Oil stains dot the gray tar, like cheetah spots.
She goes to the Third Avenue Cheese Shop. It’s like walking into a chapel that smells of sex. Or a morgue where you feel comfortable. The staff shows a devotedness like miners or nurses. They know their work, having made a commitment that’s private and stoic. They’re beautiful and rank; they’re people with a holy, boozy, creamy, rotting idea of love.
Buck looks at squirrels with a stare that says: I could, but I won’t waste my time. He’s unguarded while playing catch, and bounds around like a fat woman doing ballet. But when the game is finished, he pulls himself together and walks carefully through the streets, sniffing the wind. He looks at her as she unlocks their new building, and his eyes say: Yeah, this is the right place, but just for now. That’s what she was thinking too.
Elise navigates by faith, because she believes in love, has always known it in her bones. When she saw Jamey for the first time, she recognized him, in a way.
Jamey has always wanted to believe he believes in something good, but deep down, he fears he believes in nothing. Without fanfare. He’s not an extravagant and charismatic nihilist. He sees himself as someone who slips through the crowd at Grand Central, or stands in line at Duane Reade, or crosses the street at Mercer and Prince, a sculpted white face whose eyes and mouth are static at moments, inhuman. He might seem to belong, but is trespassing on land that belongs to better people. Love, he thinks, is accidental, fleeting—he can’t possibly deserve it.
Very often, when Elise and Jamey talk in the apartment, drinking coffee, she sits with knees spread, feet tilted on the dirty outer edges of her sneakers, seeming bored and sullen. He’ll falter, sensing animosity. It’s just that she can’t look at him—he’s too much. He’s a prince of this apartment, his eyes black and doubtful, uncertain of the maple burning in the window even while he’s enchanted by the red leaves.
She’s ahead of him, and while she does think he’ll catch up someday, it’s lonely waiting for it.
“Is something wrong?” he’ll ask, shy and concerned.
She’ll look like: Duh, and laugh. “No. Why?”
She can’t force him to know things.
There’s a deli on Tenth Street she likes. The Pakistani cabdrivers, with their burnt-yellow or salmon button-down shirts and creased brown hands, get her drinking tea and eating English muffins toasted with cheap strawberry jam.
Lester owns the deli, and his retarded son Brian does most of the cooking while Lester gossips and handles money. Brian is obsessed with baseball cards, and customers bring them to him. Brian acts like a woman who just got a sapphire bracelet from her lover, squealing and clapping his hands to his chest. Everyone makes lopsided smiles when this happens.
“You got it, Bri,” they say, pleased and embarrassed by his effusive thanks.
The bells jangle above the door; it’s mainly men who come and go. A dollar bill is thumbtacked to the wall, and so saturated with the fumes of grease and coffee and sweat, it must weigh five times its normal weight, and it hangs there like leather.
Old East Village natives come in.
“Gimme a bacon egg ’n’ cheese and a coffee light wit cream,” they say.
Elise can sit here all day, with no sports section in front of her, no notebook to scribble in. She barely listens to the soap operas playing on the TV above the refrigerated sodas, a strange choice of channel but Elise thinks the men are comforted by women being vaguely present, in their chiffon robes, hair body-waved, not demanding anything, gliding into gardens with fountains and through hospital rooms full of lilies.
She brought Jamey here once, and he couldn’t see why she thinks the place is so great.
“See yez ’round,” says one guy, folding the paper under his arm.
“Till tomorra,” says Lester, and he grabs the metal spatula and fixes something, chastising Brian, but he promptly hands it back, kissing Brian on the cheek.
Elise already knew he would kiss his son like that, right then. Her heart is set to the same time.
Jamey’s come to love his sidewalk-bench lunch on Fifth and Seventy-Second, and when he feels in his blazer pocket for a napkin, he finds a valet ticket from a yacht club in Massachusetts, and the nub of a lime Life Savers roll, and a key to something. Like clues to a crime that he still has to solve.
He looks at life around him—a nanny walking children, who are animatedly talking over each other about lions and candy apples, the light filtering through trees and buildings and clouds, the yawning pretzel guy on the corner, and a gray-haired man in a tweed jacket walking a Pomeranian. Jamey receives it all like ocean spray on his face, smoke from a bonfire, pollen on your soul after a day in the garden. He’s roosting in the heart of the city, among human lives, getting stink and oil and spit on his hands. This daily baptism of the city—he loves it. He collects it. Maybe he is gaining on Elise.
Their phone rings and Jamey answers.
“Jamey! It’s Binks, darling. How on Earth ah you?” she purrs.
“Great, I’m great, how are you?”
“Bats and I would love to have you and your lady friend for dinner, Jamey. How would next Thuhzz-day evening work, darling?”
“I think it would be fine,” he can’t help saying. “Sure.”
“I could just tell at the christening that things are amiss. I left the church that day, and this is what was going through my mind: Make things right for my Jamey.”
“That’s—thank you, Binkie. Thank you.”
Binkie—what are you up to? She’s diaphanous, but in a flinty way, like a seashell. Metallic layers. She’s the sound of a martini pitcher stirred with a sterling spoon. The smell of Après L’Ondée and thin cigarettes. She was handed more personality than other mortals, and chemically fertilized in a glasshouse—now her bionic strength allows her to teleport platters of watercress sandwiches from the kitchen to the library, where she’s beating her friend at backgammon. Her own dogs fear her. Her staff never needs disciplining because they live in terror—her authority hums on a subsonic level to all the creatures in the land.
Jamey’s ventured before into her Newport bedroom—the vanity set reminded him of a war throne.
She believes her grandson will do what she says.
Goddamn, she can gossip and growl and coo, and he suddenly understands that her star power—the part of her that really sells tickets—is the abyss between the two Binkies. It’s exciting to experience such a discrepancy, and he knows he’s performed in the same split manner in the past, and it’s a demonstration of control to keep the selves separate. Her public persona and private person are so distant from each other. He can’t help but wonder if they ever meet, and if it’s once a day, or once a year, and what it’s like.
“Jamey?” Binkie says suspiciously. “You sound fah-r away.”