The Newport house is empty: a briny wind whipping the trees, surf pounding the ice-laced beach, a fireplace, a bed. And no one watching.
“Not going to make it to Aspen,” Jamey says one day, clapping his hands like a corporate breaker of bad news.
“Why not?” Matt says.
“The Newport house’ll be empty, so I was thinking about that.”
“Of course it’s empty, it’s freezing and it’s a beach and there’s nothing to do,” Matt says.
“It’ll be cozy,” Jamey says, and actually blushes.
“So you can’t leave her for one whole week?”
“I could easily leave her.”
“You know, the fact that you never bring her over says ever-y-thing there is to say,” Matt singsongs.
Jamey rolls his eyes. “She’d feel so welcome.”
“Why not?”
“You said she was ‘casing’ the place.”
“Forget about that,” Matt says, because he can’t bring himself to apologize.
Jamey snorts. “It’s not like she wants to come over, trust me.”
They stare at each other.
“Who is she? Do you know who her parents are? Do you know anything about her?”
But Jamey doesn’t want to know her for the same reason that—(his brain starts fuzzing up here, trying to save him from the thought he’s about to think)—for the same reason a farmer isn’t close to his animals—it’s not supposed to last. Jamey burns with shame at this unbidden idea, and Matt sees his face redden.
“Are you in love with her or something?”
“Are you fucking out of your mind?”
Watching her eat toast, or tie her sneakers, or sleep—Jamey is repulsed.
The slant of her eyes is lower-class. She chews gum like a whore. She leaves skid marks in the toilet. The fact that she irons her jeans is pathetic. Her face is wide and empty when he uses words like disingenuous and amorphous.
He doesn’t even know where he gets these notions. How does a whore chew gum? Who says whore anymore?
And the disgust breaks like a fever. He sees the light in her eyes when she laughs, braids falling over her face. The way she looks at him when he walks in the door. The smell of her neck when they come together, something feral and otherworldly, salt and roses, life and death.
And his head goes back and forth. What’s he doing hanging out with this girl? And then he thinks he’s just really fucked up. And then he wants to fall asleep and leave consciousness behind before it ruins him.
But he invites her to Newport anyway.
Packing, she feels excited. And stupid. She knows the trip will be humiliating in vague, as-of-now-unknown ways, and she stands outside in the brisk morning with her backpack, smoking, waiting for him to leave his house. So much of life is about standing on the curb, willing to see what rolls up.
She squints at birds on the telephone wire, the line of small bodies never static—as one lands on the cable, one from the other end of the group takes off into flight. A masterpiece of balance.
Driving, Jamey tries to fill the silence, saying inane things like: Ever been to Newport? No, well it’s a pretty town. You like lobster? Maybe we’ll have a big seafood dinner one night. A “seafood dinner”? He sounds like a TV commercial. Did you pack your bathing suit? Just kidding.
They get cheeseburgers at McDonald’s, and she holds out a greasy paper of ketchup so he can dip his fries and drive. She finally asks if he minds listening to the radio; the Knicks game is on. He can tell she just wants him to shut up too.
Late afternoon, they turn into the gate. Her eyes take in the long driveway and the elms arching over it, and then the size of the white house, the dozens of windows reflecting sky.
“Wow,” she says. “It’s huge.”
But she doesn’t give much away, holds her cards tight as they walk up massive slate steps to the door, flanked by pots where camellias flourish in the summer.
He and Elise bumble around, reviving the foyer, the kitchen, the library, stirring the sunshine-thick rot of a still environment.
She opens a closet to put away her jacket and finds it stuffed.
“Whose are these?” she asks.
He looks at slickers and sandals and umbrellas. “Everyone’s. No one’s in particular.”
“Did people forget them?”
Jamey tries to understand her confusion.
“I mean,” she begins again. “Who lives here?”
“It’s a summer house. A second home. No one lives here.”
Elise shuts the door, unconvinced. She imagines people walking around somewhere without jackets.
Mouse droppings have collected in an antique bowl on the piano like rice grains in a monk’s cup. She plays one note and looks at the painting on the wall.
“Who’s that?” she asks, intuitively intimidated by the portrait.
“My grandmother. They call her Binkie.”
The house is rejecting Elise like a body refuses a transplanted organ. Cells conspire. The rugs, the roll-top desk, the sun-faded Economist stacks—they want her out.
They drink coffee on the couch. The chintz looks to Elise like outer-space flowers: unnatural, unearthly, a pattern of symmetrical asymmetry. A garden written in code. Sinister.
Elise wants him to be glad he brought her, and she knows part of the reason they’re here is sexual fantasy, so she does what she believes will make him happy. She starts to kiss him on the sofa, pushes up his teal sweater to lick a line down his stomach, then she unzips his pants. Of course she got her period yesterday, which couldn’t be worse timing, but she can put off his knowing if she gives him a blow job now. Her eyes flick up to his eyes as she works.
Dusk hits the windows and turns to inky night. The silk lampshades are brighter. Finished, she moves back to the couch and leans against him. He sits with knees spread, eyes bright, and then sighs and pulls it together. A couple drops of milk on the Persian rug.
They eat roast-beef sandwiches for dinner. He listens to her talk without hearing what she’s saying. If he closes his eyes, the hard way she ends words, the youngness in the middle stretch of a syllable, the innocence caught in one long lilt, followed by jadedness in a staccato phrase, like gunshots—he could be listening to a sixteen-year-old boy.
She hunkers down while she eats, a quarterback on the bench.
When she’s quiet, she sometimes looks cross or like she’s trying to remember something. She seems so lean in moments like this, and ungiving. A lot of bone and fury, and nothing else. She’s dry metal, the glint of mica ringing in your ear.
She takes Jamey’s hand, kisses his knuckles.
He’s suddenly aware of how plush she is, how luscious, within, or somewhere. What’s so exciting about her is there’s no room, in theory, for what’s inside. Her heart is voluptuous, it has a tongue and a pout, dense fur, a huge lake of blood, a dazzle of lash and white fire, where he floats and dreams, borne on lust.