Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  Mr. Xinwu nods to Rourke, and Rourke rises to join him. Rourke sets his feet shoulder-width apart, bending at the knees and tucking the hips. He breathes deeply, hollows his chest, and raises his back like the hood of a cobra. I try to imagine him preparing for a fight; I follow his actions as though witnessing a metamorphosis. I can almost see the leathering of the skin, the shoring up of the under-muscle, and beneath that, the organs shrinking back; the pulse stopping up, the steadiness of his body dropping to the steadiness of the floor, dropping to the steady chill of the earth. It suddenly looks as if he is holding an invisible ball.

  Mr. Xinwu refers to this empty space, calling it peng. Peng is protective energy, he says, that helps ward off attacks.

  When Rourke turns in profile, he sees me. He does not look, or divert his gaze, and yet, I feel his attention attach. Something shoots through me, like a charge. Physically, there is desire, and shock—it’s been so long. Immediately after come things borne of the mind—the pity of wasted time, the injustice of lost access, the sick lie of myself, the way I am dressed. The idea of being alone with him is suddenly terrifying. I step back, thinking to leave, but I stumble. I step back once more and lean against the wall.

  “Yield to overcome,” Xinwu admonishes, his eyes flickering in my direction. “Bend to be straight. Feel for your opponent, ask what is weak, what is strong? What is solid, what is empty?”

  Xinwu readies himself. Rourke also readies. They incline their heads and chests ceremoniously. “When my friend was a small boy, he was making street fights,” Xinwu relates haltingly as they begin formally to spar. “When he came to me, he was big mess—very brave, very lacking skill.” Rourke snaps a kick, which Xinwu blocks with incredible economy of action. “I say, ‘Mr. Rourke, you think too much. Do too much. You act when you need to wait.’ I say, ‘You use power. You need to use direction of power.’”

  They break, moving again, like sculptures painstakingly positioned and repositioned. They stop, they turn. They go lightning fast, then dead slow. It’s beautiful, really—Rourke towering over his friend, and yet he is no match. Xinwu anticipates every next move almost as if he can read the objective of Rourke’s muscles.

  “Recently my friend returned—still very brave, now more skillful, still big mess. I say, ‘Mr. Rourke, first control emotion to control body. First find silence.’” Mr. Xinwu moves in and finishes to the body. Rourke’s body is hard, like brick; but anyway, it gives, folding in and down, going gracefully to the floor. I suppose there are tender points, like hinges. Even skyscrapers can collapse.

  Rourke stands and everyone applauds. Mr. Xinwu nods, excusing him, and Rourke passes through to me.

  We meet in the hall. His hands locate my waist like picking a flower at the exact right place on the stem. I snap off the floor as he lifts me. His face has changed over the past three years. There are infinitesimal lines and recesses in the muscles, like code writing only I can read.

  “I thought I saw you earlier,” he says. “On Prince Street. But it wasn’t you.” He pulls me tighter, then he lowers me, stepping back.

  “When did you get in?” I ask.

  “A few hours ago.”

  “You haven’t seen Rob yet?”

  “No,” Rourke says. “I came here straight from the airport.”

  “He’s meeting you later?” I want to know when they will talk, when Rob will tell him everything.

  “Yeah, he’ll give me a ride to my house.”

  Mr. Xinwu is talking about throwing an opponent’s balance without causing harm, about trying to feel love for those things one hopes to protect rather than hatred for the adversary.

  “How is it out west?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Not much different than here. Ever been there?”

  I nod, clumsily, clumsy to admit that I’ve been to his particular part of the world without him, to invoke Mark even by implication. Mark and I went skiing in Aspen twice.

  Rourke’s eyes stir; his weight shifts. Though I say no more, I’ve lost him. I can read his intent before it is manifest. I am like Mr. Xinwu. A master.

  Would it help Rourke to know that I looked for him everywhere—every restaurant, every bar, every street. I tried so hard to see him that sometimes I did see him, only it was not him. Didn’t he just say, I thought I saw you. It wasn’t you.

  We turn awkwardly and stare into the main room, watching the cops drift into pairs. One of each set turns his back to the wall, and the other faces him. “Remember,” Xinwu is saying, “confrontation is inevitable. Those who resort to violence have not mastered nonviolence. Keep control. Neutralize pushes. The only separation between you and a man in jail is control. And for police, control is a special obligation.”

  I try to think of something to say. I ask Rourke if this is what he taught at the prison that time.

  “More or less,” he replies stiffly. “More respect. Less combat.”

  “Do you still do it?”

  “Go into prisons? Not too much. Xinwu does it regularly.”

  “And boxing? How does boxing fit into this?”

  “This teaches control,” Rourke replies. “Boxing takes control.”

  “As opposed to street fighting.”

  “With organized fights there’s shared weight or class; with street fights, it’s a match of intention. How much something means to you versus how much it means to your opponent. You could lose everything.”

  Everything, yes. A wife, a son, your life.

  “Well, I’d better head back in,” he says.

  “I guess I—should—you know, get going too.”

  The staircase is tight and fireproof gray. I start down, gripping the rail. He’s there, near me, leaning. Over the harp of bars we kiss.

  “Goodbye,” he says courteously. “It was good to see you.”

  I’ve never been the victim of his courtesy before. He hands it off like a bomb. His elbows are on the rail. He is bending and his jacket splits and I can see inside to where it is beautiful. I don’t simply see that it’s beautiful, I feel that it is beautiful. I respond to beauty. I can’t remember the last time I responded to anything. I have so much at stake. I have only seconds. I am about to say, Rourke. But he speaks first.

  “Tell Mark I said congratulations,” Rourke says, stripping the towel from his neck, shaking it at his side, looping it back over his shoulders.

  The GTO skids up as Mark and I exit the apartment building. It moves alongside us, plowing into the asphalt like a grounded meteor. My first thought is that I haven’t seen the car for so long. Seeing the car is different from seeing him. It’s as if there has been no car since, as if his car is the only car. It was the place where you kept your clothes and heard your music and ate and slept and had sex; it was a car when you needed to move. Since then there have been only vehicles. My second thought is that Rourke is angry. Rob must have told him everything on the drive down to the shore. I wonder if he saw his mother, if she’d told him of my visit.

  Mark leans to the roof, and his foot slips off the curb. I’d never seen him slip before. “Harrison! What a surprise. What are you doing here?”

  Rourke just says, “Get in.”

  “Thanks, but my car’s right there.” Mark points to the garage.

  “Mine’s right here.” Rourke leans to pop the door. “Get in.”

  Mark bites his lip. “Let me tell the garage to repark it.” He jogs across the street—not fast, not slow, but calculated, like arithmetic. It kills him to leave me at the door of Rourke’s idling car, but he has to pretend at least to trust I’ll be there when he returns.

  Rourke’s arm rests on the seat back: he stares down its length to where I stand. My body is conspicuous through my dress. A gust of wind hits my hips; I lean into it, the dress impressing deeply. With him there I feel like something soaring, something engaged in flight. I bend to pull the seat lever, knocking it forward with my knee. I climb in back and sink into the corner of the car, feeling secure. When Mark surfaces and cuts back
over the street, Rourke simply observes him, his eyes like an assassin’s.

  Mark shuts the door. “Cirillo told me you just got in from Colorado. How is it out there?”

  “It’s all right,” Rourke says, shoving the stick into first.

  “When did you land?” Mark asks.

  “This morning.”

  At the traffic light on the corner, Mark says, “Where to?”

  Rourke turns south on Ninth Avenue. He replies, “Around.”

  At Old Town Bar on East Eighteenth Street, we take a table—Mark and me with our backs to the wall and Rourke facing us. It’s like we’re at an interview. Rourke draws his chin into his neck and drops his head to the left, and a girl appears as if in response to a silent whistle. What an obligation to be him, to possess such formidable powers of seduction, such dread competence.

  “I’ll take a Beck’s,” he says. “Bring one for her as well.”

  “Do you even want a beer?” Mark asks me, laying his elbow on the table and pointing lazily to the waitress, to me, to the waitress. “Actually, she’ll have some white wine. What kinds do you have?”

  “What kinds of what?” the waitress replies.

  “Wine. What kinds of wine.”

  She furrows her brow and says, “House!”

  “House,” Mark repeats. “Would that be something you people express in the basement? Why don’t you go check on the available vintages and come back with your findings?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say to her. “Whatever you have is okay.”

  Rourke just sits, almost meditatively.

  “Tell you what,” Mark snaps. “Bring the most expensive bottle you can find. And a Stoli. Double. Rocks.” As soon as she returns with the drinks, he tells her, “Gimme another Stoli.”

  I check his glass. It’s true. It’s already empty.

  Mark dumps vodka after vodka down his throat, and Patty keeps my wineglass filled. Her name is Patty; I know, because Rourke asked. He turned his head insinuatingly into the tonnage of his own shoulder, just as a boa caresses its own mass and mean, and as she bent to exchange glassware, he asked, “What’s your name?”

  She reddened, fast and strange, like a flower infused with artificial color. Beneath her wispy black hair, she said shyly, “Patty.”

  I’m jealous of the way Rourke admires her, the way she is pretty and hardworking and uncompromised. I used to be that way too, uncompromised at Heartbreak and prior to that, uncompromised at the Lobster Roll, and pretty when I paid my own way and possessed firmness of will. I too used to be modest. Now I am at liberty to be immodest and indecent and indiscreet. I belong to Mark—to his circle and legion—like a cadet belongs to the military. I am a recruit, a conscript, an instrument. I cannot be hurt; I have an army. I am anonymous and inaccessible. Like most disciples, I was chosen because my need exceeds my reason. I was chosen because, unlike Rourke, I am without character.

  I wonder how many glasses I’ve had. Eleven, I think.

  Rourke says not quite. “More like three.”

  He hasn’t been drinking at all; Mark doesn’t even realize. Mark keeps ordering more rounds, and Rourke keeps exchanging full bottles of beer for new full ones. Him winking at Patty, her smiling back.

  Mark jabs loosely at the air. “So. Who do you—plan to, you know.”

  “Spar with?” Rourke says. “Whoever’s around. There’s a kid from Ghana who’s pretty good.”

  “Well, you’d better figure it out. You only have—what do you have?”

  “Eight days,” Rourke says.

  “Eight days? And you’re out drinking beers? You’d better get serious. It’s been a long time for you. I hear Tommy Lydell’s chomping at the bit. What happened to the old guy—the one you used to train with?”

  “Jimmy Landes? He’s still down in Florida.”

  “Better find somebody new.”

  Rourke shakes his head. “Nobody’s like Jimmy. I’d rather go it alone.”

  “Well, as I like to say, everyone is replaceable.”

  “Not everyone,” Rourke says.

  Mark hangs his head and studies the tabletop as though he is taking an exam. He is exceedingly drunk. His tongue protrudes when he talks, making me think of Venus flytraps. Once Denny told me flytraps have throat hairs that are stimulated by motion, that’s why they eat only living things. The movement is important because they get just about six meals per lifetime. “Can you imagine,” Denny said, “wasting one of the six on a twig or a rock or something?”

  “Be right back,” Mark says. He stumbles to a stand and staggers into the shoulders of the crowd.

  I look at Rourke exclusively. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him exclusively. Earlier in the day, he was in a room full of people. Men. Cops. Earlier in the day he knew nothing about Mark, about what Mark had done, about how far I’d fallen, how weak I was.

  “It’s strange,” I say. “Do you feel strange?”

  “Little bit.” His words slip like pebbles across ice, shooting off and away as they are dropped. His eyes are adamantine, like black diamonds. He leans across, and the glasses make way, parting like a sea. There is a song playing.

  With her killer graces and her secret places that no boy can fill.

  With her soft French cream standin’ in that doorway like a dream.

  He presses into me, knocking forward, his hands locking down my shoulders. My arm tears a little, I make a sound—“Oh”—shooting out, and I bite down hard on my lip accidentally drawing blood. We kiss, and the red seeps in. The taste of him is sweet. He pulls back, an inch, less, the thickness of paper.

  “Is that how you kiss him,” he says, foully, like I am foul.

  Maybe it’s all the alcohol or just the flavor of blood stitched to the perfume of his saliva, but I feel something animal. I wonder what it would be to kill him. If I held a knife, would it be easy to employ? I think of the virile final feel, the passage of his influence. His throat, turning limp, hot as he collapses into me like a dying gargantuan thing, like an anvil plowing.

  I have to get away, so I pull myself up and head to the bathroom. The floor heaves beneath me as I walk through a slough of saloonish greens and browns. Mark glides past me in the opposite direction, not even noticing. In the bathroom I decide to vomit. Alicia says it is easy, which it is. The liquor shoots out, plop, plop, and then a barrage of plops, and, okay, I feel better. I wipe icy paper towels on my face and my neck and rinse my mouth with water.

  At the bar, I ask for a lemon wedge, and I stand there, leaning, eating it. Mark and Rourke are toasting; I cannot imagine to what. Living in a world with men is like being in the center of a ring with hands spinning you in a circle. It’s like being spun, three-quarters one way, one-half the other, one full time back around. Wherever you land, there’s another set of hands. Men like you to believe they are dangerous when typically they are not. How can they be dangerous when there are so many things they want that they won’t talk about? When secretly you want a thing, you make mistakes.

  I thank the bartender for the lemon.

  He gives me another one and says, “Anytime, sweetheart.”

  I’m not a sweetheart, I’ve never been a sweetheart, but it’s nice of him to call me one and to remind me that things don’t always have to be that way. Someday maybe I will be someone’s sweetheart and that someone will take me to Great Adventure on a Saturday in June and camping in Vermont and he will buy me running shoes for Christmas. I return to the table and wonder what would have to change before I could become a sweetheart. Something big would have to change, I think.

  ——

  Rourke parks far enough away from the entrance to the building that none of the neighbors will see Mark, who is passed out in the front seat.

  Rourke steps out of the car and offers me his hand, helping me out of the back. He comes around to the curb with me and he leans on the rear fender, quietly regarding the quiet street. I lean too, gripping the trunk to anchor myself. In Rourke’s face th
ere is a light. It brightens, it dims. I don’t know where the light is coming from. The west, I think. I look for the river. I don’t see it, though it’s not far. There is hissing from the sewer beneath us; blasts of smoke skulk around our ankles.

  “So,” I say, “next Saturday.” I try to speak without slurring; I hear myself trying.

  He doesn’t answer. His arms are folded against his chest. I look at his arms in wonder; I think of me inside the ring of them, of him inside me. It’s been years. How many women have there been? For some reason I can’t stop thinking of the volatile mechanics of his sex, of him fucking other women—though I suppose just one would be bad enough. Actually, one would be worse. One gives me an indication of how he feels about Mark.

  “Well,” I continue, my head swinging a bit. “Good luck.”

  Him not moving. “You’ll be there.”

  “I won’t be there.”

  “You’ll be there,” he repeats.

  “I don’t think I—” I wave one hand, ending there.

  “Mark won’t let you miss it. He’s betting I get killed.”

  Carlo steps out to help the Morrisseys unload luggage and sleeping children from their car. The kids are two and four with matching bear slippers. Carlo looks over and notices me and gestures; he’ll be right over.

  “And if I refuse?”

  “You won’t. Rob needs you.”

  “Rob needs money. I have no money.”

  Rourke shrugs. “You pull money.”

  “And you?”

  “Me? I pull a crowd. I fight and go home. I’m like you. I’m helping a friend. I don’t care who wins.”

  Carlo’s footsteps. Him jogging over, waving apologetically. Together he and Rourke hoist Mark from the front seat, and when they stand, Mark sags down, hanging out at the knees and in at the chest, like a scarecrow. “Got him, sir!” Carlo declares, and Rourke ducks, leaving the two to shuffle off into the overbright lobby.

  I turn to Rourke, tipping in, taking hold of his shirt. The front of me on the front of him, my face by his chest. I breathe in. I study him. I feel for the remains of other women—memories of breasts, of legs, quivering throats and swollen lips, the smell of them, the taste. I should be able to find his memories, the chain that they make. But when I touch him, I find the same man I touched the first time I touched him, only now there is no openness. That’s because I closed it—closed him. In feeling for others, I simply find myself.