Nicotine (24 page)

THE NEXT MORNING, ROB MAKES
boysenberry pancakes for Penny. He sees her off for her walk home to Tranquility in light rain with an umbrella from the
FREE
box. He returns upstairs and knocks on Jazz's many-paned glass door. “Come in,” she says.

“Hey, J. How's the climate?”

“Supreme.”

“How's the landlord?”

“Hot. I'm reading this great book, the memoirs of Jean Cocteau.”

“I heard he was good.”

“He's got that breezy, casual sophistication I'm always aiming for and never hitting. Like fucking a garbage truck designer who drives an Audi. He's not really a princely prize. His art collection is the latest in porn tech. But he's hot.”

With a sigh, Rob sits down on the bed so that Jazz can read his mind.

“You're too paranoid,” she says all of a sudden, leaning toward him to rest her hands on his forearm. “It's like you got your entire sex education from Houellebecq novels. Now you think it's a heterosexual market economy and you're overleveraged—like any woman who sees your dick is going to run out and write a blog post about the emperor's new clothes. Well, guess what? It's
not
a heterosexual market economy. Heterosexuality is
over
. Who even wants intercourse anymore? Me and the landlord, maybe! Every other woman I know wants head, not to mention every other man.”

Reaching up tenderly to fix a stray bobby pin in her hair, he says, “But I always wanted to be a heavy-hung stud and impale women on my prong until they're helpless, quivering protoplasm.”

She frowns.

“I mean, when I go down on a woman, it kind of makes me want to fuck.”

“Happens to me all the time,” Jazz says. “It's the hetero-normative paradigm in action. But”—she holds up a slender fist—“I can go right up most girls with my arm.”

Rob looks down at his large hands and says, “It wouldn't be the same for me. I have options.”

“So use your dick!”

“Jazz. That's what I'm saying. Nobody wants it. Fucking happens in a woman's mind. You can't fuck alone. You know what I mean. You do the exact same thing, and depending on whether she wants it, it's rape or the highlight of her life. Well, girls take one look at my dick and say, ‘Ooh, baby, I love it when you make me come with your mouth.'”

Jazz laughs.

“But God forbid I should ask anybody to do so much as jerk me off. Even the virgins in high school were like, ‘Excuse me? This is not what I ordered.' And you know women compare notes. If I get naked once, it's over. My body image is fucked. I'm traumatized by rejection like a fat chick—like a
hairy
fat chick, with boils on her butt she drains with a shunt. I seriously cannot imagine getting naked with somebody who wasn't in love with me—but you know what? I am not interested in that person. The woman who loves me no matter what, like she's my fucking mom. I'd rather be a monk. There's generations of religious in my family. It works for me. Sort of. Not really. I have problems. I'm not happy right now. I want to get bombed off my ass and dip tobacco until everything goes back to normal.”

Jazz leans back to reflect. She says, “You ever done bondage?”

“Nope.”

“That's what you need. Tie a person up, and it's all relative. Just
look at her. After a while, she'll come if you touch her
nipple
. If it's protoplasm you're after.”

“Sounds like fun, for her—”

“Then blindfold her before you take off your pants, if you're so worried about the visuals! Keep your hand on her to confuse her. Don't use rope or belts. Use scarves. And don't say ‘impale.' It's gross.”

He picks up a conch shell lying on a bookcase. He turns it this way and that, holds it to his ear, stretches his arms and back, and says, “I love you, Jazz.”

“I love you, too, Robby.”

“Anybody else might feel sorry for me for like
one second
. But you're always like, ‘try my obvious solution, you whiner.' I can't talk to you without feeling better. And I didn't even
want
to feel better.”

“Did you hear the ocean?”

“Yup. It's right in there where you left it.” He returns the shell to its place on the bookcase.

TONY COLLAPSES HIS FOLDING BIKE
to take it on the bus. As a hostess gift, he packs one of Jazz's tobacco plants into a garbage bag, tying it shut with a green ribbon liberated from Anka. (The ribbon has been lying on the kitchen floor for several days, so he feels it is fair game.)

He rolls up to the house in Morristown, guided by the maps app on his phone. When he arrives, he sees that the black and maroon blobs on the green background around the black H are large hemlocks and copper beeches. He presses the solitary B
AKER
button on a black panel with room for several more buttons, and Amalia buzzes him in.

“So much space and no garden,” he says. “With acreage like this, you could keep a flock of pygmy sheep.” He hands over the tobacco plant.

She sets it down on the brick front porch and laughs, flattered. “Yes, it's big, no? Norm was a smart investor.”

“I'm sorry about him,” Tony says. “I mean, that he died. Though I might not be standing here if he were alive—”

“He was old and sick. I was his second wife, you know? A lot younger.” She smiles. She wears black leggings and a white T-shirt—a look inspired by Penny, or rather a look directly borrowed from Penny, some of whose clothes are upstairs in a drawer. “Coffee?” she asks.

When the conversation flags, she takes him around the yard. He plants the tobacco in a shallow pit, adding neither water nor fertilizer. She warms up lunch. They eat, speaking at intervals with long gaps.

After lunch Amalia drives Tony to the botanical garden, saying it might give her some ideas.

She is very conscientious, reading the labels on roses and camellias. She stands transfixed by a potted palm and remarks, “How can it live in winter?” She touches the leaves to see if they are plastic. In the herb garden, she points out oregano with delight, saying she has eaten it with spaghetti sauce.

“You don't know jack shit about gardens, do you?” Tony asks, deep in the arboretum.

“No! I told you, I work in HR.” Scampering, she grasps a young pine tree bole with one hand as she passes and swings around it like a teenager displaying herself. Her long hair sways. Tony feels an indistinct pleasure.

“I thought you were from some primitive hill tribe. Subsistence agriculture or what-have-you.”

“I learned to gather foodstuffs in the forest. That's how I survived when I ran away.”

“That's amazing, that you ran away and survived.”

“Ha. For girls, it's always easier if you run away. You don't have
to share anymore! Ha, that sounds bad. But it's a different life when you have nothing. Now I like to share.”

Tony grabs her free hand. She stands still, looking up expectantly, and he kisses her.

ON SUNDAY, PENNY VISITS HER
mother in Morristown.

“You're not going to believe it,” Amalia says. “I have a lover.”

“Oh god, Mom! Stop!”

“Why?”

“I already know. I
know
him. It's Tony.”

“I never thought I would experience passion again. But passion is a part of me. It was there inside me all the time, and now I can express it. I am so happy. Be happy for me.”

“Matt must be relieved. I heard you met Tony because you were stalking
Matt
. That asshole! You treat me like a
stepchild,
and you're in love with that
asshole
.” Penny wipes her eyes and blows her nose on a napkin.

Heavy sigh. Long silence. “Tony was in love with you,” Amalia says. “You know that, right? But everyone can make a mistake. The love is there inside you, and you meet the wrong person. Human beings are filled with love. That's how it was with me. I loved the wrong man all my life—”

“Dad was the wrong man?”

“No. He saved me.”

“From what? Matt? Patrick told me about how Matt used to abuse you. Remember when he tried to rape me? Matt's an
asshole
.”

“Why do you listen to Patrick? He hates me. Why do you think he lives so far away?”

Penny is silent.

“Patrick was a child. He thought love is holding hands.”

“You were his same age!”

“I had no family in Cartagena. I was a big girl, alone. Matt was a young boy. You say he abused me. What if it's the other way around? What if I abused him? Think, my baby.”

Penny thinks.

She imagines Norm striving to make up for Amalia's deficient upbringing. He and Katie serving her rich meals, giving her pretty clothes and a safe place to sleep, waiting for the light to dawn that children are fed and housed and clothed for free, simply because they are children. Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . . Penny knows pictures of Matt from when he was young. Soulful, hunky teen heartthrob for Amalia's first innocent schoolgirl crush. The ideal object—the perfect victim—for a girl struggling to act out how she was manipulated. Because that's also love. Maybe no love is needier or more intense.

One reality, mutable as shadows on smoke.

She sees Norm rejecting Amalia's advances because he was a good man, and Matt accepting them because he was neither good, nor a man. The paradox that makes her want men who reject her. The eternal conundrum of dating. She covers her face with her hands and says, “No. Yes.”

“In the end I married Norm because he loved me. You remember how he loved me.”

“That's true,” Penny says. “He loved you.”

“I believed in him. He gave me a good life, and such a wonderful daughter. And it was him who saved me. I will never reveal from what he saved me.”

Penny leans back and shakes her head, as though shaking might make the fluff fall out. “Come on, Mom,” she says. “Tell me something I don't know. I enjoy finding out what things were really like.”

“The past is gone,” Amalia says. “Norm taught me that all is one.”

“The facts are not all one!”

“Yes, they are. Even the facts are interconnected. There is
conservation of energy. When they beat you and they rape you, they become bad and you become good. As long as there is life, the balance will not change.”

Penny has trouble following what Amalia is saying. She wants it to make sense. It sounds to her like straight-up prevarication, masked as mysticism, as though Amalia is talking around something big and solid. She suspects Norm and Jazz of having masked similar prevarications as rationality, but at least—she thinks—
at least they made sense
. She wants to hear things equally persuasive from her mother. That sense of insight she felt just now, when Amalia pointed to teenage Matt's sexual inexperience: she wants it back.

“Life is like water,” her mother is explaining gently, “flowing to the ocean and up to the clouds to rain upon the hills. It can only consume itself. A river eats water. If it gets enough water, the river is a true river. Then it can carry many heavy things without pain.”

Casting about for facts to cling to, Penny's mind flashes to an image of Norm's body. Bloated and waterlogged, purple arm raised, it rocks back and forth in the shallows at the mouth of a seasonal river in western Peru. It's not the image she wants. It's extremely counterfactual, among other things.

Seeing her unhappy look, Amalia adds, “Do you see now? The river is life. That is the meaning of the cosmic snake.”

“What? The river is a snake?”

Amalia nods, and Penny shakes her head. She takes a deep breath and says, “Patrick told me about Katie.”

Amalia's fuzzy solemnity gives way to bald annoyance. “Not that,” she says. “Katie was my true mother. Don't mention her.” She stands up to take a tissue from a dispenser, and blows her nose.

“Did it happen the way Patrick said? She just disappeared?”

“What did he tell you?”

“I want your version first.”

“She took a taxicab. She waved good-bye. That's all.”

“That's all?”

“We had been fighting. Norm said she needed peace and quiet. Oh my god, he looked for her everyplace. And from the beginning we know that she is kidnapped or dead, because she loved us so much. The police didn't help us. Colombia was very bad in those days.”

Amalia's eyes are wet now, and Penny says, “I'm sorry.”

“We left Colombia right away, me and the boys.”

Penny takes another deep breath and casts her line out for another possible truth. “Some people say Matt is my father.”

“Ha-ha,” Amalia says, with studied sarcasm. “We never touched after I married Norm. I was a good wife. I loved him as a mother until Norm died
.
I never touched him for thirty years. But who cares about that garbage man? Let me show you something.”

She scrounges in her purse and finds the note to Matt on the back of the Best Buy receipt.

“Here, read this. My first love letter to Matt in all my life, on one subject only—how much I hate him. And you know why I hate him? Because I love him, but it's impossible to love an asshole. An asshole like Matt you can only hate, unless you're a worm.”

Penny reads the note. “Yeah, you pretty much hate him!”

“Compared to Norm, he's a worm.”

“He's a worm compared to most worms,” Penny says, giving her back the note. “When you said beating and raping—”

“Stop it! He was my lover, not a
para
! You think he's bad for fucking stupid sluts from the Internet? It makes me angry, too. But it's not evil. Does he kidnap and torture them? Does he kill their families? No. He's not a bad man. He is
normal
. He cannot love anyone, and that is normal. Norm was a special man.”