He looks back, unflinchingly. I don’t mind. I don’t mind to lose a little grace when by his eyes I possess so much. “You’re wrong, Harrison,” I say, using his true name for the first time ever. “I do care who wins.”
In the morning Mark rolls off the couch. Immediately he talks. Everyone says it’s good to talk, but frequently those who do are no better off than those who don’t.
“What the fuck was that all about?” he says, rubbing his head.
I check my watch. Rourke is awake. Thinking, not talking. By now he’s at the gym; he’s already been running. Eight miles, ten miles.
“What a fucking idiot,” Mark says on his way into the kitchen. “Showing up like that.”
Despite his hangover, he looks fine, like an antique. He has begun to gray prematurely, and the new pewter tinge suits his doggish capitalist charm. Any woman would be happy to have him. He punctures a can of tomato juice, fills a glass, and drains it. He peers at me through the framed passage over the hygienic white counter that separates the kitchen from the dining room. The counter is bare. Mark does not allow things on counters. No fruit, no papers, no vases, no dish rack. Dish racks harbor bacteria, he says. That’s why there are no sponges, only paper towels. In public restrooms he flushes with his elbow and pulls towels from the dispenser before he washes his hands. One for turning the faucet, one for drying.
He lays the glass in the sink and wipes his mouth. “Did he confide in you? Did he tell you that he doesn’t care who wins? That he’s just doing Rob a favor?” He approaches me, coming around. “Don’t be stupid. There is no fight. There’s a scam, a fraud, a hustle. It’s pre-arranged. Harrison’s taking the fall. That’s why he came last night. To prepare you. It’s gonna kill him to get beaten. But Rob’s in too deep with the wrong people—he has to have a guarantee. A loss is the only way he can guarantee the outcome. He asked me for the money, but I told him I can’t get involved. Believe me,” Mark says, “I’ll do my part. I’ll fill the house. But I have a reputation to uphold. I have you to think about. That’s why, after this, that’s it. We’re done with this ghetto crew. We can’t walk into our future dragging this shit behind us.”
Mark is in front of me; we’re face-to-face.
“Harrison’s an animal,” Mark states, “just like his murderer father. Did he tell you that his father was a murderer? Of course not. Because he’s a liar. He lied to you all along.” Mark reaches out quickly, but I don’t blink my eyes. He slaps his hand around the back of my neck and folds me into his arms. “I feel bad for you, sweetheart, I really do. He lied about everything.”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. I see that now.”
46
The day of the fight he fucks me very hard, like he knows it will be the last time. “Shit,” Mark says when he is done, “you are a sweet taste in the mouth.”
The Cougar is double-parked outside Astor Place haircutters. I toss my bag through the open window onto the front seat. I get in and shut the door and Rob takes off.
“Nice haircut,” he says. “Reminds me of the old times out in Montauk. You gotta check out this French flick, Breathless. Jean Seberg plays this little American girl with chopped hair and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s cut really tight.”
He bounces in his seat as he drives. The night is hot and Rob likes when it’s hot. That’s because he’s a Leo, and Leos are sun kings, and Napoleon was a Leo. On Rob’s chest is a new tattoo—inside the globe of a plankton-green sun, it says Roi de Soleil. He got it in New Orleans, at Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras tattoos bring luck. I switch on the radio.
Cisco Kid was a friend of mine. Cisco Kid was a friend of mine.
The car turns widely off Houston and onto the Bowery. Outside my window the skies are marbleized blue-black, like out of mythology. Skies like a storm is coming, only no storm is coming. Skies that make you homesick, only there is no home. When we hit Delancey Street, the prostitutes tap the hood of the car. They wave to Rob. Hey.
“A case of mistaken identity,” Rob says to me. “I mean it, baby, I swear.”
In the Cirillos’ driveway, Rob’s sister, Christine, says, “Everybody in the pool. That’s the law.” Christine works the watch counter at Bloomingdale’s. If you want a watch, go to her. “I’m giving you five minutes, Evie,” she warns. “A grace period. Then I’m coming to find you.”
The first time I went to Rob’s parents’ house, I made the mistake of heading for the front door. “What are you,” Rob asked, “the mailman? The last people to go in that way were relatives from Italy.” It-lee.
The back door by the barbecue leads to the kitchen, which is full of aunts and grandmothers and elderly female neighbors. You can see the ladies through the screen, briefly making contact, like flies against a window. Arms to the elbows appear to hand off trays of peppers and sausages to fry.
Mrs. Cirillo works the grill. “In most families, Eveline,” she explains as she flinches into the charcoal smog to flip a rack of ribs, “this is a man’s work. But, what happens is, Dom gets to talking and everything burns.”
“I’ll do it, Ma.” Rob grabs at the tongs. “C’mon.”
“No, Robert,” she says, “take care of the company.”
From the upstairs bathroom window I can see the family swept up in a sort of insular and happy confusion that is enviable but that can’t possibly last. Christine has everyone running in the water to make a whirlpool, while Rob’s father leans wearily on the ladder, spraying non-comers randomly with the hose.
“Christine’s the ambassador of the pool,” Mr. Cirillo calls out. “I’m the artillery.”
In the far corner of the yard, Joey hovers protectively over his wife, Anna, who sits sideways on a lounge chair feeding the baby, who’s almost five now, though they still call him “the baby,” and their older son, Charlie. Everybody pretends that Rob is no good and Joey is the family man, but Joey’s the one they worry about. Rob’s lawlessness has a complementary decency, but Joey’s righteousness is forced, like he’s bored of it, like any day he’s gonna snap. There’s another brother, in L.A., Anthony, good-looking. No one mentions Anthony; there are no pictures—except one buried deep inside Rob’s wallet.
Joey removes his shirt and adjusts the band of his shorts. “C’mon, Charlie. Let’s go swamp Aunt Chrissie.”
Directly beneath the bathroom window is the back porch and the keg, and Rob filling pitchers. I can see the top of his head. Christine splashes at him. “Rob. Get ova here.” Without even looking, he steps casually to the side so the water can’t reach, like he knows the exact measurement from the pool to the keg.
“Forget about it,” Joey taunts as he climbs the ladder behind Charlie. “He won’t let Evie see him in a suit.”
“Nonsense. Robert hates to get wet,” Mrs. Cirillo chides. “He always has. He’s like a cat.”
“In my day a kid never passed up water,” Mr. Cirillo says. “It’s not natural.”
“What do I want to get cold for?” Rob says. “It’s been a long winter. I’m just starting to heat up again.”
When I come back out, I join the tangle of bodies, strollers, and pocketbooks clustered around the tables in the driveway. Christine’s Dominican boyfriend, Ray Peña, is passing out clear keg cups high to the brim with daiquiris decorated with umbrellas and naked ladies. Rob says the plan is to get people in the betting mood.
“Big bets are already down,” Rob explained to me earlier on the car ride over, “but ringside is critical. You can really rake it in ringside.”
Lorraine is there with a bunch of girls, cousins probably. Everyone’s either a cousin or they work in the meat or the fish market. All you hear is, eat the fish—it’s fresh; eat the beef—it’s fresh. Lorraine lights a cigarette on one of those mosquito coils, and the live ash reddens her French tip manicure. I haven’t seen her in a while. Her hair is straight and she’s skinny. She’s wearing a sleeveless white blouse and a straight black skirt.
“Lorraine looks pretty,” I tell Joey.
“Yeah,
well, she’s on her way,” Joey says. “First Chris DeMarco got her that job at the Newark DA’s office as a receptionist. Next thing you know, she enrolls at Fordham Law. Now she’s a paralegal. She only wears pinstripes,” he adds, “even on weekends.”
Rob comes over for two coladas. “Who you guys talking about? Ironside?”
I go to see her. I say, “Hey ya, Lorraine.”
“Hey ya, Evie.” She kisses me. I kiss her too.
“You look pretty,” I say. “Your hair and everything.”
“Thanks. I like yours too,” she says, taking a look around at the back. Touching it. “Jeez, you really went ahead and chopped it off.”
“Yeah, well. Summer’s coming.”
“I can’t believe it. Summer already.”
“I hear you’re going to Fordham. That’s great.”
“Yeah.” She smiles. “Upper West Side. Right by your apartment—Mark’s, whatever. I saw you one time, you were on the other side of the street. With Mark’s sister.”
“You should have stopped me.”
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“It wouldn’t have been a bother.”
“Next time,” she says, and she nods.
“Yeah,” I say. “Next time.”
“Mark’s here?” She looks around. “I didn’t see him.”
“Not yet, I guess.”
“He’s coming here, or there?”
“Not here. I think there. Either here or there.”
“Big night tonight,” she says, turning to face me.
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
“You ever seen him fight?”
I shake my head.
“Sit with me. Just in case.” Lorraine looks down at her table. “Hey, did you ever meet any of these guys?” she asks. “This is Anne, Kathy, Allegra, Donna—Donna’s my cousin. This is Evie,” Lorraine tells them. “A friend of Robbie’s. A friend of mine.”
At seven, everybody makes their way to the street, drifting in twos and threes. Nobody gets into cars. They just get ready to get into cars, sitting on hoods, cleaning out glove compartments. Rob pops open all the doors to the Cougar and puts in an eight-track. Then he turns the volume up real loud.
My cherie amour, lovely as a summer day.
My cherie amour, distant as the Milky Way.
Christine and Ray Peña start dancing in the street, and everyone starts dancing, even Mr. and Mrs. Cirillo. When Christine dances, her pool-damp hair swings, and all the kids come to see. In the neighborhood, she is the one to emulate. She is defiant in her contentedness, outward about having accepted the small circumstances of a small life. As with a priest who has actually done some living, there is a dangerous intelligence to her limited aspirations that makes her behavior especially worth the watch.
Rob takes my arm and draws me close; we dance too. It’s good to dance on the city streets in summer, the narrowness of the road and the expanse of the sky, the heat bleeding up through your thin shoes.
You’re the only girl my heart beats for.
How I wish that you were mine.
Three cars slither up the street in a lights-on procession, and the dancing ends. There is a conversion back to the sweeping contagion of real time—people breaking apart, fixing clothes and hair. Rob’s mother steps to the darkened rear window of the first car.
“Late as usual, Tudi. Everything’s ice-cold.”
Uncle Tudi creaks out to kiss her, and over her shoulder, through the inky rounds of his jumbo sunglasses, he eyes me in Rob’s arms.
He says to Rob, “You ready to head out?”
Rob says, “Yeah, I’m ready. You ready?”
“Yeah, I’m ready. I been ready.”
“What do you mean you’ve been ready?” Rob releases me. “We’ve all been waiting for you.”
“You wanna stand around all night and discuss technicalities?” Tudi asks.
“Shit no. Let’s go.”
“All right, then, let’s go.”
What I feel at that moment is a start, an ignition, a sense that what is happening belongs less to what has preceded it than to what is yet to unfold. Rob discharges me to Lorraine, who is somewhere behind me, calling my name. It sounds like calling a child through an open window: sweet, faraway—Eveline. Ray Peña’s powder-blue Lincoln pulls up readily, like it’s been idling nearby, and Rob and Joey get in, kind of getting vacuumed down or going fast-motion in reverse. They take off, and when they make a right at the end of the street, I see Rob’s forearm hanging out the window, striking against the door frame. It has a warlike look, and in my stomach I get a sick feeling. It’s not usual for him to reveal himself.
Christine, Lorraine, and I arrive at an auditorium somewhere on the Jersey shore, a decrepit building with a grand, tame face like that of a former picture palace. There are lots of people arriving. The look of them rushing to get in is anarchical—oblivious and opportunistic and everywhere at once, like rats shooting through dumpsters. We drive past twice looking for a place to park.
An empty ticket kiosk in the center of the clamshelled entrance is filled with framed memorabilia from the fifties and sixties of performers like Sammy Kaye at Point Pleasant and Fred Waring in Ocean Grove. There is a vintage Drink Coca-Cola sign and a Pokerarcade mini-marquee. Christine stops to find her reflection and apply lipstick. It amazes me how like Rob she is. Her lack of shame is somehow forward-reaching and mature. While most of us linger reticently on the sill of adaptation, she is already over and on the other side, surviving just fine.
She pats my waist. “Don’t look so glum, kid. It’ll be over before you know it.”
Through a set of double doors leading to the main arena, through the congestion of the crowd, I see the glow of the preliminary fight. This is the first thing I notice, the location of the glow, which is the location of the ring. The girls cut in through the right. I follow.
Mark is in the center of the auditorium, surrounded by people. Everyone he knows is there—Richard, his boss, and Richard’s fiancée, Mia; Brett; Anselm; Miles and Paige; Jonathan and Alicia; Marguerite, his shopaholic lawyer friend; Dara; that guy Swoosey Schicks; cousins and co-workers and guys from the pit whom I’ve never met. I can tell they’re from the pit by the pens in their pockets.
“Sorry I couldn’t make it to Rob’s parents’ house,” Mark says, pulling me from Lorraine, helping me down the aisle, giving me a kiss. “I was leading the convoy. Twelve cars!”
He passes me to Jonathan and Alicia. Alicia takes my hand, squeezing tightly. Lorraine is about ten feet behind me. She smiles before heading in another direction, as if to say, Sorry, but what am I gonna do? She shouldn’t feel sorry. I’m used to it. Everyone does what Mark says. Everyone believes in the supremacy of money.
The first fight is almost over. To prepare myself, I think back to all the times I’ve seen Rourke on display—a field, a gymnasium, a theater, a classroom. I remind myself that nothing I have seen so far has been random. I’ve been made ready.
There is a way they tell you to draw trees. A tree should not be a blot on the landscape, stripped of obliquity. A tree should express contour, core, crevasse. A tree should lift off the paper. To render contour, you have to draw back and forward and down. To render core, you must envision center. Center is not the dead point between two edges, or the geographic median of some object you happen to see, but the soul of the O, the heart of vastness, the umbilicus, the basic order of the nature of a thing, the fixed innerness from which unfixed outerness originates. To render its scars, seek the tree’s fortune. Conceive of the tree wholly. Every tree grows up and down and out with an equivalency of energy. If you look you will find a carnival of direction—perpendicularity and pendancy, lift and transverseness, convexity and indentation. A tree rises with grandeur when it meets with no obstacle; it skews sharply to prevail against adversity; it thickens incrementally, gaining girth with years; it bears down into the bed of the earth with its talons. Like a child, it bruises back in response to crue
lty and obstruction. Like a saint, it drives to the light.
In every tree there is a system of softness beneath the armature, a velvet refuge, an underside, a whisper-sweet sanctuary where potential is stored. Underside, because there is truth and beauty in what is rejected by sight. Underside, because in every king there is a boy.
Antonio Vargas has gypsy skin and black hair tied back. He looks like the kind of guy who is good to kids and aging relatives and to the girls who love him. As it turned out, Tommy Lydell backed out at the last minute. When Mark got the call, he kicked the coffee table and broke it. After Mark heard Vargas’s stats—twenty-two years old, one hundred ninety pounds, six-foot-one, 25–3 with 20 KO’s, and a lefty—he felt good enough to kneel down and check the damage. The leg had split, so he had Manny take it to the basement.
“You want me to glue it?” Manny asked, leaning at the door with the table. It looked like he was holding a dead Labrador against his chest, legs out. “I have the clamp!”
“Throw it out,” Mark said. “I’ll buy a new one.”
Rourke is double-jabbing, steering Vargas backward around the ring with ambling, edgy grace, his feet hardly touching the canvas. He fights easily, like it’s nothing. I don’t get the feeling I often get from seeing him in public, when he’s there but not there, and transcendent somehow to his own performance. From the first bell, when he walked out to center, he looked at Vargas, lifted his hands, and began to fight. Vargas seemed caught by surprise, by the lack of formality. I know how he felt. I know what it is to be completely unprepared for a being so instinctive. I know what it is to face him that way, when it is just you he sees.
Anthropology of an American Girl Page 58
