“Is that, you know, something you wish you could do?” he asks carefully.
“Obviously—it’s easier to get a fucking job,” she says.
“Sure,” he says, and then worries that it sounds unkind.
“But at least I didn’t have to keep going to school, thank God, because I hated it.”
“You did? I like school,” he says.
She smiles at him like: Really? You’re full of shit.
The waiter asks if they’d like dessert.
“Definitely!” Elise says, finally relaxed.
Jamey’s heart sinks. He’s ready to leave.
They share chocolate torte, and Elise takes the lion’s share, talking as she chews the black cake.
After dinner, he burps under his breath in the car, holds his fist to his lips for a moment before turning the key in the ignition.
A dead raccoon on the roadside. She looks away too late, which means some part of her wanted to see it.
There’s a cul-de-sac near their block and she suddenly grabs his elbow—
“Turn here for a second,” she insists.
It must be an emergency; her voice is desperate. He pulls to the side.
“Shut the car off,” she says.
The air is balmy and cold, thick with smog and ocean and fir, like unmelted wax.
She gets out, comes around, and opens his door like a man does for his date. She flicks her gum out into the brush, leans down to kiss his mouth.
This shocks him; then she kneels. He puts his feet on the ground, sitting sideways. She unbuttons and unzips his pants, roughly tugs them down to mid-thigh.
When did I get hard? he wonders.
What she does makes him grimace. She looks up at him and keeps doing it. The air is freezing and her mouth is hot.
Headlights sweep by, far away, and he goes soft, waking up from a dream. But then she keeps going, and what scared him—being seen, doing this—makes blood rush down.
“Oh my God,” he says, breathless afterward.
She looks up with no pretense. She holds one kneecap with each hand. He sort of wants to touch her face but is paralyzed.
She stands, gravel falling from her shins, and he zips himself, turns the key with a shaking hand. She jumps into the other side and slams the door like they just finished grocery shopping.
He tries to parallel park at home, but he can hardly get near the curb and gives up.
They sit in the dark.
“Thanks for dinner,” she says.
“Yes, of course. Thank you.” As soon as he says it he regrets it.
She looks at him, then gets out of the car, and walks into her building without looking back. He should escort her to the door, but his manners have vanished.
Snow is clumped on the windows and the afternoon is greedy with winter gloom. It consumes the soul.
Jamey’s brain is a kaleidoscope. He languorously wanders through halls, gets a hard-on in Latin class like he’s fourteen. He watches the chem professor draw equations on the blackboard, but he sees Elise’s chin, milky with cum. Her eyes are deliriously tilted up at him. Without speaking, she’s communicating: I will do this again. I will do this whenever you want.
He gets home, exhausted and high from fantasy.
Jamey goes upstairs, looks out his window.
He hasn’t talked to Elise since that night last week; he avoids her. He sometimes sees phosphorescent eyes staring from her living room, but it’s probably his imagination. He’s horrified by what happened, and fascinated.
He’s been reminiscing about Millie, his high-school girlfriend, who went to Sacred Heart, and was blond, wealthy, sweet, skinny, bulimic, well-dressed in Carolina Herrera and alligator loafers and jodhpurs, polite, distant, with tiny teeth like baby teeth in a grown-up girl’s mouth.
When they made out, and eventually had sex, they were two people. A boy and a girl in a bed. They never became one thing. They were just a sloppy, uncertain pair of adolescents pressing against each other. She liked Bombay Sapphire and tonic, and they usually did it after a party, so sex tasted like that to him: English and spiteful.
She used a sponge, and he had no idea what that was. He had sex with her as hard as he could, copying porn flicks he’d seen on friends’ VCRs. She whimpered like a toy poodle, imitating women in romantic comedies. He tried to go down on her and she didn’t let him.
Millie would talk for a half hour straight in a taxi headed south, and the minute they got out, Jamey couldn’t remember a word. It was like owning a dream on waking, then watching the details get wiped from your brain.
Elise though. One minute she was a tomboy, provocative and defiant—then she was kneeling at his feet like a servant. Her skin and bones lit up as electricity ran from her through him, the switch flipped so the current could flow, and her masculinity morphed into heroic femininity. She was exquisite on her knees. She was aggressively submissive. One lick of her tongue meant more than hours of intoxicated sex with Millie. How could two girls be so different?
One clear and chilly night, Matt pulls the kitchen curtain like he’s spying.
“She’s feeding stray cats, man,” Matt says.
“What?”
“The girl. She’s in her backyard.”
“Oh yeah?” Jamey says nonchalantly.
“Just what the neighborhood needs, more strays,” he says sarcastically.
The second Matt heads upstairs, Jamey slips into his backyard. Through the chain-link fence covered in brown-leaf vines, he sees her squatting on the building’s porch, under a bright bulb. His dad always gritted his teeth when they passed old men feeding pigeons in Central Park. They’re not doing anyone any favors, you know.
In her yard, the lawn furniture is draped in snow, like a dead person’s memories.
She wears the fur, belted, and her cornrowed hair shines. She’s holding a milk carton, which she poured into a bowl between her boots; two skinny cats work on it. Their markings are ordinary—gray and amber and charcoal.
He watches her watch the cats. A third cat lopes out of the dark to sip.
Jamey’s body prickles, hot. It’s like someone showed him a map of a strange country and said he’d grown up there, and he knew they were right. That long, narrow face—the smell of her breath.
He must have shifted his feet because a twig cracks. The cats don’t look (because they already knew he was there and they don’t care) but Elise does. She stares at where he’s hiding.
Finally Elise says: “Are you going to say something?”
He grins, mortified, exhilarated.
They have a face-off.
“You got to say something,” she declares finally.
“I’m not going to,” is what comes out of his mouth. His voice is shaking slightly.
She frowns. Strokes a cat that nips her hand.
Eventually she goes inside, forgetting her milk carton, looking back as she stands in the threshold. Waits. Gives up.
Jamey lies in bed, and he can’t sleep. What the hell was that—am I fucking retarded?