Tall Bats has a way of looking into the eyes of whoever he’s talking with, then gazing out, to make sure everyone is safe—from train bandits, bad weather. Bats is not actually handsome. His face is wide, mouth and eyes like a stretched rubber doll, skin turning watermelon-pink when he drinks or plays golf or goes shooting, and his nose is almost porcine. He combs his yellow-white hair, once dark like Jamey’s, in the side-part he’s had since he was sixteen and taking Mary Blixworth out for a milkshake. A shard or two falls over his forehead.
Women follow him like cats after a fishmonger—tails raised, chins elevated. Intelligent women giggle and sip Champagne with head tilted down and eyes girlishly tilted up. Even now, in his late sixties, hands covered with sunspots, he’s the object of longing looks from Sacred Heart girls on the subway. He can get away with halitosis, and drunken finales to formal dinners, and the odd nasty comment. Even the maid who has to bleach his hemorrhoid-bloody sheets has a crush.
People hardly talk about his bad behavior, as if they live in a dictatorship and everyone’s a spy. He swims at the club every morning in Manhattan, and in East Hampton, he swims the ocean—his eyes cold and impenetrable as the Atlantic in March.
Everyone keeps talking in stained-glass-lit groups but they’re waiting to see if Bats singles them out for a hug, or a wink and a wave. They have to be ready—but can’t look like they’re waiting. So Bats moves through the distracted crowd.
When he finally makes it to the baby, a pulse of love beats in the room.
Bats is shown his grandson—the parents beam, their mouths vulnerably open. Bats tsk-tsks, shakes his head: Fine specimen, his expression says.
Jamey watches, rolling the engraved program tight and sweaty.
And now Bats heads toward Jamey—slowly—talking to people on the way.
Elise should be a Dartmouth lacrosse star whose granddad went to Groton with Bats, and she should be bronzed from the Vineyard, lips opaquely shiny from Chapstick. So happy to meet you, Mr. Hyde!
But no! Jamey is pushing forward the real Elise, in a couture dress, shins bruised from basketball, cornrows latticing her lean head, feet wedged into slingbacks.
Elise who never graduated high school, never got her teeth fixed, never heard of a country club, never flew on a plane, never attended a christening like this, never met a man like Bats.
“Elise, is it,” Bats says, eyes twinkling.
“Yeah,” she says, face drawn into unprettiness by a determination to do this thing right.
“Well, it is a pleasure,” Bats says, and Jamey knows the verdict.
Elise thinks it’s going well.
That turns Jamey’s stomach.
They slowly move into rows, sit on the carmine cushions. Elise wants to hold Jamey’s hand, but doesn’t. The priest speaks, but the baby’s bleating makes a spectral fan of sorrow in the dome.
The two girls in front of her, hair Pantene-shiny and French-braided identically, are up to something. Jamey’s actually watched these cousins braid each other’s hair in the sun-rooms of mammoth apartments, like monkeys picking bugs with love.
They giggle now.
The girl next to Elise is leaning away—almost imperceptibly, her face stoic, a caricature of politeness. She smoothly moves her purse from next to Elise to her other side.
One of the girls in front sneaks another look back, and then glances at her pew mate, and they go into a paroxysm of stifled mirth. The girl next to her tightens her face, almost grinning but not, and then Elise realizes that she, Elise, is the joke.
Elise, burning like white stone, made of nothing that isn’t pure and right. Gold earrings and man’s feet, and the ill-fitting Valentino sheath, blue eyeliner. Truer than the Holy Spirit.
Her blood freezes.
She stands up.
Jamey tries to meet her eyes as she brushes down her dress.
She murmurs at the girl next to her: “Fuck you.”
The girl blanches.
He watches Elise walk down the aisle, chin up, shoulders back.
No one turns, but everyone is attuned to her departure.
Jamey’s face is hot. He picks at his nails. He doesn’t go after her, thinking he should stay and repair what he can, protect the idea of her, see what he might save.
Elise was six, her mom was working a double shift, and Jeri-Lynn was watching the kids and smoking dope with two guys from the Bronx—Danny and Rat had come out to the “countryside” because they’d done something. Danny’s acne made his face looked mauled. The radio was loud and no one could hear the baby wailing except Elise, who whined around Jeri-Lynn’s knees, worried: Dawn’s crying in her crib. She need her bottle, Jeri-Lynn.
Help me get this thing out of my fucking face, joked Danny, and the two guys dragged Elise into the closet in the bedroom, laughing. Rat, a scrawny guy with a ponytail, blew smoke in her face. Stay put.
None of this was out of the ordinary. No! she yelled. I don’t want to!
What makes this day sting in her cellular memory is what happened next.
She got quiet seeing Danny’s expression.
He pulled down his sweatpants and pissed on her, and then he closed the door. The wetness felt hotter than her skin, and she sat in the dark as it cooled, and she stayed quiet this time, and a new dimension to her was born, a space carved inside her to be filled with emotions all through her life.
Tanning Junior High. When twelve-year-old Elise came out of the bathroom stall, Mary Gonzalez was dabbing on lipstick. Elise heard Mary’s brother got shot a few nights ago, paralyzed from the neck down, and she smiled uncertainly at the girl in the mirror.
“I like that color,” Elise said.
Mary grinned. “Wanna try it?”
Elise took the tube, and glided it on. She made a smile.
Mary laughed in a practiced way. She even clucked as she put the lipstick into her fringed purse. “Shit, girl. Nothing gonna help you. You. Are. A. Dog. You know that, right?” Mary was still smiling, talking to Elise in the mirror. “You’re the ugliest girl in the whole fucking school.”
Elise watched Mary toddle out the door on spike-heeled boots. Normally Elise would have punched someone who said that.
Instead, Elise’s blood froze and her skin got mottled. She tried to look okay as other girls came in, smoking and shrieking, and Elise kept washing her hands with her head down. She somehow slipped out of the fluorescent-lit room, and walked down the hall, not looking into anyone’s eyes, breaking out the door into the autumn day and moving briskly with no direction, just getting away, just getting off the school property. Was she crying?
She realized she was, and then she was sobbing, hurrying past the Laundromat, the deli, a junkyard, and she needed to go somewhere to be alone and she finally found her way, walking toward the dam, where she could be above the rushing dirty water.
She sat on the matted grass and let her jeans get damp from the soil, and cried like a mixed-up and stranded runaway, the descent of water just out of reach behind the chain-link fence, but the water was there, crushing and sizzling, icy and sad. She was telling me the truth, is the only thing that Elise was thinking. Someone finally said it out loud.