Elise and Jamey agree on a ravioli craving and walk toward Paolucci’s, a red-sauce joint on Mulberry Street.
They pass the junk shop, and Jamey points to the tattered harlequin puppet, the torn Bible, the bleached and vanishing maps in the window.
“My brain is full of things like that,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“From work.”
“Your job is weird.”
“My job is ridiculous.”
They eat lavishly, slowly, and drink red wine at a table outside. They have cappuccino afterward, which Elise never had before they started eating in Little Italy, and she loves it, pours sugar on the foam and licks it off like a cat. She watches Jamey sip his espresso and look around—he’s lost and determined at the same time, eyes always roving.
She suddenly feels so good, she gets flushed.
“I’ll love you till the day you die, Jamey,” she says, cupping her hands to light a cigarette, hiding her face.
“Who says I’ll die first?” he jokes.
“I’m tougher, I’ll last longer,” she says back, smiling. Then she gets serious. “To be honest, I’d rather die before you.”
She takes a deep drag, and they both watch the smoke as she exhales, quiet. Nobody has said anything about her continuing to stay at the loft—Jamey said a few weeks when he invited her—but she doesn’t feel like he’s about to kick her out or anything. Still, as they sit here in the bright spangled Manhattan night, she wonders how to make him love her.
Goddammit, what’s it going to take?
JUNE 1986
One morning she watches him eat Corn Flakes, and says: “I’ll make dinner tonight.”
She might as well try this ancient route to the heart.
He knots his tie. “Great.” He smiles.
Leaning against the couch, legs bare, she’s drinking coffee. Even though she washed her face last night, traces of makeup darken her eye sockets.
He suddenly wants her, and he shouldn’t be late for work but they do it quickly, against the couch, standing, grunting, and he leaves with face flushed, a figgy musk reeking from his armpits.
She stands naked at the door, kisses him goodbye, and he thinks about it all day—how the door was cracked, how anyone could have seen her.
She looks through Martine’s cookbooks: crème fra?che, veal stock, herbes de Provence.
“What the fuck?” she murmurs.
At Grand Union, she wings it from memory.
And she can be seen through the lazy and sullen crowd of shoppers, a girl with cornrows and a basketball jersey, head turned down with some kind of dignified everyday precision, looking through grapefruits under a fluorescent light. She’s examining the bumpy hides, the rash, the strange color that isn’t pink or orange, myopic but also aware of the world like a cat is when it focuses on one thing but is really focused on everything. She’ll choose a fruit and move on to peppers, and she smiles as she pushes the cart—at no one, briefly, at this hour, this task, at herself.
Back at the loft, she empties bags and turns on Howard Stern.
“Buck. You wanna help?”
Martine’s copper pans just seem old and battered to Elise, but she sets them on the stove. Outside, taxis honk at cars, buses grind, people shout across the street while the sun ricochets off mirrored buildings.
She cooks a Puerto Rican feast, like her aunt used to do sometimes. Bright-yellow rice, a roasted pork shoulder, the green sofrito, plantains caramelized to a crisp at their edges.
The air comes in the window, its sweetness cooling, like a cake just taken from the oven. It’s a perfect summer night. She waits.
The phone rings.
“I got to meet these friends tonight,” he says unhappily. “I can’t get out of it.”
“Really?” she asks.
“I’ve said no too many times, I don’t have any excuses left,” he says, then feels funny about what he just said. “You know?”
“Yeah,” she says, her voice hollow.
“I’ll see you around ten or eleven,” he says, and she realizes he forgot about dinner, or didn’t understand what she meant when she said she was cooking, and she could tell him now, but her voice catches, and she barely says okay.
At Dorrian’s, Jamey drinks greyhounds with Brent and Walter while girls with charm bracelets and madras blazers lean in to talk to him, their alcohol-and-Dentyne breath tickling his ear. It’s fun to be here but only because he has a secret. Otherwise it would be boring.
A dull ache throbs in her rib cage. She should have spoken up—he’ll feel bad when he realizes the one night he spontaneously chose to do something was the night she made a real dinner. A proud woman would throw a tantrum, toss the food, and leave the candles to burn down like in the movies. A vengeful woman would get drunk, call someone else. But Elise lovingly and carefully packs the rice and plantains into dishes, covers everything with aluminum foil, to be brought out and reheated when he comes home.
In the morning, realizing what he’s done, he insists on eating it all for breakfast, with a scrambled egg. He grins, telling her it’s so good, as she sits in her T-shirt and watches him devour the food, her face spiked nicely with amusement, and she smokes her cigarette on the other side of the table.
When they can’t sleep, they lie on the sheets, trading tales in the dark.
These are tiny stories that they never told anyone else—smudges of incidents, not worth repeating before but now important.
He watched a woman on a horse, and the horse stepped into a wasp nest. The bodega owner on her block always gave the kids a Swedish Fish; Elise heard shots—then saw blood run into the sidewalk seams….
On a NOLS trip in Wyoming, a girl went over a cliff, and her body was helicoptered out. Elise helped Monisha lock her cheating boyfriend into a motel room by nail-gunning the door closed.
Andy Warhol came to his tenth birthday party.
The drunk hibachi chef on her seventh birthday fell onto the grill, burning his hands.
His mom gave him a puppy for his eighth birthday, and his father gave it to another family three months later.
Her mom taught her to swim in the metallic-cold lake where her mom swam as a kid. During drowning drills at the yacht club, he and Matt saved each other. She sometimes went to a public pool whose surface rippled with a rainbow of Afro-sheen. His friend grew up in a penthouse apartment with its own tiny movie theater.
She draws figure eights on his belly with her finger.
Each time one finishes, they say: You still awake?
Yeah, I’m awake.