The landlady fervently waves her in, then pulls Elise onto the couch to watch a PBS special with her. The show is beautiful, hallucinatory. Elise stares at orange and turquoise saris, palaces so massive and ornate they seem imaginary, dark men with white mustaches walking barefoot through mist and woods, children with gleaming exquisite ways of staring at the camera, paint on their forehead.
“Mother India,” the narrator intones. “The cradle of civili-za-tion. The only place where history has not been forgotten.”
When Jamey asks later about her afternoon, Elise says it was random, and awesome.
Elise and Jamey walk up Second Avenue. It’s brisk, the wind reddening everyone’s cheeks and causing people to look down while they walk, and hold hands, or wrap arms around shoulders. Jamey likes the rude and undiscerning weather today.
Approaching the market on the corner, whose shelves are crooked and whose floor is covered in roach traps and rat shit, Jamey asks her to wait while he goes in for milk and cereal, he’ll make it fast.
An automated horse is stock-still on its metal stand, and Elise checks her fur-coat pockets for coins. She pops in a quarter, and sits while it moves in a suggestive way. Her legs are too long, her shins almost touch the ground.
The pale horse gleams against the dark sidewalk.
Jamey comes out with no paper bags. Just a crazy look.
“What’s up?” Elise asks, worried.
The horse has stopped.
Jamey moves toward her.
He gets down on one knee, takes a gumball-machine ring out of his pocket. Its chip of glass shines.
“Elise,” he says. “Will you marry me?”
She can hardly look at him, overwhelmed with emotion like a kid who has to hide her face in her mother’s skirt. But there’s nowhere to go.
And this drab avenue, with its somewhat hostile breeze ruffling litter and sending plastic bags into the sky, this ordinary afternoon, is suddenly alive with candy hearts.
“Will you?” he says.
The dark traffic of possible answers moves in his eyes.
“Yes,” her voice cracks. “Yes….”
She jumps onto him, almost knocking him over, and they stand up, she’s clinching her legs around his waist, and they stagger, laughing, and she howls at the sky, not giving a fuck who’s watching them. Elise thinks she’s going to have a heart attack, she can barely breathe. Eventually she falls off, and they kiss again, and again. She holds out her giant hand like a starfish and they both stare at her ring.
NOVEMBER 1986
November is laden with parties and feasts and business in New York City. The cold streets make everyone feel alive, the cold plush and rich now, as opposed to March when the cold is cold and makes the city feel hard up.
Every day, Elise passes the cherry-red neon sign reading PSYCHIC next to a gold hand painted on the glass. She finally peeks in.
“Don’t be shy,” beckons the woman sitting at a silk-draped table. “I’m Zelda.” The woman holds out fishnet-gloved hands. She’s manly, with a bulbous nose and blond wig, but her eyes are tired in such an antique and drastic way, she must have the magic.
“Elise,” she says, swiping off her knit hat and stuffing it in her pocket. “I got a question about…about timing.”
“Sit down, honey.”
Zelda and Elise hold hands and shut their eyes.
Sandalwood incense burns in thunderclouds of sickly sweet smoke, and a child complains beyond the beaded curtain, and a soft female voice answers in another language.
Zelda’s black-lined eyes press closed. “You’re straightforward. You don’t lie. You tell it like it is.”
Silence as she reads the hand-holding.
“You love. You’re a lover. Unafraid.”
A cat purrs against Elise’s leg.
Zelda’s brow crumples. “You need to do it soon, whatever it is. I feel urgency in your stars.”
Zelda shakes Elise’s hands so she opens her eyes too.
“Something’s coming. Do the deed.”
Elise hands Zelda a twenty as the fortune-teller lights a clove cigarette and snaps a can of Tab open. “I like your jacket,” she says as Elise zips up her white fur to leave.
Elise tries on white dresses at Gimbels. The store connects to the Herald Square subway station, so she used to shoplift there. Everyone did—it was so easy to get away. Back then, she watched women browsing, and wanted to walk out one day with her own brown Gimbels bag.
A saleswoman approaches, head tilted like it’s a medical condition.
“You know that there’s a summertime dress, right?” the woman says in a Southern accent, with smiley antagonism.
“Oh. No, I didn’t.”
“That’s why it’s on sale, honey,” she says through nicotine-striated teeth. “What are you looking for?”
“A wedding dress,” Elise says. “But not for a wedding.”
“I’m not following, sugar.”
“We’re going to the courthouse,” Elise says.
“Uh-huh.”
Elise then looks at the lady, pulling her braids insecurely.
“Baby! You’re not gonna cry, are you?”
“I just want to look like a bride.”
“Well, praise the lord! Let me find you something, honey,” the woman snaps her gum. “And I’m Cheryl-Lou, got that? What’s your date?”
“November nineteenth.”
“So soon! We’re gonna try wool suits, honey. Let’s do Audrey-Hepburn-daytime-wedding, mmkay? Real class. Grace Kelly at a royal luncheon.”
She hangs garments around the changing room, whose carpet teems with silverfish, as if serving a queen.
Elise finally likes a suit with pearl buttons. The shoulders stand up, and the pencil skirt tapers.
“That. Is. Divine,” says Cheryl-Lou, manically destroying her gum with her tongue and teeth.
“Yeah?”
“Hold on,” the woman says, putting up one finger. “Shoes.”
She brings back Fendi pumps. “Try these.”
“How much are they though?” Elise asks.
“They’re eighty percent off, girl! That’s because of these here marks,” she says, pointing to damage. “Who’s the lucky man?”
“His name is Jamey.”
“What’s he like,” she singsongs.
“He’s—I can’t explain him.”
“You don’t have to. I can tell by the way you say his name.”
Cheryl-Lou arranges Elise’s hair, and they both look into the mirror.
“Beautiful,” the saleswoman says quietly.
Elise looks at the reflection, worried. “Really?”
Cheryl-Lou is mad. “Yes, really. Are you scared or something?”
Elise holds the woman’s eyes in the looking glass and shrugs.
Cheryl-Lou shakes her head vehemently. “Life’s too short, sweetie, to think twice.”
“I know this is what I want.”
“Then what’s the trouble, little lady?”
That’s a good question, Elise thinks.
Standing in line to pay, she thinks about being sixteen and trying to make up for leaving her mom high and dry, doing penance one baby’s bath at a time, cleaning up beer bottles and ashtrays every Sunday morning, handing over a hundred dollars a week from her Payless job, fifty from the Burger King night shift, a kiss on the cheek, coming through on a promise made, patience.
Every time she walked the block back then, sweating in the July sun, or using an umbrella in the soaking rain, picking up greasy food in white bags, the grit of the sidewalk sticking to her wet legs—she would always walk slowly on the way home, and she would know that not everyone was walking with intention the same way she was.
Outside Gimbels, Elise stops to watch a crew breakdance in the drab midtown nowhere land. The star is skinny, shirtless, sweating in the cold. He smiles as he pops and locks, spins on the folded cardboard, his boys moving on the sidelines, calling out, uh-huh-ing when he backflips.
She wolf-whistles, drops a dollar in the hat, watching, suddenly grinning.
Jamey puts a quarter into the corner pay phone, and dials the lobby number he knows by heart. He watches girls draw in chalk on the sidewalk while it rings.
Teddy the doorman sounds wary when he hears Jamey’s voice. “What is it, little fella?”
“Teddy—I want to ask you a big favor.”
“Uh-oh,” he says, and means it.
“Can you be a witness at my marriage? At the courthouse this Saturday?”
Jamey cradles the phone to his ear.
Teddy quietly laughs. “Yes, son. I can and will. My oh my. Wait till I tell Claudia.”
“Will she please come? Lunch is on us—we’ll drink Champagne,” Jamey says, warmed and moved, his voice thickened. But then he laughs. “You think it’s strange I’m asking.”
“I do indeed. And I’m not even gonna inquire about why you having a courthouse wedding, son.” Teddy laughs again. “I’m just gonna show up.”
“You’ll be happy for me.”
“Very good,” he says eventually, with tenderness, or concern.
Before daybreak, Jamey lies in that half-sleep state when the heart just goes feral, attacks the brain, shits in it, scratches the backs of his eyeballs, howling and frothing. Then he wakes, and can’t recall a single dream, and there might not have been any dreams.
He’s going to ruin her if he marries her.
You’re confused and irrational, he tells himself sternly, just get up and go forth.
He takes a shower, makes coffee, forcing one thing after another.
In the shadowy bed, Elise looks up, bleary-eyed, to accept the mug. “Yo, I didn’t sleep at all,” she claims angrily, like a child, even though she did.
He cups her chin for a kiss. “Good morning.”
She pulls away to light a cigarette. “What’s good about it?” she jokes.
Her heart is like a bird caught in a house—she can’t even catch the poor thing to calm it down and set it free.
They walk hand in hand down the street, a gangly girl in white with cornrows and a red mouth, and him in a suit, hair slicked like an Irish gangster.
The day’s so cold it burns throats, and the air irradiates bodies, cell by cell. The leaves are done, so the city is light and pigeons, and windows reflecting sun.
They wait in line at the courthouse. Gretchen and Jacek arrive, and hand Elise a bouquet of violets. Teddy and Claudia huff up the stairs in elegant coats, with a gold-wrapped present.
Teddy takes Elise’s hand. “Very nice to meet you,” Teddy says.
The line of couples winds down the street, waiting to pass through the secretary’s X-ray vision—this old gal in Lucite spectacles makes private bets on who will last, and has been doing so for years.
In the City Clerk’s Office, the judge—a man with broad Nigerian cheekbones and an aura of goodwill—reads vows.
“James Balthazar Hyde, do you take Elise Dawn Perez to be your wife?”
“I do.”
“Elise Dawn Perez, do you take James Balthazar Hyde to be your husband?”
“I do.”
Gretchen uses their Polaroid to take a loud picture of the couple kissing.
At Chanterelle, they clap when the waiter pops the Champagne. Everyone glows from butterscotch shadows reflected by the walls and sun leaking in the ruched curtains.
Jacek toasts with e.e. cummings:
…love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky
Teddy pushes his chair back, crosses his arms. “I thought I would mention today something from your childhood, Jamey. Like how you’d ride your tricycle in circles in the lobby. Or how you always left your encyclopedia on my desk. Or your obsession that year with butterflies.”
Jamey smiles at the crumb-strewn tabletop, embarrassed, and Elise curls his black hair around his ear, looking at him.
“Good lord, butterflies this, butterflies that,” Teddy complains.
“I know,” Jamey admits.
“But I’d rather talk about today then yesterday,” Teddy says. “I don’t know if I ever saw you happy like this before.”
Jamey thanks him, then turns to Elise, chin down, eyes tilted up to hers. “Yeah—this is one of those things people say”—he bites his lip—“but I didn’t know I could—love someone like I love you.”
Then she sobs, awkwardly raising her flute, its rim stained with red gloss, and Gretchen and Claudia coo and soothe, feed her tissues.
“Why you crying, baby?” asks Claudia.
“I don’t know!” she manages to blubber.
She hiccups through lunch, and they all laugh at each tiny yeep.
“Champagne helps,” Jacek says, pouring.
“It makes it worse!” Claudia chides, laughing.
Walking alone now through the pale-gold afternoon, Jamey takes Elise’s hand and she takes it back.
“What is it?” Jamey asks.
Her Fendi heels drag the cement, shoulders low, the way a teenage boy walks.
“We’re married,” he says.
They pass a pet store, where sickly kittens wrestle in sawdust. An apothecary, with glass jars of herbs and roots, the labels written in script.
“Till death do us part,” he says.
They pass a school, its halls dark and empty.
“It just happened so fast. And now it’s over,” she complains, her wires short-circuiting, blinking, and burning up.
“It’s only beginning!”
“And nobody in our family saw it,” she pouts.
“But we agreed we’d just have friends?”
They march a few more blocks, the winter sun caulking the seams and gaps with black light, until she halts—she lost her flowers!
“We’ll find them,” Jamey says.
“We’re not going to find them!” she bawls.
Passersby glare at Jamey consoling her.
The red church door across the street catches his eye. Maybe a little ritual will help, he thinks, panicking.
They walk into the silent space—a bank of candles burns against one wall. Elise cranes her neck to look at the ceiling—robed figures, luminescent lilies, shepherds leaning on a cane.
“Okay, wait here,” he whispers, and seats her in the pew.
Jamey finds a priest reading in an alcove. Embroidered tassels hang over his chest, and his chin is red.
“Father,” Jamey says quietly. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”
“Not at all, son,” the man says, lowering eyeglasses, making it clear that Jamey is interrupting.
“My wife is sitting in the pews. We just got married, and she has some questions.”
“Ah. How long have you been married?”
Jamey looks at his watch. “Two and a half hours, Father.”
The priest opens his eyes like an owl.
They find Elise, kicking one leg, biting her nail. The priest expects drama.
“I understand you two are newlyweds,” the priest says.
“Can you, like, make it official?” Elise asks.
The priest looks like they’re swindling him. “Official? I don’t know of anything fitting your request, young lady, besides an actual ceremony—”
“Could you—just bless us?” Jamey suggests.
“Well, I—” the priest protests.
“Please?” Jamey pulls out his dimple.
“I suppose I could devise something—”
“If you would. As a man of God. As a spiritual leader,” Jamey says desperately and condescendingly.
“Well, then. A blessing for your marriage.”
The man hums incantations, lights a candle, hold their hands. Elise’s blood pressure slowly—slowly—comes down a little.
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They walk into the cold night.
“You feel better?” Jamey asks hopefully, and she nods, smiles for him.
They hold hands.
As Jamey talks, she pretends to agree, but she can’t hear him. She sees their vague reflections moving from some dirty apartment lobby doors to the amber mirrors and metal shutters of storefronts, and she knows she loves him almost too much to bear.
At home, they take off coats and move around, flaunting a new identity in this familiar context.
“Would you like a drink, Mrs. Hyde?”
They open wine, look out the window, lock the door, stand up and sit down, animating an hour or two.
They meant to have dinner out, but suddenly they lie down. It’s like nothing they ever felt. It comes from someplace deeper than existed yesterday or the day before. They lie on their sides, looking at each other, Jamey puts his thumb on her mouth, and she flicks her tongue. Her eyes are pained.
They wake up starving at three a.m. and cook eggs, naked, and toast each other with orange juice.
“I’m nothing without you,” he says plainly, holding up his glass of Tropicana.
“And I’m nothing without you,” she answers, and they clink.
As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.
Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what’s left to smoke.
The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.
Elise and Jamey look through the classifieds, circling jobs with a felt-tip pen, and drawing rays of sunshine around their favorites.
He asks her to choose where they go for their honeymoon. The only place she knows is Mount Airy Lodge, from its commercials of doe-eyed born-to-party couples in bikinis or parkas.
Elise and Jamey spend time in the heart-shaped bed, and in their very own pool—a cup of chlorinated water, casting spooky blue shadows. They screw the living daylights out of the room, hooked on the sweet pornography of the place. Elise bought a white garter belt and seamed stockings for the weekend. But the most interesting thing happens outside.
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