He and Matt get pizza in town, and Matt tells him about hotel-room partying in Aspen and this guy who puked all over the parquet floors, the curtains, the bed, and how they put him in the hall, naked and unconscious, on a room-service tray for the staff to handle.
Matt asks him carefully about Newport, and Jamey answers that it was “relaxing,” the house was “peaceful,” the beach was “beautiful with no one there.”
Jamey didn’t think he was going to do this—there were even moments in Newport when he imagined a murky, quivering future of sorts—but he doesn’t want to see her anymore. He’s playing with a human heart. He needs to stop this experiment. It was an experiment after all.
She calls the next afternoon.
Matt says: “Um, hold on a sec.”
He raises his eyebrows at Jamey, who shakes his head and mouths: I’m not here.
“He’s out right now, but I’ll tell him you called.”
Between his BMW being there on the street and Matt’s politeness, Elise knows.
Actually, she knew before they left the house in Rhode Island, as she locked eyes with Binkie’s portrait one last time. His people have a kind of power she thought only existed in myths. The way the fireplace lit him up, the way he stretched out in the four-poster bed, sheets to his hips—that house doesn’t want to let him go.
She tries to reach him, sporadically, over the next week. Even Jamey is surprised at how infrequently she calls. Then she stops.
Robbie and Elise are cooking Hamburger Helper and dancing to Madonna, using the greasy spoon as a mike. Get into the groove, boy, you’ve got to prove your love to ME!
They eat, watching Dallas. Elise is holding a cotton ball soaked in hydrogen peroxide to his ear, which he got pierced yesterday.
“So, you throwin’ in the towel?” Robbie asks during a commercial, blue eyes wide.
She shrugs, very uncomfortable. “He doesn’t know how to love anybody. He just has no idea.”
“I mean, he should love you, Leesey.”
Elise smirks at Robbie, grateful, and dabs at his ear. “We got too close on this trip. He has to step back.”
“Yeah?” Robbie says, trying to be supportive.
“This is gonna be”—she can’t look at Robbie when she says it—“a test. He’ll come back. He’ll miss me. I just gotta wait.”
“Why don’t you break out those ninja skills?”
She laughs, drums up some bravado. “I’ll wait like a ninja.”
Robbie smokes schwag, offers the one-hitter to Elise, who says no thanks. He coughs, and they keep watching TV, but Elise is remembering the beach that night, the glittering sky and the glittering ocean divided by one dark line, and how she let Jamey put his cold hands under her sweater, and his hands warmed up.
APRIL 1986
New Haven blooms; dogwoods open their petals of tea-streaked porcelain, and birds tune up like a symphony; rain falls on stone one day, simple white puffs fill an azure sky the next.
Students are euphoric, high on thin sunshine. Tender skin is revealed to the air in golf shirts and knee-length skirts. Kids shiver at the sidewalk café, determined to drink their coffee outside, hunching over notebooks.
Elise sometimes goes to the basketball court on Montague Street that’s annexed to the church. A program for troubled teens uses it when school lets out, but it’s deserted in the mornings. She squints into the frail light as she shoots. Her face is expressionless whether she misses or scores.
One day, a nun offers her banana bread in a napkin and a can of cream soda.
“Oh, wow,” Elise says. “That’s really nice of you.”
“I see you playing here,” the nun says. “You’re a strong girl.”
“Seriously, thanks,” Elise says, the ball between her pigeon-toed feet as she eats—she needed this kindness.
The woman’s face is turtle-like in the short tuck of her nose and the bleary, innocent eyes. She wears gray orthopedic shoes, and when she waddles back to the church, her beads sway.
Elise bikes through neighborhoods she doesn’t know, skirting the campus, taking in its massive mismatched buildings, the castles, the hospitals. Mainly she cruises residential areas, watching a mom zip her girl’s jacket on a stoop, smelling garlic in butter through a window, riding over empty dime bags.
At night, she dances with Robbie at the Anvil, where the music is thunderous and morbid, and they can each afford one drink, which they nurse over the hours.
One day she goes to their diner. She doesn’t really expect to see him, but her stomach is still twisted as she waits to be seated, eating a mint filled with yellow goo. At the table she picks at her cheeseburger and fries and lemonade.
She’s always been an outsider. She isn’t clearly black or white or Puerto Rican, and the world where she grew up was easier if you were one thing or the other, or if you claimed one thing or the other, which she could have done but never did.
Elise didn’t bond with other kids; parents watched her on a playground—throwing rocks into a bucket or talking to herself on a swing—and said: Elise got to do it on her own, always. And when she started running away at thirteen, Denise would hiss when they got her back: Why you think you can just fucking do this? Makes me crazy, Elise. You’re not on your own yet, girl. You belong to me. You stay put. Hear me?
Jamey is trying to be alone. But his mind is flooded with a psychedelica of sexual positions, fantasies invading like an army of Elises who blow kisses, snap the waistbands of their panties, strut, suck the straw of a million milkshakes, curse, and grin. A regular pinup parade of this girl in her red negligee and white fur and black sneakers, smoking, staring with irresistible boredom in her dead eyes like a killer.
He has trouble sleeping, but hates admitting it so he petulantly lies in bed, arms crossed in the dark. When he was a kid, his mom’s assistant gave him sleeping pills, and taking them sends him back to groggy and frightened nights in half-lit hotel rooms or a producer’s pool cottage in California or Portugal, so he leaves them alone.
Maybe I just need to define terms better, he tells himself one morning. Yeah, that’s it!
On the phone, he feels twelve, but a twelve he never was. He should be chewing gum, baseball in mitt, cartoons squeaking and honking in the background.
“Hey,” he says slowly.
“What’s up?” she asks matter-of-factly.
He’s thrown off by her tone. “Um, wondering if you want to have lunch.” Silence. “I miss that grilled cheese!”
“You miss the grilled cheese, huh?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
When they get there, they try to hug but make a mess of it. She pulls away before he can tell she’s trembling.
Seated, he says: “I’m thinking that—we can hang out. But this time it’s clear—”
“We’re not girlfriend-boyfriend.”
“We’re obviously something to each other.”
“We’re just gonna fuck,” she says.