The women watch his back as they dry their faces with towels, not moving to the locker room until he disappears.
He swims with great energy. He could have repaired things just now, charmed these girls back, righted the ship. It reminds him of a story that a drunk man at a beach club party once told him whose significance he didn’t understand then but might understand today. The guy dropped his suit at the dry cleaners on Eightieth and Lexington, and decided not to get it, for no reason, and to never go to that dry cleaners again. The man laughed when he told Jamey this tale, sipped his Dewar’s and ginger ale, and wandered off in a cheerfully unbound way.
When he gets to Elise’s bedroom tonight, she’s wearing a cheap red negligee, and while he built himself up before coming over, he now feels sorry for her and her trashy nightgown.
Dammit, he thinks.
“What?” she says.
“Nothing,” he says, deflated.
They make love, and lie in bed.
“How come you never ask me anything?” she says, turning the light back on after he turned it off.
“What’s your favorite color?” he tries, and he’s not sure if he’s being kind.
She takes it seriously. “I’ve got a few. Black cars. Pink roses. You know? I like the blue what’s in Club Med commercials. That kind of beach, I never even been near.”
“You want to go to a beach like that?” he says because he has to say something.
“I mean, who wouldn’t? What else you want to know?”
“Umm. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Elise shrivels her nose. “I know what I don’t want to be.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s a whole other conversation,” she says.
“What’s the saddest you’ve ever been?”
“When my sister died. She wasn’t my blood sister, but I loved her.” Elise holds her hair so he can see the name on her neck: Donna Sierra in azure-blue italics. “She died a asthma.”
“I’m sorry, Elise,” he says, turning on his side to look at her. He suddenly wonders why he never asked about the tattoo.
“Ask me something that’s not upsetting.” She’s lying back, one arm across her eyes.
“What would you be if you were an animal?”
“Shit, I don’t know. A jaguar.” She smiles.
“What would you be if you were a flower?”
“I got no idea,” she says defensively, because she doesn’t know flowers.
“A black iris,” he tells her grandly, feeling different now.
“What’s it look like?”
“It’s…unusual. It shines in this really dark, strange way.”
“Well, fuck you too.”
“That was a compliment!”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Let’s see,” he says, and he runs his hand up her thigh, distracted.
“What’s my favorite ice cream,” she says.
“What’s your favorite ice cream?”
“Peppermint at Friendly’s.”
He kisses her neck.
Elise puts her hand between her legs to close it off. “I’m sore.”
He takes the straps off her shoulders and bites her nipples.
“It’s my turn,” she says. “Even though I already know all about you. Since I pay attention.”
“Ha,” he says dully but playfully.
“What’s your favorite color?”
“I don’t discriminate.”
“Gee, aren’t you fucking correct. What’s the saddest you ever been?”
“I’m always sad.”
“That’s not true.”
“I was born sad.”
“What kind of animal are you?”
“I’m a human animal.”
He tastes her neck, kissing, soft as a cream puff. He moves so slowly that she’s the one who arches her back, starting over, finding his mouth with hers.
And here they are again, and it hurts but that makes it pungent, evil, and good. “Wait—wait for me,” she tells him sternly at the end, teeth gritted, and he does.
They’re spent. Bodies light as ash.
“Dayum,” she says a few moments later.
And for a while, the room isn’t grim, the paint isn’t cracked, the sounds of toilets flushing and dogs barking and people fighting don’t make it through the disintegrating walls. Their golden chamber is oily with incense, studded with jewels and stars and thorns, hidden from the city, the floor covered in fur rugs.
Her red negligee is divine.
They discover a diner, with a quilted-metal exterior, always busy with senior citizens and kids from the nearby Hebrew school and housewives in jogging suits. Each table has a miniature jukebox, and the grilled cheese is butter-crusty on the outside, creamy on the inside, the milkshake too thick for a straw. It’s their station, their headquarters outside the bedroom.
She mashes an onion ring into her mouth. “This kid just keeps tapping on the glass tanks. I said if I ever fucking see him again, I’ll crush his junior-high ass.”
Jamey stares at her.
“What?” she asks, eating.
“Do you listen to yourself?”
“I’m not deaf.”
“Are you unable to express things without curse words?” he asks, sounding like an old-lady teacher. “You’re going to alienate people.”
“People who? What the fuck do you care?”
What does he care?
She plays with the fake-gold necklace hanging over her turtleneck and grins, watching him be flustered. Later, she’ll think this conversation revealed that—at least subconsciously—he thinks about a future.
When they drive somewhere, she scratches his neck like he’s a cat, distracting him so he forgets to turn or signal or stop. His face is masculine, in a bountiful way, and she stares at his dimple, his teeth, his sly mouth.
He has a way of sluggishly shrugging, or winking—or slowly fingering a shirt button—that works against the way his mind darts in strange directions, and the chasm this creates draws Elise down into him.
“When I’m not with you, I just sit around and think about fucking you,” she says at the diner one day, and he winces.
“Why would you say that in a public place?” he hoarsely whispers. “Everyone can hear you!”
Now that he’s told her to stop cursing, she does it more. Is she playing? She’s poker-faced, like an Indian, like Pocahontas, eating onion rings.
One night he’s tired after writing a paper in ten straight hours on coffee and Vivarin.
She lights candles in her room, turns up the R&B station, and breaks out the baby oil.
He’s terrified. “You’re not serious.”
“Oh, I’m gonna take care of you, boy.”
She straddles his back on the bed and hums to Luther Vandross as she works. He grins into the covers with humiliation. He doesn’t do this. He’s not here. His body battles being relaxed. It’s like he landed in some MTV nightmare, some late-night boots-knockin’ remix. But it feels good, and he ultimately can’t pretend that it doesn’t, not even to himself.
Spring break’s coming up. The guys are hitching a ride out of Teterboro, meeting Matt’s family in Aspen—for a week of skiing, Armagnac, and braised elk!
Jamey’s got a better idea.