Anthropology of an American Girl (60 page)

Rob had a tight bouncy walk. He leaned forward as if his torso were connected in a line to his legs, and he walked with purpose, though it
was rare that he had one. He pulled me by the wrist down Tenth Avenue into the meat district, past the hookers and queens and the stalled and steamed Impalas. Girls in sheer baby doll dresses and boys like girls in zipper-back shorts and vinyl boots riding up brawny thighs. At the loading dock for Falco’s Meats, Rob pulled something folded from his back pocket, opened it up, and checked it over.

I took another look at the prostitutes. They were like lost sentinels, flecking the concrete horizon with bioluminescence, leaning to solicit the occasional passing car just like they do on
Starsky and Hutch
. At first you are not sure they’re there, they go so slow, but if you wait, they appear, like decorative fish caught in a choke of algae, bobbing out with omnidirectional eyes.

Rob crammed the paper back into his jeans pocket, and we entered the building. Remembering himself, he stopped to hold the door for me.

“How ya doin’, Tommy?” he said to the guy at the counter.

Tommy flipped a wilted page of yesterday’s news. “Hey, Robbie,
que pasa?”

“My uncle leave yet?”

“Nah, he’s still in the back.”

Rob parted a row of foggy plastic strips, then turned and stopped me. “You’re not gonna get sick, are you?”

“Not in front of Uncle Tudi,” I said.

Rob said, “That’s all I wanted to hear.”

Curtains of animals lined two sides of the sawdust aisle, and I held my breath as we walked toward a room in back of the warehouse. I noticed that the pigs had no conspicuous necks. Pig necks are not so noticeable when pigs are standing in a barn or at a state fair, but when they are pendant and dead, you can see how their backs slope directly up into quadrangular heads, which are kind of boxy, like dice.

At the end of the bright run was a filthy glass wall and, behind it, the hunched torsos of men playing cards. We walked into the office to see four men with eyeglasses and caps tipped rakishly over long faces habituated to a world of flesh for sale. There was a tar-coated Mr. Coffee machine and a half-eaten Entenmann’s cheese strudel. Three of the men wore smocks streaked with brown stains, where they’d dragged their freezer-swollen
fingers dry of blood and guts and marrow. The fourth man’s meticulous street clothes were an obvious expression of superiority—a dress shirt, a sweater, a quilted corduroy hunting jacket. Rob kissed him on the cheek, so I figured that was Uncle Tudi. He was huge. I wouldn’t normally stare, but his massive anatomy coupled with his shameless self-confidence was mesmerizing. Like one of those giant pumpkins you see in October at country stores, he was squat and sideways-tilted. You couldn’t help but try to guess his weight—three hundred and seven pounds.

The guys nodded.

“How ya doin’, kid?”

“Hey, Robbie. What’s up?”

Uncle Tudi breathed thickly and finessed the cards beneath the bulk of his manicured fingers. Just past the knuckle of his left pinky was a solid gold ring set with a flat face and diamond chip. His cologne was a jungle about him. “Who’s the lady friend?” he wanted to know.

“This is Eveline,” Rob said, jiggling nervously, picking an end-slice of cake off the table.

“Eveline. What kinda name is that?”

Rob motioned with his head in the direction of his uncle.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just a name, I guess.”

“What kinda name? Irish, English, what?”

“I think my mother just made it up.”

Tudi creaked back unevenly in his chair. “I thought so. I never hearda that name before. Sounds modern.”

“I fold,” the guy across from him said, laying down his hand and checking his watch.

“Me too,” another said.

The one next to Rob said he was in, and he threw a five-dollar bill on top of the pool. Tudi matched him, and they showed their hands. The guy had three jacks; Tudi had three tens and a pair of sixes. He scooped his winnings.

“Maybe it’s an old-fashioned name, Tudi, like Ernestine or Lily,” the guy with the watch speculated. He swept the cards into a pile and shuffled expertly.

Tudi clicked his tongue. “If it was
old-fashion
, we woulda heard it before.
Especially you, Tony. You’re older than dead dog shit. That’s why it’s gotta be modern. Am I right?” he asked me, peering intensely and expectantly into my face like a seaman gauging a swelling cloud. One eye was millimeters larger than the other.

“I guess—”

He interrupted me. “Where’d youse meet?”

“Montauk,” Rob answered.

Somebody said, “Montauk! She fishes?”

“I ever tell you, Pat,” one of the guys said to another, “the transmission in my car has five settings—park, drive, neutral, reverse, and ‘Montauk.’ I adjust the arm and it goes.” His flattened palm cut into the air,
Bzjump
.

Through his teeth, Rob said to his uncle, “At Harrison’s place.”

“At Harrison’s place,” Tudi repeated as he organized his money, lining up bills by denomination, then folding the packed knot into his shirt pocket. He coughed a little, repeating, “Harrison,” then he coughed more, and the room got quiet. He picked up a napkin and held it over his mouth, and he stayed still and everybody stayed still. I had the feeling Rob was going to get hit.

Tudi shouted, “What the hell’s the matter with you, walking around with a girl this time of night? It’s meat packing out there, you moron, not the boardwalk!”

“Which one’s Harrison?” Pat murmured. “The fighter?”

The others nodded.

Tudi stood and adjusted his collar. “You got some numbers for me?”

Rob said, “Yeah.”

“Gentlemen,” Tudi stated formally. “If you don’t mind.”

We followed him to the door, and he just squeaked through by making a slight corkscrew motion with his belly. Outside, Rob exchanged the contents of his pocket for ten fifties.

His uncle perused the sheets. They were photocopies, lined and filled in neatly with numbers in Rob’s writing. “How’d it work out?”

“Good,” Rob said, sounding normal again, which is to say, confident. He always sounded confident when referring to numbers.

Uncle Tudi must’ve felt bad about yelling or good about the papers
because he slapped Rob tenderly on the cheek then laid a barrel-size arm around my shoulders. “Listen,” he said. “You seem like a nice girl with a modern name. Don’t get me wrong, but don’t come down here again, understand?” His face was inches from mine; it was like kissing the moon. “I hate to think what Harrison would do if he knew Rob had you here at five in the morning.”

I promised I wouldn’t come back, and Uncle Tudi seemed satisfied.

He jerked his head to me, asking Rob, “She met your mother?”

“Not yet,” Rob sputtered, and his uncle shot him a look. Rob threw up his hands.
“Whaaat?”

“Lemme tell you something,” Tudi said to me. “My sister, Fortuna, is a lady. Rob was raised decent, with manners. But he was a change-of-life baby for her. That’s why he’s spoiled.” He lifted a finger to Rob but said nothing. Rob also said nothing, then he nodded and kissed his uncle again.

Before we got to the door, Uncle Tudi called out. He was waddling to catch us. “Boneless pork,” he said breathlessly, handing me a package the size of a shoe box. “It’s nice.”

“She doesn’t have a stove, Uncle.”

“Whaddaya mean
no stove?”

“She lives in a dormitory.” Rob backed away, taking me along. “You know. College.”

“Next time I see you two,” he warned as he withdrew the pork, “it’s in daylight!”

We spent what remained of the night on a stoop on Horatio Street. A jaundiced glow from the inside filled a second-story window across the way, and we watched it like a movie. Something had come over Rob, something not unfamiliar to me. A constitutional shift, sort of a shutdown. Sometimes he just stopped, like a machine idling.

“How long have we known each other?” I asked.

“One year,” he said. “St. Patrick’s Day.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “Seems like longer than a year.” That meant that eight months had passed since I’d seen Rourke.

He lit a cigarette. “Seems like a year.”

“I liked you as soon as I saw you,” I confided.

“Oh, yeah?” he said. He jiggled his knee lightly.

“What did you think when you saw me?”

“I thought you were good-looking.”

“Did you tell that to Rourke?”

“Not in those exact words.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember.”

I had the feeling that I owed him an apology. I thought to say sorry. I thought to thank him for coming. Only I couldn’t thank him, or say sorry, or say anything really, not when I would have had to look at him with gratitude in my eyes and still let him know he’d failed. He was the closest thing to Rourke, but he was not Rourke.

“How you been?” he wanted to know.

“Good,” I said. “I’ve been good.”

“You been all right?”

“I’ve been all right.”

I lied because Rob didn’t need to know details. He didn’t need to hear how Rourke stalked the periphery of my nights, stealthy as a feline in my dreams, mad as a dream cat. How my heartbreak kept me alive, keeping me whole the way your skin keeps your pieces in. You cannot live without skin. You don’t think to manufacture it, but absently you do. Every seven days it’s new again. I didn’t tell the truth because Rob might say,
Try to be happy
. People often say that. But it’s difficult to move beyond certain losses. Fire, for instance, as Rob had said, and death. It gets to where you can’t even talk to people who haven’t suffered as you have. I lied because I didn’t want him to know what it means to be sick. All the time, sick. I lied because he knew the truth anyway.

“I haven’t slept with Mark, you know.”

Rob drew in for the last time from his cigarette. “Not yet,” he said. “You will.”

Spring 1984

T
he Water Club is near the heliport on the East River. If you’re careful about where you sit, you can avoid the sorry sight of dormant helicopters, which look like women with wet hats. That is where Alicia and Jonathan announce their engagement, over dinner, the four of us alone. The announcement is no surprise. Mrs. Ross had told us weeks before; she’d wanted to prepare Mark.

“He’s a pansy,” Mark had said bitterly. “The asthma, the Mercury Zephyr, the backgammon. He’s allergic to mesquite. How can anyone be allergic to mesquite?”

“Jonathan treats her well,” Mrs. Ross said. “She’ll be deprived of nothing.”

“Except in the bedroom,” Mark mumbled.

His mother smacked him on the shoulder. “Oh, stop it.”

Mr. Ross shrugged. He tries to think of the big picture. His children are nice-looking, well-off, and connected, and that’s going to have to be enough since he’s dying and will soon be dead. He doesn’t have the stamina for the minutiae of survival; as far as he’s concerned, no one is going to go shoeless.

I know because he tells me things. I always come early for dinner—family dinners are on Thursdays—and I meet him at one of the cocktail tables at 21 or in the Oak Room or at Tavern on the Green. Every now and then we eat at Doubles, a club in the Sherry-Netherland. He lays down his cigarette before he stands to greet me. Then he grabs the waiter’s sleeve to order me a Tanqueray and tonic, which I accept even if I don’t feel like having it, because I made the mistake of ordering one once, and from that point on, Mr. Ross thought it was my preference. One law of being a gentleman is to know a lady’s preference, and it’s not
good manners for her to keep switching on him. When my drink arrives, we eat nuts with brown husks, the kind that look like pussy willow buds.

Sometimes I find him smoking across the street from his house, on a bench by Central Park. If it’s somewhat depressing to see Mr. Ross huddled on a bench like a bum—especially one of those broken benches without back slats to connect the exposed cement posts—it’s a clever place for him to hide, because no one would ever think to look for him there. He’s not supposed to smoke because of his health. Everyone always yells at him, but it never does much good. I usually try to take his mind off death for a few minutes.

He’s been talking about dying since I met him, and according to all reports, for some time before that. But since he returned to work following his heart surgery five years ago, no one seems particularly alarmed by his fears. Maybe he talks about dying to try to get people to take better care of him. Or maybe he secretly wishes to be done.

“The soul seeks equilibrium,” my father speculated when I asked why a man who loves his family and his job would smoke and drink in defiance of medical advice. “People who are responsible and successful often act recklessly to counterbalance all that selflessness. If you’re ninety percent accountable for others, chances are you’ll fill up the remaining ten with unaccountable behaviors.”