Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  Jack’s handwriting is linked as if the pen never left the paper. Often we would write that way.

  for the girl in despair

  you must be in despair

  foreigners always are and you are

  a visitor to compromise, a seer, pity me i couldn’t

  build a life to keep you in it.

  beyond experienced time

  and lived time there is pure time

  together we found it what we found you can find again

  every man needs to be a hero, i learned by your eyes

  we all want the secret of your eyes—

  your eyes say that it’s better to love than be loved.

  you are the supreme generous and brave like hell

  for giving the only gift that matters—

  the soul, they say the soul transcends this is a fact because here

  in the last hours there is only you.

  and so i’ll be a bird to find a bird,

  since a bird is what you’ll be.

  you’ll know me, i’ll be the one who says,

  there was a girl, there was a life

  I used to lead in the grass in the sand through the air beneath the sky

  under the waves through the rain

  through the wind. I’ll say,

  you remind me of the wind.

  so until we meet again, listen for me.

  I will sing to you, nightly

  p.s. this is not an explanation of why i’m doing this since

  you know that every time i cried no one came

  only you made me numb, music made me numb dope made me numb

  but you and music, well,

  you have to practice that, play at it night and day

  and dope, jesus, the shitty illiterate company you have to keep—

  the one reassuring constant for me has been

  the bizarre grandiosity of my despair it is

  the closest thing i have to a friend. i really hate to lose it.

  a few messages to the derelicts and limbless losers,

  all the fakers at the funeral—

  to my father—nothing, he is Satan in plaid.

  to my mother—that’s good just like that. To my mother—

  to liz—those records are not for you they’re for your kids

  tell dan stop playing for the crowd he’s too good for the crowd

  tell smokey take it easy and pick up the box i left

  for him at duke’s on 14th street.

  And tell jewel, i don’t know, you’ll think of something good.

  tell Rene thanks for going in where no one else would go—

  i’ve done what i had to do, tried to make it right can’t think of

  anything else, for what it’s worth i loved you i love you

  don’t come i don’t want you here it is not good here.

  this is the song, ask dan to play it for you,

  it’s called pretty when you wanna be

  it goes, you are pretty but just be pretty when you wanna be—

  I close the book. My first instinct is to run, fast and far. I make my way off the jetty, scrambling to the end, then I dive into the sand before cutting back across the beach. I go as fast as I can, making my way toward the parking lot. The wind draws down from behind to carry me along, and I feel like something light and dry and long forgotten. I push harder, using the wind to trample the spine of the earth. I want to move forward to reach prior points. I want to run back in time, to arrive at the day he died, to find the spot where his body lay. I want to lift him into my arms, clean him, dress him, fill the hole he made. I want to close his eyes. I want to mark the place he died; the leaving place. And then, running more, running again, not stopping until I collapse. Until a wall, there must be a wall. Am I mad? Yes, I think I must be. There is no wall in life, nothing to meet, nothing to hit, there is only running, and then more running.

  I circle the block twice, checking for cars. When I’m sure it’s not there, and that Rob’s car is not there, I ride my bike onto the front lawn and lean it alongside the porch. I enter the main house through the porch door and go to the kitchen. The dishwasher is churning and cleaned crystal glassware is stacked on the pantry counter. The radio is playing Vivaldi’s “Summer.” I go to Consuela’s bedroom door. She appears in a red terry cloth T-shirt and matching shorts. Behind her, a television shows a weather map of Connecticut. Hanging over the single bed like mournful eyes are two wildflower drawings I made for her.

  I am breathless and my legs are wet from sitting on the jetty.

  She hands me a towel. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay,” I say. I thank her. Then I thank her again. For everything. For the flowers in the cottage, the careful pressing of my laundry, the foods she knows I’ll eat. “It’s been hard,” I conclude.

  Her eyes twinkle. “Yes, sí. Too different.” Meaning me and Mark, I know.

  “I hope someday you can bring your son.” When she came to work in America she left her five-year-old son in Ecuador with her husband, who died one month after she went away. “The alcohol,” she confided when we first spoke of it. “When I leaving I begging him not to kill himself. Take care of the baby, I say. But anyway, he kill himself. That was with the drinking. Now I talk to my son on the phone but he don’t know me. He calling my sister Mommy.”

  “Goodbye, Consuela. I’ll miss you.”

  “I miss you too,” she says, as though I’m already gone, which I suppose in a way I am. “You do what you do,” she states, not meaning me, necessarily, but people in general.

  “Yes,” I agree. “You do what you do.” That’s the whole tragedy.

  A few wedding guests are still in the dance tent, about thirty of them. Another dozen or so are around the pool. It is nearly midnight. I pass unseen. In the cottage hallway, the bulb is blown, and the doormat is kicked out. I straighten the mat, then climb into a nest of cigar smoke. The smell is of many more cigars than Mark could possibly have finished alone. I wonder who has been there. At the top of the landing I take off my sweatshirt and leave it on the landing with Jack’s book. A chalk-white scuff marks the base of the built-in cherry closet where I am standing. I make a note in my mind to have it repaired—then I remember that I am leaving. The apartment door is open; in the living room area the stereo plays the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?”

  I am the son and the heir, of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.

  I am the son and heir, of nothing in particular.

  Mark is on the terrace, specter-like against the artificial radiance in his seven-hundred-dollar tux, leaning back in his chair, his legs on the wooden rail. He looks exhausted, but powerful, like a movie director surveying the glow of a just-emptied set, like he is the master of his exhaustion. His hair falls around his face; his hair is nice, straight except around the edges, where it curls now that it’s long. It’s just hair, I tell myself. His eyes, only eyes. Remarkably, I feel a failure of nerve.

  Though leaving him is something I expected, it feels no less traumatic than something unexpected—the grief of losing Rourke, losing Jack, of cherished things passing—Maman, a baby. When I ask myself whether I love Mark, the answer is yes. Because we were brought together, because we stayed together, because we are, in the black regions, compatible. Ours has been a parasitic compatibility, but it has also been an enduring one, and the sense that he is mine is uncomfortably clear.

  Mine, not mine. There are things we feel we must possess; we believe that they define us. And yet there are the things that chance would have us possess, and these also define us. The difference between the two is like owning the tree you have purchased for your yard versus befriending the bird who comes by chance to nest in it. I don’t know which is more true, more real. I know only that the gentler acquisitions enter and honor you, simply by living freely alongside you, whereas the things taken and held by force—people, objects, ideas—stagnate, like standing water. They separate from their original purpose, lose their first nature and d
esign. They become objects, and the holder the objectifier.

  I sit alongside Mark, and together we watch the wedding’s uncivilized conclusion—girls in wet dresses shivering by the side of the pool and guys in pink shirts arguing across cocktail tables. The commotion could be miles away. In the space immediately around us there is a stillness, curious and taciturn, but charged, like the dynamic silence following a bomb blast.

  “They told me about a girl,” Mark says, wiping his jaw with the back of his wrist. His hand is brown from sun, and the hairs are red like iodine. I know the weight of that hand, the persistence of it. “A girl.” He laughs. “Some girl.”

  It doesn’t surprise me that he goes back to the night we met. I went there too, yesterday evening, in my mother’s kitchen. It’s as if he is responding belatedly to my half of that conversation. He speaks with abandoned reluctance, tired of feigning ignorance to my position, bored with keeping my state of mind separate from his state of mind. From reality.

  “In your cheap thrift store clothes. In that shitty little shack by the train tracks.” He gazes into his drink, a full clear glass—vodka. I look for a bottle. I see broken pieces, a toppled chair. “God, you could dance.” He searches my face. “I felt like I was fucking you already.”

  I appreciate his candor. More men should try speaking so honestly; it must be good for the soul to set the filth free. They all think such thoughts. Why not just say them?

  His legs drop off the rail, slapping the deck. He leans forward onto his knees and liquor splashes on the leg of his pants. He doesn’t even try to wipe it off. “I thought Harrison would try to kill me that night. When he didn’t, I knew I’d won. He didn’t want you seeing him for what he is. An animal. That’s why I told you—he’s a liar.”

  Listening to Mark, I have the feeling I’ve taken part in a lockdown. This is how Jack felt his whole life. Like there was a plan for him, only he’d had no part of it. I go to the railing; Mark follows. In the tuxedo he seems smaller, shoe-black and knife-like. Like he is slicing through the haze.

  “‘Bernadette,’” Mark snarls. “Do you remember?”

  “On the jukebox.”

  “You said you would never be loved so much.”

  “You said you doubted it.”

  “Do you know why?” Mark asks.

  “Because you knew how you felt about me?”

  “Because I knew how he felt about you.” Mark laughs. Not really. Not a laugh at all. “But he knew nothing about you. He thought you were independent. You’re too insecure to be independent. He thought you would wait. You’re too impatient to wait.”

  That’s funny—impatient. I’d been waiting for years. I’d wait forever.

  He catches my thinking. “You don’t think you’re impatient? Think again. Every time he hesitated, you penalized him. The first night we met. A year later, when he took off the second time. That’s why I never wait. I make sure not to. ‘Timing is everything to you,’ you always tell me. No, Eveline—timing is everything to you. I’m just a fast learner.”

  I listen closely. Mark is good at talking. His reasoning is specious, but beneath the sophistry there is a plan. I can’t tell—is the plan to win, or simply not to lose?

  “I did my part,” he says. “Affection, distraction. I led the way. You refused to follow. You stayed faithful to him in your mind. I let you have your mind. Frankly, the mind is overrated compared to the body. Unfortunately, your loyalty didn’t register with him. The only place that counts to a man like that is this.” He slaps his hand between my legs, stroking upward to my pubic bone, stopping and jamming in with his wrist. The heel of his palm hits my low belly, and his fingertips shoot up into me. Using that axis, he clamps down, pulling me closer. Mark whispers, “He’ll never forgive you.”

  I knock the inside of his elbow to break his hold, but he returns, tighter and harder, practically sealing the gap between us.

  “He knew I’d get to you. He came back to Montauk that summer because he couldn’t risk leaving you to me. He hid you away. He tried to infect you. I infected you back. I gave you more than love, more than money. I reversed a history of neglect. I trained you to live on impulse. You want to drive—have a car. You want shoes—buy six pairs. You want to paint—don’t work. You want food—there’s more than you can eat.

  “What are you going to do now? Work in a restaurant? Sell your art at yard sales? Face it. You can’t go to him. He can’t afford you.” Mark’s face closes down quick on the right in a sort of spasm. “Go anywhere you like. The world will be empty without me.”

  He releases me but doesn’t move. It’s a dare. If I run, he’ll grab me; it’s safer to stay. There are three or four inches between us. I can see the broken glass near our feet. I think I’d better get rid of it. I bend straight down to pick it up, my body in a line, and he lets me. First I get the circular base and use it as a canister for the rest. There are two stems among the shards. Maybe there was a toast, one of those wild party toasts. It suddenly occurs to me that Mark isn’t slurring. That he’s perfectly sober. He doesn’t even smell like liquor. Either the drink in his hand is the first, or it’s water.

  He grabs a fistful of my hair and jerks me forward. I fall to my knees, swinging the hand with the broken glass just in time, keeping the palm raised. Mark holds my skull, and pulls my face into his thighs. I reach blindly to the rail, and twisting my left hand through the bars, I let go of the glass. It cracks against the brick below.

  “Bleeding on the streets,” he says to the top of my head. “Destitute.” He spits when he talks. Specks of saliva prick the back of my neck. For a second I think it’s the rain, finally arrived. “Without that abortion you would have ended up dead. Like your junkie friend.”

  The smell of his penis through his pants—it smells like soap or detergent. I turn my face away.

  “It wasn’t an—”

  “Spare me the revision. If your body hadn’t had the sense to dispose of the offending organism, you would’ve killed it anyway. You wouldn’t have gone to him. And though I was happy to pay for an abortion, I never would have raised his offspring. You might have taken it to your mother, she relishes subsocial behaviors, but you’d just gotten out. You had no intention of going back. And, by the way, you could have called anyone from the hospital that day—Dennis, your aunt, Sara, even asshole Rob. But you were quick. You were devious. You called me. You knew it would crush him. You knew I would tell. And you knew how I would characterize the loss. I was impressed by the efficiency of your cruelty. I was shocked, actually, by how hard he took it.” Mark bends. “He was crying.”

  He waits for a response. I say nothing. It’s hard to say nothing. It takes everything. I think of Jack, his moments alone with the gun. Deliberating, agonizing. Sitting there, back against a tree, coping with a lifetime of fear and failure, waiting and waiting, for nothing and for no one. Pulling the trigger in a final concession to solitude. Proof.

  “Didn’t I tell you? He came to the apartment. To give me money. He’s so honorable. The night of that pathetic Mexican dinner. The night I took you back to my parents’ place. I told him, ‘I don’t need your money.’ Harrison said, ‘Then give it to her.’ I said, ‘Trust me. She’s not going to need it either.’ That was the first night we slept together, Eveline. You actually rewarded me.”

  I say, “You should have just left me in the hospital.”

  “No, no. You were too good to pass up. Besides, I liked the way you played—an eye for an eye. Biblical.” Mark kneels now too. He takes me down to the ground. Pulling me around, following with his chest, ready to bear down. “What did I say, earlier tonight, how long has it been—a week?”

  Oh, that’s the part about his not drinking. He kisses me hard, and his tongue in my throat makes me gag. If I could scream, I would scream, but a scream—

  There’s a noise. Something hits the cottage. The wall or the door, I don’t know, a rock or a brick. Our heads look toward the rail. In my mind is a picture of us that way, M
ark and me, grafted like skin from one part of a body to another. Like living onto dead. “If you’re thinking it’s Harrison,” he says in a sort of under-growl, “you’re mistaken. He left with Diane. He’s probably screwing her right now.”