“Oh, I’ve been, you know, laying low. Just getting the hang of this job, and, yeah.”
She nods. She’s from powerful Seattle shipbuilders, but the Pacific Northwest humility plus Scandinavian disaffection cuts through prestige, and she’s not like East Coast empire daughters, even if she is as wealthy.
She takes a man at his word.
“Well,” she says, looking at a stack of envelopes. “You have a number of invitations that have come to the house.”
“Ah, thanks.”
The kids stand on chairs to peel potatoes or snap the ends off beans. You monkeys, she calls them when they squabble, or she tells them, with a measure of sweet and stern in her voice, to go play nicely in another room.
At Palm Beach last winter, Jamey walked into a bedroom where the three of them were napping, tangled on a king-sized bed with a banana-yellow coverlet. They were in dried bathing suits, Solarcaine in the air, books on the floor, and visions cast on walls: Peter Rabbit played with a hungry caterpillar, girls stood in straight lines with umbrellas while a bird flew around looking for his mother.
Alex runs in, newspapers shoved under his arm.
“Want a beer, Jamey-roo?” he says, hugging his other children.
“Sure,” Jamey says.
“I’ve got to make a call, Cece,” he says. “Back in a flash, don’t wait on me.”
While his dad talks to London, Jamey looks through the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the same volumes (now somewhat outdated) he loved as a kid. The dog-eared “Butterfly” section reminds him of the hatchery he created in the guest room when he was nine. Glass jars lined up on the Louis XV bureau and on the bookshelves—with caterpillars inside and enough leaf to make a cocoon.
Jamey now reads a line he’d highlighted in awe back then: In the chrysalis, the caterpillar must disintegrate into pure liquid, with no form at all, and no parts, before its cells start to realign themselves, as per the imaginal discs, and develop into a new creature: the butterfly.
His science report got a gold star, and the teacher wrote a note home that most children don’t have the “exemplary patience” to complete an experiment like this.
Every time a chrysalis broke, Jamey took that glass jar to Central Park, and let the butterfly go. Sometimes the Painted Lady Monarch walked the shoulders of his little blazer before dusting its oily wings enough to fly.
The nanny was bored to death. But Jamey didn’t let that stop him from infatuation, seeing butterflies in his sleep, doodling spots and legs and thorax, talking about butterflies to anyone who would listen.
“Dinnertime!” Cecily sings.
Jamey joins Cecily and the kids at the table for coq au vin, but Alex never makes it. Jamey leaves after pantomiming a goodbye to his dad in the office, and his dad pantomimes his regret about the length of the call.
On the street, he tosses the envelopes—to weddings, summer balls, twenty-first birthdays on yachts, engagement parties at Point O’ Woods—into the nearest trash can.
Walking home from work that week, Jamey impulsively buys a Polaroid camera at a RadioShack on Broadway. The sales guy has a silver cap on his canine tooth, and breath to kill an elephant. He calls Jamey “my man” over and over.
Jamey photographs a dog pissing in the street, and a red mannequin in an out-of-business shop. The flash burns the night like an X-ray, and everyone looks.
He knocks on the apartment door, and when Elise opens it, he presses the button. She’s startled, then captivated as they watch the square develop into her face.
He looks at it longer than she does, at something in her eyes and mouth, something willing yet resolute.
They go eat dumplings on Bayard Street, walk back hand in hand. Asian gangsters smoke foreign cigarettes and barely register this American couple; there’s a gridlock of energy, conversations, arrangements, and tension on this block, as on every block. Elise and Jamey don’t figure in, and they glide by like extras in a movie.
At home she picks up the camera and walks backward to the bedroom, snapping a picture of Jamey.
“Come here,” she says.
She’s kneeling on the bed.
“Take down your pants,” she says.
He undoes his belt, and she reaches with one hand to do the rest. She manages to take a picture, and they laugh at the awkwardness.
He grabs the camera, and she lies, naked, on the bed, and smiles calmly.
In moments that would make other people shy or awkward, she becomes supernaturally natural.
He shoots her lying there.
They pick a gladiola from the vase, pose it between her legs. He takes a close-up.
Elise sets a brooch from Martine’s jewelry box on his breast and shoots that—it looks like the gold pin goes through his skin.
Jamey manages a shot while they have sex. He seems half robot, half man—a bedroom centaur.
The film gets pushed out with a succinct noise.
Afterward, they spread the pictures on the floor: cloudy, shady poems of bodies, a lyrical record of love. That’s us, they think silently.
“But I don’t want anyone else to see them,” she says.
“We could burn them,” he suggests after a hesitation.
They go to the roof in their pajamas with a matchbook. Under the constellations and a thin scythe of moon, they set fire to each Polaroid, starting with a corner. The images get distorted first, as if the bodies are returning to some primordial shape closer to the soul.
They save one: her legs spread with the flower between them. It’s impossible to tell what it is. The pale globular shapes are part animal, part blossom.
The photo is like the dream that someone had in a dream: doubly inaccessible.
Jamey wakes up in a nest of sunshine this Sunday morning. He feels like a fire is burning in him, and all of a sudden, the wood will shudder and shift, send up lazy sparks. Something in him is getting rearranged, or destroyed.
At the Ground Zero Gallery, she tells him she never went to an art opening before. This exhibition is graffiti paintings, and everyone’s high, rambunctious. Jamey and Elise are bumped around the mad crowd, and their eyes get shot up with Technicolor stuff.
It’s nice and late, the sky a damaged purple, when they squeeze out.
She walks beside him, hooded sweatshirt off and hanging from her head, T-shirt tucked into jeans. She’s holding his hand, swinging it, then slowing down, dragging him to a stop as if he were rushing the night away.
Sometimes she stalls to light a smoke, grimacing over the Bic, its flame reflected in her gold necklace, then she resumes her streetwise lope—pigeon-toed—a gait he’s become addicted to watching. Addicted?
They have nowhere to go tonight. Nothing to do.
And that’s heaven. Heaven? he thinks.
But it is, to wander and explore, to play, to talk with this girl….
Tonight—seeing her laugh, head tipped back with abandon, with sarcasm, with pleasure—he’s struck by bizarre lightning.