Every week, Lily"s florist came to deliver fresh flowers. After a few weeks the scent of lilies was so deeply impregnated in my skin that I could smell it anywhere: on the street, in a bar, in cabs and coffee shops.
The night I saw Never again, Lily had taken us to a party in TriBeCa. I was getting a gla.s.s of red wine from the bartender-it was the kind of party where there was a bartender-when a familiar voice next to me said, rather nastily, "I hear you made it in."
I turned. At first I didn"t recognize him because he wasn"t wearing the glow-in-the-dark T-shirt. "Made it in what?" I said.
"That"s the question, isn"t it?" he said and grinned. "Maris says Lily pulled you and your life-of-the-party brother out of nowhere. She says you"re her latest bit of window-dressing."
Maris. It took me a moment to match a face to the name. Red hair, dour expression. Worked with Lily. Her thing was buying drinks; she was one of those people who always picked up a round. I hadn"t known she disliked us.
Never"s eyes were bleary and I realized that he was drunk. "She and my brother have a thing going on," I said carefully.
He didn"t seem to hear me. "Is that why you blew me off that night? Because I don"t have a trust fund for the two of you to live off of?" He leaned in close and there was glee in his eyes as he stage-whispered, "What are you going to do when she drops you?"
I stared at him. "Is that what she did to you?"
He called me a freeloading low-life b.i.t.c.h and walked away. The bartender gave me my wine. I felt remote and unaffected.
Later I pointed him out to Carmichael, who shrugged and looked bored. "Mark something," he said. "Pet roach. If you offered to f.u.c.k him he wouldn"t say no, no matter what he called you."
"Pet roach?"
"One of those obnoxious New York fads back in the eighties. Some designer started gluing c.o.c.kroaches to chains with pins attached, so you could wear them pinned to your clothes like jewelry. I"ve never actually seen one, if you don"t count the human kind. Don"t worry about him," he said.
The next morning, as we walked to the coffee shop on Broadway, I told Jack about Never and what Carmichael had said. Jack"s lip curled ever so slightly, but he said that we weren"t c.o.c.kroaches and told me that I shouldn"t look gift Lilys in the mouth.
"I wasn"t talking about us," I said. But in my more bitter moments I started to think of us that way: Lily"s pet roaches. Which, I"m sure, was what Carmichael had intended.
That night, after Jack and Lily went to bed, the noises coming through the wall were different. Jack"s voice was low and growling, and Lily"s answering cries of pa.s.sion sounded desperate and painful. A week or so later I came upon her wet and dripping in the living room with a towel wrapped around her, and there was a deep red bruise on her arm that looked as if someone had grabbed her, hard. I looked quickly at Jack and then at her, but they both ignored me.
After that, though, when the three of us were home alone together, Lily wore sheer, delicate tank tops or sweaters with wide necks that fell off one shoulder, and the creamy pale skin revealed was, more often than not, marked with purple bruises or ugly bite marks. When we went out, they were always carefully covered.
In the beginning I had marveled at Lily"s ability to go, go, go, no matter how early she"d gotten up for work; there were nights when we drifted in at 6 A.M. and she was up and gone by nine-thirty. I made some comment about it to Jack and he said, "Fairy dust and amphetamines. Check out the drawer in her nightstand sometime."
The late nights, the more-fabulous-than-thou parties, and the crowded bars-they began to wear on me. All that we ever did was go out at night and sleep it off the next day. My brain felt slow and stupid. Time began to blur.
The weather was turning cool then, and Jack wore his new jacket everywhere because it was the only one he had. Each morning, after Lily left for work, he woke me up by crawling into my bed, and each night when I went to sleep I knew that he would come to me during the night, shaking with the aftershocks of one of his nightmares. During the day, he was never far from me: holding my hand, stroking my hair, pulling me into his lap. At the same time, he grew rougher with Lily, even when I was around. Once in the kitchen I saw him push her, hard, so that she lost her balance and came close to falling onto the stove, but then he kissed her and she was kissing him back wildly, gripping the back of his head with her hands.
She started staying home more. Her exuberant glamour began to seem forced. When we did go out into the dark glitter of the city, there were times when her eyes shone with a desperate need. At home she treated me with a formal politeness that let me know clearly that she didn"t want me around anymore: she didn"t want me living with her, she didn"t want me watching her, she didn"t want me seeing her.
One night, at a bar in SoHo, I opened the bathroom door and found Lily leaning against the sink and Maris standing beside her. Lily was saying, angrily, "It"s none of your G.o.dd.a.m.ned-" But then she saw me, stopped talking, and turned her face away.
Maris saw my reflection in the mirror. "Do you mind?"
"Sorry," I said.
Lily gave me a strained smile and pushed past me, back into the bar. Her eyes were wet and shining.
Maris fixed me with a bitter, steely glare.
"I know what you"re doing," she said. "You and your creep brother. n.o.body"s fooled, okay?"
Then she walked out.
Sometimes, when Jack was asleep and Lily was gone, I would open my closet door softly and take out Jack"s old leather jacket. When I buried my face in it I imagined that I could smell the morning air in Jack"s bedroom on the Hill. Whiskey, cigarettes, freedom.
Near the end of October, Carmichael sent out black roses and invitations to a Halloween party. It wasn"t long afterward that Lily told us, as she was getting ready for work, that she was going to Paris for a long weekend in November.
She was standing in front of the mirror in her living room, making sure that her lipstick was perfect. Jack was standing near her; I was sitting on the couch, with my knees pulled up to my chest. The apartment was chilly; Lily didn"t like to turn on the heat because it wilted the lilies. I could see her porcelain face reflected in the mirror.
"The weather will be horrible," she said, frosting her lips over with pale pink lipstick, "but it"ll be horrible here, too, and I might as well suffer in Paris."
"Okay," Jack said. He was leaning against the wall next to Lily, watching her. His voice was smooth and easy but his eyes on her were hard.
Lily met them without flinching. She snapped the top back onto her tube of lipstick and ran her finger along the edge of her lower lip. "I"ll only be gone for five days. You guys can take care of things here, right?"
"Like it was our own," Jack said.
Lily"s dark eyes glanced up at him in the mirror. Her expression was almost a glare. "But it"s not."
Jack stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away from her. He came over to the couch and sat down next to me. Picked up a magazine.
"It"s too d.a.m.n early for this," Lily said and went into the kitchen. She took a container of yogurt from the refrigerator and dropped it into her bag.
Then she sighed. "Look, I"m just tired. I need to get out of this d.a.m.n city."
"No damage," Jack said without looking up from his magazine.
She gazed at him. I couldn"t read the expression on her face.
"All right," she said and left.
Jack didn"t look at me, but I could see the tension in his shoulders. "Everything okay?"
He shrugged. "She goes every year. She was talking about taking us-or at least me-with her this year."
Leaving me by myself again, I thought. I looked at the floor. "Are you disappointed?"
"At missing the chance to spend five days in a foreign country with only Lily to talk to? I"d kill her." He shook his head. "I don"t care about the trip. But I"m not sure I know what"s going on with her anymore. I don"t like it."
I lay a hand on the back of his neck. "It"ll be okay." I ran my fingers up and down the smooth skin that covered his vertebrae. "She"s moody, you know that. By the time she gets home tonight she"ll be so perky we"ll want to bash her head in again." He didn"t answer. "She wouldn"t be leaving us here alone if things weren"t cool, would she?"
Jack leaned his head back against my hand. "Could be. I don"t know, Jo. I don"t like it."
And sure enough, when Lily breezed through the door that night with an armful of shopping bags, she was full of good cheer again. "My costume for Carmichael"s party," she said, holding up the bags, and giggled. "Wait until you see it. It"s fabulous." She kissed the air in Jack"s general direction and disappeared into her bedroom.
"See?" I said. "Fine."
"Maybe," Jack answered.
The noises from their bedroom kept me awake for a long time that night. Everything seemed to be fine after all.
Jack and I were at a loss when it came to Halloween costumes. When we asked Lily for suggestions, she said, "I can"t tell you what to wear. You have to pick your own costume." Her costume, of course, was fabulous. We didn"t see it until the night of the party. A long dark wig covered her pale hair, and she wore a short black dress with a ragged hem made of many layers of diaphanous material. Gauzy black wings dusted with silver glitter sprouted from her shoulder blades; her arms were bare and dusted with more glitter, and she spent an hour forming cobwebs on her temples with tiny black crystals and eyelash glue. Her lips were a bruised purple and her kohl-lined eyes glittered with something feral. "I"m a fairy," she said. "The fairy of death."
Jack decided to go as a priest, wearing black and pinning a piece of white cardboard to his collar. I raided Lily"s closet, went to a few thrift shops, and ended up with a conglomeration of brightly colored scarves and junk jewelry. I added a brightly patterned skirt and an old peasant blouse of Lily"s.
When she saw me, she shook her head.
"You"re the world"s only blond Gypsy," she said.
"I"m the world"s only many things," I answered. I was finding the whole costume-party concept annoying. My first and favorite impulse had been to pull out one of Jack"s old T-shirts and some cutoff jeans and go as Josie Raeburn. I"d discarded the idea without genuinely considering it, sensing that it would cause more trouble than it was worth. Still, it would have felt good.
New York City on Halloween: half the population was out on the streets, and in the ten blocks between Lily"s apartment and Carmichael"s, we saw satyrs, politicians, pixies and fairy princesses, devils in red satin, witches in black tulle, and giant carrots wearing sneakers. Children were dressed as goblins, birthday cakes, mice, tomatoes; their adult escorts were tigers, pirates, and tired-looking moms and dads in comfortable shoes. Lily was in high spirits as we walked. She would leave for Paris in the morning.
There was the usual complement of s.e.xy witches and s.p.a.ce aliens at Carmichael"s, but for the most part his guests" tastes in costumes ran more toward the obscure and the ironic. One of Lily"s friends from the fashion magazine had come in a three-piece suit; "I"m boring," he said when people asked him what he was. Maris, who rarely wore any combination of clothing worth less than five hundred dollars, was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and holding a disposable camera. She said she was a tourist and pointed out her practical sneakers, which she had borrowed from her roommate. Another crony-one of the candidates in Lily"s man-parade, actually-was there in khakis and a polo shirt. He was supposed to be a Republican.
We were all crammed into two rooms. The lucky ones had found places to sit, on couches or tables or windowsills or radiators. Everyone knew Lily was leaving the next day and she was beset by people wishing her bon voyage. Jack"s eyes were guarded and grim, but he stood his ground in his priest"s collar, like a good pet roach. I felt no such obligation and staked out a safe spot in a corner.
Carmichael found me and brought me red wine in a plastic cup. He was dressed as a vampire, his dark hair slicked back from his bony face and a red jewel sparkling in one of his b.u.t.tonholes. He was drunk.
"Like my fangs?" he said and grinned lasciviously. His eyeteeth were long and pointed.
"They look real."
"Caps. There"s a place down on St. Mark"s that makes them. They take impressions and everything."
"Do they come off?"
"Eventually. Lily looks gorgeous, doesn"t she?" He scanned me from head to toe and said, "What are you supposed to be?"
"Gypsy," I said. "I guess."
He laughed. "Interesting choice. I guess Lily didn"t tell you, did she?"
"Tell me what?"
"That"s what I thought. Well, you look cute, anyway." He saw someone across the crowd and lifted a hand. "Hey, you made it!" he called and was gone.
I stayed where I was. That was the party strategy that I had developed: I picked a spot and stuck to it. Anyone who drifted within conversational distance, I"d talk to, provided they started the conversation and I felt like keeping up my half. At this party, at least, there were interesting things to look at. I watched as a thin girl wrapped in hundreds of feet of fluorescent pink tubing pa.s.sed me, and then Jack was at my elbow.
"What the h.e.l.l do you think that was?" he said.
"No clue. You know, I think I like these people a lot more when they"re not dressed as themselves. At least they"re fun to look at."
"Trust me," he said, "they"re no better to talk to. Christ, get me out of here."
"What"s up with Lily?"
"f.u.c.k knows. She"s running hot and cold. Where"d you find that drink?"
"Carmichael brought it to me."
"That doesn"t help." Jack scanned the crowd. "I need something potent. Listen, if you want to play sick and go home early, I"m game." He tugged at the scarf in my hair and disappeared into the crowd.
I drank my wine, which was warm and bitter, and stood for a while watching the party move around me like a carousel. Then I went to find another drink. The apartment was small; I expected to turn a corner and find Jack at any moment. Instead I found Carmichael, standing with Maris and a man I didn"t know in the hallway outside the bathroom door.
"Line starts behind me," Maris said.
"I"m actually looking for a drink," I said.
"I"ll get you one," the man said. He was wearing a crumpled top hat and a rusty black tailcoat, his face covered in black smudges.
Carmichael put an arm across my shoulders and said, "Jo, meet my downstairs neighbor-Joe."
Maris laughed. Her eyes were red and I realized that she was drunk, or high, or both. "That"s funny," she said. "Jo, meet Joe. Joe, meet Jo."
"Greetings," the man said. He had broad, muscular shoulders that strained the seams of his black suit. When he reached out to shake my hand, I caught a whiff of his cologne. It had a sharp chemical smell.
"What are you?" I said.
Joe tipped his hat and said, with a bad c.o.c.kney accent, "Why, I"m ye old chimney sweep, ain"t I, miss?"
Somebody in the crowd called out, "Hey, the psychic"s here!" and Carmichael excused himself. Maris gave Joe and me a knowing look and said, "Think I"ll go help Carmichael," and then I was alone with the chimney sweep, standing in the hallway.
"So," he said. "You"re Lily Carter"s newest protegee, huh?"
"No," I said.
"Funny, Carmichael told me you and your brother were living with her."
"She and my brother have a thing going on. I sleep in the spare room."
"But you don"t work."
"I"m only seventeen."
His eyes widened slightly. "You"re seventeen?"
Then the bathroom door opened and a ghost in a white sheet pushed past us.
"You want to come in?" Joe said.
I looked at the open bathroom door. I looked at him. "With you?"
"Sure."
Past him, on the bathroom counter, I saw a gla.s.s full of cut drinking straws and a small mirror next to the faucet.
"Think I"ll pa.s.s," I said.