The room was at the farthest end of the hallway, rarely visited, an expedition into her childhood, and it took ages for her to navigate the Sarab floor runner, her cannabinoid receptors having transformed the patterns thereupon into a down escalator she was trying to ascend.
The phone was ringing again.
She was sucking wind by the time she got to the door, yet when she opened it she summoned enough air to push out a full-throated, Hiwatt! that brought him running, if unsteadily. He kept nosing into the wall like a balsa-wood glider that had its wings trimmed wrong, and thought it would be proper to announce, as one must, as surely as the sky is blue and cats meow, This is some good shit! But he was outthinking himself two-to-one, and felt pointedly that he’d already revealed too much of himself to Turk, upon whom he’d developed an if-not-quite-debilitating then definitely goo-goo-level crush, and the utterance of that particular cliché would bring into stark light the creaky apparatus of his altered state, thereby throwing into question the intimacy they’d shared earlier that evening when they’d rapped about their families and Turk’s memories of Hiwatt’s grandfather and her own doubts about the efficacy of her upbringing. He worried because, of course, there is the question of authenticity that lurks around any confessions or intimacies shared while on drugs, since in an altered state one can no longer be considered oneself, but some other, uninhibited, even alien, person. He worried his brain into somersaults over it.
Hiwatt was a passionate guy, strong on desire, weak on restraint, a connoisseur of inhibition when it came to the game of exposing himself, whether physically or spiritually. He had certain needs, one of which was to experience the struggle between shame and the desire to share himself with strangers, a little saga that played out every time he entered the booth, unbuttoned his jeans, and began to masturbate, separated by only a pane of glass from the naked girl oozing around in front of him. His excitement relied entirely on being observed. Classic exhibitionist. He would have preferred that his observer be clothed, but he hadn’t yet been able to bring himself to offer any of the dancers money to put her clothes back on, feeling that it might cross a line of perversion that not even the official live girls at Show World would put up with. He had shared this concern with Turk, and she, given her own line of work having a bead on the full spectrum of New York’s rarest fetishes, had shrugged. What’s the harm in asking? she’d said. It seemed to have no effect on Turk when he talked about the girls and how quickly and explosively he ejaculated on the matte-black wall beneath the window. She listened, nodding, sipping from her coffee, offering no indication that she admired his courage at all. Perhaps she had no inhibitions of her own, he thought.
Hiwatt was, at the tender age of eighteen, primarily interested in re-creating a lost relationship, specifically the one he’d shared with his nanny, who since his birth had performed all the functions of mother and, after he’d reached puberty, the physical functions of a girlfriend, to a point. She let him feel but never see, and she stroked him off most nights before bed, with a bored, distant look on her face that Hiwatt would forever seek from his sexual partners, followed by praise for the velocity and quantity of his ejaculations. The nanny saw nothing out of the ordinary in their ritual, no more shameful than scrubbing his ears in the bath, proving yet again that, begun early enough, practiced often enough, anything can achieve the splendiferous normalcy of oatmeal.
The silhouettes didn’t line up, but it was close enough. Turk reminded him of his nanny at the hairline, a Transylvanian peak that announced itself when she pulled her graying hair into a ponytail, and sometimes if he squinted he could, at a distance, make it all fit. That Turk gave no indication she meant to care for him in the only way that would cure his homesickness was no deterrence. He’d understood that he’d have to convince her; New York was not the same as home. Here, he would have to express his manhood.
Commenting on the goodness of the shit did not, therefore, align with his master plan to project himself as a cool, enterprising, and altogether responsible, if horny, young man worthy of her attentions, and by the time he’d completed his spectacularly uncool journey to the end of the hall, he’d decided to say nothing at all. When he saw what was inside the room, he blurted out, Oh my word! then, as a corrective, Shit! an overreach, and as a corrective to that, Gee-dog! which was followed by a groan of despair, the realization that his spirit was weak, his mind weaker, and he’d be alone forever. Good shit, indeed.
Gee-dog is right, Turk said.
Before them lay an eleven-foot-seven-inch Scots pine. A mystery conceived and solved in the same moment. The tree, not unfamiliar to either of them, was still wearing its ornaments and lights, tinsel draping sweetly from its brittle branches. It was on its side; specifically, it was canted at about thirty degrees as a result of the crown’s contact with the far wall, bending up now like a creepy curled finger, in any case positioned to indicate that it had been carelessly discarded and left to disintegrate all over boxes and chairs and the rolltop desk Turk had set out for in the first place. The stump had oozed a little resin onto Turk’s sewing machine.
There was disappointment in her voice, her first genuine expression of that emotion in the six months Hiwatt had lived with her.
I truly thought it had gone over the balcony, Hiwatt said, affecting the Commonwealth tone he employed when he required authority in the face of authority. He pondered the tree, stroking his chin. How on earth? he said. He kept stroking his chin because it felt wonderful.
It didn’t climb back in the window, now, did it? Turk said.
Most definitely not, Hiwatt answered, still stroking his chin.
It was February 6. At the end of December, Turk had taken her annual trip to St. John, leaving Hiwatt alone in the apartment through New Year’s. Having no children of her own and lending no credence to anecdotal evidence about the expansive sense of social charity that overcomes a young person left home unsupervised for longer than a day, she hadn’t issued ground rules. She was no fool, but she wasn’t the enemy of fun, either, and when she returned on the evening of January 1, tan, hungover, bearing a bruise or two from her own revels, she set up a pot of coffee and asked Hiwatt to join her at the kitchen table.
Get up to anything fun? she said.
I did! he replied with a lush gargle of a laugh. Hiwatt was doing his straight-backed, good-breeding routine that could sometimes cross the line into fawning maître d’, which actually relaxed Turk a hair, as he only put on the college interview voice when he was nervous. Plus, he was stoned out of his gourd. He went on: I hosted a splendid party, what I can remember of it. I was told an African prince attended, but I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have had more attractive options.
I’m always sweeping them out of the corners after my parties, Turk said.
Hiwatt nodded as if chewing on a piece of particularly interesting information.
I’m sure you were a charming host, Turk said.
I am. It’s a well-known fact.
So, everything seems to be in place, Turk said.
Yes.
So where’s all the carnage? Surely all the furniture’s been replaced, or something.
There was one minor incident.
Yes. Where’s the tree?
Of course you know! You did fail to mention the ceremony before you left, though, Hiwatt said.