Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  Rob points over the tops of heads to the entrance. “I’ll be right there.”

  The door to the bedroom where I left Mark and everyone is open about eighteen inches. Through the opening I see Mark, reclining on a chaise in the center of an encampment of people, king of a wax tribe. He shifts when I come. As I look around for my sweater, he says, “C’mon people. Let’s dance.”

  Two of the girls flanking him lend him their arms and aid him to his feet, and he laughs, at himself, I suppose, at the way he imagines himself to be. He uses them like canes to right himself across the path to me, where he stops, shaking them off with a burst of manly animation. The girls saunter insolently past as if to imply that he slept with them while I was gone. Obviously they know nothing of his revulsion to disease, or of his obsessive fear of being cheated on by me in return. Or how Mark figures himself to be a man of ideals; he would not want a woman whose attraction to him is defiled by a lust for assets. Anyway, I feel no jealousy where Mark is concerned. There is simply an emptiness in the place where such emotions might reside.

  The room has cleared; his friends have gone to the dance floor. He and I are alone. Mark comes closer. He smiles a false smile. His eyes are wild and unable to focus; they look off slightly to the side. The veneer of his skin is white as birch. His upper lip is a band of sweat, his nose is running, and his breath smells like steel getting cut, like when Dad and Tony cut steel with a chop saw for some sign they’re making. I wonder what he’s been doing, snorting coke or snorting heroin, or both. I’ve seen him do it before. The last time Miles and Paige were here. It’s not a big deal, Mark told me—strictly business, purely recreational. Probably I should have seen this coming. That’s my job, I think, to see things coming.

  “I think we should go,” I say.

  He pulls my sweater from my hands. “I think we should stay.”

  I reach for the sweater. “I think I’m going.”

  “I think you’re staying,” Mark snaps, and he flings my sweater across the bedroom. His body plows into mine and he pins me against the opened door. He yanks the fabric of my skirt toward my waist with his left hand, and he grabs my ass with his right, taking up the flesh and groping it, driving me back, writhing, worming.

  “Mark!” I am able to lean far enough left to see across the dance floor. Rob is not in the appointed spot, which can mean just one thing: he’s on his way over. Within seconds, I see him; he is about ten feet away. Through the leather of his jacket, I can make out fists in the pockets. Mark casts a lethal gaze in Rob’s direction, then he turns me completely outward, exposing my bare back to the crowd. Mark pulls me into the bedroom and kicks the door shut. Rob’s foot and shoulder jam it. There is powerful shoving.

  “Mark!” I shout again, thinking, Rob is going to end up in jail. Shit, Rob is going to end up in jail.

  Immediately, people come out of the bathroom behind us, taking Mark and me by surprise. Dara and Brett emerge with two of the models, one of whom is swaying feverishly to the blaring music—“The Age of Aquarius.” It’s at the horn part, at its most hallucinatory and cultish.

  Let the sun shine! Let the sun shine in! The sun shine in!

  With Mark’s attention diverted, he loses his hold on the door and Rob smacks it open. Dara throws out his arms to protect the girls as Rob lurches at Mark and Mark lurches at Rob and Brett cuts over, forcing his way into the middle.

  Dara yells, “Everyone freeze,” and they all comply, I guess because I’m so obviously caught in the mass. I don’t kid myself into thinking Dara cares. As far as he’s concerned, I’m Mark’s property, and under any other circumstances, it would be my place to acquiesce to Mark’s will. But Dara is looking at Rob, and he’s thinking, For all I know, that barbarian is carrying a gun. Furthermore, we are guests in Dara’s client’s apartment, and Mark’s clients have drugs. Everyone is equally compromised, which is somehow a sign of the times. Dara retrieves my sweater from the floor, then slides over. He extends his arm, helping me to disembark as though assisting me off a high-speed amusement ride. I try to withdraw but can’t. I don’t know who has my hand. Someone has it tightly. Oh, Rob—I can feel the leather cuff of his jacket.

  As soon as I am extracted, Mark and Rob press back at each other, but Brett firmly holds the center, saying, “Break it up! Break it up!”

  “Sorry your fiancée is unwell, Ross,” Dara states to Mark, loudly and clearly. “You are wise to send her home. Unless, of course,” he adds with contempt as he opens the bedroom door, “you have a little headache also?”

  Mark does not reply. The three men stay immobilized, congealed into one dynamic solid, like one of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures of slaves breaking from rock.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Dara insists, “together.” He takes the lead step, and we cross the central room as one. “Does the future Mrs. Ross have a car, or does she need a taxi?”

  “Taxi,” I answer.

  At the elevator bay, Mark reaches for his wallet. The force of his own hand entering into his breast pocket throws him off balance. He finds two twenties, pinches them ineptly, then thrusts them at me. I join Rob on the elevator, and everyone looks at one another like factions facing off. I press the button fast.

  As the doors begin to creak closed, Mark tosses out an arm, blocking them, and Rob pushes me behind his back. Brett grabs Mark’s shoulders. There’s that irregular thucking that elevator doors do. Mark manages to break free just enough to dump the remaining contents of his wallet onto the elevator floor.

  “Here,” Mark says to Rob. “Go buy yourself a matching outfit.”

  Rob kicks it all back, rapid fire, cramming the toe of his shoe into each piece, not missing a single bill or coin. “Save it for psychotherapy, you sadistic motherfucker.”

  “I’d warn you to keep your hands off her,” Mark says, “but I won’t bother. You’ve always been too afraid to try.”

  I look up Varick Street for a cab, but Rob snaps his head to one side. “C’mon, I got the Cougar.”

  The ride home passes in withering silence. I consider telling Rob that what he saw was not typical, that Mark was not himself, but even if Mark were worthy of defense, I would not have insulted Rob by lying to him.

  Rob glares through the windshield, head down, eyes up, as if checking for broken bulbs in the streetlamps. He chews furiously—a toothpick, I think. We take Sixth Avenue up past all the silver towers. I’d always been pure to Rob, from the beginning, a palace in his mind. He had erected me and tended to me. I wonder if we’ll ever recover, if we can ever find a way around disgrace.

  At the entrance to my building, he hits the hazards and comes around to my door. He hands Carlo a five-dollar bill and tells him to keep an eye on the car. Rob takes me up to the apartment; he has to do something. Leaving me at the curb is not an option. In both our minds is the meaninglessness of his prudence. Mark has keys, just like me.

  I will not say that Mark and I have sex when he eventually comes home. I will say that somehow he manages to ejaculate inside me despite the stubborn flaccidness of his penis, and right away he passes out and right away I bathe, allowing gravity and soap and near-boiling water to purge the tapioca clots of stinking debris he deposited in me. And men make fun of the way women taste and smell. If only women had voices.

  41

  I throw my legs over the side of the bed. My head is pounding, though I had nothing toxic the previous night. Mark is on the phone in the living room. When he hangs up, he comes in carrying juice, and he sits, facing me. His face looks stiff like a shield.

  “If you’re not too disgusted, I’d like to apologize.”

  I shrug. “Whatever.”

  “No, not whatever. Don’t say whatever. Say what you feel. I behaved shamefully.”

  I say nothing. He can’t handle what I feel. I feel released. “It was embarrassing, that’s all.”

  “I’m sorry you were embarrassed. What else?”

  I have nothing to add. “That’s it,” I say.
>
  He reaches over and pets my hair. “I was drinking gin. You know I can’t drink gin.” He follows me to the bathroom and watches me wash and dress. “It’s not like I was with another woman. C’mon, I’m a wreck about this.”

  This is only a partial lie. Obviously he’s a wreck about something. “Forget it, Mark.”

  “Oh, no,” he states with sudden menacing rectitude, “just the opposite. I won’t forget it. In fact, I’ve called everyone. I just got off the phone with Rob. I took all the blame.”

  I brush my teeth. I wonder if there’s a difference between taking the blame and being to blame. If there’s a difference, he’s referring to it. At the door, I grab a coat and my knapsack.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “School.”

  “The gym?”

  Mark doesn’t like me to go to the gym. He says it’s a pickup scene. If I promise to avoid the basketball courts and the weight room, and just go to the pool and sauna, he’ll say that’s worse because of the lesbians. Once I said, “What are you talking about? I’ve never noticed any lesbians,” and he said, “That’s precisely the problem.”

  “The library. I have to finish my papers.”

  “I thought you finished your papers. Aren’t they due Tuesday? You should have told me. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have dragged you out last night and we could have avoided this entire mess.” At the elevator, he kisses me on the forehead, speaking into my temple. “I have your graduation present. I spoke to the travel agent this morning. We’re going away the day after Alicia’s wedding. I wanted to surprise you, but we’ll need to have your passport ready. What would you say to Italy?”

  Italy, I think as I board the elevator. It’s the least he can do.

  I spend the day walking around the city, and when it starts to rain I take a twelve-dollar cab ride to Pinky’s, Rob’s cousin’s bar in Brooklyn. Rob’s over there at least once a week, though he lives in Jersey. It has something to do with gambling. The driver takes Third Avenue to the Queensboro Bridge because there’s been an accident on the Williamsburg and the Manhattan is closed for repairs.

  The streets glisten from an evening rain. Outside is warm, even for May. Through my window I hear the tick of tires against wet pavement, and on the radio, I listen to a lecture about relationships.

  “Consider, for example, what happens when we walk,” the speaker explains. “Our intrinsic reality is, quite simply, that we are moving in a given direction toward a given destination. Extrinsically, however, we are reliant upon the earth beneath our feet. If the earth were as absent in reality as in our perception of reality, our legs would swing in air.

  “People seek equity in love as though love is a business. They look for equitable investments and gains. But relationships,” he continues, “can possess equities separate from those that can be easily named or known. Equity can exist, independent of interpretation of equity, which, of course, is variable. By seeking quantifiables, we lose sight of mystery—the real binding power.”

  The taxi slows to a stop at Fifty-eighth Street and Third Avenue, near Alexander’s department store, before making the turn onto the bridge ramp. Creaking up to consume my entire field of vision is that bizarre mural of globular buttons over Alexander’s corner doorway, like a collection of random hemi-sected eyeballs, like some insane manifestation of things urging me to see. And so I see.

  If it never occurred to me to move beyond the idea of having been abandoned by Rourke, it’s not because I’d been victimized, but because in my mind one is a victim when one does not triumph. The parts of me that came to life with Rourke were parts I could not have conceived of alone; naturally I believed that if the best I could be was with him, then without him I was nothing.

  When he left, I told myself that I was not good enough, that he wanted someone better. My anguish rendered me insensible. At the time, I forgot that life is strange and long and beautiful, and that something so extraordinary in its success could hardly be ordinary in its failure. I persuaded myself that he did not love me, that he never had; and yet, not once when we were together did I need to tell myself he did. It should have been enough to love and be loved, but there was more, I thought—I must have thought—because at some point everything changed from my simply wanting more of him to my wanting more of something else—something substantive, something normal—all the while denying the egocentricity of my aspirations, and forgetting the universe we’d made.

  The cab is on the lower roadway; the cables and girders are thoomping past, animating the steel beam windows of the bridge.

  I feel shame to have doubted him, especially when I recall his absence of artifice, the way he knew me when he met me, the way he worked to move us despite obstacles of age and position, the way he trusted that I would feel as he felt, the way he was patient and true. And so, the way he let me go—let us go—surely must have been just as deliberate.

  Since he knew things at the beginning, maybe at the end he knew things too. That we had gone as far as chance would take us. That nothing is more sacred than youth or more hopeful than turning yourself over to someone and saying, I have this time, it is not a long time, but it is my best time and my best gift, and I give it to you. When I revisit my youth, I revisit you.

  I had not been walking on air. Rourke had been there, pressure, earth beneath my feet, always.

  At Pinky’s everybody’s watching a game on television. Rob is down at the end of the bar, in his usual place, by the telephone. His mood has not improved since fighting with Mark—the stiff hunch to his back, the shaking leg. He does not smile when he sees me; he just kicks out a stool. I drop my book bag and climb up. Something happens in the game, and the men shout in unison—“Ho, shit!” Rob’s voice joins the chorus. He concentrates on the set, pretending to ignore me. Eventually he turns, his eyes drifting toward my lap. My legs are crossed, and with the pants I’m wearing, the crevice between my thighs is revealing. I slide my hands to cover myself.

  Rob grabs a couple of bar napkins and blows his nose hard. “I’m allergic to something in here.” He looks over each shoulder. “Must be somebody’s cologne.” He gestures to my knapsack. “More school? It seems like you’ve been in school longer than anyone ever—why is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t, huh?” he says. “Well, when are you done?”

  “I have three papers due Tuesday.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “And a presentation.”

  “A presentation, oh, excuse me. What’s that, like Darrin Stephens?”

  “Kind of. Only no witches.”

  He faces the bar, puts his elbows up, and wipes his nose one more time. “Where’s the ring?” he asks, talking into his napkin.

  “I left it at home.”

  “Home,” he repeats facetiously. “That’s not fair play. Some poor slob might get the idea you’re available. Unless of course you weren’t allowed to wear it. Did he tell you I’m gonna steal it and hock it?”

  “He doesn’t—”

  “The future Mrs. Ross,” Rob says, repeating Dara’s remark from the previous night. “I should have popped that vampire asshole. He was asking for it. Tell you the truth, I’d rather you were gonna marry that queer friend of yours. Dennis. He’s actually a good guy.”

  “Mark’s okay.”

  “Yeah, sure. Okay. Capital O.”

  “Do you hate him because he’s rich?” I ask.

  “Do you sleep with him because he’s rich?” Rob snaps back. “Oh, no, I’m sorry,” he taunts, “you sleep with him because you love him.”

  “No, I—”

  “No? Then why do you sleep with him?”

  “I—I’m not sure. He was there—”

  “Lots of people were there. I was there.” He slaps his chest. “How come you never fucked me?” His fingers come together. “I’ll tell you why. Because I know the code.” He clenches his jaw, leans back, pulls out his wallet, and drops a fresh ten on the bar. Rob’s
wallet is full of cash. Rob’s wallet is always full of cash. The bartender draws two tap beers and pushes them to us. Rob says, “Thanks, Pink.”

  Pinky leaves the money untouched. “How you doing, sweetheart? Long time no see.” Pinky’s an albino. They call him Pinky because he looks like the inside of a conch. I had a cat like that once, like Pinky, with two different-colored eyes, only my cat was deaf. Pinky can hear just fine except for a vague ringing sometimes. He keeps thinking there’s a break-in at the pork factory across the street.

  “Sorry, Pinky,” I say. “I’ve been busy with school.”

  “She graduates next week,” Rob reports. “A 4.0 average, dean’s list. She got a certificate. One of these rolled-up parchment jobs.”

  “If she’s so smart, what’s she doing with you?” Pinky cackles as he chugs off, sideways and slow, like a failing tug.

  Rob lifts his mug and polishes off a third of the contents in one swallow, then bends in like he’s got a secret. “You wanna know what I think? I think you’re with him because he doesn’t care that you don’t love him. Any other guy, any normal guy, shit like that matters. But you don’t want anything normal. You’re holding on to the past. He knows it. That bastard worked your … your—situation to his advantage. Just like a crook, he saw an open window, and he climbed in.” Rob’s eyes screw up tight like the lens of a camera. “Lemme tell you something about Mark—he don’t come through. You know what I mean, come through? Principles, ethics, the code. He knows the code. He knows it and ignores it.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a difference,” Rob says. “Certain things you don’t do.”

  “Nobody owns me, Rob. And anyway, Rourke left.”

  “He had no choice.”

  “He had a choice.”

  “Don’t tell me. I was there.” Rob wipes the bar around our mugs with another napkin. “The reason Harrison took that job in East Hampton with those kids in the first place was Diane backed out.”