I shivered.
The toilet flushed; the bathroom door opened; Lily’s voice, confused, called, “Jack?”
His hands lingered on my hair and then slid around my waist. He kissed the back of my neck.
“Coming,” he called to her and left me.
I went to bed with my skin singing. When I closed my eyes I saw the two science-fiction lilies next to her bed like two red flags, and between them her white satin sheets were like the golden pale of his skin and the pink pale of hers.
Lying in bed, I remembered sitting at the kitchen table while Raeburn explained atomic bonds to me. On a subatomic level, electrons are drawn to the atoms that need them. If an atom is unbalanced, with more protons in the nucleus than electrons in orbit around it or vice versa, it will seek out another atom with the opposite condition, and thus find balance. My brother was like those electrons, filling an infinitesimal void that people like Lily and Becka didn’t even know existed. It was a talent that I wished was genetic, as I tried to fall asleep in that wide, unfamiliar bed. There was always someone who needed Jack. He was never alone.
When I woke up the next morning, the sun was streaming through my window. It was a beautiful fall day, warm and friendly and relaxed. The three of us bought coffee on the corner and sat in the park until late afternoon, Jack and Lily twined together on a blanket, me next to them. Separate, but not alone. In all of my time in New York, that was my favorite day.
Being with Lily felt like being with a movie star. Everything in her world glittered fabulously. Neither of us had the kind of clothes she wanted us to wear, so she took us shopping. It turned out that she was right about Jack; he had the instinct for it, which surprised me because back on the Hill, Jack had never given a damn about clothes. Lily figured out pretty quickly that I couldn’t be trusted to choose my own clothes, and I suspect that she liked dressing me up. The things she bought me were completely different from those she bought for herself. All of my clothes were black.
She bought Jack a new leather jacket—“And let’s burn the old one, shall we?”—and then spent an extravagant amount of money on a pair of high black leather boots for me. “You can more or less get away with only one pair of shoes in New York, as long as they’re fabulous drop-fucking-dead boots,” she said, but when we returned to the apartment she also gave me the black Mary Janes that she’d loaned me that first night, and a long black skirt that she said she was tired of. She made me try it on right then, watching me turn in front of the mirror with a small satisfied gleam in her eyes.
She said, “You and your brother. It’s unfair.”
“What is?”
“Your goddamned cheekbones.” She smiled. “What I wouldn’t give.”
Jack wore the new jacket as often as he could get away with it. It was black and beautifully cut and the soft leather gleamed. Between the new clothes and the way his hair was always artfully swept back from his face, he was indistinguishable from one of her crowd. Late one night, I took his battered old jacket, the one with the sheepskin lining that I’d worn to the bonfire so long ago, and hung it in the closet in my room, behind Lily’s spring dresses. He never asked about it. Our old clothes, the ones we’d worn when we left the Hill and the ones Becka had bought for me, were stuffed into plastic bags on the closet floor. For some reason I was reluctant to get rid of them.
Lily had high standards. She smoked only French cigarettes; she wore only designer clothes; she drank only cosmopolitans, and she drank them only in bars where they cost ten dollars or more. She liked to have her hairdresser dye little colored streaks into her blond hair, frosty blue or frosty pink, to let people know what a free spirit she was. She and her inner circle (a nebulous social body with a rotating membership, where the faces weren’t always the same but might as well have been) spent all their days planning their nights. Every day was a whirlwind of phone calls about who was going to be where and when and for how long, and whether a certain bar was worth going to after midnight or if all the truly trendy people would already be at the truly trendy clubs. Every night there was a planned itinerary that was set in stone until it was changed with the flip of a cell phone.
In the beginning, Jack and I went everywhere with her.
All her friends loved him. Being pulled aside by one or another of Lily’s drunken girlfriends and hearing a confession of her secret passion for my brother—always with the stern exhortation that I was not to tell Lily—was the rule rather than the exception for me. The next day, I would mimic the girl’s voice and gestures for Jack, which he found hilarious.
Before long Lily decided that she didn’t like our being a threesome. “It throws off the dynamic,” she said, and thus began a parade of her male friends, showing up dutifully at bars and parties and parties in bars. Each of them was highly polished, skillfully groomed, and more beautiful than the last, and I had nothing to say to any of them. Afterward she would extol the virtues of the various Davids and Andrews and Jasons at great length, telling me how much this one or that one had liked me and what complimentary things they had said about me. I didn’t think any of them could hold a candle to Jack, which was undoubtedly why Lily was on his arm and not theirs. Finally, when she figured out that I really couldn’t be bothered, she paired me off with her “very best college friend,” Carmichael. He was very tall, very thin, and very gay—or so Jack claimed. It was all the same to me. I didn’t care and neither, apparently, did Carmichael. I can’t say that we ever had a conversation—he rarely tried to talk to me—but he seemed content to sit next to me in bars and stand next to me at parties whenever it was required.
One night he came up to the apartment for drinks, and after Jack and Lily had disappeared into her bedroom, as was inevitable, he asked me dispassionately if I wanted to fuck.
“I don’t think so, thanks,” I said.
He shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, and we continued sipping our drinks as if the subject had never come up. I wondered why he would want to have sex with someone he wasn’t even interested in talking to, and the more I thought about it, the more absurd it became. Meanwhile, Jack and Lily were clearly trying to be quiet in the next room, but occasional moans and thumps still reached us. By the time Carmichael left, I was shaking with suppressed laughter. Neither of us ever brought up sex again.
Every week, Lily’s florist came to deliver fresh flowers. After a few weeks the scent of lilies was so deeply impregnated in my skin that I could smell it anywhere: on the street, in a bar, in cabs and coffee shops.
The night I saw Never again, Lily had taken us to a party in TriBeCa. I was getting a glass of red wine from the bartender—it was the kind of party where there was a bartender—when a familiar voice next to me said, rather nastily, “I hear you made it in.”
I turned. At first I didn’t recognize him because he wasn’t wearing the glow-in-the-dark T-shirt. “Made it in what?” I said.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said and grinned. “Maris says Lily pulled you and your life-of-the-party brother out of nowhere. She says you’re her latest bit of window-dressing.”
Maris. It took me a moment to match a face to the name. Red hair, dour expression. Worked with Lily. Her thing was buying drinks; she was one of those people who always picked up a round. I hadn’t known she disliked us.
Never’s eyes were bleary and I realized that he was drunk. “She and my brother have a thing going on,” I said carefully.
He didn’t seem to hear me. “Is that why you blew me off that night? Because I don’t have a trust fund for the two of you to live off of?” He leaned in close and there was glee in his eyes as he stage-whispered, “What are you going to do when she drops you?”
I stared at him. “Is that what she did to you?”
He called me a freeloading low-life bitch and walked away. The bartender gave me my wine. I felt remote and unaffected.
Later I pointed him out to Carmichael, who shrugged and looked bored. “Mark something,” he said. “Pet roach. If you offered to fuck him he wouldn’t say no, no matter what he called you.”
“Pet roach?”
“One of those obnoxious New York fads back in the eighties. Some designer started gluing cockroaches to chains with pins attached, so you could wear them pinned to your clothes like jewelry. I’ve never actually seen one, if you don’t count the human kind. Don’t worry about him,” he said.
The next morning, as we walked to the coffee shop on Broadway, I told Jack about Never and what Carmichael had said. Jack’s lip curled ever so slightly, but he said that we weren’t cockroaches and told me that I shouldn’t look gift Lilys in the mouth.
“I wasn’t talking about us,” I said. But in my more bitter moments I started to think of us that way: Lily’s pet roaches. Which, I’m sure, was what Carmichael had intended.
That night, after Jack and Lily went to bed, the noises coming through the wall were different. Jack’s voice was low and growling, and Lily’s answering cries of passion sounded desperate and painful. A week or so later I came upon her wet and dripping in the living room with a towel wrapped around her, and there was a deep red bruise on her arm that looked as if someone had grabbed her, hard. I looked quickly at Jack and then at her, but they both ignored me.
After that, though, when the three of us were home alone together, Lily wore sheer, delicate tank tops or sweaters with wide necks that fell off one shoulder, and the creamy pale skin revealed was, more often than not, marked with purple bruises or ugly bite marks. When we went out, they were always carefully covered.
In the beginning I had marveled at Lily’s ability to go, go, go, no matter how early she’d gotten up for work; there were nights when we drifted in at
6
A.M.
and she was up and gone by nine-thirty. I made some comment about it to Jack and he said, “Fairy dust and amphetamines. Check out the drawer in her nightstand sometime.”
The late nights, the more-fabulous-than-thou parties, and the crowded bars—they began to wear on me. All that we ever did was go out at night and sleep it off the next day. My brain felt slow and stupid. Time began to blur.
The weather was turning cool then, and Jack wore his new jacket everywhere because it was the only one he had. Each morning, after Lily left for work, he woke me up by crawling into my bed, and each night when I went to sleep I knew that he would come to me during the night, shaking with the aftershocks of one of his nightmares. During the day, he was never far from me: holding my hand, stroking my hair, pulling me into his lap. At the same time, he grew rougher with Lily, even when I was around. Once in the kitchen I saw him push her, hard, so that she lost her balance and came close to falling onto the stove, but then he kissed her and she was kissing him back wildly, gripping the back of his head with her hands.
She started staying home more. Her exuberant glamour began to seem forced. When we did go out into the dark glitter of the city, there were times when her eyes shone with a desperate need. At home she treated me with a formal politeness that let me know clearly that she didn’t want me around anymore: she didn’t want me living with her, she didn’t want me watching her, she didn’t want me seeing her.
One night, at a bar in SoHo, I opened the bathroom door and found Lily leaning against the sink and Maris standing beside her. Lily was saying, angrily, “It’s none of your goddamned—” But then she saw me, stopped talking, and turned her face away.
Maris saw my reflection in the mirror. “Do you mind?”
“Sorry,” I said.
Lily gave me a strained smile and pushed past me, back into the bar. Her eyes were wet and shining.
Maris fixed me with a bitter, steely glare.
“I know what you’re doing,” she said. “You and your creep brother. Nobody’s fooled, okay?”
Then she walked out.
Sometimes, when Jack was asleep and Lily was gone, I would open my closet door softly and take out Jack’s old leather jacket. When I buried my face in it I imagined that I could smell the morning air in Jack’s bedroom on the Hill. Whiskey, cigarettes, freedom.
Near the end of October, Carmichael sent out black roses and invitations to a Halloween party. It wasn’t long afterward that Lily told us, as she was getting ready for work, that she was going to Paris for a long weekend in November.
She was standing in front of the mirror in her living room, making sure that her lipstick was perfect. Jack was standing near her; I was sitting on the couch, with my knees pulled up to my chest. The apartment was chilly; Lily didn’t like to turn on the heat because it wilted the lilies. I could see her porcelain face reflected in the mirror.
“The weather will be horrible,” she said, frosting her lips over with pale pink lipstick, “but it’ll be horrible here, too, and I might as well suffer in Paris.”
“Okay,” Jack said. He was leaning against the wall next to Lily, watching her. His voice was smooth and easy but his eyes on her were hard.
Lily met them without flinching. She snapped the top back onto her tube of lipstick and ran her finger along the edge of her lower lip. “I’ll only be gone for five days. You guys can take care of things here, right?”
“Like it was our own,” Jack said.
Lily’s dark eyes glanced up at him in the mirror. Her expression was almost a glare. “But it’s not.”
Jack stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away from her. He came over to the couch and sat down next to me. Picked up a magazine.
“It’s too damn early for this,” Lily said and went into the kitchen. She took a container of yogurt from the refrigerator and dropped it into her bag.
Then she sighed. “Look, I’m just tired. I need to get out of this damn city.”
“No damage,” Jack said without looking up from his magazine.
She gazed at him. I couldn’t read the expression on her face.
“All right,” she said and left.
Jack didn’t look at me, but I could see the tension in his shoulders. “Everything okay?”
He shrugged. “She goes every year. She was talking about taking us—or at least me—with her this year.”