“Sure,” Jamey says reluctantly, after racking his brain fruitlessly for an out.
Jamey stands awkwardly in this home of incense and watercolor sets and narcotics and pyramid schemes and LEGO, a place that will one day implode but is happy for now.
“We named him Mad Max!” Chloe says.
Jamey watches Simone adjust the nest of towels in the kids’ room. The raccoon is still a tiny, clumsy, grunty creature that will only become more nimble and true, the way animals do. Jamey looks at Chloe and Star, born revolutionaries. But they might become hypocrites like their parents, the way human beings can do.
They both have the day off. Elise boils hot chocolate, and the man on the jazz station talks in a monotone about a Miles Davis track for longer than the song lasted.
“I don’t ever want to go outside again.” Jamey sighs.
Jamey pulls up her sweater, dabs a half-melted marshmallow on her tit, licks it off. She giggles.
They play sex games with honey, maraschino cherries, whipped cream.
The bed is sticky and stained. He’s lying on his stomach, his hair unruly, long enough to curl down his neck.
“You got an ass like a black girl,” she tells him.
She smokes, contemplates him like a painter evaluating a model.
His body always seems stilled, inactive, but it’s gambling and tricking and delighting the world.
Why is he hard to look away from? He doesn’t invite it—fantasy is just built into the meaning of his body the way a swimming pool is made for water and a cemetery for graves.
“Turn over,” she commands for fun, looping her cigarette in the air.
He’s like the statue at the Met, supple and melting with sensuality, and closed. But she knows her way into the marble. She thinks his gentleness comes from being sure he’ll hurt someone. An eternal restraint.
Hail pelts the windows.
“It’s too cold to go out,” he groans.
“I know.”
“I mean ever again.”
And they lie in bed and smoke. He picks up a hardback The Call of the Wild, which Elise found at the Salvation Army.
“Why don’t you read it to me?” Elise says.
He holds the book open and scans for a good passage. “Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.”
They lie in a penumbra of light coming in the door. Buck sleeps, whimpering as he hunts.
“How were you so sure about us?” he asks.
“I just knew,” she says, without drama.
“Okay, Confucius.”
She doesn’t laugh. “Seriously, you think you should know the reason for everything.”
He’s quiet. “I keep thinking about the blackout,” he says.
“You didn’t do nothing till then. I had to wait.”
“I was so scared of you.”
“You still scared, baby.” She yawns, and curls up to sleep.
He watches her, propped on an elbow. Scared?
“You can’t just say that and then go to sleep,” he argues.
“I can do whatever I want,” she says, pissed off, eyes firmly closed to make a point.
“Oh yeah?” he says, and stands on the bed, backed into the corner like he’s in a wrestling ring, gearing up.
She lies back and flashes him, pulling up her Public Enemy T-shirt and throwing it down. “Scaredy-cat,” she taunts, laughs.
She switches moods in a heartbeat not because she’s out of control—she just doesn’t care what it looks like to switch. She watches other people stay in moods just to seem committed to something.
He tickles her, and she pants, hunched over, between laughing hysterically: “No, no, Jamey, no…” And then she squeals as he attacks again.
FEBRUARY 1987
Elise walks with head tucked to the morning wind, past the shoe-repair shop (front window stuffed with orphaned loafers and lavender pumps), past a man sleeping in a brittle churchyard, past a vase (luminous like a woman, but empty) in a dark window.
“How ya doin’,” says Rob at the construction area entrance, and Elise salutes him.
Guys move around, tools clanging from belts, faces smug against the chill under hard hats. The coffee truck is on site, Stan telling Irish jokes and blonde jokes and Jewish jokes, making change from his money apron.
“Morning, sunshine!” they call to her. “Kinda cold, don’t ya think?”
“Mornin’, fellas!” she calls back. “Yeah, fuck this. What can you do about it, right?”
“Yeah, right!”
Trash is collected in the bottom of the chain-link fence like spinach in teeth.
One night at work, Jamey finds Teddy’s home number in the phone book.
“You heard,” Teddy says when he answers.
“I want to make it up to you,” Jamey states, dimple working, earnest and embarrassed.
“Aw, no—don’t pull that shit on me.”
“Can I meet you somewhere?”
Teddy hesitates, and Jamey can tell he doesn’t want to see him.
But he relents. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow? Claudia’s visiting her mammy in a home up in Philly, so I’m by my lonesome.”
Jamey drives the BMW to Brooklyn, the Manhattan Bridge swaying under the tires. At a stoplight, a woman knocks on his window for money. Her sweatshirt is filthy, her lower face burn-scarred, and she looks at the tinted window (unable to see him) with an abnormal fearlessness.
He drives through industrial Flatbush, then through the Greek Revival row houses in Fort Greene, and past abandoned buildings dissolving like temples of soot.
Jamey parks and walks, passing a stoop with lions, bird shit on one statue’s eye. Chestnut trees tower.
Buzzed in, Jamey is the specter of some white boy from yesteryear, lurking around black clubs, obsessed with jazz. Goofily happy to get in the door. Jamey takes the gloomy stairs, feeling stupid.
The apartment was meant to be full of kids, but things didn’t turn out. It’s Spartan, sort of Christian minimalist, and smoky from Teddy cooking pork chops.
Jamey opens the bottle of red he brought and pours glasses.
“Thanks, James.”
“Least I could do,” Jamey says.
Teddy makes a face at that. Teddy’s face is not a kind face, but it’s not unkind. Kindness just isn’t relevant because his jaw, his forehead, his cheekbones are right. He’s walking evidence of proper actions taken over many years.
“It is because of the wedding, right?” Jamey says, his voice undramatic but serious.
Teddy shrugs. “Most likely.”
“I just—you worked there forever. You have a relationship with these people—”
“What people?”
Jamey leans against the counter and stares at Teddy. “The building.”
“I most certainly do not,” Teddy persists, taking the pan off the fire. “Not in a way that will disrupt my life, now the connection is broken.”