Nicotine (21 page)

JAZZ RESPONDS THAT SHE WOULD
be delighted to see Matt's home.

Her enthusiasm is heightened by the entertainment being offered the rehab patients. They sit sweating on the DJD while Kestrel, Huma, and Cassidy perform a dramatic reading of an original, collaborative work of apocalyptic science fiction based on aberrations in the life cycle of the eighteen-year locust. Somehow or other the locusts cause the world economy to be threatened with collapse, but that's not the issue—the economy is a paper tiger anyway. Jazz takes part by making the locust noise whenever Kestrel points at her. Cassidy plays the role of President Hillary Clinton.

Penny shares the love seat with Sunshine. She feels she doesn't know him yet, but she thinks something could develop there. He sits close to her, inside a sleeping bag. His terry cloth shoulders poke out the top. He wears his hood down and appears very comely.

She glances repeatedly from him to Rob. Sunshine seems like
such a sane, uncomplicated person compared with Rob, who is ostentatiously coloring an adult coloring book with a single color (black).

THE FOLLOWING EVENING AT NICOTINE,
Tony slaps a fifty-dollar bill into Rob's hand. He waves it in the air and says, “Next stop discount liquors!”

“No, wait!” Penny says.

“Let him go,” Jazz says. “He earned it.”

“It's his money,” Tony adds.

“He'll open a bottle on his way home and get all uninhibited and buy tobacco!”

“Good point,” Jazz says. “Go with him.” She pushes Penny down the front steps, sees Matt's car coming, turns to Tony and says, “I've got a date.” She dashes upstairs.

She comes back down wearing a tailored spring coat in a light pink-and-gray tweed over a stiff yellow Prada dress and fawn-and-white spectator pumps. Her hair is in a bun and her lipstick is very red. She jumps into the waiting car and rolls slowly away.

“Weird,” Tony says, reaching down to pet the cat raising kittens in the
FREE
box.

MATT'S HOME TRASH-COMPACTING SYSTEM FASCINATES
Jazz.

“I know what you're thinking,” he says. “That you could get rid of anything or anybody with this beast. But don't forget that the human animal is seventy percent water. Trash is about ninety-eight percent air. You can't compact a liquid. It's the most compact thing in the world. Fills every nook and cranny.” He puts his arms around her torso and presses against her from behind while she plays with the controls on the trash compactor.

“I bet you can control this with your phone,” she says.

Sensing an interest in technology, he leads her to his wraparound
black leather sofa landscape and offers her the headset from his 3-D gaming system. He sits down opposite her and opens his paper-thin laptop on the agate coffee table.

The lights come up and she sees him—not in his living room; he is perched on a raft on a particularly romantic bay in Vietnam.

“Wow,” she says.

“There's a button on the table,” he says. “You can use it to navigate.” She zooms closer, close to Matt's face, which turns blurry.

“This is for online sex, right?” she asks.

“That's the idea,” he says. “Say I'm some girl at home with my laptop. The program picks up my outline and substitutes a different background. It's the same technology they use to put the ads in sports events on TV. Or in that movie
Wag the Dog,
with the virtual Balkan wars. I see her, but she can't see me.”

“Because you don't look real good in this headset.”

“She's getting fifty cents, so she doesn't care.”

“And she strips for the webcam.”

“No, for herself. On the screen she sees herself.”

AROUND THE SAME TIME, SITTING
on the top step of the Nicotine front porch, facing the street, Rob finishes his fourth bourbon. He pushes the glass of still sharp-edged ice cubes—he is drinking very fast—over to Penny. “You have some,” he says.

“I don't want to waste your good bourbon,” she says. “You deserve to celebrate.”

“I should call my mom,” he says, getting to his feet. He lurches forward, catching himself after four steps, not stumbling so far as to put a foot on the front walk. He turns ninety degrees and climbs the stairs sideways. “She'll be proud of me. She always said it was a filthy habit.”

“She wasn't lying.”

As he passes Penny, he picks up the bottle and the glass.

“Let me stay over,” she says.

“I quit using. I don't need to be monitored.” He starts away. Then he adds in a kinder tone, “What I mean is, I'm still quitting. Any distraction, and I might quit quitting.”

“I don't want to distract you,” she says halfheartedly.

“I'm going to be quitting for months,” he says. “If it's like alcohol, I'll never be able to stop quitting.” He leaves her alone on the porch and carries the whiskey up to his room.

She sits and feels bad. He has a sexuality now, or at least an out masculine gender, and they're both telling him to stop teasing her.

PENNY VISITS DJD THE NEXT
night after supper. The weather is warmer, and Sunshine has put aside his footed sleeper for a green T-shirt and Bermuda shorts. The T-shirt reads
GREEN
in darker green. What a body, she thinks. You can tell he was a rower. He's a good-looking guy, by universal acclaim. Everybody says if he didn't dress like a fool he'd be a ten. And here he is, dressed in a normal way.

She doesn't feel him (as in feel anything in particular when he's around), but she doesn't know the difference between shallow and deep anymore. Are spontaneous feelings elemental, or superficial? Don't feelings mean more if they need time to grow?

They sit outside on the steps, drinking tap water.

“I'm still intrigued by what you said about dignity once,” she says.

“I said money makes dignity impossible, or something like that. I was kidding. I think about dignity
way
too much when I'm wearing a onesie.”

“I think it's dignified. There's dignity in trying to save energy.”

“It's no better than any other form of exhibitionism. I want to make a point by taking a stand. Be conspicuous and different. In the end all I do is make people think conserving energy is weird. I jump off this social cliff, and take the cause with me.”

“Well, some of us can't help being conspicuous and different.”

“You think that's what you are?” He eyes Penny briefly and looks back at the street. “Maybe in an upscale neighborhood you'd stick out. Around here, you're invisible.”

“Wait. Are you trying to be insulting?”

“No. I mean—take Rufus—in the whole CHA system, he's the white whale. We're proud he lives at Tranquility! But not because there's some kind of generalized shortage of middle-aged black men in Jersey City. It's just that most of them would not be open to living in an anarchist squat with a bunch of white kids. So he's invisible anywhere but in the context of CHA. That's the kind of thing I meant.”

“This is not a heavily Latin American community. I never see people like me.”

“I didn't say they
lived
here. They work night shifts. That's what you look like to me—like the cleaning crew, or a night clerk at a motel. Like somebody who leaves JC at seven o'clock every morning to commute to Edison on a bus.”

“That's even more insulting.”

“It's just context-dependent! That's how identity works. Say you were in my bed, where usually there's just white girls. The girls who cycle through this house really are beautiful, but they're so close to identical, I forget their names. They sleep with me because I'm good-looking and I went to Dartmouth, but mostly because I live here. They only turn conspicuous when they go out the door into the street. But in my bed,
you're
the one who'd be conspicuous and different.”

“Because you're a huge racist sexist.” Penny stands up. “I can't believe I came over here to flirt with a guy who wears a bunny suit, because he said something striking about dignity. It's like I'm losing my mind.”

“I'm not a racist,” Sunshine says. “Maybe if I hit on you because you're a person of color.
That
would be racist.”

“You don't even want me to like you,” Penny says. “I think you're
hoping I'll let Jazz know you're tired of white girls. Except you know what? Even
she
might not fuck a guy in a footed sleeper.”

“I wouldn't touch Jazz with a ten-foot pole,” he says. “She's too experienced. I like college girls that are all worried whether their bouncy nineteen-year-old tits are good enough.”

“I'm going home.”

“So go home. You belong there at Tranquility. Come back after you grow up enough to care about an issue that transcends your own skin!”

PENNY FEELS LONELY, GUILTY, JUSTLY
accused, and rightfully incriminated—by Sunshine, of all people. Her mood is not good. She looks at herself and sees (her harsh judgment is not entirely fair) the kind of shallow bitch who would weigh her mate choice options like some kind of eugenicist instead of falling in love (she's in love, obviously). The kind of shallow bitch who has so little genuine interest in love that she would neglect her female friends for . . . how many months now? When did Norm get sick?

Her mind is a blank. She remembers that it was cold outside.

She writes two uncharacteristically long e-mails. The first is to her freshman roommate Lucinda, who now lives in Abu Dhabi:

Hey Loose,

    
sorry I've been totally out of touch. That's what it's like when you're going through stuff you totally can't handle. My father died and he got SO sick first. When he died (hospice) I was there. It was SO sad, I got PTSD, like crying every night. Mom's cool with it, I don't get it but you know she's like 35 years younger than he was and maybe they weren't all that close. I don't know what she's going to get up to next, but it's sure to be a tragicomedy with much OMG. And maybe there's family weirdness coming out and maybe not,
but in any case I don't want to get into it because I don't actually know anything. I'll tell you if it gets interesting. Overall there's not a whole lot to say except DAD DYING SUCKED SO HARD, so give your dad a hug!

    
I'm living in a group house (Grove St/Journal Sq) looking for work. Nothing promising yet.

    
Give my love to Abby!

    
Penny

The second is to her best friend from high school in Morristown, Fontaine:

Hey Fon! Don't ask—it's all sad. Dad's dead, I'm unemployed, living in a squat (!), Mom's nuts, Matt's a shit, Patrick's damaged goods. So I haven't been in touch, sorry about that. Thank the good Lord PM [pachamama] Dad paid for my school! If I had debts coming due I would have to go underground.

    
So how's business? How's Terre Haute? I'm in JC with a SERIOUS crush on this dude who lives in the house where my dad grew up, which is creepy, but come on, where else would I meet men? Just share in my joy that he didn't squat somebody else's house! Why he seems so perfect, I don't know. We've kissed but we haven't really made out really. I'm talking about a GROWN MAN here, living in an anarchist free love group house. I know you'll say go online and broaden your horizons, and I promise I'll do that just as soon as I attain medium height/build with medium hair/eyes so somebody even fucking READS my profile before he offers me children and the maid's quarters based on my photos. I'm not bitter. Anyway, this crush distracts me from all the death-related PTSD, so I'm behind it all the way. That's the latest, fill me in on life in Indiana—love, p

LUCINDA WRITES PENNY BACK FROM
a polytechnic university under development around a small artificial lake lined with PVC in a rocky portion of the interior of the United Arab Emirates.

I'm sorry about your dad, I hope you're feeling better. I have bad news too—my father-in-law Hamad doesn't want us in contact because of your relatives in the (let me clear my throat) Zionist Entity. I know it's insane, but he says Abdullah could lose his job over it and it's such a big deal for him getting to build up a new department from scratch. We'll be out of here in five years max. Abs says his career is riding on it. I will tell you one thing (top secret): I'm pg. I haven't even told Abs (too early), but this might be my last mail for a while, so if I want to tell you it's now or never. I won't be naming it after you or raising it in this—greetings noble censors, think I'll skip the descriptions of dust. Our servants (I'm pretty sure somebody pays them and they're not really slaves) are great, they get that dust out so fast every morning, you'd never know it was ever there.

    
See you soon. Don't write me any secrets! I'll call you if I get anywhere near NYC.

    
Love you

    
Lucie

FONTAINE WRITES BACK FROM TERRE
Haute.

Come visit me. The bar around the corner has the best karaoke, all these fat guys dedicating metal ballads to their wives (home taking care of the kids but they make it sound like they're off fighting in Iraq—probably makes more sense than you wish it did). Though you
might have better luck here with your new medium height/build and medium hair/eyes . . . forget I said anything . . . You know you picked a hard row to hoe with that trashy Anglo-ass name! It makes you look so *adopted*. Your dad's gone now (I was saddened to hear that, he was such an inspiring person and helped so many people, I'd be so proud if my dad were anything like him), so you could finally start calling yourself something that fits, like “Paloma Gellis.” Otherwise Terre Haute is pretty meh. Work is great. Respectable colleagues, responsible job, house I might buy, the usual: paradise on earth, once you drown your memories of NYC. I'm working on it.