Even though he wants to take it, he shakes his head, afraid of balancing the cig and a match without falling out of the car, which is now darting through Providence like an amusement park ride.
“I thought smoking was back,” Georgia says. “I can’t keep up anymore.” She wraps her full lips around her cigarette and inhales, deeply. Her lipstick makes him think of seaweed, wet and dark, and that makes him think of sex, so he tries to push other images into his mind—Miró’s Nocturnals, the ‘86 World Series—but it’s too late. He’s sitting in Georgia’s car and he can see her calf muscles push against her leggings when she brakes. Every time Elliot is around Georgia he thinks like this. He tries the direct approach and looks right at her, blatantly. Even lustfully, he thinks. Her hair is dyed an unnatural black and falls in tight springs around her face and down her shoulders. He imagines her pubic hair, where it begins and how it must be wild and untamed. Her voice makes him think of a smoky bar.
“What?” she says when she catches him staring, but he just shrugs and tries to stop imagining her naked.
She pops in a tape, Counting Crows, and keeps smoking. Her eyes are hidden behind crooked Wayfarers, but Elliot knows they are dark brown, deep set, lined in black. He has known Georgia since he was seven and she lived in Manhattan, on Bank Street, in a fifth-floor walk-up that looked the way he has come to think apartments in Paris must look. Whenever he thinks of that apartment it seems there were constants—sheer curtains always moved in the breeze, fresh flowers sat in bowls, the espresso machine gurgled. There was always sunlight, somewhere.
They used to visit her, Elliot and his mother, every Saturday, from their oversized Colonial in Chappaqua, forty minutes by train. Georgia had three cats, Abyssinians, and cat hair all over her clothes and couch. She always had a disaster—a broken heart, unrequited love, or the wrong man pursuing her. Once, a former boyfriend even stalked her and she lived, or so she told them, in fear for months. His mother would listen; she would nurse Georgia’s frequent hangovers; they would all three go for a walk; Georgia would nod and smoke and not take any of his mother’s advice. Back home in Chappaqua his mother made him take a hot bath right away. While she did the laundry she mumbled, about germs and cats and Georgia.
“Providence is such a hole,” Elliot blurts above the BMW’s noisy muffler. Having thought of Georgia on Bank Street, it almost hurts to think of her anywhere else. “How can you stand it?”
Georgia shrugs. “It’s not so bad,” she says.
But it is. Everyone keeps reminding Elliot how lucky he is to be here, at Brown, but he misses the lawns and trees of home, the order that prevails there. Georgia is here because she teaches at RISD, but mostly she is an artist; she paints in thick, dark oils. Her paintings are always described as masculine, but Elliot doesn’t agree. They are big, intimidating, earthy, like Georgia herself. Once, in her bathroom on Bank Street, he took her pantyhose that were hanging over the shower to dry and sniffed them, the feet and crotch and long leg part in between. Under the smell of Dove soap, he caught a vague whiff of Georgia. Remembering it, he leans toward her to try to find it again. But all he smells is stale smoke and old leather.
They are already at the cutoff for the airport.
“This state is so small you can’t even get lost,” Elliot mumbles.
“Have you been to the Indian place?” Georgia asks. “We should do Indian when you get back.”
That is not the way to talk to your friend’s kid, but Georgia has no experience. She did have her own kid, but she gave it up for adoption and then moved to Mexico. Elliot knows all her secrets from the days when he used to go with his mother to visit her. That kid would be his own age, twenty. A boy. “I didn’t even hold him,” Georgia told his mother on one of those long-ago Saturdays. She did not sound sad. “I handed him over and headed south.” Briefly, Elliot wonders what became of him, Georgia’s son. Maybe he’s like me, he thinks. Maybe he’s even at Brown. Maybe he and Georgia pass each other on Waterman Street every day.
“It’s bring-your-own,” Georgia is saying, still talking about the Indian restaurant.
“Whatever,” he says. Georgia and Elliot have lived seven blocks from each other all semester and this is the first time he’s seen her.
Georgia leans close to him. “Give your mother a big kiss for me, okay?”