White Fur Read online

  That weekend, Jamey gets tipsy at the Eggnog Social, where high-society kids do cocaine and listen to the Rolling Stones. He isn’t drunk, just buzzed enough to slide out of the wood-paneled clubhouse when friends aren’t paying attention, turn his coat collar against the crackling Connecticut night, pop into his BMW, driving and grinning, to park at his house, even though he goes into her building, whose door is unlocked, taking two steps at a time, and knocks on her apartment door.

  “Whatsup,” she says.

  She’s in sweatpants and a tight leopard shirt, her cornrows slick.

  He’s got a holly sprig in his lapel; she looks at it, looks at his face.

  They have hours of sex. He’s not very good at it.

  “Easy,” she says, more than once.

  They fuck four times, till daybreak, birds piercing the giant pale winter morning. Elise and Jamey are both sober but strung out as if they’ve been partying for hours, and she throws on a T-shirt to make them coffee, which she brings to the bed. They sit with backs against the bare wall, and sip the black coffee, listening to the city wake up.

  “I have to go,” he says.

  Jamey won’t look Matt in the eye when he throws on his coat to see her, which he does almost every night now, like a junkie.

  “Later,” Jamey says, humming uncomfortably.

  Matt shakes his head one night, without looking up from his newspaper. “You better be pulling out or wearing a condom, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “Did you just tell me to ‘pull out or wear a condom’?” Jamey repeats, because he can’t think of what to say.

  “So you don’t get her pregnant—”

  “I know what you’re implying, that’s not the point,” Jamey says, his voice oddly high.

  Matt sounds like a politician: “I’m on your side.”

  “There aren’t sides!” Jamey says.

  Silence.

  “This conversation really upsets you,” Matt says.

  Then Jamey laughs that devilish way. He slips Doublemint into his mouth, and sneaks a look in the hall mirror at his freshly combed hair. In the darkness between houses, for the brief time it takes him to cross yards, he feels as inevitable as an animal.

  Elise moves from tank to tank, cleaning the water with her tiny net. Fish dart down to the gravel, afraid of her hand.

  Her pussy hurts, and her thigh muscles are sore, and she’s buzzing with love. She smiles as she works. The tight seam of her jeans runs between her legs and amplifies the pain, and she cherishes it.

  Jamey gets to know Robbie’s men.

  Craig loves pistachios.

  Steven has orange hair and a pig nose but is somehow charming.

  Gilbert is too young for his double chin.

  Barney’s white turtleneck clings to his breasts.

  The characteristic linking them all: harmlessness.

  They sit around the living room together, watching All in the Family or The Jeffersons, ordering Chinese, groping for small talk.

  Jamey sounds condescending if he asks about their jobs or lives, arrogant if he doesn’t.

  And he can’t read them either.

  “That BMW out there yours?” asks Barney with a straight face. “Great car.”

  “So do you like Yale then?” asks Robbie with a straight face. “Great school.”

  Tonight, after sex, Jamey showers the stickiness off.

  Suddenly Elise steps in, douses her face, then hands him the soap. He’s never showered with a girl.

  He’s not sure what to do, and gingerly washes her arms.

  “You can kiss my cunt but you can’t wash it?” she asks.

  Jamey crookedly grins and holds the bar uselessly.

  She pulls his hand between her legs.

  Their skin is rubbery and slick, stained by the amethyst curtain. She kneels in the basin and gives him head.

  Afterward, while she blow-dries her hair, he pretends to look for aspirin but wants to find the birth-control pills she says she’s taking. He doesn’t see them, although he’s not sure what they look like, and he feels sick.

  He leaves, his hair wet and face blank, and she can tell something’s wrong. She can often tell something’s wrong, since after sex he usually hates her and wants to disappear or die, but then he comes back the next night, or the night after, and that’s all that matters.

  Some mornings, he studies while she sleeps. Or she watches him read, trailing nails along his arm, their bodies crisscrossed with sunlight coming through tattered blinds. She can do this for an hour. It always leads to the same thing. She’s wet when he touches her.

  To her he was a virgin and she took his virginity. He was an unpicked fruit turned to sugar. His lack of skills in the beginning, his brutality, his wide-eyed need for her to spell things out, to guide his hand or his mouth—all this made her want him more.

  And his cock is thick, long but not so long that it’s silly, with a pink sheen like marble on a humid day. When she sees the spot of pre-cum on his boxers, she shudders—and then she’s a queen of sex, a Maria Callas in bed, an Olympic track star in the sheets, a sensual and deliberate teacher.

  But they never do anything outside this room. They don’t go to dinner again. They don’t do breakfast or lunch either. Sometimes she asks if he wants eggs when they wake up, asks what time his first class starts. She gets upset when he has to leave. She crosses her arms at the door as he goes down the stairs but she watches him to the last step, till he’s gone.

  She starts calling his house every evening to see when he’ll come over.

  “Hello?” says Matt.

  “Is Jamey there?”

  “He’s not back yet.”

  “All right,” she says glumly like she doesn’t believe him.

  She calls every half hour.

  “Is Jamey there?” she asks.

  “I will tell him you called,” Matt says in an aggravated, measured voice.

  “Yeah, tell him I called.”

  “I will—”

  Click—she hangs up.

  When Jamey walks in, Matt looks at him.

  “What?” he asks.

  “That psycho is stalking you.”

  At work, Elise takes a smoke break in the bleak lot, staring at a shopping cart capsized in dead grass. She taps ashes and keeps her shoulders high against the cold.

  She believes he might love her at some point. She never kidded herself that this would be easy; she just knows it will be worth it. They hail from different planets but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. He’s coming around. The cold wind makes her eyes wet.

  Matt’s taking Thalia to the Winter Ball, and Thalia has a friend visiting who needs a date, and that’s how Jamey ends up taking Cornelia Founder to the dance. A Southern girl in a powder-blue gown, she laughs all night, like archaic flute music, holding Jamey’s arm.

  There are shenanigans in the ballroom, where tinsel hangs from chandeliers. An a cappella rendition of “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” boys in the girls’ bathroom sharing pristine cocaine, Timothy Gerrigan vomiting into a Champagne bucket.

  “I’ve heard about you,” Cornelia breathes into Jamey’s ear as they sit at the silver-cloth-draped table late night.

  Jamey and Matt, Cornelia and Thalia, and the rest of their Social Register crew, either grew up on the same block or went to boarding school or summered or skied together. They were raised in a pod, incubated in the thick and slippery gel of legacy. They arrived at Yale intact as a clan.

  The group looks fine in tuxedos and dresses. Harry Smythe III, there, laughing with Beth Von Trotta and Alexandra Essex—they glitter with importance.

  Why shouldn’t they? They’ve been doused in lessons, experiences, attention, books, toys, films, saltwater and sunshine, space and quiet, vitamins, music, discipline, orthodontia, reward, vaccinations, role models of gentility and success, cake and lemonade, support, guidance.

  Harry wears his granddad’s cufflinks: tiny gold fox faces that look at the world sidew
ays, unblinking, in the blur of his gestures.

  Jamey does one bump of coke, and finishes his scotch. Cornelia is warm, and giggles into his neck when someone cracks a joke. She smokes like she never had a cigarette, coughing, pearl earrings winking.

  He drives her home, concentrating on the yellow line but thinking about unfolding the blue silk. He wants to put his hand down there. At the house, he parks and turns to her, touches her mouth with his thumb, then leans in to kiss her.

  Soon she’s spreading her legs a little as he reaches down, the car dark and scattered with light. Her mouth is too wet on his mouth. She doesn’t do much else.

  Eventually they break apart. He smooths his hair and smiles at her, in his way—apologizing, happy, nihilistic.

  She furtively snaps open her clutch and hunches over to swipe on Clinique lipstick.

  “Shall we go inside?” he asks.

  “Sure,” she says too loud, drunk.

  They walk without touching each other at an awkward fake-stroll pace to his house.

  It’s late when they wake. The sun is indistinguishable from clouds, all of it bright gray.

  Cornelia puts on her grandmother’s black mink and stands up straight.

  They walk out quietly, since Matt is probably asleep and hungover and might have a hungover guest. They move toward the car, followed by their stately shadows on the frozen ground. It’s only when they get to the BMW that Jamey sees key scratches and a shattered windshield.

  “Oh my God!” Cornelia says. “Was that—did that happen last night?”

  “Must have. It’s been happening on this block lately,” Jamey says evenly, and ushers her into the car, desperately collecting the dress’s hem like dropped sails onto a boat.

  He feels eyes watching from Elise’s window.

  “We can’t drive like this!” Cornelia says shrilly.

  “Sure we can,” Jamey says, getting in the front seat.

  Cornelia looks at him—and she suddenly loathes him, knowing something, without knowing what.

  On his way back, he checks himself in the rearview mirror. The day comes through the cracked glass to make a map of lines on his face, a diagram, a collage like the magazine cut-ups girls create for mix-tape covers. Dull light is harder to handle than bright sun—he squints, barely able to keep his eyes open. It makes him look like he’s grinning.

  MARCH 1986

  For the next couple days, Elise paces the apartment.

  Girl, you fucked up that car!

  She’s violently jealous, a plastic toy thrown into a fire, her white body turning liquid in the heat. She keeps playing a film from what she assembled—a blue dress, the idea of that rich, perfumed cunt, his drunk tongue, his bed (where Elise has never been), tuxedo slippers under a chair, and the couple sleeping, rank and sweet, while the sun rises like a peach.

  Pull it together, Elise, she thinks one morning, and shakily puts on mascara.

  At the kitchen table, she smokes and calls his house.

  He comes over that evening, hands in coat pockets, looks at her overfilled ashtray.

  “Sit down,” she suggests coldly.

  He does.

  “I’m fucking really sorry about your car,” she says, and she does sound sorry.

  “Okay.”

  Silence.

  “Your turn,” she says, snapping her gum.

  “For?” he asks.

  “An apology.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Right in my face,” she says. “You think I deserve that?”

  “In your face? What, were you spying on me?”

  “Spying?” she sputters. “You live right fucking next door. I have to see you.”

  Ugh. He couldn’t even get hard in his room that night. Cornelia resorted to a hand job, but she looked like a kid tying a ribbon on a kitten or putting the head back on a doll, earnest and flustered. He pretended to pass out.

  “I didn’t know we couldn’t see other people,” he says without conviction.

  “So you can just use me and all that.”

  “Why is this a one-way thing? Are you not getting anything out of it?” he flails.

  “I’m not getting enough.”

  “What else do you want?”

  “I want to do things with you,” she says softly.

  “But. I don’t know what you want to do,” he says nonsensically.

  She thinks. And then, guardedly, she states: “I want to go to Paddy’s Arcade.”

  Nervous and uncomfortable, they walk down the stairs.

  He unlocks the car as she winces at the sight of the windshield.

  “Whoops,” she mumbles.

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  “Can I smoke if I roll down the window?” she asks, desperate.

  “I guess,” he says, doing a U-turn.

  She lights her cigarette and looks at the dull city lights. She turns to him. “So what have you been up to?”

  When he looks at her, she’s trying not to smile.

  He can’t help but smile too. “You’re something else,” he says.

  At the arcade, she’s immediately giddy, grudgeless, unrepentant. He notices it right away. She becomes royal here, strutting with her endless legs and high chin. He changes dollars to quarters and they cruise around the mad, loud space. The spirit infects them, and they stare with big eyes at everything.

  “Whatcha gonna play? Pick something, Jamey. You got to pick.”

  She puts a Red Hot in his mouth as if to give him strength.

  The glare and ring-bop-ding of the games, the black lights illuminating the neon shapes on the carpet, make a dreamscape of wins and losses.

  The soldiers and aliens die bloodless deaths, careening through space in pixelated pain.

  Jamey’s face is dappled in these lights, a palette of lemon-yellow and pink and lavender stars, and he ignores the other boys, who smell like popcorn and fabric softener, and his eyes focus like lasers on the tilting screen after he drops in his coins.

  “Play again. I just want you to play,” she says when each game is done.

  He puts in more quarters. He leans, his shoulders narrowed, he jerks back. He fires and fires, decimating the machines, and his thumb is almost bleeding. Numbers float! Monsters help!

  When the game is done, his cheeks are hot and his eyes are radiant. He’s broken out of the shackles of himself.

  She sucks on his lip after kissing him, jumping at him like a kid too big to catch and hold. While they walk, she pulls his arm around her, then matches her gait to his.

  She finally plays one round of Donkey Kong against him.

  He looks at her, jaw dropped, after she destroys him.

  “What can I say.” She grins, shrugging with one shoulder.

  She rips cotton candy with her long magenta nails and stuffs it in his mouth. She holds out her Diet Coke in a big waxy cup for him to sip through the straw.

  He’s unexpectedly excited by what they must look like. He’s enjoying being self-conscious tonight. No one he knows is going to show up.

  He’s seen other couples look like he and Elise must look, and he knew they knew things he didn’t know. Those couples were always at movie theaters, or in Central Park, in New Haven pizzerias, at Montauk carnivals. Kids who chew gum with mouths open. Kids who yell and scream, with pleasure, with juvenile madness, fucking around, wrestling and flirting, making a scene, making fools of themselves, the girls in the guys’ laps, all singing one line in a radio song’s chorus together, and then falling apart and laughing at their outburst. Kids who pile later into one car whose side mirror is duct-taped on and whose ratty seats are covered in tiger-print towels, and they have nowhere to go.

  He’s on his way to swim laps when Thalia comes out of the pool room with Darcy, goggles pushed up on their sleek heads.

  “Jamey!” says Thalia, as if running into him in a hotel lobby in Rome.

  “Hey there,” he says, trying to move past them.

  The aquamarine mist ris
es.

  “Cornelia said to say hello,” she says with a twisted smile.

  “Please say hello from me,” Jamey says.

  The women watch his back as they dry their faces with towels, not moving to the locker room until he disappears.

  He swims with great energy. He could have repaired things just now, charmed these girls back, righted the ship. It reminds him of a story that a drunk man at a beach club party once told him whose significance he didn’t understand then but might understand today. The guy dropped his suit at the dry cleaners on Eightieth and Lexington, and decided not to get it, for no reason, and to never go to that dry cleaners again. The man laughed when he told Jamey this tale, sipped his Dewar’s and ginger ale, and wandered off in a cheerfully unbound way.

  When he gets to Elise’s bedroom tonight, she’s wearing a cheap red negligee, and while he built himself up before coming over, he now feels sorry for her and her trashy nightgown.

  Dammit, he thinks.

  “What?” she says.

  “Nothing,” he says, deflated.

  They make love, and lie in bed.

  “How come you never ask me anything?” she says, turning the light back on after he turned it off.

  “What’s your favorite color?” he tries, and he’s not sure if he’s being kind.

  She takes it seriously. “I’ve got a few. Black cars. Pink roses. You know? I like the blue what’s in Club Med commercials. That kind of beach, I never even been near.”

  “You want to go to a beach like that?” he says because he has to say something.

  “I mean, who wouldn’t? What else you want to know?”

  “Umm. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  Elise shrivels her nose. “I know what I don’t want to be.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s a whole other conversation,” she says.

  “What’s the saddest you’ve ever been?”

  “When my sister died. She wasn’t my blood sister, but I loved her.” Elise holds her hair so he can see the name on her neck: Donna Sierra in azure-blue italics. “She died a asthma.”