As they eat gluey pancakes in the dining room, Elise stares out the window at the horses in gray snow, and Jamey asks if she wants to ride.
“I never did it before,” she says.
“Even better.”
Billy’s hair is shaved on the sides, long down the back, and he’s missing teeth, but he doesn’t seem jaded. Elise wonders if he’s done so many drugs he’s gone back to a child’s mind-set, or if he just never developed, and grifted his way through train hopping and circuses and stables with wonder and innocence untouched.
“Most horses feel fear, you understand?” Billy says. “But that don’t mean you should be afraid.”
“You’ll be good,” Jamey tells Elise.
Elise puts one sneaker in a stirrup and, with Billy’s help, throws her other leg over.
“Holy shit!” she says, breathless.
“There you go, easy now,” Billy says, his lower lip fat with tobacco.
The horse side-prances, then stays.
Its bristly flank is more than human. It exceeds life! The hairy and prickly hot flesh outdoing anything of this world she’s known so far. Giant muscles and heavy bones moving under her, between her, and with her. Elise bends to lay her beating heart against the horse’s back. So, this exists—this can happen.
“You’re a natural,” Jamey shouts as Billy leads them around the corral.
She’s never seen an eyeball bigger than her own. The globe is an obsidian jewel in the galactic head. It’s a girl—a mare, to use the language—and her hooves move in a pattern like bluegrass or jazz, nothing even-tempered, nothing expected.
“What do you think?” Jamey calls.
She just shakes her head. “Oh my God!” she eventually answers.
Jamey’s seen many girls on horses, mostly riders with complex styles and skills, and total authority. But with Elise, black sneakers in the stirrups, her face mottled with incredulity, Billy leading them slowly back to him, he sees how power can be shared to make a different kind of elegance—one more immediate, and less negotiated.
DECEMBER 1986
They’re about to be flat broke.
Sparkling winter afternoon. Elise jokes with construction workers down in Battery Park City, walking Buck, lured to this mammoth half-built structure. She asks to try the jackhammer, and they say no—but the boss is looking for runners inside.
“They like girls for that job,” says one guy, giving her the up and down.
Elise takes metal steps into the trailer office, where Tommy Bricks is smoking Lucky Strikes and paging through a Bon Appétit in his sweater turtleneck.
“Could we help you?”
“I’m looking for a job?”
Tommy looks at Salvatore, whose knees are spread because his belly hangs low, and Salvatore supposedly looks back, although smoky gold-rimmed glasses hide his eyes.
“What kine?” says Tommy.
“Runner?”
Tommy puts a hand on his glossed hair. “You got to spend the days walking around this site, showing perspective residents they future home. Last girl, she threw a hissy fit and she left.”
“She thought it was too cold,” Salvatore says, mimicking a girl whining. “She said she didn’t feel safe.”
“I’m not afraid of the cold.”
“You look tougher than her,” Tommy says after a moment.
Salvatore reaches out his cupped hand. “Wanna Tootsie Roll?”
“Sure.”
Tommy shows her around, shouting for the cage elevator that runs outside the skeletal building. All thirty floors are at a different stage of completion, the top still nothing but an idea—open to the wind, to the sky.
“The Realtors send clients down here. You get seven an hour to show them what the Realtor wants them to see. Dress nice and talk nice, but don’t wear shoes where you get a nail though the sole.”
He gives her rolled lavender plans to take home. Battery Park is like a space station being erected. Looking across the river, New Jersey’s pale jumble of factories and office buildings is just a gentle and easy sorrow, written in urban language, and far enough away to be sweet, to be precious.
The Statue of Liberty is being restored too. Her scaffolding looks like the halos doctors put on car-accident survivors.
Gulls occupy the sky like flies.
Jamey asks cabbies, guys behind the pizza counter, even Mr. Gorowski, about jobs.
No one trusts a rich boy looking for work, and they feel ridiculed by his questions.
“Nothing, huh?” Jamey says, gently disappointed, to the landlord.
Mr. Gorowski looks at his tenant a little longer, rubbing knobbed knuckles in his palm. “I do know a night job. My cousin Karl just left it is why.”
And that’s how Jamey ends up at the Iris Residences, with its pearl-gray awning and glass doors. In a few days, he’s hailing cabs in a charcoal suit and cap.
The lobby is a box of mirrors, an infinity room, where reflections make more reflections.
There’s a million teens on crutches, a million women with green beads, delivery guys with pimples and scooter helmets, men tilted forward like executives in cartoon strips.
And Jamey—in white gloves—shrinks from image to image.
The dreaminess of the night shift is constant, and objects float—keys and coffee cups and Chinese containers and tissues. Time seems free to do what it wants.
In the morning, on his way home, Jamey looks at the buckets on the street, asks the guy how much for the snapdragons—(a guy whose hands are casually scarred, the hands of an immigrant, standing in the cold for ten hours with a snotty nose and thin jacket). The man grins, speaks no English.
Elise smells the flowers before she puts them in water. “They’re real nice,” she says.
Sex is beautiful when they’re tired. When he works nights and she works days, and he gets home from the shift and she has yet to leave, they lie together for one hour. The hour is like an island in a river. He’s exhausted, and she just woke up. His body buzzes with work, and she sleepily rubs his back until she feels a new weight to his body, a solemnity.
He goes under the sheets—to her little heart, feels it harden, his chin wet in the otherworldly humidity of her reddish hair, her hands roaming his skull with no consciousness, they could be someone else’s hands—and she grinds against his tongue, everything dear and alive about her pinpointed in a pearl—that he’s licking, licking—she groans—he slows down—Oh come on, she says, stern, come on—he licks—he licks—
Sunburst ravensblood snowstorm rosepetals kittenfur shootingstars!
It’s a drug of stuff, glugging through her veins, gilding her smile now, the best smile, eyes closed—but his eyes are open—looking at this girl he knocked out, angel in a coma, she’s pale with pleasure….
Then she kisses him, and he puts his hand behind her head, gently sets his weight on her. They’re quieter than usual in this orphan hour, slower. Sometimes he falls right to sleep after, and snores as she pads around, getting dressed and drinking coffee in the new light.
It’s so cold and windy, people stride backward. A cop on a horse looks like he’ll be sucked into the evil frozen sun. Everyone should just stay inside, where the radiator clanks and shudders like a beast that wants to care and protect the only clumsy way it knows how.
Walking Buck, Elise grips Jamey’s arm so she doesn’t slide on the ice.
“We should go to my mother’s house one day,” she says casually.
“Really?”
“Maybe…for Christmas?” she says, as if she hasn’t been thinking about it.
“Let’s go. You know that I—”
“What?”
“I’ve always wanted to meet them. You just seemed…”
“Seemed what?”
“Reluctant.”
Elise lights a smoke, looks at him, waiting for him to go on.
“I felt,” Jamey says, “like you didn’t want to be judged.”
“Is that right?” she asks, b
lowing smoke out her nostrils.
For Jamey, Christmas is parties, driving from Greenwich or to Southampton, stress, fighting, caviar and Veuve Clicquot, black velvet, giant fir trees and eggnog, Labradors with red ribbons around their necks, tangerines in stockings, cigars, candles, Yule logs, carols. He could spend an hour looking at the ornaments, gently holding a blue-silver dove that is weightless. If he closes his eyes, it’s like he’s holding nothing. What are you doing thuh-r, son? asks Mr. Armistead in his cashmere turtleneck. Jamey is the one who creeps into the kitchen, asks the catering director where she gets her plum pudding. He happily spends an hour sitting in the library with the spinster aunts from Philadelphia, in monastic silence, avoiding the Mullworths’ daughter, who adjusts her silk plaid dress and flips her hair by the fire, stealing looks at him.
Elise and Jamey watch Buck drop hot turds in the dark afternoon.
This Christmas was looking pretty solitary, but now they have a plan.
“I don’t want to go empty-handed,” he says. “I do have about five hundred dollars left of the old money.”
Elise squints against a newspaper blowing down the street. “I was hoping we could, like, impress them,” she says bluntly.
“Sure,” Jamey says, trying not to seem surprised. “Something special for your mom?”
She shrugs. “Yeah.”
“I’m not necessarily suggesting it, but should we get something for your…dad?”
Cabs nose through walkers at the corner.
“Angel’s not my dad.”
“Your stepdad, sorry.”
They pass foyers with names scribbled on buzzers, an advent calendar of brass mailboxes. Stir-fried rice on the sidewalk that looks thrown up, undigested.
“He’s not my stepdad. He’s my mother’s boyfriend.”
“What about the kids?”
“That would be cool, get stuff for the kids.”
Buck loops his urine on a hydrant, and Jamey thinks it’s odd how she’s always been weird with him about presents, but suddenly she’s all about it.
“It’s a deal,” he says.
Elise puts her arm around his waist and leans her cheek on his chest while they walk, awkward and lovely.
On his way to work, he eats dinner at a Greek joint, his thighs spread on the stool and shoulders hunched over the newspaper that he reads at the counter while people bustle in and out. Eventually the “mother” of the place grabs his arm whenever he arrives, her eyes practically closed because she’s grinning madly, and leads him to his hallowed seat by the steam and clank of the open kitchen. She always sends the blondest, curviest girl to take his order like a madame pleasing a beloved client.
In the mirror box of the lobby, he learns the residents by name, and knows who needs what. He hands out a lot of shirts to young professionals. These flags of ambition, starched and strung on wires, shimmer in plastic. He likes holding the door. He likes hailing taxis. He likes helping old ladies over the brass threshold into the building. Not because he’s a good person, made for service. It’s the same pleasure a kid gets from playing with someone else’s toy when he has that exact toy at home.
Bessie Jameson, 12C, always gets flowers or a package hand-delivered from Bonwit Teller or chocolates, which she orders for herself. The front desk knows because Felix signs receipts and sees her name.
Rumor is she had a nice divorce. Bessie spends the days with a mud mask and Richard Simmons, and when she sashays from the elevator, all businesslike, she makes a noise as she pretends to wonder what’s inside the package. Her body pressed up and out, her face newly shiny. Jamey knows her coming down to the lobby is a sexual act, even if she’d never admit or understand that.
Once she wore a blouse with no bra. When she was gone, Jamey jacked off fast in the staff bathroom. He would never want her, never make love to her. He washes his hands without looking in the mirror. She’s not real to him; she isn’t real to herself. When he does imagine her naked body, he sees it as fiberglass.
Elise always shows a prospective client the model units first, the fake residences that look like someone lives in them. Lorenzo the interior designer targeted the Wall Street sensibility, using Ralph Lauren wallpaper and tobacco-brown leather couches, and there’s even toothbrushes by the sink and books on the shelves. Then she takes them to the actual floor to see the site of the apartment they want, usually an empty space with no walls, the Hudson winking below, helicopters sensuously twirling at eye level, a shiver in the knees.
The clients are often Europeans, sent for a year to Deutsche Bank or Credit Suisse. Or traders, whose wives and children live in Greenwich or Oyster Bay, looking for a pied-à-terre.
Elise does Vanna White—Here’s your brand-new dishwasher! She has to shout over the circle-saw’s shrill cry, and the nail gun’s shot and echo.
Up top, as they stand among rat pellets and lost bolts and Styrofoam cups, she points out Miss Liberty, the girl next door.
Night shift.
Jamey raises his arm, and a hundred arms are raised.
He smiles, with thousands of teeth.
Jamey thinks of Narcissus bending to the pool. He thinks of how a swan on a calm lake is one with its reflection, and then, lifting off, the bird divides from its self, and both parts become smaller and smaller. Division is more interesting than duplication, and an ax is a fascinating tool. It makes a fallen tree into wood that will keep your family warm. It does more than separate a whole into pieces; it changes the spirit of the thing, its use.
He thinks about Elise checking her compact, and how he looks over her shoulder to catch her outlined eye in the mirror. Her eye, separated from the rest of her, floating. Normally he doesn’t let his mind split into pieces, because it frightens him, but he’s in a container here. He has so much time to think on the night shift.
Jamey and Elise board Metro-North on Christmas Eve morning, and the Gorowskis look after Buck.
Grand Central is busy but not with businesspeople. Fur coats, a woman carrying a potted amaryllis, children running wild who are normally behaved. A homeless man sucks on a candy cane, the stick glistening out of his scabbed mouth.
Elise and Jamey carry Toys “R” Us and Bloomingdale’s bags, their hands turning red.
The scratched train windows refract light through the cabin. The seat headrests are oiled from men’s pomade over the years. A coffee cup rolls in a twirl, clockwise then counterclockwise. Even though the car smells like soot and urine, there’s a sense of holiday and goodwill, and Elise and Jamey lean against each other and drink coffee and eat cinnamon doughnuts out of paper bags, and are very happy.
The conductor looks lost in time, like he’d been punching tickets since 1931. His sandy hair combed back, his face handsome in a blustery, committed way. Keys jangle off his belt, a schedule pad and leather pocket of tickets hanging from it too. All his equipment sways with the train. A gold cross on a chain is barely visible under his pale-blue uniform shirt.
“Where you kids headed?” he says, clipping their tickets.
“Gonna see my family in Bridgeport,” Elise says.
“Yeah? Sounds nice. Happy Christmas to yous.”
“Have a merry Christmas too,” Jamey says.
“I’m gonna,” he says, whistling as he moves down the dirty aisle. “Soon’s I get done with this shift.”
And Jamey feels included, assumed into the ethics of finishing the shift, commiserating with other working stiffs without disrespecting the job. Last year, the conductor wouldn’t have said much to him if Jamey had been on this train, and he wouldn’t have been on this train.
When they get off, their cabdriver is a fat lady whose dyed-black hair has an inch of white at the root. Her radio is tuned to Christmas oldies, and she rolls through every stop sign. The town seems empty—as in deserted forever—and Jamey’s nervous. They pass a boarded-up theater, a hair salon with a bullet-cracked window.
They pull up to barracks set unceremoniously in rows, with zero landscaping. A sign
says WELCOME TO THE SALLY S. TURNBULL HOUSES. The brick units are flat, and a white iron barrier enclosing every lawn says prison yard more than picket fence. Dead grass is clumped with snow. A pink kid-sized car is bleached by weather and wheel-less.
He’s meeting his wife’s family—his heart rate explodes and his testicles are drawn up into his groin. Now, too late, he sees it was obscenely rude not to request her hand in marriage from the family. He never even wondered what they said when she told them.
“Elise!” shrieks someone from a window.
They lug shopping bags from the trunk to Building 5. On the ground are malt-liquor empties, and a face peeps out the door.
“Yo, Elise is here!” says the face.
Elise looks at Jamey. “Here we go.”
Jamey has met hundreds of people, been left to entertain famous strangers, been relied on to charm parents’ friends or schoolmates’ siblings or Alex’s business partners. He can smile like a cat, make them nervous, be intimate and faraway, warm and cold—he can whip out the survivor skills of charisma. But he’d rather be honest for once.
The yard smells of piss. There are audio echoes of television, EPMD, children shrieking. The smell of food cooking all day.
As they enter the hallway, kids jump around Elise, talking about Santa and stockings and toys, pulling at the bags. Jamey’s heart is skipping. He can tell Elise is scared, because she won’t look at him. A paper wreath is scotch-taped to the door of the apartment.
“Get out of my way!” she grumbles at the kids sweetly.
Walking into the fluorescent-lit room, Jamey braces for scrutiny, and he grazes the faces, but mainly he’s ignored.
“Oh my fucking God!” Denise throws her spoon into the pot and wipes her hands on her apron and tackles Elise with a hug.
Mother and daughter hold each other, rock back and forth, and everyone is silent, murmuring.
Jamey’s speechless, shocked by this love, that Elise has been away from it.
White Fur Page 21