• 
• 
• 
• 

The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations. He wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.
-Thomas de Quincey,
from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

ONE SHOULD consume Baileys in a crystal tumbler while watching Spice Hot. At jazz clubs, red wine and queen-sized, white-filtered Nat Shermans. At Hamptons polo games, a Pimm's Cup for style and a line off the dash of a police-auctioned Ferrari for effect. Crème de menthe before going down on someone who deserves it. Super Bowl Sunday, Bud cans (shotgunned) and Ritalin (crushed and snorted). A boxing match on a hotel room TV, Maker's Mark Manhattans (up, three cherries) and petite ham sandwiches on a silver tray. White Castle and Remy Red for a dog-fight. While wrapping Christmas presents, Pabst Blue Ribbon and pizza. For suicidal depression on a weekday morning, pink champagne. Before a job interview, Irish coffee and Xanax. Straight tequila on your birthday. And on that night that rolls out of the blue unknown future into the lap of the present, when a lady realizes the game is over, that kind of evening calls for martinis: stock gin, filthy, up, no olives.

I found this list scrawled on a series of cocktail napkins, stuffed into a gold clutch. Belinda and I must have written it one night a couple years ago. This was our religion. Actually, it was more important; it was art. But one day, the things that make you free start to keep you down.

The beginning of the end began with a vision. I'd twisted all night to Brazilian records at Black Betty. A strawberry-blond cornrowed kid in a Lakers jersey cut lines for me in the men's room. At home, I drank warm milk with brandy. I leaned back in my orange butterfly chair and calculated the money I owed. It was uncountable.

Outside, the night sky turned turquoise at the horizon, high-lighting a clutter of buildings close by, while the World Trade Towers glittered in the distance, across Brooklyn, on the other side of the East River. I fell asleep sometime before the sun came up.

I dreamed I was lying in a bathtub full of oatmeal, like the soak my mother made when I had chicken pox. Around my neck, dropping to my sternum like a necklace, lay a ring of blisters. I understood them in the dream to be "fever pearls." From above, I looked down on my body, on my bloated white form, and knew the pulsing marks to be pockets of toxins locked under my skin.

I woke to sunlight, clutching a teddy bear that hadn't existed in many years.

I'd waited half an hour and was late for work. Anthony leaned against his Escalade, beefy arms crossed, talking to someone hidden under the keyboard awning. I owed him three months of rent, and soon, September. I bit my nails and watched through my cheap lace curtain.

I paced. Checked the time on my phone every thirty seconds. Opened the fridge once more: a few Rheingolds and a pink gel eye mask. Eggs and orange juice hadn't materialized. Stopped in front of the mirror to curse my baby face again. The dimple in my chin, the pucker under my eyes that made me look sleepy even when I was wired, my pout, my long, dark-red hair and Bettie Page bangs: these features conspired against me. I looked exactly like a girl who wouldn't pay rent.

Finally he left, and I ran down the stairs.

Everyone still wore leather, even though it was a hundred degrees, squinting as they emerged from steamy buildings with bull-dogs. Cars cruised, windows open, bass thumping. Girls walked to summer school pushing strollers. Boys strutted down the sidewalk, earphones around necks, diamonds in both ears. A hydrant exploded, crystal in the haze.

Air conditioners leaked down from windows. Plastic bags floated across empty basketball courts. A fat white kid, shirt hung around neck like scarf, walked in the middle of the street with an ice cream melting off the cone faster than he could lick it.

"Lee."

Anthony was sitting at an outdoor table. We fought in low, restrained voices. Then he offered me two weeks to pay up. Otherwise, he warned, eviction.

"I'll do it legal, Lee, but I'll put your stuff on the street. You know I will."

"You're some friend," I said.

He laughed, looked at the sky, shaking his head. "I'm not your friend."

Old Polish ladies sat on stoops and appraised me. I straightened my shoulders, sauntered past them without smiling.

I was at least fifty-five K in the hole. Spread around on credit cards, personal loans (i.e., friends who wouldn't return my calls anymore), back taxes, medical and utility bills.

I was a wild card at spending money. I shopped like a Dadaist. When Belinda found out she had herpes, I sent eight dozen white roses to her apartment. Sometimes, if I felt low, I copied Warhol and bought myself a birthday cake. One Saturday night, Sherry and I rented a white limousine to drive us through the city, over bridges, through tunnels, and eventually to a McDonald's drive-through in Brooklyn.

A couple years ago, Belinda and I met for lunch, which turned into afternoon martinis. It accelerated, and then we were in the back of a Town Car choosing pills from the bento box of drugs in the console.

Next I remember snow and making some sort of scene at Bergdorf's.

I'd woken up the following morning with that feeling I wasn't alone. Like when you open your eyes, and without turning around, without hearing breathing, without feeling warmth, you know there's a man in your bed. Dragged myself from the sheets and tripped into the kitchen. On the floor, a half-eaten piece of Wonder bread and a hot-pink cocktail umbrella. And there it was, lying across the table.

A white knee-length fur. Square black buttons with the Fendi logo. Gold and black Fs on the silk lining. Pleased to meet you, I thought.

Belinda used to be my partner in crime. My fellow outsider. I'd known the girl since she was a ninety-pound catalog model cracked out at System, her Australian accent rugged, her language X-rated. We used to sunbathe topless on her East Village roof, wearing white jeans and rainbow-mirrored sunglasses we'd bought on the street. After long nights, we parted ways at eight in the morning, stepping gingerly through ice in stilettos, lipstick smeared from making out with strangers in the red-lighted downstairs of clubs.

We used to stumble down Avenue A, sipping tallboys in paper bags, with no destination. I picked her up from the hospital after she fainted at a rave. She picked me up after a girl clubbed my head with a cell phone on the F train.

She could have had anyone back then. Monstrous cheek-bones. Blond bob. Wicked eyes, the whites as hard as china, lashes curled back to the lid. A wide frame she used to starve to stay in business. Legs that lasted for miles. Her voice was so raspy, she'd ask for butter to be passed and men would feel she'd promised them something. She made both good and very bad choices. She'd call me from anonymous apartments. The guy's pimpled back, the dusty mirror, and no condom wrapper in sight.

Eventually I did notice a shadow, a dark thing that was chased around her face. Like a black moth behind a curtain, trying to find the way out.

A year and a half ago, she got pregnant. She freaked out, decided on abortion, but all she could do was cry in her bedroom. Matt coaxed her from the edge the way a parent beckons a toddler off thin ice in the middle of the lake-you can't go get him, you cannot frighten him, and the only way you'll save his life is to act contrary to how you feel.

Brunch shift. The Tribeca restaurant I'd managed for years, a chic converted diner, slanted like the original establishment. Mirrors framed in mother-of-pearl chips covered walls. The mosaic floor was primitive, its pieces beige, white, turquoise. The stools, whose gold sparkles reminded me of banana seats on bicycles, were pulled to a white Formica counter decorated with gold spirals and stars. We'd been written up again in Time Out, so all of uptown was downtown today.

The woman sent back her soup. I apologized and explained that it was meant to be rich. She was the kind of woman who made me feel like an orphan. Her highlights had been painted strand by strand, and she wore a white Marc Jacobs sundress and an aquamarine cube on her finger.

When she beckoned for the second time, I pretended not to notice.

"Miss," she said firmly. "Hello?"

"How can I help you?"

"This white you recommended, I'm afraid it's turned." Her lips pursed as though she could barely restrain a smile. "Do you want me to taste it?" I offered.

"Um, not necessary. I mean, be my guest, if you really want to. But I know wine."

I held up one finger to indicate I'd return and walked to the bar for a new bottle. I dallied for a moment, fussing with nothing, to slow my heart rate. Then I marched back to her table and uncorked it.

"You're a doll," she said, taking a sip and winking.

Walking away, I wiped sweat from my upper lip. I'd experienced much worse than this, every day, but here I was: trembling, hot. I suddenly knew I would quit.

Yves opened the office door and looked me over with ice-gray eyes. I'd been pounding a snifter of B&B and crying. He had a way of smiling without saying anything that made me feel like a child. Not missing a beat, he said he'd just stopped by to see me. The bartender had told him I was down here.

"I'm quitting," I said, my voice yolky. "I'm telling Brendan tonight. I'm going to call him at home."

With slender, suntanned hands, he struck a match and held it to two Dunhills. After shaking out the fire, he gave one to me.

"Quitting," I repeated. He'd seen me fall apart a hundred times, but a new note of desperation in my voice surprised us both.

He squinted at me through the smoke he'd exhaled. His eyes moved from my right eye to my left. His cuffs, undone, exposed handsome wrists.

His face was icy, Nordic, even though that wasn't his heritage. Arched eyebrows and pointed eyeteeth, plus a slant of skin over cold blue cat eyes, made for a beautiful and frightening face. His chin wasn't too small, or too delicate, but there was a fineness to its sculpted shape that lent the head a feminine dimension.

Yves was old enough to be my father. In some ways-table manners, yellow-white hair like the inside of banana skin-he seemed older, and in other ways-lithe golden body, nightlife stamina-younger.

He wore high-waisted slacks like Fred Astaire. Walked like a gentleman, as if he could break out tap-dancing. His voice rumbled in his Adam's apple: a jaguar purring, licking blood from its own teeth.

"Do you know what that bitch said to me?" I asked, and then put my hand on the phone. "I'm calling Brendan now."

"I have an idea," he said in that European murmur. I looked at him scornfully. "What."

"Take tonight to think about it and then call him tomorrow." This flooded my eyes again, but the tears lodged in lashes like beads. He stepped toward me, brushed one hand through my hair. He held my hand so I could go nowhere, and ordered me home.

Walking from the subway to my building, the sun beat so hard on my face I could hear my eternal sinus infection bubbling.

I dropped out of college after my freshman year and moved to Cape Cod. Two years of living like a bum there, I moved to the city, and within a couple years, I was living with Kai.

We both worked in kitchens, but he was in culinary school at the same time. Kai always pretended to be destitute, disappearing to the men's room when the check came. We were kids together. We joked about farting and fought over drugs.

Kai had a dirty mouth. He looked, with his blond crew cut and pink cheeks, like somebody's baby brother. He left two and a half years ago to apprentice in Paris. He left with no warning. I would have gone with him, even though he was an idiot.

When Kai and I made love, if it was good, I went to a dark place. Not as in morbid or sinister. Literally: a void. Occasionally, images bubbled up like gardenias surfacing, with clean petals, in a pit of tar.

I'd been seeing Yves for almost a year now. He was a regular at the restaurant, and he'd courted me politely. One day, after we'd flirted a couple months, he started sending gifts.

White-truffle oil. A black Celine scarf. Red lipstick in a gold case. This guy was bringing me Richart chocolates when I couldn't afford toilet paper. Sherry was over the morning of the first snowfall when an antique blond fur collar arrived. She tried it on, and the yellow tufts against her ebony skin looked elegant and crazy.

"You should take it," I said.

"Come on, girl. Don't give away a man's gift. You got no manners."

"It's beautiful on you."

"Maybe one day I'll borrow it," she drawled, smoking, stretching out on my couch. "It's very movie star. It's very gangster's girl."

"Fully," I agreed, turning the collar in my hands.

Each time Yves gave me something, I got sweet. It was so linear. I was a kitty cat lapping milk, swishing its tail. Because I'd been hung out to dry by Kai, these luxuries made me safe.

Yves took care of me. When I was disorderly, he looked around the room, wide-eyed, and declared: My God, she's a hellcat. Or he'd get me another drink and tell me to sit down and shut up. I often got hiccups; he'd summon a lemon slice doused in bitters from the waiter, hold it to my mouth.

My only complaint was his music. At Virgin I took him through the aisles, filling his shopping basket. I slipped his old CDs to the housekeeper: Paula Abdul, Big Audio Dynamite, Hanson. I think it was a European thing. Movies, too. He watched Titanic eighty times. He chain-smoked as the ship went down, clutching the leather arm of the couch as though the loft were sinking too.

I eventually learned through gossip about the women right before me. The Hungarian countess sounded like a melancholic delicacy. Once in a while, she still came to Raoul's to drink wine at the bar with older men. She never spoke, never laughed. The hollows around her eyes were darkly glamorous, her mouth sullen: she had the beauty of an insomniac. I didn't know her name but called her Ophelia in my mind.

Marcelle was French like Yves, a couple years older than him, taller, and at least as tough. She'd modeled her way from a farm town to New York City at the age of sixteen. Married a series of international visionaries, amicably divorced them. Became indispensable to a couturier, and was now exalted and consulted by everyone. I saw her at a museum party. She was turned away from me: her architecture was brutal as that of an Egon Schiele subject. Black jersey clung to her and pooled on the floor. Jade chandelier earrings hung to her shoulders like rain. People said she and Yves were more expatriate siblings than lovers.

Friends had often paid me this backhanded compliment: You're one of those girls, Lee, that needs an older man, someone who can appreciate you, a connoisseur. But I finally understood when I got to know Yves. He was beguiled instead of bewildered by my desperate morning champagne, my fur jackets and cowboy hats, my need one day to track down Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack. He even called rare book dealers. When I decided we had to have quince jam for breakfast, or hard-boiled quail eggs for lunch, he escorted me on the hunt.

One night, we were drinking espressos after a long dinner at his loft with Guillaume, a proper, elderly Belgian. In Yves's bedroom, I changed into a white feather dress I'd bought that day at the flea market. Turned the lights down in the main room, cranked up Cypress Hill's "Tres Equis," and danced like a cabaret star. I shimmied and high-kicked. My hip knocked an end table, setting a Chinese lamp rocking on its base. Yves's eyes warned me to be careful. A feather seesawed to the floor. When I picked it up and tickled under Guillaume's chin, the old man glared, gripped the tiny bone-china handle of his cup. I put on Prince's "Delirious," but Yves got up and turned it down.

"I think that's enough, Lee. This is a shortcut to a migraine." But here's the thing. Later in bed, I traced Yves's mouth as he smiled at the dark ceiling.

"What is it?" I whispered.

He was silent, grinning. Finally he answered. "Did you see his face? He almost tore the cup in half. I wish I'd had a camera." Yves secretly loved chaos.

I got dressed: white capris, leopard sling backs, a dirty black mesh shirt. Bells from two churches were competing. The horizon from my window was cluttered with white-hot buildings, a turquoise mosque, smokestacks. Pigeons reeled around the sky.

I don't know how I made it to Raoul's that night, or anywhere. Every morning, I smeared on makeup, smoked a cigarette, and drank a cup of instant coffee. Sprayed perfume between legs, Binaca in mouth.

You know when your life is not adding up to more than the sum of its parts? At this point, the sum wasn't even equal to the parts; it was less. Someone was skimming.

Days off were rare, but worse than working days. I'd pace or stand by the door-could I bear to put on shoes and run errands? If not, could I bear to stay in the apartment without cigarettes? It was a draw, for hours sometimes, standing there, barefoot, paralyzed.

Way back in the day, I'd been a good-time girl. I'd made choices without thinking. I'd been a red-blooded American who dug steak, Budweiser, good sex scenes in bad movies.

On the Cape, I chambermaided at a motor lodge, lifting a pair of cuff links here, a pint of Southern Comfort there. I lived with random people, survived on clam chowder they brought home from where they worked and on hot dogs from gas stations. I smoked PCP-laced weed that made me think the trees were full of bats, not bikinis hung out to dry; learned how to race a motorcycle; fucked two guys at once; had a waterskiing accident; and eventually came back to this city bruised, uninnocent, and never prouder.

That's when I'd been strong. That's when I could drop more acid than the boys. That's when I could stay up all night, doing blow and slamming Jack Daniel's, and work all day, and do it again. I was an ox. Kai's departure was partly to blame for my disintegration. And what happened to my mother. I didn't know the exact trajectory of my breakdown, but I did know that I'd become weak, holding onto wildness, cherishing the idea of it the way you blow a dying fire.

To meet Yves, I took the L to Sixth Avenue, the Nine to Houston. My face ghostly in the violet window of the train, fragrance blooming out of my hot skin. No matter how shitty I looked, people stared: I had the smell of a fruit about to split. My flesh somehow demonstrated lethargy, as if I wanted to be lying down at all times. I was five ten, but not exactly heavy. It was the nature of my anatomy that was rich, composed as it was of foie gras, cocaine, red Zinfandel, chocolate, quaaludes, brandy.

Above ground, the night had brought nothing but darker heat. Tangerine lances shot through crevices between SoHo buildings as the sun rolled down the other side of the world. I thought to myself that something had to give. Without asking for help or admitting the scale of it, I had to talk to Yves tonight about the Armageddon of my life.

At the mouth of Raoul's, I inhaled decades of garlic, clove smoke, perfume, lamb. Yves's back was to me, his arm resting across the black leather banquette, cuff undone. Across from him, a woman's face, pale as a refrigerated gardenia, looked up sharply.

"You know Delphine, love," Yves insisted. "I don't think I do, baby." Even though I did.

"How's your sculpture series, dear?" Delphine said. "Have you finished?"

I turned to look at her. Art was more private than sex or love-not the work itself, but the endeavor. I hated being asked, especially since I hadn't done anything in so long. So I made things up. Delphine was ceramic, like all of Yves's older women friends. If there was more than one of them, they spoke other languages when I was around. They wore Chanel suits. Front teeth yellowed by tobacco. In the afternoon, they sipped bellinis at Cipriani on West Broadway, smoked Gauloises. They weren't bad people, but I enjoyed lying to them.

"Mnh," I said pensively. "Actually I got sidetracked by a storybook I'm illustrating."

"How exciting," she said. "And how's that turning out?" "Just great," I said evenly. "I'm almost finished." "But you haven't even started," Yves said, smiling. I punched him in the arm. Delphine politely made a befuddled face. "Martini, straight up, filthy, no olives," I begged the waiter. She said, "Everyone these days seems to be doing a book." I said, "That's true, Delphine. Everyone seems to be doing a book."

"May I ask what it's about?" "Fucking, drinking, smoking, loving, living, freebasing, spending, laughing, crying, working, falling apart, kissing, writing, blacking out."

"I see." Yves laughed. "I really can't wait to see it, Lee. I gather you're still in the research stage."

I sipped martini three and stared at my steak. Delphine had found a way to escape us. Yves watched my face. I stuck out my tongue at him.

"Is there something wrong, lamb?" he asked tightly. "Lamb? Yves, I'm not your niece. I'm your girlfriend." "Is there a reason you felt the need to speak that way to her?"

"I'm sure she's seen and heard worse than me." "She's an old friend, you know." "She's worn out."

"I'm tired of this," he said, and pressed his mouth with his napkin, folded it and tucked it under his plate.

"You used to think it was cute," I whined."No, I used to tolerate it because there were other elements of you that were cute."

I sat at the table alone. Sipping another martini, I watched him smoke at the bar. What a bad start.

Yves stood, one hand in his pocket, talking to a man in a beige V-neck who flicked open and closed a gold lighter.

Yves's barbered head nodded at whatever the man was saying, and he didn't look my way once. The ball was in my court. If we were to have any conversation, I had to approach him.

When I was very drunk, the world became a slide show. Sneaking up toward Yves, I looked sideways and saw a purple flame in a dark booth, light blossoming on a man's face as he drew close to the match. An anemic blonde staking a cigarette into a wedge of black cake. My own red toenail peeking from the opening of my leopard sling back.

"Hey, daddy, I need a drink." This was my way of apologizing. He looked left then right. "No one stopping you." "Okay," I said slowly, glancing at the V-neck guy, then at Yves, trying to communicate with my eyes.

"Is there something wrong?" he asked me. "Well, yeah," I said. "I kind of don't have any money."

He took a twenty from his wallet. "Bring me the change," he said calmly, and turned back to his friend. "As you were saying." I walked toward the bar, but then circled back out of his line of vision. I walked to the table. Isn't it crazy how anger sometimes feels like joy? Just a crash of blood through your heart. I took his car keys from the sport coat he'd left in the booth.

The L.I.E. swarmed with kids heading from Float in the city to Conscience Point at the beach, or straight into a chintz-wallpapered bedroom at a rented mansion. A Range Rover swerved, going ninety, glow sticks floating in the backseat. Made me feel better about my own steering.

I stopped at a gas station for candy. I must have been weaving, but a cop car passed, paint shining like a shark, and never came near me. I did get the finger, for changing lanes without signaling, from a porn-star blonde in a yellow Porsche.

I drove the Lexus through Southampton, red lights blinking instead of changing. The landscape dreamy, moonlit fields of zinnias, fruit stands closed up as though they'd never offered bins of raspberries, baskets of lettuce. Everything was beautiful and frightening, deserted for the night but coming off as forever deserted. "Bring me the change!" I'd say every once in a while in disbelief.

Ours was originally a guesthouse for the main house on the hill. The area was wooded, and my headlights severed trunks as I turned into the drive. Pulled up to the front path, cut the lights and engine, and stared until details burned out of the dark.

My mother always read on a wicker chaise under the rose tree in this yard. Bees would devour the blossoms, climbing from turquoise leaf to leaf, their bodies vibrating in the sunlight. They'd step from a petal to her knee, her skin creamy as the rose: they never knew the difference. She never flinched.

Two years ago, almost, she died in this house. I held her hand. A male hospice nurse pretended to do a jigsaw puzzle of the Manhattan skyline at our kitchen table so we had privacy.

When she was young, she'd undergone a radical mastectomy and radiation. Somehow, the underdeveloped technology had burned both lungs. The damage wasn't discovered until, at the age of fifty-nine, she suffered trouble breathing. X-rays revealed membranes around each lung. The doctor compared them to cauls, those sacs found sometimes around fetuses.

"Those are supposed to be good luck, those ones around the baby's head," I said to him. "They are," he admitted. "But my mother's aren't good luck." He shook his head, looking at his shoes. "No, no they're not."

Sitting there in Yves's car, I was sure I'd mourned; I'd been grieving for almost two years, but nothing had changed. I still didn't want to go in there. Months ago, I'd come to box the remaining belongings so I could rent out the house. My mother had been an elegant woman in her own carrottop way, and it was excruciating to go through panties with elastics broken, stockings dotted with nail polish, widowed gloves stowed away just in case. Within an hour, everything I came across-the apricot slip hanging from the bedpost, a lipstick in the medicine cabinet, an abalone shell still dusty with ash-loomed and shivered like an object from a nightmare. I'd fled with the job half finished and hadn't returned until tonight.

My mother had made my childhood into a paradise. She didn't believe in ordinary life. Every day should be a kingdom, the proportions of each hour majestic, regal.

When I'd come down for breakfast in the morning, dragging my book bag on the stairs, yawning, the first thing I'd hear was my mother singing. By my plate of sugared toast: a blue jay feather. In the windows hung glass prisms, and rainbows shot their colors against the walls. To this day, when I open her books, brown wafers of red roses fall from the pages.

With pajamas on my bath-damp body, I'd find a snowbell on my pillow. My mother always told a bedtime story. Then I'd ask her to tell another, and she would. Then she'd ask me to tell one, and she'd lay on my bed with her eyes closed.

We played with lipstick. We roller-skated on a summer midnight. We ate pancakes for dinner. Once, I remember, a snow day was predicted. We woke up, and the roads were clear. But she let me stay home. We sat by the fire that whole day, the soles of our feet pinked by the flames, and strung shells onto necklaces. In the evenings, I did homework at the dinner table while she played records: June Christy, Lee Wiley, Billie Holiday. With a cigarette in one hand and a mug in the other, she danced. Red sun burned through her kimono. The fabric seemed to dissolve in the violent light. Sometimes I watched her. Sometimes I danced with her. We never turned on the lamps until we couldn't see.

But with the god gone, the house was just a house, and I couldn't bear to enter it. I adjusted the leather car seat, and closed my drunken eyes.

I rang the main house doorbell in the morning. Rolled my head on my neck to loosen kinks. Geraniums in cracked pots flanked the door. I rang again.

When I was young, I'd scrutinized Art and Rebecca. As a teenager, I'd watched their Gramercy Park apartment when they were away. I'd worn her chinchilla. Smoked resin out of his hash pipe. I'd toddled around in her sharkskin pumps, studied his dog-eared Kama Sutra. They were my other parents.

But after showing glimmers of artistic promise throughout school, I'd dropped out of college, run away to Harwich Port to hide out with deadheads, waitresses, methheads. They'd never said so, but I imagined Art and Becca had given up on me. They didn't have kids, and over the years they'd bought me paints, brushes, linen. They paid for a summer art session at Yale when I was sixteen. It was possible they resented my failure. If so, they concealed it, making me feel worse.

I heard slippers scuffing. "My precious," she purred.

White caftan, black eyes. Bony hands weighted with turquoise, gold, opal, diamond. Short brown hair tucked behind ears. She set her coffee on the foyer table. The house had broken-down glamour: sand in rugs, dead dragonflies in candy bowls, drapes stained from rain.

"Where did you come from, you baby-boo?" she said. I said it had been a long time, my mouth muffled as she hugged me.

"Lee," she rasped, floating into the courtyard. "You are stunning, but you look like you slept in a jail cell or something."

Art, though he'd already squeezed me to his huge chest, pinched my cheeks, and tried to force money on me, was back to reading his paper.

"Doesn't she look stunning," Becca prompted. "A little washed out, maybe."

We ate lunch. Wasps droned over melon soup, dragging stingers. Art alternated between pushing up glasses, breaking off cornbread, and passionately refolding the Sports section.

I didn't know how to bring it up, so I let her talk. Becca wandered from Janice's Vero Beach wedding to bars in Spain to Coney Island in the old days. Each time she mentioned one of her teenaged loves, she stole a glance at Art, but he wasn't biting today. Blue beams refracted through the swimming pool and crisscrossed the yard, wavering, and we smoked Becca's slim cigarettes, ashing on our cake plates.

"I'm putting the house up for sale," I finally said. Art had always liked to sit on his patio with watercolors and easel. Painted poppies: slashes of scarlet, black beads. Jazz station on transistor radio. I once found him watering impatiens naked. But he was lawyer to mobsters, boxers, Wall Street traders. Often in the papers, leading the accused through an angry crowd.

Art walked me home, steering my elbow. He said we'd talk after I'd had time to think. I said I'd done all the thinking I was going to do. I asked for a local Realtor reference. He said nothing for a while. "You don't want to do this, Lee."

We stood facing each other, his white Mexican shirt sloping down his chest like God's cloak. Hands in pockets. Horn-rims sparkling in sun. I tried not to cry.

"I do," I lied. He sighed. "For many reasons, you don't." "I need to. It's not about want. I need the money." "Lee, I can tell you're going through a rough time. Selling a house, especially when it's the only property your mother owned, is not something you decide to do in a hurry."

"I-" "No, you obviously have not considered this for very long. I can tell. What you need to do is work harder. We've all been where you are, Lee."

"I'm working as hard as-" "Don't tell me that. I don't mean to be so rough, but I know you can swing it. You're a smart girl. Think out of the box."

"I-" "When the going gets tough...you know the rest. Your mother didn't want you to sell this. It's the only heirloom she had to leave you."

"It's just a house." "You're not going to think that in twenty years."

Sunshine had drowned the yard. The light blurring the weeds reminded me of a photograph from playing cards Kai left behind.

I sifted through them sometimes, when I was talking on the phone, or getting drunk by myself, as if they had the mystical significance of tarot cards. Shot in the seventies, the pictures on the cards weren't airbrushed, the girls weren't skinny, and everything was real. A blonde on a wicker throne, pulling beige crochet bikini aside. A girl on black couch, kneeling away from us, red bra, black bob, lavender star points of asshole. A brunette on a beach shack porch, legs spread, sand crusted on knees and shoulders, glass of white Zinfandel in her hand.

The queen of hearts was a strawberry-blonde in a golden field. Hair feathered. Grass up to her pussy. One hip forward. A black-eyed Susan to her nose. She looked like she smelled of patchouli, drank jug wine, did macram?, flew kites. She had a little belly.

I stood in my own field, wanting obligations to fall from me. This is one way of contemplating suicide, yet it's the exact opposite: what I wanted was to be alive, to escape all the damage, to shed it like snakeskin, to emerge pure and naked and laughing.

Cobalt evening in the city. A rain was falling, warm as tea water, when I got to Yves's lobby. I buzzed his loft.

"Hello?" he asked, voice doubtful. "It's me, Yves."

A hesitation. Nothing. Then the buzzer sounded. I vaulted up three flights and waited, nervous, hair pasted to face. He opened the door wearing a silk robe and leather slippers, hair sticking up like chick's fur. When he was pissed, his eyes developed a dark dimension of blue.

"Come in, kid. You look terrible." He put an arm around me, took my purse, put me on the white leather couch, and fixed me a scotch. I was shaking.

He helped peel off my clothes and put on his pajamas. We sat together. I touched his bottom lip with my fingertip.

"My God, you have a temper, Lee," Yves said. "I'm an asshole," I whispered.

I scratched at his thigh while he played with the hair that fell down my back as we talked, and I noticed he was stiff under the robe. All I wanted to do was get in bed with ice cream and cigarettes, and watch cartoons, but I owed him.

I let my hand wander. He kept playing with my hair, but his motions got mechanical and messy and distracted, the way they do when a man starts to feel pleasure. I set my tumbler on the glass table and kneeled between his legs, my body flush with purpose. But as I arranged him and glanced up with the "here I go" look, he suddenly pulled the robe closed and stood, walked away.

My mother used to call me her hummingbird: that was her gentle way of saying I was hyperactive and unmanageable. She didn't try to manage me; she gave me shelter. On a winter beach, she'd open her coat to let me walk in her warmth.

I broke or misplaced anything she ever loaned me, from a pink cashmere beret I left at the Roxy coat check to a gold anklet with an aquamarine charm I lost in the ocean.

I was the child who swiped icing off the cake before it was served. I ate M&M's I'd dropped on the floor of Penn Station. When we were twelve, my friend and I served hors d'oeuvres at her parents' Christmas party, and I poured the dregs of everyone's drinks into one glass, which I drank in the laundry room.

As an infant, I'd screamed around the clock until my mother made a cradle of a white stole folded into an orange crate. She crossed her fingers. Thus buried, I slept and dreamed.

When I was a little older, I feigned sleep. Who didn't? The memory of my mother's perfumed hand pulling the sheet over my shoulder could still provoke a rush of love. I remembered lying in the dark, breathing as though dreaming, shivering at the promise of footsteps as she came down the hall to kiss me good night. The kiss was good, but that ritual of enclosure was everything.

When I was five, on the icy night of a cocktail party, I hid under the mountain of coats in the guest room. My face against a silk lining that reeked of Opium and cigarettes, my hand clasping a bunch of lamb's wool that smelled of snow. I must have fallen asleep. Next thing I knew, I woke up in a darkness of fur and wool to voices of people come to get their wraps. I stared at two faces and the pink chandelier behind them. The story was repeated often, how Mary and Kirk found me buried like a stowaway. Since then, I'd rarely known refuge like that pile of coats, but I looked for it all the time.

As an adult, it was difficult to find my way into the warm lair of another person's soul. When I got to New York, I took art classes at Spring Studio. Jules had posted an anonymous request there for female models; if he'd included his name, people would pose just to get into his studio. He was in his late seventies then, and breathed like a sick dog. I adored him. I reclined on green velvet, and he let me stretch every twenty minutes. Jules talked to himself; I was caught in his dream. Oh, yeah, she's a calendar girl. That's a decadent leg, see. She might be tired of this position. He'd knock the brush around the water jar. Well, let's see if blue doesn't work. We should think about the time. We should get down to the liquor store before it closes. Even though I hadn't seen him in a few years, when I read his obituary a couple months ago, I bawled. The universe had turned another spirit out of this city, and me out of another home.

I followed Yves into the bedroom, where he was sitting on the bed, hands clasped between his knees. The bedside light spread a golden umbrella that included him from the waist down; his face was dark. I hovered on the threshold, arms crossed.

"What's wrong with you?" I asked meanly. "I'm exhausted. I didn't sleep, worrying about you," he said. "And now you want to erase your misbehavior with what I will concede is a generous gesture but a gesture nonetheless."

"I said I was sorry," I muttered. "I know, I know." He turned away.

Now this is strange, I decided. This man who shows emotions like a movie star is at a loss for words. A part of me wanted to walk out the door, leave a note in the kitchen, the kind of note I'd never written, or maybe no note at all.

"You should see a doctor," he said. "Why?"

"For your health, Lee, why else. You can't take pills and drink like you do, and you can't do coke and then take those pills. You end up speaking gibberish, you know. You're a mess."

"Well, fuck you very much," I told him.

He sighed. "Can you just bite the bullet and look at yourself?" "I look at myself all the time."

"No," he said. "You need to get it together." "But Yves," I said, exasperated. "That's not who I am. I'm not together."

He pondered the floor for a while. "You can't run away like that. You can't take my car."

"Is this about me taking your car?" "I'm only saying there has to be a line. I have to draw a line."

His eyes, blue diamonds in the gloom. I crossed the floor and sat on the bed. Then I put my arms around his body and my head to his chest. We stayed like that a long time. "Something has to change, Lee."

• 
• 
• 
•