White Fur

by Jardine Libaire

  They sit at the table, under the frilly, opaque light full of dead flies.

  “When’s the due date?” Denise asks.

  “November something?”

  Denise takes her daughter’s manlike hands, looks into her eyes. “I love you. I am so fucking happy for you. This baby is blessed. Hear me? This baby is loved.”

  From his window, Jamey overhears them on the dusky patio by the heated pool.

  “Let’s be real, sugar,” Annie says. “It’s better than shooting horse and fucking men and getting gay cancer.”

  Annie holds a gold tube of mascara and pulls a bunny face as she applies it in the mirror of a compact. Opium perfume amplifies the electric blue of her St. John dress.

  “He’s not just kissing his inheritance goodbye—he’s choosing this worthless girl….” Tory is frantic.

  “But—didn’t you think there was something between them?” Annie speculates.

  “He just picked her to piss everyone off.”

  Annie’s family villa is like a colony on the moon. The exoskeleton of the house is Provençal, and the inside is Texan. There’s horse magazines, sheets from Neiman Marcus, and a certain hay and oil and Mercedes-leather smell to the air. A vague sense that people might come down the stairs at any moment dressed in tuxes and gowns for museum balls in Dallas.

  Instead, British expats named Evelyn and Rhys, in equestrian outfits not meant for actual riding, arrive for dinner. Jamey says hello and eats in silence. He wants to be cruel when they ask about his mom’s sweet birthday surprise for him, but he’ll look spoiled, so he blandly smiles and bites his tongue.

  By dessert—a Meyer lemon cake—Tory’s had it. “Feel free to retreat to your room,” she says icily to her son.

  “No thanks!” he says, being friendly now. “I’m happy right here.”

  In the morning, she’s got a masque on her face, and drinks fresh grapefruit juice.

  “That was some attitude,” she says. “Ruined my night.”

  Jamey looks at his mother. “I could hardly give a fuck,” he says cheerfully.

  Tory gasps. “You can’t talk to me that way! I love you.”

  Elise serves chicken with tall glasses of Diet Coke.

  “It’s weird you live here,” Denise says with her mouth full, looking around the kitchen.

  “Why?”

  Denise laughs. “I don’t know,” she says earnestly. “It’s my little girl’s house. In New York City.”

  “And here you are, eating chicken at my table.”

  “Still don’t understand why he’s not here, taking care of you right now.”

  “I told him to go. I needed time to think.” Elise’s face is pale and makeup-less. A pimple by her nose.

  As she chews, Denise takes a sidelong look at her daughter. “You all grown, now, aren’t you,” she points out. “You’re changed.”

  Elise blushes.

  “I’m serious!” Denise insists.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing, Ma.”

  “Look, I know I told you what to do before. But don’t go by nobody else’s ideas but your own.” She cackles, and sparks her Bic under a cigarette. She exhales. “Shit, I didn’t listen to my mother.”

  Elise plays with rice. “Never?”

  “Oh, you know that story, El. Her head wasn’t right. But I got to say—when she wasn’t howlin’ in the gutter? She treated every single day like the day. Every hour is the hour. You don’t have nothing else. You pick the meat off the bone gets handed to you. She—she had problems…” Denise rubs her bottom lip with the back of her thumb. “But her soul, when it was lit up, man, it was ablaze.”

  Unearthly mauve twilight. A broad-backed masseur arrives for Annie, who giddily leads him to her room.

  Jamey sits outside, smokes an unfiltered cigarette he bummed off the cook.

  In her room, Tory looks out long glass doors onto a wet land, a place of rabbits and cottages, roses, of new growth and old families, stars, the pool shining deeply, and sees none of it, nor her son, who is a dark form among the sculpted hedges.

  She closes the doors, pulls her robe, and looks once more at her reflection. She paces, takes a magazine into the bed, and puts it down and stares at nothing.

  Why did it take him until this trip, this evening, to realize his mother was bankrupted in the divorce in more ways than one? That Annie takes care of her? He knew she was bitter, but didn’t understand she lives on hate, that it’s her sugar and meat and oxygen, and she’ll never recover. She’s destroyed.

  Beautiful morning. When Jamey wakes, he decides to leave.

  He walks along the sunny road and steps into the high grass each time he hears a car growling and screeching through the turns and hills. Others walk this route: a man with a baguette under one arm, teenage boys (shirts tucked into high-waisted jeans) who talk very obviously about Jamey but without menace. An old lady converses with herself, face animated under a straw hat.

  He looks into a cottage whose door is open, and terrible French rock sizzles from a radio. A baby cries in the darkness of those rooms, and food is cooking.

  He’s in love with the sky, which is tart and robust and ever-changing, the clouds pulling, swelling, bursting. Everything is in motion, the lilac branches trembling with wrens, flowers spitting pollen. Chipmunks and field mice leap in the air, and butterflies swirl around his head, the farm cat winking as he goes by, like the countryside is a Hanna-Barbera scene. It’s a diabolically merry afternoon.

  His feet are bleeding and he doesn’t notice.

  He waves at a housewife hanging laundry in her yard.

  It’s four in the afternoon, and he’s done swimming in a pond, and is drying in the faint sun and feeling alarmingly cold and lost, when the chauffeur, driving slowly around the village, finally finds him. The driver can’t speak English, so he motions Jamey into the car without hiding his antipathy.

  Jamey doesn’t speak to Annie or Tory when he gets to the house. Instead he takes a bubble bath like an old diva, and falls asleep early, naked, exhausted. He can’t remember his dream when he wakes, but he knows he was terrified. He smells of gardenia from some face cream he found last night and smeared on his bloody feet.

  Denise sleeps in bed with Elise, like old times. She snores louder now, the bed sagging under her mountainous body. After the light is out, she still makes raunchy jokes and tender observations, playing with Elise’s hair.

  “You’re gonna be the best mother, hon.”

  “You were.”

  Denise laughs raucously. “Yeah right! I did good at times, and I definitely fucked up.”

  “It was Angel who screwed us up.”

  Denise is quiet. Then she says: “Yeah, babe, but I asked him in the door, you know?”

  “You slept for what, six months after he got sent upstate. You were like Sleeping Beauty.”

  Elise can see the gleam of her mom’s eyes as she stares at the ceiling. “Yeah well. It had to go like that,” Denise says quietly.

  And suddenly Elise knows her mother turned Angel in, to regain order, so the family could survive.

  How didn’t she figure that out till tonight?

  Jamey packs his stuff, staring at his clothes in the suitcase as if they belonged to someone else. Morning makes the room glitter and shine, everything is golden. After a while, he realizes someone is watching him.

  He turns to see Tory in the door, her face ashen. He sighs. What now? He just wants to be on the plane, this continent shrinking beneath them.

  “Yes?” he says antagonistically.

  She shrugs weakly. “I just want to know…”

  He waits. “Want to know what?”

  “How you justify what you’re doing to her.” And she turns, vanishes into the dark hallway.

  When Elise wakes up, her mother is gone. There’s a box tied with curling ribbons, and a Hallmark card: Congratulations! It’s the christening gown Elise wore as a baby.

  He carries off the plane a Le Figaro with a flower pre
ssed in its pages for every day he was gone. He also brings a baker’s package of lemon tarts. In the airport bathroom’s mirror, he combs his oily hair with his fingers. He looks more like a man coming back from a year of shooting drugs with bohemians in Marrakesh than a movie star’s son who vacationed in the patrician French countryside.

  He’d made a formal bow as a goodbye to Annie and Tory. “And thank you, Annie, for what I know were good intentions.”

  From the taxi window, he stares at the city, so forced, menacing, and crowded after the hills of Provence. When he opens the apartment door, he hides his mood, tells himself it’s jet lag. He looks sick.

  Elise hugs him and won’t let go. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she says.

  “I still can’t believe you sent me away.”

  “I didn’t!” she says in a playful voice, because she did.

  He gives her a look. Then: “God, I missed you.” He’s thinking about telling her all the fucked-up things his mother said.

  “I have your birthday present,” she says, climbing into the bed, nervous. She’s wearing a wife beater, and her gold necklaces fall to the side.

  Jamey gets under the covers, looking skinny in his boxers. “Oh yeah? What.”

  They lie facing each other, and prop cheeks on hands.

  “Guess,” she tells him.

  He looks from one of her gray eyes to the other. “I’m not good at guessing.”

  “It’s right in front of you.”

  Jamey looks around the room, then falls back dramatically to look at the ceiling. “Ummmm…where?”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “Hmmmm, I—”

  Elise pulls his hand to her belly.

  He looks from her tummy to her face. He can’t speak.

  “Yeah,” she laughs at his reaction.

  He presses his mouth to her belly, kissing her, kissing her. There’s no bump yet, but he can see what everyone says, that a woman becomes radiant. He holds her braided head against his chest. This is wild.

  She’s doing holy work.

  And she throws up French toast the next morning, the chartreuse bile floating on the toilet water as he kneels beside her, holding her hair.

  “This part sucks,” she says as she wipes her mouth with a shaky hand, sort of embarrassed.

  He comes back from the store, wide-eyed from the things the pharmacist told him, a paper bag of the recommended aspirin and hemorrhoid cream and Pepto-Bismol in his arms. He’s going to be a daddy.

  Jamey and Elise are giddy, plums hanging on a branch, fat with sun.

  The day seems innocent enough. They drip out of bed, shower together, lazy, whistling, shaving. They feel like taking an epic walk.

  The East Village is bright—dark—bright with fast clouds.

  They head north, see addicts being lured out of boxes and bushes by the big silver drug of hunger. Cats in bodega windows. Block by block by block. Petals like confetti in the seams of cars. They pass parking-lot guards locked into bulletproof stalls. Gold-leaf numbers on glass doors to buildings. The sun turns the fire escape into a sideways shadow.

  “Sandwiches?” Jamey asks, swinging her hand.

  “Take them to the park?” she answers.

  “Sure.”

  They walk, the dragon’s roar of a subway under their feet.

  Barbers, tailors, delis.

  Central Park has a minty flush of new life. The horses drag carriages in endless ovals.

  They eat on a bench, wipe mayonnaise off a knuckle, squinting at the lake.

  “Check it out,” Elise says.

  Swans rise from the water, about to fight, wings raised and necks curved.

  “They can be violent,” he says.

  A couple with a baby lie on a blanket, speckled in light, sequins on their black skin. Elise and Jamey sneak looks at them.

  Back in the day, Jamey wouldn’t lie like that on this ground—it’s the kitchen floor, the toilet, the filthy sheets of New York. Wine and urine saturate the dirt—but now he barely cares.

  They watch people eating strawberries out of a Ziploc bag or reading the Post or buying drugs or pushing twins in strollers or talking to themselves.

  Elise will always think back to the atlas of this day—the peacefulness and fighting swans and the light-spangled baby—and Matt.

  “Holy shit,” Matt says. “Again!”

  He has a girl by his side—she’s tiny and hot, coughs like she has emphysema.

  “We keep running into you,” Jamey says.

  “Destiny.” Matt holds a hand up at Elise. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “You guys, this is Valentina,” Matt says proudly.

  “Hallo!” she says in a thick Italian accent, now that she’s unleashed upon them, and she gives hugs and cheek kisses. “I’m so, so happy to meet each of you, okay!”

  Her perfume is amber—spicy pollen off a forbidden flower—and it lands on them, coats them. She’s wearing couture clothes too big for her bones, but the way they fall, in conjunction with the chains on her sallow neck, and the sandals slipping off her feet like she’s meant to be barefoot, give her star power. Her hair is tangled down to her ass.

  “What-a should we do!” she says.

  Matt takes in Jamey’s self-cut hair, secondhand clothes, and fuller mouth, fascinated.

  “Yeah, we should all do something,” Matt says.

  “We got to get home,” Elise says.

  Jamey looks at her. “We do?”

  Elise bites her lip. “Yeah.”

  Valentina claps her hands. “Dinner at my place, next week? You cannot say no.” She drapes her arm over Matt, squeezes him, steadily unsteady.

  Elise and Jamey look at each other.

  But Jamey accepts the invite. “Where are you?”

  Valentina squeals with pleasure, tells them her Trump Tower address. “Fabulous,” she pronounces.

  Jamey and Elise watch them walk away, among hot-dog-cart fumes and kites and pigeons, into a tunnel where someone surely was raped in the last two weeks if not two hours.

  “Why on Earth did you say yes?” she asks, in shock.

  “Didn’t you say we should get out more?” he kids. He feels invincible.

  APRIL 1987

  Jamey and Elise have lunch at Paolucci’s: asparagus and burrata and prosciutto.

  “Vivien? Jacqueline,” Jamey says. “Or Sandrine.”

  “Why do you think it’s a girl?”

  “Just a feeling.”

  They eat dark-chocolate mousse for dessert, watching Italians saunter outside in weak sun, running errands, greeting one another with generations of familiarity. Two heavyset brothers, or cousins, jaws big with experience, one with gold chains and one without, walk in absolute synchronicity.

  “Northern California,” Jamey says. “We could even have a farm.”

  “We should move near Disneyland?” she asks. “We could bring our kid there all the time.”

  “Disneyland is not that great,” he breaks it to her.

  “Um, neither is farming,” she says.

  They don’t sound like themselves. They’re acting like they’re not scared shitless, pretending to be lighthearted.

  “But seriously. It’s a little fucked up to bring a kid into this world, right?” Jamey says, hanging on to good humor, but the line falls flat. Elise doesn’t answer, because she doesn’t like what she hears in his voice.

  They watch two guys unloading a big truck—one has a braid, might be Dominican. The other seems angry, as if freshly sprung from Rikers, but then he giggles, cute as a panda bear.

  Dinner at Valentina’s. Elise and Jamey dress in silence as if for a funeral, but there’s something heady about the evening. Jamey barely slept the last few nights, ideas rushing through his mind about where to live, how to make money, unstoppable thoughts that have him seeing stars.

  A radio on the street blares KRS-One. Sautéed onions rise from downstairs.

  “Trump fucking Towers,” Jamey say
s.

  “It’s just stupid we’re going.”

  “I can’t wait to tell them,” he says.

  She stops putting on eyeliner and gapes. “Tell them what?”

  “That we’re having a kid!”

  “I’m seriously not going unless you swear to God you won’t tell them.”

  “Why not?” he asks, his eyes wicked in the broad cheekbones.

  “Jamey,” she says, getting really upset. “You just never know—”

  “Hey, hey,” he soothes her, hugging her. “I’m teasing. I won’t.”

  “Don’t tease about that shit,” she says stubbornly, letting him hold her.

  “You realize he’s tried to find his own Elise,” he says into her neck. “That’s what Valentina is.”

  Elise smirks, reluctantly flattered. “Whatever.”

  She wears a tight white dress, and he kisses her belly, makes her smile. “You’re exquisite,” he says.

  “Shut up.”

  They take a cab, the city flashing by in its grit and radiance.

  Pulling up to the monolithic address, the taxi is opened by a doorman.

  “Thank you, sir,” Jamey says.

  The young couple—the doorman will remember them when police question him.

  Yeah, Officer, he’ll say. I opened the door to their cab. They were laughing, but they sorta seemed like they didn’t wannu go in there. Into the building. She was, how can I say, rough around the edges. She thanked me—she was just a little street. Outta her league. But not for hire or nothing. Just not on his level, you know? He looked all prep-school and high-dollar. Maybe a little run down, but the real deal. I remember thinking that, even.

  He tips his cap. Arms linked, the couple enters the smoked glass doors.

  No, Officer, I didn’t see ’em after that. My shift last night ended at ten o’clock, so I was out of there. I guess they were just getting started.

  The gold sign outside makes Jamey and Elise feel they’re entering a chocolate box. Inside, the apocalyptic waterfall roars.

  Valentina is on 57, right under the Trump family. They take the penthouse elevator, and a Taiwanese tenant gets out on 46, into a minimal space with a poppy-red couch.