His dad calls him at work.
“I’m calling to touch base,” Alex says perfunctorily. “Make sure you took care of things.”
Jamey doesn’t answer, rolls his eyes, plays with the straw in his Schweppes ginger ale can on the desk. “What does that mean?”
Alex stalls. “Did the girl move out?”
Jamey’s face heats up. “No. Why?”
“Why? Because that’s what we agreed on.”
“We never even mentioned it.”
“Martine wants her gone,” Alex says after a moment.
“Well, then, I’ll move out too,” Jamey says, testing him.
After a moment, Alex clears his throat: “I guess you should.”
Head reeling. “Wow. Okay. Just because this woman decides to judge someone she met for thirty seconds—”
“The deal was for you to live there, not some stranger,” Alex rushes to explain.
“That’s not it,” Jamey says quietly, touching the rim of his desk.
“Look. If Bats hears about all this, Jamester—he’ll be unhappy. Do you understand?”
Like Bats has anything to do with anything. Ever since Jamey could remember, Alex told him he was the favorite grandson—Bats asked how Jamey was doing at lacrosse camp, at Race Week, on his SATs. Alex reported it like Jamey should be proud—because Bats didn’t look out for other grandchildren this way.
“Dad, Elise is a harmless—”
“Just be a big boy, okay?” Alex sounds weary, like this girl he’s never met has exhausted him simply by existing. “That’s all I’m saying.”
In the middle of that night, Jamey wakes from a vision and recognizes it as a memory.
It starts as a blister of honeysuckle—he’s a kid, running though a garden, playing hide-and-seek, it’s a summer party in the Hamptons. The dogs don’t know what’s happening but they love it anyway. There’s a luxury, a July paradise, the kind of time kids get lost in, when an hour lasts a year. But now Jamey remembers seeing his dad’s silhouette by the pool, drinking with other men, as Jamey went inside to get a lemonade. He remembers noticing his dad’s shadow was shorter than the others, and he had a visceral sense his father was weaker than the rest, and that he was more dangerous as a weak person with a lot of power than a powerful person with a lot of power. Jamey knows he didn’t know that truth in words back then, but he knew it in a deciphering of silhouettes on a lawn whose green is turned turquoise by eastern light, the salt and chlorine, some mingling of blood and dusk and threat….
AUGUST 1986
The streets are hot, the sky is hot. The loft is hot no matter how many fans oscillate. Jamey’s also on fire, livid—he’s never been this pissed. Elise sees it in his eyes.
It feels really, really good.
Thus begins their spree, Jamey using his Platinum Amex to playfully stick needles in his father’s heart.
Elise and Jamey go to the Odeon one sweaty, sticky evening, lured by its orange-red neon sign. They walk into a star grid of tables—is that Harvey Keitel? Paulina Porizkova? They’re guided through downtown algorithms to a booth under a hanging globe of light.
Elise chews gently on her thumbnail, hunched over the menu, self-protecting as she does in a new place. Then she stares glumly out the window while peripherally gathering information on her surroundings—methodical while seeming indifferent. She looks at the Bakelite skyline on the wall.
Satisfied, she sits up and smiles at Jamey.
“What are you getting?” she asks.
“Steak tartare,” he answers happily.
“What’s that?”
“Raw meat.”
Elise gets a New York strip. Jamey orders his own steak tartare and one to go for Buck. Gets a martini and doesn’t drink more than a few sips. Takes a cheeseburger to the homeless guy on the corner.
“Um. What’s going on here, Jamey?” Elise asks as they climb the stairs in their building.
“Just feel like spending money,” he says with mordant delight.
He’s looking like the gothic version of a preppy boy, blood smeared on his Izod persona, his smile wrongly polite. This perversity is what makes Elise kiss him as he unlocks the door, and they close the door and lock it behind them.
They become regulars at Fanelli’s, Odeon, Chanterelle. Jamey buys everyone sitting at the bar a round. He and Elise eat prime rib, lobster, salmon, truffle fries, crème br?lée. They always get the prize on the menu, the show-off item dangled in front of the rising Hollywood child star, the Russian mobster, the insider trader; they order caviar from Finland, the Lafite, the 24-karat gold-leaf chocolate dessert—Bring it on! We’re hungry for treasure.
Jamey doesn’t even consider finding a new apartment. Elise notices he’s just less respectful of the loft. He leaves dishes in the sink, towels on the floor. Sprays Martine’s perfume in the air for fun. Opens bottles of wine from her rack, pours Elise a glass.
“What if she comes again?” she asks one day, watching fruit flies vibrate over the peaches on the counter.
“I hope she does,” he says, sitting at the table like a king in his boxers and nothing else.
The truth is also that he doesn’t know how to rent an apartment. He’s always been given places to live, and Elise would laugh at the limit of his life skills. So—tra-la-la, everything is fine!
One night, they fight outside Indochine after he buys drinks for a couple sullen models, teenagers wearing lime-green Lycra dresses and cherry-red pumps.
“Why do you feel the need to fucking treat everybody in a place?” she asks, ashing on the dusk-silver sidewalk.
“It’s not about them,” he says.
“What’s it fucking about then, Jamey?”
“I don’t know!”
“You don’t? Me neither.”
They glare at each other. Then they start laughing.
“You’re a piece of work,” she tells him.
They’re standing next to a Volvo, and they realize there’s an androgynous toddler in the backseat, in a diaper. The kid looks out the window with shy blue eyes.
“Hey, baby,” Elise says, clicking her long nails on the glass.
The child stares at her.
“Let’s get some ice cream,” Jamey says.
They buy a Popsicle on the corner and pass it through a cracked window to the hand. When the parents return, this stained wooden stick and gooey smile will be a whodunit—What self-important Good Samaritan fed our child? There’s pleasure in changing a static environment, but Jamey doesn’t know if it’s a decent and moral pleasure, and he doesn’t care if it’s not. Elise realizes he just wants to give things away, to a sixteen-year-old from Slovenia wearing Gaultier and high on heroin, or to a nameless baby. She tries to be okay with it, she really tries.