Anthropology of an American Girl (86 page)

He peels back my shirt, and I wait patiently, like getting dressed in bandages after an injury. My jeans—he starts on the buttons. Though there are five, and he knows there are five, he races through to three, and starts to pull.

I say, “Mark.”

He did not expect this, my speaking. He tilts his head, as if I can’t be heard completely, as if he’s picking up on an echo. And it’s weird, but I actually hear myself that way—his way, ringing out, bouncing back. I find my voice, capturing it, steering it center.

“It’s true you saved me. And it is possible I wouldn’t have survived without you. You never broke a promise, and you never left my side. I know you feel like you forced me into something. Like I never loved you. But you didn’t force me, and I do love you. It’s true that I have nothing and nowhere to go. Don’t you see? That’s not why I
should
stay; that’s why I
can’t
stay. I never want anyone to do that to you.”

He pauses. One hand, the hand supporting him, is on my arm, the other lingers on my abdomen. His eyes are ten inches from mine. I have
pierced something, and yet he’s been stunned, not stopped. Minutes, I have minutes.

I say, “Don’t let hurting me be the measure of your manhood.”

Mark looks left again, then bleakens, then collapses, rolling off the top of me. We are side by side.

“I’m so fucking tired of this place,” he says. “You did that to me.”

“You were born that way. You’re like your father.”

“Like my father.” He laughs. “That’s brilliant.”

“The only difference between you is that he tries to destroy himself and you try to destroy everything else.”

“That must be why he hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you, Mark. He envies you.”

For the brief remainder of our time together, we lie corpse-like beneath the gray sky above the Ross home, beneath the portion of the planet defined by them and for them. After the rain comes and goes, daylight will puncture the pallor, making way for a choir of ultramarines. In the morning comes the pacific drone of the pool filter and the premonitory stifle of the summer air and the dry creak of wicker as his mother sits to remove her shoes and lay out her robe before she swims. The mild slap of her arms hitting the water. And after, the distant tink of her spoon in a cup.

I remove the ring. I hand it to him.

“Sell it,” he says, refusing to take it. “You’ll need the money.”

I rise in degrees. I make it as far as the balcony, where I linger and fix my clothes. The gardens have never appeared more beautiful than at this moment, the moment of my leaving. Maybe once, maybe the first time, which is incredible when you think about it, since all through the middle they’ve been as good as mine.

“You almost went through with it,” Mark says. “Two more days and we’d be in Italy. You would have forgotten about him. You would have fallen in love with living well. You could have been set for life, Eveline. Now you’re straight back to nowhere. Cirillo fucked it up. He got in over his head. I should have loaned him the money instead of letting him bring that stupid fuck back—twenty-five grand. Pennies to keep you.”

“What would you have gotten?”

“Something pure,” he says. Adding, “Nothing’s pure.”

On my way out I leave the ring on the kitchen table. There is a substantial clink. I grab my sweatshirt and Jack’s book, and before hitting the stairs I hear Mark shout, “You’ll be back.”

The rain begins, lightly at first, like upward-floating flurries when it snows. I take my time cutting through the garden, in case Mark’s watching, and when I reach the sunporch I break into a run, leaving my bike behind. It’s harder to hide with a bike. At the street, I run faster. Beneath the lamplight the rain looks like jagged tinsel or chains of mercury. I tell myself to hurry. He’ll think me more likely to change my mind in the rain. At the corner I turn right toward Main Beach, heading away from town, away from home. He’ll go to town, to my mother’s house. I’ll wait under the pavilion at the beach until morning.

With the wind and the rain on my face, I don’t hear the sound of tires; I only think
car
when a fortress of light encroaches on me from behind and my own shape materializes on the ground. I stop. The car stops. I start, it starts. I think to hide—a yard, a garage. I look right, for a break in the hedges. When I look back, I realize that the light is not narrow but broad. Like a blockade. The car moves up, flanking me on the left. It is white, square. Not the Porsche. The GTO.

The door opens. Rourke says, “Eveline.”

Eveline
—I’ve never heard my name spoken like that, as though there is some indivisibility between it and me. I take one instant, just one, learning the sound by heart, feeling—I don’t know—just feeling.

I climb in, fall in, exhausted, shocked, but grateful to have a friend, in the night, in the cold, in the rain. A friend who is knowledgeable of my heart. It’s not the first time I’ve received his help. Rourke was there when I broke up with Jack, only that night was dry and I was seventeen. And things were different at seventeen. I thought about what Rob said at the wedding about friendship, about needing someone to track you, challenge you. About a friend being a fortress.

He makes a series of deliberate turns until we arrive at a private road—we’ve been here before, the first night we were together. Soaking overgrown branches slap the windshield until we emerge on a grassy
plain. Directly before us is Georgica Pond. He puts the car into park and reaches into the backseat for a towel, which he uses to dry me. The towel is stained with blood, blood from his eye, which now I can see. It is slit and stitched on top and hugely swollen, hemorrhaged and violet.

“You okay?” Rourke asks.

I shrug. “I’m okay.”

He draws the towel down my arms.

I ask him how long he was waiting.

“I watched you go in.”

“That was hours ago.”

“About an hour and a half.”

“I didn’t see the car,” I say.

“I wasn’t in the car. I was on foot.”

“By the street?”

“By the balcony. Where you were.”

“Did you hear?”

Rourke looks past the steering wheel toward the pond. His profile and his jaw look like a drawing of a profile and a jaw, the lines are that hard. “I heard enough.”

“He said you left with—”

“Diane? She left with her parents. He knew that.” Rourke turns back to me, turning very serious. “It would have taken me seconds to scale that wall. But you did fine on your own,” he says. “Better than I would have.”

Better than I would have
. That’s what Mark had been waiting for. For Rourke to come. So he could trap him, confront him, have him arrested. I can’t even think about it.

My hand reaches for his eye. He does not pull away but breathes into my touch. His normal lid drifts closed, and beneath my fingertips the distended one throbs, as if the eye below is straining to see. In his heart there is a girl; she is me. No contract keeps her; she goes with him, she goes alone, precipice to precipice, on every ledge agreeing again to leap. She is with him, she has been with him, every minute. No one can know what we know. Just us. If you listen, you can hear it. In the wide sound of the rain—
us
.

W
e go into Manhattan to an anonymous hotel. No one knows where to find us. There are no messages, no calls. One call, one call out. I knew because I woke to the sound of his voice talking on the phone, though I’d heard no ring.

I’d spoken with my mother before we arrived, saying I was safe, that I needed to figure things out, that I’d call again soon. I called for Rourke’s sake more than for hers or my own; I intended to preempt Mark. I wouldn’t give him the opportunity to suggest to everyone that I’d been taken against my will. He would never hurt Rourke again.

Being there with Rourke feels right; it feels like the only possible thing. It’s like being in a command center in a movie, one of those steel-fortified tents where the power congregates while war is raging—strategizing, studying maps, decoding messages, drinking cognac. We have shut ourselves in to accomplish something brainy and strategic. We prepare, but for what?

We sleep in the day if we sleep at all. At night we walk through Manhattan—up Broadway or across Central Park or down Tenth Avenue into Hell’s Kitchen, through scaffold castles, past lapsed construction sites where the plywood ramps rumble when you stomp them and the makeshift walls are covered with graffiti. Rourke walks and people make way. He is fierce and exact and his face is a terrifying mass of bruised flesh. If there is trouble, I don’t doubt the outcome. It’s like walking under an umbrella through a heavy storm. I never realized before how frequently I am concerned for my own safety, not only physical, but psychological. For three days I claim sanctuary—I can be me, think me, show me.

There is a piano bar on West Forty-fourth Street that we pass every night when we are out. Through the window it seems somber but sincere,
like it was once popular but now is on its last legs. One time going by Rourke asks if I feel like going in, and I say I do. Inside the ceiling is low. His head seems to touch.

“This one is for all you Johnny Mathis fans,” the piano player says, though counting everyone, we are seven. He plays “Misty.”

The Ukrainian cocktail waitress leans on the far side of the grand piano; there are smudges in her reflection on the instrument. I know about the Ukraine because I asked when she brought us drinks and a small dish of salted nuts. She has a visa for school to study nursing and an aunt in Brighton Beach. Watching her across the piano, I wonder whether I will be alone like her someday, working in a bar in a foreign country, living with a distant aunt and going to school, not necessarily for my subject. I wonder whether Rourke will come for me at forty, whether at forty I will be waiting.

“If only there were a way to live in night,” I say.

“There is no way,” he says, watching me watch her. “I tried. After you, I tried.”

He turns off the air conditioning, and the room goes hot. When he knocks the windows up and open, he leans for a moment, looking out. Past his wrists, night slips in, bringing the sounds of the city.

He moves and I memorize him. Though I know him, though I have lived with him, everything he does is new. If I am conscious of the fact that time is of the essence, that there are practical means to attend to, I can’t move past the smallest moments with him. He is tranquil and orderly. When he touches things—buttons and keys and combs and me—he touches without false delicacy, as conscious of his strength as of the refinement of his object. The authenticity is somehow crucial to me, more so than talk.

One night we heard a girl crying in the hall. “Luis, Luis.”

I saw his instinct fly to life. He reached automatically for his jeans and shirt. He buttoned two buttons and walked out. Through the closed door I heard him speak, just a word or two. There was the sound of sobbing and the sound of voices, mixing imperfectly down the hall, first two voices, then three.

While I waited, I decided to dress. I opened his suitcase where my clothes were kept, next to his clothes. I pulled out a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I brushed back my hair and found some lipstick in the pocket of my jacket. I looked out over West Fifty-eighth Street, waiting with confidence that the right thing would be done for that girl, complete in the luxury of being a partner to a man like Rourke, thinking,
Why can’t the world be mine—when I need no more of it than this?

I wake to the sound of his breathing. Someone said,
Should my eyes be lost and my hearing remain, my ears could see the sound she makes
. A painter, I think. Degas, maybe, though I’m not sure. By Rourke’s breath he is sad. I unbury my face from his arm and slide my chin up his chest, where I can see from my perch the distance between his eyes.

“What are you thinking?”

“If we’d had a son,” he says, “would he have been gentle like you.”

He sits on the edge of the bed; I curl around his back. A composite of sea-pink and frost-yellow light presses and swells past the gold drapes. The room is like a jewel box. In the light, his skin appears uncommonly fair. He looks like a white wolf or the fragile product of a hothouse, though he is neither. There is a painting, a Caravaggio, of John the Baptist. John is naked and thoughtful—boy and man, object and subject. You feel the promise of masculinity, the anticipation of action, the crisis of uncertainty. He is ready; you are waiting.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “About everything.”

He pushes into the sound of my voice as if rolling his head into a rush of wind. Reaching back with an arm, he finds my waist and pulls me closer.

“I should never have asked Mark for help in the first place,” I say, and I add. “He said I did it to hurt you.”

Rourke’s eyes close. The bad one is healing; the blood has gone down. I touch it every day, running my fingertips across, dragging them over, bringing the nerves back to life. “I know what he said.”

“Mark says I used him.”

Rourke looks at me, dipping over. I don’t have to wonder what it is he sees because I feel myself appear. Like a flare cutting through space,
erupting into a sea of stars, I see me. He says, “Use is the thing he exchanges.”

In the muscles on his chest, there are shapes. Beneath his collarbone, a whale, surfacing. By his abdomen on the left, a flattened swan. I move in, coming in around his hip bone, resting my head on his thigh. I know he feels guilty, for going against his own instinct, for thinking somehow I’d be better off with Mark. Deep down it made sense to Rourke that Mark should win. It proved his worst fears—the value of money and lies, the uselessness of strength and character.

His throat stretches to the ceiling. “I’m not sure how far back to go,” he says. “How much to ask.” When he speaks, his manner is steely but not disapproving. It seems we have come up against something he understands better than I, something at the hands of which he has suffered uniquely—me. “You could have been hurt Saturday.” Rourke waits, but not for an answer. “Once I leave, he’ll be back.”