Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  Snowflakes together with the wind blinded me, leaving me dependent upon the mercy of the men. It had been just one year before that I’d seen Rourke in the record store. I told myself to set the thought aside; it was a dead thought. And yet, one year ago was easy to recall—if I was remembering, I realized, so was he. Wherever he was, he was thinking of me. My step quickened.

  “You seem happy all of a sudden,” Mark said. “I’m glad.”

  We turned from Prince onto Thompson and raced to where we were going. In the yellowed stairwell leading up to the fifth floor, the pathetic odor of currently cooking things mixed with years upon years of long-ago cooked things, packing up the passage like a dam. Each landing was dressed for the season with a paper snowman head and a sorry bit of garland tacked beneath a feeble hall light. Where the linoleum was peeling away there were those little black and white floor tiles. It was exactly like the building my father lived in.

  “No kidding,” Mark said. “Where does he live?”

  “On Elizabeth Street. And Spring.”

  Two apartments on the top floor joined in front to form one large living area. Through strings of lights that made Xs across the windows, you could look north over the roofline of the tenement buildings on the opposite side of the street. The floors were painted glossy white, and the furniture was pale wood. There were glass tube lights with chrome caps that looked like devices from old science movies. A red-and-yellow tapestry was hanging on the wall above a pumpkinish burl sofa. I was not sure about the word burl. It was all I could think of.

  “So,” a voice said, “this is the little girl I’ve been hearing about.”

  The voice was like cellophane melting. It belonged to a man with close-cropped hair, and brown eyes with pupils like leaping fish. He had sunken cheeks with razor stubble. The drooping contour of his hairline was like the shadow of a suspension bridge. He looked, I don’t know, Carpathian. He took my coat and passed it to unseen hands.

  “I am Dara,” he said, and his words emerged as if spaced by slender blocks. Dara led me into the gathering, and Mark waved an encouraging farewell. I felt like a social experiment along the lines of Eliza Doolittle. We made our way toward the cryptic posterior of the apartment, where fashionable people fashionably gathered—Italians, Jordanians, French. “As an American,” Dara said, with a condescending sneer, “you will find you are among the minority.”

  If he was somewhat racist and sexist, I excused him. I told myself he was cultured and European, and practiced as a gentleman, and practiced European gentlemen think of women differently than American women are accustomed to being thought of. I told myself that it’s not reasonable to expect uniformity of perception, that it’s actually nice to be held to lesser standards, to be kept unaccountable, to listen until being called upon to reply—so long as the reply is brief. It was a relief to be asked to contribute only the gift of grace—the lips, the ankles, the fragrance of the hair. Such are the marks of worth when you have no others. These were the things I told myself.

  Anselm joined us with three glasses of champagne. We raised them to the New Year.

  “Father gave me an excellent New Year’s resolution,” Dara told us. “He said, ‘Take taxis. Your time is too precious to waste.’”

  “I hope Father gave you an excellent bank account with that advice,” Anselm replied.

  “Well, not everyone is born into a dynasty, my friend.”

  Anselm laughed, Dara laughed, and our glasses clinked as their laughter joined other laughter, all galvanizing in a raucous eruption. I also laughed, at them and at me, and at the hilarious fact of my own misery. I would have left the party, but I had no better place to be, and for whatever reason, they had extended themselves to me, though I was underfed with substandard shoes and cheap eye makeup. Besides, I couldn’t possibly spend another night alone, cultivating the company of my own American mind. So I resolved to endure the night, the company, the talk of easy fortune as though I were on a plane half-listening to flight instructions that I knew could never possibly save me.

  Advertising was up 25% by the third issue—The stock split twice in the first year—The Moral Morel, organic mushrooms, maybe you’ve seen our trucks—She comes right to the office with a portable table—My sister sells hats to Barneys—We just bought a flat on the Left Bank.

  Periodically I remembered Mark, periodically I located him, rustling in corners, other heads and his head hunched together, whispering, planning, selling—always selling.

  “Money talk,” Dara whispered. “And people say art is dead.”

  Anselm took me by the hand and led me away to the bathroom. I acquiesced. Who cared—more coke, less coke. I was glad for the diversion, for anything that would alleviate my anxiety to get started, to catch up, to figure some gimmick to win. Everyone I’d met was robust, vivacious, already chic, already traveled, on track to fame and fortune, or at the very least, to paying jobs. By comparison I was common, provincial—it probably seemed as though it was I who was interested in Mark for his money. It was amusing to consider that their disparaging opinions of Americans and elevated ideas of Europeans related directly to the fact that our ancestors had courageously escaped Europe, whether by choice or necessity, due to some disadvantage, while theirs had remained, hogging up all the wealth and privilege. Or perhaps theirs had simply been too fearful to make a break.

  Anselm tapped cocaine from a brown glass vial onto the finlike membrane between his thumb and forefinger, the place where you make ballpoint pen puppet faces. He offered it to me, and I accepted a little, just a little. I’d already had a lot. I’d never had so much before, and my body was small and my metabolism rapid and my heart still so terribly unsound. Dara’s medicine cabinet was full of stately apothecary bottles. There was a horsehair brush.

  I asked Anselm to brush my hair the way Denny used to.

  “Of course,” he sputtered, as if it had been his intention from the start, and he returned the coke to his breast pocket, fingering it down like men finger down sunglasses or theater tickets. He rinsed the brush in steaming water then shook it, which was a precaution I would not have taken for myself, particularly since it implied I was superior to Dara in something, and I thanked Anselm, and he made a noise not unlike a hum.

  I sat on the toilet and he sat on the tub, with our thighs lining up, parallel, touching. I watched us in the mirror, wondering if perhaps we were related. We looked alike in coloring and also in bones. My father’s father had come from Germany, from Kiel, in the north. Kiel was a port city that had traded with St. Petersburg, which is why I looked Russian, my mother always said. I closed my eyes; Anselm’s touch was gentle. I could feel the strands of my hair separate between the bristles.

  “Thank you for not asking who Denny is.”

  “I try to be sensitive,” he said.

  I liked hiding in there with him, and he liked hiding with me. It was obvious that though he had money—a dynasty, Dara had said—he wanted something he couldn’t get from other women at the party, the seductress accountants in unitards and models in shiny leather boots like Diana Rigg wore in The Avengers. If I had to guess his pain, if indeed it was pain that he felt, I would have thought it involved a Swiss girl or fashion muse, some Imperial China blonde in a chinchilla-trimmed jacket, some cognac, and three days in Biarritz.

  He placed the brush on the sink ledge—just so—and accidentally touched my neck. Though our bodies were close, there was no chance of drifting into intimacy. Anselm needed only the woman with whom he was in love, or some qualified replacement capable of satisfying his family’s demands for status and affluence. And as for my part, I could never settle for anything less than a renegade and a runaway, a descendant of greatness capable of voluntary disinheritance. Someone who would choose self-governance or death. An American.

  When the music got good, we stood simultaneously, and went to the living room where we were first to dance, and that was triumphant but lonesome, like being the first of your group to swim.
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br />   Fire. The way you walk and talk really sets me off—

  The floor filled soon after we arrived, and for a while things were manageable, until someone started to bump, then everyone started to bump, bones and bits of flesh tipping bits of flesh and bones and a forest of arms overhead, wintry and erect, like limbs attached to bodies begging to be exhumed. Something about the bareness of the arms plus the unity of the bodies made me feel claustrophobic and terrified.

  I withdrew to the window and looked at the snow-covered streets. The stormy sky was pretty, a white-pink city haze. I wished someone would come get me, but there was no one. That might have been a common thought to have on New Year’s Eve; in all the world I was surely not the only one thinking that way. The trick, I supposed, is never to have that thought, never to stray far from those who would give anything to rescue you. Such people are friends and typically they reside at home. One year before, I’d been in my living room with Jack, Dan, and Kate.

  That night, for the first time, I began to understand the graphics of hardship, which I saw as a fraction with failure on bottom and time on top. It’s close to impossible to carve even a moderate fortune from a society that is locked; the math of the fraction is the impermeability of the culture divided by your desire to make it permeable.

  Mark appeared, like an emissary or ambassador, just as I was discovering a whole new low.

  “My God,” he said, petting my jaw in upstrokes with the back of his hand, like I was catlike, like I was cunning, “I am so in love with you.”

  It was past dawn when Mark and I headed back to the dorm. He stayed several yards in front, facing back. He wanted to watch me walk, he said. At my door he held me, but I did not kiss him. I did not have to. I’d already compromised so much.

  He brushed his cheek against mine, keeping it there just for a moment. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  The bad part was to come. The bad part was going inside alone, lying alone, waking alone. He must have known how it would end for me because in fact he did not leave me alone. He’d left an envelope when he was in the room earlier with me and Anselm. Beneath my pillow. Inside was three hundred dollars cash.

  “Listen to me. You can’t get a word in edgewise.”

  We were at Le Bernardin. It was two days before Valentine’s Day. Mark was too clever for Valentine’s Day. Though had he asked, I would have accepted. I didn’t mind being with Mark. Time with him was public time. There was no need to do anything but project outward from the sphere we occupied. He knew Rourke; he knew Rourke’s effect. He was not repulsed by my heartache or impeded by my devotion. He searched for Rourke in me the way an archaeologist might crawl through caves, feeling for gouges, testing for oxides and ochres. When I was with Mark, I could feel Rourke alive.

  “Jesus, what did he do to you?” Mark said.

  I liked that he said that—Jesus, what did he do to you?—and erotic thoughts of Rourke became intertwined with erotic thoughts of Mark, and I had to work to keep the two separate. The effect of the remark was such that I wondered whether he had anticipated my response. It was possible that he had given it as a gift, but more along the lines of a degenerate gift, not to please but to test. He wanted to measure the profundity of my need, as if by exacting those dimensions he could gain some advantage against Rourke.

  For the remainder of the night we ate sculpted nouveau meals in fancy clothes, and Mark talked without abeyance—of sailing his boss’s boat to Anguilla, of a ’66 Mustang GT 350 he was thinking of picking up, of someone he knew who’d gotten murdered by the Jewish Mafia. I’d never heard of a Jewish Mafia. My dad had spoken of the Russian Mafia; maybe Mark meant that. He talked about his former girlfriend Diane, a journalist in Los Angeles who’d had breast reduction surgery.

  “She had to go out every night,” he said as he worked through a crème brûlée. “In New York it was Xenon, Studio 54, Danceteria. And in L.A., well, you wouldn’t know the clubs in L.A., but she burned through them. Beautiful like Rita Hayworth in the old classic movie Gilda—but shallow. In all the years I dated her, she never once looked at the stars.”

  “Why did you stay with her?”

  He shrugged. “Everyone wanted her, but only I could get her.”

  At the end there was a gift for me—a book on Giotto he’d purchased while we were at the Met that afternoon.

  “There’s a chapel in Padua where the walls are covered with Giottos,” Mark said.

  “Scrovegni Chapel,” I confirmed.

  I noticed for the first time that he appeared unrelated to his sister. Alicia was dark and exotic, like an Egyptian. Mark was neutral in color, with skin that was pale and hair without any particular accent or modulation. He wore it long and back off his face. The color of his suit was the color of his eyes, a grief-stricken gray, like shark hide, and light licked off his eyes, making him appear shrewd, diligent, making him seem to work twice: once for effect and then again for the pleasure of it. His lips were straight and his nose was straight; yet, for all that directness of line, he was obtuse. Everything he said came out as though in code. I was moved by the ease with which he could manipulate me; he held keys to doors I didn’t know I had.

  “I’d like to take you there so you can see them in person,” he suggested softly, staring back at me.

  Mark became attractive when he referred to money. Money meant attractive things to him—freedom and fulfillment—and a girl cannot be blamed for taking a man as he prefers to be found, for giving in to self-confidence when it makes itself manifest like lightning before your eyes. It’s like being hypnotized.

  He assisted me as I stood, placing a hand on my lower back. I didn’t flinch. No one could touch the place that was Rourke’s. No one would ever get through.

  “What are you thinking of?” he whispered to my neck.

  “Hypnosis,” I said. “I’m thinking of hypnosis.”

  37

  Rob wanted to know what I was doing that night, did I have plans. It was late April.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Fine,” Rob said. “I’ll be over in twenty minutes.”

  I came down to sign him in and found him sitting on the security desk, sweet-talking Juanita the guard. Under one arm was a record album, and in his hand was a paper bag.

  “Right outside Bedford,” Juanita was saying.

  Rob repeated like he didn’t hear right, “Bedford?”

  Juanita’s walkie-talkie hissed at her hip. “That’s right.”

  “Bedford Falls, like in the Jimmy Stewart movie? The Christmas movie?”

  “Actually, just plain Bedford.”

  He creaked his neck around. “You had me goin’ for a minute there. Bedford Falls. That’d be like meeting somebody from Mayberry.”

  I signed Rob in. Beyond him, through the doors to the street, there was a pull to the night. Like a puppet being lifted to a stand, the earth was coming alive to spring.

  I asked Juanita if Rob was giving her a hard time.

  “Not at all, honey,” she said.

  “Me?” Rob exclaimed. “She’s the one telling me she’s from Bedford Falls!” I pulled him off the desk by his sleeve. He leaned down to her. “You wanna know something? I’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life a dozen times, but I’ve never made it through Miracle on 34th Street once.”

  We boarded the elevator, and the heavy doors knocked closed. It was the first time I’d seen Rob since the previous summer in Montauk. Though I had changed and he had changed, there was a place we shared that was enduring. In that region, we observed the need for caution. In that region was Rourke.

  “Ever chew tobacco?” he inquired, staring ahead.

  I said that I hadn’t, staring ahead too.

  “You’re in for a night.” He shook the suspicious-looking paper bag, dangling it like a mouse he’d caught. “Elephant Butts, it’s a type of chew you can’t get down here. Charlie Cutlass drove it down from Oswego. I ever tell you about Charlie Cutlass?”

  I shook my head.
<
br />   “Sad story. Tell you later, over a good stiff drink. Remind me.”

  We were sitting on the floor by my bed, chewing tobacco, listening to a Richard Pryor album. Rob had obviously come to tell me something or ask me something, and that something had to do with Rourke. Behind every situation is a picture, and I got the picture as best I could: Rob felt bad for me but Rob stood by Rourke’s decision to take off. I could not speak of what had happened without seeming to blame Rourke, and Rob could not speak without seeming to betray him. I would not compromise their friendship by speaking of feelings, yet my silence had the very effect I’d hoped to avoid. Maybe there was more; I really wasn’t sure.

  From the moment he arrived, Rob’s eyes would not rest long on me. I thought he would have kissed me hello. He couldn’t even kiss me. Every day I dealt with the business of my handicap, I’d become used to it, but it was new to him. I was sorry for the shock of seeing me changed. Denny had recently given me a photograph he’d taken of me from my birthday party senior year, to show me how different I looked now. The change was unsettling. My face was still my face, and yet it seemed like all the life had gone out.

  “Where’s your friend tonight?” Rob asked.

  “Which friend is that?”

  “Which friend,” Rob repeated flatly. He spit into a paper cup, the tobacco juice shooting in a streak between his top and bottom teeth.

  I stood to flip the album. I was incredibly high from tobacco. I felt like someone was tossing me sideways into the wall, only there was no someone and no tossing, just the wall. “He’s away. Somewhere.”

  “Somewhere my ass. He’s golfing in Palm Beach with his parents. Tough life.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t like Florida.”

  “You’d change your tune fast enough. That family travels in style. Five stars all the way. For breakfast there’s oatmeal, fruit cups, trays of bacon, the papers, a swim. Then sun. Later it’s shopping, tennis, a massage, another swim. You pop a button off your slacks or spill hollandaise on your dinner jacket, and they got a Polish laundry lady and a tailor in the closet of your suite. Waiting, like elves. They come out when you’re gone and pick lint.”