They all tip their heavy shot glasses, wipe mouths in staggered unison.
The next day, he and Clark are eating takeout Waldorf salads at Clark’s desk, where trinkets are spread on the ink blotter: a crystal swan, a Purple Heart (Clark doesn’t know whose), and an ivory comb, monogrammed, that belonged to Carole Lombard.
“Clark, I wonder if I could work here for September, maybe October. I’m taking a semester off, so I can focus on my future, and I just love working here.” And it’s an easy paycheck.
“How nice to hear this enthusiasm! I suppose so.”
“Great, thanks!”
At the end of the day, Clark and Jamey wait for the elevator.
Clark fluffs the lavender hankie in his pocket. “But you will be going to Yale for spring semester, won’t you, James? You wouldn’t throw away that opportunity, right?”
“I’m sure I will.”
“Great, great,” Clark says, but with suspicion. “You’re not, like, doing drugs, are you? Should I be concerned?”
“No! All’s well,” Jamey says, giving his best smile.
Perhaps he can tell Jamey knows he’ll never go back to school.
Not next semester, not next year. Not ever.
But for once, Jamey doesn’t feel like he has to explain himself to some nanny or proctor or anyone else acting in loco parentis.
Clark smells a rat.
For Elise’s birthday, Jamey conjures up a four-course dinner on a rented yacht, circling Manhattan. She has trouble walking down the pier in high heels and he holds her elbow, and she looks nervously around the sparkling dusky marina.
“Here we are,” he says, and salutes the captain at the boat.
Elise takes off her shoes, and is helped onboard.
“Happy birthday, mademoiselle!” says the first mate.
The table in the cockpit is set with white linens, antique silver, and roses. The water rises in triangles of liquid black licorice. New Jersey blazes away across the river, and a black-tie waiter pours Elise a vodka sour with a cherry—her favorite.
“Can I smoke on this thing?” she asks under her breath.
“You can do whatever you want,” he says. “Tonight’s your night.”
They eat filet mignon, with profiteroles for dessert.
Passing under the bridge, its darkness and echo is an otherworld.
All week she’s been stressing about how his family will look at him playing hooky—she’ll be the culprit.
It’s so beautiful out here—the stink of the river, the baubles of light. She suddenly knows she won’t fight his decision. The family will decide it’s her, that she led him astray, no matter what he says or does now.
And hasn’t she?
SEPTEMBER 1986
On September first, they take up residence in a railroad crib at Second Avenue and Seventh Street.
They read their names on the lease.
“Wow,” Elise says, looking to him for assurance. “We’re doing this, huh?”
“We’re doing it.”
Elise and Jamey walked around for a couple weeks, looking for apartments. Elise taught him it’s as simple as hunting for cardboard signs posted in delivery entrances or first-floor windows, or asking the guy sweeping the stoop if he knew of vacancies.
They were drawn to the East Village. Kids run the blocks, working as lookouts, innocent ambassadors to basements and back alleys. Tompkins Square Park is its own nation of tents, milk crates, bonfires, tattooed people, and dogs that stutter and function in debilitated rhythms. A man jauntily threads through a crowd on First Avenue, T-shirt on his head like a sheik, singing—raised among so many people, at home and on the streets, that he doesn’t see them as obstacles but rather as water or air, a medium to move through, that moves through him too. Holding hands, Elise and Jamey kicked through candy wrappers and avoided dog shit. Then they found this place.
On the first floor, the landlord Mr. Gorowski lives with his wife, who only speaks Polish, so he speaks Polish to her when he’s moved to translate something, and Elise can’t help wondering why he translates the sentences he does and then doesn’t translate anything else. The elderly couple has houseplants and fake flowers in the living room, an indoor garden of metaphysical proportions.
The second-floor apartment is old but scrubbed and repainted, a bathtub in the kitchen, two windows looking into an apocalyptic courtyard, and two windows looking onto Seventh Street. The one thing left by the previous tenant is a dozen airplane whiskey bottles shoved into the toilet tank. A found sculpture of obsession.
The new tenants lie on the mattress, sheets pooling on the floor.
Elise runs her hands through his hair. “Remember how you acted in the very beginning?”
He grunts, animalistically pleased by her massage.
“You didn’t know anything,” she says, pulling his hair now to hurt him.
“Nothing,” he agrees, and turns over on her. He nips her now with his teeth, his breath between her legs.
They do it the old-fashioned way, missionary, but the unfamiliar smells here, the disturbed dust, the hollow drawers, the way air travels from this window around this room, the shush of leaves in the trees, strangers outside shrieking names they don’t know—all of this pinpricks their skin, making this seem like the first time.
They fall asleep, and the afternoon nap feels illicit, against the order of the day. They really don’t know what they’re doing. Jamey stands at the window, watches evening take over the streets. A stray dog sniffs down the sidewalk, no collar, no owner. Someone waits for something in a tinted-window Chevy, the radio so loud the whole car shudders with the bass. Jamey flattens his hand on the glass, meeting the future.
These days he eats lunch alone, perched on a Fifth Avenue bench, watching kids in uniforms on the next bench. The light moves fast through grand elms above.
One kid has a nosebleed, and boys and girls are nursing him, skipping in circles, taunting him. It’s amazing how fast a society forms around an emergency.
Jamey finishes his sandwich with a bittersweet smile. He’s not in school this September, and he misses it, but not Yale. Not even high school.
He misses third grade. He misses kickball. He misses long division.
He misses Jack London.
She gets to know the neighborhood with the curiosity of an army wife who understands they could get transferred tomorrow. Behind the dry cleaner, a bicycle with no wheels, no chain, and no handlebars is still padlocked to the window bars—a useless torso. Empty whipped-cream canisters have collected under the Kiev’s dumpster.
She discovers the pungency and shadow of this corner, or the green dank tingle of air in the alley, the way kids get acquainted with woods or attics or fields, knowing the molecules and milliseconds of a place. She looks at the red velvet boxes in the jewelry shop window, and the white cat with rheumy eyes, stoned on sunshine, that guards the chains and crosses and medallions.