Elise now pictures this girl arranging daisies in a vase, polishing silver.
Jamey keeps putting her beer on the magazine so it doesn’t water-stain the table. Elise sees old scuffed furniture, but this is an eighteenth-century English sideboard. She twirls her hair with black-tipped magenta nails, a Turner seascape as her backdrop, and luckily she doesn’t catch his expression. It’s the face he makes when their story sounds like a rumor. What on Earth are they doing?
“You have to open the flue first,” he says, reaching up into the charred space. “Like so.”
He crouches, wedging newspaper cones under an X of kindling and logs. He touches a match to the paper. Fire consumes Jamey’s construction, popping and hissing, and twigs turn molten orange and sizzle into smoke and ash, while the alligator bark starts to glow.
Jamey’s face and neck and hands are yellow as he watches.
They gaze at the fire, throwing on another log whenever the time is right, looking through art books like James Whistler paintings, Edward Weston’s mountains, an Audubon tome whose plates Jamey turns from egret to pelican to raven.
When they go to bed, she drinks a glass of water because she’s parched. She’s deeply dreamy and sleepy. That fire changed the whole house, like it finally got a heart, but the sheets feel extra cold, and they hold each other.
He sips orange juice in the kitchen, and he smells on the glass his own breath—his mouth—in that way that’s usually impossible, even if you blow into the cup of your hand. Nothing has ever made him so aware of mortality. He gets it.
Then, bang! It’s gone again.
He hands her a tartan cape to stay warm, and she looks like a Scottish warrior as they go walking through the lanes. Massive houses are almost visible behind hedges and ivy-covered brick walls, looming, moving as they pass. Once in a while, a bronze square indicates that someone’s home, or smoke chuffs slowly from a chimney into the dark sky.
“I was out in a place like this, upstate New York, for like a week,” she says.
“Oh yeah?” he says. “Was it nice?”
“It was nice, we went swimming, played softball in the town. It was just weird, you know, ’cause I was staying with this family. It was like a program.”
“A Fresh Air Fund sort of thing?” he asks after a moment.
“Yeah.”
They look at each other like: I wonder if we can talk about these things.
“That’s cool you got to go, but yeah, I imagine it was strange,” he says, his tone gently closing this part of the conversation.
He’s thinking of a summer, he was fourteen or fifteen. The Kellogg family down the road hosted a brother and sister from Harlem, Josiah and Kelly (or Kerry? or Cary?), and Jamey ended up bringing Josiah over for a barbecue. Everyone treated the kid well, including Bats and Binkie, asking about his school and his summer. Josiah was tall and spindly, wearing someone’s Izod shirt. But Jamey overheard Bats the next day laughing with his friend Greg Lamar about the Kelloggs. What, they’re Mother Teresa now? Better than the rest? Feeling especially guilty about that IPO, are we, Jeff? Jamey thought about how the maid Lysoled the downstairs bathroom right after the barbecue was done and the guests gone, and he knew someone in his family asked the maid to do that, and he knew why.
“Are you listening to me?” Elise says now, halfway through a story about strawberries and a sunburn.
Walking with Elise is like walking with a hyperactive child, because she turns around and strides backward to talk to him, or runs a few steps forward to dunk an imaginary basketball, or does a Crip Walk with a straight face while he bends to tie his shoe.
But when she holds him around the waist as they stroll, he doesn’t respond with his own arm around her waist, and she eventually lets go. Even though there’s no one looking, he still feels seen.
The morning they’re going to leave, Elise stands at the kitchen window, the T-shirt she slept in falling off one shoulder. A deer has come to the yard to see if there’s anything green to nibble. She’s watching the animal.
The doe steps through the grass, muted by dew, as if moving through a mine field of light and dark. Jamey steps behind Elise, wraps his arms around her waist.
What if, he’s thinking, for the first time. She leans back, easing weight against him. And he feels it as her saying, Yes, exactly.
The deer stops, bites, chews while listening—her big brown eyes not frightened but intensely alert.
Elise is taking one last hot soak when he comes in to brush his teeth—she’s fallen in love with the claw-foot tub and is sad to leave it. She lies back, braids hanging over the ivory edge. Her eyes are closed, goose-bumped knees high.
Then he sees it: threads of blood from between her legs, unspooling in the slow motion of ethereal things.
He knew she had her period; they’d been putting down towels in the bed. But there’s something about this—so delicate and terrifying….
In the car, she bites her nail while he drives.
“So, you wanna drop stuff at your house and come over?” she asks.
“I sort of need to collect myself.”
“Collect what?”
“Get it together for this upcoming week.”
She looks at the highway, the neon signs for Arby’s, for Jiffy Lube. A white van next to them has cheap black letters glued to its side: ST. LUKE’S HOUSE FOR MEN. Beyond, a landscape of suburbs and industry is dark rubble covered with a thousand rhinestones. The stars in the sky are browned out. She uses a fake smile to hold her place in the world.
A couple times, Jamey has the almost comical urge to swerve into the oncoming stream of headlights. He hasn’t felt that in at least a month, and he’s disappointed to feel it again, his hands sore when they get home from gripping the wheel.
When Jamey makes it into his house, he’s weirdly pleased by the clack-clack of a jeans button spinning in the dryer, and the lamps blazing, the furnace on high. He closes his bedroom door, and only then realizes how tired he is after he and Elise had to generate enough humanity between them to battle the cold and empty mansion in Newport. He’s exhausted. Finished.
He thinks about the things they maybe left there—a satin thong in the sheets, Diet Pepsi in the fridge, a People magazine. Drops of bacteria that can grow and change the environment, evolving the empty house.
“So, what time you gonna be here tonight?” she calls to ask the next day.
“Not sure.” He squirms. “I have a lot of work.”
“What work?”
“Schoolwork, Elise. I’m in school.”
“Just come after.”
“I don’t know when I’ll be done.”
“It doesn’t matter. The door’s unlocked.”
“It matters to me.”
“Why? Just wake me up.”
“Goddamn. You don’t give up.”
“I’m sorry, am I hearing that you want me to give up?”
“Elise, for God’s sake…” he says in exasperation but without answering yes or no.