In the evening, from her window, she’ll watch him come onto the porch to see the moon, breathing minty air.
Yesterday, she had a clear line on him. He was reading in the chair in the kitchen, and she could see his chocolate corduroy pants and bare foot.
Elise looked at him gently then, the way a mother inspects a son for scratches or bruises when he comes back from a long day playing war in the woods.
His dad calls from Hong Kong as Jamey navigates twilit streets toward home.
Jamey can hear his father’s smile—Hyde, Moore & Kent closed on the Ho Lang acquisition. “I had to tell someone, Jamester. What would I do without you?”
Jamey imagines Alex at his hotel-room window, sipping iced tea, flushed from swimming laps, facing a blinking, chromatic, mind-bending cityscape, and seeing his reflection.
“I really want you to meet Randolph Sander’s son—you know he’s at Yale, right? First year? I’ve never met him, but his dad is a good senator, and they’ve got a place in Kennebunkport near Aunt Jeanette. Just a thought, Jamey-rooter.”
Jamey makes a noise of acquiescence, stifles a yawn. He picks lint off his forest-green sweater.
Alex gossips about a car accident. “Unless you heard it from Sarah already….no? Well, they’re saying now Timmy was on drugs….Yes, terrible for both families….No, Catherine’s a Rye Millford.”
“How are Xavier and Sam?” Jamey asks at one point, as usual.
“Well, Cecily and the kids are in Vail, yes…ski lesson…the little one…Cecily and the kids…Cecily…Bats always said that about the Headleys, you know?…Cecily…This winter…to Italy to see his brother…Binkie won the winter orchid at the garden club…they fired Kathleen…well, the rehearsal dinner’s at the Union Club….”
Jamey’s parked in front of his house, car running.
Elise taps on his window and he jumps, looks at her wide-eyed through the glass. She waves her pack of Newport Kings.
She waits.
He points at his phone and shrugs melodramatically, mouths the word “father.”
She finally understands and keeps walking, into the night.
His stomach churns.
“Jamey, have you heard anything I’ve been saying?” his dad asks after what must have been a long silence.
At the Laundromat, a man in Carhartt khakis taps his cock, telegraphing with his eyes an invite to his truck. Elise doesn’t even shake her head but still communicates no. They both go back to looking at magazines.
Aficionados of sex see her in a crowd. Some guys stumble upon her and crudely realize their luck halfway into it. Some have no idea, and turn her out of bed as if they did what they’d come to do, not understanding they hadn’t even started. Those dudes smoked and hummed while they dressed and she felt sorrier for them than she felt for herself.
Redboy was one of the connoisseurs. He was something beyond this world himself—hungry, roaming, and furious. That boy would stay with her forever. It was something she couldn’t regret, and she’d tried.
As early as seven she knew about sex, she felt it, she understood things. And she wasn’t precocious from being abused, though she knew girls who were. Her mother was paranoid, for good reasons, and protected her—at shelters, Denise made her kids shower with her, and she tried to be meticulous and demanding about who watched them while she worked.
The first time Elise had an orgasm was at eleven years old, on a Bridgeport bus coming home from school—the seat was vibrating. Her cheeks got hot, and she felt a pressure, this sickness or desperation, the sense that something had to happen or she would die, and then it all broke open in her, hot syrup spreading in her blood, and she swiveled her head on her long neck like a bird, having missed her stop, trying to understand where on Earth she was.
His class watches the Challenger launch on the CNN school emission. Jamey slouches while a guy to his right jokes about gravity. Normally, Jamey would volley like a gentleman, but lately he doesn’t have the energy, so he nods gently and doesn’t answer.
Announcer: It’s the 51-L mission, ready to go.
The rocket on the ground makes smoke and moves slowly out of the gate, like a sedated bull from a pen. Jamey is surprised when his stomach tightens up. Is he patriotic? That’s mortifying—Jamey’s always embarrassed when he catches himself being sentimental.
T minus fifteen seconds, we have main engine start, and four, three, two, one—we have lift-off! Lift-off!
The man’s voice is so jubilant, Jamey pictures him as a kid in a Depression-era dirt backyard, squinting at the solar system and dreaming.
Challenger, go with throttle up!
The machine glides into the teal of the Florida sky.
And then: a disruption.
Flight navigators are looking carefully at what has happened.
Two bunny ears grow off a head of smoke. This chandelier of plumes comes slowly down the blue. The antlers, or jellyfish tendrils, drop: Obviously there’s been a major malfunction.
Students whisper, transparent and shocked. The professor stands cross-armed near the television set, her back turned to the class.
Christa McAuliffe. The everywoman. Her face was as familiar and American as a gas-station logo or a rhubarb pie. She was someone you saw every day but only waved to, never knew. A woman of such bionically sober ambitions that the country agreed to take her into space. She was sent on a pyre into the big night.
Jamey walks out of the classroom—trying to hide his smile.
He crosses campus, passing under stone archways.
Jamey has a disconcerting flashback to his uncle’s property on Long Island, many years ago. The parents talked and drank inside the main house, the kids set free for the day, moving through shadows and sunspots, woods and fields, running or loping, showing off, squinting into the sky at the roar of a plane, hanging in trees like leopards, making those connections cousins make that are almost lustful, the kids wanting to trade places, trade lives.
On this unchaperoned afternoon, the children ate at a picnic table while dogs swarmed around their legs, waiting for the crust of a ham sandwich. Topper, who was a perfectly likeable child, went into the potting shed. He screamed, hoarse and sincere, after the door closed behind him and he was trapped by a corn snake.
Jamey had a clear thought the second he heard his cousin’s cry: I hope he dies.
Jamey’s young eyes opened wide, ashamed, and he tried for weeks after to either delete the memory of what had flashed through his mind, or to forgive himself—and then he worked instead to be comfortable with the fact that he’s just a wicked boy.
Now Jamey gets into his car under a dingy Connecticut sky pierced by gargoyles and turrets. He doesn’t start the engine.
I’m failing, he realizes.
FEBRUARY 1986
Pigeons peck at frozen garbage. Sleet is punishing the city today, and everyone’s despondent—although post offices are always despondent.