Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  Though my body’s demands for nature were met by days spent outdoors and evenings working in a roadside restaurant, by expressions of flesh and trials of desire, I found no end to my interest in the wild. Wherever I looked, I wanted to lie, though that was not always possible. It was like being hungry for blood and smelling it everywhere around, hearing it drive, and you do not mind it touching you when you are it and it is you. If, at night, I would have dared to leave his side, I would have walked into the velvet stealth, knowing that nothing would ever hurt me there. That summer I felt the casing of my skin dissolve. I felt myself connect as pools connect.

  In the mornings, I would sit on the step beneath the chipped front door after a shower, waiting for the sun to dry the water from my skin. I would push my heels into the grass and warm dirt, thinking, God really is everywhere. Rourke would join me, coming to the porch with a pot of coffee and a cup for us to share. A space between the houses across the road revealed the smoky blue bay, and through that slender break we would look to the west. And him reaching, his hands touching my hair. And pain, a knowledge of the advance of time, an instinct that luck does not last, a feeling of modesty in regard to the opulence of my circumstances. And a sense that we had to hurry.

  “Is it time?” I would ask.

  “Yeah,” he would say. “I bet you’re hungry.”

  The GTO would barely drop speed before veering to the shoulder at Four Oaks, where we bought breakfast—either there or at Herb’s in town. Our doors would pound in unison, and I would walk a little behind, watching the even force of his legs as they hit the street. Sometimes Doreen, the cashier, would wave before we reached the door, and Rourke would toss up his arm. If you didn’t know already that Doreen drank Jack Daniel’s, you could tell by the purple swell of her face. Once at Tipperary, Rourke bought her a drink. She thanked him, and when she lit a cigarette, the hand gripping the match trembled. The bartender brought a rocks glass filled with rust-colored stuff, not bothering to ask what she’d like, and she sat back in her chair and sipped like she was comfortable, more comfortable there than at home.

  Inside the deli, the floor tiles felt stark under my bare feet, and the air was so cold it seemed to come from my bones. Near the coffeemaker was a platter of collapsed and sorry Danish. I would dig through for a few free of flies while “Piano Man” played on the radio. If people were talking to Rourke, as often they did, I would wait by the creaking novelty rack, spinning it to see the latest yo-yos and water pistols, and the guys behind the counter would stare, calculating the circumference of my ass. My eyes would pass over theirs, as if to say, Do you honestly think you could do to me the things he does?

  Sometimes he would scan the headlines while we waited for sandwiches, other times he avoided them, in either case striving to follow his way. He would run a hand through his hair, then turn to find me, as if afraid that I might have vanished. Upon seeing me he would return to summer, seduced again, despite some sounder verdict of which I remained unaware. It was as if everyone had been evacuated, but by some miracle of stupidity we remained.

  “That everything?” Rourke would ask, pulling bottled water and peaches from my arms, and tossing knots of cash on the counter.

  At the beach, we would eat. He would run several miles and swim several miles, and I would read and sleep, and if he thought I was getting too much sun, he would lay a shirt on my back—the cotton dropping down like a parachute. When he stood or walked, women would adjust their glasses and arch the bridges of their ribs. If they lay on their bellies, they would tug the strings of their suits higher around their lifted bottoms and spy him through the fragrant triangles between arms and blankets. Jealousy was not possible; no one could love him better or more. I would just turn away and face the sun, feeling it heal the flesh he’d used. The women didn’t know what I knew. They knew nothing of unconditional discretion or singleness of heart, or femininity, when femininity is madness and uncertainty and vertigo in his arms. By two o’clock he would pull his jeans over his shorts, fastening them. During our procession to the car, everyone would watch solemnly, even children and dogs.

  He would knock the front door open with his thigh because his hands would be full, and after shaking the blanket and hanging the towels to dry, we would meet by the side of the bed. The influence of his body would weigh down the mattress, and for a moment we would sit. Tenderly, we would touch, each striking lightly against the skin of the other. Sex in the day can be sad. It is to risk in light, to reach for things there and not there, to confess that you are searching, despite what you have found. In day, his face was a reflection of my own, his features flushed with innocence and a reassuring lack of sufficiency. At times, I could not bear the monuments there. At times, I felt sick from the sight of the child I’d been, lost until found in his eyes—and him, a child too. I often thought to say something. It was possible that he wished to talk.

  I never once felt the way I’d felt with Jack—baffled and agitated, unable to articulate some grave humiliation, some feeling that I’d been wrongly used, despite Jack’s maudlin concerns and conceited timidity. Jack’s tenderness was like a barrier, a reef you dared not swim through. He expressed care because he saw cause for anxiety; if you responded to it, it would prove his anxiety correct. But with Rourke there was dignity in indifference and grace in separateness. As I’d suspected, Jack had been wrong—desire is not deviant. To seek resolution through intimacy and to achieve it is to rise with your feelings confirmed, and not as if things have been unclosed and will remain that way until they are unclosed some more, each time a little wider. After sex with Rourke, the nerves in me would be stilled. Afterward he did not disgust me with tenderness. Afterward I said nothing, and he said nothing, and the look of my underwear on the floor did not depress me.

  While I showered and dressed for work, he would make phone calls; I didn’t know to whom. I didn’t think about where his money came from. I never asked what he did while I worked at night. I never looked through his belongings. His discreteness was sacred to me; inside, I preferred it. It’s hard to explain, except to say that when Jack and I used to walk, we would crash into each other, listlessly, lazily. But Rourke and I never bumped into each other. If ever we intersected, it had meaning, new meaning, not mine, not his, but a third meaning. The only thing that changed noticeably was that every Tuesday was more difficult than the one that preceded it. Tuesday was my day off, but not his. He would get up before sunrise, throw on some clothes, and before leaving the room, he would turn his head incompletely, saying, See you later. And when, late on a Tuesday evening, he returned, I would not go to him; I could not even necessarily move. I would just watch him, overwhelmed by the need to vow something, secure something.

  Montauk was the Vegas of my imagination, a dwarfish Vegas, with garish toylike motels and two-story arcades bright as airfields, and tourists in unscrupulous attire. Men in black socks played miniature golf at Puff ’n Putt with beet-skinned ladies in extra-large T-shirts, while teenagers secreted off to the muddy seclusion of paddleboats. Chesty guys from the boroughs named Sisto and Vic who ate three- and four-pound lobsters but never got a drop of lung on their shirts swatted at their kids’ heads, and checked me out through my sweater, while their wives bought miniature lighthouses and driftwood seagulls and boats inside bottles. Locals I never saw but read about in the paper grew pot in their gardens and kept arsenals in their basements, and celebrities hid like game in the cliffs. Steps away from the midget scrub pines of the village was the ocean. Not a tranquil ocean, like the lagoonish satin-lit backdrops of Florida or the Caribbean, but a northern one that coerced you into the confidence of its fury. When you swam at midnight in Montauk, you waived everything—you surrendered. Montauk was not pretty; it was something else entirely.

  Sometimes we’d go to the Tattler, or to the Montauket for sunsets. The Dock was the place to get coffee after midnight, black or with Baileys. At the Dock, the tables would fill up with people Rourke knew from slow-pitch or the
beach and occasionally with people I knew, like Lisa Tobias or Sam the Dominican waiter from the Lobster Roll, and his girlfriend, Lou, from the Surf Shop. The first time we went, Ray Trent and Mike Reynolds walked in, and they were surprised to see me. I introduced them to Rourke, and the three of them sat around until closing, talking about rugby, the start of the Olympic Games in Moscow, and whether or not Ali stood a chance against Holmes in Nevada in October. I left them alone, like leaving three toddlers in a room with toys, and when Rourke pushed back his chair that night to go home, I pushed back mine as well, kissing those guys goodbye. Rourke didn’t seem to mind them anymore, not like he had the day of the St. Patrick’s parade.

  If Rob was in town, we would go to Gosman’s for dinner and wait for an outdoor table even if it took twice as long, because Rob didn’t come all the way from Jersey to sit indoors. “If I wanted to sit inside,” he’d snap at the hostess who’d make the obligatory inquiry: inside or out? “I coulda stayed in Jersey watchin’ Love Boat with my grandmother.”

  From the cocktail patio near the docks, we would observe the eerie cortege of yachts slinking to berth after a day of lusty immoderation, the strings of spotlights on deck shining into the sable wax of water. You couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be those people on the yachts, with arrowhead jaws and matted hair and wrinkled whites, flesh alive with the stink of coconut oil and vodka. The luxuriant smell of tar would blend with the grasping stench of fish, and hostile gulls on pylons would face off with you. When the hostess would call out—“Cirillo party”—we would leave our daiquiris and go slow, the three of us, like we were somewhere else in the world, somewhere with stepped streets, cobbled and precariously narrowed, where bread is wrapped in paper and wine in wax and string, someplace where it does not hurt to be happy, where there are no necessary ends, where it’s not humiliating to end up exactly where you start out.

  Rob stayed on the couch. He would wake up first because he didn’t sleep well except in his own bed, which was a Sealy Posturepedic. He would rap on our door two times fast, and Rourke would sit up, throwing his legs over the side of the mattress, tossing a piece of the sheet over my hips, though he didn’t have to do that. It didn’t matter if Rob saw me. There was nothing I needed to hide from him.

  “Yeah,” Rourke would say.

  The door would creak open, and Rob would hop up onto the door frame and hang from his fingertips to do a few chin-ups, saying, “C’mon, let’s go get some eggs.”

  On the walls of Salivar’s, there were fish carcasses of an affecting diamond blueness, befitting equally the subterranean depths of seas and the paneled walls of saloons. Rob would make fast friends with strangers at the counters, talking about how much weight DeNiro gained for Raging Bull, and the Islanders winning the Stanley Cup, and bizarre marginalia from the papers such as streaking or Texaco making gasoline from corn or the surgical detachment of Siamese twins.

  “Leave ’em,” was his solution to the Iranian hostage crisis. “Anyone dumb enough to go to Iran in the first place is up to no good. Either they’re missionaries or monkeys for industry.”

  Rob never sat at the beach. He paced restlessly, talking to everyone. He organized volleyball games with burly guys in True Value towels wrapped high on waists, and he played paddleball with every adolescent like it was his personal duty. He threw balls to lonely dogs, he built castles with kids, and he always only faced the sun. “Why should I bother getting a tan on my back? If I’m walkin’ away from you, I don’t care what you think.”

  When Rourke was gone, it was Rob’s hand on my waist or his coat on my shoulders, Rob’s voice suggesting we get a cup of coffee or a couple of sandwiches and go do laundry.

  “We’ll be right back,” he told Rourke one morning after fishing out on the Viking Star, a charter boat Rob liked to go on. Rourke was hosing off bluefish in a plastic tub. Rob ran me across the street to Zorba’s Inn, a dilapidated motel near Gosman’s that looked like a lean-to. He pulled an Instamatic from his sweatshirt pocket. “Get a shot of me in front of Zorba’s. I’m gonna tell Jimmy Landes this is where Harrison is living.”

  Sometimes when I was at work, they would go over to the OTB in Southampton and then to the Woodshed by the Bridgehampton drive-in to see some waitress Rob had a thing for. I met her one night at the carnival in North Sea; her name was Laura Lasser. Laura wore blue eyeliner and stonewashed jeans with an eyelet T-shirt and skinny white skip sneakers from Caldor. She was pretty but heavy, which was okay by Rob, who frankly liked a big ass.

  When Rob took her on the rickety old Ferris wheel that night, Rourke told him, “Jesus, be careful up there.”

  Like wayward objects from the sky, the guys would just show up at one of the picnic tables behind the Lobster Roll, usually around ten, straddling the benches and talking shit about Johnny Rutherford doing 142 miles per hour to win the Indianapolis 500 or Ottis Anderson’s 1600-yard rushing season or the Steelers or the Lakers or Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon jump, or just old times in Rob’s ’68 Challenger or on the boardwalk with Daisy and Pongo and the Chinaman.

  When Rob’s friend Bobby G. died that August from complications following the motorcycle accident he’d had in March, Rourke met Rob in the Bronx one Sunday for the service. They showed up in Montauk after midnight with Rob hanging limp off of Rourke’s shoulder, both of them wearing navy pinstripe suits. Rourke jerked his head for me to leave the room, but Rob said no. “Don’t make her go, Harrison. I don’t want her to go.”

  Rob halfway undressed, and he straddled the arm of the sofa in his sleeveless undershirt and his suit pants, clutching a bottle of Cuervo. Rourke made egg sandwiches, and I watched the topography of Rob’s skinny tattooed arm flicker as he folded and unfolded a matchbook from Ruggerio’s Funeral Home. It was a beautiful arm, tapered and muscular, like a junkie’s arm. When the deejay on WPLR said, “This is Dana Blue. The request line is open,” Rob waved the bottle left and right, going, “Get me the phone, get me the phone.” As if by some supernatural occurrence, he got through to the station, and we three drew together in a memorable trinity—Rourke holding a plate of eggs and hovering over Rob, Rob on the sofa, legs apart, knees high, holding the receiver, and me kneeling on the floor with the phone like an offering, all of us still except for the manic push of Rob, the life and guts of him.

  “I just lost a friend,” he said. “You know what I’m saying—he’s dead.” Dana Blue must have said sorry and asked what could she do, because he thanked her, then cleared his throat. “Can you send out Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ to Bobby G.? Tell him it’s from Robbie and the Chinaman.”

  If they came to pick me up before my shift ended, I would bring them beers and fries, which made Rob happy. Rob liked to get a deal, it was a matter of pride, it made him feel less cheated by life. His was in a tough predicament. It’s tough when the things that make you proud—family, heritage, home—are the same things that shame you. One reason Rourke meant so much to Rob was that Rourke was like one foot in and one foot out. And Rourke was conscious of that line. Whenever Rob was around, Rourke tightened up, like trying not to stumble or risk hurting Rob in any way. Sometimes they would talk quietly, and when I’d pass by, they’d get quieter still. I’d pick up the empty fries baskets and the beer bottles and wipe down the table, and Rourke would unfold his arms and reach for me, taking me by the hips into his lap or running a hand up the inside of one thigh and down the other.

  Sometimes Rob would manufacture fake conversations when I would come by to hide the fact that they’d actually been speaking of Mark Ross. “So, this girl Rudy married, right, she’s a born-again. They’re over there in Stuyvesant Town now.”

  Once in August, Alicia came into the Lobster Roll to see me, and she told me they’d all had dinner together the previous night at the Driver’s Seat in Southampton—Mark, Rob, Rourke, Alicia, and her boyfriend, Jonathan, and some other people I didn’t know, friends of Mark’s probably. I realized they’d probably been seeing
one another all along. I wanted to ask her how Mark was doing, how was his new job and apartment in Manhattan, but I didn’t want to open any closed avenues. I wondered if Mark had heard I’d been living with Rourke, and what he thought about that. For a long time I’d forgotten to remember Mark, then it all started returning to me—this knowledge that he was waiting. That’s how you know summer’s almost over, when things start returning to you.

  Last time I saw Rob that summer was a Tuesday, near the end—at least it seemed near the end. Possibly there had been a previous end, another day that I hadn’t noticed.

  After Rourke left that morning, I rode my bike to the beach, stopping first at Whites Drug Store for gum. The air was still, and the tide was low, so I placed my towel near the waves, and I opened my book—Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Two white-haired babies ran around a sand castle, and a boom box played Pink Floyd.

  Hey you, out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old.

  Can you feel me?

  Hey you, out there on your own, sitting naked by the phone.

  Would you touch me?

  “You waltzed right past me.” It was Rob, bending for a kiss. “I’m playing volleyball.”

  “What are you doing here? It’s Tuesday. Don’t you have work?”

  “I came out this morning. I told everybody I had jury duty. Come on over.”

  I shaded my eyes. There were a lot of people. “I’ll just wait here.”

  “Come over.” He gestured with my book as we walked, slapping it twice in his palm. “Good book,” he said. “Brett Ashley, that’s you.” He spread my towel near his, by the net.