Nicotine (16 page)

“Is this the vacant house?” the locksmith inquires. “Where I was ordered to change the locks? This is not going to work.” The locksmith is in his thirties, with a wedding ring, an orderly short haircut, and blue uniform coveralls bearing his name, Gene. He looks dissatisfied.

“There's obviously been a mistake,” Rob says. “Maybe the wrong address.”

“Just maybe. Because nobody told me I was going to be dealing with
squatters
.”

“Who don't want you to change the locks.”

“I didn't figure that.” Gene returns his heavy toolbox to the truck and comes back up on the porch. “How long have you been here? This doesn't look fresh.” He indicates the flaking lightning bolt squatter symbol and cobwebby individualized doorbells.

“Seven or eight years, maybe?”

“I'm not crazy about squatters, but what I really can't stand is slumlords who think they can waste my time,” Gene says.

“You mean a skinny, bearded guy in an Audi A5? About forty-five?”

“I didn't see him. Just talked on the phone. He drives an Audi?”

Rob nods.

“Some people have fucking too much money,” Gene says.

“You up for lunch? It'll be ready around eleven. Moussaka, if you're still in the neighborhood.”

“Oh, that sounds so good. But I have to get over to Kearny.” They shake hands.

JAZZ SLEEPS AGAIN UNTIL ROB
calls her downstairs for lunch. After lunch she downloads an e-mail from Matt.

Doing his best to be charming, he draws on every rhetorical style ever demonstrated to him by anyone.

Princess! Hope I'm getting your address right. Bae been on my mind so hard, I might be coming around 2CU real soon. But it won't be a surprise anymore, because my attempt to get keys of my own didn't work out. Do you people *ever* go to work? Three residents out of five at home on a Monday morning! Vive l'anarchie, or something. I should have your job. Do you even know what I do? I design discreet hydraulic compacting systems for waste disposal. I do some pretty work. You won't see it around JC (bc glam). But should you get up to Saddle River or down to Princeton one of these days, you'll see my stuff. Garbage disappears like it was never there. In that spirit I remain, yours ever faithfully, MB

Jazz deletes the mail, briefly. She restores it to her inbox.

ROB SENDS A TEXT MESSAGE
to Penny:
Leftover moussaka
.

Around four o'clock in the afternoon, she arrives at the house. She brings a salad made of poached green asparagus, shallots, lemon, and blanched almonds. Jazz puts her arms around the bowl. “I love this salad so much, I want to make out with it,” she says. She pulls the plastic wrap tight and sticks it in the fridge next to Rob's moussaka, which she says tastes to her like school cafeteria shepherd's pie, only moldy.

“Is Rob upstairs?”

“Out in the garage. But maybe we could talk a second.”

“Sure,” Penny says.

Jazz sets about making a pot of coffee. “So your half-brother Lucifer sent somebody around this morning to change the locks.”

“That is so Matt.”

“So now I'm confused. Is this his house, or yours, or what?”

Penny shakes her head and bites her lower lip. “I wish I knew! Seriously. It's a complicated patchwork-family thing.”

“Right. Complicated because a man had two wives, not even at the same time, and three children. Baby, you need to lose your ethnocentrism if you want to keep living at Tranquility.”

“All right! It's not complexity per se. It's that Matt's mother—well, also Patrick's mother—I have two half-brothers and they're both a lot older—I have no idea who she was. I never heard her name.”

“That's actually pretty strange.”

“I certainly never met her, or heard anything about her. I
think
she's dead, for the reason that we also have this summer cabin that I think must have been in her family. And now Mom inherited it, just like everything else. Dad was like forty years older than Mom, with two sons also older than her. So Matt and Patrick's mother, if she's not dead, she's in her seventies. So I think it's basically that Matt might be putting pressure on Mom to pay out a little bit of his inheritance. Which would also be my inheritance? But somehow I don't seem to have any say in what happens with it.”

“Your dad didn't have a will?”

“If he did, I sure didn't see it.”

“I think Matt killed his own mother by setting fire to this house, and that's why when he goes up near the attic where she died, his dick gets hard as granite.”

“What?”

“Just thinking aloud.”

“You
fucked Matt
?” Penny folds her arms tightly.

Jazz raises her shoulders and turns her head, picking up her coffee cup in both hands like a small child. She takes a sip. “He's
intriguing! The innocent sex beast. Your brother wants it the way a guy can only want it if he's never getting it.
Really bad.
Desire like that turns me on.”

“He's not my brother, and imagining he killed his mother in your room is perverted.”

Jazz reaches for a cigarette, exposing a scarred wrist. “It's arousing to me. I try to discover what excites me first, and analyze it later.”

“Bullshit,” Penny says. “It's operant conditioning. You slept with him, and if he'd talked about his golf game, right now you'd be saying golf makes you hot. But knowing him, he didn't talk about anything. He just put his hands around your neck.”

Penny glances downward, masking a vivid flashback to her father's final run-in with his cat. She can feel the incongruous serrated knife in her heart. It has nothing to do with the current conversation—she's pretty sure of that—just with the notion of hands on necks, which of course she brought up herself, so maybe it does have something to do with the conversation.

“He wants me,” Jazz says.

“Is that why he sent somebody to change the locks?”

“Maybe he was going to give me the other key.”

“This is
too
fucking romantic. You're turning me on.”

“You're misunderstanding me,” Jazz protests. “Sure, I fucked his hot, lonely desire. Poor Matt. He sent me a love letter. And now all I have to do is tell him I want to go on living in this house with my friends, and he'll find a way.”

“To do what? Pay off the other heirs so you can keep living here? It's not his house! It could be Mom putting the pressure on him, I think because this house is the easiest way to raise cash. She's already accused me of doing what you want Matt to do—keep Nicotine a squat because I have a lover here.”

“Maybe she'd be more indulgent of a man?”

“If she knew about you and Matt, she might come over here with some gasoline and light you on fire herself.”

Jazz is silent. “Maybe I shouldn't always be plotting,” she says at last. “I think with a family as complex as yours, I might be in over my head.”

“I know I am,” Penny says. “I'm too depressed to even look for work. And I can tell you why. My whole family is useless, and every night when I go to sleep the first thing I do is lie there breathing. Okay, that's normal, but when I do that—breathe—it reminds me of Dad. Because when he was dying, that's all he could do. Breathe. For
weeks
. I was such a fucking idiot not to walk away. No one could help him, and now I have PTSD complete with flashbacks. How am I supposed to go to sleep without breathing?”

“Maybe music would drown it out. Or you could masturbate.”

“I tried all that. I still get Dad flashbacks. No, thanks. What I need is to not go to bed
alone
. To feel a living person—”

“Go back to Rob,” Jazz says with conviction. “He doesn't
want
you, but that doesn't mean he doesn't like you. You rejected him for not wanting you, but you know what desire is worth. I mean, look at me and the prince of darkness!”

“Forget I said anything.”

“Rob's different. Any other guy, to get that close, you'd have to be fucking. With him, there's not that barrier. You just get close. He won't resist it, if you don't. Trust me, there are worse things than a guy who can be friends.”

“Just forget it.”

“Then do what everybody else does when they can't handle sleeping alone—camp out on the DJD!”

PENNY TRIES JAZZ'S IDEA. FULL
of leftover moussaka, tired from thinking and talking, she shows up at DJD after supper. Without consulting anyone, she curls up on the DJD. She reads an old clothbound hardback of
The Master and Margarita
that she finds glued to an end table with honey. (Her hypothesis: a previous guest used it to hide a honey spill.) All around her, the residents go about their
business—talking, making tea, listening to music far away on upper floors. She is invisible. Each resident ignores her as though she were a couch surfer some other resident forgot to announce.

She falls asleep over the book. One moment she is reading, and the next she is waking up late in the evening, wondering where she is. From the kitchen she can see reddish light and hear voices—a vague, soft conversation that rises into laughter and back again. An unzipped sleeping bag covers her, no idea whose. She reaches out and feels the reassuring solidity of the DJD on all sides. A cat disengages itself from her hair. She realizes it has been serving her as a warm cap. “Mew,” she says in greeting.

She pulls the cat down to chest level and presses it against her heart. Not sadly, but for pleasure. For the first time since Norm's death, the night brings her no grief and no terror.

The reason is obvious. It doesn't make her feel like a fool for missing it before—more like Eve driven from Eden. Of course she feels fine. It's like being small. She's back in Manaus, and the babysitter has tucked her in on her cot with the mosquito netting and is talking to friends over mocha in Portuguese, and her kitty Boni is in her arms.

She likes it. It works. No tension. No love. She nestles down into the mattress and soaks it up: the softness underneath her, the steady murmur of voices, the purring of the animal.

She wants a cigarette, but she doesn't want to stand out on the sidewalk to get it. She hugs the cat and falls asleep.

AT SIX IN THE MORNING,
Jazz writes to Matt:

That's such a coincidence, because I too am a hard worker who makes garbage disappear without a trace! To my knowledge I have no work on display in Saddle River or Princeton either one. Want to fuck someplace private? I have some ideas.

He replies within ten minutes with a room number on a high floor of a luxury hotel on the Paulus Hook waterfront, asking her to meet him there at five o'clock the same afternoon.

AT EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE
morning, with the cat squarely on top of her head, Penny awakens on the DJD from dreams of flying.

Feeling so at home in a strange place lends her an unaccustomed cockiness. She uses her cell phone to write a short e-mail to Patrick, asking about his mother, Norm's wife before Amalia.

She receives his reply an hour later. She reads the first paragraph, gets up, wraps herself in the sleeping bag, and sits outside on the front porch to read the rest.

She knows Patrick's usual writing style—terse and controlled, masterly at condensing major life events into bite-size texts, like his response to Norm's death (“Requiescat”). This mail by contrast seems breathless, as though he had been saving up a long time to say things that now emerge offhand and casual because that's the one tone he can assume without triggering his urge to keep control.

Hey P., I'm on Mindanao. Great weather, wish you were here. It's weird you should ask that or maybe just that it took you so long and you ask only now that Norm's gone. But I guess he never talked about it, so why would you even be curious.

    
You know the story how your mother came on the scene, the wild street kid my age, Matt was older (16). Mom was great with her.

    
How can I describe Mom? Really pretty and sweet. Maiden name Katie Donaldson, from Murray Hill, her family had a little RE empire there (2 bldgs), she was a travel agent and that's how she met Dad. (Look thru his stuff for cute pix!)

    
So to make a long story short your mother sexually was a pushover. Like you could say “put this in you (whatever it was) and I'll give you an M&M.”

Here Penny briefly doubts Patrick's veracity, but only while she associates the story with her father. As soon as she tries to visualize Norm using M&M's to buy sex from a child, she knows what's coming.

    
She's smart now but in 1985 she was diff and a certain 16 year old figured it out fast. I was not into it & Dad was MOST DEFINITELY not. He ended up spending all his covering her ass,

All his what? What exactly did it take to stop Amalia from submitting to Matt for candy? Promises of love? She asked about her father's first wife, and now she's getting the primal scene.

    
It was a massive effort and conflict. Mom got stressed out and said she was taking off (from Cartagena, Dad was volunteering with this Drs w/o Borders type thing) to this fishing village to chill out on a houseboat. and that was IT. She got in a taxi and that was IT. GAME OVER. NEVER another trace. No word, no witnesses, no more lives for Mom!!! Like she turned into air and flew away.

    
Except we both know that isn't how peoples bodies disappear, so it was also like HELL. Even just thinking about it is HELL.

The part about how reluctantly bodies die strikes her intuitively as true. The
HELL
part, she tries to imagine and can't.