Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  “You sure?” Adrienne said, her lips not moving a millimeter, her chin jutted out. She stroked each eyelid repeatedly with turquoise shadow until the glaze was thick and round like bakery cookies. None of them seemed to be terrified by the zombie mannequin heads.

  “I’m sure.” I waved. “Good luck.”

  Kate lingered in the doorway. Behind her, boys dressed as villagers held a karate match.

  “Thanks for practicing my lines with me, Evie.”

  “Oh,” I said, “it was fun. You know, I guess.” I stepped back, and back again.

  My words sounded insincere, though they were not. I wished she hadn’t thanked me. Sometimes it’s better to suppress gratitude. Sometimes it puts the person you are thanking into a tiny crisis of cognizance. I told myself just to say nothing the next time I found myself overwhelmed with appreciation.

  “See you,” she said, and I waved again.

  The auditorium was still dim. At the top was a pile of programs. I took one. I walked to the ninth row from the stage on the right, draped my coat over my shoulders, and snuggled into the third seat over. In the booklet I found the paragraph devoted to Rourke. He’d acted professionally as a teenager, earned a BFA in drama from UCLA, and done small parts in film and television in Los Angeles for a year and a half before moving back East. The epigrammatic brief contained more information than I wanted to know. I did not like to think what a minor part of his history East Hampton represented, when it was all I knew of him.

  California—I’d discerned no evidence of that place in him, which just shows that people can see only as far as the eyes can see and that no one can know your story unless you broadcast it, which is not seemly. I wondered if his work on Our Town would amount to a sentence in his next bio or just a name on a list. More than likely it would not appear at all, and like some sharp pain once preoccupying but since resolved, I would be forgotten. In a few hours we would be divested of common topics and shared episodes. We would have no reason to talk. I tried to devise a notable thing to say in parting. Good luck! Or, It’s been nice. Neither sounded particularly right.

  There was a rush of cold. It did not come in a single draft but in a multiplicity of gusts, scrupulous and exacting. If the feeling had been a sound, it would have been the sound of bird wings flapping or guns discharging. And a fragrance—favorable, alien. Rourke took the seat alongside mine. I did not close the program; I did not care if he noticed the page.

  We sat for several minutes, mute and unmoving, the staring-ahead way you sit when you go to the movies with someone you know very well and you’re waiting for the picture to begin, but you don’t feel like talking. Time tarried, as though there were nothing of relevance to mark or chronicle. I had one knee propped on the back of the seat in front of mine, and I was low, with my head coming only as high as his shoulder. He slouched a little too, but he was too big to do so with any sense of purpose. The effect was that he looked weary, which was perhaps the case. I thought of the way Jack slouched. No one could slouch quite as well as Jack.

  I sighed in my mind, thinking, Los Angeles, as if things suddenly made sense, though they did not. I could not imagine Rourke spending all those years in the artificial pink glow, where people tour by bus the locked deco gates of stucco mansions, or him hanging out on the prairielike boulevards beneath the looming and incongruous Hollywood sign.

  I felt a forward lurching. I thought he was getting ready to go. I wondered what did it mean when I’d been fine before he came, but then he came and then he was leaving and I was not fine.

  But Rourke did not rise. And this gave me confidence. Just when I believed that nothing short of contrivance would make him stay, he stayed. Despite my silence, he stayed, proving there was a confluence of need between us. He rested his forearms on the back of the seat in front of him, his head on his wrists. His tie hung perpendicular to his body, his dress shirt stretched across his back. Through the taut fabric, I could see his shoulder blades protruding.

  “How are you?” I asked in a voice I’d never heard myself use before. It was a voice of invitation and daring, deep and devoid of inflection. It was the voice of a woman. Sometimes in movies when enemies meet, they greet each other with deference and civility, acknowledging affiliations more profound than the competition itself, acknowledging a parity, an evenness of match. At the end of The Hustler, Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie say goodbye, and it’s sad, sadder even than when Eddie’s girlfriend dies, because life is full of tenderness where you would not think to find it.

  Rourke tilted his head to his right and he regarded me. His face was square from forehead to jaw and graded mildly to the chin. His eyes were black; it was true. Eyes can be called black, but I didn’t think eyes could actually be black. Rourke’s were a reverberant black, a blackness of conviction, as if they had forfeited subordinate hues by decision, as if they were that way by will. They were the eyes of someone who reads the world in terms of opposition. And yet there was light. I could see where they were susceptible. I could see blind pools where the light hit and bounced back. Then, quick as it came, the light was gone, replaced by a cataract of grave insights.

  “Looking forward to the end of this,” he replied. In the natureless dusk of the theater, he shamelessly memorized my face. I memorized his as well.

  Suddenly the houselights went up. We discerned a milling gurgle, and Rourke stood. He walked to the basin of the auditorium, then disappeared into the vestibule where we had collided a week earlier.

  I felt elated; I’d never felt that way before. I thought to go out to the lobby. I wanted to be where there were people; I wanted to mingle, to be one among many. I liked the idea of everyone crowded together, sheltered from the frigid March night by the walls of the theater. As I stood to go, Dan appeared at the base of stage left, sheet music under his arm. Jack stepped next from the obscurity of the corridor, grim, hunched, and scowling. He looked like the vampire in Nosferatu. I was surprised to see him, though of course I should not have been. Their instruments were right there, waiting for them.

  “Hey, Evie,” Dan called softly up to me, taking a seat at the bench of the keyboard, adjusting the light, setting out sheet music.

  Jack wouldn’t look at me; I knew he’d seen me with Rourke. He plied the brown felt keyboard cover with painstaking precision, pulling and folding, pulling and folding, reminding me of my crime with each gesture, challenging my conscience to profit from his misery. Behind the stage drapery, someone said, “Five minutes!” and the lobby doors swung apart.

  All I recalled of the play after it ended was intermission. While everyone stretched their legs, Jack and Dan stayed bent over the keyboard, toying like alchemists. The music discharged from the corner of the auditorium as if from a void, radiating like steam from a crevice in the earth. The first piece was lush with nuance, busy with conversing chords—Dan’s. Jack’s song was less sophisticated, leaving nothing to chance, but far more beautiful. Its complexity came from layering, from a nagging superimposition of the central refrain, which had been written in a minor key, evoking heavyheartedness. Despite Jack’s tortured prophecies, people were enticed back from the lobby to hear him play. They listened attentively with their crisscross peanut butter cookies and warping paper mugs of cider. I felt pride for Jack, but also a sick, forward-moving fear. It was strange to experience in one night the difference between wanting something you cannot have and having something you cannot want. I wished it wasn’t my time to learn it. No one else seemed to be learning much of anything.

  When the curtain call came, the audience stood, and Jack and Dan played again. I went backstage to find Kate. Kids scrambled to sign programs and solidify romances. Parents obstructed staircases and dressing room doors, kissing greased faces, bestowing obligatory bouquets. Paul Z. pushed a towering stack of chairs past me, and Richie adjusted the lamps behind the chapel. An increasing sense of unease came over me. The evening’s incidents kept playing out in my mind—Kate thanking me, Rourke and Los Angeles and th
e flickering in his eyes, the rush of the crowd, and Jack’s song. In my head and my heart, it rang and rang again. Jack is my hero, I told myself, with all his messages and abilities. And yet I had a troubling sense, a visionary sense. I felt like I was holding hands with myself, guiding my shell through an evening previously lived.

  Rourke’s back blocked the door of the girls’ dressing room. Seeing it moved me—just the idea of him possessed the clarity that everything else lacked. I took two steps closer through the crowded hall. I could hear the sound of his words through the back of his chest, the vibrations. He was talking to them about the show. He must have sensed me because he turned to look, then he quickly stepped left, making room. He leaned against the side wall and folded his arms; I stood next to him. My left breast pressed lightly into his right arm, behind the elbow. I didn’t move; neither did he. All the talk drifted down to nothing.

  “Congratulations,” I said to no one in particular.

  “Are you coming to the cast party, Evie?” Adrienne asked.

  “C’mon, Evie, everyone’s going,” Cathy Benjamin said.

  Michelle said, “You’re coming, right, Harrison?”

  “Only going if she’s going,” Rourke said, jerking his head slightly, referring to me. The girls giggled, except for Kate. He looked at the ground thoughtfully, taking a minute, nodding twice. “Well, thanks again for good work,” he told them. When he turned and stepped sideways to pass through the door frame, his body brushed flat against mine, his head bowing down, his face looking to my face. It’s a treacherous world, his eyes seemed to say. Unlike everyone else, he did not deny the treachery.

  I staggered lazily up the theater aisle toward a group of people waiting for Jack and Dan. Dan’s father, Dr. Lewis, and his girlfriend, Micah, were there with Jim Peterson, the sax player from Dr. Lewis’s band. Smokey Cologne was there too, with Troy Resnick, Kathy Hanfling, Joss Mathers, and Nina Spear.

  Dr. Lewis hugged me. “Fabulous sets! Where’s Irene?”

  “A lecture, I think. She’s coming tomorrow. To the matinee.”

  “What’s she teaching this semester, Evie,” Jim inquired. “Poetry?”

  “Short stories.”

  He nodded and they all nodded, saying to say hi.

  Micah caressed my cheek with one finger. Her wrist bangles clattered lightly, reminding me of distant porch chimes. “Coming to our house for the party, Eveline?”

  “Of course she is,” Dr. Lewis said emphatically.

  Smokey stood, which meant Jack was coming. He crammed his hands into the pockets of his tattered herringbone coat and shook his purple hair from his face to little practical effect. Beneath Smokey’s bangs, his eyes were chronically claret and watery, making it appear as though he’d reached us by way of a channel. “Smokey is one strange dude,” Jack would say, “but a great fucking drummer.”

  Jack swung an open hand to Smokey in greeting. “Marvin,” Jack said, using Smokey’s real name. “What’s up?”

  “Nice job, men.” Dr. Lewis launched a new round of applause. “Glad to know my gear is being put to good use.” His hand rested on Jack’s arm. Discreetly he asked, “Did your parents come?”

  “He didn’t even tell them about it, Dad,” Dan informed his father, and we all headed for the door in a funny bundle.

  On the brick path that led from the doors of Guild Hall to the street, we dispersed. Dan climbed into Smokey’s black Nova, and Jack and I headed east on Main Street, walking in the direction of the village. Jack unfolded his collar and pulled his Chinese Red Army cap to his eyes. I tucked my hands into my sleeves. He offered his gloves to me. As he wriggled one onto my left hand, the other slipped from under his arm and fell to the ground. We knocked shoulders as we both bent to retrieve it.

  “What a load of shit!” he proclaimed, meaning the play. “What a criminal waste.”

  “Your song was good.”

  “That’s hardly an endorsement for the play. The acting sucked.”

  “People have to start somewhere. You weren’t born a musician.”

  “The difference is I’ve been playing every day since I was four. This is like handing out thirty guitars to people who’ve never played before, who’ll never play again, and trying to get something coherent in three months. And for what, five lame performances?”

  “At least it’s not football.”

  “No, no. It’s exactly like football. Half-assed recreation, a distraction for the kiddies. It’s about deceiving taxpayers into thinking juveniles are being kept off the streets, that they’re being offered concrete opportunities. It’s about college résumés.”

  I tried to remember my point. I wasn’t sure I had one. “Kate worked hard, and—”

  “And you worked hard,” he said, though I hadn’t even considered myself. “That crap was a waste of your time. Your church will be in the trash on Monday.”

  I hadn’t considered that—the trash. I said, “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean, Ev-e-line.” Jack stretched my name to fully fill its three syllables. He faced me. “But do you know what you mean?” His blue eyes were bleached and even, making a strike through his face like the crossbar of the letter T. “Listen to yourself.”

  Kids from the play closed in on us from behind. Jack slipped into the garden of the Huntting Inn, and I followed. He sat on an enormous rock, took a joint from his pocket, and lit it. Our eyes met above the embers. I wished to be drained; I wanted him to drain me.

  “The whole thing got me down. The whole fucking night.” Jack was referring to Rourke, though he would not introduce that name into our dialogue. He would not risk making it more real than he guessed it to be, as real as it was. I kicked the ground. He kicked the ground as well, setting a piece of ice to fly. “You’re headed down a bad road, Evie. I won’t be able to see you through this.”

  The wooden porch of the Lewis house creaked under our weight. It was a moldy cedar-shake colonial on Pantigo Road, held together primarily by its odor—a composite of curry and candle drippings. Micah refused to live there, choosing instead to remain at their apartment on West End Avenue and Eighty-second. She visited East Hampton rarely, almost exclusively in summer. “The heat burns off the negative ions,” she once told me.

  Inside was a sequence of rooms lined with instruments, dubious art, obsolete electronics, stacks of flaking scores, and mountains of damp books. Inside, you never knew exactly where you were or how to get out. The wainscoted hallways were papered in framed photographs of Dan’s father with greats such as Oscar Peterson, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Rollins. Besides being a musician and composer, Dr. Lewis was also a professor of music theory at Juilliard, which he called his day gig. He and the band traveled to places such as Newport, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Paris, and São Paolo. When in town, they would sit around discussing the evolution of jazz, debating East and West Coast composing signatures, and lamenting the loss of quality clubs and the declining musical interest among young people. My mother would sometimes be with them. She and Dr. Lewis had dated when Dan and I were in grade school, the winter before she met Powell. This was a big deal to Jack. Unlike his revulsion to the idea of me, Denny, and Peter as college roommates, he liked the idea of Dan and me as siblings and his coming to live with us and Mom and Dr. Lewis in one big jazzy, literary house with everyone being cared for by Bitsy, Dr. Lewis’s housekeeper from the Philippines. Bitsy wore ill-fitting sweat socks and threw down paper plates of muddy lasagna and yelled uniquely when Dan put his feet on the table. After yelling, she would squish his cheeks together and slap the side of his head. Bitsy was seventy-one and an avid golfer.

  Jack joined Dan and Smokey in the living room, going straight to the piano, bowing over, his powdery white hair splaying in a fan. There was a guitar on the couch. I wished he would have selected the guitar instead. He was less sure of himself on guitar, and his vulnerability plus his refusal to relent was beautiful. I wished he would be beautiful.

  Denny and Kate were
at the base of the stairs, laughing. Kate’s face was flushed. I could see they’d been drinking. Denny caught me and reeled me in, squeezing like toothpaste. The smell of cheap Chablis mixed with the smell of his deodorant depressed me.

  A flurry at the front door was accompanied by shouting and whistling. The teachers had arrived. Dr. Lewis, Micah, and Jim Peterson came in first, then Mr. McGintee, Toby Parker, and Lilias Starr. Rourke came last, shedding ounces of midnight cold as he filled the foyer.

  McGintee complimented everyone. “Terrific job! Top shelf all the way! And that meeting house,” he said, giving me a firm wink. “The sets were the finest we’ve ever had.”

  “Thank you,” Denny said, patting me on the back, using my arm to pat him on the back. He thrust my hand into the crowd. It stuck out like a little clock arm. “Her hand is like ice!”

  “Maybe she’s anemic,” Lilias said.

  “You do look pale, Eveline,” Micah agreed.

  “My God,” Denny said to me, “don’t faint again.” And then to the crowd, “Last week I found her passed out on the darkroom floor.”

  There were general expressions of concern for my health. Rourke reached for my hand, forgoing false propriety. He collected it as though taking up a baby, baby homeless something. In his hands my bones felt like bird bones, like crayons or small pencils. I demurred with a smile, and I pulled away. Not a smile, but a vague flickering. It was nice for a moment to have him, and sad to have to lose him.

  I burrowed my hand into my jeans pocket, and looking down, I moved obediently to the living room, where I found Jack, leafing through a songbook, getting ready to sing. He appeared wafer-thin, wraithlike, there, but not there. My body moved about the perimeter of the grand piano which was already crowded with people who had come to listen.

  Dr. Lewis joined Jack on the bench. A cigarette hung precariously from the corner of his mouth as he slapped his legs establishing a light rhythm prior to Jack’s playing. Then real banging—Smokey, whipping the lid of the piano with the heels of his hands. And Jack’s fingers hitting the keys, thump-thump, thump-thump-thump. And him singing Muddy Waters: