Anthropology of an American Girl (67 page)

“It wasn’t a decision. It was an accident.” He turns to me; our faces are practically grazing. “You know, like, a loss,” I explain. “I woke up in E.R. I didn’t know what happened until after it was over. Did Mark tell you that I—” I leave off with the question; I already know the answer. Mark had told Rob I’d been found
practically dead in the street
. Didn’t that imply I’d done it to myself, like with a coat hanger?

Beneath Rob’s eyes are the hard lines of misfortune. You cannot read him through his eyes. They defy, they oppose. Rob’s eyes are not how you see in, but how he sees out. He’s in shock, like me, only my shock is less and his is more. I live with Mark. I belong to a circle of people who are duplicitous, to a world in which friends are disposable. Rob’s is a world in which blood ties extend beyond blood. It’s difficult to see him forced to confront questions of betrayal among friends. It’s like he’s got rats in the house. It’s a shitty lesson, that of all the reckless ways to live, the most reckless of all is an absence of influence over your own affairs.

“What was I supposed to do?” he says. “Everybody knowing Harrison’s business but him, it wasn’t right. I had to tell him. If he ever found out that I knew too, it would be bad. Ever since his father died, it’s like he’s got this pressure. Everything goes back to that.” Rob shakes his head. “It’s bad luck all around. Except for Ross. He scored a triple win—retribution for Diane, a shot at you—which, I mean, he never stood a chance—and Harrison—he never fought again. Mark called him an animal, and he believed it.”

Rob shakes his head. “You know, it’s taken me a while to figure it out. I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid. Harrison left without me twice, not because he didn’t want me to come, but because he wanted me to stay. He wanted me to look out for you, once in Montauk and then later, after
finding out about this. And I failed—
twice.”
He drums his hands on the bar and cracks his back to the right. I wonder what he’s going to do. He looks like he’s going to do something. “Do me a favor,” he says to me. “Don’t say anything yet. Just think. Think back on everything. And remember what I told you in the beginning—
be careful.”

R
ob said to think, so I do, though it is difficult to find in myself what happened. Though the memories are there, my mind has transformed them, remaking them over the years into a thing finally crippled, finally deformed, abbreviated, in measure like bones missing from a body.

The first thing is the letter from Rourke, just checking in. The next is the night in the meat district, when Rob came to my dorm room. That was in April 1981, months after Rourke, but still before me and Mark. I’d seen Mark three or four times, never seriously. There was Rob’s sudden phone call—
I’ll be over in twenty minutes
—and then the delicate way he acted when he saw me, like he was picking up petals that had fallen off a flower. Obviously Mark had told him by then.

After that is a Sunday, one week later. Rob and Mark showing up at my dorm. They were going to play football. “It’s a beautiful day,” Mark said, swinging open my closet door, “you should get out.”

I can still see them standing there looking in at the empty hangers, then down to the ground at my suitcase, realizing that I’d never even unpacked from the start of the year. Rob turned away like he didn’t want to see, but Mark kneeled and went through my stuff like a surgeon, careful not to disrupt the piles that were folded and belted.

“This is perfect,” he said, withdrawing something white. He placed it on my shoulders. “C’mon, let’s head to Central Park!”

Rob’s Cougar was double-parked on Tenth Street. I sat up front next
to Rob and we pulled out, turning down Broadway. There was a deli on the northeast corner of Ninth Street. Mark ran in for coffees and sandwiches and a pack of Wrigley’s for Rob. While Mark was in the store, Rob combed back his hair with his fingers, then threw a lithe muscular arm over the back of the seat. I could feel the electricity behind my neck.

“He’s coming back,” Rob said, clearing his throat as though he wanted to be very precise. “For a couple days. He’d like to see you. You gonna be okay about this,” Rob inquired gravely, “or what?”

I said I’d be fine.

According to Rob, Rourke had been fighting full-time down in Miami with a world-class trainer, but was coming up north because he had agreed to help a friend on a job in Rahway, in Jersey. The trainer in Miami was that guy Jimmy Landes; the friend in Jersey was the Chinaman, and the Chinaman needed Rourke because Rourke knew martial arts and could defend himself, and Rahway was dangerous. No one told me any of this direct or outright; I learned in pieces that day. They must have thought it was the best way to tell me, in pieces.

“What’s Rahway?” I asked Rob later. We were sitting in the grass, on the Great Lawn.

“It’s a prison,” he said. “Maximum security.”

Three days after that I saw Rourke.

We all met at a restaurant at a marina in Jersey. There were sail masts towering disproportionately from the low, flat ground as if to tear night from the sky. And stars like shattered dishware, recklessly strewn. And the excruciating clarity of the vast beyond; the clinking, chiming ropes; the welted slap of the water against the wharf; the
flap-flap-flap
of plastic grand-opening flags that draped the raised butts of dry-docked boats. I had to walk on my toes to keep my heels from sinking into the sandlot.

“Rob ever take you here in summer?” Joey asked Mark.

“Couple of times,” Mark answered.

“Nice sunsets, right?”

“Gorgeous,” Mark agreed. “I was here with you guys for Eddie’s wedding.”

“That’s right,” Joey said. “Eddie M. That bastard.”

Under his breath, Rob said, “He
is
a bastard.”

Mark palmed Lorraine’s back as we walked up the stairs. “What do you think, Lorraine? Nice place for a wedding.”

Rob stopped at the landing, facing us. “I’ve often thought about marriage. But it always ends up being just that—
a thought.”
He busted out laughing. Lorraine gave him a whack and walked on.

“Why you gotta say such stupid shit?” Joey wanted to know, he and Rob walking abreast. “I swear.”

We approached a round candlelit table in a room to the left of the restaurant’s entrance, and right away, before sitting, Rob excused himself. He had to make a couple calls. He looked at me before he left, and he winked like everything was gonna be okay. I watched him fold into the crowd at the bar. Then I couldn’t see him anymore, but I stayed staring into that same spot just in case he might return to fill it.

“Sit down, Eveline, sit down,” a voice was saying. The voice belonged to Lee, the same Lee from the year before, who was there with Chris, her husband. That was the first time I’d seen them since the previous summer, when she said she’d wanted to be an artist. I sat and pulled my chair all the way in.

“You have your driver,” Mark was saying, “your mid-iron, your putter, and your spoon.”

“There’s also a brassie, a mashie, and a niblick,” Brett added.

“A niblick!” Joey’s wife, Anna, said. “You guys have got to be joking!”

Brett had driven out with Mark and me. I’d never met him before that night. They picked me up at school after eighteen holes in Eastchester. On the way down to Jersey they spoke of peaches.
Open-heart peaches, open-rock, open-seed
. “Freestones are the ones from which the pits are easily removed.” Mark drummed the syllables on the dashboard for my edification—
Free-stone
. “Get it?”

But from the moment we arrived at the restaurant, Mark didn’t talk to me. He just watched, as if eventually I was going to fall, and he was going to have to catch me.

“Lobsters all around,” Joey said to the waiter. “Three two-pound, lemme see, five three-pound.”

When Rob returned to the table, Joey started in on him, asking what
he was up to and who was he calling. Rob picked sesame seeds off of bread sticks and ate them one at a time. As he chewed, his jaw flexed, making two dark creases that arced parenthetically from his cheekbones.

“From running fights to running numbers. And my mother had big hopes for him,” Joey said. “Her
baby.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not dead yet.”

“
Yet
is right,” Chris said. “You don’t have a bodyguard anymore.”

Rob tilted back his chair. His arms hung straight off his sides and his thighs were apart. “My mother wants me to be an accountant. I go, ‘Ma, think of me as an accountant with a mobile office.’”

“Very funny,” Joey said. “Four years of college, then grad school, and he’s standing on street corners. My parents had to take out a second mortgage to pay tuition.”

“I don’t stand on corners.”

“Run slips, whatever. You’re in the wheel. You’re a spoke.”

“I don’t run slips either. You know what, Joey, you don’t know what the fuck I do.
Wheel. Spoke
. Where do you get this shit from—
Baretta
?” Rob’s chair slapped down; Lorraine shifted an inch to the right. “First of all, if there
was
a wheel, I’d be at the hub. Number two, I paid back Mom and Pop three times over. And while we’re at it, do you think major brokerages recruit guys like me? Harvard Mark and his buddy Brett over here’ll each make partner at Goldman in a couple years, but I’d be walled up in some cubicle, crunching numbers, making fifty grand, thinking up scams. You know how easy it is for me to think up scams?” Rob mashed his teeth together. “There’s a big difference between a prison-bound entrepreneur and a prison-bound clerk.”

“True,” Chris said. “Only one can afford a good lawyer.”

“Besides,” Rob added, “Lorraine over here is very high maintenance. Very Park Avenue.” His hand slipped up from her shoulders into the uncivilized nest of her hair. She rolled her eyes. If Lorraine had been a cat, she’d have been a calico—pretty but peculiar. She carried a huge pocketbook, which always contained the thing Rob needed most. “Hey, Rainy,” he’d say, flicking his fingers into his palm, “got a deck a cards?”

“How come your father can’t get Rob a job at some corporation?” Joey asked Mark. “Something honest.”

“Corporations honest?” Rob mocked.
“Ha!
Go back to pissin’ on fires, Joey.”

“No problem,” Mark said convincingly. “My father loves Rob.”

Lee leaned over to me. “So, how’s everything with you? School?”

“Yeah, how’s it going, Eveline?” Chris inquired.

“It’s going okay.”

“She’s all A’s,” Rob said. “Forget about it.”

“And it happens to be a very rigid curriculum,” Mark added.

Rob said, “It’s not like she sits around drawing pictures all day.”

I wondered why they felt they had to defend me. I wondered if I seemed dumb.

Past the heads of Lee and Chris was a plastered archway leading to the packed central dining area, and on the far side of that, another archway going to the kitchen. Red-vested waiters passed from the back arch into the main dining room, one on top of the other like out of a musical, each carrying sweltering aluminum platters, and one time through the steam came Rourke.

I remember thinking,
How did he get into the back? Did he get there before us, or did he come in through the kitchen?

The seven months had left him altered, heavier, harder. His skin was dark; he was letting his hair grow. Above his left eye, a whole new scar. I noticed a mechanical efficiency, a half-human impassivity. It was like having an animal enter the room, and the animal is also a machine—if you can picture the way animals occasionally simulate machines, if you can picture a fascinating confluence of aspiration and design. I would not have thought it possible for him to be sexier, but he was. If he were a killer, I would not have known whether to run or stay and be killed—I would not have wanted to miss a moment of him.

If it’s sad to reflect upon the wrongness of that particular impression, of him as capable of killing, it is germane, I think, to the history of my failure. Because, in fact, I’ve never known anyone with such a reverence for the sanctity of the body and the independence of the spirit. It’s easy to speak in favor of freedom and strength, but grueling to live a life of emotional economy and physical reserve as Rourke did. His capacity to cause real harm obliged him to exist mindfully. Ironically, it was his sober
self-containment, his refusal to equivocate, that threatened and hurt people most. I know because nothing has ever threatened or hurt me more than the moderation of his heart.

I felt conspicuous in my need; I felt wrong to be there. Before he even reached the table, I wanted to leave. I reminded myself that I was not very smart and not very pretty. That my eyes had dark circles and my skin was pale like potter’s clay. That I did not have a nice haircut like Lee did or good makeup from Saks like Anna or gold hoop earrings like Lorraine. Surely everyone noticed my five-dollar haircut. Five dollars because at Astor Place Haircutters, Dominic charged me the men’s rate since I hardly had hair. Probably they could guess that beneath my clothes my underwear had lost its original elasticity and in my pocket was all I possessed—a work-study paycheck for sixty-six dollars. Rourke must have recognized me to be the pathetic liability that I was. That was my feeling. Sometimes a feeling is all you get.

“Hey, hey, it’s the grifter!” Joey said, rising first to greet him.

The women rushed Rourke, and the men stood, and the waiters came too, gathering around. He greeted them all, then he looked in my direction, and nodded, smiling, softly saying, “Hi.”

I said hi, and after that everything went slowly. I remember the twist of my shoes against the floor.

Chris squeezed Rourke’s shoulders. “You ready, or what? Look at this!”

“He’s training to go one-on-one with me,” Joey said.

“I’d pay big money to see that,” Mark said sarcastically, reaching and shaking hands with Rourke. “Harrison, you remember my friend, Brett.”

“Good to see you again,” Brett sputtered with a deluge of respect.

Rourke shook hands and moved on to Rob. The two embraced. Rourke’s arm locked onto Rob’s back, and his face inched over Rob’s shoulder, his black eyes cutting through space.