Aquamarine (9 page)

This week, she has been busy scrubbing bloodstains out of her carpet, dragging the body out in the dead of night to the river, where, before pushing it over the bridge railing, she tied dumbbells to its wrists and ankles. Without a corpse, Rhonda’s guilt is going to be difficult to prove, and Kit figures she has at least several months more of employment while Rhonda acts coyly innocent in the face of strong suspicion. The show is taped two weeks in advance, so they can write her onto a back burner and she can slip away to Missouri tomorrow for a few days, and go home with Jesse.

While the teen hookers are pulling scraps of paper from their oversized purses, Jesse ducks into a small record shop and buys a tape for the trip. When she comes out, the girls are gone, but have been replaced by a middle-aged woman and her mother, trying to cajole plot revelations out of Kit—specifically whether Dr. Silva and Louise the hospital administrator are really the leaders of a satanic coven. Wordlessly and rudely—it’s the only way—Jesse pulls Kit free and off up Christopher Street.

“Next time anybody asks me for an autograph,” Kit says, “I’m going to say, ‘Well, where’s your autograph hound then? I only sign stuffed hounds and leg casts.’” Kit doesn’t—can’t, really—take her celebrity seriously; it’s only based on a moderate-sized part in a daytime drama, and some commercials for a dandruff shampoo. If she’s at all pretentious—and this takes a bit of wine and some prompting—it’s about her aspirations, which hover in Meryl Streep range.

“I’m going to cook tonight, something special,” she says now.

Jesse draws a fingernail across the inside of her own wrist, miming the opening of a crucial vein.

“Be nice,” Kit says.

They kill each other with kindness in the kitchen. Both of them are deadly cooks. Jesse is bonded to her godmother’s red plaid cookbook from the fifties. Everything she makes is baked for an hour at 325 and covered with white sauce and sometimes crushed potato chips, or molded in freezer trays and topped with maraschino cherries.

Kit is of an opposite persuasion. “Civilization has advanced beyond the plaid book,” she says. She careens into the elaborate and exotic. Cuisines from the fourth world, the deepest folds of the Himalayas. She shops in the darkest of ethnic groceries, rummages through the dusty cans on the back shelves, the inscrutable plastic-shrouded items lurking in the smoky depths of the freezer. She has involved, labored conversations with shop owners, then with their ancient mothers brought out from curtained back rooms. By this time, Kit is taking notes on check deposit slips, buying additional, amazingly authentic condiments.

The end result of these flurries goes like this: Jesse arrives home. The hallway of their building has a malevolent odor. She immediately worries that Mrs. Levine in the garden apartment—the oldest person Jesse has ever seen outside of those yogurt ads—has finally expired, and everyone has been too busy or self-absorbed to notice.

But the peculiar smell only gets stronger as she climbs toward her own apartment. Inside, the odor is almost visible. Several pots burble ominously on the stove.

“What is it?” Jesse will say, skipping past the pleasantries.

“Well ... you like steak, don’t you?” Kit will say in a desperately cheery voice.

“I like steaks when they come from cows,” Jesse says. “Cows who, when they were alive, lived in America.”

“Well, this is just the Burmese version.”

“Kit. If there’s lizard in any of those pots...”

At this point Kit’s eyes begin to water up.

“Oh no,” Jesse says, rushing over to hold her. “There really
is
lizard in one of those pots.”

“But
only
one.”

“Don’t cook,” Jesse says when they’re inside the door. “It’s way too hot. We’ll go out.”

Not right away, though. They fall onto the futon, pulling off some of their clothes, forgetting the rest.

A while later, Jesse asks Kit, “Are you about to come?” Kit nods.

“Can you not?”

Kit laughs. “Maybe. Just.”

Jesse stands and pulls Kit off the futon. “Let’s go. We’ll be back. Later. Now though, you’ll have something to think about during dinner.” Jesse holds Kit in a light sexual thrall. Who knows how long it will last. And anyway, Jesse figures all the real power is on Kit’s side of the equation.

When they get back, they drag the futon up onto the roof, near the washtubs of potting soil in which Jesse is cultivating an urban garden of hybrid tea roses. The petals, deep red in sunlight, now look black and give off a heavy night musk. Here, Jesse and Kit begin again, then sleep under the stars and above everyone’s music. Then wake and watch the moon travel across the deep black sky.

The next morning, Jesse takes the mail key downstairs. It’s only eight-thirty, but Carmen stands in her doorway like a lesser goddess of the demimonde, backed by dim lights and a thin haze of blue smoke. Lou Reed is on the stereo. Samuel, her boyfriend, is lounging on the sofa. He owns a few laundromats, which seem to spin and tumble along on their own. Jesse thinks Carmen and Samuel might be the ultimate party animals, that they could write their own weekly column for the
Voice,
just about what happens in their apartment.

Once Jesse went down to borrow a screwdriver, and Carmen and Samuel were starting the day with one of their panatela-size joints and offered Jesse a hit. Why not, she thought, and then lost the whole part of her life that happened between exhaling and finding herself at the checkout counter of the Korean minigrocery down the street, having just bought three Hostess chocolate fried pies.

“You’ll be back when?” Carmen says now.

“In a week. We’re going to see my mother. In Missouri.”

“Ah,” says Carmen, closing her eyes and smiling dreamily. “The Show Me State.”

It astonishes Jesse, the things people know.

Later, she’s clipping a borrowed fuzz buster onto the visor of the rental car while a couple of teenagers, unasked, squeegee the already-clean windshield.

“No thanks,” Jesse says to the palm sliding through the open window in front of her face.

“Man you shoulda said something
before
we did such a nice job for you.”

“I’ll leave you something in my will. It’ll be like that gas station attendant and Howard Hughes.”

Coming originally from a small town, Jesse is given to just the sorts of mildly witty comebacks that get people knifed in their hearts every day in this lower end of Manhattan. This time, though, the fates conspire kindly around her. Kit comes down the front steps and gets in the car just as a coplike vehicle rounds the corner (it turns out to be something bogus like environmental patrol), and the squeegee guys sulk over to the curb.

Jesse clicks her tape in as Kit pulls out. It’s Springsteen’s “Nebraska.” “Open All Night” comes up.

Fried chicken on the front seat
She’s sittin’ on my lap.
Both of us poppin’ fingers
On a Texaco road map.

Kit smiles from deep inside the ethos of “trip.” For a couple of weeks now, she has been expressing longing for “the road,” and making statements like, “Living in New York is like living in an extremely interesting shoe box.” And now she’s R.T.G.—ready to go—in traveling clothes. Hawaiian-print bermudas and a T-shirt that says I eat my road kill. She has her blond hair gelled up and back into some kind of surfer retro. She looks like Jan, or Dean.

“All
right
!” she says, pushing her shades up onto the bridge of her nose, shifting into third with just her fingertips as they ramp onto the interstate, pinky-tapping the turn signal as she glides across three lanes.

“Are you nervous? About bringing me?” she asks Jesse in southern Ohio. They’re sitting across from each other in a big booth in a restaurant-truck wash along the highway. The restaurant part is the Home of the Dorisburger. Jesse is stretching her bent arm over her head, trying to pull out the kink inside her right shoulder blade, an old weak spot, a vestigial reminder of some punishment her body absorbed during its training days. She shakes her head in response to Kit’s question, lying. She has no idea how she’s going to mesh Kit with Missouri. Plus there is so much stuff that now seems necessary to explain.

“Don’t go crazy with this,” Kit says, seeing that Jesse is fretting. “Everybody always feels like their family scene is too weird to translate for someone in their present. You don’t really need to tell me anything. I probably won’t even see any of the bad stuff. Everyone’ll be nice to me just because I’m with you. And I already think you’re the most wonderful person in the world, so you don’t have to worry about my opinion of you. It’s locked in.” She taps her heart with a forefinger.

“Still...”

“Okay,” Kit says. “Go ahead and wrestle those old aliigators of your past. But don’t worry about me. They’re your alligators, they won’t bite me.”

Every time Jesse comes back to Missouri, she tries to prepare herself, get the issues lined up, sorted out, internally addressed so she doesn’t get ambushed by them when she’s there. This, of course, never works. Once home, the same faulty systems kick in—everything out of whack and running full steam at the same time. She is almost immediately sucked into trying to impress her mother, and trying to dismiss her. Feeling far above and beyond New Jerusalem, and at the same time romanticizing it like crazy. Longing to be instantly away, and alternately to stay forever, spend her days with Hallie, move with her and William into a house with a wide porch on Broad Avenue.

“What’s chicken-fried steak?” Kit says from behind a giant laminated menu. “Does it have chicken in it, or what?”

“Oh, honey,” Jesse says, thinking of the week ahead.

Kit and Jesse have been together half a year. One night Jesse was supposed to have dinner with Leo Swift, who teaches all the Victorian courses in the department, and is far and away her favorite colleague. Leo is how she imagines the Bloomsbury boys were. Maynard Keynes. Saxon Sydney-Turner. He seems to her a true scholar. Always lit from within over a connection discovered, an influence discerned, always bearing down on a monograph deadline, pressing into the night as though the world will awaken the next morning in urgent need of coffee and literary criticism.

They share an office in the department’s basement quarters, and often when Jesse arrives in the morning before a class, Leo’s presence is still hanging around in the air. Peppery cologne, dry-cleaned wool, butterscotch. So she knows he’s at most an hour or two gone.

One morning into the second month of a terrible broken heart Jesse was languishing with (she hoped in a quiet way no one was noticing), he asked if she would like to come to dinner with him that Friday.

“There’s a new restaurant on Thirteenth Street that serves food of the Southwest. Do you think that would be interesting?”

And then on Friday, he asked, by the by, if she’d mind if his niece joined them. Something, nothing really, made Jesse think the niece would be a girl, a teenager. And so she wasn’t expecting a woman, wasn’t expecting a dyke, and especially wasn’t expecting someone so blond and tan and better-looking than regular people to such a degree and in such a put-together way you knew right off that the looking good was part of what she did for a living.

Jesse wanted to resist being influenced by this. She didn’t like to think looks played a big part in what attracted her to other women, although when she thought about it, the bookstore owner and the flight attendant and the taxi driver-performance artist and the investment analyst and the house painter, and one of the two radiologists (she met one through the other) on the slightly longer than she would like (now that they comprised her past, her permanent sexual record) list of women she had been involved with were actually quite good-looking. But still, none like this.

“Flake off,” Kit said when she sat down, looking seriously into an invisible camera. It was the name of the product, and her tag line on the ads. “I’m supposed to say it in a sexy way. No mean feat.” She had just landed a fivecommercial deal as spokesperson for a dandruff shampoo. The night turned into a small celebration of this small piece of good fortune, in spite of Jesse being a little pissed at Leo for not giving her fair warning about this matchmaking, and in spite of her being leery of Kit’s looks, and the fact that she was an actress, which seemed almost to guarantee selfabsorption.

At some point probably too early on, Jesse could feel herself throwing caution out the window and running all her internal red lights. She began letting herself sink into deep focus on Kit, who was just smiling and sitting down and acknowledging Leo’s introductions and saying “flake off”—performing perfectly ordinary social mechanics in a perfectly unflashy way. Yet at the same time, occupying the available space with molecules that were traveling faster than normal, achieving higher density. Everyone else’s had to shift a little and rearrange themselves to make way. Jesse was made goofy by this, and then somewhere around the second margarita, Kit began to reply in kind, paying an elevated attention to whatever Jesse said, responding to her remarks as though they were particularly droll or perceptive or whatever.

Oh boy, Jesse thought, staring for way too long at the puddle of salsa on her plate. And then felt a flush run through her entire body when their fingertips brushed, not quite accidentally, amid the blue corn tortilla chips.

And then later, when Leo was insisting on picking up the bill and Jesse was thanking him and saying good night, Kit was coincidentally heading just Jesse’s way and so why didn’t they get a cab together? And then why didn’t Jesse come up, Kit had some Kona coffee she’d just bought herself as a treat.

In the time it took the creaking freight elevator to ascend the five floors to Kit’s loft, Jesse, traveling on a light gloss of margaritas, figured, What the hell, if there was a seduction going on, why not co-opt it? She pressed a hand against the scarred metal wall next to Kit’s head, leaned in, and kissed her.

“This is so—” Kit started to say.