“No, I get it now,” Elise agrees.
Jamey thinks she means she finally sees through his family’s bullshit. But that’s not it. She sees through his.
“You can say I told you so,” he says.
“Nah,” she says, looking out the window.
The flower nods over potholes and bumps.
“What’s that you got there?” asks the cabbie with curious eyes.
“An orchid,” says Jamey.
The cabbie looks like they’re trying to pull one over. “That ain’t real!”
“It is too,” Elise says sullenly, and looks away.
“Wait a minute, why you mad? What’d you do to her, buddy?”
“Long story,” says Jamey.
“You should say you’re sorry,” he warns Jamey via the rearview. “Even if it ain’t your fault. Trust me, I been married twenty-one years.”
“I am sorry,” Jamey says.
“He is sorry,” Elise corroborates to the cabbie. “That’s not the point.”
She holds it together until he leaves for work the next morning. Alone, she makes coffee like an automaton. Why didn’t she tell them to screw themselves! Because that would confirm everything they think. They’re not about to be defeated in a parking-lot cock fight—They’ve rigged it so they can hang shit over your head while looking innocent, and you end up looking like the lunatic, the aggressor, the problem.
She sucks on her cigarette at the kitchen window, dirty sunshine streaming onto her bare feet as she contemplates the bottom line.
Why can’t he stand up to his goddamn family for real?
She packs a bag. Her body is light like she can float out of this trouble. She takes the two hundred dollars she stashed in a menthols pack the way her mom always hoarded a twenty in a tampon box, or a ten in the crib.
Holding Buck’s face, she rubs her forehead on his.
“You know what’s up,” she murmurs.
He freezes as she opens the door to leave.
When she closes the door, she stands a minute on the landing because she feels Buck waiting on the other side, can sense the heat of him two feet away from her. He never panics, knowing good behavior is his best chance, but she can hear a low, quiet whine. She can’t bear to listen.
She heads to the St. James Hotel, bag slung over shoulder, chewing gum, aviator glasses reflecting New York City, hands shaking. She shacked up at this motel once with a guy who’d just run from home and still had money from pawning his stepdad’s power tools.
The candy-pink neon sign is comfortably familiar.
This is where she’ll start.
In the room, she sits against the headboard, playing with a nicked switchblade she’s had since she turned sixteen.
Why does it have to be so hard? Elise remembers sitting with her mom’s friends while they watched game shows and smoked, snow coming down. To them, men are enemies. The more you want a man, the harder you lie and fight.
These women, from teenhood on, had the guys’ babies, mailed pictures and letters to prisons, battled girls in his ladder of lovers.
“Don’t let them get comfortable. Make sure they see you touchin’ another man’s shoulder, you know? Shit, even if you get a smack. Keeps the blood up.”
“I wear them little shorts and vacuum when he’s watching TV with his crew, and I bend down, girl. He doesn’t like that, me showing it off, but it fires him up. Later that night, he comes to me, you know what I’m saying?”
Elise looks onto the warzone of the West Side, onto tarpaper roofs and bodies splayed on the sidewalk and rusting cellar doors and a curbside mountain-scape of garbage bags.
If they were here, the women from her hood—the girls, cousins, aunts—they’d circle her, gesturing like their fingernails are wet, leading with the chin, showing support. It’s a riptide—she could drown in their affection and good-intentioned fury. This is when it hurts to be gone, but she can’t, she cannot go back to them.
When he gets home, there are Elise’s keys, with the cobalt rabbit foot, on the kitchen counter.
No note.
He envisions an animal blithely gnawing off its limb to escape a trap.
How dare she? How could she…
Come evening, she buys a hot dog and a Coke on the corner, and sits on the Alice-in-Wonderland-blue bed. A roach watches from the corner of the room, antennae waving.
She’s come here to imagine life without him. He’s everything now. He is her life.
Picture him gone. She’s not being sincere in imagining separation. It’s like running her finger through the candle flame—it should hurt but doesn’t.
Come on. Feel it.
There, that’s it!
Everything diminished to ordinary proportions—a spiritual reality that can kill a person fucking dead. The world shrinks, loses inner light, becomes a gray and hard site. I just don’t want to go there.
The TV is stricken with lines but she watches it anyway, her big feet in athletic socks crossed on the bed.
Gorbachev says Chernobyl shows the sinister force of nuclear energy. United States calls it premature to draw conclusions about Syrian complicity in recent terrorism. Haitians are destroying voodoo temples and killing priests and priestesses. A pornography panel has called for a reversal in the nation’s law enforcement and prosecution of distributors. A whale who charmed people as she swam off the Connecticut coast for fourteen months has been found shot to death.
Elise stubs out her cigarette, turns sideways on the bed, and spends the night with eyes open. Around seven a.m., when light starts fingering the curtains, she falls into dreamless sleep.
Jamey walks the East Village with Buck, past the open jaws of bars, past cats licking a tuna can, past the guy with a ghetto-blaster on a stoop. He looks into hallways, yearning for a fight—his bearing makes everyone uncomfortable, as if Baryshnikov is loitering in the streets.
“Can I help you, boy?” spits one guy in a bell hat.
“Looking for my girlfriend,” Jamey says.
Buck growls at another man who shuffles too close.
At a Third Avenue deli, Jamey buys a cheese sandwich and a root beer. He eats the sandwich, pops the soda, and drinks the whole thing. He burps, staring into pool halls and church foyers and burger joints. Jamey sizzles through the environment like acid.
He’s brain-dead at work, hair curling over one eye, pale as an opium addict.
“Did someone party like a rock star?” Clark asks coyly.
Jamey languishes in the apartment, with no idea how to reach her mother. No friends’ numbers—he’s not sure there are friends. Robbie’s in Miami or some other fantastical paradise.
She’s an orphan and he liked that until now. She was dependent on him and without a jury of family and friends.