White Fur Read online

  Ford is like everyone is and has always been with Jamey: Ford had a crush, he wanted Jamey to like him, he expected the world, and now he hates him because Jamey won’t respond.

  “I’ll do whatever you think is best, Professor Ford,” Jamey demurs.

  Jamey noticed it early in life. In a group of kids, a parent would speak to Jamey as the other adult in the room. Jamey would look at the floor, but whenever he glanced up, the camp counselor or parent or babysitter was still talking at him.

  It even happened with people who had no idea who he was, who never saw his house in Town & Country, or read about his parents’ divorce in the National Enquirer, or relied on his grandfather’s predictions as quoted in Barron’s, who didn’t realize they were in the presence of a commodity, a publicly traded stock, a prototype of a child—like Huck Finn or the Little Prince.

  If someone were fumbling with their wallet, the drugstore clerk would blush and summon Jamey, next in line: Let me take care of you while this lady figures her stuff out. Jamey wasn’t impatient; he didn’t even notice the line wasn’t moving!

  When he was little, playing at the Morrisons’, Jamey cradled their new pet bunny, and Thomas whined and pulled for a turn—it was his bunny after all! Mrs. Morrison warned Thomas to stop, and warned him again, and then she violently grabbed Thomas’s little hand off Jamey.

  “Let Jamey hold the bunny, Thomas, goddammit.” Her mouth was bright red and open as she furtively stared at Jamey afterward, and he saw something in her face he would recognize for the rest of his life.

  He always thought of these moments later as his “Let Jamey hold the bunny” moments.

  People looked to him like one of those Tibetan children picked out as a reincarnated lama. They think he knows the secret to life. They get mad when he doesn’t offer it up. What happens, anyway, when the village chooses the wrong kid as their prophet?

  Every morning Matt waits for Elise to walk by so he can glare at her from the porch, ice hanging from the portico. Sometimes he even vaguely ashes his cigarette in her direction, shivering in his white Oxford.

  “You’re an asshole,” Jamey says when Matt comes inside. “Why are you so threatened by her anyway?”

  “I’m not threatened,” he says.

  “But you are,” Jamey corrects him. “She’s obviously nothing to you, so why don’t you just leave it?”

  “Because she came into our house.”

  “We invited her in,” Jamey says, stirring hot oatmeal.

  “That’s because she ‘axed’ to come in. Doesn’t mean she can tell me what to do.”

  “I don’t know. I thought it was hilarious,” Jamey says.

  “Yeah, it’ll be hilarious when our house is on fire,” Matt says.

  Jamey laughs lusciously, then sighs, and doesn’t say anything more. He does this a lot lately.

  Matt looks at him like: What the fuck is going on with you?

  It’s strange how much they resemble each other, these two men. But Matt—with his pale skin, dark hair, dark eyes, prominent pointed chin, fine clothes, practiced stances—should be handsome like Jamey. And he’s not. There’s a sense of moral failing here, the idea that Matt himself is to blame for not being handsome, which somehow makes him uglier.

  Robbie is white and short, and studies airplane mechanics at South Central Community College, and waits tables at Red Lobster. His bowl cut and cornflower-blue eyes are gnome-ish.

  With him tonight is a tubby black giant who stoops under the ceiling light.

  “What’s up, Leesey,” Robbie says, chagrined at having yet another guy over.

  Sitting cross-legged on the couch, Elise pulls back her sweatshirt hood. “Hey,” she says, giving the new guy a once-over.

  “Hello there,” the guy says in a gracious, Darth Vader–deep voice.

  The pair ambles, blushing, into the bedroom, like boys about to play G.I. Joes or Matchbox cars, and Robbie shuts the door softly.

  They put on Depeche Mode. Each time a side ends, there’s a rustle as someone reaches across the bed to turn the tape over and press Play.

  She makes coffee, pages through the newspaper, biting her lip.

  Elise grew up listening to her mom have sex in the next room—Denise growling and muttering naughty words—or her cousin giving head in the bed where Elise was sleeping. Hearing other people is arousing and aggravating, the way getting tickled is a mishmash of laughter and the possibility of throwing up.

  She puts her hand in her jeans.

  That evening, Robbie and Elise smoke on the roof, squinting at New Haven’s squat and dumpy skyline dusted with stars.

  The bedroom window next door lights up.

  “Oh shit, that’s him,” she whispers, awestruck.

  “The one with the dimple?”

  “I’m getting sorta obsessed,” Elise says. “His name is Jamey.”

  Robbie smiles uncomfortably. “They’re rich kids. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Robbie flicks ash into the abyss between houses, and the coal is fired up by its twirling descent for a second or two. “You like him though?”

  Now Elise is shy. “He seems different.”

  They toss cigarettes over the ledge, pull coats tight, and take the steps down into the building.

  “I guess you never know, honey,” Robbie says over his shoulder. “Right?”

  “Right?” she answers.

  Elise trusts Robbie on a gut level. She gets being bisexual, and thinks everyone is attracted to anyone, but gay boys have it rough, they learn fast and cruel. This one kid who worked at a check-cashing place in her old neighborhood was famous for being queer. He was all buttoned up, saving money, determined to get out of that town, always wearing neckties and cardigans, polite in the Plexiglas booth, but he wouldn’t hide his wrists or pursed mouth. She walked in there once with her Burger King check, and he was swollen, one eye bandaged, one ear burned. Necktie in place—green polyester with diagonal maroon stripes. She was fascinated by him—nearly destroyed for love, over and over, and refusing to lie.

  She survived years of school fights herself, fights that came from real and imagined sexual and social conflicts. She knew what it was like to be forced to take the squatting posture against another girl in the parking lot, hair in her face and mouth, a tribe watching, a random extra girl coming into the fight once in a while to kick or punch, the creepy silence broken with huffing and a whimper. No matter how bad Elise got hurt, she never regretted standing up for herself. She was glad when that stage—fighting every week—was over. Although you have to be on guard forever.

  Dove shit steams then freezes on the road. Icy light radiates into the house.

  In the kitchen, Matt unpacks sushi lunch from takeout boxes.

  “Let’s see—what have we got here,” he says.

  “Yum, I’m starving,” Abigail says self-consciously.

  Abigail’s Christmas-in-Bermuda tan is amplified by a white turtleneck. She’s scared, in a titillating sense, which is how most girls feel near Jamey. He’s not charming—it’s something weirder, more potent, dangerous. He’s so convincingly disconnected from his beauty that people look away, not wanting to be the one who tips him off with their gawking.

  Jamey bends over the Aeneid in Latin, the only thing he studies anymore.

  He’s always taken classes off the beaten path: Japanese Swordsmanship, Thermodynamics, the Culture of Belief from Saints to Atheists, a course on Prison Ethics, one on Botanical Drawing, and one on Jainism. The barbs and thistles of these fields caught him. He had a double course load and immaculate grades—until now.

  His classes…had committed mutiny. The simplest, most innocent concepts turned overnight into enemies, capable of triggering full-system shutdown. Light is not light but energy. A person will never see his own face, just its reflection, or a photograph of it. Brain waves are more active during dreams than waking life. Roses don’t smell beautiful; they smell like ripe fruit, which is good for
survival, and so they’re defined as beautiful in our aesthetic beliefs. These are obvious riddles, in the league of conundrums that blow a thirteen-year-old’s mind after his first bong hit.

  Jamey wonders, vaguely ashamed, why they’re getting to him now.

  He carved ballpoint x’s into B. F. Skinner’s eyes. He had to throw out his Kierkegaard.

  And now, his last refuge—amo, amas, amat—disintegrates: the paragraphs don’t hold, words fall apart. Letters degrade into tiny sticks and circles, and Jamey closes the book.

  He dispiritedly gets up for water, and Abigail watches like a hawk.

  Matt snaps his fingers. “Over here,” he says, indicating himself, being funny. “Show’s over here.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Abigail plays it off.

  “Jamey gets plenty of attention,” Matt says.

  “Do I?” Jamey asks drily.

  “That one over there like spies on you,” Matt says, looking to Elise’s building.

  “What?” Jamey’s surprised he’s angry.

  Matt shrugs, psyched he got a reaction. “I’ve seen her, looking out the window.”

  “She’s not looking at me,” Jamey says, opening the fridge for something to do.

  “And you defend her all the time. Fascinating,” Matt says, tapping his chin with his finger.

  “Oh, whatever,” Jamey says.

  Jamey ends up parking at the Chapel Square Mall, crossing the lot with hands in camel-hair pockets. He wanders the domed hall, following mauve diamonds on the rugs, passing potted plants that don’t need sun. He likes the mall because he is somewhere, but he doesn’t go into the stores so he’s also nowhere.

  He sits on a bench to observe the population. He’s always relied on odd activities to soothe himself, like reading true-crime books in hot baths. As a kid, the encyclopedia was his security blanket. He sucked his thumb until he was eleven and a nanny started dipping his thumb in nail-polish remover.

  Now watching strangers is his salvation.

  Today it’s backfiring, making Jamey feel particularly left out of the world’s doings. He looks away from girls in tight jeans, from women in acrylic sweaters. He observes two losers by the food court throw out a nasty hello like a fish hook until they reel in a girl, play with her till she’s not so disdainful, and then her friend joins them, and the guys clumsily sneak the girls a look at their freshly rolled joint. They all saunter off, the guys’ arms over the girls’ shoulders, newly minted couples, for a quick blow job on the loading dock then a grape soda at the arcade, or a car ride and a fuck at one of the girls’ homes, with the second couple taking her little brother’s room, his turquoise globe falling off the bed stand, cum on his Spider-Man sheets.

  Jamey watches them leave the mall, his eyes golden with misery.

  Elise rides a rusting Huffy BMX bike (whose handle grips are gone) to work, her body vibrating with energy. Passing the Harkness Tower and the translucent-marble library of the university, she then navigates a couple bad blocks where boys in black beanies and shearlings stand on corners.

  The shop is downtown, past the movie theater and next to a hamburger spot. She unlocks the frozen door to a room humid with fish tanks.

  Marianne, the shop owner, comes in later, barely ever able to get there at all, dragging a cape of Mylanta and Epsom salts and cat litter vapors.

  Marianne feeds the fish and watches soaps on a tiny TV.

  “You seem awful happy,” Marianne says.

  “I’m in a good mood today!”

  Elise wishes she could talk to Marianne about Jamey, but there’s no point. Marianne has frizzy white hair and is obese, and is impartial to life, to living, without being bitter or blaming anyone. I get along better with critters is what she tells people.

  Elise sings to Lionel Richie on the stock-room radio; hours pass.

  At the pizzeria, she eats a slice while looking at a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet someone handed her. She sips Diet Coke from a wax cup, staring out the window at sun sliming the ice on the sidewalk.

  At the Goodwill on Linden Street, she finds mirrored glasses for twenty-five cents.

  Loopy Lex waves from the church steps. Homeless, his long hair matted and lip scabbed, he’s still a raw-boned, handsome American.

  “How’s it going, Lex?”

  “Going going going.”

  Back at the shop, she makes a paperclip chain.

  Everything is about Jamey now. She’ll wear the sunglasses for him. She could introduce him to Lex, tell him about the daughter in Vietnam that Lex never met, how Lex comes in the store to look at the fish. She wants to show Jamey the python Marianne keeps in the big tank, whose markings are like puzzle pieces.

  She talks to Jamey out loud. As she bikes home in the dark, she’s lost in a complicated conversation with him. Standing on the pedals to stall for a light, she suddenly worries she forgot to lock the door to the store, and has to go back.

  It’s locked.

  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 s
even 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.