“Sure,” she says too loud, drunk.
They walk without touching each other at an awkward fake-stroll pace to his house.
It’s late when they wake. The sun is indistinguishable from clouds, all of it bright gray.
Cornelia puts on her grandmother’s black mink and stands up straight.
They walk out quietly, since Matt is probably asleep and hungover and might have a hungover guest. They move toward the car, followed by their stately shadows on the frozen ground. It’s only when they get to the BMW that Jamey sees key scratches and a shattered windshield.
“Oh my God!” Cornelia says. “Was that—did that happen last night?”
“Must have. It’s been happening on this block lately,” Jamey says evenly, and ushers her into the car, desperately collecting the dress’s hem like dropped sails onto a boat.
He feels eyes watching from Elise’s window.
“We can’t drive like this!” Cornelia says shrilly.
“Sure we can,” Jamey says, getting in the front seat.
Cornelia looks at him—and she suddenly loathes him, knowing something, without knowing what.
On his way back, he checks himself in the rearview mirror. The day comes through the cracked glass to make a map of lines on his face, a diagram, a collage like the magazine cut-ups girls create for mix-tape covers. Dull light is harder to handle than bright sun—he squints, barely able to keep his eyes open. It makes him look like he’s grinning.
MARCH 1986
For the next couple days, Elise paces the apartment.
Girl, you fucked up that car!
She’s violently jealous, a plastic toy thrown into a fire, her white body turning liquid in the heat. She keeps playing a film from what she assembled—a blue dress, the idea of that rich, perfumed cunt, his drunk tongue, his bed (where Elise has never been), tuxedo slippers under a chair, and the couple sleeping, rank and sweet, while the sun rises like a peach.
Pull it together, Elise, she thinks one morning, and shakily puts on mascara.
At the kitchen table, she smokes and calls his house.
He comes over that evening, hands in coat pockets, looks at her overfilled ashtray.
“Sit down,” she suggests coldly.
He does.
“I’m fucking really sorry about your car,” she says, and she does sound sorry.
“Okay.”
Silence.
“Your turn,” she says, snapping her gum.
“For?” he asks.
“An apology.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Right in my face,” she says. “You think I deserve that?”
“In your face? What, were you spying on me?”
“Spying?” she sputters. “You live right fucking next door. I have to see you.”
Ugh. He couldn’t even get hard in his room that night. Cornelia resorted to a hand job, but she looked like a kid tying a ribbon on a kitten or putting the head back on a doll, earnest and flustered. He pretended to pass out.
“I didn’t know we couldn’t see other people,” he says without conviction.
“So you can just use me and all that.”
“Why is this a one-way thing? Are you not getting anything out of it?” he flails.
“I’m not getting enough.”
“What else do you want?”
“I want to do things with you,” she says softly.
“But. I don’t know what you want to do,” he says nonsensically.
She thinks. And then, guardedly, she states: “I want to go to Paddy’s Arcade.”
Nervous and uncomfortable, they walk down the stairs.
He unlocks the car as she winces at the sight of the windshield.
“Whoops,” she mumbles.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“Can I smoke if I roll down the window?” she asks, desperate.
“I guess,” he says, doing a U-turn.
She lights her cigarette and looks at the dull city lights. She turns to him. “So what have you been up to?”
When he looks at her, she’s trying not to smile.
He can’t help but smile too. “You’re something else,” he says.
At the arcade, she’s immediately giddy, grudgeless, unrepentant. He notices it right away. She becomes royal here, strutting with her endless legs and high chin. He changes dollars to quarters and they cruise around the mad, loud space. The spirit infects them, and they stare with big eyes at everything.
“Whatcha gonna play? Pick something, Jamey. You got to pick.”
She puts a Red Hot in his mouth as if to give him strength.
The glare and ring-bop-ding of the games, the black lights illuminating the neon shapes on the carpet, make a dreamscape of wins and losses.
The soldiers and aliens die bloodless deaths, careening through space in pixelated pain.
Jamey’s face is dappled in these lights, a palette of lemon-yellow and pink and lavender stars, and he ignores the other boys, who smell like popcorn and fabric softener, and his eyes focus like lasers on the tilting screen after he drops in his coins.
“Play again. I just want you to play,” she says when each game is done.
He puts in more quarters. He leans, his shoulders narrowed, he jerks back. He fires and fires, decimating the machines, and his thumb is almost bleeding. Numbers float! Monsters help!
When the game is done, his cheeks are hot and his eyes are radiant. He’s broken out of the shackles of himself.
She sucks on his lip after kissing him, jumping at him like a kid too big to catch and hold. While they walk, she pulls his arm around her, then matches her gait to his.
She finally plays one round of Donkey Kong against him.
He looks at her, jaw dropped, after she destroys him.
“What can I say.” She grins, shrugging with one shoulder.
She rips cotton candy with her long magenta nails and stuffs it in his mouth. She holds out her Diet Coke in a big waxy cup for him to sip through the straw.
He’s unexpectedly excited by what they must look like. He’s enjoying being self-conscious tonight. No one he knows is going to show up.
He’s seen other couples look like he and Elise must look, and he knew they knew things he didn’t know. Those couples were always at movie theaters, or in Central Park, in New Haven pizzerias, at Montauk carnivals. Kids who chew gum with mouths open. Kids who yell and scream, with pleasure, with juvenile madness, fucking around, wrestling and flirting, making a scene, making fools of themselves, the girls in the guys’ laps, all singing one line in a radio song’s chorus together, and then falling apart and laughing at their outburst. Kids who pile later into one car whose side mirror is duct-taped on and whose ratty seats are covered in tiger-print towels, and they have nowhere to go.
He’s on his way to swim laps when Thalia comes out of the pool room with Darcy, goggles pushed up on their sleek heads.
“Jamey!” says Thalia, as if running into him in a hotel lobby in Rome.
“Hey there,” he says, trying to move past them.
The aquamarine mist rises.
“Cornelia said to say hello,” she says with a twisted smile.
“Please say hello from me,” Jamey says.