White Fur Read online

  “I’m sorry, Elise,” he says, turning on his side to look at her. He suddenly wonders why he never asked about the tattoo.

  “Ask me something that’s not upsetting.” She’s lying back, one arm across her eyes.

  “What would you be if you were an animal?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. A jaguar.” She smiles.

  “What would you be if you were a flower?”

  “I got no idea,” she says defensively, because she doesn’t know flowers.

  “A black iris,” he tells her grandly, feeling different now.

  “What’s it look like?”

  “It’s…unusual. It shines in this really dark, strange way.”

  “Well, fuck you too.”

  “That was a compliment!”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Let’s see,” he says, and he runs his hand up her thigh, distracted.

  “What’s my favorite ice cream,” she says.

  “What’s your favorite ice cream?”

  “Peppermint at Friendly’s.”

  He kisses her neck.

  Elise puts her hand between her legs to close it off. “I’m sore.”

  He takes the straps off her shoulders and bites her nipples.

  “It’s my turn,” she says. “Even though I already know all about you. Since I pay attention.”

  “Ha,” he says dully but playfully.

  “What’s your favorite color?”

  “I don’t discriminate.”

  “Gee, aren’t you fucking correct. What’s the saddest you ever been?”

  “I’m always sad.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I was born sad.”

  “What kind of animal are you?”

  “I’m a human animal.”

  He tastes her neck, kissing, soft as a cream puff. He moves so slowly that she’s the one who arches her back, starting over, finding his mouth with hers.

  And here they are again, and it hurts but that makes it pungent, evil, and good. “Wait—wait for me,” she tells him sternly at the end, teeth gritted, and he does.

  They’re spent. Bodies light as ash.

  “Dayum,” she says a few moments later.

  And for a while, the room isn’t grim, the paint isn’t cracked, the sounds of toilets flushing and dogs barking and people fighting don’t make it through the disintegrating walls. Their golden chamber is oily with incense, studded with jewels and stars and thorns, hidden from the city, the floor covered in fur rugs.

  Her red negligee is divine.

  They discover a diner, with a quilted-metal exterior, always busy with senior citizens and kids from the nearby Hebrew school and housewives in jogging suits. Each table has a miniature jukebox, and the grilled cheese is butter-crusty on the outside, creamy on the inside, the milkshake too thick for a straw. It’s their station, their headquarters outside the bedroom.

  She mashes an onion ring into her mouth. “This kid just keeps tapping on the glass tanks. I said if I ever fucking see him again, I’ll crush his junior-high ass.”

  Jamey stares at her.

  “What?” she asks, eating.

  “Do you listen to yourself?”

  “I’m not deaf.”

  “Are you unable to express things without curse words?” he asks, sounding like an old-lady teacher. “You’re going to alienate people.”

  “People who? What the fuck do you care?”

  What does he care?

  She plays with the fake-gold necklace hanging over her turtleneck and grins, watching him be flustered. Later, she’ll think this conversation revealed that—at least subconsciously—he thinks about a future.

  When they drive somewhere, she scratches his neck like he’s a cat, distracting him so he forgets to turn or signal or stop. His face is masculine, in a bountiful way, and she stares at his dimple, his teeth, his sly mouth.

  He has a way of sluggishly shrugging, or winking—or slowly fingering a shirt button—that works against the way his mind darts in strange directions, and the chasm this creates draws Elise down into him.

  “When I’m not with you, I just sit around and think about fucking you,” she says at the diner one day, and he winces.

  “Why would you say that in a public place?” he hoarsely whispers. “Everyone can hear you!”

  Now that he’s told her to stop cursing, she does it more. Is she playing? She’s poker-faced, like an Indian, like Pocahontas, eating onion rings.

  One night he’s tired after writing a paper in ten straight hours on coffee and Vivarin.

  She lights candles in her room, turns up the R&B station, and breaks out the baby oil.

  He’s terrified. “You’re not serious.”

  “Oh, I’m gonna take care of you, boy.”

  She straddles his back on the bed and hums to Luther Vandross as she works. He grins into the covers with humiliation. He doesn’t do this. He’s not here. His body battles being relaxed. It’s like he landed in some MTV nightmare, some late-night boots-knockin’ remix. But it feels good, and he ultimately can’t pretend that it doesn’t, not even to himself.

  Spring break’s coming up. The guys are hitching a ride out of Teterboro, meeting Matt’s family in Aspen—for a week of skiing, Armagnac, and braised elk!

  Jamey’s got a better idea.

  The Newport house is empty: a briny wind whipping the trees, surf pounding the ice-laced beach, a fireplace, a bed. And no one watching.

  “Not going to make it to Aspen,” Jamey says one day, clapping his hands like a corporate breaker of bad news.

  “Why not?” Matt says.

  “The Newport house’ll be empty, so I was thinking about that.”

  “Of course it’s empty, it’s freezing and it’s a beach and there’s nothing to do,” Matt says.

  “It’ll be cozy,” Jamey says, and actually blushes.

  “So you can’t leave her for one whole week?”

  “I could easily leave her.”

  “You know, the fact that you never bring her over says ever-y-thing there is to say,” Matt singsongs.

  Jamey rolls his eyes. “She’d feel so welcome.”

  “Why not?”

  “You said she was ‘casing’ the place.”

  “Forget about that,” Matt says, because he can’t bring himself to apologize.

  Jamey snorts. “It’s not like she wants to come over, trust me.”

  They stare at each other.

  “Who is she? Do you know who her parents are? Do you know anything about her?”

  But Jamey doesn’t want to know her for the same reason that—(his brain starts fuzzing up here, trying to save him from the thought he’s about to think)—for the same reason a farmer isn’t close to his animals—it’s not supposed to last. Jamey burns with shame at this unbidden idea, and Matt sees his face redden.

  “Are you in love with her or something?”

  “Are you fucking out of your mind?”

  Watching her eat toast, or tie her sneakers, or sleep—Jamey is repulsed.

  The slant of her eyes is lower-class. She chews gum like a whore. She leaves skid marks in the toilet. The fact that she irons her jeans is pathetic. Her face is wide and empty when he uses words like disingenuous and amorphous.

  He doesn’t even know where he gets these notions. How does a whore chew gum? Who says whore anymore?

  And the disgust breaks like a fever. He sees the light in her eyes when she laughs, braids falling over her face. The way she looks at him when he walks in the door. The smell of her neck when they come together, something feral and otherworldly, salt and roses, life and death.

  And his head goes back and forth. What’s he doing hanging out with this girl? And then he thinks he’s just really fucked up. And then he wants to fall asleep and leave consciousness behind before it ruins him.

  But he invites her to Newport anyway.

  Packing, she feels excited. And stupid. She knows the trip will be humiliating in vague, as-of-now-
unknown ways, and she stands outside in the brisk morning with her backpack, smoking, waiting for him to leave his house. So much of life is about standing on the curb, willing to see what rolls up.

  She squints at birds on the telephone wire, the line of small bodies never static—as one lands on the cable, one from the other end of the group takes off into flight. A masterpiece of balance.

  Driving, Jamey tries to fill the silence, saying inane things like: Ever been to Newport? No, well it’s a pretty town. You like lobster? Maybe we’ll have a big seafood dinner one night. A “seafood dinner”? He sounds like a TV commercial. Did you pack your bathing suit? Just kidding.

  They get cheeseburgers at McDonald’s, and she holds out a greasy paper of ketchup so he can dip his fries and drive. She finally asks if he minds listening to the radio; the Knicks game is on. He can tell she just wants him to shut up too.

  Late afternoon, they turn into the gate. Her eyes take in the long driveway and the elms arching over it, and then the size of the white house, the dozens of windows reflecting sky.

  “Wow,” she says. “It’s huge.”

  But she doesn’t give much away, holds her cards tight as they walk up massive slate steps to the door, flanked by pots where camellias flourish in the summer.

  He and Elise bumble around, reviving the foyer, the kitchen, the library, stirring the sunshine-thick rot of a still environment.

  She opens a closet to put away her jacket and finds it stuffed.

  “Whose are these?” she asks.

  He looks at slickers and sandals and umbrellas. “Everyone’s. No one’s in particular.”

  “Did people forget them?”

  Jamey tries to understand her confusion.

  “I mean,” she begins again. “Who lives here?”

  “It’s a summer house. A second home. No one lives here.”

  Elise shuts the door, unconvinced. She imagines people walking around somewhere without jackets.

  Mouse droppings have collected in an antique bowl on the piano like rice grains in a monk’s cup. She plays one note and looks at the painting on the wall.

  “Who’s that?” she asks, intuitively intimidated by the portrait.

  “My grandmother. They call her Binkie.”

  The house is rejecting Elise like a body refuses a transplanted organ. Cells conspire. The rugs, the roll-top desk, the sun-faded Economist stacks—they want her out.

  They drink coffee on the couch. The chintz looks to Elise like outer-space flowers: unnatural, unearthly, a pattern of symmetrical asymmetry. A garden written in code. Sinister.

  Elise wants him to be glad he brought her, and she knows part of the reason they’re here is sexual fantasy, so she does what she believes will make him happy. She starts to kiss him on the sofa, pushes up his teal sweater to lick a line down his stomach, then she unzips his pants. Of course she got her period yesterday, which couldn’t be worse timing, but she can put off his knowing if she gives him a blow job now. Her eyes flick up to his eyes as she works.

  Dusk hits the windows and turns to inky night. The silk lampshades are brighter. Finished, she moves back to the couch and leans against him. He sits with knees spread, eyes bright, and then sighs and pulls it together. A couple drops of milk on the Persian rug.

  They eat roast-beef sandwiches for dinner. He listens to her talk without hearing what she’s saying. If he closes his eyes, the hard way she ends words, the youngness in the middle stretch of a syllable, the innocence caught in one long lilt, followed by jadedness in a staccato phrase, like gunshots—he could be listening to a sixteen-year-old boy.

  She hunkers down while she eats, a quarterback on the bench.

  When she’s quiet, she sometimes looks cross or like she’s trying to remember something. She seems so lean in moments like this, and ungiving. A lot of bone and fury, and nothing else. She’s dry metal, the glint of mica ringing in your ear.

  She takes Jamey’s hand, kisses his knuckles.

  He’s suddenly aware of how plush she is, how luscious, within, or somewhere. What’s so exciting about her is there’s no room, in theory, for what’s inside. Her heart is voluptuous, it has a tongue and a pout, dense fur, a huge lake of blood, a dazzle of lash and white fire, where he floats and dreams, borne on lust.

  In the morning Jamey jogs. He runs like an athlete—light and unerring. The road cuts into the rocky coast over the ocean. The sea throws up plumes of water—viciously cold.

  No one’s here this time of year except caretakers: often alcoholic friends of the family who can’t handle society, who hide and take care of mansions and animals.

  He knows every family on this route. The Galloways over there have albino peacocks. The birds usually strut by the old eggplant-purple Mercedes, maybe because they’re narcissists and they like their dull reflection in the paint.

  Here’s the pale-gray castle where the widow Rutherford, last of her line, throws bridge parties and grand dinners at the age of eighty-six. She remembers Jamey whenever he takes his turn greeting her, small as a girl in a wicker throne shaded by lilacs and robins.

  The Tennyson house, blocked by tall privet hedges, was the site of a sad birthday party. Jane Tennyson was turning twelve, and her best friend, Eileen Choward, dove into the shallow end and broke her neck, paralyzed for life. Jamey still thinks about these two girls, almost every day, and he doesn’t know why.

  He runs by Sarah Stanhope’s house, his best friend in their early summers. They traded books at the beach club. Now she wears gold bracelets and a topknot, and he thought for a while she’d be the person to love. At a wedding on St. John’s, they tried it, while jasmine-spiked moonlight leaked through the window, and drunk guests squealed on the beach, but he felt like he was kissing his sister.

  His hair is damp and cold as he runs on the cliff.

  He runs past the pier where he’s launched and docked many a sailboat. This is where family and friends have evening drinks, sitting in captains chairs on the wharf, smoking, having wandered down in loafers from their homes with their own drinks in their own glasses.

  Jamey often sailed alone, and they all got quiet when he approached to dock the boat. Jamey was the promised child and the cursed child. The sun would set through his sail as he got close, and he would loose the mainsail to luffing by turning the bow into the wind, and make a perfect landing.

  They always helped tie her up.

  His young body was intended for sailing—he moved like a cat on a hot roof—he looked to his relatives as they exchanged rope, and his uncle or second cousin bent to cleat the line with one hand while holding a scotch in the other, and no one looked back at him.

  It wasn’t a cruel silence. They were all just waiting. Jamey continued growing, changing, his mother’s otherness maybe showing in his skin, in his full mouth, his elegance. He should be the family legacy, and they want him to properly and exclusively claim his Hyde blood. They don’t shun him. They just don’t know what to do with him yet. Someone offers him a hand off the boat. He takes it, steps to the dock, letting the boat gently rock behind him. Atta boy, someone says.

  He starts to become aware now as he runs, conscious of his moving parts, of the unlikelihood they’ll continue to interact. Synchronicity ends.

  In a class last month, the professor conducted an experiment by telling students not to think of a white bear for five minutes. To suppress that image. And then to record how often they thought of the white bear.

  Not only did Jamey think of the white bear a hundred times in five minutes, he thought of it for the rest of class. Then the rest of the day. Then that night. The white bear sits in his head now, like Jamey’s skull is a circus ring and there’s no ringmaster. The bear cracks a whip and grins with yellow teeth.

  When Jamey gets back to the house, he pulls off his sneakers, wet with sand, walks quietly through the rooms.

  He finds Elise in a bedroom, bending over a vanity table where many girls have cut bangs and tried on their aunts’ earrings and
whispered and squabbled.

  She’s looking in a jewelry box.

  He wonders what’s in her pockets. The second he suspects her, a phantom hand—his own—slaps his face.

  “Hey.” She smiles.

  “Hey.”

  “How was your run?”

  “Fine.” He looks at her.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Nothing. What are you doing?”

  “Looking for a safety pin to hold my stupid bra together,” she says.

  “Oh. Yeah, there might be one in there.”

  He wonders, as he showers, if she heard the real question: What do you think you’re going to find?

  He doesn’t really know her; it’s his right to speculate. Isn’t it? She’s a stranger.

  As he towels dry, looking at a Dior perfume bottle next to a conch shell on the glass shelf, he thinks of a scene at his dad’s place in the city, years ago. Alex was yelling at a housekeeper, who’d brought her daughter along that day. The girl was ten or eleven. She’d taken a perfume bottle off a dresser and the cook had caught her hiding in the pantry and trying it on.

  “I don’t care that she gave it back—she gave it back because she got caught,” Alex was saying to her mother.

  The girl looked up and Jamey didn’t want to see the poor thing’s eyes; he expected humiliation. He was surprised to see pinwheels of pure hatred spinning in her face.

  Photographs line the walls of a hallway. Jamey stands behind Elise as she looks, and he wonders—Do I really want her to understand all this?

  “That’s you!” she says, pointing to a kid in a Brooks Brothers blazer by a Christmas tree.

  “Yeah, in Palm Beach.”

  “And this one! Look at you, so skinny,” she says of Jamey—he’s alone in a bathing suit, his body painted with the cobalt shadow of blooming rhododendrons. Braces and a pale chest—even at his most awkward, he was awkward with grace. It’s funny that, grown-up now, groomed and charming enough, he still identifies most with that boy, with that photo, with that moment of gloom and radiance, possibility—and solitude.