Anthropology of an American Girl (72 page)

I pour the reboiled water; she sets cookies on plates. Rob makes the last of several trips to the attic. There is the machine gun stomping of footsteps. She likes the noise; it’s been a long time. We lift our steaming cups, eyes connecting above china.

“I’m glad you came,” she says. “I hope it won’t be the last time.” Her eyes search my face. She reaches across the table, touching my hair. “It’s longer now. It used to be very short.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t understand.”

“There’s a picture he carries. You were in the high school when he took it, he said. In a gymnasium.”

——

On our way down the porch steps, she calls out for us to wait. She returns with a letter for Rourke, asking Rob to mail it. Rob is farther than I am, so I reach, taking it in my hands.

“Goodbye again,” she says, grasping my hands. I feel something pass from her to me: courage, confidence, soundness.

If you think it’s impossible to feel worse than the worst you’ve ever felt, you’re wrong. Worse than numb, worse than solitude and despair, is to possess one particle of hope, to feel the feel of fate brushing so close you think you will die. I say goodbye as well.

Rob honks twice, and we back out and drive away. He pulls up at the first mailbox.

“Not this one,” I tell him. “The next.” I hold the letter tightly—his name, knowingly printed.

He leans on the accelerator.

“How did his father die?”

Rob reaches to smack down his visor. We must have turned west. The sun, going down.

“He was murdered. By the brother of a guy he killed. He was on duty; he threw a punch and killed a guy. A fluke. A robbery on Chambers Street. The kid’s brother came down from Detroit to settle. He got killed too. Billy Rourke’s partner shot him. In the face. It was bad. It was a fucking mess.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen. We were fourteen.”

M
r. and Mrs. Ross are in Los Angeles, so Mark throws an impromptu party at their glamorous apartment with their glamorous things—food, wine, staff. Mark is careful not to call it an
engagement party;
after the disastrous night with Rob, he knows better. He keeps asking to pick a time
to tell my parents “the news,” and I keep suggesting that we wait until we see them in person.

The guests look like pigs. Like pigs in suits. All the eyes look dead and round in faces that are compilations of parts—teeth and noses and millions of hairs blown and combed, and lips that liberate opinions through tangles of smoke, sideways disclosures about mentions in
Variety
and the luminescence of diamonds. I stay by my seat. I know it is mine because there is a card with my name. The card is the color of spoiled cream, and the ink is a sort of ochre.

Through the window behind my upholstered dining chair, the city churns, an ocean of catastrophe and chance. A red light windmills and swipes across the treetops of Central Park; an ambulance retrieves a body and delivers it to the aid of strangers. We are high in the air, but we cannot escape the violence of the streets. We content ourselves not to see—it is not the fact of indigence that distresses us, just the spectacle. I remind myself that the red lights are a sign. Every night is the worst night of someone’s life. It’s easy to forget that.

It is time to turn; I turn. Arms come together like branches of a star rising over the center of the table. Jeweled fingers and gold-cuffed wrists grip clear tulips. Candlelight inhabits the champagne, making it like effervescent caramel.

“Hear, hear,” they say, and we drink—to Mark, his promotion, his engagement. His
success
.

There is epic meaning in the erect and stately circle we form, in the alliance of ready arms, in the fists clutching the brittle glass. A toast is a ritual aside, a communal departure, a type of prayer. We step out of time because we have vanquished it. We are superior to the things of which we speak. I think of valorous knights and courageous kings, of notable deeds forgotten, great heroes dead and gone.

“A second toast,” Mark says, his voice fashioning tenderness. “To Eveline.” He gestures to me, they gesture to me, and I bow to straighten my perfect dress, which hangs against me perfectly. In the glimmering moon of my china plate, I discover a watery likeness of my face. Mindful of the way I hang my head, I right myself to confront the sea of eyes. “May the rest of our lives be as happy as these three years have been.”

“Salud,”
they murmur kindly, though they are not kind. To them I
begin and end with Mark. He is my origin and objective. To them I am no more than what I appear to be. They go to lengths to keep me in the prison of their view.

“Hurry up and drink,” Alicia says. “Dinner in twenty minutes.”

Bodies cleave from the table, forming genial clusters. I wait for an opening, which is like waiting to be picked for a team.

“Three years,” a voice thunders from behind my back. The voice belongs to Brett. “A long time, Eveline. A damn long time.”

I’m uncertain whether this is true. Sometimes a year is lavish and profuse, riotous as a gale. Sometimes it goes breath by breath by breath. Minutes can be critical, decades without meaning, and so I might say, but he is done with me. My reticence is proof to him of my stupidity. To Brett I am useless unless seen. He scans the crowd hoping we’ve been noticed. He feels manly when he stands with me, just as some people feel learned when they carry books. His gaze returns to my body. His eyes are mean and his skin prematurely wrinkled, and a shock of brittle hair marks the center of his skull. His nails are manicured, and beneath his cashmere turtleneck his breasts droop. The proposition he makes with his eyes is stealthy and simple—money, power, and comfort in exchange for sex. I wonder by what error of nature he has come to feel so virile. And yet his audacity is not without weight. Brett is a man of business, of wealth and renown. No opportunity is to be left unexplored, no friend so dear that he cannot be betrayed.

Maybe I will take him with me into the kitchen, where appliances gleam harshly in kitchen light, sending back warped ideas of yourself. In the kitchen, I will let him touch me—he would like that. His greedy fingers kneading my flesh, cramming into scars—scars are everywhere, no matter where you touch, you cannot miss. “Yes,” I will say to Brett, through the icy kitchen glare. “Three years is a very long time.”

My glass is empty. I hold it by its stem, considering the delicacy of the marks I make. My fingerprints are specific and small, like baby bridges. I think of fossils, fishy and particular, weary cadavers in khaki rock—proving, proving something.

Brett and I are joined by Dara and a man named Swoosey Schicks, whose name sounds like a drunk with castanets. They discuss treasury
bonds and Reagan’s Star Wars missile plan, cycling in Bali, and the price of Brett’s 14-carat-gold octagon Rolex—$1,950. Across the room Mark begins to dance with Amy, a redhead who appeared in
Amadeus
. Or maybe
A Passage to India
.

“Uh-oh,” Brett says, nudging me. “Things are beginning to get interesting.”

I excuse myself. I go to the bathroom. It is the one place to hide. Men want to know what women do in bathrooms. They
hide
.

I sit on the edge of the bathtub. It is a round-edged prewar New York tub. I don’t need to pee, but anyway I lift my dress and lower my stockings to my knees. The division is strange, black to white. I touch each side of the division, one side and the other, jumping the line, my finger popping—nylon to skin, skin to nylon. From the elastic of my bra, I remove a small pen, and on my thigh I draw some fossils, rose fossils, which are petrified rose remains. Last time I saw my dad we ate gelato and he gave me a newspaper article about rose fossils dating back thirty-two million years. Also on my leg I write my name. My dad—I haven’t seen him in a long time. Gelato means summer.

Behind the shower curtain above the tub is a tall window set deep in a tiled rectangular cubby. It looks onto a sheet of brick, which is the neighboring building. Outside is music from an adjacent apartment. The song comes from a time when music used to say who you were, not how to look, and life was like a dream you dreamt streaking by like you’re staring out of a speeding vehicle. Nights were dark then, black, like mother of coal.

I climb into the tub. I push the shampoo bottles to one side of the sill and crank the window open. Some dust blows in, a little ash.

The song curls in the air shaft between buildings before getting drawn out through the duct. I follow its route. Sometimes you see a balloon going that way, bobbing in jerks against nothing, like a toy retracted by
God. It’s sad to see a balloon disappear that way; it makes you nostalgic. It is seeing the child you once were and conceding that more are coming—you are not the last.

Quiet now; not quiet, just the whimper and rumor of voices skulking through the fissure between door and floor. At the sink I wash my hands. I unravel a strip of toilet paper to wipe my footprints from the bottom of the tub. It’s not that I’m neat; it’s just that I have so much time to kill.

When the guests have gone, we go back to bed in his childhood room, where we first had sex. I wonder if the last time will be in this bed too. That would be good, a last time.

Mark’s body approaches mine. His hands tow across my skin like damp mitts. I feel without feeling, which is nothing, which is easy, like sterile mechanics. I am thankful he does not insist upon cognizance. There are certain things a girl cannot tolerate.

There is a place to go, a place no one can access—a barrier. I do not know what it blocks, but I move to it, journeying, further and deeper, to reach—I don’t know, just a place.

“You okay?” Mark asks when it is over. He always asks.

“I’m okay,” I say as I sit up, “just thirsty.” This is not a lie. The thirst is supreme, as though inside I have shriveled. I stand at his parents’ refrigerator, drinking everything, one container at a time, moving left to right so I can keep track of those that I have emptied. I hate to raise an empty container as if it is full—the way your hand flies up, deceived.

In the living room window, I see myself, white from blue moonlight or blue from white moonlight. My arms look like dead arms, clipped to my shoulders by pins, dangling; I watch as my image detaches from my silhouette, stepping away.

I see her. She touches her cheek; my arm remains hanging. She pivots, winding one quarter around, though I am still. Her hands draw behind her back and rest airily on the rise beneath it.
I know this girl
, I think. She may be the one I once was. She is driven. I too was driven.

I wish to speak, to say something. But things that are legible to the senses are often captive to language, such as the dizzying faraway feeling you get from the way daylight pools on the kitchen floor, mesmerizing
you in the midst of sudden misfortune, making you think of the frailty of life—and the beauty. Or the shimmery persistence of a perfume that lingers in the air, filling you with longing when you pass through it. No words can describe what it means to lose someone you love, or tell what it is to grieve.

And loneliness. I should say something of loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift. I should describe the filthy province of mind, the blighted district inside, the place so crowded you cannot raise the lids of your eyes, and your chest is bruised by the constant assault of your heart. I want to convey the burden of despair, the ruin of compromise.
Be brave
, I should say to the girl in the glass, the way brave used to be—desperate to live and to love. I want her to prepare for the curse of perseverance. She may not know about resiliency. That she will last.

My belly still hums from coming. I wonder—can she see me? I hope not. I don’t want her to know that sex here is loveless, that here I achieve a goal, an end, like reaching for a ring. But no—she sees nothing. She recedes, slipping back to the chamber of my heart where I reserve the essence of her, and of him. Secretly I keep us, a rustling quilt of madness unfolding like pealing chapel bells that go gradually softer and further, twining in and around, extending beneath and beyond anything anyone can perceive. I cannot say that I loved him—it wouldn’t be enough. I can say that I’ve watched myself die, and that I’ve seen my lips form his name with my final breath.

T
here are those who attempt to manipulate fate. There are those who gamble for purposes of self-deception. They are stranded on their paths but want to feel otherwise. They want to feel the thrill of determination. They play with chance. They live a reality in which the potential of any
single win pales in comparison to the game. This sort of risk is not for the faint of heart. This is Rob.

There are those who leave nothing to chance. They will not be seduced. They connive and hoard to distend the aggregate of what they are, all the while straining down the world to something small, like a stone to clench. The refusal to be enticed is a means of control, a way to guarantee they are not violated, a way to exploit the business about them. It is a matter of determining truth before it determines you. Mark.

There are those who risk to ascertain that they have nothing, that they need nothing. They are open to prospect and blind to hazard because they’ve been hurt, which is just another way of saying
informed
. They are bodies moving through space, inviolate and impermeable. They are full on the inside; nothing beyond can speak on their behalf. They require no validation; they are owners of themselves. That is Rourke. At one time, it was me too.

I don’t know whether life is pre-decided. Perhaps it can be better conceived of as a series of hallways, growing wider or growing narrower, depending upon your receptivity to chance. The trick is to stand always at the crest of fate, to become proficient at response. Never get stuck thinking small, thinking slow, thinking any one state a finality; otherwise, life turns stagnant—the hallways narrow. This is an abuse of the gift of mobility.