Neighbors and tourists make a shrine of candles, bouquets, and posters against the building. Strangers weep, and a coalition keeps an overnight vigil for the first few nights. Jamey stands in front of it one dawn, after work. Granted, he’s tired, but for a moment he sees the flower petals move like worms. He abruptly leaves, walks home as quickly as he can without running.
Then the news releases footage of the mother in shackles and an orange suit, face streaming with tears. I did it because I loved her, she screams.
He comes home, she wakes up. They make love in the shower, her hands splayed on tile. He finds a white Bible on their stoop. Elise gets her period. Jamey gets stuck on a subway car with British tourists—older ladies and gents all with identical bobs, mad gleaming eyes and snaggleteeth, completely decomposed faces—who sound like recently hatched birds. She comes home, he wakes up. She dreams of unfinished rooms, hallways leading to the sky. He watches rats forage in the subway track. She’s walking down the avenue, glances up to see a poinsettia on a sill.
The snow looks like thin felt when he peeks out the window. Jamey walks Buck on his leash down the stairs and feels the searing white radiant cold from the other side of the front door. He braces himself before turning the knob like before shooting vodka or diving into a chilly lake, with an extra heart thump and an earache on the way. He walks around the block grinning because his face is reacting to the sun-spangled panorama out here, and Buck prances through the blinding wonderland of his master’s world.
The city is emptied of its holidays, and Jamey feels the echo from his first Christmas away from his family. This is what he wanted. Now he wants to enjoy ordinary time with Elise as they go to work, come home, eat and drink and make love and sleep, instead of overthinking it or being anxious. But a merry-go-round still operates in his head. It starts up on its own, whenever it wants, music jangling, the animals (frozen in expression but mobile in their prescribed circle) beginning again….
It’s not like he ever thought about doing this; it just happens one day when Jamey and Elise coincidentally end up in the same subway car.
Pink graffiti reads PROPHIT, next to a spray-painted Doberman with satanic eyes and a diamond collar.
The way he saunters up, body swinging with the train, she has a feeling.
“Haven’t I seen you in the neighborhood?” he asks quietly.
“Maybe,” she says, twirling her hair.
“Let’s have a drink. At your place.”
She sinks her hands in the white fur. “But I don’t know you.”
An old woman gives Jamey a look of disgust.
He tails Elise off the train.
Why is she scared? She measures her walk like when she’s terrified for real.
“You’re following me,” she says without turning.
At the building, she smiles, thinking they can’t sustain this.
He smiles back, but not like Jamey, and follows her in, his breath steaming, unbuttoning his camel-hair coat as they mount the steps.
On the landing, he gets under her skirt, tears the pantyhose, not kissing her.
She’s stiff.
“Open the door,” he says gruffly.
Her hand shakily unlocks it, they walk in, door open, anyone can see—
Jamey pushes her to the couch, bends her over…
And Buck lunges, fights him to the floor, roaring, snapping his teeth!
After a silence, Elise starts laughing. Buck’s lips still twitch over his black gums at Jamey. She soothes the dog and gently pulls his collar.
“You’re a bad man,” she says to Jamey.
“Buck,” he says, beseeching, only half in humor. “I was playing!”
They watch The A-Team and Miami Vice, stuffing their minds with helicopter crash landings and gold crucifixes. Jamey tells himself they were just experimenting. Right? He feels as if the guy he was, just a few hours ago, is still in the apartment, hiding in a closet with a baseball bat, ready to attack Jamey next time.
But Elise has drifted into television world without looking back, a liter of Sunkist between her legs, mouth slightly open, as she tracks the detectives on screen who stalk a man through a marina, pastel loafers glowing in the moonlight.
“He’s gonna fall in the water,” she says to no one.
In bed, Elise sends smoke rings into the lamp’s light.
“We’re on a gangplank these days,” she tells Jamey. “Way up, above everything.”
“Looking over the city,” he says. “I know.”
She imagines exotically infinitesimal buildings. Itty-bitty cars, people are fleas. Roofs glitter silver or black.
She puts her forehead to his and holds his face, closes her eyes.
“I want you to see what’s in my mind,” she says earnestly.
They press their skulls together, eyes closed, breath synched, the oil of her skin seeping into his skin. There’s the vague groan of a vault opening, a flood of green like a tornado sky, and then damp silt that moves in still water. Little dolls and cats and monsters in the shadows, the puppets of memory, almost emerge. Wet cement pouring into the cavern, and they drag themselves out before it dries, pulling skulls apart.
They look at each other.
“You’re a weirdo,” she tells him.
“You are!” he says, laughing. “That was your fucking idea!”
Terry and Simone, a couple who live a couple buildings down, knock on the door one evening. They’re ’70s hippies, cosmic, and high on heroin—and this week they’re selling vitamins door to door. Jamey and Elise always see them with their kids, Chloe and Star, psychedelic ragamuffins with knotted hair, on the neighborhood swing set.
“Hey, man, feel like getting healthy?” says Simone.
“Hell no,” Elise says. “But come in for coffee if you want.”
The couple put down their B12 samples and take off their boho coats. Jamey’s at work, so Elise pours Folgers into the machine and wonders what to talk about.
She doesn’t have to come up with anything, because Terry and Simone raspily relay every detail of their own lives for the next couple hours. Elise finally says she has to get up early, she needs to go to bed.
“Well, fuck, no problem! God, we got to get back to those sleeping babes, anyways,” Terry says. “Hey, let’s have dinner sometime!”
They leave her a vitamin E sample and some dehydrated garlic. If she wants to earn extra cash, they confide, she should talk to them about selling supplements. They won a waterbed last month for top sales in the hood!
Whenever Elise and Jamey walk past the Variety Playhouse, they look away from the guys hunting there like wolves, smoking, pulling a flask now and then. But why?
This time it’s her idea—she’s restless—she feels like pushing him—she whispers it in his ear one night.
And here they are—everyone standing at attention when Jamey in his camel-hair coat wanders like a general onto the territory.
In the clammy recesses of the deteriorating theater, men cruise with dexterity that comes from practice and desire. There’s one kid with high-waisted slacks and corn-silk hair—but he’s too girly.
A man with roan sideburns and a cut-off Garfield T-shirt looks better. His jeans are skintight, his sneakers ultraviolet-white. The connection is triggered, although his eyes turn skeptical when Elise follows—I’ll just watch, she whispers nervously—and he keeps walking, self-conscious, resentful, and showing off.
They end up in worn velvet seats, Jamey in the middle. The guy deftly unbuttons his jeans and takes out his cock—skinny and snakelike. The hair is trimmed. Jamey takes out his own, uncertain. The guy strokes himself, and looks at Jamey’s face then at Jamey’s cock then at his own cock, and then makes the rounds again, with an expression that’s fierce but emotionless.
He gruffly directs Jamey to stand, facing him, his bare ass on the seat back. And now the stranger takes Jamey’s cock into his mouth.
Jamey loses it and gets it back. His legs are trembling, his
thighs go rigid, but he won’t touch the man’s head, keeps his fists on his own waist. He does raise himself by tilting his hips—he can’t help it—his hips are getting higher—higher—higher!
Later in bed, Elise asks questions.
“It was the same but different,” he answers, still in awe.
“Would you do it again?”
“Most of what I felt came from you watching.”
“I loved watching,” she says, eyes bright with jealousy.
She talks about the dark auditorium, how other men were near but invisible, the heat and the illicit big space—and Jamey just observes her face. She licks her lips, holding braids like a rope. She’s amped up and tumbling over observations.
“You used me,” he says jokingly at one point.
She doesn’t deny it like he expects her to—she just laughs, shrugs. “I’m bored. It’s wintertime. We need things to do.”
Washington Square Park. Hash smoke twirling, ice in the fountain, a girl with broken fingernails strums her ukulele. Elise thinks she sees Jodi—someone she knew in Bridgeport—pushing a stroller with another girl, and she pulls Buck to a halt to watch.
Jodi looks at the beeper clipped to her tight black jeans. The girls part with a hand slap, one of them says something funny because they laugh, turn their high heads and strut in opposite directions with smiles.
Yeah, it’s Jodi. Fur-trimmed hood, like a German shepherd.
Elise squints. It might be cool to say Hi, to say Holy shit whatchu doing here, talk gossip, meet the baby. She watches her walk under the arch, stopping once to fuss with the kid. Gone.
Let her go.
Brainwaves from the old world, marcelled squiggles of energy, infrared forces try to hijack Elise’s own ways. It’s like that—it’s science. When she’s with the tribe, it’s hard not to live like the tribe, think like them, love like them, die like them.
When she was at the juvenile center, girls were all on the rag at the same time, their bodies synched up with no intention or permission.
Back in Bridgeport, life repeated itself every day. The women would lean elbows on the kitchen counter and bitch. Pile into someone’s car, babies on laps, laughing and smoking. Take over a section at the playground or Dairy Queen.
A girl is in or she’s out—she can’t loiter on the threshold with the door open.
Denise drags girls in synthetic lace dresses and plastic Mary Janes to church, shouting hello to people, her giant face shining with love. An addicted, compulsive, close-minded, gambling, pre-diabetic, angelic, giant-busted survivor, resurrected from minimum wage, from last night’s battle in the bedroom, from self-loathing. But when Elise tried to drag Denise away from that world, her mother made it clear that if Elise was going to jump ship, she better jump alone. And so she did.
And here she is.
Jamey and Elise haven’t driven the BMW for weeks, and today it makes a strange rattle.
He pops the hood in brittle sunshine.
“What the…?”
They don’t even know what they’re looking at.
An old man limps by, carrying a newspaper, and peers over their shoulders.
“Aw, shoot. Know what that is?” the stranger asks, smiling lopsided.
“What?” Elise says, fixated on the tiny bones.
“Rats is eating they dinner up in your engine. Ha-ha, that happen to my sister Maureen.”
“Chicken bones?”
“Yup. Must be from the KFC ’round the corner, you know. They gets all their bones from the dumpster, then use this hidey-spot for they dinner.”
Jamey and Elise collect skeletal parts from their machine. Grinning with absurdity.
A week later, Jamey sees blue glitter on the sidewalk before looking up to the crushed window. Inside: tinfoil burned with grime, seats pushed back.
The car is his big, black ceramic pram. Why does he keep it? He wonders that while waiting in the oil-reeking garage for it to get fixed.
It’s a queasy little afternoon, and they’re hungry—but there’s nothing in the house. Jamey doesn’t want to go outside, but Elise lures him into the brisk day with the idea of Broome Street Bar hamburger pitas. The place is quiet, a calico cat stealing from corner to corner looking for scraps. Jamey and Elise are greasy-fingered and laughing when a shadow falls across the table.
“Jamey! What the hell, man!”
It’s Matt.
“Hey,” Matt says to his entourage, “this is my buddy, Jamey Hyde.”
The two guys—shirts untucked under yellow cashmere sweaters, sockless ankles in duckboots, eyes bloodshot—shake hands with Jamey. They barely nod at Elise.
“Dag.”
“Shep.”
Jamey is speechless.
“Dude, you’re the most gossiped-about human being I know,” Matt says. “Everyone says you two are holed up shooting dope together.”
“Who’s everyone?” Jamey asks. And where did Matt learn language like “holed up” and “shooting dope”?
“Bennett told me you’re painting now? You got a gallery or some shit?”
Jamey manages to clear his throat. “Gallery?”
“Are you coming back this semester? You’re like living the anarchist dream.” Matt hungrily memorizes Jamey’s threadbare camel-hair coat and demeanor. He flicks his gaze at Elise, then away.
“What are you doing in New York?” Jamey asks.
“I’ve been spending most of my weekends here, these days. Hanging. Shep’s folks live on Crosby Street,” Matt brags.
Shep is dipping Skoal and Dag has coke powder on both nostrils.
“Crosby Street, that’s great,” Jamey says.
“I’m sure we’ve met, man,” Shep says grandly. “I know who you are.”
Dag pipes up. “We’re headed to the Palladium. I’m promoting tonight with my buddies.”
“Maybe we’ll see you there.” Jamey stands up. “Matt, good catching up.”
Jamey drops a couple twenties on the table and leads Elise out.
As they walk in ruptured moods, hands in pockets, Jamey looks at Elise.
“Don’t you think it’s odd?” he says, holding his coat closed at the collar.
“What?”
“Him showing up like that.”
“Weird coincidence.”
Jamey squints into the distance. “Is it coincidence?”
Elise snorts. “What else could it be?”
“I didn’t want to leave the house for a reason,” he says testily.
“Now you stopped making sense,” she says, and they walk in silence, both annoyed.
Jamey wants to hide out all the time, but Elise is at work today, and they’ve run out of toilet paper and coffee, so he’s forced to go to the deli. It’s ugly out here, as he thought it would be, and he walks into dank wind.
Dim faces look down from the roof: kids smoking. Snow hangs, unspent.
Jamey thinks he’s hallucinating: it looks like a guy moving a grandfather clock (which he can hardly hold upright) down the cracked sidewalk on a skateboard.
The guy is wearing wraparound sunglasses and a denim jacket.
“Yo, help a brother out,” he says.
Jamey gestures to see if the guy means him.
“Yeah, you, I got to get this pain-in-the-ass clock into this truck but the truck ain’t here yet. Let’s move it into the Holiday!”
“What are you doing with this thing?” Jamey asks.
“My grandma needs it fixed,” he says with a straight face.
Jamey stares at him, deciding.
“I’m Tony. I live here.” The guy scratches the blemishes on his white chin, then grins. “I’ll buy you a drink, man.”
Jamey shrugs, amused, and uses his back to push open the door as they guide the tilted clock into the dive bar. Smoke and old wool. A tiny dog sleeps in a knitted red bed on the cigarette machine.
“We’re just resting it here for a second,” Tony tells everybody as he positions the clock by the door.
/> The bartender: square face, dead eyes, and a gold hoop in one ear. He gives Tony a look Jamey can’t decipher.
“My grandma,” Tony says conspiratorially to Jamey, twirling whiskey in the fingerprinty glass, “is a woman of God. She prays every minute she’s awake. She prays for you and she don’t even know you yet. You should come meet her sometime. She’ll make you cocoa. She got three cats and two of them is blind. They were born blind,” he says matter-of-factly.
The clock strikes a quarter hour.
A lady with a lipstick ring shakes her head. “Why the fuck am I in here if I wanted to sit next to church bells ringin’?”
“This ain’t no church, Gwen,” Tony says.
Tony follows the horse race on TV. He looks like a grasshopper: huge eyeballs, spindly limbs, and a predatory mouth. He probably gets laid but has to spend all his money to get her drunk and high, even though he could spend the same on a hooker, but won’t.
“We should hang out sometime,” he says to Jamey. “You seem like you from somewhere else.”
Tony springs off his stool to see if the truck arrived, then asks Jamey for a quarter.
The clock watches over them all.
“Hey Jamey, order us another round?” Tony yells from the pay phone in the corner.
When Tony sits back down, he scratches his arms. He sees Jamey see that, but it doesn’t stop him.
“My grandfather died three years ago,” Tony offers. “He took care a his old lady, he was good to her, he worked for thirty-nine years in this factory over in Red Hook.” Tony considers life and fate for a moment, then continues. “She’s the shit, my grandma. She barely got any friends left, and the ones still alive, they down in Florida. But she loves New York, man. She got her butcher, her cheese shop, her tailor, all on one block. Same block she grew up on.”
“She sounds amazing.”
Just then, a man in a work jumper, dusty and mad, arrives. Jamey wonders if this is the guy with the truck.
But the bartender backs up and smiles, crosses his arms to observe.
Tony sees the man and his jaw drops.
The man pops Tony in the mouth, and Tony cradles his face and looks with pure hurt at his attacker.
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