The second coming, p.23
The Second Coming, page 23
She shook her head. She hadn’t known to ask.
“The record company is on the phone by this point and is like, Prince, babe, what’s the holdup? And Prince is prevaricating, pick your excuse—maybe because he knows he’s about to blow up his career. So one night, he goes out to a club, which is where he likes to spend his time, but in a kind of non-nightclub-goer’s fantasy of a nightclub. The guy doesn’t even do drugs, reportedly. I think his favorite drink was Madeira. No, the beauty of the nightclub, from Prince’s perspective, is that he can arrange to have his own music played and watch how people are reacting, like does it get them moving. He has the DJ put on a test pressing of The Black Album. Now at this point the story turns a little fuzzy. Maybe nobody likes to dance to uncompromising black dance music about, like, bondage and squirrel meat. Or maybe everybody does. But Prince, watching, gets this distinct feeling that what he’s done here is wrong. Is against the God he’s always claimed to believe in but maybe hasn’t thought about for a while. Does God exist, in this story? You tell me: a girl suddenly appears out of the darkness—radiant. They start talking, she ends up feeding him ecstasy, the first time he’s ever done psychedelics or whatever, and they stay up the whole night, talking, talking. No one knows what is said. But come sunrise, he calls the record company and orders all copies of The Black Album destroyed, which they are, except for one. And in the course of the next three weeks, he records a whole new album from scratch, which is Lovesexy, the one with him on the cover cuddled naked in an orchid and no breaks in between the tracks: the single continuous story of how he almost spiritually died but then received a vision which the album doesn’t even fucking tell you what it is! The single in the U.K. is ‘Alphabet Street,’ which is huge, as I said, but in the U.S., Lovesexy tanks his career, and Prince is never really the same again. Now get over here.”
Having taken her hand, considerately, he led her down off the ledge.
“Breathe in when I say.”
He reversed the joint so that the burning end was in his mouth and leaned forward as if to kiss her, a centimeter of wet end smoking faintly between his lips. Then he blew, and she understood she was supposed to inhale at the same time, the very thing she’d planned not to do. Into her boozy mouth came a hot dense fog. How was it, you ask? Confusing. Slightly painful. It was mostly to get him to stop that she put a hand on his chest. And just like that, the joint was on the edge of the desk and his eyes were closed and his hands were on her breasts and they were kissing.
She found herself thinking of a brace-faced boy from orchestra camp two summers ago, Zack, or Zach, whose tongue had been a sweet little blip of plausible deniability. Grayson’s, by contrast, was beer-cold, all business. Through his shirt, his stomach muscles felt tense; she had somehow been expecting more give. Away on another track, she said, “Wait.” Your door’s still open, your dad could come in. You’re going to burn a hole in your carpet. But as their mouths clunked back together, he took her hand and moved it to the front of his jeans, as if to confirm that this wasn’t his first time. She tried to keep it flat, but when her fingers flexed autonomically, he seemed to take it as a signal to pull her toward his bed—though maybe the signal he was responding to had been the selfie she’d sent back in July, which she just had time to decide he must have received after all.
Then the choreography grew more involved. More consequential. His skinny jeans were down by his gymsocks, revealing engorged tighty-whiteys. He fumbled a bit with her button-fly before resigning himself to copying, along the inseam, the same pressure she was giving him. Not a patch on the shower’s massage-head at home, yet connected to another human being. Still, she thought, as his hips began to move, did she even like him like this? Did she like anyone like this? She heard herself years in the future trying to tell someone, Grayson. Grayson was the boy I lost my virginity to. With.
It was only upon opening her eyes that she realized she had closed them. She was on her back now and he was sucking her earlobe, making noises that sounded like he was really into it and seeking out her nipples with his thumbs. Dead center on the ceiling hung an incongruously cheap fixture, a glass dome like a candy dish, and for a second, she was up there with it, an oversight, floating. Then into her ear, in a voice that at first seemed a stranger’s, he murmured, “I should get some protection, yeah?”
To buy time, she slid out from under him and put her head on his now-bare chest, planning to ask could they maybe just hold each other until her buzz faded a little, but this, too, he seemed to misread, because now his hand was on her recovered shoulder, nudging her down toward what she still wasn’t ready to see. So maybe she could use her fingers to sort of confuse him? Some saliva would be required too, probably, if he was to mistake her hand for her mouth. She closed her eyes again, felt for his jock, was briefly turned on by her own power, and ducked to apply just the slightest bit of tongue, since what could it hurt? Maybe she’d like it. Then he lurched his hips and a hand was on her head, forcing it down, and for a whole minute she was choking on potted ham and couldn’t breathe. He winced—“Ow, teeth!”—and eased off temporarily. And as she opened her eyes again to the gleaming pale bareness of him, the torso, the arms, something cold went through her: I’m not here. This isn’t happening.
“Wait…” She coughed. “Where are the scars?”
“What?”
“Your wrists, Grayson. Shouldn’t there be scars?”
“Scars from…? Oh, Christ, you didn’t still think—ah, of course, right.” He’d wriggled free and was sitting up now against the headboardless wall with his knees drawn, suddenly chaste. “Look…if you’re going to go all the way with me I should probably just clear things up once and for all: you realize I wasn’t part of that group, the day we met.”
“I wasn’t part of that group either! But what are you even talking about? I thought you were a cutter.”
“I don’t know why you’d assume anything of the sort.” The stiffness seemed to have passed into his whole body. “As I said at the time, the nurses told me that’s where to find you. I wasn’t trying to give the impression I was a patient myself…I mean, I did tell you.”
“Not a patient? But then why would you even be at the hospital?”
“Well, I had to get you your violin, didn’t I? It was those stickers on the case that had caught my eye from across the tracks, you see…”
“Oh my God—”
“And when I saw you put it down and walk off to the end of the platform, the first thing I thought was that some stranger might try to take it—”
“You were at the station? Watching?”
“Before you get angry,” he said (though it seemed awfully late innings for that), “I thought what I was watching was someone die, okay? But then the train pulls away and there you are, Jolie, a perfect miracle. By the time I get over to your side to see what I can see, there are so many EMTs and cops and whatnot that I can’t get through, but then I spot the case getting left behind and I just…grab it. And since someone mentioned the ambulance was bound for Bellevue, I knew where to go.”
“Jesus Christ. And you weren’t going to tell me any of this—”
“I thought on some level you already knew! Besides: When was I going to bring it up? Hey, don’t act like you’ve always been a model of forthrightness.”
“You must be out of your mind.”
“ ‘The Jersey Shore,’ though, Jolie? Not Montauk? You know people can see your location when you message on Facebook, right? Do you even know how privacy settings work?” He gestured vaguely—infuriatingly—toward his screens.
“So you caught me fibbing about what beach I was at!” She’d stood now to tug on her clothes. “How is that anywhere near the same thing?”
“And if you truly weren’t meant to be in the dayroom that day, or on the train tracks, then what is this?” From under his desk blotter, he pulled some smoothed pages, their creases like those of a weathered face. The piece she’d written. He must have dug it out of the trash at the hospital, maybe looking for her name. She felt herself go numb.
“That’s not mine. I don’t want that.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to disown it, though. But listen, I’m sorry! Think how embarrassed I must be!”
“On behalf of the suicidal fourteen-year-old whose throat you just left a pube in? Or was my age not the kind of thing you snoop around for online?”
“Shit,” he said, and banged his head against the wall behind. “Shit, shit, shit.” But already she was running back down the hall, fumbling at the top button of her jeans. The blueprint had been knocked from her head, and she ended up passing a laundry room and a third bathroom before reversing back toward the kitchen. He was calling after her to stop, but by the time he came sliding into the entry hall, shielding his crotch with a pillow, she was at the elevator. Never before had a “Door Close” button responded to her touch, but maybe this, too, was a prerogative of the one percent, because a moment later she was in a sealed metal box, plunging down through the bluing throb of Manhattan.
And again briefly choking—this time on tears.
Off-duty lights drifted like windblown seeds through the dusk beyond the lobby. For once, her luck would hold: at the corner, a cab was letting out a fare. She grabbed the door and threw herself in back and gave the henna-bearded driver her address. As he glanced at the rearview, she willed herself not to turn and check for a pantsless psycho skidding out into the street.
Then they were passing along the highway, and after that the surface streets: papaya spot, synagogue, some film shoot taking up a whole section of Broadway as Jolie shielded her eyes from the cabbie, fought to stifle her crying…and finally, the long, dark residential frontage of her block. When the dome light revealed that there wasn’t enough cash in her wallet for a decent tip, she shoved the entire wad plus some coins through the cab’s partition window and then fled before it could be counted. She’d almost reached the stairs inside when Vikas touched her elbow.
“I can’t talk now, Vikas,” was all she could say, pulling away; for another memory had just assailed her. It was their first day in the building, and she was on a stoop nearby, struggling her numb-fingered way through a bag of pistachios while a couple of Mom’s grad-school colleagues milled behind the U-Haul. All at once, Vikas had swooped from the lobby, seeing past their bright chatter to the manual incompetence underneath. He found the catch, rumbled the iron ramp out, fetched the dolly from its hiding place as she looked on—in secrecy, she believed. But then he’d reappeared before her, flapping his long coat to shake off the brownish-beige detritus of her life to date. She hadn’t been sure how to respond except with a different problem, a particularly obdurate nut. His manicured nails had the shell halved instantly. Still, the moment she reached for the green flesh bare on his palm, he’d popped it into his own mouth. And watched for a reaction with those all-seeing eyes, like a tailor’s inspecting a fabric for holes.
Now, just as she was realizing that the whole sordid truth was going to have to come out, to her mother at least, he gently suggested she buzz up first.
“Buzz up to my own apartment? I don’t…Is everything okay?”
“Here.” He retreated to his desk to hoist a telephone onto the parapet. With its chunky buttons, it seemed to hail from the time of the flintlock, the victrola. The line beeped four times before her mother answered, her voice strangely muzzy. “Hello?”
Which is when Jolie caught another voice, a man’s, in the background. Eyeliner…swimsuit…exercycle. “Mom?”
And suddenly all was alertness. “Jolie, what’s going on? Are you downstairs?”
“Of course I’m downstairs, I’m using the intercom, aren’t I? I’m at Vikas’s desk. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“I thought Dad was supposed to keep you till ten.”
“So? We ate a big lunch, I wasn’t hungry after the show.”
“God. This is really awkward, but…honey, I’m not exactly alone.” A long pause. “Do you think you could go walk around the block for a few minutes?”
“What the hell, Mom?” she said. “What kind of parent sends her eighth-grader out to wander the streets of Manhattan at this time of night?” She hung up, grateful to Vikas for having retreated outside to smoke but unable to return his gaze when he swept the door open for her—unsure, in fact, that she’d ever be able to again.
At one end of the block, the low trees of Riverside Drive clawed at a violet sky. At the other: the TV kliegs of Broadway, and the train tunnels running into the distance. The track on the near side led back downtown, but to what? To Grayson, and his lies. To Precious, at a stretch. And over there was the track that ended somewhere in the farthest reaches of the Bronx. But did only two tracks even constitute a choice, really? Did anything? Neither politics nor psychology nor even her own apartment had offered any respite from the pain that seemed to surround her. And drinking, the one thing that had, had betrayed her no less than had Grayson. Or worse: she had betrayed herself. And so all this would be swirling around inside her—her mom and escape and The Black Album and the question of any way she might make the betrayal stop—when she looked over from her spot behind a girder on the far side to lock eyes with the man in his leather jacket bouncing down onto the platform headed the other way: Mr. Koussoglou, from last year’s Cultural Richness class. Here she’d been, that is, nursing her griefs and little grievances, dithering over whether to push ahead or turn back, and all the while, her motherfucking teacher had been fucking her mother.
6
And now somewhere in Brookhattan a jingle of keys could be heard, and a merry little string of dogs came tripping out into a crosswalk, the tall and increasingly fragile young man at the cynosure of their leashes seeming more in pursuit than in control. It was a Monday or it was a Friday or it was anything in between, and was also, to judge by the half-mile of ripe garbagecan behind them, well after lunchtime—itself now falling mere hours before dusk. And even so, wasn’t the vibe out here a bit dark? A cool wind off the river, Hudson or East, ripped through the nylon track-bottoms he’d grabbed off a discount rack months ago. Beyond that, he wore only his Beastie Boys tee and a fast-fashion corduroy jacket, since no other job, up to and including exotic dancer, boasted sumptuary codes as loose as those of dogwalker. You could have stayed in pajamas if you wanted. You could probably have gone topless. The client cared mainly about your smell, “client” in this case meaning “canine,” because the creative destruction of New York seemed immune to recession—or even stimulated by it—and the work-hours of its humans commensurately long. In the utilitarian terms on which the system was constructed, no one here should have wanted a dog in the first place, yet loneliness was the system’s great byproduct, so these dogowners were now counting on Ethan Aspern, at nine fifty an hour, to supply what they couldn’t.
Depending on how many walks he’d booked at once, the accrued lucre could be substantial, not to say filthy. Then again, his own personal liquidity crunch hadn’t so much subsided as given way to a graver problem, one of how a person like himself might ever attain solidity. You could subtract right off the top the cost of food, for example: the freezer-case Tex-Mex, the takeout Chinese. And then the thirty percent commission owed back to Les McGonagall on every walk, plus another grand in rent due the first of each month, once you factored in the price of the storage space. And then subtract too the cash for Jolie’s therapy he’d shrouded in notebook paper and mailed off mid-July and had to assume Sarah had received, never having heard back; subtract, in theory, another return ticket to L.A.—though each milestone that passed without word from his daughter (Labor Day, equinox, Halloween) seemed to argue against his leaving as much as for it. And oh, right, he thought, bounding for the shelter of the High Line as the first raindrops prismed the glass above his negative bank balance: subtract the hundred dollars he was now shelling out monthly for a smartphone.
This had turned out to be one of the gig’s few fixed demands. The other—that in a pinch, he be able to drive the van—remained more of a working assumption (one he’d thought it best not to undermine with talk of suspended licenses). But at the end of Ethan’s second day as a trainee, his last before being dispatched to far-flung ZIP codes, McGonagall had shown him how to send each client’s owner a high-res photo documenting the day’s walk. “Then at Christmastime, I email everyone a personalized album, see? And don’t be afraid of a little creativity. If Monday was a shot of Princess tucking into a bowl of kibble, maybe Tuesday’s you rubbing her belly. No need to be skittish, though, she won’t bite. And like this: only the hand. In my experience, people will trust a stranger with their keys and valuables right up to the point where they’re forced to actually see him as a whole human being.” He was tweaking the iPhone’s “crop” feature when his glance fell on Ethan’s lumpen Samsung, its two-pixel lens. “Aw, you’re joking.”
Ethan must have been holding his breath. “I don’t suppose Erica mentioned I’m, ah…coming out of a substance-treatment program?”
“ ’Course she did. Why do you think she paired us up?”
