“Reluctant.”
Elise lights a smoke, looks at him, waiting for him to go on.
“I felt,” Jamey says, “like you didn’t want to be judged.”
“Is that right?” she asks, blowing smoke out her nostrils.
For Jamey, Christmas is parties, driving from Greenwich or to Southampton, stress, fighting, caviar and Veuve Clicquot, black velvet, giant fir trees and eggnog, Labradors with red ribbons around their necks, tangerines in stockings, cigars, candles, Yule logs, carols. He could spend an hour looking at the ornaments, gently holding a blue-silver dove that is weightless. If he closes his eyes, it’s like he’s holding nothing. What are you doing thuh-r, son? asks Mr. Armistead in his cashmere turtleneck. Jamey is the one who creeps into the kitchen, asks the catering director where she gets her plum pudding. He happily spends an hour sitting in the library with the spinster aunts from Philadelphia, in monastic silence, avoiding the Mullworths’ daughter, who adjusts her silk plaid dress and flips her hair by the fire, stealing looks at him.
Elise and Jamey watch Buck drop hot turds in the dark afternoon.
This Christmas was looking pretty solitary, but now they have a plan.
“I don’t want to go empty-handed,” he says. “I do have about five hundred dollars left of the old money.”
Elise squints against a newspaper blowing down the street. “I was hoping we could, like, impress them,” she says bluntly.
“Sure,” Jamey says, trying not to seem surprised. “Something special for your mom?”
She shrugs. “Yeah.”
“I’m not necessarily suggesting it, but should we get something for your…dad?”
Cabs nose through walkers at the corner.
“Angel’s not my dad.”
“Your stepdad, sorry.”
They pass foyers with names scribbled on buzzers, an advent calendar of brass mailboxes. Stir-fried rice on the sidewalk that looks thrown up, undigested.
“He’s not my stepdad. He’s my mother’s boyfriend.”
“What about the kids?”
“That would be cool, get stuff for the kids.”
Buck loops his urine on a hydrant, and Jamey thinks it’s odd how she’s always been weird with him about presents, but suddenly she’s all about it.
“It’s a deal,” he says.
Elise puts her arm around his waist and leans her cheek on his chest while they walk, awkward and lovely.
On his way to work, he eats dinner at a Greek joint, his thighs spread on the stool and shoulders hunched over the newspaper that he reads at the counter while people bustle in and out. Eventually the “mother” of the place grabs his arm whenever he arrives, her eyes practically closed because she’s grinning madly, and leads him to his hallowed seat by the steam and clank of the open kitchen. She always sends the blondest, curviest girl to take his order like a madame pleasing a beloved client.
In the mirror box of the lobby, he learns the residents by name, and knows who needs what. He hands out a lot of shirts to young professionals. These flags of ambition, starched and strung on wires, shimmer in plastic. He likes holding the door. He likes hailing taxis. He likes helping old ladies over the brass threshold into the building. Not because he’s a good person, made for service. It’s the same pleasure a kid gets from playing with someone else’s toy when he has that exact toy at home.
Bessie Jameson, 12C, always gets flowers or a package hand-delivered from Bonwit Teller or chocolates, which she orders for herself. The front desk knows because Felix signs receipts and sees her name.
Rumor is she had a nice divorce. Bessie spends the days with a mud mask and Richard Simmons, and when she sashays from the elevator, all businesslike, she makes a noise as she pretends to wonder what’s inside the package. Her body pressed up and out, her face newly shiny. Jamey knows her coming down to the lobby is a sexual act, even if she’d never admit or understand that.
Once she wore a blouse with no bra. When she was gone, Jamey jacked off fast in the staff bathroom. He would never want her, never make love to her. He washes his hands without looking in the mirror. She’s not real to him; she isn’t real to herself. When he does imagine her naked body, he sees it as fiberglass.
Elise always shows a prospective client the model units first, the fake residences that look like someone lives in them. Lorenzo the interior designer targeted the Wall Street sensibility, using Ralph Lauren wallpaper and tobacco-brown leather couches, and there’s even toothbrushes by the sink and books on the shelves. Then she takes them to the actual floor to see the site of the apartment they want, usually an empty space with no walls, the Hudson winking below, helicopters sensuously twirling at eye level, a shiver in the knees.
The clients are often Europeans, sent for a year to Deutsche Bank or Credit Suisse. Or traders, whose wives and children live in Greenwich or Oyster Bay, looking for a pied-à-terre.
Elise does Vanna White—Here’s your brand-new dishwasher! She has to shout over the circle-saw’s shrill cry, and the nail gun’s shot and echo.
Up top, as they stand among rat pellets and lost bolts and Styrofoam cups, she points out Miss Liberty, the girl next door.
Night shift.
Jamey raises his arm, and a hundred arms are raised.
He smiles, with thousands of teeth.
Jamey thinks of Narcissus bending to the pool. He thinks of how a swan on a calm lake is one with its reflection, and then, lifting off, the bird divides from its self, and both parts become smaller and smaller. Division is more interesting than duplication, and an ax is a fascinating tool. It makes a fallen tree into wood that will keep your family warm. It does more than separate a whole into pieces; it changes the spirit of the thing, its use.
He thinks about Elise checking her compact, and how he looks over her shoulder to catch her outlined eye in the mirror. Her eye, separated from the rest of her, floating. Normally he doesn’t let his mind split into pieces, because it frightens him, but he’s in a container here. He has so much time to think on the night shift.
Jamey and Elise board Metro-North on Christmas Eve morning, and the Gorowskis look after Buck.
Grand Central is busy but not with businesspeople. Fur coats, a woman carrying a potted amaryllis, children running wild who are normally behaved. A homeless man sucks on a candy cane, the stick glistening out of his scabbed mouth.
Elise and Jamey carry Toys “R” Us and Bloomingdale’s bags, their hands turning red.