“How could you be there so long, and…”
Teddy takes off his oven mitt and grimly considers Jamey. “Things are good between me and my lord. How you think I made it this far? If my dignity was hung up on those people, no offense to you, Jamey—I would have no self-respect, no peace.”
Jamey smiles. It’s like finding out a friend has been having an affair for years. That’s why he was distracted. It’s obvious now!
They eat, and the meat is tender, briny, pink in the center. The phone rings and Teddy looks at his watch.
“Claudia’s calling at nine, Jamey, I gotta take it, man.”
Jamey watches Teddy talk to her, mainly uh-huh-ing, and then laughing, picking his teeth with the edge of a matchbook all the while.
Teddy says Claudia sent her best.
They play chess, and swirl Courvoisier in glasses.
“Can I ask you something?” Jamey says.
“Well, I could tell you had something else on your mind.”
“You and Claudia—really love each other.”
“Yesssss…”
“I feel…lucky these days,” Jamey admits, smiling, chagrined. “Sometimes, I just wonder if, I don’t know, if I’ll screw it up.”
“You worry about what you got?” Teddy looks at Jamey with pleasant scorn and disbelief, which amounts to: Ah—white people. “That’s your problem right there. Think about it.”
They get on the subject of Valentine’s Day presents, and Jamey tells Teddy how much he loved Christmas presents from him and Claudia as a kid. (The gifts were wrapped in cheap drugstore paper. It was usually candy, or a remote-control car that broke on its second day, or cologne. They were real, unlike the Steiff animals and Barbour jackets a personal shopper picked out “from Father.”)
“Well, your dad tipped the bejesus out of me.”
“Right, of course.” Jamey looks down, the dimple flickering.
Teddy sees the reaction and pauses. “I did always have affection for you, James. None of those other children were curious. You were different.”
When Jamey gets ready to leave, he feels jittery, knowing this could look like noblesse oblige—but that’s not how he means it. He’s going to put faith in his intention and screw the appearance of things.
So he takes the BMW keys and a pink slip out of his coat pocket. “Almost forgot,” he jokes.
“What the heck is this?”
“Your new car.”
Unflappable Teddy: flapped.
Sometimes the mirrored lobby makes Jamey claustrophobic, and he folds this fear into paper airplanes, performing origami on the hours themselves.
He writes Elise love letters on scraps and receipts. He sketches the dahlias in the vase, his hand, the midcentury modern ashtray standing by the elevator, his key ring. Nights go by, time itself converted into cartoons he draws for her, haikus he writes of rambling thoughts, hearts in black ink.
After her last appointment, Elise smells smoke from the first floor. She knows the odor, like plastic burning but more toxic. She peeks into the room—two drywall workers are smoking rock.
Seeing their faces—in blank rapture, big eyes looking but not registering—doesn’t scare her as much as what will happen after they’ve smoked it all.
She runs across signs everywhere. Teeth ground down, burned fingers. On the street—wire hangers, scouring pads, wet cigarette filters….
This poor city.
Early morning, waiting for the bus, she stared at a lace sock covering a swollen, poisoned foot, sticking out of a cardboard hut.
Yesterday kids with pinned eyes jacked an old man on her train, with a Rambo Survival Knife, while passengers watched.
A dead woman was found in the McDonald’s entryway on Tenth Street; the police tape was going up when Elise walked by. The cops were talking about the Knicks game.
Crossing through Wall Street after close of market, no light straggles into those canyons, and the old buildings are grimy caves. Elise passes a three-piece suit in the hollow of a gothic stairwell, a hooker sucking his cock while he sucks a burning pipe, his shoe buckles shining.
She’s lonely. There’s a chasm between Jamey’s days and her nights.
Elise wakes early to be crushed and smashed against him, sealed in heat under the comforter in the dark stink of the bedroom, the accumulated gas and breath of humans in a small room, for one hour. Light touches the edges of the blinds, a thief finding its way, and she nestles her jaw between his ear and shoulder, and he makes a dream-heavy noise acknowledging her and everything. Usually, in this gray light, they hear a gunshot or fire engine or domestic fight.
Good morning, East Village.
The other night, Teddy told Jamey his only advice was to give women what they actually want.
“It’s a logical recommendation, but rarely followed,” Teddy said wetly, far from drunk but loosened up.
So on Valentine’s Day morning, Jamey hands Elise an envelope—with tickets to the Prince concert at Madison Square Garden that night.
“No. You. Dint,” she says.
Hallelujah!
Elise was raised on the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Isley Brothers—Denise played records, night and day. Prince is the son of Motown, born early and underweight, an over-incubated child raised in a bedroom with a white grand piano.
Anemic genius.
He summons Haitian spirits, Pentecostal virgins, drowned witches. If James Brown and Baudelaire had a hermaphroditic bastard, babysat by Mister Rogers, who grew up to wear lilac matador pants—it would be Prince.
“Happy?” Jamey asks.
“You don’t understand,” she says.
Elise gets ready like she never got ready before.
Madison Square Garden is ready too. The city (and Jersey and Long Island) launches an army of pilgrims to meet their lord, him with the rolled curls and beauty mark and white dance shoes.
Everyone surges to the stage, pushing. Dark hearts, kids ready to sing their brains out.
Girls with shirts smaller than bras, pouts, and violent stars in their eyes; guys with combs in pocket and little street spats and minty gum. All eyes are tilted up, waiting for the moon to rise into the black sky.
Like a unicorn on a rampage, he emerges. He slumps into every cherry-red note and electric piano chord and lightning streak of guitar.
“I’m in heaven!” she yells at Jamey.
She dances like a demon took hold.
She signs with her fingers: You…I would die for you….
Dancing dancing—no one’s in charge. Everybody just smiling. Tits and ass thump, big hands in the air, fancy feet—everybody do their thing—yeah—moving and grooving.
In the river of LIFE…
Dancing is when the devil holds your tail and keeps yanking down like a chain. A woman onstage with glowing suspenders plays the keytar. Elise can dance for hours, sweat rolling down her rib cage, soaking her shirt, and she smiles like a heathen.
Sparklers and chimes tear through the stadium, flash-bulbing as every heart goes: pop-pop-pop!
Life…can be so nice….
And then, the crying game, the tearjerker, tears that run down your neck into the bathwater.