argue,” he says in a bitter voice. “Game over.”

  He takes her hand and gets up.

  In the main foyer, Jamey yells: “We’re leaving!”

  Binkie flutters in from wherever she was waiting. “James, stay,” she says soothingly.

  Elise surprises herself by not being able to meet the woman’s eyes.

  Jamey politely says: “Can you please tell me where our coats are.”

  Bats glides into the foyer. “Let’s have another drink.”

  Jamey opens rooms and closets. “We’re going out in the cold without our coats unless you tell me where to find them.”

  A maid looks on—anxious, paralyzed—until Binkie nods at her and she fetches their coats.

  Outside, Elise realizes she has the fucking orchid in her hand. She doesn’t want it—but it’s a living, breathing, blameless thing. It shouldn’t be left on the street.

  They get in a cab.

  “God, I’m sorry, Elise,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “They’re not going to stop, apparently. The whole family—is rabid,” Jamey says.

  “No, I get it now,” Elise agrees.

  Jamey thinks she means she finally sees through his family’s bullshit. But that’s not it. She sees through his.

  “You can say I told you so,” he says.

  “Nah,” she says, looking out the window.

  The flower nods over potholes and bumps.

  “What’s that you got there?” asks the cabbie with curious eyes.

  “An orchid,” says Jamey.

  The cabbie looks like they’re trying to pull one over. “That ain’t real!”

  “It is too,” Elise says sullenly, and looks away.

  “Wait a minute, why you mad? What’d you do to her, buddy?”

  “Long story,” says Jamey.

  “You should say you’re sorry,” he warns Jamey via the rearview. “Even if it ain’t your fault. Trust me, I been married twenty-one years.”

  “I am sorry,” Jamey says.

  “He is sorry,” Elise corroborates to the cabbie. “That’s not the point.”

  She holds it together until he leaves for work the next morning. Alone, she makes coffee like an automaton. Why didn’t she tell them to screw themselves! Because that would confirm everything they think. They’re not about to be defeated in a parking-lot cock fight—They’ve rigged it so they can hang shit over your head while looking innocent, and you end up looking like the lunatic, the aggressor, the problem.

  She sucks on her cigarette at the kitchen window, dirty sunshine streaming onto her bare feet as she contemplates the bottom line.

  Why can’t he stand up to his goddamn family for real?

  She packs a bag. Her body is light like she can float out of this trouble. She takes the two hundred dollars she stashed in a menthols pack the way her mom always hoarded a twenty in a tampon box, or a ten in the crib.

  Holding Buck’s face, she rubs her forehead on his.

  “You know what’s up,” she murmurs.

  He freezes as she opens the door to leave.

  When she closes the door, she stands a minute on the landing because she feels Buck waiting on the other side, can sense the heat of him two feet away from her. He never panics, knowing good behavior is his best chance, but she can hear a low, quiet whine. She can’t bear to listen.

  She heads to the St. James Hotel, bag slung over shoulder, chewing gum, aviator glasses reflecting New York City, hands shaking. She shacked up
at this motel once with a guy who’d just run from home and still had money from pawning his stepdad’s power tools.

  The candy-pink neon sign is comfortably familiar.

  This is where she’ll start.

  In the room, she sits against the headboard, playing with a nicked switchblade she’s had since she turned sixteen.

  Why does it have to be so hard? Elise remembers sitting with her mom’s friends while they watched game shows and smoked, snow coming down. To them, men are enemies. The more you want a man, the harder you lie and fight.

  These women, from teenhood on, had the guys’ babies, mailed pictures and letters to prisons, battled girls in his ladder of lovers.

  “Don’t let them get comfortable. Make sure they see you touchin’ another man’s shoulder, you know? Shit, even if you get a smack. Keeps the blood up.”

  “I wear them little shorts and vacuum when he’s watching TV with his crew, and I bend down, girl. He doesn’t like that, me showing it off, but it fires him up. Later that night, he comes to me, you know what I’m saying?”

  Elise looks onto the warzone of the West Side, onto tarpaper roofs and bodies splayed on the sidewalk and rusting cellar doors and a curbside mountain-scape of garbage bags.

  If they were here, the women from her hood—the girls, cousins, aunts—they’d circle her, gesturing like their fingernails are wet, leading with the chin, showing support. It’s a riptide—she could drown in their affection and good-intentioned fury. This is when it hurts to be gone, but she can’t, she cannot go back to them.

  When he gets home, there are Elise’s keys, with the cobalt rabbit foot, on the kitchen counter.

  No note.

  He envisions an animal blithely gnawing off its limb to escape a trap.

  How dare she? How could she…

  Come evening, she buys a hot dog and a Coke on the corner, and sits on the Alice-in-Wonderland-blue bed. A roach watches from the corner of the room, antennae waving.

  She’s come here to imagine life without him. He’s everything now. He is her life.

  Picture him gone. She’s not being sincere in imagining separation. It’s like running her finger through the candle flame—it should hurt but doesn’t.

  Come on. Feel it.

  There, that’s it!

  Everything diminished to ordinary proportions—a spiritual reality that can kill a person fucking dead. The world shrinks, loses inner light, becomes a gray and hard site. I just don’t want to go there.

  The TV is stricken with lines but she watches it anyway, her big feet in athletic socks crossed on the bed.

  Gorbachev says Chernobyl shows the sinister force of nuclear energy. United States calls it premature to draw conclusions about Syrian complicity in recent terrorism. Haitians are destroying voodoo temples and killing priests and priestesses. A pornography panel has called for a reversal in the nation’s law enforcement and prosecution of distributors. A whale who charmed people as she swam off the Connecticut coast for fourteen months has been found shot to death.

  Elise stubs out her cigarette, turns sideways on the bed, and spends the night with eyes open. Around seven a.m., when light starts fingering the curtains, she falls into dreamless sleep.

  Jamey walks the East Village with Buck, past the open jaws of bars, past cats licking a tuna can, past the guy with a ghetto-blaster on a stoop. He looks into hallways, yearning for a fight—his bearing makes everyone uncomfortable, as if Baryshnikov is loitering in the streets.

  “Can I help you, boy?” spits one guy in a bell hat.

  “Looking for my girlfriend,” Jamey says.

  Buck growls at another man who shuffles too close.

  At a Third Avenue deli, Jamey buys a cheese sandwich and a root beer. He eats the sandwich, pops the soda, and drinks the whole thing. He burps, staring into pool halls and church foyers and burger joints. Jamey sizzles through the environment like acid.

  He’s brain-dead at work, hair curling over one eye, pale as an opium addict.

  “Did someone party like a rock star?” Clark asks coyly.

  Jamey languishes in the apartment, with no idea how to reach her mother. No friends’ numbers—he’s not sure there are friends. Robbie’s in Miami or some other fantastical paradise.

  She’s an orphan and he liked that until now. She was dependent on him and without a jury of family and friends.

  This fall day is flat. No forgiveness to the afternoon, just straight particles of air. Buck watches Jamey from where he can also see the door if his lady returns. There’s a measure of blame in the dog’s eyes.

  Jamey imagines the fuzz on her braids, the way she hides her smile when he comes home from work, her standing in a man’s wife-beater (that barely covers her pussy) in the morning light and watering the plants, her pigeon-foot strut down the sidewalk as she tells a long story with hands splayed.

  He’s been sitting here for an hour, fully clothed in the empty bathtub, smoking menthols from a pack she left behind, and ashing in the drain, bare heels on the rim. His hair is greasy and his dimple acts up when he grinds his teeth.

  He thinks this whole thing looks like a prank.

  It always struck him as suspicious—how she showed up, the girl next door, and kept after him until he fell in love, this choosing between her and his family—it’s too biblical, too tragic, too concise a conundrum for a life as amoral as his.

  He’s never had to be moral. He falls into one of those crevices: a certain kid in a certain society in a certain generation where no decisions remain because his ancestors have finished every single thing within reach.

  While tapping ash into the drain, he feels a revelation like adrenaline: If everything is already done, maybe I’m here to undo things.

  He pictures himself on a pyramid, lugging off its top stone, and sending it to the ground, where it bounces silently. He takes a last drag and crushes the butt on the worn porcelain between his thighs.

  She smokes out the window. The night drips and pops with prostitutes, drug dealers and addicts, runaways, drifters. Her fourth-floor room is too high to hear anything but the shrillest hooker-to-hooker “Girl!” and car horns held for psychotic lengths of time.

  She does jumping jacks to get her blood flowing.

  She smokes on the bed, her consciousness a kingdom where many things take place but nothing wins or loses. Growing up in a hood whose one playground had one working swing, whose candy stores sold more heroin than candy, whose public library was a carcass of a building, she knows how to amuse herself.

  After a while, she ventures out, spends seventy-five cents on a Wonder Bread loaf, feeds pigeons from a church stoop. Their feet are red like gum that’s been chewed.

  “I’m gonna pay for another night,” she says to the front desk. “Four-oh-Four.”

  The clerk takes her money without saying anything.

  A man whose flattop is bleached yellow leans against the lobby wall and sizes her up. Elise imperceptibly shakes her head no. He looks away.

  The room is very lonely, but she doesn’t feel lonely. She feels the presence of her childhood, but doesn’t reminisce on things like they were completed incidents. The past is layers of cake with cream in between, and she can bite through it on one fork; it’s a deck of playing cards being shuffled and shuffled and shuffled; it’s what she sees when she spins and spins, light streaking her mind with white and ghost-pink and nuclear-blue. It’s poodles coughing, rough kisses from her mother, blood in the bathroom sink, policemen knocking in the night, flowers from the supermarket, funerals in damp churches, melted popsicles—all of it is still happening, it’s alive and recurring. Her memory works like a beat.

  “Buck. Where is she?” Jamey asks, half expecting an answer.

  He’s lying on the bed, looking at a Polaroid from a Jones Beach afternoon. She’s wearing a string bikini and black sneakers, holding up her hands as if to stop the hours, laughing, aviators reflecting him.

  Jamey limps to work. Clark sends him home before
lunch.

  “Whatever you have, child, I do not want it, thank you very much,” Clark says from a safe distance, and shoos Jamey out of the office.

  Clark can taste heartbreak like a rotten egg.

  In his building’s hall, Jamey hears the phone, sprints upstairs.

  He’s jamming the key into the lock when the phone stops. He storms into the apartment, and Buck hides in the bedroom.

  Jamey sinks onto the couch.

  The phone rings again. “Elise?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus fucking lord,” he says.

  They’ve grown up years in a matter of days—they know it when they hear each other.

  “I had to think,” she explains.

  “Why did you leave to think when you could have stayed and talked?”

  Silence for a moment. “So let’s talk.”

  “Where are you?” he says impatiently.

  “St. James Hotel.”

  His taxi gets stuck in traffic around Forty-Second Street, among sandwich-board evangelists, under beaded-light LIVE SHOW signs, so he pays the guy and jumps out.

  He enters the lobby in a way that makes the clerk sit up.

  “Four-oh-Four,” Jamey tells him without stopping.

  He flies up the staircase like a cat.

  “That was fast,” she says as she opens the door.

  She’s sullen and unreadable. Shoulders and boys’ hips cocked in opposition.

  He walks by without touching her.

  “Say whatever you need to say,” he says.

  “Fucking calm down first!”

  “I’m pissed. You left without leaving a note.” He’s sitting with legs crossed, as if meeting with businessmen in a parlor somewhere. His face is calm, the broad mask trained to be flat, while she can see the red in his eyes.

  “Jamey,” she soothes.

  “Just tell me.”

  Elise looks at the ceiling.

  “Speak,” he says loudly.

  “Why do they have such a hold on you?”

  Expressionless. “My family?”

  “If you can call them that.”

  “They’ve given me everything, Elise,” he says like he’s breaking horrific news as gently as possible.