Jamey knows what his advisor meeting will be like, and walks across a courtyard that’s shellacked in ice. He tip-taps in suede bucks up the marble stairs, an Ivy League paper doll who holds the door for two rosy-cheeked white girls with books in their arms.
Professor Ford has reached the final stage with Jamey. They started the year amiable, but Ford feels played, disrespected. Jilted.
“Jamey,” says Ford, opening his door.
“Hello, sir.” Jamey smiles, doomed.
Ford’s white hair is carved to the side. “Did you see what Professor Hilden gave you on the paper?”
“I did.”
“The class is writing on Othello and you hand in a paper on the misunderstood altruism of honeybees.”
“I was—”
“I don’t want to know.”
Jamey shuts his mouth.
Ford holds out his palms in an exaggeration of inquiry. “Do you not want to graduate next year then?”
“I do actually want to graduate.”
“This has become, by the discrepancies between potential and execution, an insult.”
Jamey looks down as he’s meant to do while the sun creates a muddy heat from the shelves of clothbound books.
“And I do not care a whit who your father is, nor do I care who your mother is,” Ford lies.
Ford is like everyone is and has always been with Jamey: Ford had a crush, he wanted Jamey to like him, he expected the world, and now he hates him because Jamey won’t respond.
“I’ll do whatever you think is best, Professor Ford,” Jamey demurs.
Jamey noticed it early in life. In a group of kids, a parent would speak to Jamey as the other adult in the room. Jamey would look at the floor, but whenever he glanced up, the camp counselor or parent or babysitter was still talking at him.
It even happened with people who had no idea who he was, who never saw his house in Town & Country, or read about his parents’ divorce in the National Enquirer, or relied on his grandfather’s predictions as quoted in Barron’s, who didn’t realize they were in the presence of a commodity, a publicly traded stock, a prototype of a child—like Huck Finn or the Little Prince.
If someone were fumbling with their wallet, the drugstore clerk would blush and summon Jamey, next in line: Let me take care of you while this lady figures her stuff out. Jamey wasn’t impatient; he didn’t even notice the line wasn’t moving!
When he was little, playing at the Morrisons’, Jamey cradled their new pet bunny, and Thomas whined and pulled for a turn—it was his bunny after all! Mrs. Morrison warned Thomas to stop, and warned him again, and then she violently grabbed Thomas’s little hand off Jamey.
“Let Jamey hold the bunny, Thomas, goddammit.” Her mouth was bright red and open as she furtively stared at Jamey afterward, and he saw something in her face he would recognize for the rest of his life.
He always thought of these moments later as his “Let Jamey hold the bunny” moments.
People looked to him like one of those Tibetan children picked out as a reincarnated lama. They think he knows the secret to life. They get mad when he doesn’t offer it up. What happens, anyway, when the village chooses the wrong kid as their prophet?
Every morning Matt waits for Elise to walk by so he can glare at her from the porch, ice hanging from the portico. Sometimes he even vaguely ashes his cigarette in her direction, shivering in his white Oxford.
“You’re an asshole,” Jamey says when Matt comes inside. “Why are you so threatened by her anyway?”
“I’m not threatened,” he says.
“But you are,” Jamey corrects him. “She’s obviously nothing to you, so why don’t you just leave it?”
“Because she came into our house.”
“We invited her in,” Jamey says, stirring hot oatmeal.
“That’s because she ‘axed’ to come in. Doesn’t mean she can tell me what to do.”
“I don’t know. I thought it was hilarious,” Jamey says.
“Yeah, it’ll be hilarious when our house is on fire,” Matt says.
Jamey laughs lusciously, then sighs, and doesn’t say anything more. He does this a lot lately.
Matt looks at him like: What the fuck is going on with you?
It’s strange how much they resemble each other, these two men. But Matt—with his pale skin, dark hair, dark eyes, prominent pointed chin, fine clothes, practiced stances—should be handsome like Jamey. And he’s not. There’s a sense of moral failing here, the idea that Matt himself is to blame for not being handsome, which somehow makes him uglier.
Robbie is white and short, and studies airplane mechanics at South Central Community College, and waits tables at Red Lobster. His bowl cut and cornflower-blue eyes are gnome-ish.
With him tonight is a tubby black giant who stoops under the ceiling light.
“What’s up, Leesey,” Robbie says, chagrined at having yet another guy over.
Sitting cross-legged on the couch, Elise pulls back her sweatshirt hood. “Hey,” she says, giving the new guy a once-over.
“Hello there,” the guy says in a gracious, Darth Vader–deep voice.
The pair ambles, blushing, into the bedroom, like boys about to play G.I. Joes or Matchbox cars, and Robbie shuts the door softly.
They put on Depeche Mode. Each time a side ends, there’s a rustle as someone reaches across the bed to turn the tape over and press Play.
She makes coffee, pages through the newspaper, biting her lip.
Elise grew up listening to her mom have sex in the next room—Denise growling and muttering naughty words—or her cousin giving head in the bed where Elise was sleeping. Hearing other people is arousing and aggravating, the way getting tickled is a mishmash of laughter and the possibility of throwing up.
She puts her hand in her jeans.
That evening, Robbie and Elise smoke on the roof, squinting at New Haven’s squat and dumpy skyline dusted with stars.
The bedroom window next door lights up.
“Oh shit, that’s him,” she whispers, awestruck.
“The one with the dimple?”
“I’m getting sorta obsessed,” Elise says. “His name is Jamey.”
Robbie smiles uncomfortably. “They’re rich kids. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know.”
Robbie flicks ash into the abyss between houses, and the coal is fired up by its twirling descent for a second or two. “You like him though?”
Now Elise is shy. “He seems different.”
They toss cigarettes over the ledge, pull coats tight, and take the steps down into the building.
“I guess you never know, honey,” Robbie says over his shoulder. “Right?”
“Right?” she answers.