Nicotine (15 page)

“You may,” Jazz says. “Is that breakfast?”

“Do you prefer coffee?” he asks. “We can go out.” (He appends this suggestion in case she has company.)

“No. I've been awake for hours.”

Hearing the “I,” he knows she is alone. Leather boot heels clicking,
he follows her through the front hall and up the stairs. The red quilting of her robe sways as she slinks through the house, her body dodging from side to side like a weasel's. On the third-floor landing, she turns and says, “There's nobody home. They're all at a demo against TTIP.”

“And you?”

“I wasn't in the mood.” She continues up the stairs.

In her room he sets down his gifts and says, “May I help you with your boots?”

She sits on the foot of her bed and raises one leg.

He pulls off a boot, and she raises the other leg. He pulls off a boot, unbuckles his belt, unzips his fly, and falls into a modified push-up, hovering above her on his hands and knees on the bed. Her legs are spread and she is smiling. He stands again briefly to take a condom from his pocket and unroll it over his penis. He lets his pants and underwear fall, without kicking them off (he is still wearing boots), and suggests she draw the curtains.

“No curtains,” she says.

He looks out and sees, five roofs away, a woman watering potted plants with a green plastic watering can.

The landscape is a high desert, black and silver, touched with the red of rusting TV antennas and the white of satellite dishes. Storage sheds on the roofs poke up like the hollow hills of Cappadocia. He looks down at Jazz's face, and lowers his now blind, rubber-encased penis to her vagina. It is soaking wet. “Jesus,” he says, sliding into the hot, wet space.

Jazz moves against him and begins to cry out. He looks up and sees the woman with the watering can. She is staring. He places his hand over Jazz's mouth and nose and thrusts into her violently. She squeaks—a muffled, wide-eyed, helpless gasp for air—and the woman with the watering can turns away. He grabs two handfuls of Jazz's hair and tugs her head down into the mattress. He fucks her
for seventeen minutes, feeling himself hard and heavy as a stone. He lets himself fall, smothering her with his chest, embracing her tightly with his arms around her waist as he comes.

They lie still for a minute or two. He says, “Give me a kiss.”

“Why?” Jazz asks. She pushes her hair out of her eyes.

He laughs and asks if she's thirsty. She nods, and he reaches to take the champagne bottle from the bedside table. He rests it next to her ear to open it, his weight on his elbows. The cork flies upward with a pop.

He drinks only a few sips before announcing that he needs to get back to work. Not seeing a wastepaper basket, he drops the condom on the wax paper wrapping of the focaccia and pulls up his pants.

Jazz follows him down as far as the landing on the second floor. She says aloud her long, anonymous e-mail address—a string of numbers at an anarchist domain—paying them both a compliment with her confidence that he will remember it.

ROB PARKS THE MINIVAN ON
Bowery and the group disembarks. They walk uptown, holding their placards downward and facing in. They walk like jaded sophisticates, their mission not to change hearts and minds, but to pad out the small cohort of activist groups determined to be publicly identified with opposition to secret trade negotiations. The organizers expect at most eight hundred people. Around thirty will be agents provocateurs enjoying police protection, and another twenty will linger in the designated smoking area where Sorry now stands, finishing a cigarette.

She leans on a lamppost, at her feet a small portable fire extinguisher. The irregular polygon where smoking is permitted is outlined on the pavers in yellow duct tape. The smoking area is so far from the stage that the small crowd reaches nowhere near it. That makes it easier for the Blue Bloc minivan passengers to see Sorry as they walk up Broadway. She waves.

Rob waves back. They cross Fourteenth Street—looking both ways to see not oncoming traffic but distant mounted policemen on horses that stand foursquare and still, as though asleep—slowly raising their placards as they approach Sorry. She laughs approvingly at
TTIP/BAD TRIP.

“It's nuts that we're so far away,” Penny says.

“Yeah, we're pretty far back,” Sorry says. “If you want to hear something, you can just head up front. You're not obligated to stay with us.”

“No, I mean it's weird.” Penny glances eastward to where demonstrators are gathering with large banners in black, red, and green. “It's like they're here against TTIP, and we're here for smokers' rights.”

“That's how discrimination works,” Rob says. “You exclude people because they have something meaningless in common, and pretty soon they're one big family.”

“Plus I thought this was supposed to be a march.”

“That's later,” Rob says. “For people who want to get arrested.” He turns and spits into a bush. “Not my thing.”

“I've never had
any
interest in getting arrested,” Sorry says, stubbing out her cigarette against the lamppost. “I'm allergic to institutions of that nature. Any place that locks you up.” She tucks the tar-stained cigarette filter into a spring-loaded portable ashtray she takes from her pocket. She picks up a sign and faces front.

The sun breaks through the clouds, lighting up the banners and treetops. The weekend air seems fresh. An organizer's voice booms, but it is too far to hear well. “I'm going up front,” Penny says. Holding her sign upright, she walks toward the distant loudspeakers, accompanied by Anka.

After they leave, several other smokers come to the lamppost to chat. Soon they, too, choose signs and walk toward the dais, accompanied by Sorry. Rob is left alone with Tony.

“She really digs you,” Tony says. “I'm so fucking jealous, I might move out.”

“That wouldn't stop her,” he says. “And I don't know what you're worried about.”

“She's different.”

“True.” Rob spits into a bush. “Why don't we talk about TTIP for a while? How much it sucks and all that.”

“Who gives a shit about TTIP?” Tony says. “Everybody knows it's wrong. It's just a news item. Another bad omen in the sky.”

Rob doesn't respond.

“Do you even know what TTIP stands for?”

“Transatlantic, trade, international, partnership?” Rob ventures.

“Nope,” Tony says. “I don't know either, but that isn't it. Anyway, I'm more interested in knowing whether you plan to cut Penny loose anytime soon, so that maybe she notices I'm alive.”

“No chance,” Rob says.

“You're a female attention sinkhole,” Tony says. “You lead them on. It's kind of shitty, especially for men within your gravitational field.”

“What do you mean?” Rob says. “Would it be less shitty if I fucked them all?” He spits out his wad of tobacco on the asphalt and adds, not looking at Tony, “My political activities are a foregone conclusion. I'd like for my personal life to be different.”

“You have it way too easy,” Tony says. “If you want things to get interesting, gain twenty pounds and shave your head. That would put the suspense back in your life. You might even meet some women who don't follow you around begging for it.”

Tony tries to relight his cigar with a cardboard match from an old yellow matchbook advertising a taxi service, but it has apparently been wet. He cannot get any match from the matchbook to light. “I'm going to catch up with those guys,” he says, flinging the matchbook into a bush and tucking the cigar behind his ear.

“I'll come with you,” Rob says. “It's not like I need to be in the smoking zone.” He picks up the little red fire extinguisher and carries it like a schoolbook, cradled in one hand.

On their way forward they meet Anka and Sorry coming back
the other way. Tony joins them to return to the Blue Bloc, while Rob presses forward into the crowd, looking for Penny.

He finds her close to the stage. Setting the fire extinguisher down, he stands behind her and places his hands on her shoulders. He lowers his head to rest his cheek against her ear. She shivers with pleasure. A tall plainclothes cop in a button-down shirt and Mets cap touches his arm and says, “Weapons not allowed.” His gaze indicates the fire extinguisher. Rob makes eye contact with Penny, and they return to the smoking section.

“How come there's no ‘NORTL'?” Sorry is saying as they arrive. “‘National Organization for the Reform of Tobacco Laws.'”

“Because it would be superfluous,” Tony says. “There's a huge industry devoted to making it easy to buy tobacco.”

“At thirteen dollars a pack?” Sorry says. “If they want it to be easy, they're definitely fucking up. I have a medical need to keep my mania under control.”

“By turning it into depression, thirteen dollars at a time,” Tony replies.

Sorry laughs with the others. “I know. Financially, smoking is suicidal. But in every other way, it's the thing keeping me alive. I'm serious.”

“Why don't you buy nicotine patches or gum?” Penny asks. “Wouldn't Medicaid cover it?”

“Because they're not indicated for manic-depressive disorder. They're for people trying to quit smoking.”

“Not for people who think if they quit smoking they're going to die,” Rob says.

“That sounds like some kind of paradox,” Penny says.

The rally winds down. There is some discussion as to whether they should send Rob alone to get the minivan and pick them up, but they decide it's such a nice day that they should walk together back down to Bowery.

“Nice to know TTIP is dead and buried,” Tony says.

“Did you see people there from any other CHA houses?” Penny asks.

“There's no anti-World-Trade-Organization house,” Tony says.

“There aren't really any ‘anti' houses,” Rob says. “The houses are always
for
something. I mean, you can be against poverty, but you wouldn't go around saying it should be banned. That would be like the Trump campaign. On the left, you try to get the government to invest in your issue. Create sustainable growth via fairer redistribution of our tax dollars.”

“If it weren't for cigarettes, you wouldn't be paying taxes at all,” Penny says. “You're all pseudo-self-employed, right? And squatters, even if you are paying off a home improvement loan from CHA.”

“CHA is probably bankrolled by the Koch brothers,” Rob says. “You want to control the left, offer it cheap rent. We get to live for free, and what do they get? We stick to specific issues and work in a way that's potentially effective. Meaning we join the service economy, and the service we're providing is to be a sop to people's conscience. Make them think there's somebody out there fighting TTIP.”

Penny looks at her sign. She says, “So are CHA houses ever bugged?”

“What for?” Rob says. “Informants are cheaper. Like you. Look at you. Just drift in on the wind, and you're living in Tranquility, with people there arguing that you don't need to pay rent. The Feds don't even have to give you a salary. You're grateful for a roof over your head. Maybe they told you there'll be a couple thousand dollars in it for you if you dig up something good.”

“Like that dirty bomb you're building with the plutonium in the garage,” Tony says. “That bomb is ineffective. I don't know why you keep building it.”

“Being a fuckup gives me flexibility,” Rob says.

“You're just typical white dudes,” Penny says. “You can fuck up over and over and get away with it. Fuck up stuff a hundred times
in a row, get it right once, and call it a learning curve. I
know
you people, man. I was a business major!”

“Anarchism is the poor man's B-school,” Tony says.

“I mean it! CHA is like the dot-com boom. I had it as a case. It's like an overcapitalized start-up, having to adjust its goals upward to justify the faith placed in it by its investors. You know that saying ‘Think Globally, Act Locally'? That's what start-ups do. You have to tell the VCs you're going to change the world, even when what you've got is an app that tells you when to refill the dog dish. To get liberal seed money for a free house for people like Stevie and Jacob, you have to say you're achieving way more than cheap rent.”

(She has this critique ready at hand because something similar has been going through her head since she noticed she's heavily invested in Rob. She can't stop thinking he's both high potential and a liar. Undervalued businesses are dishonest, too, in their own way, right? If Rob didn't go around saying he's asexual, wouldn't she be standing in line behind dozens of competing emotional VCs? She's his only stakeholder. She could win big. That's her thinking.)

“I know what you mean,” Rob says. “It's like facilitators, always telling you their nonviolent conflict resolution method would work in Syria because it worked at their community garden.”

“But our ambitions really are trivial as all get-out,” Sorry says. “Live one day at a time, and try to afford cigarettes by living in New Jersey.”

“And bring down the WTO and put an end to globalization.” Penny waves her sign in the air. A car honks its horn in support.

The others stand still and wave their signs, and several more cars honk.

THE NEXT DAY—MONDAY—A
locksmith's panel truck pulls up in front of Nicotine and parks in the street. It is five minutes after 9:00
A.M.
and the truck's loud idling awakens Sorry and Jazz.

Sorry looks out her window and yells, “Tony! Toe-neeee! Rob!”

Tony is not home—he is taking a walk, planning to tell everyone when he gets back that he went down to the union hall to ask about work as a welder—but Rob is in the kitchen, making moussaka with wilted broccoli, dubious mascarpone, and packaged prefab puff pastry he fished out of a Dumpster. He opens the front door.