Gretchen grabs Elise’s forearm. “What the fuck are you doing?” she laughs. “Mince means tiny pieces. There you go.”
Gretchen wipes her cheek with her shoulder when her flour-covered hands aren’t free, chewing her lip as she reads the cookbook.
She teaches Elise to pick the membrane and veins from the sweetbreads.
“You’ve got the perfect tools for the job there,” Gretchen says, indicating Elise’s neon-pink curved rhinestone nails.
“This is so-o-o-o nasty,” Elise finally says, smiling.
Gretchen laughs, stomping her feet. “Oh man. I like you.”
When Jacek arrives home, he gives Gretchen a hug, and she gets gooey eyes. She acts like a teenager, her body somehow becoming girlish and slight.
“Jacek, this is Elise,” she says.
“Very pleased to make your acquaintance.” He smiles, chewing a black licorice rope.
Elise is flabbergasted at her wrong ideas. It takes her ten minutes to process the truth: Gretchen loves Jacek.
Gretchen doesn’t need anything from Elise.
Jacek opens a dark Mexican beer and talks about Britton, who got a teaching post in Umbria but has been lying in bed with depression for the last month.
“Delilah’s going over to be with him,” Jacek tells Gretchen.
“Well, that’s good at least,” Gretchen answers, forehead furrowed.
“You guys are from here?” Elise blurts out, overwhelmed by how natural and secure they are.
“Michigan,” Jacek says. “I came to school here when I was a kid.”
“I moved from Nebraska to be with this guy.”
Elise thinks about Gretchen’s journey. How she was raised up, by a hot-air balloon of a heart, and she floated over fields and hills, chubby ankles hanging in the sky, across the many miles.
Jamey appears with a chilled bottle of Sancerre.
“Finally we meet the mystery man!” Gretchen says happily.
Guests arrive—Jemma, a woman in a bronze lamé jumpsuit who is otherwise casual, looks unbathed, unconsidered; Timor, a small man with a bow tie and an air of extreme compassion; Estella, an older lady with a modern architectural haircut and Italian accent and gnarled hands heavy with gloriously unusual jewels; Sam, a man in white overalls who brings Gretchen and Jacek library books on Nova Scotia.
“Jamey and Elise are staying at Martine’s place while she’s gone,” Gretchen explains.
“Dear God, thanks be that she is gone,” says Timor, and then looks apologetically at the couple.
“No need to censor yourselves!” Jamey’s throaty, wayward laugh gets everyone’s attention, as always. “We already battled with her.”
Elise does a razor-sharp imitation of Martine’s heart attack when she caught Elise in her loft, Ohmygod, who on Earth are you, and they all cackle. The group makes fun of Martine relentlessly—buying whatever art a dealer tells her to buy, chatting them up in the hallway when she’s high on coke and then ignoring them the next day, pulling her chinchilla tight at the neck and putting on massive glasses.
“She used to hang out with Carolyn Von Terrire,” says Jemma.
“The girl slumming with Jean-Michel, the girl who ODed?” asks Sam. “That was sort of heartbreaking.”
A dinner party is the oldest experiment. Trap a bunch of souls in a room. Faces move like painted moons, rising and setting, as talk blows in from the east. The thunk and freckles of a hand slammed down on the table in laughter, the noise of a long night unscrolled like a map. Madeira and Roquefort. Paper towels for napkins. The maroon wall telephone rings: next round of folks on their way!
At dinner, Jemma grills Elise on her thoughts about life.
Elise finally and clumsily sums it up as: See what comes your way.
Jemma says, “You’re a cool kid, baby.”
“You grew up where?” Sam asks, listening in.
“Bridgeport. The Turnbull houses.”
“And you’re still alive,” he says bitterly. “No thanks to Ronald. Half the population might as well be crossed off these days.”
Elise is a little flush with wine. “We don’t exist out there, it’s like—war. Families with babies living up against a bunch of sociopaths who don’t give a fuck.”
The room is silent.
“Sociopaths?” Jemma asks finally.
“Half the people in the houses aren’t human,” Elise says antagonistically.
“Everyone is human,” Jemma says soothingly.
“What the fuck do you know about it?” Elise asks. “They’re addicted, they’re zombies, humiliated to death. Or they’re making money off it.”
“Sorry, I understand now,” Jemma says quickly.
“You do?” Elise says, heating up for a fight. “Spend a lot of time out in Bridgeport?”
Alert! Alert!
“Elise, I think she means she understands that she doesn’t understand,” Sam says smoothly.
The group survives that sinkhole, and deftly finds new subjects.
Later, Elise says to Jemma: “I didn’t mean to be like that. I just don’t like people talking about something they don’t know, and being all correct about it.”
“I totally get it,” Jemma says, properly terrified of the discussion starting up again.
“Okay, good,” Elise mumbles, apologetic and also still wanting to argue, but letting it go.
By the end of the night, Gretchen’s teeth are stained gray with wine. She guffaws and stamps her feet as she tells a story to Jacek while he washes dishes, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
Over dessert—port wine and braised peaches—Estella squints at Jamey.
“You’re the kid in Bad Hand, aren’t you,” she asks.
“Yup.”
“Tory Mankoff’s son,” Estella says. “I knew her, back in the day. Must be wild being her kid.”
“I would hardly know,” he jokes. “I see her once a year. Which is fine.”
Jill and Crane show up, in the middle of an argument, moving to a corner to hash it out. The table is dirty with foreign cigarette packs, sticky glasses, abandoned threads of talk about de Kooning and Kathy Acker and spaghetti westerns.
Elise licks her stinking fingers—she never had cheese like that. More plates are piled in the sink for a wash, and Sam takes over, cigarette hanging from his teeth too as he talks and scrubs. Someone’s neon-pink stilettos are jumbled in the corner.
Two blond children are putting a paper crown on the cat in a beautiful nighttime project the cat patiently tolerates. Jamey keeps looking at the pits toothpicked in jelly jars on the kitchen windowsill, sprouting roots and leaves. He’s having a lovely time, he really is, but he’s separated from the group, including himself; he’s a ghost hanging in the corner of the ceiling.
Then he looks at Elise, who is uncertain but fascinated by everyone, she’s learning them, understanding them, and she joins in, laughing, unafraid now. He loves when she forgets to hide the anarchy of her bottom teeth. These people are above his people, certainly in their minds. They’re anti-snob snobs.
Elise is thinking she and Jamey were invited as curiosities, but everyone in the room is a curiosity—that’s the currency of this crew. It doesn’t offend her. Everybody wants something after all—why shouldn’t they?