Hungry for dinner, they leave the loft, listening to how their footfalls sound together down the stairs. As the building door closes behind them, they get that New York City exhilaration of launching into the unknown.
It’s immediate; they’ve arrived into the night, into the intimacy of strangers, the second they step outside.
They walk up Broadway; Jamey wants to go to a sushi place he heard about. They pass a spectrum of human beings: pierced, shorn, manic, grounded, painted, torn, distended, shriveled, innocent, guilty as sin, foreign, local, young, old, dying, regressing, growing. Jamey in his seersucker slacks and Elise in her gold hoops and overalls are citizens too.
He stops next to a record store, under a tree, to kiss her.
She smiles when he’s done.
They see a cat on a stoop, and the cat sees them. The cat moves his head to watch certain people pass, showing his inner ears—iridescent with membrane.
A group of club kids pops out of a door. They’re birthday cakes of sex. Ludicrous fairy-tale animals on the run. Clowns made of drugs. The cat won’t look at them, won’t feed their egos; he licks his paw instead.
At the restaurant, Elise takes a Polaroid of a tiger fish in the tank.
“Is it just raw fish?” Elise asks, looking at the menu.
“No, we should get edamame, some miso soup.”
“You order. I trust you.”
Elise puts tuna in her mouth like taking communion of some religion she doesn’t follow. It tastes like a girl at a juvenile program in Massachusetts, and Elise flashes back to bunk beds, drills, the girl, that time—and then it’s gone.
Jamey convinces her to try eel.
She spits it out, and they laugh, and cry, and toast again.
“Let’s get another one,” she says of the empty sake pot.
They remember paying the bill, scribbling a tip, finding the door, then careening down the street.
Make out against a building, sneakers in poisoned grass, a rat, Whoa, whoa, one moans, they stagger on, making out in the street, twisting together like a couple in the rain but it’s not raining.
They fall, lie there, as if to sleep, laughing so their rib cages stutter up from the asphalt, holding hands, and someone gruffly says Get off the street, and there’s streetlamps for moons, glass in the tar.
Jamey’s been drunk, of course, but mainly he avoided it when everyone around him was bingeing and crashing cars. Yet tonight is a good roughening up. Jamey, I’d like you to meet indignity.
They manage a photo of the ceiling when they get home.
Masser-piece, Jamey will say after looking at it blearily for a long time.
This is how it feels to sleep in your shoes. You’re supposed to take them off. You should have brushed your teeth, said your prayers, kept your hands out of your pajamas. If you die before you wake, I pray the lord your soul to take. I pray the lord your toys to break.
Jamey’s not even cognizant when he makes it to his knees and lifts the toilet lid, just in time. His stomach muscles work of their own volition. He breathes and spits in between.
He crawls into bed. Elise shakily sits and pees, and then understands they had sex without taking out the tampon. The cotton plug is jammed, and her trembling fingers work a while to remove it. Her eyes are hot and wet when she gets back in bed.
Jamey smiles miserably, roughly throwing one arm onto her shoulder.
“It’s not funny,” she says.
He grunts. After a moment, he asks into the pillow: “Why don’t we just decide it’s funny.”
“What’d you say?”
He moves his mouth. “Why don’t we choose to make it funny?”
She considers, nauseated and curious. “All right.” She presses against him, so they can feel as bad as each other, or make each other feel better.
They start to have sex, with no foreplay—just rancid kissing and rough fucking—but he has to stop, cross-eyed, to keep from vomiting.
“But it’s funny,” Elise says slyly, eyes winking in a blur of makeup.
He holds up his finger. “Please don’t talk,” he pleads, knowing if he laughs, it’s over. His body has gone wild, sick and aroused, and he can’t figure out what to commit to. The madness of the situation is awesome.
He watches, smiling, with nothing better to do.
In Martine’s kimono, she’s pretending to be a sex slave, pressing her palms together at her chest and making up gong-ringing fake words, stuttering across the floor as if her feet are tiny, not gigantic.
When the game gets old, her real posture takes over, and she sits with legs spread on a kitchen chair dragged to the window so she can smoke into the night sky.
“So in line at the bodega this morning, this girl was ahead of me,” Elise says. “She had crazy long blond hair, and white lace-up stiletto boots? But she turned around, right, and there’s black stitches from her mouth up her cheek.”
“Did you ask what happened?” Jamey says, because Elise usually feels no shyness in these situations.
“No, I just thought: Little sister, I feel for you. Who knows. Sometimes we have to see what life is doing to us, it has to be physical to be real.”
Jamey adores the shooting stars of her mind, the powdery galaxy of her thoughts. Her intelligence isn’t organized the same way his is. She never finishes more than a few pages of a book, but loves to talk about what she read. She thinks in wild gardens, and his thoughts are espaliered into an introduction with a thesis, then supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion.
She waits now for the Empire State Building to flicker on, and then makes a childish yelp and points it out.
He’s aware Elise is moving around the city every day, roaming, with no professional design for her future. She apparently put in a job application at a hair salon, and they’re going to call if something opens up, but she doesn’t want to go to beauty school. And she spends afternoons at the record store on Broadway, where guys scratch on turntables, and she nods to the beats and asks them questions about DJing. But that’s it—she listens and keeps her hands in her pockets, talks shit, laughs. This kind of aimlessness, according to how Jamey was raised, is a sin. She’s supposed to have elaborate ambitions.
But why? The girls he knew who were on their way to conquer Wall Street, or run art galleries, or start PR firms—were they really going to improve the world so much? He grew up thinking you’re supposed to work till your eyes bleed, be exhausted all the time, get money, get houses, get prestige, do good, be important, be busy, get on the board, run out of time, cancel lunch with friends, run out of gas. Why? Why did he believe them when they said that? Why did he believe anything they said?
Four in the afternoon. Gretchen hollers to Elise from the stairwell, unable to knock because she’s got bags in her arms. There’s a dinner party tonight and Elise is helping cook.
Gretchen’s potbelly swells her corduroy shorts. She cooks with rabid and decadent accuracy.
She asks Elise to mince the garlic.
Elise coarsely chops cloves on the board.