Nicotine (20 page)

“Whatever happened to consensus?” Tony says. “I need an income.”

“Did you ever think about trying to fund yourself online?” Sorry asks. “You go on some Web site like Kickstarter or Betterplace, and presto, you're Tony the fund-raiser, lobbying for a medical tobacco excise tax exemption or whatever. You brand yourself with a progressive cause, and total strangers fund you.”

“Tobacco is way worse than cars,” Jazz says.

Everyone looks at her.

“Advocating for tobacco is the opposite of social justice. It's poor, ignorant people who smoke. They aim all the advertising at them, because it's poison—”

“Look who's talking,” Tony says.

“Come on, you know me! Would I hesitate to do something because it's poison? For me, nicotine is basically a suicide method. The slowest, most decadent method I know. Slower than slitting my wrists.”

“That would be pret-ty god-damn slow,” Rob says, dragging the syllables out to maximum length.

“That's a world high mark for sarcasm,” Tony observes.

“Smoking is like moving to Fukushima for the privacy,” Jazz says. “But at least I'll have lung cancer that spirits me away
quickly,
while you get tumors right in your fucking
face
. How you can eat cigarettes, I'll never understand.”

“This is the wrong collective for this debate,” Rob says.

“Yeah, I'm confused, too,” Sorry says. “Are you planning to quit? You sound almost like you want to quit and move out.”

Jazz spreads her hands on the table and looks at her careful manicure. Her pointy nails are dark red. The fingers on her right hand are yellow. She asks, “Is there life after nicotine? That's what I want to know. I've been smoking since I was ten.”

“If you quit, I'll quit,” Rob says.

“The wager stands,” Tony says. “They both quit right now, and this year's tobacco crop is
mine
.”

“I'm not quitting,” Sorry says. “Even though I could quit anytime I wanted.” They all laugh at her good-natured joke. “But it might be hard for them to go on living here if they quit. Just saying. Quitting is not easy. I know that for a fact.”

Anka says, “I could give it up for the interim. I'm not a real smoker. More of a social smoker. Like, if I see people smoking.”

“So we detox somewhere else,” Jazz says. “I got it. We'll go to DJD. Cold turkey on the DJD. Ten days, starting tomorrow.”

“I would definitely save money if I quit,” Penny says.

“Fifty bucks says Rob can't do it,” Tony says.

SURPRISE LATE-NIGHT HOUSE MEETING AT
DJD. Its residents acclaim the monitored detox plan by consensus.

The next evening, several linger in the living room after supper to show their support. A lovely and sporty young resident named Kestrel breaks out a guitar and runs through her small repertoire of protest songs. Leaning against the back wall of the DJD, Jazz and Rob warble “Give Peace a Chance.” Many photos are posted to Instagram (hashtag: #
bed-in
).

A short time later, Rob begs Sunshine to stop singing the John Lennon song “Imagine,” saying his voice sounds like rutting elk. “You suck,” he adds gratuitously. Sunshine says his singing perhaps doesn't conform to Rob's commercialist, consumerist standards, and Jazz says perhaps Rob didn't come to DJD to submit to the populist aesthetics of a latter-day Gang of Four. A gentle, well-meaning young woman named Huma confirms that Sunshine never planned to take it on the road. Housemates Feather and Cassidy nod in agreement.

Penny watches Sunshine, drawn to his pretty face, put off by his footed sleeper and terrible singing. Jazz pulls her onto the DJD and whispers that she should rub Rob's back for him. Gently she massages his neck and shoulders. He calms down a little.

Sunshine says, “I have a certificate in shiatsu.”

Rob says, “If you touch me, I swear—”

THE NEXT EVENING, AROUND NINE,
Rob lies thrashing on the DJD while Penny sits next to him, rubbing his back. Jazz paces the room reading aloud from a stern critique of coal-fired power plants by Naomi Klein
.
Penny leans forward and kisses Rob's ear, and Rob moans, “Just stop it already!”

“Stop what?”

“Reading aloud!” he says. “Christ, can't you read without moving your lips?” He snorts and shifts his weight. “God, I am bored out of my fucking
mind
. Can't we do this at home?”

The prettiest girl at DJD—Anka's friend Susannah—comes in from the kitchen and offers him some garlic toast.

“Is this with butter?” he says. “That's just what I need. To get fat stealing my food from
veal
.
V-E-A-L
veal
.”

“There's a little butter on it,” she admits.

“You want some?” he asks Penny. “Penny will eat it. She'll eat anything.”

“It's like he's his own evil twin,” she says to no one in particular.

“I love garlic,” Jazz says, taking a piece of bread. “Thank you.” She returns to reading aloud.

“Is there a working TV here
anywhere
?” Rob asks Susannah. “Because you know what would be a genuine distraction? Watching a game. Aren't the playoffs on?”

“Nobody here has a TV,” Susannah says. “We watch series on the Internet sometimes, like
Game of Thrones
.”

“I wouldn't mind a little violence right now,” Rob says. “It would feel good to see somebody's head get crushed.”

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, JAZZ RECEIVES
a text from Matt:
Hotness, where are you?

On the DJD with P and R,
she responds
.

Her text is not entirely to Matt's liking. He pulls out to pass another Audi on the Pulaski Skyway, narrowly missing a pylon. To his phone, he says, “Reply. And where is the D space J space D, question mark.”

At DJD. Back in a week on a bet. Hang tight J

He looks up DJD: Degenerative Joint Disease and/or Discoveries in the Judean Desert, the Oxford edition of the Dead Sea scrolls. (Online, where strangers can see it, the house remains “Pangaea.”) Headlights flash in his rearview mirror. He puts on his hazard flashers and downshifts into fifth.

TWO NIGHTS LATER, FOUR IN
the morning.

Penny lies behind Rob, who lies behind Jazz, all asleep on the DJD. The house is quiet. The neighborhood has a barking dog, but no one registers it. It has never stopped barking since it learned to bark.

Dozing half-awake, Penny places her arm more snugly around Rob's waist, and something brushes her sleeve. She lowers her hand.

Unmistakable. Something resembling an erection.

She is so surprised that her first impulse is to nudge Jazz and get confirmation. “Jazz,” she whispers. Jazz turns around. She points.

Jazz touches Rob's underwear for one second. He makes a happy sound. Almost inaudibly, she whispers, “What do we do now? Flip a coin?”

“It's
mine
,” Penny hisses back.

But she's on the wrong side of him. To fulfill her arguably abusive plan of initiating sex while he sleeps, somehow she has to get in front of him without disturbing him or ending up on the wrong side of the blanket. While trying, she wakes him up.

“Stop flailing!” he says. “Where am I? Jazz?”

Penny kisses him on the cheek from behind.

“Get off me,” he says.

He turns over, moves closer until his now inconspicuous hard-on just grazes her shirt, and falls asleep again. She abandons her plan.

IN THE MORNING HE REMEMBERS
nothing.

Penny's imagination is inflamed—a throbbing, swollen wound festering with sexual virulence.

Jazz weaves around the house, scanning every surface for anything that might intrigue her, like a foraging raccoon. She chews on caraway seeds and mint leaves. She talks to Kestrel and Huma about solar power. She eats cheap Danish butter cookies with granulated sugar on top—a first. She goes with Feather and Susannah to
the co-op and buys two pounds of organic kumquats. She offers Rob kumquats—once. Rob does not want kumquats.

He is immensely irritable. He demands to return home, saying forced inactivity and boredom are the two most wrongheaded nicotine cessation aids conceivable. He finds a novel from the
Master and Commander
series and reads it in silence, ignoring everyone. When Penny asks him how he likes it, he says, “Don't make this more hellish than it needs to be.”

With Rob so bitchy, it is easy for her to take a break and go back to Nicotine.

She and Anka clear the house of every trace of tobacco and every ashtray, except for what's in Sorry's room or Tony's. They throw away Rob's special cups and even his baking soda. They search his garage for hidden paraphernalia—anything that might trigger a relapse.

They regard Jazz's plants and the half-cured harvest with perplexity.

Tony says to leave them alone. Rob, he says, can't dip uncured tobacco, and Jazz has willpower.

IN THE AFTERNOON, MATT STOPS
by Nicotine. He tells Sorry he just wanted to say hi. Anka and Tony are not at home, and Sorry refuses to tell him where to find Jazz, Penny, or Rob. She suggests he try again next month.

Matt reasons that DJD could be another anarchist house, named perhaps for its address on Don Juan Drive or its political mission (Dealing Junk to Degenerates). He cruises neighboring streets in his car, scanning facades for the squatter lightning bolt symbol. Around three o'clock, he realizes he could call CHA and ask them. But it's Saturday. He finds the CHA office number online, but no one answers the phone.

PENNY, STILL SHARING THE DJD,
longs for a change of air and some real sleep. Rob's restlessness, the way he takes all the available blankets and wraps himself up like a burrito: unpleasant. She lies awake, breathing shallowly, thinking hostile, lustful thoughts.

At least that's how it feels—as if she never sleeps—because Jazz at DJD keeps her regular hours. She puts on records and sits in an armchair reading. She drafts poetic manifestos in a leather-bound notebook. The key distinction between 2:00
A.M.
and 2:00
P.M
. is her light source. At seemingly random hours of the day and night she sleeps, on her front, her face in the crook of her elbow—always in the same position, as though her nose had grown crooked from the pressure of her arm.

Rob keeps similar hours, but he calls his schedule “self-induced sleep deprivation that's going to fucking kill me by destroying my immune system and fucking with my head until I can't even tie my own fucking shoes.”

“This is nothing,” Jazz says. “Think about people with babies in the house. They never sleep.”

“And they're insane. People so strung out they can't tell their ass from their elbow are raising all the kids. No wonder people spend half their time shooting each other.”

On Sunday night, Penny returns to Tranquility. While getting organized to take a shower, she falls asleep facedown on the bed. She remains motionless all night with her face in the crook of her elbow.

AROUND SEVEN THE NEXT MORNING,
Jazz deliberately brushes Rob's crotch with the back of her hand—gently, casually lets her fingers run across the front of his plaid boxers.

“Mitts off,” he says, slapping her arm away.

“No, let me see!” She sits up.

“Get me a pack of cigarettes, and I'll be your sex slave forever.”

“They're right outside,” she says, indicating the front door of the house a few feet away. “There's nothing keeping you in bed with me. Go for it.”

“There's fifty dollars from that fucker Tony.”

“Come on. Be a sport.”

Rob rolls onto his back and allows his penis to stand upright in his undershorts.

It appears to be roughly the size of a roll of quarters, similar to Bill Clinton's in the testimony of Paula Jones.

“What can I say,” Jazz says. “Not my weight class. But Penny's very petite, and she's in love with you.”

“Fifty dollars will buy a nice bottle of bourbon,” Rob says.

NO ONE ANSWERS THE PHONE
at CHA. Matt sends an e-mail.

ON WEDNESDAY, MATT'S E-MAIL HAS
not been answered, his calls to CHA go to a voice mail box that is full, and when he goes by the CHA office near Journal Square in the early evening, he discovers that it is a practice space—filthy and unoccupied, but well soundproofed—in a former commercial building called Wherehouse that was founded as a free restaurant and depot for discarded food. The file cabinet with drawers labeled
MORTGAGES
and
LEASES
contains a plastic cup encrusted with mold, along with some facial tissues and dead flies.

In his bewilderment, he ironically asks the young woman showing him around where she thinks the money goes when CHA houses pay off their debts to CHA.

“I never thought about that!” she says brightly. “You could ask Island Girl, the guy who founded it.”

“Where does he live? Does he live here?”

“He lives at Detonator, but he might be in Portland.”

“Where do you send your loan payments?”

“Do we do that? I thought we got grant money from the city!”

Matt retreats. He refrains from driving to Nicotine. He goes to his top-floor duplex in Fort Lee and writes Jazz an e-mail.

I miss you. Let me pick you up tomorrow at seven and take you to my place? I want you with real wine, real food, real music, and a real brass bed. Disclosure: I also have sort of a wading pool with gilt tile work and art-deco nymphs cast in a marble-resin blend, but I didn't put it in. I bought the place cut-rate from a meatpacker and didn't have the heart to tear out the nymphs. Until now. My nymph. Please say yes. The pool is heated.