White Fur

by Jardine Libaire

  “Wally, what? Why’d you do that?” Tony asks, his lip bleeding.

  “Where do you even think you can sell a fucking clock, Tony? This is the third time you done this. Are you retarded?”

  Tony looks blamefully at the bartender. “Did you call?”

  The bartender shrugs.

  Wally hustles Tony off the stool. “Your grandmother deserves better than a turd like you. Get up, and help me get this back into the apartment.”

  “The clock drives me crazy! I’m not selling it just to sell it.”

  “Everybody knows why you would sell it, Tony. Not a big secret, you faggot.”

  The two men sourly collaborate on moving the giant object over the threshold and into the dark light of an East Village evening.

  Jamey has another whiskey. Gwen makes him sit next to her and she studies him.

  “Who are you, anyway?” she asks.

  “Nobody special,” he says, giving her a sideways smile.

  She cackles hoarsely, and her lips work over the too-perfect dentures. “Oh, join the club, my love,” and she gestures for the bartender to pour Jamey another.

  When she reaches into her coat pocket for beef jerky, and breaks herself off a piece, she offers one to Jamey, who accepts, and then she feeds the last bit to the dog. He suddenly doesn’t think he should eat it, and watches to see if the animal gags. When he can, he delicately drops his jerky on the floor. Gwen talks while he sits politely, wondering what she wants.

  She narrows her eyes at him after a while. “You got the look of a bona fide paranoid.”

  He finally makes an excuse and escapes.

  The Gorowskis come over for dinner. As a gift, Mrs. Gorowski brings a paperweight with a sea anemone in it, and Elise presses it to her heart. Elise makes beef stew and potatoes from a magazine recipe.

  “So is your son visiting anytime soon?” Jamey asks.

  “No,” Mr. Gorowski says.

  “Are you going anywhere, taking any trips?” Jamey asks.

  “No, just making it through the winter, sitting tight,” says Mr. Gorowski.

  And Mrs. Gorowski looks on with beautiful eyes but her husband doesn’t translate. It’s an awkward hour because she’d be the one to get the talk going. So they eat in genteel quiet.

  They have Entenmann’s banana cake for dessert. Debussy trills and plings among static on the transistor radio, and Elise fake yawns until their landlord and his wife finally leave.

  “I feel sorry for her,” Jamey says when they’re gone. “He controls her, don’t you think?”

  Elise shakes her head. “She likes not having to talk. That’s what I figured out tonight.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  Elise looks at Jamey. “You’re, like, suspicious of everyone lately.”

  Jamey blinks innocently. “Not suspicious of you,” he says, and clears the plates.

  The next afternoon, Chloe and Star play hopscotch on the sidewalk, and Terry knocks and invites Jamey to see their baby raccoon.

  “Sure,” Jamey says reluctantly, after racking his brain fruitlessly for an out.

  Jamey stands awkwardly in this home of incense and watercolor sets and narcotics and pyramid schemes and LEGO, a place that will one day implode but is happy for now.

  “We named him Mad Max!” Chloe says.

  Jamey watches Simone adjust the nest of towels in the kids’ room. The raccoon is still a tiny, clumsy, grunty creature that will only become more nimble and true, the way animals do. Jamey looks at Chloe and Star, born revolutionaries. But they might become hypocrites like their parents, the way human beings can do.

  They both have the day off. Elise boils hot chocolate, and the man on the jazz station talks in a monotone about a Miles Davis track for longer than the song lasted.

  “I don’t ever want to go outside again.” Jamey sighs.

  Jamey pulls up her sweater, dabs a half-melted marshmallow on her tit, licks it off. She giggles.

  They play sex games with honey, maraschino cherries, whipped cream.

  The bed is sticky and stained. He’s lying on his stomach, his hair unruly, long enough to curl down his neck.

  “You got an ass like a black girl,” she tells him.

  She smokes, contemplates him like a painter evaluating a model.

  His body always seems stilled, inactive, but it’s gambling and tricking and delighting the world.

  Why is he hard to look away from? He doesn’t invite it—fantasy is just built into the meaning of his body the way a swimming pool is made for water and a cemetery for graves.

  “Turn over,” she commands for fun, looping her cigarette in the air.

  He’s like the statue at the Met, supple and melting with sensuality, and closed. But she knows her way into the marble. She thinks his gentleness comes from being sure he’ll hurt someone. An eternal restraint.

  Hail pelts the windows.

  “It’s too cold to go out,” he groans.

  “I know.”

  “I mean ever again.”

  And they lie in bed and smoke. He picks up a hardback The Call of the Wild, which Elise found at the Salvation Army.

  “Why don’t you read it to me?” Elise says.

  He holds the book open and scans for a good passage. “Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.”

  They lie in a penumbra of light coming in the door. Buck sleeps, whimpering as he hunts.

  “How were you so sure about us?” he asks.

  “I just knew,” she says, without drama.

  “Okay, Confucius.”

  She doesn’t laugh. “Seriously, you think you should know the reason for everything.”

  He’s quiet. “I keep thinking about the blackout,” he says.

  “You didn’t do nothing till then. I had to wait.”

  “I was so scared of you.”

  “You still scared, baby.” She yawns, and curls up to sleep.

  He watches her, propped on an elbow. Scared?

  “You can’t just say that and then go to sleep,” he argues.

  “I can do whatever I want,” she says, pissed off, eyes firmly closed to make a point.

  “Oh yeah?” he says, and stands on the bed, backed into the corner like he’s in a wrestling ring, gearing up.

  She lies back and flashes him, pulling up her Public Enemy T-shirt and throwing it down. “Scaredy-cat,” she taunts, laughs.

  She switches moods in a heartbeat not because she’s out of control—she just doesn’t care what it looks like to switch. She watches other people stay in moods just to seem committed to something.

  He tickles her, and she pants, hunched over, between laughing hysterically: “No, no, Jamey, no…” And then she squeals as he attacks again.

  FEBRUARY 1987

  Elise walks with head tucked to the morning wind, past the shoe-repair shop (front window stuffed with orphaned loafers and lavender pumps), past a man sleeping in a brittle churchyard, past a vase (luminous like a woman, but empty) in a dark window.

  “How ya doin’,” says Rob at the construction area entrance, and Elise salutes him.

  Guys move around, tools clanging from belts, faces smug against the chill under hard hats. The coffee truck is on site, Stan telling Irish jokes and blonde jokes and Jewish jokes, making change from his money apron.

  “Morning, sunshine!” they call to her. “Kinda cold, don’t ya think?”

  “Mornin’, fellas!” she calls back. “Yeah, fuck this. What can you do about it, right?”

  “Yeah, right!”

  Trash is collected in the bottom of the chain-link fence like spinach in teeth.

  One night at work, Jamey finds Teddy’s home number in the phone book.

  �
��You heard,” Teddy says when he answers.

  “I want to make it up to you,” Jamey states, dimple working, earnest and embarrassed.

  “Aw, no—don’t pull that shit on me.”

  “Can I meet you somewhere?”

  Teddy hesitates, and Jamey can tell he doesn’t want to see him.

  But he relents. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow? Claudia’s visiting her mammy in a home up in Philly, so I’m by my lonesome.”

  Jamey drives the BMW to Brooklyn, the Manhattan Bridge swaying under the tires. At a stoplight, a woman knocks on his window for money. Her sweatshirt is filthy, her lower face burn-scarred, and she looks at the tinted window (unable to see him) with an abnormal fearlessness.

  He drives through industrial Flatbush, then through the Greek Revival row houses in Fort Greene, and past abandoned buildings dissolving like temples of soot.

  Jamey parks and walks, passing a stoop with lions, bird shit on one statue’s eye. Chestnut trees tower.

  Buzzed in, Jamey is the specter of some white boy from yesteryear, lurking around black clubs, obsessed with jazz. Goofily happy to get in the door. Jamey takes the gloomy stairs, feeling stupid.

  The apartment was meant to be full of kids, but things didn’t turn out. It’s Spartan, sort of Christian minimalist, and smoky from Teddy cooking pork chops.

  Jamey opens the bottle of red he brought and pours glasses.

  “Thanks, James.”

  “Least I could do,” Jamey says.

  Teddy makes a face at that. Teddy’s face is not a kind face, but it’s not unkind. Kindness just isn’t relevant because his jaw, his forehead, his cheekbones are right. He’s walking evidence of proper actions taken over many years.

  “It is because of the wedding, right?” Jamey says, his voice undramatic but serious.

  Teddy shrugs. “Most likely.”

  “I just—you worked there forever. You have a relationship with these people—”

  “What people?”

  Jamey leans against the counter and stares at Teddy. “The building.”

  “I most certainly do not,” Teddy persists, taking the pan off the fire. “Not in a way that will disrupt my life, now the connection is broken.”

  “How could you be there so long, and…”

  Teddy takes off his oven mitt and grimly considers Jamey. “Things are good between me and my lord. How you think I made it this far? If my dignity was hung up on those people, no offense to you, Jamey—I would have no self-respect, no peace.”

  Jamey smiles. It’s like finding out a friend has been having an affair for years. That’s why he was distracted. It’s obvious now!

  They eat, and the meat is tender, briny, pink in the center. The phone rings and Teddy looks at his watch.

  “Claudia’s calling at nine, Jamey, I gotta take it, man.”

  Jamey watches Teddy talk to her, mainly uh-huh-ing, and then laughing, picking his teeth with the edge of a matchbook all the while.

  Teddy says Claudia sent her best.

  They play chess, and swirl Courvoisier in glasses.

  “Can I ask you something?” Jamey says.

  “Well, I could tell you had something else on your mind.”

  “You and Claudia—really love each other.”

  “Yesssss…”

  “I feel…lucky these days,” Jamey admits, smiling, chagrined. “Sometimes, I just wonder if, I don’t know, if I’ll screw it up.”

  “You worry about what you got?” Teddy looks at Jamey with pleasant scorn and disbelief, which amounts to: Ah—white people. “That’s your problem right there. Think about it.”

  They get on the subject of Valentine’s Day presents, and Jamey tells Teddy how much he loved Christmas presents from him and Claudia as a kid. (The gifts were wrapped in cheap drugstore paper. It was usually candy, or a remote-control car that broke on its second day, or cologne. They were real, unlike the Steiff animals and Barbour jackets a personal shopper picked out “from Father.”)

  “Well, your dad tipped the bejesus out of me.”

  “Right, of course.” Jamey looks down, the dimple flickering.

  Teddy sees the reaction and pauses. “I did always have affection for you, James. None of those other children were curious. You were different.”

  When Jamey gets ready to leave, he feels jittery, knowing this could look like noblesse oblige—but that’s not how he means it. He’s going to put faith in his intention and screw the appearance of things.

  So he takes the BMW keys and a pink slip out of his coat pocket. “Almost forgot,” he jokes.

  “What the heck is this?”

  “Your new car.”

  Unflappable Teddy: flapped.

  Sometimes the mirrored lobby makes Jamey claustrophobic, and he folds this fear into paper airplanes, performing origami on the hours themselves.

  He writes Elise love letters on scraps and receipts. He sketches the dahlias in the vase, his hand, the midcentury modern ashtray standing by the elevator, his key ring. Nights go by, time itself converted into cartoons he draws for her, haikus he writes of rambling thoughts, hearts in black ink.

  After her last appointment, Elise smells smoke from the first floor. She knows the odor, like plastic burning but more toxic. She peeks into the room—two drywall workers are smoking rock.

  Seeing their faces—in blank rapture, big eyes looking but not registering—doesn’t scare her as much as what will happen after they’ve smoked it all.

  She runs across signs everywhere. Teeth ground down, burned fingers. On the street—wire hangers, scouring pads, wet cigarette filters….

  This poor city.

  Early morning, waiting for the bus, she stared at a lace sock covering a swollen, poisoned foot, sticking out of a cardboard hut.

  Yesterday kids with pinned eyes jacked an old man on her train, with a Rambo Survival Knife, while passengers watched.

  A dead woman was found in the McDonald’s entryway on Tenth Street; the police tape was going up when Elise walked by. The cops were talking about the Knicks game.

  Crossing through Wall Street after close of market, no light straggles into those canyons, and the old buildings are grimy caves. Elise passes a three-piece suit in the hollow of a gothic stairwell, a hooker sucking his cock while he sucks a burning pipe, his shoe buckles shining.

  She’s lonely. There’s a chasm between Jamey’s days and her nights.

  Elise wakes early to be crushed and smashed against him, sealed in heat under the comforter in the dark stink of the bedroom, the accumulated gas and breath of humans in a small room, for one hour. Light touches the edges of the blinds, a thief finding its way, and she nestles her jaw between his ear and shoulder, and he makes a dream-heavy noise acknowledging her and everything. Usually, in this gray light, they hear a gunshot or fire engine or domestic fight.

  Good morning, East Village.

  The other night, Teddy told Jamey his only advice was to give women what they actually want.

  “It’s a logical recommendation, but rarely followed,” Teddy said wetly, far from drunk but loosened up.

  So on Valentine’s Day morning, Jamey hands Elise an envelope—with tickets to the Prince concert at Madison Square Garden that night.

  “No. You. Dint,” she says.

  Hallelujah!

  Elise was raised on the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Isley Brothers—Denise played records, night and day. Prince is the son of Motown, born early and underweight, an over-incubated child raised in a bedroom with a white grand piano.

  Anemic genius.

  He summons Haitian spirits, Pentecostal virgins, drowned witches. If James Brown and Baudelaire had a hermaphroditic bastard, babysat by Mister Rogers, who grew up to wear lilac matador pants—it would be Prince.

  “Happy?” Jamey asks.

  “You don’t understand,” she says.

  Elise gets ready like she never got ready before.

  Madison Square Garden is ready too. The cit
y (and Jersey and Long Island) launches an army of pilgrims to meet their lord, him with the rolled curls and beauty mark and white dance shoes.

  Everyone surges to the stage, pushing. Dark hearts, kids ready to sing their brains out.

  Girls with shirts smaller than bras, pouts, and violent stars in their eyes; guys with combs in pocket and little street spats and minty gum. All eyes are tilted up, waiting for the moon to rise into the black sky.

  Like a unicorn on a rampage, he emerges. He slumps into every cherry-red note and electric piano chord and lightning streak of guitar.

  “I’m in heaven!” she yells at Jamey.

  She dances like a demon took hold.

  She signs with her fingers: You…I would die for you….

  Dancing dancing—no one’s in charge. Everybody just smiling. Tits and ass thump, big hands in the air, fancy feet—everybody do their thing—yeah—moving and grooving.

  In the river of LIFE…

  Dancing is when the devil holds your tail and keeps yanking down like a chain. A woman onstage with glowing suspenders plays the keytar. Elise can dance for hours, sweat rolling down her rib cage, soaking her shirt, and she smiles like a heathen.

  Sparklers and chimes tear through the stadium, flash-bulbing as every heart goes: pop-pop-pop!

  Life…can be so nice….

  And then, the crying game, the tearjerker, tears that run down your neck into the bathwater.

  This one’s for you, Jamey.

  Elise sings: Sometimes it snows…in April.

  Lighters come up, a giant field of tiny fire flowers.

  She’s blind and happy as they make their way with other dazed boys and girls out the doors, and they’re part of the mob of vulnerable freaks. On the subway, kids—whose silk shirts are drying—light one more joint. That was a dope show. Slowly, their snakeskins grow back, and everyone is strangers again.

  When they get home, Elise and Jamey have sex, spending sweaty hours in bed.

  He comes, and comes again, inside her.

  Those swimmers hunt the egg.

  Elise and Jamey fall asleep, and the work is done without them.