This one’s for you, Jamey.
Elise sings: Sometimes it snows…in April.
Lighters come up, a giant field of tiny fire flowers.
She’s blind and happy as they make their way with other dazed boys and girls out the doors, and they’re part of the mob of vulnerable freaks. On the subway, kids—whose silk shirts are drying—light one more joint. That was a dope show. Slowly, their snakeskins grow back, and everyone is strangers again.
When they get home, Elise and Jamey have sex, spending sweaty hours in bed.
He comes, and comes again, inside her.
Those swimmers hunt the egg.
Elise and Jamey fall asleep, and the work is done without them.
Collision—the spermatozoa dig through the outer layer, headfirst, flagella waving behind them, carrying a library of identities.
Elise’s dad, picking almonds in Adjuntas, is joined with Tory’s mother listening to Eisenhower on the wood cabinet radio. Binkie as a teenage girl crosses a ballroom floor, dropping one pink glove like a petal. Denise swims in the cold lake, blind underwater, safe for an afternoon. Denise’s dad watches farm fields unfold beneath a bomber plane. Trembling, Tory studies her first headshots, paid for with babysitting money. Elise’s grandfather, tall and slender in a dark room, watches Elise’s father delivered from a dying woman’s thighs. Alex bleeds from the ear on a New England football field in the dying sun. Denise’s Dutch-Irish mother wakes up in the tank again, and the lady officer knows her name, hands her an apple for breakfast. Tory’s dad is a teenager driving through Pennsylvania woods, elated, beer bottle between thighs, deer strapped to roof. Bats is ten, smokes his first cigar in a hotel room in Havana with his lilywhite uncle.
This is the hour of blood-binding.
Elise wakes up later to piss, sitting on the cold toilet seat—she had an extravagant dream. She’s tired from dreaming. She wishes she could remember it.
MARCH 1987
If she does feel funny, dizzy or off-kilter, ravenous for pickles or cream puffs, she doesn’t notice. Because Elise heads to work one day, ratty fur belted tight around her, and gets a surprise.
It’s an arctic morning, and she envies the woman on the train with a floor-length down coat that moves like a bell. She can’t feel if her nose is running, because her face is too cold as she stands in line at the coffee cart. Her numb fingers can barely count out the right change, and she and the coffee guy joke about that.
The site is still open at the top, no roof, no walls up there, and she squints at it as she approaches. Rays of sun pierce the structure, gild the steel girders.
She makes her way around chalky dumpsters, but when she walks into the office, she gets silence instead of the usual fist bumps.
Tommy Bricks holds up the National Enquirer, March 3, 1987.
The headlines: Tatum O’Neal’s Trouble; Princess Stephanie’s Rock Album; How to Live Forever; Losing Weight in the Winter; Dynasty’s Bloody Plot Twist; and: Hyde Heir Marries Ghetto Girl, Slumming in Style!
With a photograph of Jamey in sunglasses, arm around Elise in her white fur, emerging from the Dugout after a liverwurst sandwich and root beer, both of them—very obviously—in love.
Dawn breaks into the lobby with shards of yellow light, and Jamey stews in disbelief—Elise brought the paper to him this afternoon. Then at four a.m. a man supposedly delivering Indian food snaps a shot of Jamey at the front desk and runs, leaving curry on the lobby floor.
Now Bessie sidles out of the elevator in a mohair dress, and slaps down Page Six of the Post. “Well, good morning.”
Finance royalty James Balthazar Hyde, whose mother, Tory Boyd Mankoff, and father, Alexander Hyde, battled in one of the bloodiest divorces NYC ever saw, has taken up with Section-8 Princess Elise Perez, whose criminal record is as long as Jamey’s tuxedo coattails, and she’s apparently gotten him to shower her with Tiffany diamonds and Mo?t et Chandon even as they slum it up down in the East Village. Word has it they’re cooking more than caviar in the spoon.
“You’re a secretive boy.”
Jamey pulls his doorman cuffs. “It’s a long story.”
Claire from management arrives in a houndstooth coat, her face ruddy with discomfort. “James, can we talk in the office?”
They stand among file cabinets and umbrellas.
“We can’t have people taking pictures of the doorman,” she says.
“Well, that won’t last.”
“I wish you told me, coming in.”
“Told you what?”
“Who you are.”
“I did.”
“You know what I mean,” she says, flustered.
He looks at her. “Yeah. I do.”
He walks out, numbly high-fiving Gregory, who smiles ruefully at Jamey, and he disappears into the pastel city.
Elise is eating lunch at White Castle when she gets flash-bulbed.
“What the fuck?” she says, spilling her Diet Coke.
The camera catches her face for the world to relish.
She goes back to work in soda-wet jeans. The construction guys aren’t mad—their women (like Godiva and Mercedes, stars at Billy’s Topless) get in trouble all the time. These men enjoy policing the site for stringers, and protect her like Bullmastiffs.
“How’s our ghetto princess today?” they call out affectionately.
“This was bound to happen,” Jamey says as he mopes around the apartment, smoking too much. “I could feel it coming.”
Elise sits on the couch and stares at him. “Really?”
“It’s never-ending.”
“What’s never-ending?” she asks, annoyed.
He lights another of her Newports, winces when he inhales.
She watches him look out the window—at Puerto Rican ladies walking Chihuahuas, at skateboarders, at old Cadillacs double-parked with flashers blinking.
“What I really don’t get is why you didn’t tell Claire to fuck off,” she says.
“I don’t want to work there anyway,” he says.
“But you need the job,” she tells him sourly.
He won’t answer, just looks at the street.
Over the weekend, she and Jamey cook mac and cheese and eat Cheerios from the cupboard. They don’t even order delivery because Jamey doesn’t want to open their door.
“What are you scared of?” she asks.
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“Saying what?” she says, playing with her sweatshirt zipper.
“That I’m scared.”
“You’re scared of everything.”
She goes to eat alone at the pizzeria, watching Star Search on their TV, and pushing red pepper flakes around the tabletop with her fingertip. Nobody looks twice at her.
One evening, she puts hands on hips. Jamey’s unshaven, reading in bed before the sun has even set, and the apartment stinks—he hasn’t been out once.
“Let’s go to Wo Hop,” she says. “I’m gonna be fucking crazy if we stay here one more night.”
He looks at her, his dimple coarse with stubble.