Monty watches as a shirtless, muscular white man, his arms sleeved with tattoos, crowds his way into Naturelle’s circle and begins dancing with her. ‘So how much of that do you see?’
‘What do you mean, like a commission? There is no commission; that’s not the way it operates.’
‘So two million for them means zero for you?’ The shirtless man has bent close to Naturelle to say something to her. She shrugs and spins away.
‘It’s all about the bonus,’ says Slattery. ‘The more money I make for the bank, the more I make for myself. We have this system now called capitalism. I don’t know, I think it might work.’
Two young men walk toward them on the balcony. When they see Monty they clap him on the back and shout in his ear. Both wear expensive suits without ties, thick gold chains glittering below their open shirt collars. Slattery watches the dancers. Now the tattooed man is speaking to Mary. Mary grabs hold of his belt and begins gyrating her hips into his pelvis.
‘Six more months,’ says Monty, after his friends have left.
‘Speak up!’ Slattery hollers, and Monty nods.
‘Six more months and I would’ve come to you, said, Here, here’s the loot, what do I do with it? Let you play with it. Buy some stocks, kick back. Watched the coin multiply. Six more months. I got greedy. That’s what happened. I got greedy and then I got fucked.’
‘You can’t think about that stuff.’
‘Yeah, I can. That’s all I can do is think about that stuff. I’ll tell you what, Frank,’ says Monty, his voice calm and steady. Slattery has to bend closer to hear him. ‘I’m not going to make it. I always thought I was a tough guy, always thought I could take anyone, but it’s a joke. I’m not going to make it. There’s a thousand guys harder than me inside that place, and they’re going to use me up and end me. Look at me! I’m a pretty white boy. I will not survive seven years in there.’
‘Yes, you will. You’ve got to.’
‘You’re not listening to me.’
‘You don’t have a choice, Monty.’
‘What?’
‘I said you don’t have a choice!’
‘I have a choice. If I choose not to go in there tomorrow, I will not go in there tomorrow.’
Slattery nods. ‘You’re not running, though. If you wanted to run you’d already be gone.’
‘I’m not running,’ says Monty. ‘There’s another way out.’
‘That’s stupid talk,’ says Slattery, shaking his head. ‘You’ve got to be strong—;’
‘Strong? It’s over, brother, finished. Strong for what? What do you want me to do, bite my lip when they start in on me? Don’t tell me strong. Don’t stand there like you know what to do.’
‘You’re smarter than all of them,’ says Slattery. ‘Listen: you are. One week and you’ll have the place figured, you’ll know the names, the scenario. Just—;’
‘Let me explain the first night to you. Picture this, all right? First night, the place is overcrowded, they’ve got bunk beds set up in the gym to handle the overflow. You with me? Next thing I know all the guards are out of the room, they’re laughing as they leave, looking at me and shaking their heads. White boy, you are miles from home. Boom, I’m down on the floor, someone big’s got his knee in my back. I’m trying to get away, but there’s too many of them. One guy starts smacking me in the face with a pipe. He knocks out my teeth; I’m choking on my own blood. They’re kicking me in the ribs and I throw up, and there’s teeth in there, I see my teeth in a puddle on the floor. They knock them out, they knock them all out. You know why? So I can give them head all night long and they won’t have to worry about me biting. They’ll make me a suck puppet for every yard queen in the house. And what if I make it the whole way through, what if I make it seven years, minus eighty-four days for good behavior? Then what? I’ll be thirty-four years old when I get out. What kind of job am I going to get? What skills will I have? I’ll be a punked-out convict with government-issue dentures. What the fuck is the point? I’ve studied this, Frank, believe me. I’ve looked at the options.’
‘Thirty-four is still young. Listen to me, would you? Hey, listen to me. You’re still going to be a young man. I’ll be set up by then; I’ll be running my own place. You and me, we’ll start something up. No, come on, hear me out. I’ll be working, Monty, seven years I’m working. I’ll work harder than every Ivy League fucker down there. And when you get out . . . we’ll start something up. I’ll buy a restaurant, or a bar on the Upper West Side. There’s big money in a good bar. I’ll put in the cash, you’ll run the place, we’ll own that neighborhood. Couple of Irish kids from Brooklyn, Jesus, how can we not have a bar? Green beer for St Paddy’s Day, free hot dogs for Monday Night Football. Shit, one night a week I’ll work the door, I haven’t done that since college. Think about it. Old-fashioned jukebox sitting in the corner, pool table in the back—;’
‘Frank, can I tell you something? I appreciate this, okay? But I don’t see a future in it. I don’t see us working together. I don’t see me and Jake hanging out. I don’t see me and Naturelle. I don’t see it.’
‘I didn’t mention them,’ says Slattery softly. Monty is not looking at him, he shows no sign of having heard, so Slattery speaks louder. ‘I never mentioned Jake. I never mentioned Naturelle.’
‘Just you, huh?’
‘Tell me something, okay? Have I ever broken a promise to you? Have I ever once in my life broken a promise to you? Have I ever said I would be somewhere and not shown up?’
Monty is quiet for a moment, staring at his hands. ‘No.’
‘I’m telling you I will be there and I will be there.’
‘Okay,’ says Monty. ‘But you’re not going to be there tomorrow.’
Slattery nods and says nothing.
‘So I’ve got a favor to ask you. You’re my brother, right, my best friend?’
‘You know that.’
‘I need you to do something for me.’
Slattery waits.
‘Not here,’ says Monty. ‘We can’t do it here. Can you come uptown with me and Jake? I’m giving him Doyle.’
Slattery smiles. ‘I was afraid you were giving me the dog.’
‘Nah, Doyle can’t stand you. We’ll leave here in a little bit. I’ll meet you back in the VIP room, okay? I’ve got to say goodbye to some people. Sound good?’
‘Whatever you want,’ says Slattery. ‘You know that.’
‘Good.’ Monty returns his eyes to the dancers. The shirtless man is lying on the floor, curled up on his side, his hands between his legs. Mary and Naturelle are nowhere in sight. ‘Our friend Jake,’ says Monty, ‘has picked himself a winner.’
Sixteen
Jakob stares at the black steel question mark and sips from his glass of champagne. He wants to be home, stretched out in his warm bed. He has been awake for too long.
The red room is growing crowded. Jakob does not recognize any of them pushing through the velvet curtain, these loud-speaking men holding champagne flutes in ringed fists, lean women who stand in clusters, heads bowed together, murmuring in low tones. Jakob sits alone on the sofa and eavesdrops, tries to fish phrases from cross-currents of accent: Brooklyn, New Jersey, Boston, Dominican, Eastern European, Puerto Rican, Brazilian. He hears the name Monty spoken in four different languages, a dozen dialects, but always the same hush descending, the way friends sitting shivah mention the departed.
Jakob wonders how many would gather for his own farewell party; he compares the imagined group to the crowd before him and feels a sharp pain at the smallness of his life. Who would come? A bunch of English teachers in chalk-stained blazers; Paul from the math department; Slattery; two or three college friends who would huddle around the whitefish and swap good Jakob stories for eight minutes, exhausting all the good Jakob stories. Monty’s existence seems impossibly dramatic, guns and prostitutes and South Americans, a life worth hearing about. If someone wrote the history of us, Jakob thinks, if someone decided to tell the story, wher
e would I be?
The room is hazy now with cigarette smoke. D. J. Dusk lays down a heavy bossa nova beat, Elis Regina calling out one phrase in a looped sample. Three women in the center of the room drop their purses on the floor and dance around them, vigilant and abandoned all at once. Jakob imagines strolling out to join them, their skeptical looks fading into stunned admiration as he swings his hips in a provocative manner, drops into a perfect split, begins walking on his hands. He frowns. I can’t even imagine myself dancing well, he thinks angrily. I’m picturing a gymnastics routine. He drinks the last of his champagne, tries to stand, is not successful. Oh, boy, he thinks, I’m drunk.
He dips his head against the sofa’s velvet armrest and closes his eyes. Don’t drop the glass, he tells himself, his last coherent thought before the fuzz of dream logic occupies his mind. Don’t spill the milk.
The next thing he senses is the pressure of a warm body curled up alongside him, a hand unwrapping his fingers from the champagne flute’s stem. Somewhere deep down in his consciousness an alarm rings, a muted bell clanging danger! But the red velvet is too comfortable, the heavy heart-thump of bass too embryonic, too lulling, everything too warm.
He feels fingernails following the curves of his ribs and some part of him knows the name that goes with these fingernails; another part of him knows that this is what he wants – these nails, this warm body. The name and the want never collide but skitter around the edges of his mind like repellent electrons.
But then a tongue curls along the inside of his ear and he hears his own name whispered by a voice he cannot render anonymous. Jakey, comes the whisper. Jakey.
He keeps his eyes closed for another moment and wishes the whisperer into a dream, but she doesn’t fade away; her tongue, nails, and voice linger on him. He opens his eyes and sees Mary D’Annunzio straddling him, a knee on either side of his lap, her hazel eyes peering at him from below his Yankees cap. A strong urge comes over him to damn the rules and regulations, but he remembers himself, with an unpleasant start, in time.
‘Whoa, what are you doing? Mary, get off me.’
Mary shrugs and falls onto her back on the red velvet cushions, her black Doc Martens still resting on Jakob’s thighs. ‘Don’t panic. Nobody here gives a shit.’
‘I give a shit,’ he tells her, shoving her feet off him. ‘What do you mean, nobody gives a shit? Do you know what happens if somebody sees me – us – like that?’
He observes that it’s true, though; nobody in the room seems to have noticed them. The three women still dance around their purses; the men still argue loudly, gesturing with their cigarettes; Daphne still maneuvers through the thick of it with her tray of cocktails.
Mary, lying on her back with her feet dangling off the edge of the sofa, is also examining the crowd. ‘You know what? I’ve got a feeling the Campbell-Sawyer faculty don’t spend much time in the VelVet VIP room.’
Jakob sits up straight, rolls his shirtsleeves down to his wrists, buttons them. ‘I’m here, right? You never know.’
‘I just kicked some guy in the balls. He’s on the ground throwing up.’
‘Did you? That’s nice.’ Jakob leans forward and rubs his temples with his thumbs. ‘Mary?’
‘What?’
‘Why did you kick some guy in the balls?’
She grins at the memory. ‘I was dancing with him and he decides to put his hand down my pants. He had his hand like inside my ass. So what was I going to do?’
The terse description of a stranger’s hand inside her pants becomes an irritatingly vivid image in Jakob’s mind. He tries to block it but cannot; he sees thick fingers slipping under the dark denim waistband and grabbing the white curves beneath.
‘He’s rolling around on the floor saying he’s going to kill me, describing how he’s going to kill me, so Naturelle went and got a bouncer and they threw him out. Naturelle’s in tight with the bouncers. She’s cool as shit. I love that name, right? Na-tur-elle! One hundred percent Naturelle. Naturelle flavors!’
‘Yeah, the great thing, she’s never heard those jokes before. You could really entertain her.’ He stares at Mary’s chest. Tweety Bird stares back, alarmed.
‘So what’s up with her boyfriend? It’s like he owns this place.’
‘Listen, Mary, do you think it would be possible to avoid talking about tonight at school?’
‘I think it would be possible.’
‘That would be a really good thing,’ says Jakob. ‘I think it would be really smart for both of us.’
‘You think it would be possible to give me an A for the term?’
Jakob stares at her bruise-painted eyelids, her lank black hair. ‘Tell me you’re joking.’
‘I’m joking, Mister Elinsky. You know my favorite word in the English language? Swoon. I love that word. Swoon. I’ve never swooned. I’d like to, you know. Just sort of swoon and somebody pretty would catch me.’
‘Right. So we’re agreed, no talking about tonight?’
Mary smiles and closes her eyes. ‘That’s what I like about you, Elinsky.’
‘What’s what you like about me?’
Mary opens her eyes. ‘I can’t remember. What was I talking about?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Dusk is for real. Isn’t he? Hello? Elinsky? Do you think I’m weird?’
‘No,’ says Jakob. ‘I think you like to play around sometimes, but you’re not weird. You’re . . .’ Jakob closes his mouth before the outlaw word – beautiful – can escape. ‘Not weird.’
‘Deering thinks I’m weird. My mom thinks I’m weird. That’s why they have me in Ruben’s office all the time. They think I’m weird.’
‘Dr Ruben talks to a lot of kids.’
‘Yeah, and they’re all weird. They don’t send normal kids to the psychologist’s office.’
Conversations I Never Wanted to Have, thinks Jakob, number 9307. ‘Well—;’
‘Jenny Klemperer is bulimic, Ian Hart never showers, Sebastien McCoy talks to himself, really loudly. Freaks. Weir-does,’ she sings.
‘Jenny Klemperer is bulimic?’
‘Jenny Klemperer is bulimic and she’s still fat. That’s really weird. I mean, what’s the point?’
‘Okay, actually, let’s not do this, please. Let’s not talk about them.’
‘Yeah, but I think she wants people to talk about her. Which is kind of weird right there.’
‘You don’t want people talking about you?’
‘If it was good things, sure. But, I mean, why would I want someone saying, Look, there’s Mary D’Annunzio, she pukes in the toilet after lunch every day. That’s not the reputation I’m gunning for. Hey, you coming to see Hamlet next week?’
‘Of course. You’re in it, right? Ophelia?’
Mary rolls her eyes. ‘Fuck Ophelia. Laertes.’
‘Laertes?’
‘You want to see my death scene?’ She springs up from the sofa and takes three steps back, then begins staggering toward Jakob, hands folded over her gut. ‘“Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet: Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee, nor thine on me!”’ She collapses onto the red cushions and quivers there, moaning.
A group of men smoking cigars in the corner clap loudly. Jakob scowls at their grinning conference and realizes he is jealous. Other men shouldn’t be looking at the girl I’m with, he thinks, even if she is my student. They don’t know she’s my student.
Jakob stares down at the prone Mary, at the stretch of pale skin between the dark denim waistband of her jeans and the white cotton of her tank top. A row of three vertebrae calls out for a finger to connect the dots. Jakob wants to cover her with a blanket or else peel the clothes off her body.
Mary sits up and brushes her black hair away from her eyes. ‘It’s better with the fake blood.’
‘No, it was very good. You have a fan club.’
‘Ms Taylor says I’m the best dier she’s ever had. Did you see Romeo and Juliet last year? I was Mercutio. That was the gr
eatest death of all time. My mother cried. My mother cries at everything, but still. You know what I’d really like to be? A stuntwoman. Except I’m afraid of heights. You think they’d hire a stuntwoman who was afraid of heights?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ Jakob wishes he didn’t sound so boring, but he is half convinced that he ought to sound boring, that any interesting comments would constitute flirtation.
‘I actually need to leave about now,’ he tells her. ‘And I think you should probably leave too.’
‘You really want to be seen leaving a dance club with me?’
He hadn’t thought of that. ‘All right, you leave first and I’ll leave a little later.’
‘Screw that,’ says Mary. ‘Dusk only plays New York a couple of times a year. He’s huge in London. I’m not walking out until the sun is shining. Anyway, tomorrow’s a snow day for sure.’
Jakob rubs his eyes with his palms. ‘I need to go to sleep.’
Mary lies back and kicks her feet into the air, begins a bicycling motion with her hands behind her head. The rolled cuffs of her baggy jeans fall to her knees and Jakob stares at her slender calves, at the tattoo of braided lilies that encircles her right ankle. How many tattoos does she have?
‘Can’t sleep yet,’ she says, bicycling madly. ‘He’s turning it on.’
Jakob nods. He finds himself strangely entranced by the music, the lush, humid tropicality of it, a drumbeat incantation, Regina’s one phrase a mantra, a snatch of words Jakob cannot translate sung in a tone that makes translation unimportant.
‘You know what I love about you, Elinsky?’ Mary asks, nudging his hip with her foot. ‘The way you walk. It’s like you’re planning everything out, left foot here, right foot there. It’s like the way you hold a book. You’re standing up there teaching and you’re holding this book – Melville or whatever – you hold it like it’s something fragile, this baby bird; if you squeezed too hard you’d kill it. I love that. I have to pee.’
Jakob watches her make her way through the crowd, stopping to dance for a moment with the three women in the center of the room. He watches a tough-looking man with slicked-back hair appraise her, then turn to his friends and nod. He watches her grab Daphne’s wrist and stand on tiptoe to whisper something into the taller woman’s ear; he sees Daphne smile and hand Mary a blue drink. He watches her open the bathroom door and disappear inside, and he knows it’s over; he knows he’s lost. He stands and walks unsteadily to the far side of the room; he leans against the red velvet wallpaper and waits for the bathroom door to open.