Anthropology of an American Girl (82 page)

Evan delivers me to the second row, to a padded white folding chair behind Mark’s grandparents, who are so small I have to lean to kiss them. As I lean, I am completely conscious of Rourke and Rob, mute and upright, eight rows behind me, observing the supple arc of my spine. The string quartet begins Mozart’s “Minuet in G,” and Mark and Alicia’s cousin Sam and his second wife, Abby, who is seven months pregnant, join me. Abby is not in taupe, she is in teal. A teal net hangs off her teal hat. Abby and Sam own a baby furniture company on the Upper West Side. One of her gloved hands touches my arm. “We heard about your friend last night at the rehearsal dinner. Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

Sam leans over. I see the map of his goatee, the grand plan of it. “We’re terribly sorry.”

Mark’s father made the announcement at the rehearsal dinner the night before. The dinner was at 1770 House, a historic inn and restaurant on Main Street in East Hampton, which the Ross family had taken over for the weekend.

Mr. Ross explained to family and bridal party members that a friend of mine and Alicia’s had died, and that due to my particularly close relationship with the deceased, it would not be appropriate for me to participate in a wedding just one day after the funeral.

I didn’t hear the announcement; I was at my mother’s. But I’d come to the Ross house to finish the place cards hours before the wedding, and Mr. Ross informed me of what he’d said. By the time I arrived there, Mark had gone to play some tennis with Brett, and the bridesmaids were lined up waiting for stylists. I opened the shoe box of cards I’d finished two weeks earlier and added all the table numbers. Mr. Ross waited patiently. As soon as I wrapped up the calligraphy pens, he said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Mrs. Ross suggested I stay. “She’s had a rough week, Richard. She might like to be included in the styling session. I don’t know what we could do with that hair, Eveline, but how about nails and makeup?”

“Don’t be conniving, Theo. She has no intention of staying past the ceremony.”

“Richard, I—”

“We’ve been through this a dozen times. She’s leaving after the ceremony. Besides, have you seen these girls when they come out? They look like hookers.”

Mr. Ross and I strolled past the fountain and the newly erected tents. I was relieved to think that the tents were not the same ones used by the Flemings. Had the events been separated by more than one day, it might have been possible. All those sedimentary tears, caught in the vinyl, dripping down and around the wedding party.

I’d given away my bridesmaid dress to Mirelle, so I had to stop by Mark’s cottage to collect a spare dress and a pair of shoes for the ceremony,
and when I did, Mr. Ross waited for me in the hallway. Though the cottage was in fact theirs, he and his wife had always afforded us the strictest privacy. In the three years I’d lived with Mark, they’d never stopped by without an invitation, though Alicia would walk in all the time.

My suitcases were in the center of the room. I hadn’t seen them since I’d packed to leave the city after the fight. I ended up going without them when I got the news about Jack, just taping a note to the top and heading for Penn Station.

Mark brought the luggage out with him on Thursday. He said he assumed it was for Italy. My graduation present. He’d planned for us to leave directly from East Hampton on Monday morning. A car was coming. No matter what he said, I knew he suspected otherwise.

The sight of the luggage brought back memories of the fight, of Rourke being beaten, of him beating back, of the screams of the crowd, of my run down the desolate boulevard to the Greek diner, of the cab ride home, of packing and Dan’s phone call, the little silver clock and the mad wind. These elements fused in my mind so that no detail could be removed without collapsing the memory as a whole. Just as flames, smoke, and heat mean
fire
, the suitcases meant
Jack is dead
.

“You okay?” Mr. Ross called up.

I called back that I was. “Want something to drink?” I asked from the landing. “A glass of ice water?” At breakfast he’d had three coffees.

He was lighting a cigarette. “I’m fine,” he said, distractedly.

I jogged down the steps, and he held the door for me. We paused by the pool, where he hooked my dress for the wedding on the crosspiece of an umbrella, then we walked in the opposite direction of caterers, florists, and landscapers.

“I hope you don’t mind my having said anything at the rehearsal dinner last night,” Mr. Ross said, “but Mark has had a solid week to inform people. You were up-front and timely, and your choice is honorable. Considering the quality of your friendship with our own children, Theo
and I would be fools to want it any other way.” He extinguished his cigarette against a fence post. “I’m not happy that Mark waited until the last minute. Not happy at all.”

“He was hoping I’d change my mind.”

“He wasn’t
hoping
anything. He was
entrapping
. I’m not sure what Mark’s up to. I hope this trip to Italy will be a good thing,” he said, not sounding particularly convinced. “It should be nice for you to get away.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him otherwise, so we continued to walk lingeringly, with him making inquiries into the memorial, and me describing the things I’d heard and said. I told him about sitting with Jack’s mother, and he liked to hear about Father McQuail.

The BMW Mark had given me sat waiting on the front lawn, balmy and adorable, lanolin-green like chewing gum. Mr. Ross attached my dress to the hook above the rear passenger door and thoughtfully scooped up the bottom, laying it across the seat. At the driver’s door he took both my shoulders and he kissed me on the forehead. I could smell the stale nicotine on his breath and I felt my heart swell. I recalled my own words from the funeral about Jack never having been forced to become something he didn’t want to be. Some people live their entire lives holding true to the promises they’d made to those who depend on them.

“We’re kindred spirits, you and I,” Mr. Ross said. “Poets.”

In the heavily contrasted light beneath the trees, it became clear to me that he was thinning. I considered attributing the change to a haircut and new eyeglasses, but I confronted the possibility that he was sick again. I hoped someone was paying attention. I couldn’t bear to lose one more person. That’s why it was a relief to me that Denny had settled down. One night, before Denny and Jeff made a commitment, Rob had had to get Denny out of a bad situation over on Gansevoort Street, and afterward all Rob had said was,
It’s a good thing I took a gun
.

“Yes, Mr. Ross,” I said. “Poets.”

I twisted the side-view mirror and observed his return to the house. As he neared the porch, Alicia and her girlfriends rushed to the window like he was a celebrity and they were his fans. They knocked on the glass, calling and laughing. He waved in feigned annoyance as he mounted the steps, and when he opened the door they engulfed him. I watched Mr.
Ross rededicate himself to the monster kinetics of family life, allowing himself to love and be beloved despite the private concessions of his heart and mind.

Mark had shown up at my mother’s house at seven o’clock Friday night, one hour before the rehearsal dinner to try to pressure me into attending. I’d just returned from Jack’s funeral. We all had—Mom and Powell, my father and Marilyn, Lowie and David, Denny and Jeff, Dan, Troy, Smokey, and Jewel, Dr. Lewis and Micah, and several of my mother’s friends. Mark came upon us in the living room, a disheveled black circle.

He had met most everyone over the years but never all at once and never with them sober and nicely dressed. Usually when Mark visited, he would get this look of unfolding shock, as though viewing a particularly revolting striptease. But that evening, like a politician suddenly recognizing the voting power of a marginal constituency, he walked in and worked the room, shaking hands, offering condolences.

“Thank you for being there for Eveline,” he said as he passed from person to person. “I would have been there too, but my grandparents flew in from the coast for my sister’s wedding, and I had to pick them up at JFK. Considering the tragic circumstances, I should have sent a car for them, but my grandfather’s ninety, and my grandmother has Crohn’s disease.”

In the kitchen, Mark sat at the table, in the chair nearest the stove, the place he’d sat the night we met four years before. As it happened, I was standing where I’d stood then, against the counter in front of the sink. Like dominoes, the days fell flat; I returned to the time when I knew what I wanted but had no means of achieving it, as opposed to having the means to achieve without the knowledge of any exceptional end.

“Do we
have
to sit in here?” Mark wanted to know.

Looking in his eyes, I could see the things I’d missed when we’d first met—the undisclosed designs, the skimmingness about the mind, the restless arrogance. Before going further, I was visited by a second memory—one of Rourke—in the same room, back on that same night, and me, caught in the crucible of adolescence but braver than I’d ever been. The memory of Rourke was so positive and tactile as to clear my
mind. I felt a gaping sorrow, elegant and actual. Me thinking,
Oh, what I’d lost, what I’d become
.

Sensing crisis, Mark changed directions. It was amazing, how well he knew me. “You’re going to break my father’s heart if you don’t come to the dinner tonight. Never mind the wedding tomorrow.”

I called upon the only authority I possessed—artistic instinct and imagination. I established a scene, and I entered it. The kitchen, so overrun with memories of family and friends, became something purely physical, a set or stage, something onto which Mark and I had been thrust. He took on the look of a puppet, only not innocuous, and the things of which we spoke began to sound stilted. I could interpret his script. I could see that his promise to shelter me was based upon the premise of my homelessness. I wondered what was it he wanted from me in exchange. What did I possess that he needed to take away?

My feet were bare; I set them firmly into ground, all points touching. Though it was June, the floor was cold. It was the same coldness that had always been. The coldness that belonged to my mother’s house, and so to my memory and perception of it and of me. That coldness was precisely what I needed to name; it was
the paintable thing
. And in my head there was a quote my mother used to say that always made me think of facing facts. It was T. S. Eliot’s, I think.

I walked myself through the years. I had attended college and I had a job in an art gallery. Mark and I shared an apartment on West Sixtieth Street, and there was a car for me to drive. In the bank I had eleven thousand dollars. Any time I paid for something during my time with Mark—books, food, gifts, clothes—the money reappeared in my account.

I tried to think of Saturdays, any Saturday. I had some fractional memory of him on the grenade-green leather couch in the living room, phone in one hand, channel changer in the other, pulling me down to join him. And Saturday places—restaurants, nightclubs, benefits, Nantucket, the Vineyard, Cape Cod, East Hampton. Balding men, spidery
women, the superfluous sounds of sex from his friends in adjoining rooms. Mark’s sex was silent. It was stealthy and habitual like some dark routine, like he was addicted to the feeling of getting his money’s worth.

And me, there with him, imprisoned by the impregnability of his position, lost in a world purged of sincerity and rife with conceit. Like him and every other member of his society, I was just another creaturely thing, defined outwardly by my appearance and inwardly by the ungainliness of my aspirations, the ugliness of my compromise. I was rendered most precise not by what I possessed, in fact, but by all that I had not yet attained. In the end, I was left only with an obscene sense of having participated in one long masquerade.

Mark was reminding me of my obligations to his sister, his parents. “They
have
to supersede,” he said, “any conceivable obligation you might have had to this, this—”

“Jack.”

He was right. My obligations to Alicia and to Mr. and Mrs. Ross
did
supersede my obligation to Jack: they were living and he was not. They had treated me as family and I had agreed to be a member of the wedding party. However, these obligations did not supersede my obligation to myself—and this was something I needed to understand: the ongoingness and the wholeness of the self regardless of external circumstance. I tried to think about what
I
wanted. I considered the toll of my continued avoidance and denial: I’d lost everything—home and Jack and Rourke. Though I might have been passive, beneath my passivity there had been agency. My life had never been
Mark’s
version versus
mine
—rather, it had been one of my creations versus another. Nothing had happened that I had not allowed to happen. I had been stronger than I’d realized. Now I felt like I needed time. The coincidence of Jack’s death afforded me exactly that. Jack would not have minded. He would have insisted. Part of me wondered if he had not arranged the entire thing.

“I’m sorry, Mark. I just can’t.”

When Mark left, everyone in the living room took a break from telling stories about Jack to discuss Mark.

“What a straight shooter!”

“He’s not so bad!”

“And I always thought he was kind of an asshole!”

Except for my mother, who hadn’t spoken more than a few dozen words since my speech at the memorial. From midway up the stairs, she brought conversation to a halt when wearily she stated, “If you’ll all excuse me, I’m going to bed.” Then she turned and went, moving uncharacteristically slow as if there were marbles in her shoes, as if she dare not move as she usually moved, as if she feared shooting off to someplace faraway.

Jonathan and Mark appear from behind the ivied trellis. They are joined by the groomsmen who had been ushers. Mark looks like a movie star in his tuxedo. He winks. Poor Mark, with Rourke looming directly behind me.
Rourke
, I think, clinging to consciousness, trying not to drift.