There’s a baldness to Elise, a stripped-down sleekness like a car left for dead, its parts jacked and sold. The perfume she wore to dinner smelled like carpet cleaner. What she did to him was voodoo.
Was it even sex he had with Millie? Now it seems like he was just jacking off inside her.
But Millie used him too, when they had sex, but not for sex. She mashed herself against his body, like a toddler desperately snuggling a teddy bear.
To her, Jamey was a plaything, a present. Like a cupcake from her nanny, or an Elizabeth Arden gift certificate, or the blue ribbon at the Hampton Classic.
He’d been in love a few times—not with Millie—but always from a distance.
Nicole Andolino, who lived on the third floor of his building growing up, wore coats with gold buttons and bit her red-painted nails waiting for the elevator.
He loved a woman with a strawberry-blond braid who stood at the ma?tre d’ stand at a bistro on East Fifty-Sixth Street and stared with suicidal desperation out the glass as he walked by on his way home every day.
Matt’s mother was his first real love; she ate a blood orange and wiped the juice off her lips, and he could play and rewind and replay that moment a million times in his dark bedroom.
Nobody he loved would have guessed it. Even as a kid, he was sealed, locked, cold. It’s not that he was self-obsessed—he’d comb his hair or straighten his dinner jacket as if curating a stranger in the mirror. All his life, he could have convinced a lie detector he didn’t need anything at all.
Jamey turns his face into the pillow, sees Elise’s legs opening in his black heart.
Elise takes a bus through the dark morning, ice crackling down the sky, encasing buildings.
She doesn’t carry her bag like a lady does, but like a hunter slings dead quarry over a shoulder. Her fingers are long and thin like a piano player’s, with big knuckles. Her pigeon-toed feet meet on the bus floor. She has a mission today.
At the store, she cranks the heat.
She’s going to call her mother, because it’s time. And she finally has herself staked in this new territory, and it’s safe to reach back toward home.
Seven months have passed since she talked to her family, and since then, she’s slept on more than a couple subways overnight, eaten chop suey dregs and pizza crusts from dumpsters, hung out with a fifteen-year-old from Memphis who was living with his leashed ferret in a church basement, and let a man take her into a loan office and jack off to the sight of her pussy—she pulled her jeans halfway down and he wasn’t allowed to touch—for twenty dollars. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
“Hey, Ma,” she says.
“Elise! How you doing.” To Angel: “It’s Elise. Jesus Mary, Elise.”
“What’s going on there, Ma?”
“We’re watching television. You ain’t missing nothing. Where you calling from? Someplace warm, I hope? Tell me you’re in Florida, baby girl. Tell me everything’s sunny and good.”
“New Haven. I didn’t get far. Can’t really talk long either, Ma, just want to check in.”
“Are you not gonna tell us where you’re at?” Denise protests hoarsely.
“I’m in New Haven, Ma.”
“Elise, come on.” Snap and whoosh of a Bic lighter.
“I’m getting settled. I’ll tell you when I tell you. What’s going on there?”
“Nothing. Everything.” Big drag, exhale. “But I mean, at least it’s the weekend now, so.”
Elise fiddles with the desk drawer handle. “Yeah. It is the weekend.”
“I got them unicorns you mailed me. I started looking forward to it each month, getting a little package from you.”
“Yeah? I’m glad you like them.”
“You not going to tell me why you left and didn’t say nothing?”
“Ma. I’m twenty years old.”
“Lise, if you was forty-two I’d expect you to say something.”
“I guess I don’t know. You guys didn’t do nothing wrong,” she lies.
“Well. At least you calling us now. Don’t forget me.”
“I won’t.”
Drag and exhale. “It’s okay, baby girl.”
“I love you,” Elise says, trying to control her voice.
“I love you to pieces,” her mother returns.
Denise asks her to come home for Cori’s sixth birthday.
“I can’t, Ma.”
“Why not? Come back for two days. We’re having a party.”
“I got something going on here,” Elise says shyly.
“Oh, really,” her mother says with a smile Elise can hear.
Fuck! Elise feels a panic of lovesickness. She misses her mama.
They say goodbye, and she sits in the stockroom, bent over on a stepladder, among metal shelves of fish food and empty tanks, and tries to breathe.
Elise thinks of Denise’s laugh cracking like thunder over the Turnbull houses, the paprika in her chili, the way her bra cuts into her back, the powdery heat of her body when they’d lie on the bed in the summertime, the afternoon too hot for anything but gossip and game shows. Her mother played with Elise’s hair like it was her own, absentmindedly twirling it as they smoked.
Denise looks like a white-trash Swiss Miss: blond with a jolly face corrupted by cigarettes and methadone.
She had Elise at sixteen, and gave a teenager’s violent tenderness to her baby. Their bond is ironclad. She named her Elise so their names would rhyme. They wore matching pink tracksuits when Elise was a kid.
Of course, her mother also misses Elise doing dishes, buying diapers and Kool-Aid with her own paycheck, watching whatever orphaned children ended up at the apartment, cleaning when case workers were due, sewing torn clothes.
And most important—going down the street for daily lotto tickets.
Elise thinks of the apartment: roach shit, a defunct fridge in the window to block stray bullets, and leftover Christmas decorations shedding glitter on the floor. Someone’s black-eyed toddler sick and sleeping on the couch.
I pulled the short straw, so what, Denise likes to say, about anything in her life: men, money, health.
And she is beat up. She lashes out in inefficient ways. Like she doesn’t dump the garbage if she’s overworked, living with the smell just to get the family miserable. Elise remembers more than once the can moving with maggots. Her mom believes in love. Angel broke her ribs, and sold her TV, but they have that thing, the fire that goes out and comes back from the smallest cinder, the flame of god. Denise will not give him up because her world would turn completely cold. You got to let it go, Elise thinks now. It’s not your life. Let her go.
Early morning—the sky is lustrous like a pearl, and cruel with dampness. Matt and Jamey get into the BMW and wait for it to warm up.
“So you did drop that girl off the other night,” Matt says. “Abigail saw.”
“Abigail saw? Are we in junior high?” Jamey flicks cold eyes at his friend.
“But I mean—you did.”
“Yeah. Took her to dinner to make up for, you know, the incident.”
“Huh.”
The heat roars.
Matt wants to say something else. “She freaks me out, dude.”
“Why?”
“Well. She’s a hustler, don’t you think?”