Nicotine (8 page)

“Why Jordan?”

“That's where I'm a citizen. Anyway, they put me on lithium. And I took that shit, for a while. But I found out there's a less toxic substance that cools me down and lets me concentrate.” She glances at Rob over her cigarette. “Though I
still
don't know how you can put wads of tobacco in your
mouth
and
spit
. Like constantly holding tobacco soup
in your mouth
.” She shakes her head. “Now cigarettes, you breathe in deep, you get your oxygen and everything you need, and when you breathe out you're excreting all the bad stuff, like your lungs are a kidney or a liver or something.” She demonstrates.

Rob removes a cigarette from the pack on the table and begins shredding its contents with some baking soda into a Paxil cup.

“Maybe it's just what you're used to?” Penny suggests. “I don't much like the smell of stale smoke, but it doesn't bother me seeing him spit. Maybe because of the way I was brought up.”

“How was that?” Rob asks.

“My family is pretty weird.” Unconcerned about discretion—she can't imagine the conversation taking a turn that would lead her to say her family owns the house—but intent on seeming as interesting
and good-natured as possible, she says, “First off, my mom is Kogi. This people from Colombia.”

“I've heard of them,” Rob says. “On the mountaintop, with the gourds. They keep the universe going.”

“Now they're more into slash-and-burn cattle farming in national parks.”

“What's their deal?” Sorry asks.

“They used to be the ultimate weirdo tribe,” Penny says. “Their whole lifestyle was chewing coca. That's all they did. I mean munch it like goats, all day every day. Wandering around chewing coca leaves with builders' lime until their molars were flat, smearing their spit on these gourds. But that was just the men, obviously. The women cooked and cleaned and got traded between totemic clans or something. That's why my mom blew out of there.” Sorry laughs, and Penny adds, “It wasn't so great for guys, either! To get shamans, they would raise little boys in caves, like the Irish bards. It happened to my great-uncle. Mom says when he got out, he was certifiable.”

“Like the Irish bards,” Rob says.

“So when she met my dad, he was working on building up this clinic for indigenous herbal therapies in Manaus, in Brazil, on the Amazon. Can I bum a cigarette?”

“Sure, help yourself,” Sorry says, offering her the pack. “So did he, like, heal people with coca?”

“No. With this jungle vine that makes you trip your brains out. It will heal absolutely anything, because it makes you puke like there's no tomorrow. That's how it works. You go in thinking you're sick, but by the time you're tripping and losing every ounce of fluid in your body, you realize you didn't know the meaning of the word. Your immune system gets a jump start out of self-defense. It's called ayahuasca.”

“I can't tell whether you believe in it,” Rob says. “But the method sounds kind of Ayurvedic.”

“That's how traditional medicine
always
works,” Penny says. “They purge you, or bleed you, or take your body temperature up to a hundred and six, or whatever. It's all like chemo, taking you down to zero for a reboot. Dad's specialty was cancer patients. So anyway, that's why I don't get grossed out over tobacco juice.”

“So your parents shared an interest in traditional medicine,” Sorry prompts her. “Or did your mom have cancer?”

“No, no,” Penny says. “He met her in Cartagena. She made it from Kogi country all the way to the coast, and Dad found her taking care of these pigs at the dump. She was herding these fucking huge pigs that she was scared shitless of, and he made her an offer she couldn't refuse.”

“Is the dump a tourist attraction?”

She stares quizzically at her own hand as she taps an ash into the ashtray and says, “You know, I have no idea what he was doing at the dump.”

“Picking up chicks,” Sorry suggests.

“She was thirteen! Almost the same age as my brother Patrick. He took her in because she was homeless and starving. Then she fell in love with him, and he made her wait five years. She always says it really pissed her off. She thought if they waited that long, she'd be too old to get married.”

“Like Soon-Yi Previn.”

“I guess. But she got with the modern life program really fast. First she went to high school in Nyack. Then she married Dad, and had me in Brazil, and then she went to Barnard, and now she's an HR exec in the city.”

“She must be smart.”

“She's just funny.” Penny shrugs. “She doesn't talk enough, so she still sounds Colombian. You can practically hear her squeezing these weird-ass Kogi ideas through a filter of Spanish and English. About half the time she just says”—she lowers her voice to say the
phrase in Amalia's rhythmic monotone—“‘Oh my god, oh my god.' My dad was like not even from the same
planet
.”

“Is he not alive?” Sorry asks.

“He died recently. He was really old, and really sick.”

“I'm sorry,” Sorry says.

Penny adds, “At her HR department everybody thinks she's this huge feminist, but it's only because she's still secretly so traditional, it weirds her out that men would apply for jobs. She's like, what are they doing cluttering up our workplace? Don't they have gourds to attend to?”

Sorry and Penny take long, amused drags off their cigarettes, and Rob tucks his chew into his mouth.

“Yeah, so, the idea behind this house,” Sorry says. “You know how smokers, in this society, we're a step below meth-heads. I mean, say you shoot up heroin in the bathroom on an airplane. What happens to you?”

“Nothing?” Penny ventures.

“And if you smoke a cigarette?”

“Air marshals?”

“Summary execution!” Sorry says. “People walk around fucked-up on illegal drugs, on prescription drugs—on anything they want—and nobody cares. But smoke a cigarette, and you're on everybody's shit list.”

“Preach,” Rob says.

“You're a baby killer,” Sorry says. “Same baby who's sucking on a nipple full of phthalates, eating antibiotic chicken, breathing PCBs, playing in dirt made of tetraethyl lead and drinking straight vodka while it rides a fucking
skateboard
—when that baby dies at age eighty-six instead of ninety, it's going to be because
you
lit a cigarette in a public park.”

“I do kind of believe in that secondhand stuff, though,” Rob says. “That's one reason I dip. It keeps the ill effects to myself.”

“You're just closeted,” Sorry says to him. “A closet smoker.” She taps her cigarette on the ashtray and pushes down on the black knob that makes its surface twirl, dumping the ash in an invisible receptacle. “I'll never quit. It's this or lithium. One smoker in three dies as a result of smoking, one in ten of lung cancer. Those are way better odds than I'd have leading the revolution in Afghanistan.”

Rob says, “Nicotine's kind of an outlier in CHA, because it's the catchall house, with activists working on all different fronts. But we do have this one thing in common that gets us ostracized at every single march and rally and everywhere we go. That's how we ended up banding together.”

“They wouldn't even let me smoke at a NORML
smoke-in
,” Sorry says. “They said nicotine is a
nerve poison,
and they were drinking fucking
beer
.”

“It's activism that's poison,” Rob says. “The police are out there beating the shit out of people, breaking ribs and hip joints like they did to Jazz at RNC—the Republican National Convention—and nobody minds if she walks in their march with a fucking
cane,
but they don't want her walking with a cigarette. And that's where I say somebody's consciousness is fucked-up.”

“It's because they're good leftists,” Penny says. “They want to blame perpetrators, not victims. And everybody is the smokers' victim. They'd triumph in the struggle and be living in the new Jerusalem, except we're killing them with our cancer sticks.”

Rob and Sorry trade admiring glances, as though Penny had jumped through a hoop. She is thrilled to be sitting with them at their big table, reaping spontaneous approval for spontaneous utterances. She beams with joy. Rob is so cute—and Sorry so not in the running as competition—that she sees herself getting very close to him very quickly.

“I like you,” Sorry says.

“If you don't mind my asking, how'd your name get to be Sorry?”

“It's Sarah,” she explains. “‘Sari' for short. But people in this country think I'm saying ‘sorry.' I grew up in a settlement on the West Bank, so I spend half my life saying ‘sorry.' It's a shortcut.”

“You got any beer?”

“Want to see our bodega?” Rob replies.

He and Penny go on a beer run.

When she comments that the empty brick “brownstones” could be crack houses, he says they are empty because they were built on fill. Rather than install a drainpipe to carry the stream he buried, the developer 120 years ago dumped it full of dirt and trash. “The back halves are in ruins,” he explains. “Every day they slide a little farther down into the creek.”

“They could still be crack houses.”

“I don't know. This is more of a heroin-type neighborhood.”

They turn and walk for a few hundred yards parallel to a high chain-link fence separating them from an enormous asphalted schoolyard. The children have gone home, and the chain nets of the basketball court rattle in the wind. The afternoon is warm, but so dense with humid haze that the sun seems to have set already.

Rob holds the door of the bodega open for Penny. A small silver bell rings as it closes. They stand in front of a tall refrigerator, studying the selection. Rob chooses a bottle of eight-ball, and Penny buys a can of Foster's and three packs of American Spirits (an impulse buy, based on a sudden decision to quit Marlboros) because they cost five dollars less—each!—than they do across the river in New York City.

Back at the house, the conversation deteriorates into open flirting. Sorry goes upstairs. Penny gives Rob a slightly buzzed kiss on the cheek. He touches her arm with a kind of tenderness, but does not kiss back.

They make curry sauce with coconut shavings because it goes with carrots. When Sorry comes down to eat, they serve her in the dining room as though they were host and hostess and she the guest.
They say very little but look at each other often. Sorry finishes her plate and excuses herself.

Penny and Rob wash and dry the dishes. They do some nicotine, a bit drunkenly.

Around eight, before the last bus, he takes her hand and leads her to the stairwell. He returns her peck on the cheek. His hands wander the outlines of her body, briefly. He enfolds her in his arms like a long-lost friend. “You look like the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,” he says.

“I'm not sad.” It's her first best honest answer.

He draws away to look in her eyes. Then, hesitantly, aiming carefully, he kisses her on the mouth. His lips rest on hers without moving for a full five seconds. His eyes close and he squints a bit, as though lost in thought. Then he pulls back, seeming to have considered and reconsidered and decided he shouldn't move too fast.

Penny decides it's sexy. It's like he thinks really kissing her would pose a risk, so he's slow to step on the slippery slope, take the bait, enter the trap. She feels spontaneous affection and trust, a sense of knowing him already forever. She notes that his genitals are pressed against her at waist level (he is a full twelve inches taller), and she wriggles, expecting a reaction—some kind of bulging—maybe a curl of something expanding in too-tight underwear?—some undeniable message that he likes her?

He hugs her affectionately while his crotch communicates indifference and boredom.

She considers kissing him in a more goal-oriented manner, maybe getting aggressive with her tongue. Then she remembers the tobacco in his mouth.

She kisses him on the neck, standing on tiptoe, and thanks him for a lovely afternoon.

“You should come by tomorrow when there are more people around,” he suggests.

BACK IN MANHATTAN, SHE LIES
on her back in bed, trying to sleep. She tries to think about Rob, but her pose reminds her of Norm. She turns on her side and then on her front.

Her breathing echoes in the springs of the mattress, reminding her of Norm. The week when he could do nothing but breathe, each breath more labored than the one before. Waiting for his heart to fail, his kidneys, his liver, anything. Holding the e-kit in reserve. What a mistake.

She remembers his thirst. The memory comes in the form of an invisible serrated machete cutting downward through her chest. Or maybe not invisible. Somehow black and white and dense.

She turns on the light and sits up against his headboard. She drinks from his water glass. She sees herself surrounded by his furniture. She lights one cigarette and then another, as though fumigating for ghosts.

She lies flat again and is haunted by Norm's last days for three solid hours before falling asleep.

THE NEXT DAY SHE DROPS
by Nicotine around noon. There is no one around but Rob. He gives her the full tour. He is very proud of his house.

“When I found this place, it was a burned-out shell,” he says. “Classic landlord BS, a so-called hot eviction. It must have got out of hand, because I can't imagine they wanted to lose a slate roof. But this place is solid. There was almost no damage, except to the plaster upstairs. And the basement was underwater, so obviously the boiler and the electric and the plumbing were fucked, but I pumped it out and got a loan from CHA to put a flat roof on it before the rain really did a number on the brickwork.”