Elise stomps slush off her boots as she enters the room. A poncho is sealed like a plastic bag over her rabbit-fur jacket.
Standing in line, she feels her heartbeat triple when Jamey enters, and she waves him up as calmly as possible.
When he indicates the line will be mad, she comes back, eyes gleaming.
“I’ll stand with you then.”
“Okay,” he says unsurely.
She unravels about twenty feet of toilet paper to show him a ceramic unicorn with a chipped gold horn. “I’m mailing this to my mom. She collects them.”
“Gotcha.”
“So?” she asks after a moment.
He smiles with embarrassment. “So?”
“Don’t you want to go out sometime, make it up to me?”
“Do I want to take you out?” he asks stupidly.
“Like, for pizza. Whatever. Go see a movie.”
He grins widely, wondering who in line is listening. “Um. Okay?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Sure,” he says, drawing the word out so eavesdroppers know this is ridiculous.
They stand there.
The line isn’t moving.
She looks at his creamy envelopes, an oxblood monogram—JBH—raised on the paper. “You want me to mail them?” she asks. “Then we don’t both have to wait in this stupid fucking line.”
“All right,” he says, amused and horrified. “They just need stamps.”
She winks, deadpan. “I sorta figured.”
He walks out into a city that’s smeared with filthy white, feeling like he just got smacked across the face, and is awake. She caught him in his schoolboy mode, polite and dutiful, mailing letters to his grandparents and stepsiblings, notes full of nothing, written in perfect script. Yet he feels like she caught him so unaware and alone that she saw the other side, the wolf crawling through wreckage, through broken walls, cracked Venetian mirrors, dust, blood, a turned-over rocking horse—the child who doesn’t know its own name.
It’s dark as midnight by evening. Robbie smokes while Elise tries on clothes.
She puts her braids in a ponytail, then takes them out.
“What. The. FUCK!” she shrieks in frustration.
“Leesey, sit,” he says, pats the couch. “Time-out, honey.”
She throws herself down, arms crossed, glaring at nothing. On her left foot, a white boot with scuff marks like a kid drew on it with black marker, and a white sneaker on her right. Gray acid jeans, a turtleneck.
He rubs her shoulders. “You don’t need to go if you don’t want to.”
“But I do! You don’t understand,” she says, eyes welling.
Robbie takes her fingers in his hands. “Breathe.”
Once she’s calmer, he looks in the mirror with her, and he wipes a smear of eyeliner away.
He says to her reflection: “I just don’t want you to get hurt, honey. Okay?”
She nods. “I know. I know that.”
Slouched like a lord in his car, Jamey waits.
She comes out the front door like a conclusion you don’t expect after thinking about the same thing for too long.
Her hands in the pockets of the white fur, a thumb hanging over each rim. Eyes lined in turquoise.
“Hello there,” he says, suave and distant, and drives in the direction of downtown.
“What’s up,” she says dourly.
Dour! he thinks. What happened to the bravado?
“So what’d you do today,” he asks, making conversation.
She shrugs. “Worked.”
“Where at?” he asks.
“The fish store on Main Street, like, the pet store, not the fish market.”
“You’re into fish?”
“Um, not really,” she says.
“So, then, you work there because?”
“Let’s see, I’m into paying my half of the rent. What, did you never have a job?”
He looks around elaborately at an intersection. “I’ve had a few jobs over the years.”
“Like.”
“Pumping gas at the Shelter Island Yacht Club. I taught tennis another summer.”
She smiles wryly out the window.
Inside La Forginni, white roses are reflected on the black marble bar. He picked this tacky and expensive place because he’ll know no one.
He checks his camel-hair coat. Elise refuses to hand over her fur, giving the girl a death stare.
They sit at their table and unfold napkins.
“Let’s see. Do you like Barolo?” he asks.
“Yeah.” She has no idea what he’s talking about.
“Should I order?”
“For me?” she says.
“A bottle, I mean?”
“Of?”
He pauses. “Barolo.”
“Yeah.”
She seems morose, charmless. No style in her delivery. No flick of the wrist, no tricks—just a dull, plain stare as he talks. Her voice is bare when she answers, the knobs and gristle of her accent out in the open. She talks the way she talks. Her voice isn’t low or husky, yet it’s somehow masculine. Her makeup is reminiscent of Cleopatra.
“So. I’m sorry about the other night,” he says eventually.
She butters her bread. “Who cares. Let’s talk about something else.”
“I thought we were here to talk about what happened.”
She grins. “But that’s boring, is what I’m saying.”
He’s happy to be interrupted by the waiter. As he orders, Elise considers his heart-shaped face, those sleepy eyes—tired but electrified like he’d been up all night thinking.
He’s got the surfeit of an only child: cream collecting on top, thick and rich, excessive. He’s never been stirred. The loneliness shows up as latchkey keyholes for pupils.
“Why don’t you tell me something about your life,” she says eventually.
“What exactly are you wondering?”
“Tell me anything.” She waits. “God, you suck at this.”
“Jesus! Thanks a lot!”
“Sorry,” she mumbles. “I get harsh when I’m nervous. You want me to start you off?” she asks. “Where were you born?”
He drinks wine. “New York City. Where were you born?”
“Hartford,” she says, buttering more bread, hungry like a workman. “Where’d you grow up?
“New York City.”
“Do you have brothers or sisters?” she asks.
He gives her a G-rated version of his family, the divorce, his stepfamily. He assumes she’s heard of them because he never met anyone who hasn’t—they’ve been in the papers since before he could read. It’s like asking if she heard of the Eiffel Tower or Mickey Mouse and she shakes her head, befuddled.
“HMK. Hyde, Moore & Kent,” he says.
“But what is that?”
“The family business. It’s a private investment bank.”
“Where’s it at? This bank?”
“Well, I mean, HMK has offices all around the world.” He blushes, feeling stupid for what sounds like bragging but is simply factual.
She fixes her eyes on his mouth when he’s speaking, then she guilelessly explores his face. He sees her doing it. Then she looks away, bites her lower lip, eyes dull and damp.
Her style of self-possession is almost a matter of conservation, an efficiency, like she doesn’t want to waste energy in affectations. There’s no hair twirling or pouting.
“So…Are you, do you want to go to college? Or were you planning—” he stutters.
“I didn’t finish high school.” Her didn’t is dint. Her cheeks shine.