She bats her lashes.
But what would normally be for Jamey a sugary cotton-puff of nothingness has an allure of fear to it—not unpleasantly. He doesn’t want Joan to meet Elise.
And he does want them to meet.
But Elise doesn’t come out in time.
“Toodle-oo!” Joan says, swaggering off in Ferragamo flats.
A rare Japanese print collection hangs in one of Sotheby’s galleries. Jamey’s working late, with no one around, so he calls Elise.
He turns on the lights, and they walk around the exhibition, and he points to favorites. The room feels like a garden at night, ripe with mountains and birds and chrysanthemums, and they’re alone in it.
“You like them?” he asks.
She half smiles at Jamey, her upper lip shadowed with peach fuzz, eyes limpid, and shrugs. “Yeah, I love them.”
He’s so awkward, she thinks, trying to figure out how to include me when no one’s looking. Another woman would be insulted, but Elise is touched, and thinks it’s tender. Neither of them wants to leave, and they keep moving around the room, looking at paintings they already looked at. It feels pretty silly.
They amble through Washington Square Park on a bright afternoon, the trees reflecting green onto their skin.
A man in a denim hat hisses: “Little smoke, little horse, got some white.”
They walk past him, faces down, holding hands.
Sitting at a sidewalk café, she can tell he’s going to ask her finally.
“You don’t do drugs at all?” he asks, as if asking what she’ll order for lunch.
She thinks for a second how to answer. “Yeah. I’ve done some. Have you?”
“Not much. What does ‘some’ mean?”
She can’t help smiling uneasily. “Do you want to be hearing all this?”
“Hear what?” he asks, spinning a fork in his fingers.
“We never talk about our past.”
“We don’t?”
“I always want to but you never do.”
He’s quiet, accepting the accusation while maintaining eye contact.
“I’ve done drugs,” she tells him, moving things forward bluntly. “And seen every drug being done. That’s probably not something we have in common, right?”
“Depends on what you mean.”
“Do you understand where I come from?”
“Bridgeport.”
“Subsidized housing in Bridgeport,” she clarifies. “No offense, but it’s a different galaxy. And you know, my mother had me real young—”
“How old was she?”
“Sixteen! And her mother, well, that woman was evil. Messed up in the head. She drank. She was sick. So my mother was in the streets as a kid. My dad was some homeboy from San Juan, didn’t speak English, he was sent upstate and got killed.”
“You didn’t know him?”
Elise shakes her head. “Never met him.”
Skinheads play soccer down the middle of the street, but Elise and Jamey pay attention to each other.
“So we grew up with not much, that’s for sure. We lived crammed into these housing units. My mother had kids with two other men, men who never stuck around. Everybody I knew, everybody I looked up to, they all did drugs to some extent. Not counting one or two people. Cocaine, heroin, smoking herb. With their children, all day, all night sometimes. You understand?”
Elise lights a cigarette.
“I took care of the younger kids ’cause of being the oldest,” she continues. “My mother had two jobs and I did the housework. But when I was ten, she got in a car accident, which put her on this medicine, which she had a problem with once the medicine was done, and then one day—she’s a junkie, shooting dope. Angel starts coming around then, ’cause he’s a junkie too. And I’m the one getting kids to school, cooking beans for dinner, begging money off neighbors for baby formula.”
Jamey ignores a dog who sniffs his shoes, and the owner pulls it away.
“Angel beat the shit out of my mother, and she beat him too, for real. He beat us kids—you know, and I’d try to get him to focus on me. Then one day him and me, we had it out, and he put a knife on my throat. I went fucking crazy, and I did everything I never did before.”
“Good lord.”
She raises her eyebrow: “I don’t want any pity from you. I’m just saying.”
“No pity,” he agrees.
She breathes smoke through her nostrils, and continues. “So, yeah. I was trouble from twelve to fifteen, barely living at home, I neglected those children, I left my mother on her own, I was selfish, and no one could stop me.”
She flicks her cigarette onto the street, flicks her braids over her shoulder.
“Then?” Jamey asks.
“I was fifteen. Living with this man, Redboy, he was sort of redhead black—his family’s Caribbean. He was older, you know, he introduced me to things. We did all kinds of shit. He was a mad soul—furious, you know? He taught me about love.”
“That sounds…I’m not sure how that sounds,” Jamey says, coming off paternal and regretting it.
“Naw, trust me, it was…He—”
Here she tears up, quickly—
She wipes a tear with her long nail and tries to collect herself.
“I really cared about him,” she tells Jamey, her voice yolky.
“Was he—what happened?”
Elise looks down the street, eyes big and glassy. “Poured gasoline, lit hisself on fire.”
“Why?” Jamey asks, incredulous.
“He was doing PCP for days. I couldn’t find him, nobody could. Turns out he locked hisself into a Holiday Inn in Hartford, and the police try and get him out, ’cause he was making a ruckus. TV news got it on tape, so we had to see it later even though I didn’t want to. He finally come out the door at dawn.”
“He burned to death?”
“Truthfully? He hated the world he got born into, and he was gonna get out no matter what.”
Tears are smeared on her jaw, and he touches her hand on the table, and she pulls her hand away to light a cigarette.
“Then Angel got locked up, he got four years, and Donna Sierra died. My mother was gonna fall apart. So I went home. And me and Redboy, we had been doing drugs together, but I stopped. My mother went on methadone, and Angel was out of the picture, so we got back into order as a family.”
Jamey feels useless.
She stares at nothing with red eyes, smoking.
But then she gives him a quarter smile.
Dusk. Blue shadows in the loft. They’ve been having sex for hours. He went down on her as soon as they got home, on the floor, making her come twice before they found the bed.
They’re standing. Lily-white, he gleams in the mirror, and she holds his waist from behind, staring at their reflection over his shoulder.
He used to glance at his body like catching someone’s eye and looking away fast to discourage conversation.
His cock twitches up as she rubs his stomach. He watches, hypnotized by the cardinal sin of staring. He’s here: dimple, arm, eye, foot. This is James Balthazar Hyde, and a woman’s warm body is pressed against his back so he can’t run.
In bed, they smoke and talk.