Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  Took a train to my mother’s. My friend died. Eveline.

  Mark brought the luggage out with him on Thursday. He said he assumed it was for Italy. My graduation present. He’d planned for us to leave directly from East Hampton on Monday morning. A car was coming. No matter what he said, I knew he suspected otherwise.

  The sight of the luggage brought back memories of the fight, of Rourke being beaten, of him beating back, of the screams of the crowd, of my run down the desolate boulevard to the Greek diner, of the cab ride home, of packing and Dan’s phone call, the little silver clock and the mad wind. These elements fused in my mind so that no detail could be removed without collapsing the memory as a whole. Just as flames, smoke, and heat mean fire, the suitcases meant Jack is dead.

  “You okay?” Mr. Ross called up.

  I called back that I was. “Want something to drink?” I asked from the landing. “A glass of ice water?” At breakfast he’d had three coffees.

  He was lighting a cigarette. “I’m fine,” he said, distractedly.

  I jogged down the steps, and he held the door for me. We paused by the pool, where he hooked my dress for the wedding on the crosspiece of an umbrella, then we walked in the opposite direction of caterers, florists, and landscapers.

  “I hope you don’t mind my having said anything at the rehearsal dinner last night,” Mr. Ross said, “but Mark has had a solid week to inform people. You were up-front and timely, and your choice is honorable. Considering the quality of your friendship with our own children, Theo and I would be fools to want it any other way.” He extinguished his cigarette against a fence post. “I’m not happy that Mark waited until the last minute. Not happy at all.”

  “He was hoping I’d change my mind.”

  “He wasn’t hoping anything. He was entrapping. I’m not sure what Mark’s up to. I hope this trip to Italy will be a good thing,” he said, not sounding particularly convinced. “It should be nice for you to get away.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him otherwise, so we continued to walk lingeringly, with him making inquiries into the memorial, and me describing the things I’d heard and said. I told him about sitting with Jack’s mother, and he liked to hear about Father McQuail.

  The BMW Mark had given me sat waiting on the front lawn, balmy and adorable, lanolin-green like chewing gum. Mr. Ross attached my dress to the hook above the rear passenger door and thoughtfully scooped up the bottom, laying it across the seat. At the driver’s door he took both my shoulders and he kissed me on the forehead. I could smell the stale nicotine on his breath and I felt my heart swell. I recalled my own words from the funeral about Jack never having been forced to become something he didn’t want to be. Some people live their entire lives holding true to the promises they’d made to those who depend on them.

  “We’re kindred spirits, you and I,” Mr. Ross said. “Poets.”

  In the heavily contrasted light beneath the trees, it became clear to me that he was thinning. I considered attributing the change to a haircut and new eyeglasses, but I confronted the possibility that he was sick again. I hoped someone was paying attention. I couldn’t bear to lose one more person. That’s why it was a relief to me that Denny had settled down. One night, before Denny and Jeff made a commitment, Rob had had to get Denny out of a bad situation over on Gansevoort Street, and afterward all Rob had said was, It’s a good thing I took a gun.

  “Yes, Mr. Ross,” I said. “Poets.”

  I twisted the side-view mirror and observed his return to the house. As he neared the porch, Alicia and her girlfriends rushed to the window like he was a celebrity and they were his fans. They knocked on the glass, calling and laughing. He waved in feigned annoyance as he mounted the steps, and when he opened the door they engulfed him. I watched Mr. Ross rededicate himself to the monster kinetics of family life, allowing himself to love and be beloved despite the private concessions of his heart and mind.

  Mark had shown up at my mother’s house at seven o’clock Friday night, one hour before the rehearsal dinner to try to pressure me into attending. I’d just returned from Jack’s funeral. We all had—Mom and Powell, my father and Marilyn, Lowie and David, Denny and Jeff, Dan, Troy, Smokey, and Jewel, Dr. Lewis and Micah, and several of my mother’s friends. Mark came upon us in the living room, a disheveled black circle.

  He had met most everyone over the years but never all at once and never with them sober and nicely dressed. Usually when Mark visited, he would get this look of unfolding shock, as though viewing a particularly revolting striptease. But that evening, like a politician suddenly recognizing the voting power of a marginal constituency, he walked in and worked the room, shaking hands, offering condolences.

  “Thank you for being there for Eveline,” he said as he passed from person to person. “I would have been there too, but my grandparents flew in from the coast for my sister’s wedding, and I had to pick them up at JFK. Considering the tragic circumstances, I should have sent a car for them, but my grandfather’s ninety, and my grandmother has Crohn’s disease.”

  In the kitchen, Mark sat at the table, in the chair nearest the stove, the place he’d sat the night we met four years before. As it happened, I was standing where I’d stood then, against the counter in front of the sink. Like dominoes, the days fell flat; I returned to the time when I knew what I wanted but had no means of achieving it, as opposed to having the means to achieve without the knowledge of any exceptional end.

  “Do we have to sit in here?” Mark wanted to know.

  Looking in his eyes, I could see the things I’d missed when we’d first met—the undisclosed designs, the skimmingness about the mind, the restless arrogance. Before going further, I was visited by a second memory—one of Rourke—in the same room, back on that same night, and me, caught in the crucible of adolescence but braver than I’d ever been. The memory of Rourke was so positive and tactile as to clear my mind. I felt a gaping sorrow, elegant and actual. Me thinking, Oh, what I’d lost, what I’d become.

  Sensing crisis, Mark changed directions. It was amazing, how well he knew me. “You’re going to break my father’s heart if you don’t come to the dinner tonight. Never mind the wedding tomorrow.”

  I called upon the only authority I possessed—artistic instinct and imagination. I established a scene, and I entered it. The kitchen, so overrun with memories of family and friends, became something purely physical, a set or stage, something onto which Mark and I had been thrust. He took on the look of a puppet, only not innocuous, and the things of which we spoke began to sound stilted. I could interpret his script. I could see that his promise to shelter me was based upon the premise of my homelessness. I wondered what was it he wanted from me in exchange. What did I possess that he needed to take away?

  My feet were bare; I set them firmly into ground, all points touching. Though it was June, the floor was cold. It was the same coldness that had always been. The coldness that belonged to my mother’s house, and so to my memory and perception of it and of me. That coldness was precisely what I needed to name; it was the paintable thing. And in my head there was a quote my mother used to say that always made me think of facing facts. It was T. S. Eliot’s, I think.

  The ways deep and the weather sharp. The very dead of winter.

  I walked myself through the years. I had attended college and I had a job in an art gallery. Mark and I shared an apartment on West Sixtieth Street, and there was a car for me to drive. In the bank I had eleven thousand dollars. Any time I paid for something during my time with Mark—books, food, gifts, clothes—the money reappeared in my account.

  I tried to think of Saturdays, any Saturday. I had some fractional memory of him on the grenade-green leather couch in the living room, phone in one hand, channel changer in the other, pulling me down to join him. And Saturday places—restaurants, nightclubs, benefits, Nantucket, the Vineyard, Cape Cod, East Hampton. Balding men, spidery women, the superfluous sounds of sex from his friends in adjoining rooms. Mark’s sex
was silent. It was stealthy and habitual like some dark routine, like he was addicted to the feeling of getting his money’s worth.

  And me, there with him, imprisoned by the impregnability of his position, lost in a world purged of sincerity and rife with conceit. Like him and every other member of his society, I was just another creaturely thing, defined outwardly by my appearance and inwardly by the ungainliness of my aspirations, the ugliness of my compromise. I was rendered most precise not by what I possessed, in fact, but by all that I had not yet attained. In the end, I was left only with an obscene sense of having participated in one long masquerade.

  Mark was reminding me of my obligations to his sister, his parents. “They have to supersede,” he said, “any conceivable obligation you might have had to this, this—”

  “Jack.”

  He was right. My obligations to Alicia and to Mr. and Mrs. Ross did supersede my obligation to Jack: they were living and he was not. They had treated me as family and I had agreed to be a member of the wedding party. However, these obligations did not supersede my obligation to myself—and this was something I needed to understand: the ongoingness and the wholeness of the self regardless of external circumstance. I tried to think about what I wanted. I considered the toll of my continued avoidance and denial: I’d lost everything—home and Jack and Rourke. Though I might have been passive, beneath my passivity there had been agency. My life had never been Mark’s version versus mine—rather, it had been one of my creations versus another. Nothing had happened that I had not allowed to happen. I had been stronger than I’d realized. Now I felt like I needed time. The coincidence of Jack’s death afforded me exactly that. Jack would not have minded. He would have insisted. Part of me wondered if he had not arranged the entire thing.

  “I’m sorry, Mark. I just can’t.”

  When Mark left, everyone in the living room took a break from telling stories about Jack to discuss Mark.

  “What a straight shooter!”

  “He’s not so bad!”

  “And I always thought he was kind of an asshole!”

  Except for my mother, who hadn’t spoken more than a few dozen words since my speech at the memorial. From midway up the stairs, she brought conversation to a halt when wearily she stated, “If you’ll all excuse me, I’m going to bed.” Then she turned and went, moving uncharacteristically slow as if there were marbles in her shoes, as if she dare not move as she usually moved, as if she feared shooting off to someplace faraway.

  Jonathan and Mark appear from behind the ivied trellis. They are joined by the groomsmen who had been ushers. Mark looks like a movie star in his tuxedo. He winks. Poor Mark, with Rourke looming directly behind me. Rourke, I think, clinging to consciousness, trying not to drift.

  I fix my dress, flattening the thin cross of ribbon that binds the bodice. I’m in gray, dove-gray, like a bound dove. He likes me in gray, though I didn’t think to make him like me. I didn’t intend to think of Rourke today. I don’t want to live any more of my life in absentia. Such living is cruel to those who need you truly. When the service commences, I listen carefully. I never want to forget how close I’ve come.

  Outside the tent, guests assemble loosely before forming a line to congratulate the families. Musicians disband and begin their exodus to the patio near the pool so that the ceremony tent can be reconfigured for dessert and dancing. The wedding planner and her staff appear, dressed like the parking attendants in white oxfords and khakis. They move us out with false smiles and stiff backs and stretched-out arms as if they belong to the Secret Service. Mrs. Ross asks me to escort her parents to the kitchen, where they can rest until the reception.

  “Thank you, darling.” Mr. Sacci’s head goes in circles like it is following the trail of a tightly flying fly. He grasps for his wife’s hand, and she grasps for his, both of them missing repeatedly. I take a hand of each and walk them slowly behind the altar to the kitchen, the province of tea and cookies, and Consuela.

  Unlike at the funeral, there are children—wearing pluffy taffeta dresses and little-man suits, running, swinging, climbing. Jack did not know any children or anyone with children. I suppose in his circle he was the last child.

  After the memorial service cleared out, Jack’s mother had summoned me privately into the house and given me a shoe. A baby shoe. White with a soft graying lace and scuffs by the heel and toe.

  “For you,” she’d said breathlessly. One foot remained on the lowest rung of a stepladder, and in her hand was a half key. On the edge of the closet shelf was an opened fireproof box. “For the Blackfoot hunting grounds. If you ever make it out there. Something of Jack’s to bury.”

  I’d turned the shoe in my hands. I’d wondered if it was a gift from Jack or from her. No matter, the message was unmistakable—in it I could see the stubborn will to walk.

  “Take it,” she’d insisted. “I have the other.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Fleming,” I’d said, and we’d embraced for the last time, the shoe in my hand, and my hand resting on her shoulder. When I got to Denny’s car, he and I had waved, both of us. And driving off, we’d waved once more, leaving her alone at the head of the driveway.

  Rourke has already said congratulations. He is not far from the end of the receiving line. His suit is a midnight-blue with fine white stitching, cut flat to his body. Beneath is a light-blue dress shirt. Both the blue of the suit and the blue of the shirt have considerable red in them, giving him an electric appearance. He’s laughing with Rob and Denny and Jeff, his head modestly lowered. The right side of his face is bruised black and inflamed. I can’t make out his eye. I wish I could go to him, to them, to my friends, but I can’t. There is still so much to do. Besides, I feel kind of groundless and spinning. Like Mark’s grandparents, grasping blind, one hand for the other.

  “Here’s Evie! Evie!” Alicia beckons, and she pulls me to the bridal party side of the line. “Is my makeup okay?” she asks overloudly, her face hovering by mine. “Did you see his eye?” she whispers. “They say it’s never going to be the same.”

  I kiss her, then Jonathan. The photographer demands a picture. There is an awkward pause, a flash. Alicia winks at me, then brightens professionally for the next person. I move on to congratulate the others, and finally, Mark.

  “It’s been a long week,” he murmurs suggestively as he squeezes me, his hips pushing in, his eyes looking behind me, to see if Rourke notices. Mark says, “We’re going to take a drive to get photos. Meet me over by the limos.” As I walk away, he yells, “Stay out of the sun.”

  Rob takes my hand and leads me across the garden, turning the corner by the summer room and going in, standing where Mark can’t see from his position in the receiving line. Rob raises his green aviator glasses to the peak of his head. Beneath the glasses his eyes are green as well, only softer, more receptive. He adjusts the fallen strap of my dress, and gives me a light hug.

  “You smell like coconut,” he says.

  My chin rests on his shoulder. “My aunt gave me some lotion.”

  “Oh,” Rob says. “Lotion. Very nice.”

  I push away. I’m crying, and I don’t want to get his suit wet. His suit is cream-colored, a linen ecru, and his shirt is snow-white. His tie is the color of purple irises.

  “You look handsome.”

  He reaches in his pocket for a tissue, and, taking up a tiny piece, he pats beneath my eyes. “You like the suit, huh? Lorraine picked it out. She’s into fashion now, so I gave her a call. We went to Barneys over in Chelsea. You gotta see her rip through ties. It’s like a special aptitude, like those autistic kids who know Mozart. We went to the Russian Tea Room after. She always wanted to go there, so I figured, What the hell!”

  “That’s great, Rob.”

  “She’s dating some lawyer now. Short kid—five-eight. He’s got a two-bedroom condo in Jersey City. I go, ‘Rainy, any short guy with a two-bedroom condo is wife hunting.’ And she goes, ‘That’s right, Rob. And any guy living with another guy and a rabid do
g in a trailer with no job and a penchant for gambling is not. It took me ten years, but I finally figured it out.’” Rob laughs. “‘Penchant,’ she says. ‘For gambling.’”

  “She loves you.”

  He looks over my head and sucks one cheek to his teeth. “You all right? You seem shaky. You shaky?”

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “Suicide,” Rob says. “That’s rough. But what are you gonna do? You can’t change people. Look at my brother. He’s dead. Practically. Soon, he’ll be dead.”

  “Anthony?”

  “That’s right, Anthony, in L.A.” Rob reaches for a cigarette, removes his hand, and finds a stick of gum instead. “Tony. All any of us ever heard growing up was how handsome he was. Had any girl he wanted, aged fifteen to fifty. A guy like that gets a complex, know what I’m saying, like, Who needs a real job? So Tony goes out West and takes an excursion through the magical world of porn. Strictly straight stuff, but still. I tried talking to him. I tried everything. But forget about it, the money was too good.”

  I sit on the rattan sofa. Rob adjusts his tie and sits too.

  “That’s the reason me and Harrison stayed in L.A. after college. My uncle was ready to go make Anthony ugly, so he couldn’t shame anybody. I’m like, ‘Uncle, what are you gonna do, cut his dick off?’ I mean, once you start that shit, where do you stop? I asked for a chance to use a little positive persuasion. You know, spend some time, hang around, get inside, pry him loose. I offered to stay on at UCLA—at Anderson, that’s the business school—my mother wanted me to get an MBA anyway, so I figured this way I’d make her happy. My father and my uncle were a little chilly on the plan. They knew I was a pushover where my brother was concerned. That’s when Harrison agreed to stick around too. And then that whole Diane thing happened soon after. Even so, I got caught up. That world sucks you in. Sex and cash. Blow clouds your judgment. That’s what’s up with Mark, by the way. Too much coke. Those Masters of the Universe assholes keep at it all day. It gets to be like popping aspirin.”