Teddy pushes his chair back, crosses his arms. “I thought I would mention today something from your childhood, Jamey. Like how you’d ride your tricycle in circles in the lobby. Or how you always left your encyclopedia on my desk. Or your obsession that year with butterflies.”
Jamey smiles at the crumb-strewn tabletop, embarrassed, and Elise curls his black hair around his ear, looking at him.
“Good lord, butterflies this, butterflies that,” Teddy complains.
“I know,” Jamey admits.
“But I’d rather talk about today then yesterday,” Teddy says. “I don’t know if I ever saw you happy like this before.”
Jamey thanks him, then turns to Elise, chin down, eyes tilted up to hers. “Yeah—this is one of those things people say”—he bites his lip—“but I didn’t know I could—love someone like I love you.”
Then she sobs, awkwardly raising her flute, its rim stained with red gloss, and Gretchen and Claudia coo and soothe, feed her tissues.
“Why you crying, baby?” asks Claudia.
“I don’t know!” she manages to blubber.
She hiccups through lunch, and they all laugh at each tiny yeep.
“Champagne helps,” Jacek says, pouring.
“It makes it worse!” Claudia chides, laughing.
Walking alone now through the pale-gold afternoon, Jamey takes Elise’s hand and she takes it back.
“What is it?” Jamey asks.
Her Fendi heels drag the cement, shoulders low, the way a teenage boy walks.
“We’re married,” he says.
They pass a pet store, where sickly kittens wrestle in sawdust. An apothecary, with glass jars of herbs and roots, the labels written in script.
“Till death do us part,” he says.
They pass a school, its halls dark and empty.
“It just happened so fast. And now it’s over,” she complains, her wires short-circuiting, blinking, and burning up.
“It’s only beginning!”
“And nobody in our family saw it,” she pouts.
“But we agreed we’d just have friends?”
They march a few more blocks, the winter sun caulking the seams and gaps with black light, until she halts—she lost her flowers!
“We’ll find them,” Jamey says.
“We’re not going to find them!” she bawls.
Passersby glare at Jamey consoling her.
The red church door across the street catches his eye. Maybe a little ritual will help, he thinks, panicking.
They walk into the silent space—a bank of candles burns against one wall. Elise cranes her neck to look at the ceiling—robed figures, luminescent lilies, shepherds leaning on a cane.
“Okay, wait here,” he whispers, and seats her in the pew.
Jamey finds a priest reading in an alcove. Embroidered tassels hang over his chest, and his chin is red.
“Father,” Jamey says quietly. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”
“Not at all, son,” the man says, lowering eyeglasses, making it clear that Jamey is interrupting.
“My wife is sitting in the pews. We just got married, and she has some questions.”
“Ah. How long have you been married?”
Jamey looks at his watch. “Two and a half hours, Father.”
The priest opens his eyes like an owl.
They find Elise, kicking one leg, biting her nail. The priest expects drama.
“I understand you two are newlyweds,” the priest says.
“Can you, like, make it official?” Elise asks.
The priest looks like they’re swindling him. “Official? I don’t know of anything fitting your request, young lady, besides an actual ceremony—”
“Could you—just bless us?” Jamey suggests.
“Well, I—” the priest protests.
“Please?” Jamey pulls out his dimple.
“I suppose I could devise something—”
“If you would. As a man of God. As a spiritual leader,” Jamey says desperately and condescendingly.
“Well, then. A blessing for your marriage.”
The man hums incantations, lights a candle, hold their hands. Elise’s blood pressure slowly—slowly—comes down a little.
They walk into the cold night.
“You feel better?” Jamey asks hopefully, and she nods, smiles for him.
They hold hands.
As Jamey talks, she pretends to agree, but she can’t hear him. She sees their vague reflections moving from some dirty apartment lobby doors to the amber mirrors and metal shutters of storefronts, and she knows she loves him almost too much to bear.
At home, they take off coats and move around, flaunting a new identity in this familiar context.
“Would you like a drink, Mrs. Hyde?”
They open wine, look out the window, lock the door, stand up and sit down, animating an hour or two.
They meant to have dinner out, but suddenly they lie down. It’s like nothing they ever felt. It comes from someplace deeper than existed yesterday or the day before. They lie on their sides, looking at each other, Jamey puts his thumb on her mouth, and she flicks her tongue. Her eyes are pained.
They wake up starving at three a.m. and cook eggs, naked, and toast each other with orange juice.
“I’m nothing without you,” he says plainly, holding up his glass of Tropicana.
“And I’m nothing without you,” she answers, and they clink.
As filthy as any night was, a New York City morning is always clean. The eyes get washed.
Flowers in white deli buckets are replenished. The population bathes, in marble mausoleums of Upper East Side showers, or in Greenwich Village tubs, or in the sink of a Chinatown one-bedroom crammed with fifteen people. Some bar opens and the first song on the jukebox is Johnny Thunders, while bums pick up cigarette butts to see what’s left to smoke.
The smell of espresso and hot croissants. The weather vane squeaks in the sun. Pigeons are reborn out of the mouths of blue windows.
Elise and Jamey look through the classifieds, circling jobs with a felt-tip pen, and drawing rays of sunshine around their favorites.
He asks her to choose where they go for their honeymoon. The only place she knows is Mount Airy Lodge, from its commercials of doe-eyed born-to-party couples in bikinis or parkas.
Elise and Jamey spend time in the heart-shaped bed, and in their very own pool—a cup of chlorinated water, casting spooky blue shadows. They screw the living daylights out of the room, hooked on the sweet pornography of the place. Elise bought a white garter belt and seamed stockings for the weekend. But the most interesting thing happens outside.
As they eat gluey pancakes in the dining room, Elise stares out the window at the horses in gray snow, and Jamey asks if she wants to ride.
“I never did it before,” she says.
“Even better.”
Billy’s hair is shaved on the sides, long down the back, and he’s missing teeth, but he doesn’t seem jaded. Elise wonders if he’s done so many drugs he’s gone back to a child’s mind-set, or if he just never developed, and grifted his way through train hopping and circuses and stables with wonder and innocence untouched.