He shaves in the sink, thrilled by the gigantic and unfamiliar space. He knots his tie and clasps his watch. Steps into the morning a new man.
Takes the 6 train to Fifty-Seventh and Lex, and then walks east, then up York Avenue, as he’s early, and it feels good to see the million faces, the grubby sidewalks, the river shimmering to his right.
His job is assisting Clark Woodford, an asexual buyer from Virginia who wears Ben Silver periwinkle suits and tortoiseshell glasses, and who loves Jamey at first sight.
“Well, well, well, nice to meet you,” Clark says. He seems young but certain signs—stained teeth, loose skin on his tanned hands—put him older.
“You too, sir.”
“Oh, God, not sir, anything but sir.”
Everyone seems affected by New York’s fresh May flowering, the petals cracked open in the middle of the night so you wake up to hope and possibility.
This office is titillatingly new to Jamey, ripe with Hermès cologne, duck rillettes at lunch, magazines from Italy and Japan on desks. He hopes to lose himself this summer, to hide among the etchings and furniture and jewels. At HMK, he’d be out there in the clearing, out on the bald plains of finance, where he’d be called to fight, to choose sides. All that.
Stella walks him from floor to floor of the Sotheby’s empire, introducing him to everyone, and he shakes many hands. He’s a racehorse paraded through barns, and they make a fuss—This is Jamey Hyyyddde—so belittling! By the end of the day, he’s skanky with fatigue, his mouth in a state of rigor from smiling. Two girls watch him, giggling, scheming pornographic social-ladder dreams.
Jamey hangs suits in the closet, and folds Tshirts and jeans into empty drawers.
Onyx earrings, with gold backings, gleam in the soap dish. Martine must have taken them out in the bath—they look like black soap bubbles.
Jamey is intrigued and repulsed by bathing where other people have bathed. The ceramic basin has a perfume to it, of water and skin and lavender. A non-American smell.
He reluctantly imagines Martine there, her dark hair coiled into a chignon, in a Cubist fan of images. She’s there and not there. He’s fantasizing and also repelled. She pisses in that toilet. She plucks her eyebrows in that mirror.
The closet is foreign and adult too. Shoeboxes line the floor: Balmain, Mugler. The clothes have been worn; there is fragrance, pedestrian life, days and nights aromatically accordioned into the slacks and dresses.
The cookbooks are in French, with transparent ovals where oil seeped through the paper. The refrigerator door is crammed with fish sauce, Worcestershire, grapefruit marmalade from Spain.
Jamey arranges for D&E Car Service to get Elise and Buck on Saturday.
When that morning comes, he paces the floor, moving through the exotic hour of anticipation.
He sees the black car pull up below the window, and feels sick with anxiety.
“You made it!” he says, greeting her on the sidewalk.
Everything she owns is crammed into a cheap suitcase she bought at the Salvation Army. Buck pours out of the backseat, nails clicking unfamiliar cement.
“Hi,” she says.
“Welcome.”
They’re both shy and ecstatic.
He’s never lived with a girl! Notions of domestic life always grew on his horizon like lichen, furry bumps of children, money, furniture, cars, second homes, trips, dogs.
But Elise eclipses the woman from Jamey’s future, the lady in tennis whites flashing her diamond as she drinks orange juice fresh-squeezed by a maid. A woman Jamey never quite believed in anyway.
Elise doesn’t say anything fake and grand when he shows her around the minimalist loft; she just asks: “Where’s all the stuff?”
They sit on the gold-plugged magenta sofa and Buck laps from a china bowl.
“What do we do now?” she asks.
“Whatever we want.”
“Should I get a job?”
“I mean, if you don’t know where you want to be after this, then maybe not?”
She nods, understanding. He doesn’t want anything permanent.
“But I’ll miss you every day,” she says, trying not to seem weak.
“We can meet for lunch sometimes?”
She can’t help seeming sad, and fidgets with her necklace. He’s worried, like a new dad with a crying baby that seems hungry but won’t take food. What should he do?
That night they just lie together before having sex. Her thighs around his hip—rough fur against his skin.
The whites of his eyes—electric milk—his tongue is hot, her mouth is hot, she feels his jaw, strokes his neck, and this is when doubt reverses and charges along the golden train tracks, hooting and hollering, like a machine once stalled but conquering this territory again.
It makes him sure she should be here.
But she’s uncomfortable. They sleep fitfully, wake up in pale light. They make coffee, and he gives her grocery money—if she wants to shop, he adds, terrified it sounds like giving orders.
“What should I get?” she asks, trying to read clues for what he wants from her.
“I don’t know. The basics, I guess.”
She knows enough to know their basics aren’t the same. When she arrived, there was stinky cheese and black bread and Pellegrino in the kitchen.
She goes to Key Food, whose windows are plastered with white pages of purple or red block letters: Chicken, $3.99, or Milk .99. She buys cold cuts, spaghetti sauce, an iceberg lettuce head, soda.
She balances the bags on her hip as she unlocks the building. She hasn’t seen other people, only intuits a cat across the hall, an electronic keyboard somewhere.
“Yeah, Buck,” she says when he greets her. “That’s my boy.”
She puts things away, a trespasser in a stranger’s cupboards—stealing inverted.
The clouds part for a demure sun.
She stacks Jamey’s change on the table and thinks of her mom counting change to Angel like a cashier. When Angel was doing well, he’d throw extra dollars to her. She bought the girls used roller skates, laid out feasts from Kentucky Fried Chicken, paid off debts to neighbors for formula and diapers.
When Angel was locked up, she’d use the money his friend delivered for whatever she wanted, like a kid’s birthday party, because he wasn’t there to yell about it. Denise bought the mega-cake at Carvel, and ordered a dozen metallic balloons.
Now Elise is so anxious for Jamey to come home, she paces, and Buck whimpers. When she finally sees Jamey down there on the sidewalk (the way he walks, he’s not like anyone else), her knees almost fail, and her face turns white with passion.
In the morning, he says goodbye, and she stands at the threshold in a T-shirt. She seems to have the power of a great bird—like a heron or a swan—to lift into the sky with just one swift and glorious flap of the wings.
Her lunch is an egg-salad sandwich and ginger ale, but while washing up, she drops the glass. She keeps Buck away as she picks up pieces.