Anthropology of an American Girl (30 page)

“I’m going,” I announced, and there were a few mumbled good nights.

Jack thrust back his chair, standing before the legs were square, so that it marched and threatened to topple. He stormed up behind me and tossed his coat over his shoulders. One limp sleeve skimmed my back.

The screen door slammed behind us, hitting twice. I left, and Jack followed. His feet punched the porch steps as he descended, and when our bodies were aligned, he zipped his jacket and handed me his gloves again. The cold was not the same tranquil cold as when we’d left the theater, but a sharp chill. Jack and I walked as we’d always walked, on the streets we knew so perfectly well, and as we did, the drama of the evening began to dwindle into distant nonsense.

At my house I washed and put on long underwear and socks, and I felt more like myself again, whatever that was. Or
whoever
. I joined Jack on the floor. He was picking threads from the torn knee of his jeans.

“I know what’s happening,” he said into his hands.

I didn’t ask what he meant. If I forced him to put his thoughts to words, they would appear to lack foundation. He could only say,
I saw you two sitting together, not talking
, or,
I saw him take your hand after Denny offered it to the crowd
. I could defend myself against accusations, but that was a lawyerly way to waste time, assailing an argument’s logic rather than conceding to its probability. Something
was
happening, it was true.

“I’m really upset,” he said.

I was also upset. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“You’re not losing me,” he said. “You’re forsaking me.”

Forsaking implied choice. I had no choice with Rourke. I said, “Jack, I love you.”

He tilted his head back and fell silent, for a long time, saying nothing. He was heartless to retain his grief, to inflict me with the knowledge that for once I was the cause of his torment, not the remedy. For purposes unknown I had been entrusted with the care of his soul, and so it was the most vile type of treason for me to have enriched his self-loathing. His existence suddenly seemed so tenuous to me, his figure so fragile. He was just one body, leading one life.

He breathed in, and three lines appeared in the middle of his forehead. He reached for me, and I folded into his arms, happy to give him the thing that I lacked—the object of his desire. I wondered if he’d felt happy when I’d told him I loved him, and was he relieved that I did not say different things—or worse, nothing at all. Through his sweater I assessed
his breathing. I knew it by heart. It was shallow, like water you can hardly wade in, and unsynchronized, as if he could not match with the atmosphere.

“You’re shivering,” he said. He took the comforter from my bed and wrapped it around my shoulders and then his, making a nest. Jack stroked my hair and I kissed him. And we listened reverently to the night—to the chronic buzz of the refrigerator, to the occasional lurch and jerk of the boiler, to the dainty
tink
of the metallic numbers on my digital clock, flapping scrupulously. At three-thirty, he said that he should go home.

“Not yet,” I begged, “please.” I couldn’t be alone, not yet.

I
knew what to do. I would renounce my feelings. I would resume early loyalties. I would reduce my needs. I would disappear. The dispossession of Rourke would become for me a symbol of life’s divine impermanence.

My days began and ended the same as anyone’s—with light, with dark. The difference was that mine were stripped of the routine that generally divided the middle. I forfeited the comfort of habit. I wandered unpredictably, leaving school early or staying late. I began to accept offers. If Lisa Tobias or Dave Meese or Rocky Santiago asked if I needed a ride home, I said okay, even if I wanted to walk. When Alicia Ross invited me to O’Malley’s for Sara Eden’s birthday dinner, I brought balloons. When my mother invited me to watch her friend Francis Holland do his Dylan Thomas impersonation at the college, I accepted. When Denny needed me to drive with him and his mother to her pulmonologist in Stony Brook, I did. And when Dad was building frames for my final watercolors, Jack and I went into the city one weekend to help.

Though everyone was grateful for the congenial way I was acting, I did not particularly enjoy doing the things I kept agreeing to do. My
only aim was to avoid Rourke until April. Kate said April was the last drama class. In science fiction movies, women in suit dresses and men in skinny ties stand at plate glass windows, waiting for the invading things, ants or birds or pods, to finish whatever they’re doing, breeding or eating, and to leave. Home became that way for me: a place infected with risk.

All time became my own time, regulated by a mysterious inner mechanism, superior to the clock. I understood time; clocks merely measured it. I would rise to leave one place and move to the next. I did not need to know that it was Tuesday or Thursday afternoon to detect his occupancy in the building. I could feel the changes Rourke rendered—in the halls, in the rooms, in a track that drew in the school like a belt. When I sensed that he had engaged with whatever it was that he had come to engage with, usually with drama class in the auditorium, I knew I could safely slip away. Weeks went by this way.

“I’m totally confused by this new schedule,” Jack grumbled one day. He came into the yearbook office and hopped onto Marty’s desk.

“You always seem to find me,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to make a profession out of it,” he complained. “What do you do in here, anyway?”

I shrugged. “Make lists. Sort.”

“Sounds pressing,” he said. “C’mon, let’s go.”

“A few more minutes.”

He reached for Kate’s flute case. “What’s this doing here?”

“She asked me to take it home for her.”

“Take it home for her?” Jack asked sarcastically. “Why, did she sprain her wrist?”

“She has drama. She didn’t want to carry it there.”

He opened the box. Inside was a peculiar bed of opaque sapphire fabric, that crushed velvety instrument case stuff. He peered inside the joints of the flute, then pieced it together obligingly, the way mothers brush newborn hair. When he blew into it, it cooed sweetly. Jack could play anything. He paused. “I was accepted at Berklee,” he said.

Berklee was a music college like Juilliard, only in Boston. Jack could
have gone to Juilliard with Dan, which would’ve been logical with me at NYU, but he refused to live at his parents’. “No contest,” he’d said from the start. “I’d take up hairdressing to avoid living at home.”

We both began to talk at once. “What did you say?” we asked, simultaneously also.

“Go ahead,” I offered.

Jack insisted, “No, no. You first.”

I’d forgotten what I’d been thinking, and he seemed to forget also. His leg started to swing, slow then fast, even and hard, like a carpenter’s hammer, with the toe of his blue suede Puma kicking the metal garbage can and the heel bouncing against the side of the desk. In one jolt, he banished the canister into the defenseless center of the room. It pirouetted on its rim in the suspenseful manner of a rolling coin. “We’re driving up this weekend,” he said. “My old man hasn’t been there yet.”

So it was final. Jack would be in Boston and Kate in Montreal. I would be in Manhattan at NYU. None of us within walking distance of the others. One thing about friends is that they have to be within walking distance. That’s why mothers with kids in parks and guys in the military and people who work in offices become friends even if they have nothing in common.

Jack started to speak, but his words were consumed by a change in pressure, a nearly inaudible sound that passed as it appeared, like the light nick of a record skipping. Rourke—engaged in class.

I raised my chin and cocked my head. “Let’s go.”

“Excellent,” he said, somewhat surprised. “Cool.”

Kate started to make me nauseous. One night I was reading in the living room, and she came in and answered the phone. She spoke so loudly that I thought I might get sick. When I tried to get up, I fell back down in a queasy cyclone of confusion. My stomach pitched. I lowered my head to my knees.

My mother’s hand touched my neck. “Let’s get you to bed.”

She tucked the edges of my blanket around me, trimming the perimeter of my body. Probably I resembled one of those homicide outlines, marked indelibly in the position of my collapse. My mother sat. I was
consoled by the depression made by her body in the mattress. I drew her hand between my palm and cheek. Maybe I would sleep. There was a chemical coming in, dripping in. I felt microscopic pulses of something, diminutive gates opening.

“When was the last time you ate?” she asked.

My eyes opened—how much time had passed? It seemed she’d been sitting only seconds, yet it had been long enough for me to dream a dream. Something about lost passports and missing luggage and foreign customs officials in a makeshift room set up on the tarmac.

“Be right back,” my mother said. She took back her hand and left me, stepping into the kitchen. A ruthless dusk replaced her, hitting quick, like a prison cell door shutting.

Kate popped in, her hair rippling like a flag. “Sick again?” she said, and I felt another wave of nausea. I pulled the quilt over my face. “Well, excuse me!” she said.

I stopped sleeping almost altogether. The malignancy of night and lust and loneliness made me shift restlessly. All that I’d struggled to suppress during the day would erupt into the dark at night, flooding the silence of my room, and I would call for him. If I slept at all, I would find him behind closed eyes, like an object through bright water, a shivering richness. We would convene—
reconvene
—in some substitute district, at some alternate age, with him not speaking and me not speaking. In those false regions, at his false side, I found my first peace.

It was then that I began to write. Writing helps when you can’t talk to your friends; it wasn’t that my friends were untrustworthy, it’s just that I would never discuss something that was hardly real as though it were really real. Often people do this, forcing friends into authenticating an imaginary life. I composed a list for myself. One column for all the times I’d seen him, another for each time I’d discussed him. Mom’s accountant friend Nargis would have called this a
table
. I liked the idea of a table, of providing a frame for runaway numbers or dodgy ideas. I noted peripheral details such as conversation, clothes, and weather. I used a code for names, which was somewhat pointless since the list was in my room in my handwriting, and there were not enough characters in my life to outwit
a motivated intruder. For Rourke’s name, I substituted the letter
S
, which followed
R
in the alphabet. Kate was
B
, which preceded
C
for Catherine, and Jack was
G
, the last letter of Fleming.

Seventeen encounters in six months, and eleven conversations. I thought maybe I should burn the document, but I liked the compact and illegible blocks of handwriting. The dense and inky look of the pages seemed official and purposefully slanted, urgently conceived and textured to the touch, like the original Constitution.

S
omeone called my name from the pay phone area. “Hey, Eveline.”

I froze, though I knew it could not possibly be Rourke. I went slowly to the alcove across the hall from the main office and peeked around the edge of the wall. Ray Trent was there, picking through a handful of change. He wore a black turtleneck and blue jeans, and his blond hair was feathered back. He looked like a handsome Tom Petty. Under his arm was a worn, liver-brown phone book held together by a rubber band. It seemed urbane, the need to make calls from school. I wondered was my number inside.

“Did I scare you?” He smiled. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No, I just, no—you didn’t.”

“That’s a nice sweater.”

“Thanks, it’s Kate’s.”

“I’m sure it’s nicer on you,” Ray said, then he held up one finger to me as he told the person he was calling to hang on. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “What are you doing Sunday?”

Jack would be in Boston with his dad. I said, “Nothing.”

“Ever been to the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Montauk?”

“No,” I said. I hadn’t.

“Great,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at nine.”

At eight fifty-five on Sunday morning there was a knock, and my mom answered the door. Steam was rising from her coffee mug, fanning her face. “Hi, Ray,” she said. They’d met before—the first time was when he took me to the junior prom.

“Happy St. Paddy’s, Irene.” Ray kissed her cheek.

My mother raised her cup. “I made coffee. Want some?”

“A quick cup, sure.” He stepped into the house and followed Mom to the kitchen.

I had no idea why I’d said yes to the parade, except to say that the invitation had taken me by surprise. Though I knew Ray well, I felt nervous about widening some circle I didn’t intend to widen. Now that I’d experienced being a woman to a man I was in love with, I’d become self-conscious about being a woman to the world in general. Of course, being female is always indelicate and extreme, like operating heavy machinery. Every woman knows the feeling of being a stack of roving flesh. Sometimes all you’ve accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident.