Nicotine (36 page)

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, MATT
comes down to the café to accept the congratulations of his father's old friends. His mood can be described as very, very bad.

He feels bad. Also angry, which is less unpleasant but more of a spur to action. Still he stays calm. What else can he do? In the last
analysis, everything is fine. He has supplanted Rob. Commerce can begin. Even his father's old friends are paying for their tea. Jazz isn't there, but as the Bread song says, it don't matter to him.

IN THE MORNING PENNY GETS
up at half past six, feeling groggy. She puts on panty hose, a tight blue suit, and platform pumps. She teases her hair with a viscous product and pins it into a chignon. She sneaks downstairs to make coffee and call a cab to the PATH station.

No one else is awake—except Rob, who comes into the kitchen in his sleepwear and says, “Who are you, and what have you done with Penny?”

“I'm her earthbound other self, ‘money-Penny.' Get it?”

“Well, I hope you have a very good day, because it's a very hot look. I might be interested in taking it off you when you get home.” He pours himself a cup of coffee to take back to bed. “God, I remind myself of Tony.”

“As long as you don't remind
me
of Tony.”

“It's those shoes,” he says. “They make your skirt twitch around when you walk.” He grabs her around the hips and gives her a damp and elaborate kiss. “Who needs money? Let's go upstairs.”

“No chance,” she says. “Especially not now that I know what turns you on. The management consultant look. This outfit cost seven hundred dollars, so if you don't mind, I have to go occupy Wall Street now.”

“We don't have to take long.”

“I am
way
too tired to have sex.”

“You're not too tired to go to work!”

“It's not like I'm a waitress, or operating a jackhammer or something. All I have to do is get to Manhattan and sit down.”

“Looking at you, the financial crisis makes a lot more sense to me,” Rob says.

HER FIRST DAY OF PRESENTATIONS
in darkened rooms with her fellow global commodities market analyst trainees in the investment banking division of Big Bad Bank is grave, dignified, and uneventful. She goes out with her classmates after work, for just one drink. She heads home to Tranquility bleary-minded and happy.

And there's Rob, waiting for her in bed, reading a magazine! She couldn't be happier. She can't think of anything that has happened lately without just feeling happy as all get-out. She fucks him in a trance state and falls asleep, rising the next morning at six-thirty to shower.

Rob isn't as passive as he looks. He feels an avid longing to move to a house with a space where he might set up his tools and work on bikes. He even knows which house he wants. He just can't see how to get it yet.

THE NEXT MEETING OF THE
Baker Books Collective (they refuse to call themselves employees) takes place without Matt. They can hear him upstairs moving around. They ring his doorbell. They text him. He stays upstairs.

There is consensus that his behavior must be censured. Kestrel is charged with speaking to him.

It takes her two days, but she catches him coming home from work and asks for a word in the hallway. About twenty seconds into her formulaic and pompous explanation of anarchist collective protocol, he fires her.

“You can't do that.”

“Yes, I can. Take your shit, leave my bookstore, and never come back.”

The other employees walk out with her. He has to lock the door himself.

THE DOOR STAYS LOCKED FOR
two weeks while Matt hires experienced booksellers from Brooklyn. The store reopens discreetly. No customers come.

None. Zero. Hashtag:
#boycottbakerbooks
. The movement's Facebook page demands collectivization of the store and removal of the violent profiteer Matt.

The meeting rooms and yoga studios are bustling centers of community activity, but no one orders a coffee in the bookstore. No one eats a cake pop. No one buys a novel. In their spare time (they have nothing but spare time), the Brooklynites try to launch a mail-order business. They ask Matt for a capital injection.

Matt announces on Facebook that he is firing the Brooklynites and closing the store. Unceremoniously, the store closes.

THE NEXT DAY, IT REOPENS.
Matt comes by after work to find Kestrel manning the register. Feather is in the act of selling a large latte with three shots of espresso to Jacob in exchange for one dollar in tips.

Matt turns back toward the door and sees that the lock is broken. A heavy new padlock—not his—dangles from a hasp. He walks up the stairs to his anarcho-pied-à-terre, ignoring the Center staff and patrons to the best of his ability.

Soon DJD takes over staffing the café in rotation. Within a month, the store is consistently filled with people. In addition to books, magazines, and vinyl, it sells T-shirts, tattooing pigments, condoms, one-hitters, vibrators, and unusual shades of hair color in large bottles. When it rains, the Children's Garden shelters in the children's section—a carpeted corner filled with toys and dirty, dog-eared books that will remain forever unsold.

IN NOVEMBER, MATT STOPS COMING
around.

He stops coming around because his Real Time Crime friend discovers Jazz back on the grid. Her pattern of communication with Rob and Sorry emerges on a throwaway phone in a woodland shantytown on Oahu. Immediately he adds her to the no-fly list.

Now say thnx, it wasn't easy,
he texts Matt.
No surveil on Kurds, we're arming them now WTF?!

Sorry, he adds, is never far away, except when Jazz goes down to Waikiki Beach, which she does at such regular intervals that he has to assume she has a job there.

Matt takes a break from his new hobby of buying up houses near the Baker Center to go in search of Jazz.

Her phone lacks GPS. Finding her is a matter of triangulation. It's imprecise. He stakes out the waterfront for two fruitless days in heavy rain.

Aware that he's making a tactical error, he drives into the hills and hikes to the squatter encampment where she lives. He chooses early morning, hoping she'll be at home and asleep. It's a forest of plywood shacks and moldering portable homes, half a mile up a logging road popular with mountain bikers. There's a café with one table and two chairs to raise money selling the bikers lattes and hash. The usual psychedelic barber poles, mandalas, and towers of junk. It reminds him of Pippi Longstocking's place, if she and her friends had been flabby nudists.

There he sees Sorry emerging from a composting toilet—an outhouse high in the air, perched on a rotating drum of sawdust—only after she sees him. They don't converse. Immediately, she starts yelling. She calls him bad names. A crowd gathers. The one question she answers, she answers with, “In your dreams, asshole.” Then she returns to cursing him.

“Jazz!” he shouts. “I know you're there! Jazz!”

In an old narrow-gauge caboose at the edge of the settlement, a
woman Jazz is about to massage says to her, “You hear that? Somebody's looking for you.”

Jazz warms ylang-ylang oil by rubbing her hands together. Placing them motionless on the woman's back, she says, “That's my fiancé. We're getting married the day I turn fifty.”

“Congratulations,” the woman says.

Matt slogs away through mud that reminds him unpleasantly of his last encounter with Sorry. He sits in his rental car next to the trailhead for the rest of the day, but he doesn't see Jazz. She takes a different path to catch her bus to where she works late, washing dishes at a dinner theater. She turns off her phone. The next day, using Sorry's Social Security card and driver's license (it's an old picture), she lands a twenty-eight-day gig standing in the galley of a fishing vessel. A day later she is on the ocean, learning Tagalog.

HE FINDS HER, JUST ONCE.
Passing outside a massage parlor between the convention center and the boardwalk, he is accosted by a Romanian girl who looks like her. She pleads with him, saying, “I want you all night long.” She holds out one hand to him, pressing the other against her abdomen, as if to prepare or protect it—a pitiful wisp of a girl, too hungry, too young. Motives the same as any woman's. The human condition gives her no choice but to make love or die.

The gesture makes him think of whirling dervishes dancing with one hand pointed at the sky and the other at the ground. Power flows through them. A gesture of the purest femininity. He almost blows the sixty bucks. Then he thinks, Hell, I can't fuck this girl. She's too weak. Transmitting my power would destroy her. He imagines coming inside her and watching her die—with sadness. The image strikes him as inexpressibly sad.

It also strikes him as completely crazy. He's sober enough to know that much. He breaks into a sweat and runs all the way to the
beach. There he sits down on a bench on the boardwalk, breathing heavily.

He rises again to get a drink from a bar below him on the sand. Maybe it's the bar where Jazz works. He always imagines her tending bar.

He recalls her off-kilter walk, her off-center nose, her frizzy curls, her jagged scars, her stubborn, frail body. Her eyes like portholes into space. Say you want her, and she names her price: her life, yours, the loss of everything she owns. She doesn't hesitate. She acts. He thinks, When the world was empty and void, her drama and grace called me into being, and now there are two of us in the whole world.

These philosophical reflections make his balls hurt. As the bartender hands him a double Scotch, he can barely suppress a cry of pain.

“I know,” the bartender says. “I wouldn't call it a double either.”

Collapsed in a lounger, he views the steady stream of foot traffic along the water's edge. Self-confident women draw past in bikini tops and fluttering sarongs. They turn dark, blank eyes on him—big bug-eye sunglasses, some mirrored, some brown. Their bodies remind him of thoroughbreds before a race. Pure brainless restlessness, restrained by the calculations of jockeys. No worries wrinkle their brows. They are sex-mongers carrying their wares to market. Their femininity is pure sham.

He reflects that while his emotions will surely fail to be satisfied in any way by sex with one of these women, his body may calm down quite a lot. He invites a woman of about thirty-five to his hotel room, buys her liquor from the minibar, and takes her to bed.

It's a relief. She seems to value their tryst for its quickness alone, for the opportunity it affords her to appear blasé. Briefly, when he first slips a finger into her cunt, she plays coy—
what a sickening parody of innocence
,
what a distasteful travesty of feminine weakness,
he
thinks as she turns her head away—saying, “What am I even doing here? I was just taking a walk! I need to get back!”

He resists the urge to slap her. He pushes her away and says, “Oh brother. Now you're going to say this wasn't consensual.” She responds by reaching for her purse and extracting four strawberry-flavored condoms. Four! Each no doubt traceable to her credit card and preferred customer program at her drugstore chain of choice. To Matt they look like little certificates of indemnity or papal indulgences. She puts one on him with her mouth.

Fondling her brittle hair, he resolves never to buy a condom again. Servicing men is her art form, the challenge she has set herself in life—as a feminist, most likely. He laughs aloud, and she looks up. He gives her a gracious smile, and she goes back to work.

He doesn't know her last name or anything about her, except that she lives in Texas, comes to Hawaii every year around this time, and (presumably) likes strawberries. Does she have a husband or kids? He has no clue. He guesses she has a husband, and that this husband's erotic ideal is the flat-rate Thai body massage. In New York, he tells himself, she would be single (marriage there is how people retire from sex, not how they start), rifling through his pockets for his wedding ring while he takes a piss, extracting sixty dollars from his wallet for a taxi to Bedford-Stuyvesant. Furthermore, she would wish to do this again tomorrow, and within a week she'd be getting creative—as in competitive—trotting out her bag of tricks (ceramic strap-on, opera tickets her boss gave her) in hopes of holding his interest. No such thing as safe sex in New York. And let's not even talk about Vegas—

The woman interrupts his reverie by pushing him down on the bed to fuck what she apparently thinks is a full erection. Her lube: strawberry. When he corrects her position to be more to his taste, she thanks him. When he's done, she jumps up like a sheep after shearing, saying she needs to get back.

So get back, he thinks.

He in turn goes back to the beach, where he scores again. Back to the room, where the minibar has been restocked. He's starting to like Hawaii. His return flight gets back in two weeks.

MATT TAKES THE TIME TO
look around, using the same proud, blank gaze the adulteresses use on him. Not a look trying to do the impossible—see through walls, or through women's eyes into their brains. Just to catch all the signals. The “What's in It for Me” gaze of the mature adult.

What he sees are high prices, low wages, a well-funded public sector reliant on tourism, heat, humidity, and strong seasonal fluctuations in garbage volume, all working together to create optimum conditions for profitable importation and maintenance of the world's most discreet, silent, odor-reducing, micro-compacting, ultrapremium garbage truck.

He can sense it. Hawaii wants his truck. He can't walk the streets without seeing its streamlined, iridescent blue-green form glide by—in his mind's eye and nose—spreading an odor of putrescence and decay, but only barely.