The 25th Hour (18 page)

‘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 greatest 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.

A minute later it does and Mary is staring up (staring
up
! he notes happily) into Jakob’s face, her eyes as wide as Tweety Bird’s.

‘You need to pee?’ she asks.

‘No,’ says Jakob. He presses forward, backing her up, and closes the door behind him. The bathroom is black-walled and lit by a single blue bulb.

‘Hi?’ asks Mary, her teeth glowing in the eerie light, and Jakob grabs her by the shoulders and kisses her hard on the mouth. It’s a great and guilty kiss, a blue kiss, a shock of a kiss. Jakob’s toes curl upward; his eyelids stay closed long after the kiss is done. It seems necessary that his hands move to her breasts, and they do, fingers pressed to the underwire of her bra.

Blame it on the champagne, he tells himself, a thousand little bubbles rising through my veins, aerating my brain. Good, she’s very good, soft where she should be soft and firm where she should be firm. Blame it on the champagne. Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.

Only now does Jakob realize that she’s not kissing him back, that her tongue is still, her hands open and lax by her side. He jerks away from her, wiping his mouth with the back of his fist. The Yankees cap sits crookedly on her head. She stares at the floor and Jakob’s mouth is open; he turns around and rams through the bathroom door, shoves past cigar smokers and dancing women; he’s running now. He pushes through the velvet curtain and runs.

Seventeen

The women Monty knew growing up were loud, cursed boisterously, and gnawed on chicken bones. Not like the fragile girls he met from Manhattan’s prep schools, who looked ready to shatter if you yelled at them, to lie inert and crystalline on the hardwood floors of their duplex apartments. Naturelle was just right, a neighborhood girl who could play the uptown game.

He met her in the playground of Carl Schurz Park, two blocks from her high school, on a hot September afternoon. She and a friend were sitting on the swings, smoking cigarettes, when Monty walked past, holding a dripping cone of vanilla soft-serve with chocolate jimmies. He was twenty years old. He had just sold fifty decks of black tar to an Englishman for two thousand dollars. The Englishman could have bought the same amount for five hundred dollars if he had walked two miles uptown, but he didn’t know he was overspending or else he didn’t want to explore the streets of Harlem, and either way Monty’s silver money clip was now jammed with hundreds.

Monty sat on a green park bench and licked his ice-cream cone, watching the two girls swing higher and higher. They wore their school uniforms: white blouses embroidered with the school’s initials and green plaid skirts over black tights. Monty wondered if the black tights were part of the dress code; he thought they were a bad idea. As the girls kicked forward, legs held straight in front, all he could see beneath their skirts was black, a censor’s blot hiding all the fun.

They knew he was watching them and they knew they looked good, their athletic legs straight, then bent, straight, then bent, their long hair falling beneath them as they kicked higher. Monty gave the blonde high marks for her long thighs, but he focused on the brunette. While the blonde kept her cigarette clenched in one hand as she started swinging high, the brunette never stopped taking reckless drags, the crook of her elbow holding the chain lightly as she soared skyward. Her disdain for the danger thrilled Monty; he expected her to fly off the edge of her seat at any second, fly off over the East River to land with a bang in Queens. But she didn’t; she swung and smoked and chatted with her friend, all of it effortless, a gentle pumping of the legs.

A little boy cried as his mother dragged him by the wrist away from the slides. The sandboxes were filled with children building a skyscraper, a bucketful of sand balanced on top of another bucketful of sand on top of another, up and up, until the whole thing collapsed and the kids screamed and laughed and started again. The bigger boys played dodge ball in a sunken court where the sprinklers sprayed during the summer.

Monty swallowed the last of his cone and wiped his lips with a paper napkin. He walked over to the girls and sat on the free swing. Puerto Rican, he decided, watching the brunette. A scholarship girl. She whizzed by him on the way to the top of her arc.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘could I bum a smoke?’

She whizzed by again. ‘What?’

‘A smoke,’ said Monty. He thought asking the girl for a cigarette would force her to stop for a minute, but it didn’t.

‘This is my last one,’ she told him, whizzing by.

‘You go to Chapin, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You know a girl named Ella Butterfield?’

The blonde braked with her feet and skidded to a halt. ‘I’ve met you before, haven’t I?’

Monty nodded, though he was sure he had never seen the girl before in his life. ‘Yeah, I thought you looked familiar. Are you friends with Ella Butterfield?’

‘I know who you are. Come on, Nat, we’ve got practice.’

‘You know who I am?’ asked Monty. The brunette began slowing down, watching him. ‘Who am I?’

But the blonde said nothing. She jumped off her swing, picked up her bookbag, and walked away without looking to see if her friend was following.

Monty turned to the brunette. ‘So you’re Natalie?’

‘Naturelle.’

‘Really? Naturelle. I like that. Naturelle. So what’s your friend’s problem?’

‘You’re the one who got thrown out of Campbell-Sawyer for knifing some guy during a basketball game, right?’

Monty laughed. ‘Now I knifed him. No, that’s not why I got kicked out. How come you didn’t follow Blondie to practice?’

She shrugged. ‘I want to finish my cigarette.’

‘Where you from, anyway?’

‘The Bronx.’

‘Yeah, I figured you were F.A. What’s your name?’

‘How do you know I’m F.A.? How do you know I’m not from Riverdale?’

‘Because the only Puerto Ricans in Riverdale are there to wax the floors.’

She flicked her burning butt over the fence, stood up, and began walking away.

Monty jumped off his swing and chased after her. ‘Wait, hey, hey, I’m sorry. I’m insulting
Riverdale
, not Puerto Ricans. I was F.A. too.’

‘Go away.’

‘I’m not insulting you; it’s a neighborhood thing. Hey, come on, I’m sorry. I can make it up to you. Dinner anywhere you want, you pick the place. Come on, at least look at me. You’re kind of mean-looking when you want to be, you know that? You look a little like that guy on
Sesame Street
, what’s his name? The Cookie Bandit. You look like the Cookie Bandit. Hey, talk to me, Cookie Bandit. Come on, I said I was sorry.’

‘Cookie Monster.’

‘Right! Cookie Monster. You’re smart too. So come on, you talking to me again? Are we friends again?’

‘You’re too old to be hanging out in playgrounds,’ she told him, and left him standing there.

‘All right,’ said Monty. ‘Same time tomorrow?’

Not the smoothest first meeting, he thought, but Monty was blessed with cockiness – he was sure the girl liked him despite all signs to the contrary. So he borrowed Ella Butterfield’s yearbook, found the only Naturelle and her last name, and began leaving gifts for her with the school’s receptionist. Platinum bracelet, pair of amber earrings, chinchilla vest: one a week, the receptionist now a grinning co-conspirator. Naturelle accepted the gifts but never phoned the number prominently written on every accompanying note after the first line, which always read:
Give me a chance
. Finally Monty hit on inspiration: he left her a single Knicks’ ticket, courtside seat, first home game of the season.