“It was in the poem!” she says, moving the hat up. “Didn’t you listen?”
They go watch After Hours by Scorsese, then see Breathless by Goddard. They eat cabbage soup at Odessa, watch the girls with massive teased hair, cat eyes, and sleeveless shirts as they laugh raucous and high with leather-vested boys, all picking fries off the plate in the center, dragging it through ketchup and slapping it on a tongue.
Their days and nights are spent in cafés and bars, movie theaters, parks, and they talk about the things people near them are talking about: AIDS, women’s rights, the welfare system. The topics jump from one group at a table, smoking and drinking beer, to another, like fleas from one dog to the next dog.
It’s a chilly day, not raining but all the yellow and orange leaves are vaguely wet.
Alex receives the first clues of Jamey’s renunciation as Rodion closes accounts and files motions.
“Jamey,” his father growls on the phone.
“Alex,” Jamey says in a low voice, trying to be calming, but he ends up imitating his dad’s voice.
“What is the problem with you?” His dad sounds like Phillip Drummond.
Jamey bites his lip. He thought he’d feel guilty when this moment arrived, but he feels great. He felt guilty before, knowing he’d never fulfill the contract of being a Hyde but getting paid anyway. “I just don’t want money that doesn’t belong to me—”
“It’s family money.”
Jamey pauses. “Robber-baron money—”
“Oh, you kids love to throw that term around. Do you know what the Hyde Foundation gives every year?”
“For tax deductions, you mean?”
“I make jobs in this city—I create work for people who would be homeless.”
Jamey shakes his head in amazement. “You do?”
“Yes, I do,” Alex says, his voice hoarse. “We provide a better life for so many folks—”
While Alex is blustering on, Jamey disconnects the wire from the wall, permanently, walking outside to leave the avocado-green telephone on the curb. He lets hatred mushroom-cloud in his head, after years and years of cold war with his pops.
He stands and looks at the phone on the clammy cement. He gently kicks it over, the receiver clattering out of the handle, the coiled line stretching. He skips up the steps, whistling like a farm boy.
One day, Elise enters the building and suddenly the landlord’s door opens. It’s Mrs. Gorowski in a lace-collared dress, eyes wide under her Dee Dee Ramone bowl cut. Meat is cooking, and this joins the smell of ginger, ancient secrets, amber, and old leather in their apartment.
The landlady fervently waves her in, then pulls Elise onto the couch to watch a PBS special with her. The show is beautiful, hallucinatory. Elise stares at orange and turquoise saris, palaces so massive and ornate they seem imaginary, dark men with white mustaches walking barefoot through mist and woods, children with gleaming exquisite ways of staring at the camera, paint on their forehead.
“Mother India,” the narrator intones. “The cradle of civili-za-tion. The only place where history has not been forgotten.”
When Jamey asks later about her afternoon, Elise says it was random, and awesome.
Elise and Jamey walk up Second Avenue. It’s brisk, the wind reddening everyone’s cheeks and causing people to look down while they walk, and hold hands, or wrap arms around shoulders. Jamey likes the rude and undiscerning weather today.
Approaching the market on the corner, whose shelves are crooked and whose floor is covered in roach traps and rat shit, Jamey asks her to wait while he goes in for milk and cereal, he’ll make it fast.
An automated horse is stock-still on its metal stand, and Elise checks her fur-coat pockets for coins. She pops in a quarter, and sits while it moves in a suggestive way. Her legs are too long, her shins almost touch the ground.
The pale horse gleams against the dark sidewalk.
Jamey comes out with no paper bags. Just a crazy look.
“What’s up?” Elise asks, worried.
The horse has stopped.
Jamey moves toward her.
He gets down on one knee, takes a gumball-machine ring out of his pocket. Its chip of glass shines.
“Elise,” he says. “Will you marry me?”
She can hardly look at him, overwhelmed with emotion like a kid who has to hide her face in her mother’s skirt. But there’s nowhere to go.
And this drab avenue, with its somewhat hostile breeze ruffling litter and sending plastic bags into the sky, this ordinary afternoon, is suddenly alive with candy hearts.
“Will you?” he says.
The dark traffic of possible answers moves in his eyes.
“Yes,” her voice cracks. “Yes….”
She jumps onto him, almost knocking him over, and they stand up, she’s clinching her legs around his waist, and they stagger, laughing, and she howls at the sky, not giving a fuck who’s watching them. Elise thinks she’s going to have a heart attack, she can barely breathe. Eventually she falls off, and they kiss again, and again. She holds out her giant hand like a starfish and they both stare at her ring.
NOVEMBER 1986
November is laden with parties and feasts and business in New York City. The cold streets make everyone feel alive, the cold plush and rich now, as opposed to March when the cold is cold and makes the city feel hard up.
Every day, Elise passes the cherry-red neon sign reading PSYCHIC next to a gold hand painted on the glass. She finally peeks in.
“Don’t be shy,” beckons the woman sitting at a silk-draped table. “I’m Zelda.” The woman holds out fishnet-gloved hands. She’s manly, with a bulbous nose and blond wig, but her eyes are tired in such an antique and drastic way, she must have the magic.
“Elise,” she says, swiping off her knit hat and stuffing it in her pocket. “I got a question about…about timing.”
“Sit down, honey.”
Zelda and Elise hold hands and shut their eyes.
Sandalwood incense burns in thunderclouds of sickly sweet smoke, and a child complains beyond the beaded curtain, and a soft female voice answers in another language.
Zelda’s black-lined eyes press closed. “You’re straightforward. You don’t lie. You tell it like it is.”
Silence as she reads the hand-holding.
“You love. You’re a lover. Unafraid.”
A cat purrs against Elise’s leg.
Zelda’s brow crumples. “You need to do it soon, whatever it is. I feel urgency in your stars.”
Zelda shakes Elise’s hands so she opens her eyes too.
“Something’s coming. Do the deed.”
Elise hands Zelda a twenty as the fortune-teller lights a clove cigarette and snaps a can of Tab open. “I like your jacket,” she says as Elise zips up her white fur to leave.
Elise tries on white dresses at Gimbels. The store connects to the Herald Square subway station, so she used to shoplift there. Everyone did—it was so easy to get away. Back then, she watched women browsing, and wanted to walk out one day with her own brown Gimbels bag.