Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  Who’s that yonder come walkin’ down the street?

  She’s the most beautiful girl any man would want to meet.

  I wonder who’s gonna be your sweet man when I’m gone?

  I wonder who you’re gonna have to love you.

  In his voice there was new weight, masculine weight. Jack had never been hurt by me before. At least I’d given him something, even if only just a passport into sorrow. When the last chord came, he jammed the piano one final time—bwomp—and he smiled mordantly into the crowd, his eyes latching on to no one and nothing. His rejection of me was correct; I understood it had to be that way. If in life there is flow, a current or a course, I had the feeling I’d found it. They began a second song, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, my favorite, he knew. He sang it so beautifully.

  Past the piano on the southern side of the room, a wall of windows overlooking the porch extended from floor to ceiling. I moved behind the frayed drapes and went to the farthermost window, the top half of which was open. Pantigo Road lay ahead. The oily gloss of the street and the sound of passing cars suggested it was raining. Wheels on wet pavement make a very particular going-home sound, serene and conclusive. I wondered what Marilyn was doing. Maybe she was making tea, scooping stray leaves from a wrinkled paper sack with Golden Assam stamped in withering red. Maybe she and Dad were reading. If she was looking out the window at the rain, perhaps she was thinking of me.

  “I’m leaving,” Rourke said, his voice coming practically from within my mind.

  I was not surprised. Lots of things were in there—him too. My eyes didn’t leave the street. I was in some unattended place, some dangerously unattended place. He was on the porch, on the other side of the wall, leaning against my open window. I did not look to see him, but I could feel him, the way you can close your eyes and feel a hand above your skin. He emitted something electrical, and I responded, electrically.

  “I want you to know,” he said, “that you’re very talented.” Quieter, down an octave. “I think you’re going to go far.”

  A car passed. I traced its lights eastward. It was a curious thing to mention talent. He seemed to want to persuade me of something. I might have told him not to bother trying. Though I could not name the choice, it had been made the first time I saw him. My preference for him was unconditional, absolute—feral, as Jack would have said, the type of choice animals make. Jack was mistaken about the ability of conscience and moral reciprocity being the best means to move humanity. In the end it’s just natural will that inspires us to action. Love, hatred, hunger, desire, indigence—things that find no home in logic. What I felt for Rourke was a partiality that situated me. It defined and animated me.

  He moved suddenly, his shadow changing radically from a lean vertical strip visible only from the corner of my eye to a carbon shield that obliterated the view, like a door swinging decidedly shut. His mouth came down on my cheek, the one farthest from him. With his jaw he pushed my face into the hard pocket of his inclined chest, and with loose lips he softly held it there. I was breathing, my breath wetting his chest, going down the tendons of his neck. Beneath the membrane of his lips lay the complete and threatening remainder of his body. I could feel the way he held himself in check. Just when he might have retreated, he lingered, noticing perhaps as I did the way his mouth had been shaped by God to fit the hollow beneath my cheekbone.

  “I have to go,” he breathed in apologetically. When he withdrew, the skin of his lips and the skin of my face resisted separation. I wondered when we’d reached a place of apologies.

  “Yes,” I said. “Go.”

  Rourke leapt from the porch. He seemed dauntless, satisfied with himself, and with me. He reached his car—a 1967 cameo-white GTO with a parchment interior. I knew the details because I heard him talk about them the night he came to my house in the hailstorm. He opened the door, and his body vanished into what looked like a tank full of moonglow. I wished to vanish also, but I was bound by the things that professed to designate me—family, friends, school, culture, country. How had I fallen under their influence, when these things referred to something other than what I felt myself to be, when the care I received was diluted by their self-interest?

  I was no prisoner, and yet, when faced with an occasion for determination, I was not to follow the lead of my will, but to endure in tedious familiarity. What is freedom when you’re too beholden to act spontaneously? What is desire that is absolute but untimely? Or obligation when you have ignored your soul’s conviction? Is sacrifice really a virtue when in your heart you feel not a shred of devotion? I knew all this and more, but for all that I knew, knowing did not bring him back, and knowing did not move me. Only he could have brought himself back, only he might have moved me. And that is just slavery of another kind—which was something to consider.

  I listened to the push of his car in reverse—a steady, hard push, taillights coming back. I nestled into the glow, and then he cut out to the right, in the direction of Amagansett and Montauk. I was to go back and face Jack and Kate, my parents, school on Monday. I was to gather away the monster I’d become, and, in the meantime, count on Rourke for nothing. He had acquainted me with the next place, but he would not take me there. I felt slightly doubtful, the way caterpillars must feel in the instant they are awakened to become butterflies.

  That was the promise I’d made to Rourke—to fly.

  The piano was unattended, though the room was still packed with people. I moved to the kitchen at the rear of the house, where I found Jack and his friends, an androgynous, invertebrate puddle of flannel and denim, sitting in a sooty cloud of pot smoke. Jack was slumped so low in a ladderback chair that his head met the middle rung. One foot jutted across the dining table, and he was rubbing the gummy label from a beer bottle with a nail-bitten thumb. His friends looked smug. They didn’t like Jack with me; they thought I wanted something from him, who knew what, since Jack had nothing to give. “Unless it’s the flu,” Jack would speculate. “Or a hangover,” Denny would add.

  One time Trish Lawton called me a calculating bitch.

  “Who’s Trish Lawton?” I asked Jack.

  “Troy’s sister’s friend from Michigan. From Flint.”

  “Has Trish even met Eveline?” Dan inquired mildly.

  Jack thought for a minute. “I guess not, no. Pretty sure she hasn’t.”

  I didn’t care what they thought of me, but I didn’t like how little they knew of Jack. If they insisted on remaining blind to his capacity for manipulation, his hunger for intellectual ascendance and moral leverage, his aptitude for dealing abuse, then without me, he would be as good as friendless.

  “I’m going,” I announced, and there were a few mumbled good nights.

  Jack thrust back his chair, standing before the legs were square, so that it marched and threatened to topple. He stormed up behind me and tossed his coat over his shoulders. One limp sleeve skimmed my back.

  The screen door slammed behind us, hitting twice. I left, and Jack followed. His feet punched the porch steps as he descended, and when our bodies were aligned, he zipped his jacket and handed me his gloves again. The cold was not the same tranquil cold as when we’d left the theater, but a sharp chill. Jack and I walked as we’d always walked, on the streets we knew so perfectly well, and as we did, the drama of the evening began to dwindle into distant nonsense.

  At my house I washed and put on long underwear and socks, and I felt more like myself again, whatever that was. Or whoever. I joined Jack on the floor. He was picking threads from the torn knee of his jeans.

  “I know what’s happening,” he said into his hands.

  I didn’t ask what he meant. If I forced him to put his thoughts to words, they would appear to lack foundation. He could only say, I saw you two sitting together, not talking, or, I saw him take your hand after Denny offered it to the crowd. I could defend myself against accusations, but that was a lawyerly way to waste time, assailing an argument’s logic rather than conceding to its probabil
ity. Something was happening, it was true.

  “I’m really upset,” he said.

  I was also upset. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You’re not losing me,” he said. “You’re forsaking me.”

  Forsaking implied choice. I had no choice with Rourke. I said, “Jack, I love you.”

  He tilted his head back and fell silent, for a long time, saying nothing. He was heartless to retain his grief, to inflict me with the knowledge that for once I was the cause of his torment, not the remedy. For purposes unknown I had been entrusted with the care of his soul, and so it was the most vile type of treason for me to have enriched his self-loathing. His existence suddenly seemed so tenuous to me, his figure so fragile. He was just one body, leading one life.

  He breathed in, and three lines appeared in the middle of his forehead. He reached for me, and I folded into his arms, happy to give him the thing that I lacked—the object of his desire. I wondered if he’d felt happy when I’d told him I loved him, and was he relieved that I did not say different things—or worse, nothing at all. Through his sweater I assessed his breathing. I knew it by heart. It was shallow, like water you can hardly wade in, and unsynchronized, as if he could not match with the atmosphere.

  “You’re shivering,” he said. He took the comforter from my bed and wrapped it around my shoulders and then his, making a nest. Jack stroked my hair and I kissed him. And we listened reverently to the night—to the chronic buzz of the refrigerator, to the occasional lurch and jerk of the boiler, to the dainty tink of the metallic numbers on my digital clock, flapping scrupulously. At three-thirty, he said that he should go home.

  “Not yet,” I begged, “please.” I couldn’t be alone, not yet.

  21

  I knew what to do. I would renounce my feelings. I would resume early loyalties. I would reduce my needs. I would disappear. The dispossession of Rourke would become for me a symbol of life’s divine impermanence.

  My days began and ended the same as anyone’s—with light, with dark. The difference was that mine were stripped of the routine that generally divided the middle. I forfeited the comfort of habit. I wandered unpredictably, leaving school early or staying late. I began to accept offers. If Lisa Tobias or Dave Meese or Rocky Santiago asked if I needed a ride home, I said okay, even if I wanted to walk. When Alicia Ross invited me to O’Malley’s for Sara Eden’s birthday dinner, I brought balloons. When my mother invited me to watch her friend Francis Holland do his Dylan Thomas impersonation at the college, I accepted. When Denny needed me to drive with him and his mother to her pulmonologist in Stony Brook, I did. And when Dad was building frames for my final watercolors, Jack and I went into the city one weekend to help.

  Though everyone was grateful for the congenial way I was acting, I did not particularly enjoy doing the things I kept agreeing to do. My only aim was to avoid Rourke until April. Kate said April was the last drama class. In science fiction movies, women in suit dresses and men in skinny ties stand at plate glass windows, waiting for the invading things, ants or birds or pods, to finish whatever they’re doing, breeding or eating, and to leave. Home became that way for me: a place infected with risk.

  All time became my own time, regulated by a mysterious inner mechanism, superior to the clock. I understood time; clocks merely measured it. I would rise to leave one place and move to the next. I did not need to know that it was Tuesday or Thursday afternoon to detect his occupancy in the building. I could feel the changes Rourke rendered—in the halls, in the rooms, in a track that drew in the school like a belt. When I sensed that he had engaged with whatever it was that he had come to engage with, usually with drama class in the auditorium, I knew I could safely slip away. Weeks went by this way.

  “I’m totally confused by this new schedule,” Jack grumbled one day. He came into the yearbook office and hopped onto Marty’s desk.

  “You always seem to find me,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to make a profession out of it,” he complained. “What do you do in here, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “Make lists. Sort.”

  “Sounds pressing,” he said. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  “A few more minutes.”

  He reached for Kate’s flute case. “What’s this doing here?”

  “She asked me to take it home for her.”

  “Take it home for her?” Jack asked sarcastically. “Why, did she sprain her wrist?”

  “She has drama. She didn’t want to carry it there.”

  He opened the box. Inside was a peculiar bed of opaque sapphire fabric, that crushed velvety instrument case stuff. He peered inside the joints of the flute, then pieced it together obligingly, the way mothers brush newborn hair. When he blew into it, it cooed sweetly. Jack could play anything. He paused. “I was accepted at Berklee,” he said.

  Berklee was a music college like Juilliard, only in Boston. Jack could have gone to Juilliard with Dan, which would’ve been logical with me at NYU, but he refused to live at his parents’. “No contest,” he’d said from the start. “I’d take up hairdressing to avoid living at home.”

  We both began to talk at once. “What did you say?” we asked, simultaneously also.

  “Go ahead,” I offered.

  Jack insisted, “No, no. You first.”

  I’d forgotten what I’d been thinking, and he seemed to forget also. His leg started to swing, slow then fast, even and hard, like a carpenter’s hammer, with the toe of his blue suede Puma kicking the metal garbage can and the heel bouncing against the side of the desk. In one jolt, he banished the canister into the defenseless center of the room. It pirouetted on its rim in the suspenseful manner of a rolling coin. “We’re driving up this weekend,” he said. “My old man hasn’t been there yet.”

  So it was final. Jack would be in Boston and Kate in Montreal. I would be in Manhattan at NYU. None of us within walking distance of the others. One thing about friends is that they have to be within walking distance. That’s why mothers with kids in parks and guys in the military and people who work in offices become friends even if they have nothing in common.

  Jack started to speak, but his words were consumed by a change in pressure, a nearly inaudible sound that passed as it appeared, like the light nick of a record skipping. Rourke—engaged in class.

  I raised my chin and cocked my head. “Let’s go.”

  “Excellent,” he said, somewhat surprised. “Cool.”

  Kate started to make me nauseous. One night I was reading in the living room, and she came in and answered the phone. She spoke so loudly that I thought I might get sick. When I tried to get up, I fell back down in a queasy cyclone of confusion. My stomach pitched. I lowered my head to my knees.

  My mother’s hand touched my neck. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  She tucked the edges of my blanket around me, trimming the perimeter of my body. Probably I resembled one of those homicide outlines, marked indelibly in the position of my collapse. My mother sat. I was consoled by the depression made by her body in the mattress. I drew her hand between my palm and cheek. Maybe I would sleep. There was a chemical coming in, dripping in. I felt microscopic pulses of something, diminutive gates opening.

  “When was the last time you ate?” she asked.

  My eyes opened—how much time had passed? It seemed she’d been sitting only seconds, yet it had been long enough for me to dream a dream. Something about lost passports and missing luggage and foreign customs officials in a makeshift room set up on the tarmac.

  “Be right back,” my mother said. She took back her hand and left me, stepping into the kitchen. A ruthless dusk replaced her, hitting quick, like a prison cell door shutting.

  Kate popped in, her hair rippling like a flag. “Sick again?” she said, and I felt another wave of nausea. I pulled the quilt over my face. “Well, excuse me!” she said.

  I stopped sleeping almost altogether. The malignancy of night and lust and loneliness made me shift restlessly. All t
hat I’d struggled to suppress during the day would erupt into the dark at night, flooding the silence of my room, and I would call for him. If I slept at all, I would find him behind closed eyes, like an object through bright water, a shivering richness. We would convene—reconvene—in some substitute district, at some alternate age, with him not speaking and me not speaking. In those false regions, at his false side, I found my first peace.

  It was then that I began to write. Writing helps when you can’t talk to your friends; it wasn’t that my friends were untrustworthy, it’s just that I would never discuss something that was hardly real as though it were really real. Often people do this, forcing friends into authenticating an imaginary life. I composed a list for myself. One column for all the times I’d seen him, another for each time I’d discussed him. Mom’s accountant friend Nargis would have called this a table. I liked the idea of a table, of providing a frame for runaway numbers or dodgy ideas. I noted peripheral details such as conversation, clothes, and weather. I used a code for names, which was somewhat pointless since the list was in my room in my handwriting, and there were not enough characters in my life to outwit a motivated intruder. For Rourke’s name, I substituted the letter S, which followed R in the alphabet. Kate was B, which preceded C for Catherine, and Jack was G, the last letter of Fleming.

  Last night at the play S and I sat next to each other in the dark. He has eyes that are black. When you mix paint, black is like all color, but his black is no color. I spoke to him and my voice was strange. Later he kissed me through a window at Dan’s. When he left I wanted to go with him, only I didn’t, though there was a beautiful rain. At home G and I sat all night like we were waiting for something. He said my chapel would be trash by Monday. B & Den came in drunk at 1:30 A.M. and we made vanilla pudding. The pot bottom cooked off and there were Teflon flakes inside, but the four of us ate it anyway. Today B made me sick. She was on the phone between the matinee and evening performances, saying how “in love with Harrison” she is. Mom measured my temperature at one hundred two and put me to bed with tomato soup that tasted like scalding ketchup water. Mom’s hand felt bony and mortal. It’s still raining. It’s been raining since Saturday. Even after five days it’s a beautiful rain.