Jane Doe #2 is newer—she’s only been in the marsh for two days. If you got close enough you might still be able to smell the traces of her perfume on her skin or the scent of the last cigarette she smoked lingering in her hair. She is still that close to life, like a door she could almost walk back through. Jane Doe #1 has been here for two weeks now. She is breaking down; her skin no longer holds her in. The mud beneath her is dense and cold, like pudding. When the tide pulls the water back, there is a thick, scatological stink as the sulfur at the bottom is exposed. As the casino junket buses pass by, the passengers will frown, scowl in the direction of the restroom, look around at one another to detect a glimmer of guilt on someone’s face. The old women press their handkerchiefs over their noses, trying to stifle the gag that rises in their throats. But the smell is everywhere, impossible to escape.
Jane #1 had loved school, even though classes bored her. A straight C kind of girl who doodled on the backs of her hands during class. Her teachers sensed some intelligence, ambition, coiled deep in her and were always prodding her to try harder, but she figured there would always be time for seriousness, for duty, later on in her life. And she thrived in other ways. Homecoming court, winner of the Best Wardrobe award her senior year, Prom Queen. She had a smile that even the strictest teachers couldn’t resist, a quick, crackling wit that made her a good flirt. She spent those four years feeling like the bright shining thing that other people orbited around.
The summer after she graduated was when the malaise crept in, when everything became blunted, gray. When the beers didn’t seem to be as cold, the parties as fun, the songs as moving, the sun as hot. It was as though there were some kind of screen between her and the rest of the world, dimming the thing that made every moment pulse with energy, sparkle with promise and light. And then the kids she dismissed as losers, nerds, moved away for college. One of them even went to Yale, and the idea that something so monumental could happen to someone whom she had thought so little of occupied her mind for days. She felt as though she had made a fatal mistake—all this time she thought she had mastered the order of the world, and it made her sick to wonder if perhaps, maybe, she had not.
She took a job at the cage in the casino, where she counted out chips and cash all day. The polyester uniform made her sweat. She hated the tuxedo shirt she had to button to her chin, the horrible little paisley bow tie cinched around her neck. The mildewed smell of old dollar bills always on her hands. The dim light threw dark circles under her eyes. Her tan faded by Labor Day. The blonde streaks in her hair from the sun grew back dark, and before she knew it, she was unremarkable. In December she ran into the boy who had been Homecoming King her year, who had been hanging drywall since they graduated. She felt such contempt for his ordinariness that for days the thought of him filled her with rage. But then she realized, he could look at her and feel the same. She was so disgusted with herself, so bored when she looked out at her future, flat, her days filled with counting other people’s money, nothing to call her own. She was mortified by how often she got her counts wrong, and how everything started to remind her of work: the sun and the moon nothing but dull coins in the sky. Meeting men was what made her feel something, her only chance at being admired, at pleasing people again. And at least they were something she couldn’t predict, the one thing in her life that wasn’t going to be the same. Even the last one had seemed intriguing, mysterious. As they drove to the Sunset Motel she noticed the ways his eyes caught on the outline of the ballpark, the banks of lights that had gone dark years ago. What was that about?
The tall reeds shutter and shush in the breeze around them. #2’s mother always said it wasn’t truly summer until the marsh changed from heather to green. It’s a brilliant green now, fertile, thriving. This place is feeding off of her, growing strong off of her body, off of what she gives. The more she breaks down, the better it grows. Her family has been here for centuries. Her father told her that they were the descendants of the sea captain whose house still stands in Somers Point. Her grandfather helped run liquor during the Prohibition, told her stories of lowering crates of rum into the hatch at the back of Nucky Johnson’s house in Ventnor in the middle of the night. But the stories about her grandmother were always her favorite. Her grandmother had been one of the diving girls.
She’s studied the photos: the wooden platform sixty feet above the boardwalk. The horse being led up the narrow ramp. The elegant woman in the bathing suit and dark lipstick, waiting, crouching, springing up and getting a leg over the horse, and then the dive—woman and horse tucking their heads, falling face-first through the air. The splash as they hit the pool, the gasps forced from the crowd. The woman—ta-da!—throwing her hands in the air. How good it must have felt to perform that way, Jane #2 thinks. To have a moment in each day when you could raise your arms and demand to be praised.
* * *
JANE #1 doesn’t remember a time before the casinos and the hotels. To her they had always been there, the same way the ocean had always been there, the sand, the marsh. But Jane #2 remembers when they went up, her older brother going off to help build them, the new shadows the towers cast on the streets. She rode her bicycle along the boardwalk to watch the ribbon cutting ceremony when Resorts opened in ’78, pushed her way through the crowds and gripped the rails of the boardwalk tight. Before, it had been an old hotel, then a Quaker meeting house, a plain three-story structure made of wood, and now there was this: a palace, practically. Large and clean and white.
Jane #2’s older cousin, Louisa, was one of the first women hired as a cocktail waitress, and she got to go into one of the ballrooms early, before the place opened, and practice carrying trays of drinks without spilling anything over the rims of the glasses.
She used to watch Louisa shimmy into her uniform: the bustier lined with so many black sequins it looked wet, the way she flicked her Zippo, ran her kohl pencil through the flame, and drew dark lines, slowly, patiently, around her eyes. The nude stockings that were like skin but prettier, satiny. Number 2 knew that this was what she wanted when she grew up: getting paid to be so glamorous, to play dress up.
And she did. By the time she was eighteen, six more casinos had opened. She got a job at the Taj Mahal. By then, things had changed a little. The newness had been buffed away and carpets had faded. The crystal chandeliers had lost some of their shine. But she liked the girls she worked with: they looked out for one another. Pitched in when one girl was swamped with orders. Loaned stockings whenever someone else had a run. Grumbled over salads and Diet Coke in the cafeteria. The casino had rules for them to follow: monthly weigh-ins if you were a cocktail server. Gain more than 10 percent of your weight and you got stuck on the day shift, when everyone knew the good money was in the 6 to 2 a.m. slot.
That’s where the drugs were meant to help.
Ah, the coke. If #2 could take it back, turn the other way when a dealer first offered her a hit on a shift, would she? That first zip of energy. The confidence of holding a straw, the comforting script of ritual. The thump of her heart and the lightness of her body. The way the nights blurred by in a frenzy of flirtation and vodka and little bumps in the ladies’ room, the surge of energy thrumming through her limbs, the thread of her pulse pulled a little more taut. She felt proud that she could keep up her figure—proud even when her shift supervisor would come and fit his hands around her waist, the fog of his breath on the back of her neck.
No. Even now. She wouldn’t trade it. Not those nights when everyone seemed to be laughing together. When she could feel men watching her, wanting her, and she could hold herself just beyond their reach. She would be more careful, though. She wouldn’t, the night when no one was holding, take the barback up on his offer of speed. She wouldn’t let the speed slide into pills. She wouldn’t get so high that she tripped during her shift, crashing on the marble floor with a full tray of drinks. She knocked her tooth so hard on the rim of a beer mug that it fell out and she felt it slide along the slick pocket of her
cheek. Her mouth filled with the taste of blood, and once she sat up, she spat the tooth into her hand. She stared at it for a minute, thinking it was strangely pretty, this little piece of her. She probably had a concussion, along with the sweet buzz of the speed, and it made her thoughts tilt in strange ways, but she had been mesmerized by the bizarre beauty of it, the swirl of blood on her skin, the hard white square at the center of her palm. The next morning she was fired for being high on the job.
If she could do it again, she wouldn’t pick up a needle after she was canned, wouldn’t feel so relieved that heroin came cheap. When she got clean, like she did in ’96, ’98, ’03, ’07, she would stay that way. Leave town, go to school, learn a skill that didn’t involve moving through dark places, handing out drinks, leaning over so men could get a better look at her breasts before deciding how much to tip her. She pictured herself in an office filled with plants and sunlight, the smell of paper and ink. But school would cost money. And what to do in the meantime? She was like everyone else: the grind of daily life, so many bills to pay.
A generation apart, but both of them feel betrayed by the mythology they grew up on: that Jersey girls are the most beautiful, the most carefree, the most fun. That they were meant for something big, that they had grand destinies to claim, that Atlantic City had enough energy, enough luck, enough money and glitter for everyone. That they would one day have their own stories to tell their grandchildren—serving a martini to Madonna. The limo ride with Muhammad Ali. The silk and satin of their uniforms, the hair spray and air kisses and twenty-dollar bills rolled into their bustiers. That’s what he’s taken from them.
They knew death was inevitable. Once they started with the needles, being surprised by death would have been like being surprised when you come to the other end of a piece of string. But he took their stories and changed the shape of them. Janes 1 and 2 share their greatest regret: that once they are found here, in the marsh, this will be the only story anyone will ever tell about them.
LILY
I GOT THE INTERVIEW AT the spa for one reason: my father worked as an electrician at the casino before he died and people still remembered his name. My mother made a phone call to a friend of Dad’s from the union, who put in another call to the facilities manager, who forwarded my résumé to the hiring manager, Deidre. We set up my interview for a Friday morning, two weeks exactly since I boarded a Greyhound bus from Port Authority and got off in Atlantic City, my eyes red from crying, my suitcase filled with a few things from the apartment I’d shared with Matthew. My future, which had once felt sturdy and assured, a ship I was steering, revealed itself to be much more fragile than that: a candy dish that I had mishandled. Now I was sweeping the pieces back into my hands, trying not to get cut.
The day of my interview, I stopped at the bar near the penny slots. It was only 11 a.m. but the bartender didn’t bat an eye when I ordered a vodka and soda. A slumped-over man two stools away glanced at me in a slow, side-eyed way that reminded me of a lizard, and the sweat from my palms left a stamp on the bar top. Already slot machines whirred around us. The lights’ glow brought out the crevices around gamblers’ mouths, the circles under their eyes, the sagging skin around their chins. Every now and then, some coins crashed out a metal chute or a cocktail waitress clicked by in her heels with a tray of screwdrivers, but mostly there was just the empty, meaningless dinging and the lethargic dim of a large room designed to keep out natural light.
The vodka stilled my nerves, which had been shot since I left the city. I checked my emails while I sipped my drink and saw that another blogger had written me, to ask for a comment on Matthew. I deleted the message. I had plenty to say about Matthew, but those were private, jilted thoughts, and I figured the only way I could salvage even a shred of dignity from the whole situation was to say nothing. The art world loved nothing as much as a controversy, but I’d retreated home for a chance to be someone else—a reprieve from humiliation as the central fact of my life. The week before I’d clicked on a link someone sent me to an article in Jezebel, only to be greeted with a photo of myself crying, my mouth hanging open in a dumb gape, mascara running down my cheeks in thick rivulets. Is This Art? the titled asked. I closed the browser window before I could read another word.
The vodka was cheap and had a sharp, medicinal taste, but soon enough its blunting warmth crept into my throat. I wasn’t worried about the job interview, but it was unsettling to be in Atlantic City again—coming home had filled me with an inarticulate dread. It was in the atmosphere, suggestive and hazy. In the feral cats that flattened themselves to shimmy through gaps in boarded-up storefronts. In the empty casinos that loomed along the boardwalk with darkened windows and chains slung across their doors. It was in the patrons lugging their oxygen tanks behind them on little wheeled carts, clear tubes running into their noses, and the tattered posters on the telephone poles pleading for information about a missing teenage girl. The entire town was like a dreamscape tilted toward nightmare.
I wanted a second drink but knew that would likely lead to a third, and whatever pity was being extended to me would evaporate if I showed up to the interview drunk. And, as much as I hated to admit it, I needed the job, needed the money if I was ever going to start over. It was only my second week back home, living with my mother again, and I had already resolved to stay only as long as it took to save up for my first month’s rent and security on a new place back in New York. By my math, if I scrimped, I could be back in the city by September. I tried not to imagine where I’d end up—a dingy sublet, a windowless closet, mice scrabbling in the walls. But I thought that even the worst of my options would feel like a small success.
I signaled for my check, and as I thumbed through my cash I stopped to finger the two-dollar bill I kept behind the plastic pane that held my driver’s license. I took it out and laid it on the bar. My father had always carried it, claimed it gave him good luck.
The edges of the bill were velvet between my fingers, though now one of the corners was missing. On the back, where it showed the Trumbull painting of the Declaration being signed, my father had drawn a lightning bolt above Ben Franklin’s head, though now it was covered with a splotch of dried glue. The guy did a lot for electricity, my father used to say. I owe him. When I was little it had made me so proud—to look across the water from our town three miles to the south and know that my father helped make Atlantic City glow.
I loaned the bill to Matthew for good luck before his last interview with Artforum four months ago, and I didn’t see it again until it turned up in the center of a collage in his last show. I was charmed that it seemed to mean something to him and pleased with my own magnanimity. But underneath it all, maybe I felt a change in my grip on him. Maybe I thought that two-dollar bill bought me what I shouldn’t need to purchase: His loyalty. His love.
In the collage, he had included it among a recent dry cleaning ticket, an electric bill, a hair tie, a grocery list on the back of an index card: bread avocado butter lettuce detergent. Layered underneath were slices of a photo of us. I recognized it right away—it was the first picture we had ever taken together as a couple, on the rooftop of a new hotel in DUMBO, the lights of the city sparkling behind us. I found a sliver of the image that contained my eye, another of Matthew’s mouth, my fingers on the stem of a glass, a slice of Matthew’s forehead. All the meaning and glitter obscured by the drudgery of daily life. It was a bad, crude piece, which only added to the insult—it only became art after I tore the bill away, hands shaking with rage, leaving just a corner, a single filigreed 2, behind. I read later that it was one of the first pieces to sell. People said I must have been in on it.
If only that was true.
I slapped a ten on the bar top and slid the two-dollar bill back in my wallet, climbed down from my stool. A woman at a slot machine behind me mumbled a curse as she watched the numbers spin and, one by one, roll to a halt. Her expression shifted, her dumb, openmouthed hope contracting into grim disappointment. She s
hoved more coins into the machine like she was trying to teach it a lesson.
I hadn’t been inside the casino since the new tower had been completed. The ground floor of it was made up of a long, tunnellike hallway that curved around a swimming pool, which was capped off by a glass dome that was filled with rattan cabanas and lounge chairs, lush with imported palm trees and hibiscus. The casino had named it the Swim Club. Even from the outside, it reeked of something saccharine and something chemical: piña colada mix and chlorine, suntan lotion and canned pineapple. The cocktail waitresses wore aqua bikinis and delivered brightly colored drinks on wicker trays. The spa was just across the hall, the entrance a metal door installed in floor-to-ceiling plate glass. Maybe it was the effect of that quick drink, but between all the glass of the Swim Club and the spa’s façade I was reminded of an aquarium, and I had the slightly unnerving, claustrophobic feeling of being underwater and being watched. I looked up to the ceiling, found the glossy eye of the nearest security camera, jerked my gaze away.
The spa door looked heavy but was light when I pulled on the handle, and I staggered back as it swung open. I looked up to the camera again, knowing my every misstep was being transmitted, recorded, noticed. Before Matthew’s show, it might not have bothered me in the same way, but now the cameras felt pointed, their gaze transformed from omniscient and impersonal to invasive, judgmental.
Unlike the casino floor, with its layers of stimulation—chiming machines, clicking poker chips, dizzying spin of roulette wheels—there was a chastising hush in the spa. I was immediately conscious of the way my cheap polyester dress swished as I walked. I had left the city in a rush, not bothering to take much, and so the only interview-suitable clothes I had were things I’d left at my mother’s years ago. I could’ve brought more from New York—the Alexander Wang cocktail dress Matthew bought me for my birthday, the Rachel Comey oxfords I treated myself to after my first raise—but the morning I left I’d looked into my closet and everything seemed like the wardrobe for a play I’d never even seen.
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