He gets wide-eyed. “You’re in an eloquent frame of mind.”
“Sounds great,” she says, and taps the menu. “Turkey club.”
“Okay then.”
“And I gotta have onion rings.” She looks around the diner like she’s bored.
Sunlight illuminates dust in her bedroom, garishly exposes every stipple in the carpet.
She strips like she’s getting in the shower. Tells him to strip too. She runs nails over his naked, daylit arms, his chest, his groin, looking him over while ignoring his eyes.
She licks her palm, then kisses him while reaching down and stroking him with an economical rhythm. She puts her hands on the bed, and looks over her shoulder. “You fuck me,” she says. “Come on.”
He’s harder than he’s been in his life, swollen, and thick at the base. She’s so wet her inner thighs get slimy. She rubs her clit and comes in a series of bucks, before he does. She pulls away and sits on the bed.
“Jack off on my tits,” she directs.
And he does. She watches, unflinching.
She wipes translucent cream off her nipple to lick.
He stretches out on the bed but she puts on her clothes.
“I’m not in a mood to lie around today, Jamey,” she tells him gruffly.
“Oh. Okay.” He dresses in a daze, dark hair falling to his nose as he looks to button his shirt.
Kissing him and folding her hand in a goodbye at the top of the stairs, she goes back into the apartment. Only then does she let herself sink onto the bed, exhausted, grinning at the ceiling. She rolls over and takes a deep breath of him from the sheets, closes her eyes.
Aaaannnndd they’re back! Together almost every night, under cheap blankets. He sleeps with his back to her but doesn’t mean anything by it.
They’re making bacon and eggs when he says his mother is coming to town.
“You have things in common,” he says.
“Like what?”
“You’re both…feisty.”
“I’m feisty?” Elise asks, grinning. “What’s she look like?”
“You’ve seen her.”
“Where?”
“In movies!”
“She’s famous?” Elise asks, nibbling bacon grit off the spatula.
“I thought you knew that. Tory Boyd Mankoff.”
No reaction.
“She was in The Canyon?” Jamey prompts. “And Polanski’s The Father’s House.”
“What’s Polanski?”
“Or…you must have seen Star City. She’s the card dealer. She finds the body. She has sex with Peter Fonda in the elevator.”
“That’s your mother?” Elise sits on the counter and looks at Jamey with giant eyes.
“Yup. Yale is showing a retrospective of Abernath films, and she was one of his muses,” Jamey says.
Elise stares at the ceiling. “I can’t believe you had to watch your mom fuck that guy.”
“It wasn’t real.”
“Sure looked real, let me tell you.”
Tory is supposed to meet Jamey for breakfast, but changes it to lunch, then calls to say she’s an hour late. Par for the course.
When she pulls up, he can see through the car window her long straight hair, and he knows she’s as tough and skinny and glamorous as she ever was.
He gets into the ivory Jaguar, entering its force field, sinking into leather.
Tory looks at her son, the way she does.
Suddenly his shirt is too tucked in. His hands can’t find rightful places on his knees so he crosses his arms. His mouth, eyelids, teeth palpitate with wrongness.
“Hey, babe,” she says with a casualness that makes him feel his self-consciousness is self-created.
The light changes. They’re off.
“How you doing?” he asks.
He made a lightning decision between How are you (formal) and How you doing (mistake).
“How’m I doin’?” she asks, in a godfather-of-the-mafia impersonation.
Her face is straight, but then she grins at him. “How’s life?” she says, without answering.
“School’s great,” he says. “Yeah. Been a great semester.”
As he rambles, Tory takes a Merit Light from the soft pack between her skinny white-denim thighs. She lights it, cracks the window with the cigarette in her mouth and eyes half-closed against the smoke.
“This is such an ugly city,” she interrupts.
“It is,” he agrees.
“I’ve missed you,” she says without looking at him, which is how he knows she means it.
“Missed you too,” he says.
“You’re coming to the screenings?” she asks girlishly.
“Tory, of course.”
She tosses the cigarette and rolls up the window.
Red light at Haney Square, where the vacant department store stands. A dead tree comes out of the sidewalk, a deflated balloon caught in its branches.
At lunch, she tries, as usual, to find out what Alex is doing—since they haven’t spoken in about eight years. “So! I hear HMK has a massive lawsuit from some Japanese company.”
Jamey fills her in with what sound like top-secret details but are not. He knows how to do this to both parents, head tilted forward, shoulders slumped back, tapping the table with his fingers—generously indiscreet. Whoever he’s talking to always stares like his mouth is smeared with honey.
Then they chat about Jack Nicholson coming tomorrow, about the documentary she’s funding on Moroccan schools for girls—Wait, no, girls in Istanbul, is that it? They changed it on me—shoot, I can’t remember—and various parts she’s been offered in films that are in various stages of possible production. Jamey stifles a yawn.
“I’m just in one of those periods, James, when there’s so much being thrown my way. I can’t commit to anything and everything someone begs me to do.”
Even as a kid, Jamey knew that his mother’s thinking so hard about acting, studying lines, being absentminded, was acting. Her trailer was a curated mess, with fan letters and cigarette packs and banana peels everywhere.
But she couldn’t act all the time. Her dark moods were renowned, and genuine.
In her hotel room now, skin creams and homeopathic pills and clothes exploded everywhere, she presses the phone’s red light as Jamey talks; a woman says Jack is unable to make the screening and wants Tory to know he’s sorry.
Jack is sorry….
Oh, there had been benevolence till now. A playfulness in the air.
Now Tory evades Jamey’s eyes, touches her hair in the mirror.
“What am I even wearing?” She laughs rabidly.
Jamey’s stomach twists.
Instantly Tory turns sulky and wants to go shopping.
“Um, sure,” her son says, racking his brain for stores. New Haven is not exactly Paris.
He should call Elise to put off dinner tonight, since his mother will now be especially dangerous. But he’s never alone with the phone.
Tory and Jamey are drinking wine when Elise knocks on the door. She’s wearing acid-washed jeans and the white fur. She got her nails done for tonight: burgundy with gold lightning streaks. Great!
He sees shock on his mom’s face.
Reflected in each of his mom’s eyes is a tiny ghetto demon who waves her hand and bites her bottom lip.
“What’s up!” Elise says.
His mom is speechless.
“Tory, this is Elise. Elise, my mother, Tory.”