They spend hours getting dressed, drinking rum-and-Cokes, jumping and jiving around the house. Robbie’s wearing a silver tank top and Elise has on overalls, a black leotard, and gold chains. They leave the house without jackets because the jackets will get stolen, and they both shiver, ecstatic, as they walk.
The club is empty when they arrive, and the dance floor is calling their names. They get down, hold nothing back, lost in the shudder of strobe lights and beats. Robbie’s lovers show up, and they sweat as a tribal group, never taking a break.
“I love you, honey!” he shouts to Elise.
“I love you! Yo, I want good things to happen for you, Robbie—hear me?” she yells.
“I know good things gonna happen for you, Leese!” he screams among laser beams while the DJ nods to the record.
The guys pack. The radio plays classic rock and commercials for New Haven car dealers and sports bars as Jamey and Matt put books and desk chairs on the curb, and dump food into garbage bags.
Jamey remembers moving in—the rooms had been quiet with autumn light and shadows, mattresses bare and closets empty. The house was a question, and it got an answer.
Matt and Jamey sit on the porch when they’re done. Matt sips a large Pellegrino and smokes a cigar, and the spring sunset is vivid. Matt’s off to Zurich in a week, to assist on a trading desk.
“You should be coming with me,” Matt says as if he’s joking. “With my bedside manner and your brain, we could destroy Wall Street, smash it to smithereens.”
“You’ll do just fine,” Jamey says, knowing Matt’s fantasies are real. “And I’m locked into Sotheby’s.”
“Which is a great job. If you have a vagina.”
“Ha.”
“Well,” Matt says after a moment, without looking at Jamey. “It was a good year.”
“It was,” Jamey says, appreciative of Matt’s attempt to connect. “A weird year.”
“I mean…” Matt says, shrugging, but leaves it at that.
Jamey has the opportunity, like with Thalia at the pool, to stay friends, to make the other person comfortable, to apologize.
They sit in silence instead.
In the past, Jamey did ridiculous things to keep Matt company—like standing in the empty VIP section where Matt wanted to be even though the fun was outside, or approaching a pair of girls Matt wanted to meet, who looked vacuous and sadistic. Jamey owed Matt, who discreetly—all their lives—got Jamey invited on Matt’s family trips, took him to concerts (front row and chauffeured), made Jamey sit with the Dannings at school functions.
Matt told Jamey’s stories as if they happened to Matt. When Jamey got a surfboard, Matt got the same one. When Jamey wore a tomato-red Polo shirt, he looked louche, edgy, and accidental. When Matt wore that exact shirt, he looked like someone who desperately wanted to look louche, edgy, and accidental. None of that bothers Jamey. But Jamey has reluctantly and bitterly accepted that his friend isn’t going to be a good person when he grows up.
Jamey’s hitting the city first, and Elise will meet him in a few days. They say goodbye at dawn. Elise insists on coming down to the street—the sky is still dark, no birds.
She holds him, and he smiles as they pull apart.
“I’ll see you really soon,” he says. “Right?”
She nods, and stays there till brake lights flare at the end of the block.
Climbing the stairs, Elise tells herself to stop worrying. It’s a done deal. She’ll see him soon.
But what if he just never calls? She lullabies herself to sleep for a couple disoriented hours: It’s a done deal, it’s a done deal. Closing her eyes—he presses her mind from the inside out. Opening her eyes—the silent apartment makes her sick.
The sun comes up, thick like cheap butter, as his car rolls down the Merritt Parkway, passing a linden tree in bloom, then a horse chestnut tree on the brink.
The loft on Crosby Street is care of Martine, whom his father dated after he divorced Tory and before marrying Cecily. A beauty editor for French Vogue, Martine lives in Hong Kong, Paris, and NYC, and she was too young when she dated Alex years ago, and is now too old for Jamey but has always looked at him in a certain way.
He’s never seen the place, but SoHo is good and far from the Manhattan where he grew up.
He parks on the wide, empty cobblestone street.
The building’s super is Giacomanni, who has a twisted head like he’d been wrenched from his mother’s loins by a barbarian—and an old Little Italy accent. He wears a dusty jumpsuit and lets Jamey into the loft.
“This used to be a lightbulb factory,” Giacomanni tells Jamey while unlocking the door.
They enter a white hangar whose floor is scarred with sunlight. The king bed is in one corner, and a dinner table that seats twenty stretches down the middle of the room. A Julian Schnabel painting takes up a wall. A birdcage dangles from the ceiling (which is a confusion of pipes), and Jamey realizes it’s a piece of art from the signature scrawled on its base. But he still makes sure there is no bird.
“Here’s the key,” says the man, and nods as Jamey thanks him.
Jamey sees his dad the next day for lunch on a South Street Seaport pier.
“Jamey-roo!” his dad says, pulling his son’s earlobe, sitting down.
Alex barely has time to eat, late like the boarding-school boy he’ll always be—making chapel by a second, his coat misbuttoned, eyeglasses askew.
“Hey, Dad, good to see you,” Jamey says, nervous Alex will detect something.
They’re sitting in wind laced with brine and oil, drinking beers among suits. Alex’s car is waiting downstairs and he has to “make it quick,” which is one of his phrases.
“So, how’s the loft?” Alex asks.
“Amazing. Thanks for your help with that.”
“And the job?”
“Starts tomorrow.”
“Still not sure why you took a girl’s job, Jamey—”
“Come on, it’s not—”
“Well, if you’re the only fella there, I guess you get your pick of the lot.”
“Not my agenda.”
“You’re putting off your career, which I don’t understand.”
“At HMK? Well, it will come soon enough. How are you?”
Alex rants about the Stockholm office, and Cousin Hallie in East Hampton and the boat issue, and then he tells a story involving Xavier and a bicycle and a frog.
Alex asks for the check before they’re half done, crams cheeseburger into his mouth, and rubs Jamey’s head.
“Glad you’re here, Jamester,” he says, and disappears.
Jamey wonders what he feared, since Alex has never noticed anything about Jamey’s life.
He gets another beer. He’s been coming to the Seaport since he was little, eating pickles from the Fulton Market barrels, watching waves swirl up the docks. He used to visit Bats at the HMK headquarters on Rector Street, where Jamey was walked through executive offices like a child king in line for the throne.
On his way back to the loft, Jamey watches three sparrows fly through a chain-link fence without pause. How the fuck do they do that? He smiles, and keeps walking.
Jamey wakes to sunrise covering him like a hot blanket.