He asks about her first sexual experience. It’s like he suddenly needs to know everything.
“Guess it’s storytime today,” she teases. “I seriously was wondering when you’d want to know me.”
“Come on,” he says defensively.
She shakes her head, meaning never mind.
He pulls her braids off her face, arranges them on the pillow.
“Well, I heard people fucking my whole life,” she finally answers, “which is an education all by itself, trust me.”
“I’m sure.”
She pulls the sheet off her lower legs because she’s hot. “When I was eleven, me and my friend played hooky and met these guys at 7-Eleven. No one talked about what was gonna happen, and to be truthful, how did we know what we were about to do? It’s just what you did.
“So we go to this empty house. It was burnt up and all graffitied, but it was like a hangout for kids in the neighborhood. We smoked a joint, probably. And then my friend and the guy she was with go over to one area, and me and this guy hang out on the couch.
“And the guy I was with couldn’t get hard. But he told the whole school I couldn’t give head. So I of course had to set him straight. I ended up having an abortion when I was thirteen, another one at fourteen. I had let my friend Monique convince me I couldn’t get pregnant if I douched with soda right after.”
“Who was your first love?” he asks.
“Redboy. What about you?”
This is the moment he’s dreaded, when he says out loud: I’m an alien, I can’t love anyone. He grits his teeth.
“Nobody.”
“Tell me who!” she says.
“No one.”
She pulls herself up so she can look into his eyes. And then she rests her head on his chest, and they listen to night traffic and street voices and dogs howling. He waits to be ashamed.
“No one yet,” she whispers instead.
The next day, she gets out of the shower and listens to the echoes that fill the apartment—different notes and chords in the morning. She wants to go out, play a part in the story of the city. She’ll walk Buck into a radiant turquoise world.
No amount of roaming around town will satisfy her today, and she’ll be wanting more hotel taxi lines, more hot-dog-cart fumes, more car horns, more newspaper stands, more dog piss, more, even more!
Something’s changed; she feels different.
She buys a coffee with a couple quarters and sits in the park. She fools everyone, and always has, letting her mouth fall open (untended, obviously dumb), and never blinking her eyes, which are mean, simple marbles, one-dimensional and lightless. Her shoulders hunch, the long masculine hands uncertain where to rest or hang. But she’s tracking, computing, and either discarding or accepting factors other people barely notice. Her costume—the gray jeans, the fake-gold E on a chain—doesn’t blend in and doesn’t stand out. Her awkwardness is strategic, turning people away in boredom or discomfort before they register the vague, haughty, delicious joy she takes in being alive.
He didn’t want to leave the loft Sunday for this Bedford horse-farm wedding but his absence would have triggered questions. The bride walks between hundreds of white chairs in a field while the groom awaits, the sky touching everyone with quicksilver light.
Jamey says the same things over and over: Sotheby’s, fantastic, Clark Woodford, SoHo, Martine Boulton-Locque, amazing, sure, yes, let’s, fantastic, I’ll tell them you say hello, that would be fantastic, amazing, sure, yes.
He drinks Champagne. Horses in a corral look on suspiciously, manes and tails braided for the occasion. The bride, with puffed-up sleeves and elbow gloves, glows from attention.
A bouquet soars through the air. Men in suits and sunglasses, ankles bare and vulnerable like women, stand in groups, ruined from coke at the party last night. A buttermilk-white 1936 Cord Phaeton rumbles up the dirt road to fetch the couple, and Jamey is amused to see the exquisite machine trundle through shit.
He brings home tuberoses from his table for Elise, who fell asleep on the couch waiting. Even though he closes the door quietly, she wakes herself up. She’s devout about making love every night, no matter if she’s barely awake, or if he has a Champagne headache—which seems to go away within minutes anyhow.
When he gets up to piss around four a.m., he sees Elise smoking by the kitchen window. She hugs one arm across her ribs, and sometimes looks at the cigarette between drags like she has a complex relationship with it. He doesn’t realize she’s scheming, and she’s so intent she doesn’t notice him.
Another night he goes to Dorrian’s for early gin-and-tonics with Webster and Vanessa, who then beg to see his loft so persistently he says he doesn’t feel well and must go home immediately. How much longer can he do this? Vanessa watches him go, standing in Dorrian’s doorway in her pink gingham shirt, the uniform of certain spies.
At Sotheby’s, a netsuke collection comes in from a British doctor who lived in Japan, and Jamey organizes the tiny wood and bone sculptures for appraisal.
Clark assigns Edna to assist: “Ed, help out Jamey, however he sees fit. He’ll tell you what to do, ’kay?”
They spread the fawns and dragonflies and rats on the conference table.
Edna holds one in her plump, butterscotch-freckled hand: “Tagua nut?”
“If you say so,” Jamey says earnestly. “Screw what Clark says—you’re in charge.”
She considers him, and her lips turn up at the corners. “You know what, Jamey Hyde? You’re full of shit. You could have said that when Clark was in the room.”
She walks out, her green plaid culottes stuck in her ass crack.
Jamey’s bloodless for a few minutes, until Clark arrives.
“Holy Mary, you’re pale,” Clark says. “Did you make little Edna vewwy angwy? She just marched off!”
“Did she leave the floor?”
Clark shrugs happily.
Sometimes when Jamey’s falling asleep at night, Clark stomps into his mind, and stands there with hands on hips, spectator shoes splayed in a demented ballet pose, and he grabs Jamey’s jaw and says: Honey, you can sleep when you’re dead. Or he shakes him by the shoulders in a pantomime of child abuse and says: Pour Daddy more Champagne, chop-chop, don’t be shy and don’t be stingy.
“Shoot, I’m going to see if I can find her.”
Jamey runs out, to Clark’s uncomfortable amusement.
Why does Jamey work to please Clark? All his life, Jamey’s hustled to make people feel good, so they don’t feel stupid or guilty for whatever stupid or guilty thing they just said or did. No one asked Jamey to be the policeman and pastor of egos. Why does he think this is his obligation? Clark is fabulous in many ways—he can make a rainy Tuesday at the office into a circus, complete with gossip and candy and afternoon Pimm’s Cups. But he’s also a prick. Why shouldn’t Jamey tell him so?
Jamey can’t find Edna, and he stands with hands on his hips at York Avenue and Seventy-Second Street, under ever-changing and fast-moving white clouds.