What can she do besides cultivate a daily schedule? Make coffee for him and say goodbye in the early light, watch Good Morning America (red skirt suits with black buttons, concealer on the man’s face, potted flowers in the window), take a shower and pick out clothes, put on eyeliner—which takes a mighty long time, the way she does it.
She smokes her menthols on benches, squinting at people passing. She finds a hair salon that braids hair the way she likes it. Sometimes she shoots hoops if she finds an empty court, and if someone’s there, they alternate shooting, moving in sundial curves and not speaking, and throwing the ball back if it bounces to the wrong owner.
She wonders if she should get a job, if Jamey wants her to now that she’s staying longer than a month. She peeks into shops. She asks if they’re hiring, but she acts odd, nervous, and they think she’s shoplifting. In a thrift store, she touches a row of slips the colors of wine coolers, puts her hand into one to see the silhouette of fingers through fabric. She rubs the zipper of a motorcycle jacket, silently composing words about working here to the Japanese man behind the counter. Her body produces an attar of insecurity, and he looks at her with suspicion. He even sighs loudly, meaning: Fish or cut bait.
Fuck, this lack of confidence is bad for business, she knows that. She’s been here before. What girl in love doesn’t know this territory? Don’t get weird. Chin up.
She eats McDonald’s in Washington Square Park, and leaves the cup and crumpled yellow wrapper on the sidewalk when she’s done, stretches, yawns, and lopes home.
Elise was so shy as a kid, but at ten, she found a friend, Phara, from Haiti. The girl got dumped with some relative after her parents faded into trouble. Phara’s smile was curved and cherry-red, and she talked to everybody. Even at eleven, she worked the sidewalk or the playground or the bodega. Tagging along, Elise saw the world open like a flower.
Phara talked to strangers.
After Phara left a year later, deposited into another random home, Elise forced herself to do it. To talk. Other girls watched and sneered: You’re not Phara, and you never will BE her, so give it the fuck up. But Elise practiced, somehow knowing curiosity would be the key to her life.
Walking Buck today on the piers, she surveys the hustlers ambling, or sunbathing in coconut oil. One dude in army boots and tiny denim shorts hands out flyers. This is a frontier.
She moves through the invisible net of power dynamics and mating signals.
No one meets her eyes but they aim their own eyes as close as possible without making contact—I don’t want you—but I’m not looking at the ground or the sky like I’m ashamed.
Tugboats groan on the river.
She walks close enough to one guy—in parachute pants as thin as rice paper—that he has to see her.
“Got a light?” she asks.
He looks confused.
“I mean, an actual light,” she explains, taking out her cigarettes.
“Sure,” he says gruffly, his voice heavy with interrupted conquest.
He flicks a Kelly-green Bic.
“What’s her name?” he asks.
“It’s a he. Buck. Like from the Jack London book.”
The guy smiles, cracks his gum. “I loved Jack London. When I was a kid, in school,” he adds cheerfully.
“I never read any of his books,” she says, taking a drag. “But my boyfriend talks about them.”
“Read John Barleycorn. Fucking outstanding.”
“I will. Thanks, man.
“Anytime.”
She waves, giddy now. “Have a good day.”
“You too,” he says, resuming position like a mime going back to work.
She hangs out the loft window, the way everyone did where she grew up. She’s inquisitive, runs her fingers over the street like reading Braille. Who’s shouting down an alley between apartment buildings? Whose pit bull sits in the auto-body shop window there, pale eyes wise in the caramel face?
This is how Elise prays, how she gets keener, how she bows.
The music from that man’s car, as he wheels down the street, is it opera, some Italian immigrant stuff? Blue smoke comes out his window, and she sees his fat hand as the huge Cadillac passes, he’s older, belting out the lyrics, cigar held high.
What makes him so happy?
She likes to imagine his house in Queens, his wife, a parakeet in a cage, a gold-framed mirror, fake roses in a vase, veal parmigiana for dinner….
They go to Balducci’s and buy French goat cheese, fresh-squeezed juice, English muffins, lemon curd, rib-eyes, Champagne grapes, fresh pasta from Italy, a case of Perrier bottles, a bouquet of orange roses, romaine salad, cooked shrimp with cocktail sauce, bagels, and capers.
Elise thinks she heard wrong when the cashier says the total, but Jamey doesn’t seem surprised. Elise stares at him bug-eyed as he hands over the cash.
On the way to work in the morning, Jamey gives a dollar to a homeless man; he never used to do that. Not because he thought he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t figure out his motivation for charity, and that drove him nuts. Did he want to be seen as good? Did he want to be admired and thanked? Did he want to control the man by giving him money?
Now he doesn’t care about the reason and hands out coins all the time.
This man, he’s seen him before: he resembles a bodybuilder in rags, with muscles veined like worm-eaten rock.
“I fear not,” the homeless man says to no one, as if practicing for the stage. “I know not.”
The old Jamey would have walked away, but now he lets himself watch.
The man traipses from one persona to another, changing shape and color, shining under the morning sun. The man is President Reagan, now he’s Ulysses, he’s a baby, he’s a corpse, he’s a drug addict, he’s a preacher—he’s a piece of meat through which pass the divinities and rascals of human imagination.
Tonight it’s dinner at his old home. Jamey thought about bringing Elise to meet Alex and Cecily and the kids, but decided he’d just tell them about her first. One step at a time.
Jamey arrives at his childhood block: there’s the gold lobby table in the corner building, arthritic Mrs. Grant walking her Yorkie, Town Cars idling along the curb.
Marvin opens the door and Teddy sits behind the desk.
“What’s up, Teddy!” Jamey says.
“How you doing, James.”
“Long time.”
“Too long, young man.” Teddy smiles broadly—meaning: Do not hug me while I’m on the clock.
Upstairs, Cecily is arranging giant, falling-over peonies. White petals razor-cut with red.
“How good it is to see you,” she tells him.
Xavier and Samantha play with wooden trains on the parquet floor, their sibling-talk unintelligible and calming.
“We’ve missed you,” she says, kissing his cheek.
Cecily’s a very good wife. After Tory, Alex found someone benign. His friends warned him about Tory, then rode her fame with him, then rejoiced when things went sour, pranking Alex by taping articles to his desk on the “divorce of the decade.”
“I ran into Caroline Stallworth at a party, and she said she hadn’t seen you around this summer. Where have you been hiding?”
Cecily’s face is round as a plum, and she waits guilelessly for an answer.