“I don’t know.” Jamey blows into his Purdey gloves of copper-brown leather.
“You’re nice to her because you feel guilty. Correct?”
Jamey shrugs.
“Don’t you think she knows that?” Matt presses, looking at Jamey who just looks at the ice-crusted windshield. “Don’t you think she’s counting on that?”
“So she’s to blame for you pushing her?”
“I barely touched her! How else could someone in my place react?”
“There’s lots of ways someone could react.”
“She’s a townie,” Matt observes.
“She’s not even from here.”
“Wherever she’s from, she’s a townie there.”
“Why do you care?”
“Um, she looks like she didn’t finish high school and is casing our house as we speak.”
Without answering, Jamey steps out and rakes ice off the windshield.
Matt watches, the light in the car a frozen blue.
Jamey gets back in, takes off his gloves, and puts his hands to the heat vent. Then he turns to Matt.
“Anyway, you went out with that girl Beth.”
“Brenda? From Port Jefferson? What does that have to do with anything?”
“She wasn’t from your social circle.”
“You sound like my mother!”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“We went out for two weeks,” Matt says, unrelenting. “She gave the greatest hand job in Suffolk County.”
Jamey stares out the window.
Matt sighs. “I’m just looking out for you, man.”
“Please don’t.” Jamey smiles.
This makes Matt angry. “What, am I supposed to feel guilty because I have a great family, and we have money, and I got a really good education? Should I be miserable all my life because I got lucky? Sorry. I don’t feel guilty at all.”
Jamey says nothing.
“Dude,” Matt says, flustered and giving up. “I’m sick of your shit.”
They drive to school over roads pitted with salt, mute.
She watches from her window as the car drives away.
Him and Matt—that’s no good. She has the urge to pry them apart, like photographs on album pages that got stuck together, the faces sealed.
The cold is mean. Cheeks are red and raw, and hands hurt when they take up pens in the classrooms, knuckles thawing. Snow melts off a boot to watery mud on the marble floor.
Jamey sits in a classroom, and his is the only desk to get an angle of sun. He resists closing his eyes. He can’t warm up. He pretends to stare at the professor. Dust moves around his head but barely; Jamey could be a photograph he’s so still. When the class is over, he leaves as if he just got there, as if he didn’t hear a thing.
A mitten is half-sealed into a dirty snowbank outside the science building. When a bird shrieks, everything that already felt fragile suddenly feels broken.
In the dining hall, he sits with Matt and friends, pretending to listen to their Gorbachev debate.
Amber pendant lights, blue curtains, mashed potato on blue-rimmed plates, wood walls, ginger ale—Jamey holds on to the table like someone on a stormy sailboat.
Because he’s watching Matt (collar popped, jaw set, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed).
I don’t like my best friend anymore, Jamey understands, and actually tears up.
Matt watches the debate. He always gauges how an argument will lean before choosing a side. His French-blue cashmere sweater is new; Jamey’s never seen it. That’s how well they know each other.
Growing up, Matt gave Jamey the birthday gift Matt wanted for himself, dragging his nanny to FAO Schwarz; Jamey did the same. A toy Ferrari to pedal in circles around your bedroom! A Japanese robot whose chest shoots real sparks! The most extravagant water gun the world has ever known!
Matt recently decided to be an investment banker. He wants to ski triple black diamonds at Vail. He wants a loft in SoHo. He wants to marry a supermodel. He wants a Rhodesian ridgeback, like the one some cowboy bond trader brought to a party in Montauk last summer. He wants a sixty-foot sailboat like his dad, and he wants to win races in Jamaica, Newport, Antigua, and then he wants to do a victory sail with the boat full of supermodels and his Rhodesian ridgeback.
Matt always had Jamey over because Jamey’s home was a ghost land, with the nanny-of-the-month drifting through rooms, and his father in Gstaad or London or Lyford Cay. The families lived on the same block—East Seventieth between Park and Madison—and were of the same social status: both dads were East Coast royalty but chose wives who knocked them down a peg, or skewed them sideways at least.
Matt’s mother, Yasmin, is a megawatt beauty from an Iranian oil family. Matt acted out if she gave Jamey too much attention: Matt would spit food, fake-cry, slit his eyes in drastic boredom. She questioned the boys in an opulent accent about their day, the new Latin teacher at Buckley, the books they were reading. Her gold bracelet’s one charm clanged on the marble counter or the phone receiver.
Matt’s sister was named Asha, and her room spun with mobiles and Madame Alexander dolls. A cave of glitter and porcelain and grosgrain. Her hamster, Rod Stewart, nibble-sucked the silver water pipe in his cage with blank eyes.
Asha once stared at Jamey through dinner, then asked: Why are you always here anyway? Her parents shushed her. Matt hissed: “He’s like my brother that’s why, you stupid,” which is something he never said out loud before or since.
The Danning apartment had things the Hydes’ did: a junk drawer of twine and batteries and menus; a linen closet that smelled of lavender sachets; a foyer table where mail collected; and a master bedroom the kids couldn’t enter. That wing was often empty at Jamey’s house but full of light at Matt’s. Jamey once got up to pee, and saw Matt’s mom and dad in the hall—she was in a robe, he was in boxers. The couple faced each other, and he tucked a wisp of black hair behind her ear before kissing her. Jamey felt like someone lit a Roman candle in his mouth and aimed it down into his soul.
A blizzard is predicted, snowflakes cartwheeling across the TV screen all day as New England gets hysterical, waiting to see if it will come true.
Robbie’s new boyfriend, Craig, wears a Metallica T-shirt tucked into jeans. He eats pistachios on the couch, delicately putting shells in the ashtray.
Robbie and Elise grind to Grace Jones, “Slave to the Rhythm.”
“Shake your boo-tays!” Craig yells out.
Each time the song ends, they rewind the tape and play it again.
“Wow,” Robbie says, and looks out the cold glass.
Elise and Craig smile with him as the white crush of sky lands on the earth. Snowstorms are mortally gentle, a silence dropped from heaven to stifle houses and highways, factories, dumpsters, and statues and fences and motorcycles and bushes and sheds. Birds and squirrels and stray cats vanish into hiding places that seem preordained, since the disappearance is seamless and immediate.
Next door, the guys watch CNN until the lights flicker and die.
“Blackout!” Matt says, lighting a candle and grabbing a box of Triscuits. “Want some?”