Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  He stirred, raising himself onto one elbow, the muscles of his infolding abdomen making a miniature city, and he drank from the glass of water I’d set by the bed. He was not surprised to see me, which was bittersweet. It was as though I had infringed upon his nights as often as he had upon mine. His arms went around my hips and his fingers slipped through the empty belt loops of my jeans, and I drew my fingertips across his jaw, and he breathed softly, coming closer.

  From where I sat, I could see the bathroom door. Once we showered there, and I had cried, and he’d been good about that, not asking questions. Next to the bathroom was another door to an interior staircase, leading to the first floor, and the second, and at the very top, the indigo room. If I climbed those stairs, I would find her, still awake, reading in her robe. Mothers who wait up read and wear robes; I knew because I’d never had such a mother, so she existed perfectly in my imagination. If I went to her, would she be the sort to solve everything, or possibly the sort to say nothing—to let you make your own mistakes and to hope for the best.

  I wondered when as a man Rourke had been proved. After the fight over his father, the one that had given him his scar? I wondered would we die without meeting again, or would we meet and smile in the slightly embarrassed manner of former lovers, with all the intervening seasons of regret coming to life in our eyes. And if I died, would he come to my funeral, and who would call to notify him, and would he grieve—yes, he would grieve; but would he know that if I could be given one day, one hour, one minute more to live, that I would accept only if I could spend that time with him? I thought how a baby conceived in July would have been born in April. That would have been a biological coincidence, to have been brought together for conception and then again for the delivery. People like to say babies come for a reason. If so, was ours taken away for one?

  As I watched the ascension of day, with every ripple of light coming like drops to fill a bucket, I held him, and I persuaded myself to come to terms. How strange that I felt most gloriously alive just as I prepared to withdraw from the hazards of sensation. Like some animal gazing into the wondrous world through the door of its dank cave before bowing off to voluntary sleep, I breathed greedily as if each trapped ounce of his vitality could be called upon to sustain me through hibernation. And I became seized by a whole new sorrow, a loving sorrow. Although once again it was Rourke who was leaving me, this time I knew I would bear the burden of the sacrifice. I was turning him over—to soul corruption, to the inclemency of survival.

  I said, “Mark Ross is not going to give up.”

  Rourke answered, “I know.” His breath on my wrist.

  I left as he slept, the worst and hardest thing I’d ever done. I knew that if I stayed, it would have made everything worse. I knew also that by leaving I was giving up every possibility of coming to some understanding. At daybreak, I walked to the main road, then I hitchhiked as far as the highway, where I hitched again. Feeling forlorn as I did, and lacking a destination, I might have traveled on as far as the road would have taken me, Albany or Boston, Canada maybe, except that I got a ride directly into the West Village from two co-workers, a Polish guy and a diabetic woman, best friends, they said, who left me safely at the corner of Hudson and Morton.

  At a Mexican restaurant on Columbus Avenue, Lee and Chris held a goodbye dinner for Rourke. Lee had called me that day from her office on Wall Street.

  “I initially planned this for Sunday, since he said you two were going to Atlantic City, but I just found out he’s leaving tomorrow. It’s been crazy getting organized.”

  I didn’t want to go; yet, I couldn’t stay away. I arrived on time, but instead of going in I walked around—north, west, south, then east again, making a fifteen-block square. By the time I climbed the restaurant’s staircase to its balcony and joined the party—there were nine people, including Mark—they were finishing dessert—dishes of flan and fried ice cream were scattered around the table.

  “You’re here,” Lee said, rising to give me a kiss. “I’m so glad.”

  Rourke didn’t speak or move to greet me. Everyone else mumbled hellos but fidgeted uncomfortably, not knowing what to do or expect. They were even more ignorant of the goings-on between Rourke and me than we were ourselves, and that uncertainty, mingled with his disappointment, was like a critically elevated temperature. As Rob would say, Things were pretty dicey.

  Lee called over the balcony to the waiter for another espresso and an ice water, and she drew out a chair at the table’s head, which I dragged to Rourke’s side, so I did not have to see him, though I could sense him, everything about him. He was in the room with me, I was thinking morbidly. Soon he would not be in the room with me anymore.

  Mark raised his café con leche. “Well, best of luck, Harrison.”

  No one else raised their glasses or cups because Rourke did not accept Mark’s toast; he just stared, then stood. He had to get going, he said to Lee; he wanted to spend time with his mother. There was squelching chair scraping, but he lifted his hands, telling everyone to stay put, and giving Lee a quick kiss before walking out.

  I remember wanting nothing more than to get up and leave with him, to apologize for having left him that morning, to figure out what had to be figured, to go and meet his mother, to help him pack, to have a private goodbye, and that moment of all moments is most maddeningly vivid to me; it was the last honest need I experienced for years. In a heartbeat, he was gone. I knew I’d never see him again.

  Chris paid the check, and we finished in silence. They all stood and grabbed their jackets. Mark thanked Lee and Chris.

  Rob lifted my sweater off the back of the chair. He said, “Let’s go. I’ll give you a ride.”

  I told him no. Looking down.

  “C’mon,” he said darkly. “I’m taking the Holland. I’ll go straight down Ninth Avenue, take Bleecker to Tenth, drop you there, and then shoot west to Seventh on Ninth Street.” Boom, boom, boom.

  I’d be okay.

  Rob swung his chair closer, then glanced over his shoulder at the others. “Look at me.”

  My eyes looked at his, facing off.

  “Once you do this,” he said, “there’s no going back.”

  “There’s already no going back.”

  “Would you like to walk a bit?” Mark asked as the cars pulled away.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Home just seems like—” I waved one arm.

  “Like home,” Mark said. “Say no more.”

  The night was magnificent, as such things go, and we infringed upon it mildly, strolling up one side of Columbus Avenue and down the other, gazing into store windows. We passed many of the same places I’d walked by when I was alone earlier in the evening.

  “You look like an Italian movie star,” he said to our reflection. “With your sweater over your shoulders and just the top button done.”

  I tried to remember if I’d ever told Mark about Marilyn and Dad comparing me to Monica Vitti. But then again, it was just the type of guy Mark was, the kind who makes you think he’s gotten hold of your file.

  We turned east on Seventy-sixth Street and headed toward Central Park. I climbed onto a low wall and reached for his shoulder as I walked. When he helped me off, I slid through the shaft of his arms.

  “Like an angel,” he said, “just descended.”

  “Fallen, you mean.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean.”

  He guided my face back and he kissed me, and I let him because my lips were deserving lips wishing to be kissed and my body was a deserving body wishing to be touched and because there is a moment in every life when you hit the lowest possible point. In that moment you are not you but a monster of you, a creature stalking the cloisters of your own despair. The monster urges you on—come, come—and so you do. In fact, you feel better in there, crazed and incautious, capable and free. You feel you have reached the other side, that you have passed through the pain, though you have only capitulated to it. And you are lucky you d
o not have a gun. If you had a gun, you’d shoot yourself.

  “This is where I live.” We are at the Beresford on Central Park West. “Actually, my parents live here.” He escorted me through the set of doors facing the American Museum of Natural History.

  “Good evening, Mr. Ross,” the doorman said.

  Mark shook the doorman’s gloved hand. “Ralph, this is Miss Auerbach.”

  Ralph greeted me warmly and walked us to the elevator. I wondered what he was thinking. Men are always thinking things, doormen in particular.

  The Ross apartment was august and sublime, a quintessential New York prewar apartment. If ever Manhattan could be smelted and poured, it would take the shape of an apartment like that. The difference between it and the house in East Hampton was dramatic—the plaster walls, the original detailing, the chain of elegant rooms connected by high-ceilinged corridors. A Steinway grand was situated near a bank of windows overlooking the park. My thoughts turned to Jack. I wondered where he was and how I had managed to stray so far. I saw the art—a de Kooning, a Stella, a Diebenkorn, several Picasso etchings. Mark had bought the Diebenkorn at a gallery in California, he told me, and had given it to his parents for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. In the bedrooms were lithographs by Miró, a charcoal by O’Keeffe, a series of photographs by Stieglitz.

  White cabinets towered from floor to ceiling in the main cooking area, but there were also cabinets in the hall that was a sort of larder. The floor was made of those classic black and white square ceramic tiles, and near the maid’s room, a door with dead bolts led to a service elevator. Garbage was placed there; invisible hands retrieved it.

  Mark rummaged through the refrigerator. “You didn’t eat tonight. Let me make you something.”

  When the kettle whistled, Mark transferred boiling water for tea into a beautiful china pot. It was light turquoise with handpainted geese in flight and gold foliage and a gold border. He showed me the black stamps on the bottoms of the matching cup and saucer. The set was Japanese, from the turn of the century.

  “Nippon,” he said, referring to the mark. “It simply means ‘Japan’ and refers to the country of origin. In the 1920s, U.S. Customs law changed and demanded the marks read: ‘Made in Japan,’ which doesn’t sound as nice as ‘Nippon,’ does it?”

  I said no, that it didn’t. By the kitchen clock, it was nearly three-thirty Mark and I had walked for hours. Rourke was finished packing. He was alone in his apartment, thinking of me. Just a day ago, I’d been there too.

  “Where are your parents?” I asked Mark, banishing thoughts of Rourke. There was the seedy smell of rye bread toasting.

  “Milan,” he answered. “On vacation. Then it’s up to Monte Carlo for a little gambling, then they shoot through Nice over to Cannes for the film festival.”

  I was sorry I’d asked; somehow, it made everything hurt worse.

  “C’mon,” he said. “Let me show you around.” We left the dishes on the table for someone else to clean and soon we were moving through hallways. It was strange, but I could see us—moving. One room we passed had window seats and long boxes of flowers—pansies. I hesitated; it was so pretty there.

  “Alicia’s,” he said.

  Mark’s former room was at the very end. It was smaller and darker than his sister’s but nicer. There were built-in cherry bookshelves and a cherry rolltop desk and hanging things such as photographs, pennants, diplomas—Collegiate, UCLA, Harvard. The room was like one of those hidden coin pockets in your Levi’s, the perfect place if you happen to have the perfect thing to fit inside.

  I understood that Mark had taken me there instead of to his new apartment because there was a chance I would have declined. The visit to his parents’ house felt accidental and edifying, and I did not mind being there; in fact, I felt safe, unfindable, like deep in the tail of a snake.

  It seemed that Mark was always right—anyway, his instincts were, and fortune was with him, and these are superior traits in a man when you can find no others.

  At the edge of his bed, he kissed me again and he unbuttoned my blouse slowly, methodically. It was cotton, a doeskin color with pearl buttons—I still have it. Next Mark lowered the straps of my bra, thumbing down the lace.

  “Am I dreaming?” he murmured to himself. “I must be dreaming.”

  I did not bother to stop him. I did not bother to say no, not when the sun would soon be rising, not when he had walked me through the labyrinth of the night, not when he had worked so hard for so long, and he had waited—one whole year.

  Rourke was no god, no king—he was a solitary, solitary man. I had no reason to wait for him. If it was true that Rourke wanted me, perhaps it was also true that he needed to forsake me. Perhaps his sacrifice helped him to proceed; there are men like that, men who need loss to exempt them, who feel unconsecrated without forfeiture.

  In any event, did it really matter, days alone or days with Mark, when his eyes had seen Rourke’s eyes and my eyes and the exchanges between them? When his loathing of Rourke was so vital as to move him to claim me? Those were the things I told myself.

  Mark, kissing my neck, his hands slipping to my waist and my pants. When he followed the line beneath the elastic of my underwear with one finger, his lips hung apart and he caught his breath. He steered me back onto the bed and removed the rest of my clothes, though not his own—for a long time he did not remove his own. He went very slowly, staring the entire time. I did not dare move. I’d read somewhere that power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims. I did not want him to think I was ungrateful.

  When he tossed my jeans onto the floor, there was the sound of coins rolling. My money, falling out. He said not to worry. “I have all the money you’ll ever need.”

  43

  I meet Rob at a garage, and we are happy, both of us, and free. I follow him to the back, where it smells of incubated diesel and desiccated oil—safe, a world of men. Beneath one of the cars is Rourke. He rolls out. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him. I want to touch his face, but I cannot reach it. Rob says to try, so I try, and when I do, I feel him, his skin, and things begin to grow—the light and the warmth and my sense of myself, growing from the bottom up, like plants.

  Rourke and I are in a room. It’s brightly lit without windows; the door is ajar. He leans over a suitcase. Being close to him feels provisional or probationary, like being reunited with someone dead. Like soon he will go again. Like time is marked.

  He kisses me, saying he will be back in a few hours. I will wait, though I know he will not come back. He doesn’t mean to be untruthful. He simply doesn’t know what I know.

  I’m not sure about time passing, if any has. But Mark has come, and the room Rourke and I shared is in Mark’s apartment. Someone called for you, Mark says. Some guy, calling your name—Eveline. Eveline. From the bedroom, Mark says. Go on in.

  Beneath the covers is a shape. Is it Rourke? I go under the blankets. It’s dark; he is naked. He brushes back the hair from my face. We lie, close and broken apart, known, unknown.

  Baby, he says. I missed you, baby.

  I am wearing a slip with buttons. He unbuttons, expertly. One hand holds me still while the other—Now he is in me. I feel him. We lie on our sides, hardly moving. I find his pulse. I strive to be an organ to him, sightless, mindless, attached. Is it true, could it be true, has he come back?

  I’m sorry, I say. For doubting you. I love you. I tell him I love him.

  Yes, he says, starting to push faster now. I love you too.

  And I—my eyes—they squeeze shut, they will not open, they know not to open. The sight of Mark would kill me. It kills me.

  Before Mark gets up I take cash from the dresser and I go get the BMW from the garage. I’m going to see Rob at church. It’s his family church, where he goes every Sunday at nine, by his parents’ house, in Rumson. I know the way because I’ve been there a few times, twice for Easter, once for Christmas Eve, and once for Charlie’s communion. Charlie is Rob’
s nephew and godson, Joey and Anna’s son. I would have called to say I was coming, but I didn’t want to take the chance of Mark hearing me and waking up. After I got home from being at Pinky’s last night with Rob, Mark was out and he didn’t come home until after I’d gone to bed.

  I wait on the church steps in the drizzle and listen to the end of Mass. The priest is talking about the Knack. He says the Knack is the ability to live in the present, which is something God has and Lucifer wants. I’m not sure about that, about the Knack. Priests have a way of extrapolating a lot, then neglecting to explain themselves. I guess he’s implying that God—or, the goodness in people—is satisfied with the gifts of each ordinary moment, and that Lucifer—or the maleficence in people—is obsessed with the shadowy and elusive things lying ahead and behind—like dreams and regrets.

  Rob dips out with both Mrs. Cirillos, his mother and his grandmother on his father’s side. Coincidentally, they share the same first name too—Fortuna. He opens their collapsible umbrellas, one, then the other. They hook on to him at the elbows so when he walks he has to stretch his neck above the fabric arch they make. When he sees me, he stops in his tracks, they all do, in a line. The elder Mrs. Cirillo loses her balance. He steadies her.

  “What happened?” he demands of me.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “I’m okay,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  “Jesus, give me a friggin’ heart attack, why don’t you?”

  Both women slap him in sync. “What is wrong with you?” his mother says quickly, like this happens all the time. “You just walked out of church.”

  “He’s gonna get struck dead,” his grandmother warns. “It happened to my cousin.” She makes a hatchet move with her hand. “Dead.”

  I kiss the ladies hello. Rob’s mom is dressed in a union-blue shirtdress with a Peter Pan collar and darts beneath the breasts. Nonna Cirillo is wearing a pressed housecoat with a black crocheted sweater around her shoulders, and with her free hand she clings to her bag, tight, like somebody might snatch it. She doesn’t remember me, but that’s okay since she never remembers anything other than obscure details from her past such as the shoe sizes of dead sisters and the price of tomatoes from the grocery store the family used to operate on First Avenue.