Anthropology of an American Girl (64 page)

With all the commotion, Mark doesn’t notice me slip away. I pass through the loft, finding a hallway, a door, a staircase, the roof. There are other guests up here, dancing and playing children’s games.

“Mother says, ‘Take six wondrous city pigeon steps!’”

“Mother May I?”

“Yes! You may.”

Some of them are so fucked up I’m concerned they might try to fly. When I was a kid, you always heard about dope fiends trying to fly. Nobody tries to fly anymore. There is something to that, I think.

I walk to the roof rail. I look to see if there are balconies or ledges, but it’s just a straight shot down. The cars in the street look like gribble, lonely like bugs in paths on rotting wood.

“Don’t go getting any crazy ideas,” a voice says from behind me.

Rob. His elbows line up next to mine on the rail, and for a while we just stand there, staring. It’s like we’re looking off a ship. The music from the loft below is like the pounding of the boat on the water, and our faces press into the night wind as if seeking relief from some indwelling nausea. Unlike our fellow passengers, we are disappointed with where the ship is headed, yet we assigned ourselves to its course long ago. No asylum ahead can approximate the one we once imagined reaching.

“I figured you were downstairs,” I say. “With the rest of them.”

“Me? Nah. You know I’ve been off blow for years, and I’d never touch smack. And forget about ecstasy. Look at those free-love lunatics.” He gestures to the people across the roof, skipping in pairs. “They were playing Duck, Duck, Goose before, very nice, then all of a sudden one of the ducks starts holding hands with a goose and that’s it—
chaos.”
Rob finds my eyes. “Listen.”

I look back down at the street. Whenever people start sentences with
Listen
, you know that no matter what comes next, it’s not going to be good.

“I’m heading out,” he says. “I don’t want to tell you what to do or anything—I know it’s not my place—but you should probably let me take you home.”

Rob asks if I understand. I do. He’s telling me that things downstairs are bad. But I know that. They were bad already at Area when Mark picked a fight with Rob, and then bad again when Miles and Paige arrived. Rob is saying that my commitment to Mark is for the present nullified—that Rob is under a prevailing obligation to see me safely home, that obligation being to me, and also to Rourke. I understand that by agreeing to honor forgoing loyalties, I betray Mark, and in turn condemn myself for my movable allegiance.

I say okay.

“Okay,” he repeats,
okay
. He is surprised and also relieved, not exactly happy, but lighter. “Let’s do this fast. What do you have downstairs, a pocketbook?”

“A sweater.”

He nods, calculating. “Fine. A sweater. I’ll wait by the elevator. I won’t leave alone unless you walk out and tell me you’re okay. But I’m warning you, you’re gonna have to be pretty fucking convincing.” He takes my hand. “Let’s go.”

Going down the roof stairs and back into that party sickens me. Everyone in the loft is dancing, or rather, staggering like zombies. It’s like their knees won’t hold them. I recall the roof. If not for Rob, I think in fact I would try to fly.

Rob points over the tops of heads to the entrance. “I’ll be right there.”

The door to the bedroom where I left Mark and everyone is open about eighteen inches. Through the opening I see Mark, reclining on a
chaise in the center of an encampment of people, king of a wax tribe. He shifts when I come. As I look around for my sweater, he says, “C’mon people. Let’s dance.”

Two of the girls flanking him lend him their arms and aid him to his feet, and he laughs, at himself, I suppose, at the way he imagines himself to be. He uses them like canes to right himself across the path to me, where he stops, shaking them off with a burst of manly animation. The girls saunter insolently past as if to imply that he slept with them while I was gone. Obviously they know nothing of his revulsion to disease, or of his obsessive fear of being cheated on by me in return. Or how Mark figures himself to be a man of ideals; he would not want a woman whose attraction to him is defiled by a lust for assets. Anyway, I feel no jealousy where Mark is concerned. There is simply an emptiness in the place where such emotions might reside.

The room has cleared; his friends have gone to the dance floor. He and I are alone. Mark comes closer. He smiles a false smile. His eyes are wild and unable to focus; they look off slightly to the side. The veneer of his skin is white as birch. His upper lip is a band of sweat, his nose is running, and his breath smells like steel getting cut, like when Dad and Tony cut steel with a chop saw for some sign they’re making. I wonder what he’s been doing, snorting coke or snorting heroin, or both. I’ve seen him do it before. The last time Miles and Paige were here. It’s not a big deal, Mark told me—
strictly business, purely recreational
. Probably I should have seen this coming. That’s my job, I think, to see things coming.

“I think we should go,” I say.

He pulls my sweater from my hands. “I think we should stay.”

I reach for the sweater. “I think I’m going.”

“I think you’re staying,” Mark snaps, and he flings my sweater across the bedroom. His body plows into mine and he pins me against the opened door. He yanks the fabric of my skirt toward my waist with his left hand, and he grabs my ass with his right, taking up the flesh and groping it, driving me back, writhing, worming.

“Mark!” I am able to lean far enough left to see across the dance floor. Rob is not in the appointed spot, which can mean just one thing: he’s on his way over. Within seconds, I see him; he is about ten feet away.
Through the leather of his jacket, I can make out fists in the pockets. Mark casts a lethal gaze in Rob’s direction, then he turns me completely outward, exposing my bare back to the crowd. Mark pulls me into the bedroom and kicks the door shut. Rob’s foot and shoulder jam it. There is powerful shoving.

“Mark!”
I shout again, thinking,
Rob is going to end up in jail. Shit, Rob is going to end up in jail
.

Immediately, people come out of the bathroom behind us, taking Mark and me by surprise. Dara and Brett emerge with two of the models, one of whom is swaying feverishly to the blaring music—“The Age of Aquarius.” It’s at the horn part, at its most hallucinatory and cultish.

With Mark’s attention diverted, he loses his hold on the door and Rob smacks it open. Dara throws out his arms to protect the girls as Rob lurches at Mark and Mark lurches at Rob and Brett cuts over, forcing his way into the middle.

Dara yells,
“Everyone freeze,”
and they all comply, I guess because I’m so obviously caught in the mass. I don’t kid myself into thinking Dara cares. As far as he’s concerned, I’m Mark’s property, and under any other circumstances, it would be my place to acquiesce to Mark’s will. But Dara is looking at Rob, and he’s thinking,
For all I know, that barbarian is carrying a gun
. Furthermore, we are guests in Dara’s client’s apartment, and Mark’s clients have drugs. Everyone is equally compromised, which is somehow a sign of the times. Dara retrieves my sweater from the floor, then slides over. He extends his arm, helping me to disembark as though assisting me off a high-speed amusement ride. I try to withdraw but can’t. I don’t know who has my hand. Someone has it tightly. Oh, Rob—I can feel the leather cuff of his jacket.

As soon as I am extracted, Mark and Rob press back at each other, but Brett firmly holds the center, saying, “Break it up! Break it up!”

“Sorry your fiancée is unwell, Ross,” Dara states to Mark, loudly and clearly. “You are wise to send her home. Unless, of course,” he adds with contempt as he opens the bedroom door, “you have a little headache also?”

Mark does not reply. The three men stay immobilized, congealed into one dynamic solid, like one of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures of slaves breaking from rock.

“Let’s take a walk,” Dara insists, “together.” He takes the lead step, and we cross the central room as one. “Does the future Mrs. Ross have a car, or does she need a taxi?”

“Taxi,” I answer.

At the elevator bay, Mark reaches for his wallet. The force of his own hand entering into his breast pocket throws him off balance. He finds two twenties, pinches them ineptly, then thrusts them at me. I join Rob on the elevator, and everyone looks at one another like factions facing off. I press the button fast.

As the doors begin to creak closed, Mark tosses out an arm, blocking them, and Rob pushes me behind his back. Brett grabs Mark’s shoulders. There’s that irregular thucking that elevator doors do. Mark manages to break free just enough to dump the remaining contents of his wallet onto the elevator floor.

“Here,” Mark says to Rob. “Go buy yourself a matching outfit.”

Rob kicks it all back, rapid fire, cramming the toe of his shoe into each piece, not missing a single bill or coin. “Save it for psychotherapy, you sadistic motherfucker.”

“I’d warn you to keep your hands off her,” Mark says, “but I won’t bother. You’ve always been too afraid to try.”

I look up Varick Street for a cab, but Rob snaps his head to one side. “C’mon, I got the Cougar.”

The ride home passes in withering silence. I consider telling Rob that what he saw was not typical, that Mark was not himself, but even if Mark were worthy of defense, I would not have insulted Rob by lying to him.

Rob glares through the windshield, head down, eyes up, as if checking for broken bulbs in the streetlamps. He chews furiously—a toothpick, I think. We take Sixth Avenue up past all the silver towers. I’d always been pure to Rob, from the beginning, a palace in his mind. He had erected me and tended to me. I wonder if we’ll ever recover, if we can ever find a way around disgrace.

At the entrance to my building, he hits the hazards and comes around to my door. He hands Carlo a five-dollar bill and tells him to keep an eye on the car. Rob takes me up to the apartment; he has to do
something
. Leaving me at the curb is not an option. In both our minds is the meaninglessness of his prudence. Mark has keys, just like me.

I will not say that Mark and I have sex when he eventually comes home. I will say that somehow he manages to ejaculate inside me despite the stubborn flaccidness of his penis, and right away he passes out and right away I bathe, allowing gravity and soap and near-boiling water to purge the tapioca clots of stinking debris he deposited in me. And men make fun of the way women taste and smell. If only women had voices.

I
throw my legs over the side of the bed. My head is pounding, though I had nothing toxic the previous night. Mark is on the phone in the living room. When he hangs up, he comes in carrying juice, and he sits, facing me. His face looks stiff like a shield.

“If you’re not too disgusted, I’d like to apologize.”

I shrug. “Whatever.”

“No, not whatever. Don’t say
whatever
. Say what you feel. I behaved shamefully.”

I say nothing. He can’t handle what I feel. I feel released. “It was embarrassing, that’s all.”

“I’m sorry you were embarrassed. What else?”

I have nothing to add. “That’s it,” I say.

He reaches over and pets my hair. “I was drinking gin. You know I can’t drink gin.” He follows me to the bathroom and watches me wash and dress. “It’s not like I was with another woman. C’mon, I’m a wreck about this.”

This is only a partial lie. Obviously he’s a wreck about something. “Forget it, Mark.”

“Oh, no,” he states with sudden menacing rectitude, “just the opposite. I won’t forget it. In fact, I’ve called everyone. I just got off the phone with Rob. I took all the blame.”

I brush my teeth. I wonder if there’s a difference between
taking
the blame and
being
to blame. If there’s a difference, he’s referring to it. At the door, I grab a coat and my knapsack.

“Where are you headed?”

“School.”

“The gym?”

Mark doesn’t like me to go to the gym. He says it’s a pickup scene. If I promise to avoid the basketball courts and the weight room, and just go to the pool and sauna, he’ll say that’s worse because of the lesbians. Once I said, “What are you talking about? I’ve never noticed any lesbians,” and he said, “That’s
precisely
the problem.”

“The library. I have to finish my papers.”

“I thought you finished your papers. Aren’t they due Tuesday? You should have told me. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have dragged you out last night and we could have avoided this entire mess.” At the elevator, he kisses me on the forehead, speaking into my temple. “I have your graduation present. I spoke to the travel agent this morning. We’re going away the day after Alicia’s wedding. I wanted to surprise you, but we’ll need to have your passport ready. What would you say to Italy?”

Italy
, I think as I board the elevator. It’s the least he can do.

I spend the day walking around the city, and when it starts to rain I take a twelve-dollar cab ride to Pinky’s, Rob’s cousin’s bar in Brooklyn. Rob’s over there at least once a week, though he lives in Jersey. It has something to do with gambling. The driver takes Third Avenue to the Queensboro Bridge because there’s been an accident on the Williamsburg and the Manhattan is closed for repairs.

The streets glisten from an evening rain. Outside is warm, even for May. Through my window I hear the tick of tires against wet pavement, and on the radio, I listen to a lecture about relationships.

“Consider, for example, what happens when we walk,” the speaker explains. “Our intrinsic reality is, quite simply, that we are moving in a given direction toward a given destination. Extrinsically, however, we are reliant upon the earth beneath our feet. If the earth were as absent in reality as in our perception of reality, our legs would swing in air.

“People seek equity in love as though love is a business. They look for equitable investments and gains. But relationships,” he continues, “can possess equities separate from those that can be easily named or known. Equity can exist, independent of
interpretation
of equity, which, of course, is variable. By seeking
quantifiables
, we lose sight of mystery—the real binding power.”