This fall day is flat. No forgiveness to the afternoon, just straight particles of air. Buck watches Jamey from where he can also see the door if his lady returns. There’s a measure of blame in the dog’s eyes.
Jamey imagines the fuzz on her braids, the way she hides her smile when he comes home from work, her standing in a man’s wife-beater (that barely covers her pussy) in the morning light and watering the plants, her pigeon-foot strut down the sidewalk as she tells a long story with hands splayed.
He’s been sitting here for an hour, fully clothed in the empty bathtub, smoking menthols from a pack she left behind, and ashing in the drain, bare heels on the rim. His hair is greasy and his dimple acts up when he grinds his teeth.
He thinks this whole thing looks like a prank.
It always struck him as suspicious—how she showed up, the girl next door, and kept after him until he fell in love, this choosing between her and his family—it’s too biblical, too tragic, too concise a conundrum for a life as amoral as his.
He’s never had to be moral. He falls into one of those crevices: a certain kid in a certain society in a certain generation where no decisions remain because his ancestors have finished every single thing within reach.
While tapping ash into the drain, he feels a revelation like adrenaline: If everything is already done, maybe I’m here to undo things.
He pictures himself on a pyramid, lugging off its top stone, and sending it to the ground, where it bounces silently. He takes a last drag and crushes the butt on the worn porcelain between his thighs.
She smokes out the window. The night drips and pops with prostitutes, drug dealers and addicts, runaways, drifters. Her fourth-floor room is too high to hear anything but the shrillest hooker-to-hooker “Girl!” and car horns held for psychotic lengths of time.
She does jumping jacks to get her blood flowing.
She smokes on the bed, her consciousness a kingdom where many things take place but nothing wins or loses. Growing up in a hood whose one playground had one working swing, whose candy stores sold more heroin than candy, whose public library was a carcass of a building, she knows how to amuse herself.
After a while, she ventures out, spends seventy-five cents on a Wonder Bread loaf, feeds pigeons from a church stoop. Their feet are red like gum that’s been chewed.
“I’m gonna pay for another night,” she says to the front desk. “Four-oh-Four.”
The clerk takes her money without saying anything.
A man whose flattop is bleached yellow leans against the lobby wall and sizes her up. Elise imperceptibly shakes her head no. He looks away.
The room is very lonely, but she doesn’t feel lonely. She feels the presence of her childhood, but doesn’t reminisce on things like they were completed incidents. The past is layers of cake with cream in between, and she can bite through it on one fork; it’s a deck of playing cards being shuffled and shuffled and shuffled; it’s what she sees when she spins and spins, light streaking her mind with white and ghost-pink and nuclear-blue. It’s poodles coughing, rough kisses from her mother, blood in the bathroom sink, policemen knocking in the night, flowers from the supermarket, funerals in damp churches, melted popsicles—all of it is still happening, it’s alive and recurring. Her memory works like a beat.
“Buck. Where is she?” Jamey asks, half expecting an answer.
He’s lying on the bed, looking at a Polaroid from a Jones Beach afternoon. She’s wearing a string bikini and black sneakers, holding up her hands as if to stop the hours, laughing, aviators reflecting him.
Jamey limps to work. Clark sends him home before lunch.
“Whatever you have, child, I do not want it, thank you very much,” Clark says from a safe distance, and shoos Jamey out of the office.
Clark can taste heartbreak like a rotten egg.
In his building’s hall, Jamey hears the phone, sprints upstairs.
He’s jamming the key into the lock when the phone stops. He storms into the apartment, and Buck hides in the bedroom.
Jamey sinks onto the couch.
The phone rings again. “Elise?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus fucking lord,” he says.
They’ve grown up years in a matter of days—they know it when they hear each other.
“I had to think,” she explains.
“Why did you leave to think when you could have stayed and talked?”
Silence for a moment. “So let’s talk.”
“Where are you?” he says impatiently.
“St. James Hotel.”
His taxi gets stuck in traffic around Forty-Second Street, among sandwich-board evangelists, under beaded-light LIVE SHOW signs, so he pays the guy and jumps out.
He enters the lobby in a way that makes the clerk sit up.
“Four-oh-Four,” Jamey tells him without stopping.
He flies up the staircase like a cat.
“That was fast,” she says as she opens the door.
She’s sullen and unreadable. Shoulders and boys’ hips cocked in opposition.
He walks by without touching her.
“Say whatever you need to say,” he says.
“Fucking calm down first!”
“I’m pissed. You left without leaving a note.” He’s sitting with legs crossed, as if meeting with businessmen in a parlor somewhere. His face is calm, the broad mask trained to be flat, while she can see the red in his eyes.
“Jamey,” she soothes.
“Just tell me.”
Elise looks at the ceiling.
“Speak,” he says loudly.
“Why do they have such a hold on you?”
Expressionless. “My family?”
“If you can call them that.”
“They’ve given me everything, Elise,” he says like he’s breaking horrific news as gently as possible.
Elise shrugs. “So give it back.”
It takes him a while but he finally grins, considering this. Then he laughs, that golden, filthy laugh. It fractures his skepticism—yolk runs from the cracked shell.
“What?” she says.
“That’s such a good idea.”
Her eyes—outlined in black—open. “Really?”
“Come here.” He buries his head in her waist.
They rock, and laugh.
“Elise, Elise…” He sighs.
“Jamey, Jamey,” she says, to be funny.
“We’re fucked,” he says, muffled.
She kisses his head.
“That was way too simple,” she says, and they laugh more.
“Goodbye, fortune,” he says, and lets it go like a balloon zigzagging up to the sun.
OCTOBER 1986
Sunshine sifts through white oaks and mulberries on Seventh Street, and someone in the building sings scales. Two guys in leather trench coats sit on the stoop across the way, sharing a pint of Gallo in a bag. Upstairs, Elise folds his laundry while he cooks her eggs for lunch.
“I could literally divorce my family—I’ve heard of people doing that,” he tells her, closing up an omelet.
Albert Peterson, a fellow Buckley mate, got himself emancipated at fifteen, and his SoHo loft was promptly overrun with street kids and parasites. Albert separated from his parents but not from his trust fund, and the ants found the sugar cube.
“I think Albert went at it backwards,” Jamey says. “No need for divorce if you just get rid of the capital.”