Part 22 (1/2)

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-s.h.i.+rt. ”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 s.h.i.+ning.

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.