Diamonds of heat prickle his face: You idiot. This is all you need. This is all you ever wanted. You just didn’t know it. You prideful dickhead. You blind piece of shit. You retard.
“What?” she suddenly asks.
He must be grinning like a lunatic.
He shrugs and keeps smiling, refuses to tell her.
She smirks awkwardly, intuiting he’s happy for some reason that has to do with her, and she walks with an extra-clumsy strut.
It’s like a daydream he forgot to have. It’s like he forgot to daydream at all. It’s like he never wanted anything, but only thought and fretted about what he should want, what other people wanted him to want. He’s a brat all of a sudden now, turned back into a child, and he wants four, no five no six no seven lollipops from the deli. He’s going to waddle away with them, through traffic, hearing no one call his name. He’ll go lie in a field of toys and video games. The babysitter can go to hell. His teacher can get fired and cry. He’ll suck on candy and watch airplanes make their silent way across the sky.
That night, in bed, he says: “I want you to stay all summer. I don’t want you to leave.”
She laughs, with old-fashioned joy. “For real!” she squeals. “For real for real?”
“For real for real,” he says.
Right before she falls asleep later, she murmurs it one more time: “For fucking real for real…” She sleeps like the devil, basking in victory, smiling while she dreams. Her exhaustion is the best kind. I did it. The words hover over the bed—a crown of golden hearts, spinning in infinity.
JULY 1986
Elise walks Buck in the early-morning light. He sniffs overflowing metal cans before lifting his leg. She smells trails of nightlife, of narcotic musk tracks left by party people roaming from one after-hours club to the next. The darkness, just a couple hours ago, seemed so invincible to the night crawlers, but the sun turned out to be stronger, and the poor insects were flushed into the street, black sunglasses on, shoulders hunched in a grenadine-red suit against light.
The New York Times is on doorsteps, a sack of ideas and facts, the city’s brains and tongues gutted by masterful hands, arranged into sausage.
The cobblestones shine; horse phantoms clop over them still. And how do you know this turd is human shit? The deli bag that wiped someone’s ass is crumpled next to it, and a cloud of wounded pride hangs dense as flies.
She shoots the breeze with the bagel man, and the guys who loiter on Broadway and Prince don’t whistle anymore but wave instead. This is her neighborhood now.
She brings home a cheese Danish and coffee, and puts them on the kitchen table in a graph of sunshine. She’s draining her coffee when she senses a disturbance, and she flinches.
“Hello?” says a woman who just let herself into the loft.
She has long, dark, lustrous hair in a blue leather headband, and a dress with asymmetrical shoulders. Her eyes are incredulous and her mouth is resigned; the two features creating one meaning, the way Chinese characters are built.
Elise is dumbstruck, swallows in a hurry. “Hi.”
“And you are?” says the woman.
Elise clears her throat. “Elise.”
“Am I supposed to know you?”
Elise can hardly think. “I’m with Jamey, I’m his girlfriend.”
The woman hesitates and then holds out a thin hand to shake. “Martine. This is my home.” She gives a stoic and un-warm smile. “I never heard about a girlfriend so forgive me for not calling first—I assumed Jamey would be at work.”
“Oh, yeah,” Elise says nonsensically.
Martine is holding a bottle of Champagne that she can’t hide, with a navy grosgrain ribbon. “Well, this was meant for Jamey,” she says tightly, and puts it on the counter.
Elise nods, not sure what she’s supposed to do. Apologize? Leave? Is the Champagne not meant for Jamey anymore?
“Don’t mind me,” Martine says acidly, “I’m just going to pick some things up and I’ll get out of your way.”
Buck wanders toward them, a soiled panda bear in his mouth.
Martine looks at Buck. She glares at Elise.
“I’m going to walk the dog,” Elise says.
Martine is silent for a moment. “Fine.”
Elise gets a leash on him and vanishes, walking a full block with her hand over her mouth, barely breathing.
“Oh fuck,” she whispers when she finally sits on a West Fourth Street bench, in front of a basketball game.
She thinks of the ice in this woman’s voice.
After a while, Elise realizes she locked herself out again.
“Goddammit!”
At five, she stands with Buck outside the building. The street burns under the July sun, which acts like it will last forever and not vanish one day in September, with no warning, the way it does every year.
Who else but Gretchen should come home?
“Let me guess,” she says gleefully to Elise.
Elise makes a wistful smile and follows Gretchen up the stairs. Elise is grateful, but she has a feeling Gretchen likes girls, and Elise worries about getting into debt. Everybody wants something, don’t they?
“Come in,” Gretchen says, and this time she means it.
They enter the huge loft, a spatial variation on Martine’s, drawings and photographs taped to the walls, the furniture arranged as if people, late at night, huddled to discuss Marxism or Rothko or volcanoes here—who knows. Nothing ordinary could be debated in these formations.
“Keep me company while I cook.”
She asks Elise about her life as she takes things out of the fridge.
“What’s his name?”
“Jamey.”
“Where’d you meet?” she says, cutting shallots.
“New Haven. We were neighbors. It’s funny cause we’re definitely from different worlds.”
“Where’s he from?”
Elise shrugs. Buck is lying at her feet, and she rubs his tummy with her toes. “Money. High-class family.”
“You got class, girl.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Class isn’t money.”
“Well, the woman who owns the apartment came in today, and—”
“Martine?”
“Yeah.”
Gretchen laughs shortly. “Oh, she’s a cunt.”
Elise can’t help but grin. “Whaaatttt?” she asks with pleasure, drawing it out.
Gretchen wipes her hands on a rag. “You think she even likes this building? Someone told her it was cool to live here. That woman has no soul. What, did she make you feel unwelcome?”
“Well, she’s letting Jamey stay there, but she didn’t know about me. Think she was surprised. Surprised some ghetto bitch is sleeping in her bed.”
“You’re not a ghetto bitch.”
Elise shrugs.
The women look at each other. Elise is uncomfortable, stares at the floor. Gretchen takes mercy and changes the subject. When Elise hears Jamey coming up the stairs, she thanks Gretchen and flees.
“Hey!” she says. “I forgot my keys again.”
They kiss, and enter the dark loft.