White Fur Read online

  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.

  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.

  “Is that, you know, something you wish you could do?” he asks carefully.

  “Obviously—it’s easier to get a fucking job,” she says.

  “Sure,” he says, and then worries that it sounds unkind.

  “But at least I didn’t have to keep going to school, thank God, because I hated it.”

  “You did? I like school,” he says.

  She smiles at him like: Really? You’re full of shit.

  The waiter asks if they’d like dessert.

  “Definitely!” Elise says, finally relaxed.

  Jamey’s heart sinks. He’s ready to leave.

  They share chocolate torte, and Elise takes the lion’s share, talking as she chews the black cake.

  After dinner, he burps under his breath in the car, holds his fist to his lips for a moment before turning the key in the ignition.

  A dead raccoon on the roadside. She looks away too late, which means some part of her wanted to see it.

  There’s a cul-de-sac near their block and she suddenly grabs his elbow—

  “Turn here for a second,” she insists.

  It must be an emergency; her voice is desperate. He pulls to the side.

  “Shut the car off,” she says.

  The air is balmy and cold, thick with smog and ocean and fir, like unmelted wax.

  She gets out, comes around, and opens his door like a man does for his date. She flicks her gum out into the brush, leans down to kiss his mouth.

  This shocks him; then she kneels. He puts his feet on the ground, sitting sideways. She unbuttons and unzips his pants, roughly tugs them down to mid-thigh.

  When did I get hard? he wonders.

  What she does makes him grimace. She looks up at him and keeps doing it. The air is freezing and her mouth is hot.

  Headlights sweep by, far away, and he goes soft, waking up from a dream. But then she keeps going, and what scared him—being seen, doing this—makes blood rush down.

  “Oh my God,” he says, breathless afterward.

  She looks up with no pretense. She holds one kneecap with each hand. He sort of wants to touch her face but is paralyzed.

  She stands, gravel falling from her shins, and he zips himself, turns the key with a shaking hand. She jumps into the other side and slams the door like they just finished grocery shopping.

  He tries to parallel park at home, but he can hardly get near the curb and gives up.

  They sit in the dark.

  “Thanks for dinner,” she says.

  “Yes, of course. Thank you.” As soon as he says it he regrets it.

  She looks at him, then gets out of the car, and walks into her building without looking back. He should escort her to the door, but his manners have vanished.

  Snow is clumped on the windows and the afternoon is greedy with winter gloom. It consumes the soul.

  Jamey’s brain is a kaleidoscope. He languorously wanders through halls, gets a hard-on in Latin class like he’s fourteen. He watches the chem professor draw equations on the blackboard, but he sees Elise’s chin, milky with cum. Her eyes are deliriously tilted up at him. Without speaking, she’s communicating: I will do this again. I will do this whenever you want.

  He gets home, exhausted and high from fantasy.

  Jamey goes upstairs, looks out his window.

  He hasn’t talked to Elise since that night last week; he avoids her. He sometimes sees phosphorescent eyes staring from her living room, but it’s probably his imagination. He’s horrified by what happened, and fascinated.

  He’s been reminiscing about Millie, his high-school girlfriend, who went to Sacred Heart, and was blond, wealthy, sweet, skinny, bulimic, well-dressed in Carolina Herrera and alligator loafers and jodhpurs, polite, distant, with tiny teeth like baby teeth in a grown-up girl’s mouth.

  When they made out, and eventually had sex, they were two people. A boy and a girl in a bed. They never became one thing. They were just a sloppy, uncertain pair of adolescents pressing against each other. She liked Bombay Sapphire and tonic, and they usually did it after a party, so sex tasted like that to him: English and spiteful.

  She used a sponge, and he had no idea what that was. He had sex with her as hard as he could, copying porn flicks he’d seen on friends’ VCRs. She whimpered like a toy poodle, imitating women in romantic comedies. He tried to go down on her and she didn’t let him.

  Millie would talk for a half hour straight in a taxi headed south, and the minute they got out, Jamey couldn’t remember a word. It was like owning a dream on waking, then watching the details get wiped from your brain.

  Elise though. One minute she was a tomboy, provocative and defiant—then she was kneeling at his feet like a servant. Her skin and bones lit up as electricity ran from her through him, the switch flipped so the current could flow, and her masculinity morphed into heroic femininity. She was exquisite on her knees. She was aggressively submissive. One lick of her tongue meant more than hours of intoxicated sex with Millie. How could two girls be so different?

  One clear and chilly night, Matt pulls the kitchen curtain like he’s spying.

  “She’s feeding stray cats, man,” Matt says.

  “What?”

  “The girl. She’s in her backyard.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jamey says nonchalantly.

  “Just what the neighborhood needs, more strays,” he says sarcastically.

  The second Matt heads upstairs, Jamey slips into his backyard. Through the chain-link fence covered in brown-leaf vines, he sees her squatting on the building’s porch, under a bright bulb. His dad always gritted his teeth when they passed old men feeding pigeons in Central Park. They’re not doing anyone any favors, you know.

  In her yard, the lawn furniture is draped in snow, like a dead person’s memories.

  She wears the fur, belted, and her cornrowed hair shines. She’s holding a milk carton, which she poured into a bowl between her boots; two skinny cats work on it. Their markings are ordinary—gray and amber and charcoal.

  He watches her watch the cats. A third cat lopes out of the dark to sip.

  Jamey’s body prickles, hot. It’s like someone showed him a map of a strange country and said he’d grown up there, and he knew they were right. That long, narrow face—the smell of her breath.

  He must have shifted his feet because a twig cracks. The cats don’t look (because they already knew he was there and they don’t care) but Elise does. She stares at where he’s hiding.

  Finally Elise says: “Are you going to say something?”

  He grins, mortified, exhil
arated.

  They have a face-off.

  “You got to say something,” she declares finally.

  “I’m not going to,” is what comes out of his mouth. His voice is shaking slightly.

  She frowns. Strokes a cat that nips her hand.

  Eventually she goes inside, forgetting her milk carton, looking back as she stands in the threshold. Waits. Gives up.

  Jamey lies in bed, and he can’t sleep. What the hell was that—am I fucking retarded?

  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 maître 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.