Nicotine (19 page)

“A second ago you're gentrifying JC, and now you're Che Guevara. That was fast.”

“I'm telling you that these people are stealing from you. You let this man touch you and he keeps our family home. Oh my god, you're so spacey. You let him do what he wants with you, and for this he gets a big house. You don't want to work—don't tell me you're looking for work, because I won't believe it!—and now when I give you a chance to try some capitalism, what do you do? You give away the store!”

“You want to know the truth?” Penny counters. Briefly she visualizes the truth—grief, asexuality, Matt with Jazz, Matt with thirteen-year-old Amalia, M&M's . . . She puts the truth with all its mystifying uncertainties out of her mind and says, “It's not important. What matters is that we all have places to stay. I've got a house to live in called Tranquility, and it's very nice. And you have this house, which is wonderful, and we all have the summer place. So there's no reason for anybody to take away anybody else's home for any reason. Not even squatters. You've been homeless before, and I just got evicted. It's no fun.”

“No one is ever ‘homeless.' There is room on this earth for everyone.”

“And I'm not doing that guy. I'm really not. He's not like that. He's not
gay,
exactly, but he's not like that.”

“You mean he's like Patrick, not Matt.”

Penny feels vague dissatisfaction. Something tells her that the earth is not held in common—that some people really are homeless—and that possession of a sex drive does not inevitably turn a man into Matt. “Did you know Patrick has a girlfriend?” she inquires. “I think they're going to get married. He mentioned her in an e-mail, and called her his fiancée.”

“He did? That's wonderful!”

“She's French and Thai. I think she might be from the Philippines. She's rich.”

Amalia beams. “Is she a Jew?”

“I would guess Muslim, Buddhist, Huguenot—but why the interest in religion all of a sudden? Are you sick?”

“No, no. I was thinking about their marriage ceremony. I think the ceremony makes a big difference.”

Penny hesitates, then asks, “What was your wedding like?”

“Hippie wedding! We gathered at the summer place, all our friends. I had a white dress, like a Kogi dress, and we married each other in the presence of God and the community.”

“With a rabbi?”

“Norm didn't want anyone official. He followed native ways. There was no person in the world who could have married us. Only God.”

“So it was like with a Quaker license.”

“It was no license. He had adopted me as his child in Colombia. How can we get a license to marry?”

PENNY LEAVES SOON AFTER THAT.
The confirmation of extreme weirdness overwhelms her emotions. It makes her want to talk to a person who can absorb extreme weirdness without a ripple: Jazz.

She runs with the story back to Nicotine—jogs to the station, fidgets on the trains, squirms on the buses, runs to the house, runs up the stairs, flings herself through the door and onto the bed—to declare breathlessly, “My parents never got married. My mom is legally my dad's
daughter
. His child, the same as me and Matt and Patrick! If they did probate, we would be splitting things evenly!”

Jazz sits up to put out her cigar. “Penyushka. Think a second. What does ‘legally' even mean? It means sanctioned by the state. It's Napoleonic.”

“What?”

“It's statist absolutism. Under common law, the case is obvious. She was his
wife
. You know it. She knows it. Of course, if you want to
let the state tell you people are something they're not, go right ahead. If you want to give the government ontological superpowers.”

Penny is silent and looks at her hands.

“In business school you learn to read contracts and split hairs,” Jazz adds. “It's worse than law school. It makes you the plaything of conflicting interpretations. Reality is clearer. That's why I live in reality. It never stops changing. It's like shadows on smoke. But at least there's only one of it.”

“It's strange,” Penny says. “You drive me crazy, but I like talking to you so much.” She flops down on her side and props her head on her elbow, looking into Jazz's kinetic eyes from a distance of ten inches or so. “You see past my bullshit, and I hate it, but I love it.”

Jazz holds up a scarred wrist and says, “Don't overestimate me.”

Penny reaches out and touches the scar, running her fingers down it. It seems like a foreign body, not part of anyone. She says, “I don't overestimate you. But you have this clarity.”

“I try to see life as it is. I don't understand it any better than anybody else.”

“No. You always cut straight to the heart.”

“Anything's simple if you cut it to the heart!” She rolls over on her back. “I've cut myself so many times, I don't have an inside and an outside. Simple as a lump of clay. But life's not like that. I wish, I wish, I wish it were like that.”

Penny touches the scar again.

“I could cut you right now,” Jazz adds. “I could say, ‘Bitch, stop pretending you like me. You only talk to me because I'm friends with Rob.'”

“That would hurt!”

“That's what I mean. I know too many things that are only true because I made them that way.”

Penny embraces Jazz. They lie still until it is clear they might kiss. Jazz gets up and offers her guest a cup of Darjeeling, and they talk about Kurdistan.

LATER THAT EVENING, PENNY LIES
flat on her back in bed with Rob, failing to sleep. Her pose reminds her what sex with Rob might be like, if it were conceivable.

She turns to face him. Her breathing quickens, reminding her of sex. The labored breathing of lovers having sex. Breathing and nothing else, each breath more labored than the one before. Waiting to crest the hill of orgasm. She twitches. She thinks of masturbating, but Rob sleeps so quietly she can never be sure he's not awake. She opens her eyes. She takes a drink from his water glass. She sees herself surrounded by his furniture. She lies flat again and thinks about fucking Rob for two solid hours before she falls asleep.

When she awakens, around eight, she shakes him until he says good morning. She begs him to give up alcohol and nicotine.

What originally inspired his self-medication, she doesn't know, but she feels certain its usefulness has passed. She is equally certain that if his combined BAC and serum nicotine ever fell below artery-constricting, vein-bloating, erectile-tissue-crippling levels, he would awaken every morning a new man, ready to forswear asexuality and pay some erotic attention to the exclusive designer drug by his side, also known as Penny Baker.

“Maybe some other day, when I'm more rested,” he says. He gets up to shred a cigarette. She falls back to sleep.

AT NOON SHE GOES TO
visit him where he is working that day, at a soup kitchen. She accepts and eats a plate of cauliflower au gratin, but she doesn't see him anywhere.

The parish hall is square. Every surface is white flecked with artificial stains. The shiny linoleum is white with subtle brown streaks. The walls are rough plastic wallpaper with a shadowy moiré pattern. The drop ceiling is thousands of crinkly white panels decorated with an irregular pattern of small holes. The clientele is
poor—badly dressed and silent, nervous and loud, fat and thin, but in every case without valuable possessions. Purses are plastic with bursting seams. Shoes are extruded foam clogs, leggings unevenly knit. Men wear incongruous T-shirts and sweat-stained hats. There are easily operable deformities in the room, and open wounds. She looks for Rob and doesn't see him.

Taking her plate to the bus tray, she asks a short-haired woman wearing a gold cross on a chain over her purple turtleneck where Rob might be.

“Showering some guy in the gym.” She points.

Penny follows her gesture to a door that opens on a hallway that is part of the attached Catholic school. She opens the double doors to the undersize gym full of foam mattresses and cheap inflatable balls printed with cartoon characters. To her left is the door to the boys' locker room. She opens it a crack and calls out, “Rob?”

“Go away,” Rob says.

She walks in, expecting to see something sexual that might bring her peace of mind. She sees him crouched at the feet of an older homeless man whose toenails remind her of Norm's. Down near the floor, Rob is cutting them.

“Scram,” he says.

“Let her stay,” the man says. “She can clean my foreskin.”

“She's been a bad girl,” Rob says, without glancing up, “but not that bad.”

“She could comb my hair,” the man suggests.

“Get out of here,” Rob says.

Penny remains transfixed. She has never seen a healthy, mobile human being in such lousy condition—bumps and puckers and discolorations, blood blisters, red patches, blobby joints, bewildering hair patterns, leprous-looking scars, fungi like navigational charts of shallow oceans. She turns to go and leaves slowly.

Back in the gym, she finds and opens the door of the girls' locker
room. The air is dense with yeast, a haze of unwashed female. Behind a partition, a shower drizzles. Flip-flops slap the tiles. “Maggots in your armpits,” a woman says. She sounds brisk and unfazed, yet surprised, as though expecting maggots elsewhere.

“You're a saint,” an aged voice replies weakly.

Penny steps back, not wanting to be heard or seen. She eases the door shut and exits the gym through the crash-bar doors, not returning to the parish hall.

She thinks Rob is amazing. Not merely cute. Truly awesome as a human being. Also that this kind of awesomeness—the capacity to care about a filthy stranger—is something she never consciously wanted from anyone and hopes she will never need.

SHE WALKS HOME TO TRANQUILITY.

She turns on her laptop and writes an e-mail to her former supervisor in the corporate purchasing department where—as the culmination of an unpaid nine-month internship—she oversaw the supply chain for a skin conditioner used in makeup removers and shaving cream.

Anything opening up?
she asks.

The supervisor writes back,
Wish I could help you. We're down and out—downsizing and outsourcing ☹ Best of luck

She visits a job-search site and sees that the company is seeking a senior procurement manager with regulatory experience for a permanent position in Shenzhen.

She visits her favorite dating site and alters her profile to say she would be open to marriage.

When she rechecks her e-mail before turning off the PC, she has an alert. Twenty-one forty-eight-year-old men want to meet her.

She is tempted to send each of them the same message (that a surrogate mother and nannies would be cheaper). Instead she closes
the laptop and removes a pack of cigarettes and a folding umbrella from her bag. She smokes while walking around the block in the beginnings of a thunderstorm.

AMALIA SITS IN AN ARMCHAIR
in the master bedroom in Morristown, drinking coffee. She picks up her cordless phone and calls Matt's cell.

He is at work, preparing a tender for six odor-reducing garbage trucks in response to an RFP from Millburn Township.

“What do
you
want?” he says. “Make it quick.”

“Hello, Matt. I have a simple request. I want you to do the project of getting those squatters out of Norm's house. Penny will never do this.”

“I don't know why you're in such a rush,” he says. “It's like having bedbugs that do the dishes. They're not hurting that house. And that neighborhood is on the brink. Those left-wingers are making it safe for democracy. You really want to be first in, first out? The sticker price could double in two years.”

“That's what Penny says.” She sounds doubtful.

“Penny's a flake, but she knows about finance. You never take her seriously. You don't respect her.”

“You sound like an anarchist. Are you in love now, too? Did you also meet someone in that house?”

“Why are you so fucking jealous? Have I
ever
given you a reason to like me? I'm a complete shit to you, Amalia.” He enters a number in his spreadsheet, and two other numbers rise disproportionately. He frowns and clicks an icon. “I'm busy. I'll call you.”

WHEN PENNY ARRIVES AT NICOTINE
in the evening, an impromptu house crisis summit meeting is taking place in the kitchen. Tony wants to use half of the garage where Rob has his bicycle workshop
to set up an unlicensed welding business specializing in black-market auto body work for the uninsured.

“You're going to get us beaten up with baseball bats,” Anka says.

“She's right,” Rob says. “We'll end up like MOVE in Philly. First the neighbors fuck with us, and then the police firebomb the roof.”

“That's probably what happened before we moved in,” Jazz says.

“And meanwhile I have nowhere to store my bikes.”

“It will be loud and dirty,” Sorry says. “And it will attract undesirables. Drivers. Since when do we do advocate cars?”

“Are you having a house meeting?” Penny asks.

“An informal one,” Tony says firmly.

Anka opines that CHA wouldn't let him go on living at Nicotine, because welding wouldn't be activism. Tony says even nonunion labor is activism, if it helps the poor. She insists that helping the poor drive unsafe vehicles is the totally wrong kind of activism. “The poor need people helping them out with Franciscan salvation-by-works crap like Rob does. The poor are fucking helpless! Don't put them behind the wheel!”

“We have a quorum,” Rob says. “Our decisions are binding. Show of hands. All for Tony's muffler and auto body. None in favor. All against. Unanimous. Sorry, Tony.”