Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,9
the fertilizer that had been stored here half a century ago. In one corner was the Bastards’ equipment, still occasionally revisited—Jude’s third-hand guitar, Kram’s beat-up drum kit, Johnny’s old amp. The rest of the room was scattered with cardboard boxes, sawhorses, an old door leaning against the wall, a bicycle with a plastic baby seat, and an assortment of wooden school chairs. Some of them, stacked yin-yang style, were turned into makeshift easels from the years when Harriet taught life drawing, slabs of plywood wedged in their upturned legs, yellowed drawings held up by clothespins. A single bare bulb hung from the low ceiling. Jude turned it on, then went straight for the bottle of turpentine over the sink. “Just to tide us over,” he said. His cold fingertips fumbled. His heart, though, was warming up like an eager, rattling engine.
“What are we doing?” Teddy asked, sitting down on the basement couch. It wasn’t really a couch. It was the row of seats Jude’s father had removed from his van sometime in the seventies.
“Give me that underwear.”
From his pocket, Teddy presented the underwear he’d stolen from Victoria’s Secret. Jude soaked the panties with the turpentine. They were silky and pink, with a pink tag still dangling. “Remember this?” He plunged his face into the panties as if drying it on a towel. It had been a long time since he’d inhaled this particular elixir, but the sensation was recognizable right away. It smelled like being twelve, being with Teddy, being a redheaded boy in pajamas, and before long Jude’s nostrils were flaming nicely, and warm, acid tears were burning his eyes.
Jude passed the panties to Teddy, and Teddy pressed them to his face; they made a little hollow boat in his open mouth. It was a moment of weakness—he wanted to smother the thought of his mother, of their dark, empty house. He breathed in vigorously, then broke into laughter. Teddy’s laugh was sloppy, muffled, embarrassed, and usually accompanied by closed eyes. He sat like a blind man, mouth agape, waiting. That was how trusting Teddy was.
“This is wicked,” Teddy said.
Jude sat down beside him and took another huff, choking on a noseful of fumes. “Is it panties,” he asked, “or panty?”
“There’s only one,” said Teddy.
A dish towel or a paper bag would have worked just as well, but it was wonderful, getting high off of a panty. Jude put his head between his knees. For a moment he felt as though he were floating on or in the ocean, he felt as though he were made out of water. Then he panicked, drowning, and grabbed Teddy’s ankle and held on.
He sat up. “Dude, you know you’re staying here, right?”
Teddy reached for the panty and breathed. Snowflakes beat against the two ground-level windows. “Maybe for a little while.”
“For good, man. For bad, whatever. Richer or poorer.”
Jude redampened the panty. Teddy was quiet. Jude said, “All right, you fag?”
Two
The train car was empty. She liked the long, silent chain of seats, the domed ceiling above, dark as a theater’s. She sat listening to her headphones, socked feet resting on the seat ahead while she looked through her reflection to the black screen of snow. She always felt at sea when she was outside New York—giddy but lost, disbelieving how abysmal the world was. Cocooned here on the train, she could be anywhere. She could step outside and find herself in heaven, or Alaska.
But it was better here than in the bright white terrain of the last week, the fake snow on the slopes, the fluorescent lights of the room at the resort, where she did coke and shots with Nadia and Cissy and Cissy’s older sister and rolled her hair in curlers so tight they burned her scalp. It was better than being at home, where she watched videotaped episodes of Santa Barbara with her mother, smoked on the fire escape, taught herself David Bowie songs on the piano, and practiced makeup on Neena, the live-in housekeeper, whom she bribed with coke—the poor woman really had a problem—to cover for her when she snuck out. And it was better than being at school, whatever school she’d find herself in when the semester began. She had been kicked out of two boarding schools in a year and a half—both times for drugs, the second while skinny-dipping in the school’s Olympic-size pool.
She’d thought finally she’d have the chance to go to public school, but her mom had pulled some strings at some desperate