White Fur

by Jardine Libaire

  Elise shrugs. “So give it back.”

  It takes him a while but he finally grins, considering this. Then he laughs, that golden, filthy laugh. It fractures his skepticism—yolk runs from the cracked shell.

  “What?” she says.

  “That’s such a good idea.”

  Her eyes—outlined in black—open. “Really?”

  “Come here.” He buries his head in her waist.

  They rock, and laugh.

  “Elise, Elise…” He sighs.

  “Jamey, Jamey,” she says, to be funny.

  “We’re fucked,” he says, muffled.

  She kisses his head.

  “That was way too simple,” she says, and they laugh more.

  “Goodbye, fortune,” he says, and lets it go like a balloon zigzagging up to the sun.

  OCTOBER 1986

  Sunshine sifts through white oaks and mulberries on Seventh Street, and someone in the building sings scales. Two guys in leather trench coats sit on the stoop across the way, sharing a pint of Gallo in a bag. Upstairs, Elise folds his laundry while he cooks her eggs for lunch.

  “I could literally divorce my family—I’ve heard of people doing that,” he tells her, closing up an omelet.

  Albert Peterson, a fellow Buckley mate, got himself emancipated at fifteen, and his SoHo loft was promptly overrun with street kids and parasites. Albert separated from his parents but not from his trust fund, and the ants found the sugar cube.

  “I think Albert went at it backwards,” Jamey says. “No need for divorce if you just get rid of the capital.”

  He and Elise scour the Yellow Pages as they eat.

  They come upon Rodion Slavin Flits, Esq., at 199 Neptune Avenue in Brighton Beach. Serving Brooklyn since 1978. A Personal & Empathetic Friend. Specializing in Wills, Family Law & Probate. Mainly they like his name.

  “What’s ‘empathetic’?” Elise squints.

  “He cares about us.”

  That weekend they get a cold front. One evening, they’re walking Buck on Third Avenue and see a sweatshirt on a fence, white with Jordache in gold letters, the stallion in mid-gallop. Elise holds it up to her shoulders.

  “I don’t want to know where that thing’s been,” Jamey says, watching her in the lamplight.

  “You have this whole plan to be broke, and you can’t handle a sweatshirt on a fence?” she tells him.

  At Goodwill, she buys him a red wool sweater (which she washes in the kitchen sink and dries on the radiator), and Isotoner gloves. She finds a wok on the curb. She takes scissors to the coupon section of the paper.

  She thinks about Lorena, a diabetic Puerto Rican lady who wore her white hair in a bandanna—her Turnbull apartment spun and glittered with junk. Lorena gardened in the summer on her “patio,” a tiny enclave where she grew herbs and vegetables, watering them from her wheelchair. During August, she’d let Elise pick cherry tomatoes off the plant. Elise can still remember the heat of the fruit as she bit into it. The little seeds were orange tinged with green, the liquid a viscous blob.

  “Su-per-ior to store-bought,” Lorena said in an imposing voice. “You best believe that.”

  Tuesday morning is one torrential rain, the street gutters carrying beer cans and dead leaves into drains. Right before they leave the apartment, it stops.

  The sky is now deafeningly silent.

  On the subway, he reads the newspaper while she sits forward, elbows on knees, and he rubs her back with one hand. It’s a long way to where they’re going. The train finally rattles up from the tunnels and into the cityscape. Elise watches graveyards and junk lots and scorched buildings fly by.

  “What stop is it again?” Jamey says.

  “Ocean Parkway. It’s next.”

  They get off to a cheap block. In the barbershop window, neon shears glow. Every house has a different look: new brick or red siding or butterscotch-yellow cement. But this world is tidy. The gates all lock and open, the mailboxes aren’t crooked, the beach chairs in each fenced-in sidewalk front yard are in good shape.

  “Here it is,” Elise says, biting her thumb.

  A damp American flag hangs from the peaked porch roof. The sign by the metal screen door says: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

  Jamey rings the bell.

  A woman opens the door, offers her hand. “I’m Marianne, Rodie’s wife, we talked on the phone, how you doing.”

  Her shirt is zebra-print, and a blond pile of ringlets is bobby-pinned on her head. She has lavender eyes and marionette lines around her smile.

  Jamey almost trips, the carpet is so thick.

  “You two want coffee? Something stronger? Get the rain out of your bones?”

  “Mmmh, coffee,” Elise says.

  Turquoise-and-gold-wallpaper hallway, past a dining table stacked with mail, to a tiny office, where Rodion, white-haired, in a velvet jacket, plays a wobbly Haydn record on a turntable. The cave is tangy with European cologne.

  “Good afternoon.” He shakes hands, his Brooklyn accent etched with Russian.

  When they sit, he lights a brown cigarette.

  “Well,” he says. “What does this regard?”

  Jamey and Elise look at each other.

  “My inheritance—”

  “You’re competing with stepsiblings,” Rodion suggests.

  “No.”

  “You’re worried about the tax.”

  “Completely the opposite.”

  “There is no opposite,” Rodion says, amused. “You’re not excited by taxes.”

  “I don’t want the inheritance.” Jamey looks apologetically at Rodion, because he knows this is a silly thing he’s brought to the man’s doorstep.

  Rodie grins, shakes his head at the strangely decent boy sitting in his office, while Marianne delivers dark coffee in bone-china cups. She points to a sugar bowl and creamer, and mouths: sugar and cream, then winks and leaves.

  “If whatever incited this decision happened in the past week, we’re not going to discuss anything today,” Rodion says.

  “It started the day I was born.”

  “What did?”

  “They try to own him,” Elise jumps in belligerently. “They use his trusts against him and shit like that.”

  “Ah,” says Rodion, and then he offers cigarettes, and Elise takes one. He holds a gold lighter to it while he evaluates the couple.

  “It’s called a renunciation,” Rodion says. “Why don’t you give me a sense of where we stand.”

  Jamey tells Rodie his net worth. Then he watches Rodie consider that number with operatic drama.

  “Who are you, for chrissakes?” asks Rodie quietly.

  “James Balthazar Hyde, of Hyde, Moore & Kent. The problem child.”

  “James Balthazar Hyde,” Rodie says, sipping black coffee from the delicate cup.

  “Yes sir.”

  “I fear you’re being idealistic, or vindictive—neither of which are criminal actions—but I want us to consider your best interests here.”

  “I have.”

  Rodie shuffles papers, and nods his grand head. “What’s harmful in thinking about it some more, James?”

  “I’m wasting time.”

  “Why not take these millions and do good?”

  “When something is poisoned at the root, it won’t flower,” Jamey says.

  Rodion smooths his lapels, keeps nodding. Then he sighs: “I don’t feel right about this. But we can do it if you say so.”

  While Jamey and Rodion start the carbon-copy forms, talking in that low-voice litigious way, Elise smokes and watches. Whenever Jamey glances up at Rodie, he almost looks like he could kiss the lawyer—his mouth is so pure.

  As Rodion adds up numbers, Elise thinks: It is too bad it has to be all or nothing. She realizes her hands are sweaty, and her mind is racing with lost possibilities. She didn’t know she’d harbored a secret dream of buying her mother a house, but she knows it now, as the dream gets extinguished.

  “How do you feel about everything, Elise?”
Rodion asks, tapping a Waterman pen in his palm.

  She shrugs, tosses her braids back. “Got to do what you got to do.”

  Rodion stands up to stretch, and asks them to have lunch with the family.

  “I insist,” he says.

  They wander into the kitchen, where Marianne is cooking beef stroganoff, the window valance making a shadow of lace on her face.

  A girl, around five or six, is rolling tiny balls out of Play-Doh at the table. When she looks up, Jamey knows by the hanging mouth and shark teeth, plump cheeks, round eyes, that she has Down syndrome.

  “This is Bethany,” Rodion says with tenderness.

  “Hi sweetheart,” Elise says.

  Elise asks to help make Play-Doh balls, and Bethany grins wetly: “Yeah!”

  “Look at that, she’s good with children,” Marianne says. “How long you two been together, long time?”

  “Only eight months,” Jamey says. “It feels like longer.”

  But Elise is looking at the lustrous open request of Bethany’s eyes, the chubby dimpled hands that rub a tired face, the tiny bum plunked on the chair, feet kicking air as she works the assembly line of dirty yellow clay.

  Now Elise can’t block out a row of phantom kids’ eyes from another home, all beaming from one bed, reflecting a Bambi night-light plugged into the wall.

  Those kids wonder where Elise went, why she’s not there to kiss them good night, to tell them morning will get here soon. Elise used to stamp fear from their hearts. She told them You’re safe even though it wasn’t true. They knew the fear could come back, they would recognize it like a sleeping face knows the legs and wings of a roach crossing your cheek even before you wake up.

  Or worse, the fear would return as your brother’s friend, who invites you into your own mama’s room, because she’s at work, to show you something, and you get a cookie after, and he’ll kill you if you say a word.

  Yeah, sorry I couldn’t stick around, kids! Elise thinks. It’s been fun. Good luck with everything. Oh, the world will treat at least half of you like half a person at best, not worth any investment cause you’re already damaged and undereducated and emotionally weird, even though yeah, they can see something kind of great in you, but isn’t it just a losing battle, throwing good money after bad? Your environment is so fucked that your behavior gets more and more impossible, till society claims they can hardly use you for anything but its lowest tasks—an orderly at an old folks’ home, garbage-truck guy—and you’ll barely support yourself.

  BUT you could try this little piece of candy you put in a pipe, and you’ll be beamed into white light and heavenly love, which will in five minutes turn into a greater problem than you ever knew, so you’ll then have a new problem to solve, and you’ll solve it by doing things you never dreamed of doing. Good luck with that!

  Not sure in the meantime who’s gonna dress your little bodies, make a ghost costume or Magic-Marker a Batman mask onto your face for Halloween, guide your hand to spell your name ’cause you keep making the s backwards, change your pajamas if you wet the bed, tell you you’re special on your birthday, hold you after you had a nightmare and you can’t stop crying, put you on the bus your first day of school, teach you to catch snowflakes in your hand on the last day of winter….

  The kids in Bridgeport know her now as another person who just vanished—like their dad went upstate, and their sister hit the streets. So sorry! Hope you manage. I’m sure you’ll understand that I felt like there was no other way for me to leave than to leave completely, absolutely, to never fucking see your mischievous and hopeful eyes one more fucking time.

  It’s getting dark early as they stand in line. Coney Island Cyclone, here we come. They move through a labyrinth of fences, the late sun collecting like gasoline rainbows in garbage-can water and gutter puddles and bottle caps.

  “How you feel?” Elise asks.

  Jamey shrugs, tries to smile. “Liberated?”

  They’re first, they’re next. A carny wipes down a seat for them. Elise holds Jamey’s hand, presses it, for her comfort or his assurance.

  They sit in the cab. They get belted in, the clunk of the metal bar closing and locking, and then the silence, the emptiness of time and thought as the roller coaster is sent into movement.

  And then the glide and click, jewelry rattled and bones jangled. The face drawn open then closed. The stomach distended then crushed shut, exultation and nausea. Seeing and smelling the top of the sky, on a lonesome New York ride, not in each other’s arms but instead in the arms of the day.

  Amazing that such a rickety old machine can take them so high.

  Clark’s in a mood today. His morning bloody mary hasn’t helped his hangover. Now he’s just cockeyed. He’s bawling out anyone who gets in his way, cursing Gillian up and down for lukewarm coffee, and telling Mitford he’s dressed like a Mexican pool boy and should go home and change.

  Jamey tries to be invisible, the way he’s always done when the adults around him rant and rave. He’s the little boy pressing himself into the backseat of a swerving car.

  Jamey stares at his own hand, clutching a mug. It’s not a child’s hand.

  “I think I’ll go home too,” Jamey suddenly tells Clark.

  “Excuse me?” Clark says, mid–pain au chocolat, licking a flake of croissant from his oily finger.

  “I’m done at Sotheby’s for good, actually. But thank you for having me here this whole time.”

  “You’re…quitting?” Clark asks.

  “I just quit. Yes.”

  Clark stares at Jamey swaggering down the hall, jacket slung over shoulder while his other hand undoes the top buttons of his shirt.

  “Don’t come back then!” Clark feels venomous, and they both understand something greater happened than Jamey resigning from an auction house. Jamey has somehow spit in Clark’s eye. Clark wants nothing to do with him, sniffing treason like a bloodhound. He’s heard rumors anyway. Before Jamey’s even sealed into the elevator, Clark is whispering with anyone who will gather to his desk.

  Elise gets butterflies when Jamey tells her he left his job.

  “Really?” she asks. “ ’Bout time, I guess.”

  Swinging, he let go of one branch before grasping another.

  She also explored that in-between place, after leaving Bridgeport and before arriving at Robbie’s. Hitchhiking with sweatshirt hood up, she looked like a boy, then she pulled it back to say thank you once in the seat. Her eyes slid back and forth, blink-blink, as she devoured polluted Queen Anne’s lace along highways, Indian town names on green signs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, truck-stop counters with lemon meringue under Saran Wrap in a pie case. She panhandled in Syracuse, alone on the median, while cars passed in either direction. When you don’t have to be anywhere, you can figure out where to go.

  Now Jamey and Elise look at classifieds, draw hearts around listings. They hang in free fall from one life to the next. Jamey’s got a few grand left in his account so they just doodle and talk.

  Cocktail Waitress. Pharmacy Technician. Milk-truck Man. Limo Driver. Front Desk. Aquatics Coordinator at YMCA in Bensonhurst. Macy’s Merchandiser. Coffee-shop Counter Girl in Dyker Beach. Experienced Fish Cutter in Midwood.

  They hear a poetry reading by a tall man whose pale red hair falls over his face as he bends above his pages at the microphone.

  Later she play-pushes Jamey on the sidewalk: “I’ll die for your sins if you live for mine.”

  “What?” he says, pulling the knit cap over her eyes.

  “It was in the poem!” she says, moving the hat up. “Didn’t you listen?”

  They go watch After Hours by Scorsese, then see Breathless by Goddard. They eat cabbage soup at Odessa, watch the girls with massive teased hair, cat eyes, and sleeveless shirts as they laugh raucous and high with leather-vested boys, all picking fries off the plate in the center, dragging it through ketchup and slapping it on a tongue.

  Their days and nights are spent in cafés and bars, mov
ie theaters, parks, and they talk about the things people near them are talking about: AIDS, women’s rights, the welfare system. The topics jump from one group at a table, smoking and drinking beer, to another, like fleas from one dog to the next dog.

  It’s a chilly day, not raining but all the yellow and orange leaves are vaguely wet.

  Alex receives the first clues of Jamey’s renunciation as Rodion closes accounts and files motions.

  “Jamey,” his father growls on the phone.

  “Alex,” Jamey says in a low voice, trying to be calming, but he ends up imitating his dad’s voice.

  “What is the problem with you?” His dad sounds like Phillip Drummond.

  Jamey bites his lip. He thought he’d feel guilty when this moment arrived, but he feels great. He felt guilty before, knowing he’d never fulfill the contract of being a Hyde but getting paid anyway. “I just don’t want money that doesn’t belong to me—”

  “It’s family money.”

  Jamey pauses. “Robber-baron money—”

  “Oh, you kids love to throw that term around. Do you know what the Hyde Foundation gives every year?”

  “For tax deductions, you mean?”

  “I make jobs in this city—I create work for people who would be homeless.”

  Jamey shakes his head in amazement. “You do?”

  “Yes, I do,” Alex says, his voice hoarse. “We provide a better life for so many folks—”

  While Alex is blustering on, Jamey disconnects the wire from the wall, permanently, walking outside to leave the avocado-green telephone on the curb. He lets hatred mushroom-cloud in his head, after years and years of cold war with his pops.

  He stands and looks at the phone on the clammy cement. He gently kicks it over, the receiver clattering out of the handle, the coiled line stretching. He skips up the steps, whistling like a farm boy.

  One day, Elise enters the building and suddenly the landlord’s door opens. It’s Mrs. Gorowski in a lace-collared dress, eyes wide under her Dee Dee Ramone bowl cut. Meat is cooking, and this joins the smell of ginger, ancient secrets, amber, and old leather in their apartment.