Josie and Jack (28 page)

I lifted a hand to the side of my face where it was still bruised and sore. I shivered.

“You know I could never stand for anyone else to touch you. Even in Erie. That Michael guy,” he said. “You know I’d do anything for you. I’d kill those guys, if you wanted me to. Even that.”

I shook my head.

His eyes snapped. “I would. I’d do it. You only have to say the word.”

I wondered. Joe and Carmichael were Lily’s friends. “It wouldn’t change anything,” I said.

When we got back, there was a postcard from Lily in the mailbox, an arty black-and-white shot of misty steps and bare trees against a winter sky. On the back, she’d written, “This is exactly what I needed. Hope the two of you are having as much fun as I am!”

“What do you want?” Jack asked me the next day, over coffee and rolls at the diner down the street. “What do you want, more than anything else in the world?”

The fingers of my right hand were stiff and uncooperative. I had trouble tearing open the packet of sugar for my coffee. “To leave New York,” I said, and it was true: what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to leave the city and never come back to it. Once, I had found the anonymity of the crowded city comforting. Now I felt as if I were constantly biting back screams that would force people to turn and stare at me, to acknowledge that I was there.

“Leave?” he said. “Why the hell would you want to leave?”

Because there is a searing pain in the only part of me that was ever truly mine. Because someday I’ll go to a bar and sit next to Carmichael, and you’ll sit across the table from me and smile.
I said, “Because it’s expensive, and difficult, and we don’t have any money—”

He gave me a pained look. “Since when have we ever worried about money?”

I didn’t answer.

“You really want to give up everything we’ve worked for here,” he said, “everything we’ve managed to do, because of one bad night.”

One bad night, I thought. “Never mind, Jack,” I said.

“At least we’re not in goddamned Janesville,” Jack said. “You know what Crazy Mary used to say when something went wrong? She’d say, ‘We’ll fix it. We’ll figure out a way, Jacky. The greatest force in the universe is the power to think for yourself.’ And when I asked her what that meant, she’d say, ‘It means, at least we’re not in goddamned Janesville.’” The light in his eyes faded a little. “No worries, young sister. Things will end in happy places. They always do with us.”

I thought of Lily’s apartment, a cold, charmless pocket in a tall building that was a hive of cold, charmless pockets, and said nothing.

Jack signaled to the waitress for more coffee. I said, “Did you know that ferrets are illegal in New York City?” I had learned this from a flier posted in the window of the local pet shop.

“No. So are mountain lions. So what?”

“Mountain lions are big, though. Why would ferrets be illegal? They’re like guinea pigs.”

“It’s too easy for them to survive here,” the waitress said as she poured our coffee. “Give them a month or so, we’d have ferrets instead of rats in the subways.”

I imagined it: standing in the subway with Jack, waiting for the No. 2 train. Winter. A flash of tawny pelt on the tracks. Rustling in the litter at the end of the platform. They’re everywhere, even crouched at the foot of the stairs. We’re surrounded.

The night Lily was due back, Jack and I lay side by side in bed, not touching.

“You fall off a horse, you get back on,” said Jack, who had never been on a horse in his life, to the ceiling.

Next to him in the darkness, sore and silent, I said nothing, and soon he fell asleep. I wasn’t really sleeping at all anymore, just dozing and dreaming thin pain-dreams that seemed real. Eventually I was aware of the pale winter sun coming through the window. I was alone in the bed. Lily was laughing in the living room.

When I saw her curled up like a spoiled Persian cat in the armchair, with her bronzed skin and her newly dyed brown hair, I realized that I hated her. Listening to her chatter set my teeth on edge. After spending a day with her friends in Paris, they had all decided “on a whim” to go off to Greece for the rest of her time abroad, and she’d had such a wonderful time and met so many wonderful people, and it had all been so rejuvenating, so incredibly fabulous—the food, and the music, and the beaches, and the parties, and the scenery! I sat there on the couch in the endless blur of her prattling, empty of everything except the throbbing in my arm and my seething rage.

Lily’s eyes widened when she saw the bruises on my face, which had faded to a dull yellow. She glanced quickly at Jack, who sat next to me on the couch with one of his arms flung across the back of it, his fingers barely touching the back of my neck. He was smiling but his eyes were grim.

“And you two,” she said, pulling up one trim leather pant leg so that she could unzip her high black boots. “You had a good time?”

“It was fine,” Jack said. “We didn’t do much.”

“As long as you enjoyed it.” Lily peeled away the cashmere socks underneath her boots to reveal tanned, pedicured feet. There was a silver ring on one of her toes.

Jack said, “Let’s go have dinner.” He stood up as he talked, went to the closet, and took out his black leather coat.

Lily stretched her legs out and gazed at her glossy, shellpink toenails. “Maybe.” She swung her legs up over the side of the armchair. “But first I want to take a nap. I cannot
wait
to sleep in my own bed.” In one motion, she sat up, swung her legs down to the floor, and stood up. She yawned prettily. “I’m exhausted. Can you try not to wake me up?”

Her bedroom door closed with a small, smug noise and Jack and I were left together in the silence that fell instantly over the rest of the apartment. He came to me and we stood together.

When Lily awoke, she expressed concern about my arm, which was swollen and angry-looking up to the elbow by then. I told her that I’d cut it opening a can of olives.

She told Jack to forget about dinner, to take me to the emergency room.

“Josie’s okay, aren’t you, Jo?” he said. I wasn’t; I could hardly bend my wrist, and I couldn’t move my fingers at all. But I nodded.

“I’ll take you tomorrow if it’s not better,” he told me. “Just not”—his eyes flicked to Lily—“now.”

When he was out of the room Lily sat down next to me and said, “What about your face?”

“Born with it. Nothing to be done.”

She gazed steadily at me for a moment. “Did Jack do it?”

“Jack would never hurt me,” I said.

“I know what he can be like,” she said evenly. “I know how he can get.”

“The difference between you and me, Lily, is that I don’t get off on it,” I said, instead of telling her that it was none of her goddamned business. I sounded so much like Jack that my stomach lurched.

She didn’t blush and she didn’t look away. Her dark eyes were serious, for once.

“You’re smarter than that, Josie,” was all she said.

That night, her first night back, she went out for a drink with Maris and came back late. I went to bed early and sank immediately into the familiar dream-haunted, fitful sleep. I was aware of Jack lying down next to me and getting up again, as restless as I was.

He was sitting on the edge of my bed when we heard Lily’s key in the lock. It was only after he went to greet her that I realized that he was wearing only his underwear. I wondered what she would think, and why I didn’t care.

No noises came through the wall that night. All I heard were voices, Lily’s and Jack’s, rising and falling and rising again. More than once I was pulled out of a half-sleep by Jack’s angry voice, but I couldn’t ever make out the words. Then Lily, quiet and sibilant, hushing him, calming him.

Finally I woke with a start to find my room filled with bright light and swirling cigarette smoke. Jack was sitting next to me, propped up against the white headboard. There was a cigarette in his hand and a highball glass full of butts on the table next to him. His gaze was fixed blankly on the wall but the set of his mouth was angry.

“We have to leave.” His voice was toneless. “She wants us out.”

Still not fully awake, I asked, “When did this happen?”

“Last night,” he said in the same cheerless monotone. “She said she decided while she was away. She’s going to her parents’ house in Maine Saturday morning. She wants us gone by then.”

“Is that what you were fighting about last night?”

“I let her win. Told her she was right, after all.” Then he turned to look at me, and his green eyes were as cold and expressionless as his voice. “You always hated her, didn’t you?”

I shrugged. I didn’t care.

“I’ve always hated her, too,” he said. “From the moment I saw her.”

On Friday, Lily made herself scarce. Jack brooded, and smoked, and drank. Once I said, “Something will come up. It always does,” and he said, “Sure it will.”

“We’ll go to California. Like you said when we first got here.”

“Maybe.”

“Or anywhere else you want.”

Slowly, he turned his head and looked at me.

“Josie,” he said. “Little sister. Quit trying to make me feel better.”

She came home that night, holding two shopping bags in each hand. A blood-colored scarf edged in black embroidery was wrapped jauntily around her neck. The scarf blazed against her new dark hair. One of the bags held a bottle of champagne, already chilled, and a bottle of pear brandy. “A going-away party,” she said gaily, “for all three of us, and if we don’t all set off with hangovers tomorrow I’ll turn in my Holly Hostess badge and join a leper colony.” She dropped the bags on the island in the kitchen and looked around. Her eyes skipped nervously over my brother, who was standing in a corner of the kitchen, watching her sullenly.

“I went to see my decorator today,” she said, starting to dig around in the shopping bags. She pulled out plastic bags of tomatoes and garlic and boxes of pasta. “I think I’m going to have this place redone, get rid of all this damn white. André has some beautiful tapestries in his show room. I’m thinking reds and purples, maybe some indigo.” She gave us a dazzling smile. “Doesn’t that sound gorgeous? You’ll have to come back for a visit when it’s done.”

Jack pointed at the two bottles on the counter. “What are we supposed to do with these?”

“First, open them,” she said. “Then, drink them.”

“Chick drinks,” Jack said as Lily poured generous shots of brandy into three wine glasses and topped them off with champagne.

Now he looked at her intently. She didn’t seem to notice.

“A festive drink for a festive evening.” She handed us our glasses with a flourish. “Voilà. Mimosa à la Lily. Now, what should we drink to?”

Jack said, “Whatever you want.”

“To the future, then,” she said, and we drank.

Once you’ve decided to tell the truth, it’s hard not to qualify it. The facts are the easy part. The sky is blue. Fire is hot. He hit her. The problem is that it’s so often tempting to qualify those facts:
It sounds worse than it was. It sounds terrible when I say it like that.
Or there’s the other way out: rationalization as absolution.
It was awful, I shouldn’t have done it. I wasn’t thinking. You have to understand how I was feeling, what I’d been through.

Either way: I didn’t do it. But I didn’t stop him.

We were drunk. Something different.

Lily and I were each stretched out on one of her two white couches, laughing. I told myself that it was all a sham, that I was only acting cheerful, but the truth was that this was the last night that I would ever spend in Lily’s apartment. We would leave the next morning; I didn’t know where we would go, but it would be somewhere else. That was enough for now.

Jack brooded in the background. Once, while Lily was in the bathroom, he came to me and let his head drop into my lap, whining, “I hate her. I hate her. I hate her.” He sounded like a child. I wondered why leaving Lily was so different than leaving Raeburn or Becka had been, but she came back into the room before I could ask him.

Lily told us a story about a friend of hers who had been cheated by every tour guide and shopkeeper in Athens. By the third time the friend paid fifty dollars for a ten-minute cab ride, I was laughing, and so was Lily. Next to me on the couch I felt Jack grow more and more rigid until finally he said, “For the love of Christ, would the two of you please shut
up.”

Lily fixed him with a pitying gaze and said, “So very, very grouchy.”

In response, Jack jumped to his feet and threw his full glass of champagne at Lily’s pure white wall, leaving an ugly wet splotch.

Lily’s eyes widened and she laughed. Her laugh was high and uneasy. I laughed, too—I couldn’t help it. His gesture was so melodramatic and self-indulgent and I was giddy with alcohol and fever and nervous tension. When Jack walked around to the back of the couch and stepped on the stem of the glass, it snapped with a noise like a tree branch breaking and I giggled again.

“Fuck both of you,” he said.

Lily beamed up at him drunkenly. “But darling, you already have.”

Time froze. Across the room Jack was looking at Lily with new eyes, ablaze with green fire. I felt as though one of the walls of the room had collapsed, like the bombed buildings in war photos, with the inhabitants’ lives exposed: this is how they lived, this is what they ate, this is how they loved.

Her eyes glittering, she looked at Jack, who was standing between the couch and the wall, then at me. “I’m right, aren’t I?” She clapped her hands and laughed wildly. “I knew it. I knew it! Carmichael had his suspicions, and I knew, of course I knew, but I didn’t
know.”

“Lily,” Jack said. His voice was low and dangerous.

She jumped to her feet. Her eyes shone. “Oh, I’m not judging. I think it’s kind of romantic. A little sick, maybe, but who isn’t a little sick sometimes?”

“Lily,” I said. I thought that I should probably put myself between her and Jack, but I couldn’t make my feet move, and in addition to the alcohol and the fever and the fear, there was a burgeoning excitement in me that was a little terrifying. I saw Jack move toward her.