They go to Little Italy one night for comfort food and red wine. Their table is in the corner of the big-windowed restaurant, looking onto Grand and Mott. The snow coming down vanishes once someone steps on it. The footsteps of the few walkers are exact.
They get a bottle of Chianti, and their hustler-waiter winks at Jamey and points to Elise, pantomiming that she’s too beautiful, he’s too lucky. He makes a hundred flourishes in turning the corkscrew, and they’re so enchanted someone could easily pick their pockets, but the performance is just the cherry on top of dinner. He flips the corkscrew closed and tosses it in the air and catches it behind his back, slips it into his apron.
Over clams linguini, Elise gets misty.
Jamey steamed the window and wrote their initials.
“I love you more than life,” she says.
“You’re drunk,” he chides her, but he likes it when she says things like that.
Before work, he decides to drop off Teddy’s gift—a Canon 35mm camera for Teddy and Claudia’s birdwatching trips upstate.
Martin mans the door, and Jamey greets him on the icy sidewalk, squints to see if Teddy is at the desk.
“No sir,” Martin says without looking at him.
“Shoot,” Jamey says. “Think I could leave this here for him?”
“Teddy doesn’t work here anymore, sir.”
Jamey gets queasy. “What?”
“He—well, sir. They let him go.”
When Jamey walks into the apartment the next morning, the camera, bow on top, is under his arm. “They fired Teddy. For coming to our wedding. I know it.”
Elise sits heavily at the kitchen table. “Are you serious?”
The trees make bony shadows on the cabinets.
“Yup.”
Jamey takes off his coat, suddenly too hot. He stands behind a chair, holding its back with knuckles facing out, shoulders high. They look at each other.
“I didn’t want to go to Bridgeport,” Elise confesses. “I just felt guilty. Now word’ll spread I married a rich boy.”
“I’m not a rich boy anymore.”
“You’ll always be rich deep down.”
“Fuck you!” he says sort of playfully.
“Trust me, there’s family of mine could show up.”
“Oh come on,” Jamey says halfheartedly.
“What are we going to do?” Elise asks.
Jamey rolls his sleeves, takes out a skillet. “Let’s fry some eggs.” He can’t look at her.
New Year’s Eve. They feel too heavy-hearted for partying, but Jamey at the last minute buys paper hats that say HAPPY NEW YEAR! and rainbow-foil blowouts.
“We can’t not celebrate,” he chides.
So they plan to go to Times Square, watch the red apple drop, kiss strangers, stay warm by crowding against bodies. They hit the streets, which feel like anarchy, people meeting one another’s eyes, daring to connect, intoxicated, jacked-up.
“You got any resolutions?” he asks.
Elise’s hands are deep in the white fur, top hat at an angle, as they turn onto Sixth Avenue. Someone throws a Champagne glass from a window to break on a car.
Thumping music from a kid strutting by with a boom box.
“Maybe I’ll quit smoking,” Elise says.
They’re paused, shivering, while she lights a smoke, when Jamey’s eyes wander down Twenty-Second Street to a dark clump of motion, distress.
“Hey!” he shouts, and moves in that direction.
The clot of people freezes, and Jamey starts running, and three silhouettes vanish in the opposite direction.
Elise chases Jamey, and they arrive at a boy, sequins torn from his shorts, feathers from wings, blood trickling from his mouth.
“Oh my God,” she panics, kneeling.
His blue eyes pop open, one false eyelash askew. “That’s what I get,” he says wryly, “for being an angel.”
“Who were they?” Jamey asks.
“Strangers. Fuckers.”
This kid is now anointed with violence, his glitter stuck to those boys’ hands. This was the finishing touch to his costume.
They take a cab to a Ninth Avenue address Frankie gives the driver, holding a tissue to his mouth.
“Where you going?” Elise asks as they drive.
“You guys should come!” he says suddenly, clapping. “I’ll take you to the best party in town.”
They hold him as he hobbles to a door (wedged open with a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales), and into a freight elevator. “We’re going all the way up, if you know what I mean,” he says.
The elevator door opens, and they’re about to climb an iron ladder when Frankie asks how he looks.
“Divine,” Elise says.
He grins, showing a lost tooth.
And they ascend, into the night.
Into a forest of recycled Christmas trees on the roof, woods inhabited by unwashed beasts of art and vaudeville—grown-up delinquents—who glued and spit and stitched (with dental floss and shoelaces) a world. The seams are invisible at night.
“Welcome, welcome!” says a guy roller-skating through the crowd, tossing iridescent dust.
His nose is giant and chin minimal, and he skates into the arms of his Hawaiian girlfriend, twice his size with gold rings in her lip. But like the other misfits here, their faces are not hidden or corrected. Instead the features glitter and shine, transmuted into authentic humanhood and transcendent character.
Jamey and Elise make their way through the woods, past a bar carved out of ice, past a DJ whose turntable blasts remixed Bananarama, and Frankie introduces them to someone in a pink wig, robed in seashells.
“I’m Neptunia of the Netherworld,” she says, brandishing a trident.
“Hey!” Frankie points to the stars.
The moon is new.
Many hours later, Elise and Jamey go home, after dancing and fire-juggling and ice queens, and they never see Frankie again. He was reunited with his tribe. Everything that was odd and ungainly about him became beautiful in the right crowd.
Maybe Elise and Jamey are their own tribe, and they belong to no one else, to nothing larger than themselves. Can we live like that? Elise thinks about this question as she wearily unlaces her black sneakers, soles coated in gold.
JANUARY 1987
One of the first mornings of the year they hear sirens down the block, and the sirens don’t end. Later on, Elise walks by news crews camped in front of a building.
“These ladies were torturing a little girl,” an onlooker says, hugging his shoulders.
She and Jamey watch the TV, eating lasagna at their coffee table, but soon they can’t eat, and dinner congeals.
The reporter braces against the wind in her scarlet coat, the camera light glaring at her.
“Leticia Broadman is being accused today of killing her only daughter, six-year-old Shawna Broadman, with an exorcism gone awry. A neighbor here at 152 Second Avenue heard screaming, but when the police arrived, the damage had been done. Leticia Broadman allegedly made her daughter drink Drano, according to sources inside the police station, because God told her to. This is Cindy Drecker, Eyewitness News.”
Shawna’s school photograph comes on the screen. She’s beaming, hair braid ending with a red plastic ball on the elastic. The blue “sky” is mottled behind her.