“Most horses feel fear, you understand?” Billy says. “But that don’t mean you should be afraid.”
“You’ll be good,” Jamey tells Elise.
Elise puts one sneaker in a stirrup and, with Billy’s help, throws her other leg over.
“Holy shit!” she says, breathless.
“There you go, easy now,” Billy says, his lower lip fat with tobacco.
The horse side-prances, then stays.
Its bristly flank is more than human. It exceeds life! The hairy and prickly hot flesh outdoing anything of this world she’s known so far. Giant muscles and heavy bones moving under her, between her, and with her. Elise bends to lay her beating heart against the horse’s back. So, this exists—this can happen.
“You’re a natural,” Jamey shouts as Billy leads them around the corral.
She’s never seen an eyeball bigger than her own. The globe is an obsidian jewel in the galactic head. It’s a girl—a mare, to use the language—and her hooves move in a pattern like bluegrass or jazz, nothing even-tempered, nothing expected.
“What do you think?” Jamey calls.
She just shakes her head. “Oh my God!” she eventually answers.
Jamey’s seen many girls on horses, mostly riders with complex styles and skills, and total authority. But with Elise, black sneakers in the stirrups, her face mottled with incredulity, Billy leading them slowly back to him, he sees how power can be shared to make a different kind of elegance—one more immediate, and less negotiated.
DECEMBER 1986
They’re about to be flat broke.
Sparkling winter afternoon. Elise jokes with construction workers down in Battery Park City, walking Buck, lured to this mammoth half-built structure. She asks to try the jackhammer, and they say no—but the boss is looking for runners inside.
“They like girls for that job,” says one guy, giving her the up and down.
Elise takes metal steps into the trailer office, where Tommy Bricks is smoking Lucky Strikes and paging through a Bon Appétit in his sweater turtleneck.
“Could we help you?”
“I’m looking for a job?”
Tommy looks at Salvatore, whose knees are spread because his belly hangs low, and Salvatore supposedly looks back, although smoky gold-rimmed glasses hide his eyes.
“What kine?” says Tommy.
“Runner?”
Tommy puts a hand on his glossed hair. “You got to spend the days walking around this site, showing perspective residents they future home. Last girl, she threw a hissy fit and she left.”
“She thought it was too cold,” Salvatore says, mimicking a girl whining. “She said she didn’t feel safe.”
“I’m not afraid of the cold.”
“You look tougher than her,” Tommy says after a moment.
Salvatore reaches out his cupped hand. “Wanna Tootsie Roll?”
“Sure.”
Tommy shows her around, shouting for the cage elevator that runs outside the skeletal building. All thirty floors are at a different stage of completion, the top still nothing but an idea—open to the wind, to the sky.
“The Realtors send clients down here. You get seven an hour to show them what the Realtor wants them to see. Dress nice and talk nice, but don’t wear shoes where you get a nail though the sole.”
He gives her rolled lavender plans to take home. Battery Park is like a space station being erected. Looking across the river, New Jersey’s pale jumble of factories and office buildings is just a gentle and easy sorrow, written in urban language, and far enough away to be sweet, to be precious.
The Statue of Liberty is being restored too. Her scaffolding looks like the halos doctors put on car-accident survivors.
Gulls occupy the sky like flies.
Jamey asks cabbies, guys behind the pizza counter, even Mr. Gorowski, about jobs.
No one trusts a rich boy looking for work, and they feel ridiculed by his questions.
“Nothing, huh?” Jamey says, gently disappointed, to the landlord.
Mr. Gorowski looks at his tenant a little longer, rubbing knobbed knuckles in his palm. “I do know a night job. My cousin Karl just left it is why.”
And that’s how Jamey ends up at the Iris Residences, with its pearl-gray awning and glass doors. In a few days, he’s hailing cabs in a charcoal suit and cap.
The lobby is a box of mirrors, an infinity room, where reflections make more reflections.
There’s a million teens on crutches, a million women with green beads, delivery guys with pimples and scooter helmets, men tilted forward like executives in cartoon strips.
And Jamey—in white gloves—shrinks from image to image.
The dreaminess of the night shift is constant, and objects float—keys and coffee cups and Chinese containers and tissues. Time seems free to do what it wants.
In the morning, on his way home, Jamey looks at the buckets on the street, asks the guy how much for the snapdragons—(a guy whose hands are casually scarred, the hands of an immigrant, standing in the cold for ten hours with a snotty nose and thin jacket). The man grins, speaks no English.
Elise smells the flowers before she puts them in water. “They’re real nice,” she says.
Sex is beautiful when they’re tired. When he works nights and she works days, and he gets home from the shift and she has yet to leave, they lie together for one hour. The hour is like an island in a river. He’s exhausted, and she just woke up. His body buzzes with work, and she sleepily rubs his back until she feels a new weight to his body, a solemnity.
He goes under the sheets—to her little heart, feels it harden, his chin wet in the otherworldly humidity of her reddish hair, her hands roaming his skull with no consciousness, they could be someone else’s hands—and she grinds against his tongue, everything dear and alive about her pinpointed in a pearl—that he’s licking, licking—she groans—he slows down—Oh come on, she says, stern, come on—he licks—he licks— Sunburst ravensblood snowstorm rosepetals kittenfur shootingstars!
It’s a drug of stuff, glugging through her veins, gilding her smile now, the best smile, eyes closed—but his eyes are open—looking at this girl he knocked out, angel in a coma, she’s pale with pleasure….
Then she kisses him, and he puts his hand behind her head, gently sets his weight on her. They’re quieter than usual in this orphan hour, slower. Sometimes he falls right to sleep after, and snores as she pads around, getting dressed and drinking coffee in the new light.
It’s so cold and windy, people stride backward. A cop on a horse looks like he’ll be sucked into the evil frozen sun. Everyone should just stay inside, where the radiator clanks and shudders like a beast that wants to care and protect the only clumsy way it knows how.
Walking Buck, Elise grips Jamey’s arm so she doesn’t slide on the ice.
“We should go to my mother’s house one day,” she says casually.
“Really?”
“Maybe…for Christmas?” she says, as if she hasn’t been thinking about it.
“Let’s go. You know that I—”
“What?”
“I’ve always wanted to meet them. You just seemed…”
“Seemed what?”