“Okay, okay.”
“I can’t believe your father would do that. Was that him on the phone?”
“He paid someone to do it, I’m sure.”
“I would of told you anything if you had asked. Fuck all-a you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You better be. You know what? Go sleep on the couch—I can’t even be near you.”
He gazes at her—she lies down and won’t return his look. He slinks onto the couch but can’t sleep.
She eventually turns off the light again.
The August morning blazes like petroleum through SoHo streets.
Elise and Jamey sit in silence on the magenta loveseat and drink grapefruit juice.
Suddenly Jamey gets up, rubs his neck, deciding. “Let’s go celebrate your record.”
She tries to interpret his expression; he looks like one of those smug, bored baby-faced Cali boys who drive Mercedes sedans with big trunks for shopping bags—that’s their virility.
“I have a stupid idea,” he tries again. “Just come with me, okay?”
They take the subway, hanging onto the pole as the car heaves and bucks. The door doesn’t quite close, and the girl in the Salems ad has a black Magic Marker gap in her teeth.
Uptown, they walk in off the steamy street, and Elise and Jamey swivel their heads to take stock of the store, expensive air shining them.
Crude transactions are done in muted, eloquent tones.
An old woman gets her shoe heel stuck in the escalator pleat. Her spun hair tall as a fruit basket, she almost topples, but a gang of sport coats saves her.
“What are we doing here?” Elise asks.
His cousins always played the Tiffany’s game, where they’d crowd around the baby-blue catalog, and every girl picked one thing on each page.
“Playing a game,” Jamey says.
He puts his hands over her eyes, and they walk awkwardly toward a bank of glass cases. She grins, blindly holding her hands over his.
“All right, point your finger, and whatever you point to is yours,” Jamey tells her.
“What?” she says in a childish voice.
The counter man has dyed hair and a snarl like an aristocrat, although he probably still lives with Mother in Lindenhurst. He glances to the door to make sure security is watching—and they are.
“Should I assume you two are having fun?” the salesman asks in a careful voice.
“Sure,” Jamey says.
Elise puts her finger to the glass and Jamey releases her eyes. It’s a floral moonstone-and-ruby pin.
“It’s a grandmother pin,” Jamey says.
“I love it,” Elise says, because it’s psychedelic.
The salesman uncomfortably asks: “Would you care to see it?”
Jamey shakes his head. “Just put it in a box, please.”
The man clears his throat. “Will this be cash or credit, sir?”
“Credit.”
The man’s eyes flick to security again, but he slowly wraps the pin in a baby-blue felt bag.
Elise scowls at the man. “What’s your problem?”
“Elise,” Jamey says, smiling.
“That will be four-thousand five-hundred ninety-nine dollars, please, sir.”
Jamey hands him a platinum Amex. The man looks at the name on the card, clears his throat.
Returning the card, he smiles, sensual with apology. “Thank you, Mister Hyde,” he purrs.
She sticks the pin on her leather baseball cap, and turns the hat sideways, blows a bubble and cracks her gum, busting through the door into the world of sunshine and true, stinking, boiling air.
He’s going to do it. Just as other ideas lately have shed onion skins to reveal a wet heart, this one is impossible to parse any further. He’s taking her to Theodore’s christening—a monumental Hyde family convention.
Morning simmers in the loft like golden milk on the stove.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” he asks.
“What’s wrong with it?” She looks at her denim miniskirt, red tank, gold necklace.
“We’re going to a church.”
She shrugs and shakes her head, meaning: So?
“Don’t you want to maybe do long sleeves, or a longer skirt?”
“I don’t have the outfit you’re thinking of, Jamey,” she says harshly.
“Elise—it’s a bunch of conservative, gossipy ladies.”
She slumps on the bed. “I could borrow something of Martine’s?”
Jamey shrugs. “Why not?”
They hijack her closet, handling clothes delicately at first, but then Elise spins and models, throwing castoffs on the chair.
Jamey watches her. She pouts in tight white Azzedine Ala?a, twirls in the Sonia Rykiel sundress, grabs her tits in a Chanel jacket.
“Fuck, I dunno,” she says, surveying the mess.
“You look good in everything,” he says honestly.
She smirks, like: Shut up. But she’s infected with his hopefulness.
They’re almost late, but dressed to the nines. They enter the massive bronze doors, and walk into the church. Pink granite pillars hold up the arches on each side, and a Tiffany glass dome sends jeweled light onto the altar.
Everyone else is pleated into grass-green blazers and whale-print skirts. They all move like bees in a hive, buzzing for Bats and Binkie.
“James, darling!” says Aunt Jeanette.
Jeanette’s popular in the family. Powder-blue suit worn like a field-hockey uniform. Freckles on her tan, athletic hands. All the family traits of sociability and charm are there but unpollinated by entitlement. She’s a perfectly benign ambassador from the family, and he introduces her to Elise.
“Well, hello, Elise.” Jeanette beams, her face convulsed with extreme delight. In another culture, she might look insane, but here—this is grace.
At the center of the crowd, the baby—Theodore Stanhope Hyde—is five months old, born at New York–Presbyterian.
His mother wears a canary-yellow shift. Black hair in a chignon. Her bum is still a little wide, and she grins at her husband, Jeb, who has the baby over his shoulder. He bobs slightly to the left and to the right as he talks about the US Open to Cousin Marshall.
And the king and queen arrive, make their way up the African-marbled floor between pews.
Binkie leads in a rose-pink Oscar de la Renta suit, her raspy whisper doled out in endearments and greetings. Occasionally her voice catches fire in a cackle. Well, hello thuh-r, sweetheart! Binkie’s fun, even in God’s house.