Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  After Tristan und Isolde we stop at Fellini’s for dinner. Mark feels like having a plate of fresh spinach pasta with pheasant sauce. The restaurant is practically empty because it is late, and the few remaining waiters leap to life. “Hello, hello. Good evening signore, signorina.” They seat us in the same place they always seat us—five tables back, against the southern windows. The table looks out over West Sixty-eighth Street, which is ghastly still like a scene from an Edward Hopper painting. I don’t know what makes us deserving of this particular table, but each time they escort us to it with a smug sort of pride, as though surely they’ve pleased us immensely.

  The waiter recommends Aglianico del Vulture, from the Basilicata region, a young wine, 1981—delizioso. When the bottle comes, Mark caresses it approvingly, after which he tastes the wine and nods, thanking the waiter, who pours obsequiously as Mark adjusts his cuff links, fluted platinum with onyx inserts. A gift from me with money he provided.

  “That fucking soprano gave me an intense headache,” he says.

  I knew the opera had been difficult for him—the rich king versus the dragon slayer, the estranged lovers devoted unto death. It didn’t help that the king’s name was Mark.

  “So,” he says, drinking, and then pulling back his lips in a businesslike manner. “Let’s talk about what to do after you graduate. I don’t want you jumping into anything.”

  I don’t answer; he seems relieved. I wonder, does he think if I get a job, I’ll leave him? How could I leave? I have no place to go. I have no friends or resources that are not his. How could I go when I have come to value things and have faith in them? Things mean distance between me and everything else. Diamonds mean I don’t have to talk to shopgirls with thumbtack eyes and perpetually suntanned cleavage who want to know where I got those shoes. Cars mean I don’t have to take subways that smell of vomit and urine, or cabs where drivers ask into the rearview mirror, Have you been baptized?

  Sex with Mark means I don’t have to wait tables and talk to drunks who say I look like one of the girls in the Robert Palmer video, or go home to my mother’s in the summer where memories of life and of living are everywhere. And sex with him is perverse. In the absence of desire, it’s good to be set upon without expectations of affection. At the end, when I’m overtaken by the same abject longing for things I will never have, I can get up and walk away, clinging to that loss without interference.

  I will not leave Mark, because when I wander through the house at daybreak, repelled by the sight of the bed, by the wet circle in the center, by the place on the mattress I leave unoccupied, there is some small consolation in a refrigerator filled with thirty-dollar-per-pound smoked Scottish salmon and organic strawberries and fresh-squeezed orange juice, and the fact that the mess in the sink can be left for someone else to clean. In the garage is a car I can drive to anywhere; in the top dresser drawer is all the cash I could ever need. If being in love is consolation when you are poor, money is consolation when you are not. Life is a trap not because I can’t leave Mark, but because there’s no reason to.

  “The workplace is such a scene,” he’s saying. “The politics, the bullshit incompetence. I don’t want you ending up as the subordinate to some asshole who thinks he can coerce you into—situations.”

  When the plates are cleared, the waiter brings two glasses of grappa. I don’t like grappa; Mark knows I don’t. He pulls my chair to his, grabbing a leg. He plays with my hair. “You can do anything—photography, painting, drawing. My mother will help. She’ll get your work out there.”

  The coke snakes round and round on a framed picture Mark removed from the wall. I cannot say what the picture is; it’s covered with clumps. The caviar, like the cognac and the cocaine, is exceptional—hand-selected Tsar Imperial Beluga. If you want to know about hand-selected caviar, you can inquire, but you’ll be judged by your ignorance—and forced to endure an exhaustive account of the size of sturgeon, the shape of eggs, the cost per gram, the temperature of the Caspian, and the vulgar habits of the Slavs. You don’t inquire; you prefer not to learn.

  Ignorance is as good as intelligence in this contradictory world, this dream landscape, where the sun shines at night and creatures mingle wrongly and seasons are without circumference—no beginning, no end. We are voracious, we are clever, we are the victors, which is the same as being victims because everything here is inversion. Like the bored members of a royal court, we are insular and divine. No one told me about this place; I arrived unprepared.

  Mark’s friend Dara turns to me, apologizing for shoptalk. He has been discussing credit derivatives.

  I don’t mind. It’s better than other things they discuss—the size of bonuses, breasts versus legs, all the Mexicans “crossing over.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Mark tells Dara. “It’s about time Eveline learned some of the principles of economics. In fact, let’s give her a little tutorial.”

  His friends settle into Eames armchairs with their chilled vodka and smuggled Montecristos and cashmere pullovers with suede elbow patches, and they listen solemnly beyond moribund undertones of the English Beat and the Psychedelic Furs as Mark describes debt-to-equity ratios and supply-side economics in the simplest possible terms, which is sexy. I know that inside he wants very much to be sexy, so I smile, and he smiles back, appreciative that I’ve given him the opportunity.

  “Rule of Seventy-two,” he instructs as he licks black-light bubbles off a mother-of-pearl spoon, “is the formula used to calculate how long it will take for an investment to double. So at eight percent, your investment would be doubled in nine years.”

  Maybe I’m experiencing a type of dark adaptation; maybe my eyes have grown accustomed to him. Suddenly Mark is attractive to me—at least, tonight he is, as he sits there, twinkling isochronally like a movie of himself or a crystal catching light, losing it, catching it again. His delivery is artfully uninterrupted, gluey smooth as the siphon of a clam. His eyes are ringed with fatigue from achievement—they are gray like the cinders of volcanoes, like ash. There is a richness to the remains; lives have been lost to form the dust. Somehow I’ve never seen him so clearly—the inclemency in his features, the cohesion of his skin, like living marble, like he’ll last forever, like he will prevail. He forges time to fit his will, like bending iron; timing is everything to him. This is what he knows that I need to learn. For the first time I think, I love him.

  If I’ve never said it to him before, it’s because I’ve never felt it. If it’s fair to say “I love you” only when you mean it, then it’s wrong, perhaps, to withhold it when it occurs to you. I lean off my stool, coming to kiss him. I love you, I am about to say, but he stops me. He has been viewing me watchfully; it is as if he noted the change in me before I perceived it myself, as if he’d been observing me stir to life after a protracted sleep.

  “I want to marry you,” he says, holding my shoulders. “Will you marry me?”

  “Okay,” I say, and the room is reeling.

  There is applause and the bright bullish sound of Sinatra’s “Summer Wind” followed by champagne pops and high fives and jokes about the broken hearts Mark will leave behind. This is a surprise—have there been hearts to break? I’m passed from hand to hand, lap to lap, squeezed and kissed. Alicia is on the phone; she loves me; she has never been happier. “Can you imagine?” she says, her voice so small, so far. “Sisters!”

  I wonder where she is, where we have reached her. Possibly at Yale, ignoring her studies, making hats. She is always making hats. We all wear them—Denny, Sara Eden, Jonathan, even Mark. He is good that way, never forgetting where his loyalties lie.

  Brett knocks on the bathroom door. “The cars are waiting.”

  The cars will take us to Odeon to celebrate. We always travel in cars. There are so many of us that one is never enough. People are suddenly anxious to place themselves in relation to me. Already everyone is acting more, more something, I don’t even know what.

  “Make yourself decent,” Brett call
s out. “I’m coming in.”

  The bathroom door opens. Perhaps I’ve been in for a long time. At the mirror, he rights his suspenders. I don’t see him do it, but I hear the elastic snaps. The water comes on hard, and he combs back his hair. I feel the flying drops.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, his voice like a croupy cough. “Listening to neighbors?”

  My hand is on the wall. My forehead on my hand. If you rest your forehead on the back of your hand, you’ll notice how many protruding and breakable bones your hand has, like a chicken foot. It’s a disgusting feeling, the feeling of your own skeleton.

  “Yes,” I say. “Listening to neighbors.”

  Mark has a confession. He opens the closet door and reaches into the breast pocket of a gray Armani suit. He withdraws a ring box.

  “I’ve been waiting for the right moment.”

  Yes, I think. A public moment. Witnesses.

  The ring is a square diamond, a rare chameleon, he says. Looking into it is like looking into a well of infinite angles. He tilts the box, and light hits the jewel, casting kaleidoscopic prisms on the wall. I strain my neck to see, awed like a peasant beholding an act of sorcery. It is not wrong to compare Mark to a magician when he is so clever, when he turns my methods against me, obliterating the natural with equal doses of artifice. Like a true master, he leaves nothing to chance. Like a true connoisseur of ruin, he does not destroy me directly but lures me to my own destruction. He hands me champagne.

  He bought the diamond first, then had the ring made to specification—built is the word he uses—by Ronnie Armeil, a West Coast jeweler who is a client of his father’s. Armeil builds for television stars like Victoria Principal and Stefanie Powers. The diamond has characteristics. Talk of characteristics is code for talk of cost, and I don’t want to know cost. I’m sure it cost at least five thousand more than Alicia’s, and everyone knows the cost of Alicia’s. It’s a sanctioned topic of conversation. Mark would never be outdone by Jonathan.

  He sits at the foot of the bed, facing me. He moves to put it on my finger. I stop him. He takes hold of my waist. “What is it?”

  I look into his eyes. I remind myself that I know him, that I’ve always known him, from the first night we met. That is something—something important. “I want you to know that I said yes because every day I pray that the worst has passed. Every day I think I can’t possibly feel as bad as I did the day before, but every day I’m wrong. I said yes because he’s not coming back.”

  The ring remains suspended near my finger; I wonder if it can drive off the terrors of the night. I hope it can. “Now you can put it on,” I say. “If you still want to.”

  39

  He sent one letter, on yellow legal paper, carefully folded. I opened it on an April afternoon as I cut through Central Park in a taxicab, going past dogwoods in full bloom. Every time I see dogwoods in bloom, I go back to the day of the letter, back to being in love, back to Rourke.

  It was eight months after he left, back when Rob visited my dorm room, back when I still had hope. I remember thinking, isn’t life amazing—the letter flew on an airplane; the plane touched down. The paper was carried in a canvas sack, delivered to me by anonymous hands. At the end, his name; at the beginning, my own. My name, tenderly rendered. Clear, perfect—Eveline. Proof.

  I have one photograph. This came to me much later. In it Rourke is young, maybe seventeen. I keep it with his letter in a box on Mark’s dresser, where my things are kept. I don’t fear discovery; discovery would change nothing. I would never hide evidence of Rourke or lie about him.

  I remove the photograph to touch it—sometimes, when I can’t help myself. First it’s strange, like looking at a picture of fire, feeling no heat. Then I fall into the false dimension, and I feel him, warm like flesh, and soft.

  He stands on the boardwalk and faces the water at an angle; the sun sets behind him. There are no lines in his face; his skin is clear, his cheeks are mesmerizing hollows. He is lean and solid and tall, self-conscious of his separateness from the crowd around him. I draw my fingertips along the line of his jaw. I want to know him then, kiss him then.

  “That’s the Criterion,” Rob told me the first time I saw the photo in his wallet. Rob pointed to the second story of a yellow brick building in back, the one Rourke took me to that day on the boardwalk. “Harrison was 34–2 at the time. Just regional matches, but still, it was an awesome record. He was untouchable.” Rob lifted the wallet closer to my face. “That’s Eddie M. in back there, yanking up his pants. Remember Eddie M.? And over in the corner is Tommy Lydell—that big redheaded asshole. And that’s Chris DeMarco. You had dinner with Chris and his wife, Lee, in Jersey that time. Remember? Take it out,” Rob prodded gently. “G’head, take it.”

  I held the photo, thinking, Time is so important. Time is everything. It’s a mystery, the way time for us was wrong when time is right for so many useless things, when things that should be impossible are in fact possible. There are machines that divide atoms, jets that fly at the speed of sound. Flags on the moon. And yet, we could not be together.

  “You keep it,” Rob said, folding his wallet back up. “I’ve got the negative somewhere.”

  ——

  The rest is intangible. Events unfolded quickly and unexpectedly, like things exhaled and evaporated, so lacking in exactness and effect, it’s hard to say they even happened.

  The phone would ring and I would run. I would know it was him, feel it was him. He would speak, and I could see him sprawled across his couch, lit by the lapis light of his stereo, in his underfurnished living room, wherever that room might have been. I never asked; he would not have answered. If he did say where he was, I would have left, going until I found him. I would hear his loneliness—it was all he would give. Still, I wanted him to be happy, but I wanted him to say that he was not, that like me, he was incapable. Why did you have to go away? I’d want to ask. Why are you back?

  But I could say no more than “I dreamt of you last night.”

  “I dreamt of you too,” he says. “You were beautiful.”

  Over time I came to grasp the nature of my position among women. I came to see that despite what I knew to be the rarity of my bond with Rourke, my feelings of uniqueness were not unlike other women’s feelings of uniqueness. At bridal showers, at picnic tables, in dressing rooms and hair salons and kitchen gardens, I listened with compassion—if every woman has made herself available or has given herself over despite some better knowledge, isn’t that the same as faith, and aren’t women so faithful?

  I began to pay attention when women talked; I learned to interpret the language of grief. Women who have suffered use talk as a way of addressing the baffling sea at their feet. They talk to make the abstract real. Like men who name flowers, viruses, and boulevards, women talk to stake ownership. They talk to reclaim the pride they feel they’ve lost.

  In December of my sophomore year, after Mark and I had begun to see each other, Mark and Rob arranged for their friends from Jersey to come to an art show I was in. It was Rob and Lorraine, Chris and Lee, Joey and Anna, and Mark. Everything of mine was city rooftops. Chris and Lee bought a charcoal of Madison Avenue rooftops, and Mark bought an acrylic of a black bird sweeping over Murray Hill rooftops. Afterward we all walked through the snow to Patisserie Lanciani in the West Village for coffee and dessert. Halfway through pastries Lorraine ran out because of something Rob said; I didn’t hear what. It must have been bad, because the men looked down and shook their heads and Anna and Lee followed Lorraine, taking their coats to the bench in front of the café. Through the glass Lorraine’s hair fanned against the picture window like a corona of hooks and coils. It looked like a squid sucking up against the side of a tank.

  “Fucking guy,” Chris said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know how you expect to keep a woman,” Mark said.

  Rob said, “I don’t want a woman to keep, just one to fuck.”

  “Yeah, well,” Mark re
plied, “any woman worth fucking is a woman worth keeping.”

  “Yeah, well,” Rob said, copying Mark’s voice, “exactly my point.”

  I figured I’d better leave. Lorraine and I weren’t exactly friends, but it wasn’t right to listen to the men discussing her. I joined the girls on the bench. It was cold but pleasant. West Fourth Street is beautiful in snow, with flesh-colored lamplight seeping through branches and everybody with dogs and packages, going slow. Lorraine was relieved that I’d come, though I couldn’t say precisely how that relief was communicated.

  Lee was striving to boost Lorraine’s self-esteem, but Lorraine’s head was junked up with crazy information. By the pool at the Ross house one day when they visited us there, she saw an article in Cosmopolitan called “Keeping Your Man Satisfied—10 Tips to Great Sex.” Just as I thought, What a profitless bit of journalism—a damp cushion could satisfy a man, Lorraine tore out the article, folded it, and placed it in the back flap of her date book. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the woman who’s afraid that she isn’t satisfying her man is being satisfied herself. Is anyone giving him tips?

  Lorraine kept blowing her nose and shaking her head, saying she lives in constant fear of Rob getting arrested or busted-up or “worse,” but when she asks him things, she’s told to mind her own business.

  “Mind your own business?” Lee repeated indignantly.

  Lee could become very indignant. She was not the average Jersey girl; she was going places. You could tell by the impeccable way she dressed.

  “If only he would talk to me,” Lorraine sobbed, guilty suddenly to have impeached Rob’s character. “It’s just, he won’t even talk to me.”

  “Don’t defend him!” Lee snapped. “His behavior is inexcusable.”

  I thought it was okay for Lorraine to feel guilty. Life is complicated, and she and Rob were complicated, and it’s often difficult to render in language the dynamics of the heart.