Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  After the café we walked around the Village in twos and threes, looking into the parlor windows of brownstones, saying how great it would be to live in this or that house. Just as we were about to turn the corner from Bleecker onto Eleventh, Lorraine stopped me.

  “Thanks a lot for listening back there,” she said. “It helped me out. You know, us girls sticking together.”

  Something about the skittish look in her eyes and the freckles around her nose and her plump hand lying mildly on my wrist made me wonder if there’s a formula to humanity—such as all anyone wants is to be loved, even the employees at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Lorraine wasn’t necessarily hateful. It was her frustrated love for Rob that made her seem that way. When they first met, that love had likely been an agreeable love, but at some point it changed. Maybe he’d been too opaque, maybe she’d pressed too hard for answers. Maybe she should have quit back at the best time, while feeling capable and desired.

  Just as I started thinking that Lorraine should have kept custody of that first love, I could see myself—cinched behind a screen of heartache, committed to the legend of my own sorrow, clinging to something spent, holding out for something hopeless, contributing to the disintegration of whatever Rourke and I had once shared that was good and true and private.

  I remember that moment. I remember setting it all to drift like a stick in a river. I remember telling myself, Just let go.

  “No problem, Lorraine,” I said. “I hope things work out for you guys.”

  The bottommost item in the box was a scrap of paper with phone messages taken the week after that art show by my roommate, Corrine. Corrine became my roommate in sophomore year, when Ellen got an apartment, a hygienic duplex on East Twenty-first Street with a terrace facing the Empire State Building. Sometimes I would go to Ellen’s for dinner, sometimes with Mark. He felt she was my one respectable friend, and she felt he was equally respectable and unquestionably clean, and they were both happy for me and happy over the stalwart and prosperous fact of each other. Once Ellen had a cocktail party and asked me to come early to help set up, and she introduced me to guests as her best friend from school, which depressed me. I felt she deserved better.

  Corrine was an economics major who danced to the Go-Go’s and Cyndi Lauper and Katrina and the Waves in orange shirts with cutoff collars and turquoise leg warmers. She would do splits and backflips in the room. That’s all I knew of her, since I never slept in the dorm again after freshman year. Beginning in sophomore year and going through to graduation, I stayed at Mark’s. We didn’t make a big deal out of it, it just sort of happened that way. I only stopped by the room to shower and dress on busy days or after using the gym if Mark wanted to go out someplace downtown like Il Cantinori or Chanterelle. But by my junior year, Mark kept telling me, Go off of housing, for God’s sake.

  When Corrine called me at Mark’s apartment about the calls from Rourke, I jumped on the subway, got off at Sheridan Square, then ran fast to East Tenth Street to pick up the message.

  12/18/81. 7:50 pm. Harrison Rourke

  Harrison again, 10:30 pm.

  HR 1:15 am. Meet him at the Mayflower Hotel, Room 112.

  I gripped the list of messages, turning it over—it was pale green, accountant’s green, torn from one of Corrine’s graph books. As I turned it, I wondered if Corrine had written while on the phone with him, or if she’d written after she’d hung up. For some reason it mattered. She told me that she’d tried calling me until 2:00 A.M., but there was no answer. Mark and I were at his company’s holiday party.

  Instead of going to class after getting the messages, I went back uptown to Mark’s, walking the whole sixty blocks. Once inside the apartment, I stared at the phone and thought about calling. Possibly Rourke had not yet checked out. Possibly he was sitting there by the phone, waiting for it to ring. I stared and thought, thought and stared, and one complete day transpired that way, with me not leaving the apartment. Tuesday became Friday, and by then I thought it had become too late to call.

  “You must be getting home after dinner,” Mark said when he arrived home from work that Friday night. Typically Mark left the apartment before me in the morning and returned after I did. “Manny told me he hasn’t seen you all week.”

  “Actually, I’ve been staying in,” I told him. “Headaches.”

  A few days later, the phone rang at Mark’s. It was Christmas Eve.

  I was quick to pick up. I knew it was Rourke.

  “I got in to the East Coast a week ago,” he said. “I left six messages at your dorm. Then there was no answer. I guess your roommate went home for the holiday.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, slipping the phone around the corner into the hall. That wasn’t a lie. I was sorry. For everything.

  “I’m flying into Boston the day after tomorrow.”

  “What for?”

  “A fight.”

  “Oh,” I said, “a fight.” Him getting hit. Him bleeding. Him being watched. Imaginations laying claim. “Are you fighting?”

  “Not me,” he said. “A friend of mine. Jerry Page. I can get you a plane ticket.”

  I thought of—I don’t know what. Nothing good. Lorraine, waiting, “minding her own business.” My parents, how they had loved each other and still loved each other but it wasn’t enough. And Jack. I thought of Jack. Everything damaged, everything broken, everything lost. No effort, it seemed, could ever be good enough.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I can’t.”

  When he hung up, I hung up. I sat numbly, like I’d just received news of death. To get out of it, I kept telling myself that I was not some possession that he had lent, that he could not appear out of nowhere to reclaim me, that I’d already done the work of losing him. But the words in my head sounded stilted, like when you memorize a phrase in a foreign language or a phone number when you have no pen.

  “Who was that?” Mark asked. He was half-wrapped in a towel at his dresser, holding a glass of Cabernet, looking for collar stays.

  I said, “Harrison.”

  Mark froze. “Harrison? What did he want?”

  “He wants me to meet him in Boston for the weekend.”

  Mark set down the glass he was holding and it teetered and nearly fell. He caught it, then sighed with annoyance because wine splashed out.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I told him I couldn’t.”

  And then that was it. After that, there was nothing. No more calls. No messages. No letters or visits. I got what I wanted, something to hold, to control. Something dead—a memory.

  40

  With the shower off, I hear a bottle pop and voices.

  “So, what’s up with Lorraine?”

  “Same old shit.”

  “Same old shit,” Mark repeats. “I mean, where is she?”

  “She couldn’t make it,” Rob says.

  “What do you mean, couldn’t make it? It’s a Friday night. Didn’t you say we have something to celebrate?”

  “She had plans.”

  “You didn’t even tell her about the engagement, you prick, did you? And why are you dressed like that? You look like a manager at the movies. I have clients coming tonight.”

  Mark stops talking when I come out of the bathroom, and Rob stands. Rob looks great, actually. His vintage jacket is tan and black plaid, and his Western shirt is tan also, with snap buttons and a pearl-white collar with white stitching on the edge.

  “Congratulations,” he says, kissing me spiritlessly. “Lorraine couldn’t make it. She has a virus.”

  I try to think of what to say. I’m speechless. It never occurred to me that Mark would tell everyone so fast.

  Rob helps me despite his disgust. He takes up my hand. “So where’s this rock I had to hear about?”

  Area is the hot new club downtown. It has themes. Tonight the theme is night, so the place is practically black. I am left dancing with Dara while Mark and Rob step outside to argue. At least I think they stepped outside; I can’t see th
rough the darkness.

  Mark returns alone. He walks past me, going straight to the bar, where he orders a drink and confers with his clients, Miles, who works for the State Department, and Paige, a pharmaceutical heiress and an equestrian. Miles and Paige are up from their estate in Arlington to attend a reelection fund-raiser for Reagan. They are very high; they are frequently high, injection-high. If it’s hard to notice, it’s because they are professional about concealing. Miles has this way of locking down, of stiffening and leaning like plywood against a wall, only there is no wall. Except for an occasional Buddy Holly–type spasm of his left leg that comes so fast and hard you think his knee has buckled backward, you might believe him to be musing and meditative. Paige adjusts—constantly. She flicks her feathered rabbit-brown hair and reapplies lipstick and tweaks nonexistent particles from her shoulders and straightens her skirt even if she is wearing pants. When she takes up the fabric on the thigh of her pants to descend a flight of stairs, she is the picture of Southern refinement.

  We don’t call them drug addicts, though Paige has been in rehab twice, and last month Miles drove his car through their garage door. We say, They like to party, even though the word party implies sharing euphoria, whereas they conceal it. They get giddy off stealth, as if what they crave is not the substance but the subversion.

  At least Jack had cohesive ideas about the political significance of mind-expansion. It’s sad to think that the survival of people like Miles and Paige is more secure than the survival of someone like Jack. They’re chic; Jack is a junkie.

  That winter I ran into Smokey Cologne at Canal Jeans. Smokey told me that he didn’t play drums for Jack anymore, that Jack had basically “blipped off the radar.” For a while Jack had been doing fine—they had a new band, Piss Pot, dates at CBGB’s and at Continental Divide, an album’s worth of recorded songs that were ready to be mixed—until all of a sudden Jack pulled out and hit the streets. I told Smokey to call me if he thought I could help. Smokey said sure, but he doubted I could.

  I wait for Rob to come back; he never does. I excuse myself from Dara, leaving him to dance alone, and I approach Mark and Paige. I wait politely. Mark is concentrating on her face as if watching an ant farm. Even he has difficulty viewing her in her spasmodic entirety. It’s too nerve-racking; it’s like watching in dread as a speeding car veers between lanes on a highway. Mark wants to protect Paige’s interests, he says. Frankly, he’s worried about unscrupulous operators trying to get their hands on her trust fund and her pharmaceutical inheritance—especially now with the whole AIDS thing.

  “Ever heard of churning?” he inquires, meaning the constant buying and selling by a broker from a client’s account in order to earn commissions.

  Paige shimmies out of time to the music. “I’m doing it right now, honey,” she drawls.

  I tap Mark on the arm. “I’m going to the bathroom,” I say.

  “Fine,” he says. “Watch yourself with that ring.”

  Rob is alone by the back bar, pounding Chivas. I can just make out the caramel color of the alcohol through the dim. An attractive girl in black is alongside him. She is catlike with liquid mascara, a body leotard, and lace-up leather boots. Rob doesn’t even notice her. I watch as he clears two tumblers and signals for a third, then pushes the hair off his forehead like he just received bad news. I like to see him this way; it speaks to the bond between us. We each admire in the other the tendency to travel great distances. Neither wants the other to be hurt, but covertly, we push; both of us long to behold true audacity, modern heroism. But it’s like watching a movie star cowboy. You forget sometimes that beneath the skin the blood is real.

  Rob sees me coming. He stands straight, shoving his latest glass to the rear rim of the bar and rolling his head in its socket. “Shit,” he says, “you got some fucking legs.”

  “You okay?”

  He pulls back to make eye contact. “Who, me?”

  “You seem upset.”

  “I’m fine. I’m not sleeping much,” he says. “That could be it. You know, my back.” He bends to pluck something off the floor—a five-dollar bill. “Look at this. Must be our lucky night.” He looks around and says, “C’mon, let’s split a beer.”

  We walk a few blocks north to a photographer’s party in a loft on Varick Street, Mark and Miles and Paige and Dara, me and Rob. We pass Heartbreak on the way. There is a crowd lined up—all the people who’d been rejected at the door at Area. You can tell because they’re overdressed for Heartbreak. I see Phil the bouncer, but he’s busy and doesn’t see me. I wonder how Aureole is doing and D.J. Jim Jerome and Mike the bar-back. It’s been three years—maybe they don’t work there anymore. Maybe Aureole finally made it to L.A. Maybe Mike finally brought his family to Australia. I hope everybody got out to go pursue their dreams. That’s funny to think about, me having gotten out, me and my dreams.

  The building we enter has morgue-like lighting and industrial halls, and a filthy cement smell, like behind the Sheetrock is wet concrete, like you can bite the air and eat mortar. We ride up the elevator with fabulous strangers, all of us brushing shoulders, someone giggling. The guy having the party is one of Dara’s investor clients; Mark says he shoots editorials for Vogue.

  The music gets louder as we go up, like a temperature rising, and when the doors open, we’re hit by a wall of sound. The place is packed; there are hundreds of people. There are motorcycles parked on the dance floor. We follow Dara to the host’s bedroom; by the time we get there, Rob is gone. Miles and Paige pull out their alligator skin kit bag full of pills and foil and pipes and rocks of powder. That’s their community kit; there’s another that you never see.

  Women immediately rush in, beautiful mannequin women with breasts like teacups and washboard abdomens and narrow hips. Brett and Mark’s boss, Richard, are behind them. Their fiancées are out of town, so they invited a few model friends along. The models are hardly friends, though it’s true that the guys often pay for their meals and car service, and do things at the girls’ apartments that they would never do at their own, such as kill mice or scare off stalkers or haul furniture up four flights of stairs. Richard’s fiancée, Mia, said she wouldn’t mind having the “girls” around as long as we start to use more appropriate descriptors for them, such as freeloaders, social climbers, or usurpers.

  My dad once told me about a parasitic bird that air-drops its own egg into another bird’s egg-laden nest when the mother bird is out. The nest mother then returns to unwittingly hatch all the eggs. The invader chick emerges first, grows disproportionately, evicts the mother’s babies, and monopolizes her resources. In the end you have a tiny mother bird struggling to meet the demands of a gargantuan baby. Something about laying eggs in a nest already built, something about family work being largely done reminded me of women who prefer attached men. It is as if they can’t trust themselves to determine on their own the worthiness of a partner.

  With all the commotion, Mark doesn’t notice me slip away. I pass through the loft, finding a hallway, a door, a staircase, the roof. There are other guests up here, dancing and playing children’s games.

  “Mother says, ‘Take six wondrous city pigeon steps!’”

  “Mother May I?”

  “Yes! You may.”

  Some of them are so fucked up I’m concerned they might try to fly. When I was a kid, you always heard about dope fiends trying to fly. Nobody tries to fly anymore. There is something to that, I think.

  I walk to the roof rail. I look to see if there are balconies or ledges, but it’s just a straight shot down. The cars in the street look like gribble, lonely like bugs in paths on rotting wood.

  “Don’t go getting any crazy ideas,” a voice says from behind me.

  Rob. His elbows line up next to mine on the rail, and for a while we just stand there, staring. It’s like we’re looking off a ship. The music from the loft below is like the pounding of the boat on the water, and our faces press into the night wind as if seeking relief from some i
ndwelling nausea. Unlike our fellow passengers, we are disappointed with where the ship is headed, yet we assigned ourselves to its course long ago. No asylum ahead can approximate the one we once imagined reaching.

  “I figured you were downstairs,” I say. “With the rest of them.”

  “Me? Nah. You know I’ve been off blow for years, and I’d never touch smack. And forget about ecstasy. Look at those free-love lunatics.” He gestures to the people across the roof, skipping in pairs. “They were playing Duck, Duck, Goose before, very nice, then all of a sudden one of the ducks starts holding hands with a goose and that’s it—chaos.” Rob finds my eyes. “Listen.”

  I look back down at the street. Whenever people start sentences with Listen, you know that no matter what comes next, it’s not going to be good.

  “I’m heading out,” he says. “I don’t want to tell you what to do or anything—I know it’s not my place—but you should probably let me take you home.”

  Rob asks if I understand. I do. He’s telling me that things downstairs are bad. But I know that. They were bad already at Area when Mark picked a fight with Rob, and then bad again when Miles and Paige arrived. Rob is saying that my commitment to Mark is for the present nullified—that Rob is under a prevailing obligation to see me safely home, that obligation being to me, and also to Rourke. I understand that by agreeing to honor forgoing loyalties, I betray Mark, and in turn condemn myself for my movable allegiance.

  I say okay.

  “Okay,” he repeats, okay. He is surprised and also relieved, not exactly happy, but lighter. “Let’s do this fast. What do you have downstairs, a pocketbook?”

  “A sweater.”

  He nods, calculating. “Fine. A sweater. I’ll wait by the elevator. I won’t leave alone unless you walk out and tell me you’re okay. But I’m warning you, you’re gonna have to be pretty fucking convincing.” He takes my hand. “Let’s go.”

  Going down the roof stairs and back into that party sickens me. Everyone in the loft is dancing, or rather, staggering like zombies. It’s like their knees won’t hold them. I recall the roof. If not for Rob, I think in fact I would try to fly.