Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  It’s the Friday before Washington’s birthday. The art studio is empty; I am alone. To my right is a pile of contorted tubes, and fresh paint dots line the tray I use as my palette. Today’s paint looks pulpy and alive alongside the scraped and raked stains of old paint. I light candles and turn up the volume on the music, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.

  Come una mosca prigioniera—l’ali batte il piccolo cuor!

  On the canvas is a female figure, a face and bare shoulders. She first arrived before Christmas, and I examined her as though I’d discovered a dead bird in the house—I tilted my head, wondering where she’d come from, and how to get rid of her. Her body is like living resistance; it cuts across the canvas in two directions and in multiple fields, like stop-motion photography or time-lapse film. The muscles of her chest and shoulders are pronounced as she leans to escape the frame, though her face contradicts her body by addressing the foreground. She connects with the observer despite risk; that is, the risk of exposing her leap as a leap to nowhere. After all, she is trapped in paint.

  Yet she has lessons. In revealing intention, she admits the possibility of failure, so she is courageous. Despite her imprisonment, she clings to the idea of freedom, so she is faithful. She reminds me that faith is better than hope. Hope is blind expectation; faith awaits nothing. It is a means of preserving the self, regardless of outcome. With faith, every day of constancy is itself a good day.

  In the first review of the new term, Don Matthews, my teacher, told the class that my figure’s story was one of “entrapment and emancipation, a discrepancy not unlike that of Jesus on the cross—wood and flesh, bondage and deliverance, defeat and triumph.” It made me think of how Jack used to call the crucifix the perfect corporate logo. Don was an older version of Jack, if Jack happened to be an irritable art theorist from Dublin with round gold-wire eyeglasses and a full-time job teaching at NYU. It would be good if Jack had a teaching job and glasses. Apparently he didn’t even have five dollars. The most recent news I’d heard about Jack was him hitting up Denny for cash on St. Mark’s Place. When I asked Denny if he knew how to find Jack, he looked at me and said, “It wouldn’t be a good idea right now, Evie.”

  I look at my painting once more before preparing to leave the studio. Though I rendered what I thought I saw, the image bears no resemblance to the model used by the class, or, for that matter, to the paintings of the others. For a while it looked like stacks of color until it looked like a woman; then you couldn’t see it the first way anymore. Sometimes you perceive a secondary figure in an image, like the etching of a cube that changes orientation when you blink or the goblet that is obviously a goblet until it is two faces kissing. Sometimes you get stuck in the subordinate state, and that is stranger still, because you recall most clearly that there was an original way of seeing, yet you can’t return to it. When people talk about seeing like a child, they are referring to a state in which the eye and mind are fluid, and can pass easily from specificity to ambiguity. Like when strings of letters look like shapes, not just words.

  From a dented El Pico coffee can, I select the black handle of a putty knife and drag it through the wet paint. “I’m sorry,” I say to the figure, saying the words to her that no one ever says to me. And my knife moves. Horizontally, one side, the other, dissecting with new oil the meringue cliffs and ponds of paint that have comprised her image. My hand makes olive lines, repeating, crossing over, bars, and between these, I use a rust color, integrating the two tones, corrupting them, marrying them. Yes, marriage—a corruption—a gain, a loss, a twisted sort of balance.

  The room blackens; two hands mask my eyes. The hands are scented like soap from a recent washing. “Don’t move,” Mark whispers into my ear, holding for a minute, kissing the back of my neck. He pulls away and hits the light switch. The fluorescents creak and yaw in their casings, then surge to life. Mark always sneaks up on me. Don Matthews calls him “the ferret.” Don didn’t tell me this directly; I overheard him.

  Mark gasps. “Evie! You ruined her!”

  I like how she looks. She seems to have satisfied some pressing desire. She adjourns contentedly into paint, defenseless to the very nature of herself, as if only that which made her unique and which gave her substance has the genius to deprive her of continuance. She’d just been so—locked in.

  “Consider the importance of process,” Don once said to me. “There is no end greater than the means. Buddhist monks spend days and weeks making sand mandalas, grain by grain. They drop streams of colored sand through the tapered ends of these minuscule funnels to create magnificent patterns intended to graph the order of the universe. At the end, the mandalas are just swept away.”

  The painting was nothing. Just paint, just canvas, just work in time. And the time, in turn, is a fragment of my existence. If I had not been living with Mark or taken that class or gotten to know Mr. Matthews, the image would not have materialized—at least not through me. And of course, if she did begin in me, then she hadn’t vanished at all. She’d simply withdrawn, the way turtles’ heads squirm back into shells.

  Farewell, I say. In my mind I say it, then my wrist arcs to obscure her entirely.

  Mark sighs, exasperated. I wonder what he could possibly think he’s lost. She seems so exclusive to me. I would not want to hang her at his home. Or at Brett’s. Brett bought two other paintings of mine, one of rooftops and one of a bird’s nest. Whenever we go to Brett’s loft, I avoid the bedroom. If Mark forces me to go in, I see the paintings and I end up thinking, Oh, babies, poor babies.

  Denny and I are on Bleecker Street under the awning at Figaro’s, and it’s raining. Rain falls, it disappears, more comes. There is a beautiful sizzling sound it makes, like bacon frying. People huddle in doorways. A man in a saturated white parachute suit and Birkenstocks passes. His toes are black.

  Denny takes a forkful of deep-dish apple pie. “Know what my mother calls this?” he asks, then answers his own question. “Pandowdy. Want some?”

  I shake my head.

  “So you’ll do it?” he asks. Denny got money to produce the clothes for a music video one of his friends is shooting. He wants me to design the sets.

  “I don’t know. I’ve just been so busy. I really don’t know where the time goes,” I say.

  “What are you talking about? You have too much time. You have no life outside Mark or the gallery. And you still look exhausted.”

  I am exhausted. It’s exhausting to give up the past as I do, as I have done. It’s like having an autoimmune disease. I fight against myself, against everything that is natural: love, memory, autonomy, desire. I don’t want to breathe. There’s this balance I need to maintain that breathing upsets. I don’t know what it means not to breathe, but I heard Lowie say that everything you have ever done is written into your respiration.

  “It’s just, the seasons,” I try to explain to Denny. “And time. I can’t tell if it’s spring, fall, winter. Days of the week run together. I lose track. I don’t even—”

  There is a cloudburst, then a downpour. The rain is torrential, a covalent, sticking rain. The building across the street has scaffolding, and the raindrops cascade like marbles through a maze of planks and pipes. It reminds me of that game Mouse Trap. Scaffolding is awful. The other day I was thinking how nice the city will look when all the construction is done. Then I remembered: it will never be done.

  Denny sets his knapsack on an adjacent chair, where his cane is hanging. An air conditioner fell out of a fifth-story window on Christopher Street awhile ago and smashed to the ground in front of him. A piece of metal flew into his leg and he had to have surgery. He ended up winning a twenty-four-thousand-dollar settlement.

  “If I’d been one step forward,” he’d confided with shock and horror at the time, “it would have killed me. It just wasn’t my time.”

  If Denny had been killed by a falling air conditioner, everyone would have said that it was destiny. People would have to say that, just to give meaning to something seemin
gly meaningless. But he didn’t die, and so the incident becomes irrelevant and remains largely undiscussed, which is regrettable, because of all the remarkable things about life, the most remarkable are the near misses.

  When he arrived, he said he’s almost ready to get back to dancing and that we should sign up for instruction soon. He’d bought us a series of lessons for Christmas last year, or possibly the year before. Mark kept telling me it was too dangerous to go, that those dance studios are really just money-laundering fronts.

  “Getting any sleep at all?” he asks.

  “Sort of. Not really. A little, I’ve been dreaming.”

  “Well—good! Dreaming is good. It’s brain work. It’s a sign of health. You know, I read somewhere that death row inmates have disproportionately fewer dreams than the rest of us,” Denny says as he pays the check. “And that a majority of them choose Dr Pepper as their last drink. Wouldn’t that make a great ad campaign?—‘The last word in soda—Dr Pepper.’”

  The weight of the rain lifts; the sun presses through. The street dries rapidly, making me think of those hooded rollers in car washes. Denny and I make eye contact through the picturesque vapor, which is awkward—awkward because I want something from him, which feels like asking for money to buy pills. I want him to remind me of where we started, since where he started and where I started is the same. I wonder if he retains the impression of me and of Rourke like keys to a former house.

  I ask Denny, “Do you remember me then?”

  “Very well,” he says. “You were happy.”

  “You need some rest.”

  “Rest is all I get,” I tell the doctor.

  She says, “Obviously not the right kind.”

  I didn’t even know there were different kinds.

  Dr. Mitchell replies, “Well, first of all, rest at home is cheating. You still have the phone and bills and mail and shopping and cooking to deal with. You know, cleaning and laundry.”

  I do not bother to tell her I do nothing, pay for nothing. It’s too embarrassing.

  She prescribes Halcion and an extended vacation.

  “Don’t you have a school break coming up in February?”

  “Yes,” I say, thinking, Mark has put her up to this.

  Jamaica is hot, hot like you will need emergency services. It is a lonesome and detestable heat, a broad, blinding heat, like being tied to a post at a crossroad. Like there is no shelter, no friend. No help in sight. Just you, left to burn.

  In the tropics I think without reprieve; maybe it’s the heat or maybe it’s the medicine, with outside sounds that grow softer and inside ones growing louder. There is a long dock with a thatch-roofed awning at the end; in the morning I go out there to where the world is orderly, where it is arranged in plates of color—white and blue and blue. Like the candle we used to look at in high school, discussing whether the bird was flying on the plane of the sea or on the sky. I wonder about that conversation, about why we kept having it, and about all the probing conversations of our adolescence. There was a simultaneous coming to consciousness. It was like a circle of ladders wide at the base and tapered at the top—with each of us stepping up together, testing in tiny rises the ideal of a singleness of perspective, gaining by rungs new things to swear by, going as far as we could possibly go before forsaking the ascent altogether.

  What is it that we were hoping to obtain? Did we speak in the pursuit of unity because we could not speak in the pursuit of power? Is that why early allegiances are discontinued, because eventually you must demand of friendships some advantage? I certainly don’t need to become more politically liberal or artistically aware or socially open-minded to survive; as a matter of fact, my opinions often cripple me. Was it that we had nothing pertinent to give one another anymore, such as sound investment advice or better career credentials? All Mark’s associates just make one another richer. It feels incredible, how hard I tried, how much I lost—the luxury of time and friends and poetic aptitude, the modest opulence of home, where definitions of success extended no further than the pleasant close of the day you were in, where dreams of paradise were enough to sustain you.

  Through these thoughts, thoughts of Rourke appear. Is this soul preservation I am feeling, or the vanity of sorrow returning? I don’t mean to go back to grief. It’s just, there are memories of days when I did not have to do, but only to be, when I was desired for the little grace I was. I tell myself, We all lose such days. Why should I be any different?

  Mark helps me to advance, despite my own aversion to my betterment. It hardly seems just with so many going untended in their despair, but somehow I feel cheated. I feel dispossessed of leverage. The fact of my living a life of privilege precludes me from reflecting on privilege—there are rules about thinking or saying too much about your place if your place is an especially comfortable one, even if you arrived there by accident. Though I’m conscious of the comparative ease of my position, I can’t access it in my head—it’s like pushing peas through molasses. If privileged is not how I feel, it is how I look, and how I look is how I am viewed, and view is everything. It’s irrelevant that I myself possess nothing, that I am more destitute than ever. If I am dependent, if I am subjected to views with which I disagree, if I live a life of compromise, it’s a life I’ve chosen. I am wholly responsible.

  My mind turns naturally to my parents: to my mother’s struggle to support us while she attended college and graduate school, though she could have married anyone she wanted and attained financial security; to my father in his Ray-Bans and khakis, ready for a drive in his Plymouth station wagon to Gaslight Village in Lake George or the Danbury Fair in Connecticut, grateful for the inglorious luxury of a two-day vacation and a full tank of gas. Stuffed into the visor there would be maps and site brochures to caverns and motel recommendations and a leather pouch filled with change for the tolls. In a cooler would be the lunch he and Marilyn had made when they’d gotten up at five in the morning.

  The day Mark and I pulled up to the sign shop in the Porsche, Dad came out with Tony. When I introduced my father as an artist, he shook Mark’s hand and said, “Actually, son, I’m a sign-painter.”

  And me, not an adult, but a sick shell, void of fury, purpose, instinct. Not even a sellout, since sellout implies that there is some superior identity I’ve left behind.

  Mark is coming. I feel the bob and creak of the dock with every step he takes—forty-seven steps. It’s time for breakfast. At breakfast, the tables are immaculately set upon a curved concrete lagoon beneath huge tracts of cranberry-red bougainvillea where middle-aged Teutonic couples who do not touch in the night suck back poached eggs from thick silver spoons like sucking back oysters off of shells, and where the silence is uncanny until the arrival of our party—we are twelve. When we arrive, we create chaos. There is turbulent chair-switching and table-shifting and off-menu ordering. There is the flamboyant tying of slipped bikini straps and the indecent cross-table sharing of food and the rummaging through beach bags for cameras and aspirin, lotion and sunglasses.

  Mark kneels behind me on the dock and puts his arms around my waist. “What are you looking at?”

  “Home,” I say, because as a couple, we are not without our virtues. I speak the truth when asked, and I never care to hear what he chooses not to tell. He doesn’t mind that in my heart I betray him. I steal because I’ve been stolen from. It would take forever to replace all that has been taken from me. He knows that.

  “Did you take your pill this morning?” Mark asks. I tell him yes, I took two.

  Ocho Rios is about an hour’s drive from the Half Moon Hotel, where we are staying. To get there, we rent motorcycles. Brett found six Triumph Bonnevilles through a British expatriate in Montego Bay. We take off east down the road—steep and angry highlands to the right, tranquil Caribbean to the left. We stop for beer at a place called the Famous Lovely Lynn’s, a roadside shanty made of sundry timber and corrugated tin painted a caustic berberine-yellow.

  A Jamaican man with
an elongated head and spooling facial hair observes us from an aluminum folding chair. Lynn opens twelve tepid bottles of Red Stripe—there is the limp chzzt, chzzt of bottle caps snapping off. She sets the beers next to piles of bananas and neat rows of pineapples and peeled-back coconuts. I know she’s Lynn because right away Brett asked, “Are you the famous Lovely Lynn?”

  The man in the chair wants to know my birth date, which I give. He tells me my number. “Eight.”

  I turn my bottle in my hands and think of the number eight—stacked Os, a pair of glasses, segments of an earthworm, bubbles fused.

  Mark takes a swig and makes a gratified sound. Lynn smiles at him. He inquires about her bracelets. Her arms are loaded with them—silver, gold, colored plastic.

  “Fifty-two,” she says, dangling her wrists in air. “One for each week.”

  “These three are identical,” Mark says. “They only count as one.”

  The man continues to inspect me. “Whatever happened to you happened through eight.”

  “We started going out when she was eighteen,” Mark chimes in.

  “No. Not eighteen,” he reports flatly to Mark, all the while his eyes boring into me. “Seventeen—one plus seven—eight. She knows what I’m saying.”

  Yes, I know what he is saying. Rourke.

  Mark stiffens. He pays for the beers, then gives the guy twenty bucks. “Buy your lady another couple of bracelets.”

  At a local happy hour club named Bloody Mary’s Jerk Pork BBQ, we all dance on a stage that cuts through the tables like a runway. For some reason, it’s dressed on the sides in drooping velvet. It looks like a fancy coffin—a catafalque, a draped casket for presidents and kings. I remind myself to smile and to be pretty. It’s hard to remember anything when I have the heavy feeling that Rourke is looking, that he’s coming, though it’s not likely that he will find me, since it’s dark where I am. I wonder—when Rourke left, did he give me up to Mark consciously, like laying a baby on the steps of one particular house?