“I know what you’re implying, that’s not the point,” Jamey says, his voice oddly high.
Matt sounds like a politician: “I’m on your side.”
“There aren’t sides!” Jamey says.
Silence.
“This conversation really upsets you,” Matt says.
Then Jamey laughs that devilish way. He slips Doublemint into his mouth, and sneaks a look in the hall mirror at his freshly combed hair. In the darkness between houses, for the brief time it takes him to cross yards, he feels as inevitable as an animal.
Elise moves from tank to tank, cleaning the water with her tiny net. Fish dart down to the gravel, afraid of her hand.
Her pussy hurts, and her thigh muscles are sore, and she’s buzzing with love. She smiles as she works. The tight seam of her jeans runs between her legs and amplifies the pain, and she cherishes it.
Jamey gets to know Robbie’s men.
Craig loves pistachios.
Steven has orange hair and a pig nose but is somehow charming.
Gilbert is too young for his double chin.
Barney’s white turtleneck clings to his breasts.
The characteristic linking them all: harmlessness.
They sit around the living room together, watching All in the Family or The Jeffersons, ordering Chinese, groping for small talk.
Jamey sounds condescending if he asks about their jobs or lives, arrogant if he doesn’t.
And he can’t read them either.
“That BMW out there yours?” asks Barney with a straight face. “Great car.”
“So do you like Yale then?” asks Robbie with a straight face. “Great school.”
Tonight, after sex, Jamey showers the stickiness off.
Suddenly Elise steps in, douses her face, then hands him the soap. He’s never showered with a girl.
He’s not sure what to do, and gingerly washes her arms.
“You can kiss my cunt but you can’t wash it?” she asks.
Jamey crookedly grins and holds the bar uselessly.
She pulls his hand between her legs.
Their skin is rubbery and slick, stained by the amethyst curtain. She kneels in the basin and gives him head.
Afterward, while she blow-dries her hair, he pretends to look for aspirin but wants to find the birth-control pills she says she’s taking. He doesn’t see them, although he’s not sure what they look like, and he feels sick.
He leaves, his hair wet and face blank, and she can tell something’s wrong. She can often tell something’s wrong, since after sex he usually hates her and wants to disappear or die, but then he comes back the next night, or the night after, and that’s all that matters.
Some mornings, he studies while she sleeps. Or she watches him read, trailing nails along his arm, their bodies crisscrossed with sunlight coming through tattered blinds. She can do this for an hour. It always leads to the same thing. She’s wet when he touches her.
To her he was a virgin and she took his virginity. He was an unpicked fruit turned to sugar. His lack of skills in the beginning, his brutality, his wide-eyed need for her to spell things out, to guide his hand or his mouth—all this made her want him more.
And his cock is thick, long but not so long that it’s silly, with a pink sheen like marble on a humid day. When she sees the spot of pre-cum on his boxers, she shudders—and then she’s a queen of sex, a Maria Callas in bed, an Olympic track star in the sheets, a sensual and deliberate teacher.
But they never do anything outside this room. They don’t go to dinner again. They don’t do breakfast or lunch either. Sometimes she asks if he wants eggs when they wake up, asks what time his first class starts. She gets upset when he has to leave. She crosses her arms at the door as he goes down the stairs but she watches him to the last step, till he’s gone.
She starts calling his house every evening to see when he’ll come over.
“Hello?” says Matt.
“Is Jamey there?”
“He’s not back yet.”
“All right,” she says glumly like she doesn’t believe him.
She calls every half hour.
“Is Jamey there?” she asks.
“I will tell him you called,” Matt says in an aggravated, measured voice.
“Yeah, tell him I called.”
“I will—”
Click—she hangs up.
When Jamey walks in, Matt looks at him.
“What?” he asks.
“That psycho is stalking you.”
At work, Elise takes a smoke break in the bleak lot, staring at a shopping cart capsized in dead grass. She taps ashes and keeps her shoulders high against the cold.
She believes he might love her at some point. She never kidded herself that this would be easy; she just knows it will be worth it. They hail from different planets but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. He’s coming around. The cold wind makes her eyes wet.
Matt’s taking Thalia to the Winter Ball, and Thalia has a friend visiting who needs a date, and that’s how Jamey ends up taking Cornelia Founder to the dance. A Southern girl in a powder-blue gown, she laughs all night, like archaic flute music, holding Jamey’s arm.
There are shenanigans in the ballroom, where tinsel hangs from chandeliers. An a cappella rendition of “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” boys in the girls’ bathroom sharing pristine cocaine, Timothy Gerrigan vomiting into a Champagne bucket.
“I’ve heard about you,” Cornelia breathes into Jamey’s ear as they sit at the silver-cloth-draped table late night.
Jamey and Matt, Cornelia and Thalia, and the rest of their Social Register crew, either grew up on the same block or went to boarding school or summered or skied together. They were raised in a pod, incubated in the thick and slippery gel of legacy. They arrived at Yale intact as a clan.
The group looks fine in tuxedos and dresses. Harry Smythe III, there, laughing with Beth Von Trotta and Alexandra Essex—they glitter with importance.
Why shouldn’t they? They’ve been doused in lessons, experiences, attention, books, toys, films, saltwater and sunshine, space and quiet, vitamins, music, discipline, orthodontia, reward, vaccinations, role models of gentility and success, cake and lemonade, support, guidance.
Harry wears his granddad’s cufflinks: tiny gold fox faces that look at the world sideways, unblinking, in the blur of his gestures.
Jamey does one bump of coke, and finishes his scotch. Cornelia is warm, and giggles into his neck when someone cracks a joke. She smokes like she never had a cigarette, coughing, pearl earrings winking.
He drives her home, concentrating on the yellow line but thinking about unfolding the blue silk. He wants to put his hand down there. At the house, he parks and turns to her, touches her mouth with his thumb, then leans in to kiss her.
Soon she’s spreading her legs a little as he reaches down, the car dark and scattered with light. Her mouth is too wet on his mouth. She doesn’t do much else.
Eventually they break apart. He smooths his hair and smiles at her, in his way—apologizing, happy, nihilistic.
She furtively snaps open her clutch and hunches over to swipe on Clinique lipstick.
“Shall we go inside?” he asks.