Anthropology of an American Girl (42 page)

The car idled at the front of the driveway while he emptied the mailbox. He walked back over, sifting through papers, extracting certain pieces and examining one envelope in particular before getting in, wedging the pile on the dashboard, and easing the car to a stop at the driveway’s end. He turned off the engine, and we sat. And it was nice, and it was strange, because though it was not home, it was as good as home, and in fact, it was better—it interested me more.

A brick walkway led from the car to the backyard, passing through a wooden gateway. On the other side was a garden in full bloom, enclosed on three sides by a high wall of yew. There were birds, their calls colliding, creating a miniature symphony of sound. Rourke reached into the iron frame of an outdoor light fixture and withdrew a key, then he unlocked the door to a ground-floor apartment.

I followed him into a sun-filled studio. The mottled plaster walls were off-white and bare, and the woodwork was charcoal-gray. It smelled like recent construction, as though it had just been renovated. To our left, two glass-paned doors opened onto a brick patio, and in the corner opposite the entry, there was a modest kitchen with new appliances.

He set my bag on top of a stack of packed cardboard boxes that lined the entry. I figured they were from when he moved out of his house in Montauk the previous month, though I supposed it was possible he had not unpacked because he was leaving again to go somewhere else. Rourke moved to the kitchen counter and rifled through the remainder of his letters, popping a few apart. The room was hot, so I stepped around the couch and unbolted the doors to the yard, splitting them for air.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and he disappeared down the hall.

When he left, a certain heaviness in me was alleviated; I felt my consciousness seep back into my body. Sometimes you see people on television get awakened from hypnosis. There’s a dumb blink followed by an apish inner inquiry as to how long they’ve been witless and what degradations might have occurred. If it is a cartoon or a comic, there are stars about the eyes.

I just remained in place at the patio doors, waiting for him to return. Watching the day lower like the curtain on a play you wished would never end. I could hear the summertime nothingness, the haunting children’s voices, advancing, then waning. And yet, I did not slip beyond Rourke’s field of influence. It was as if we were sharing the same web or net: no matter what position he occupied, I would be moved.

His voice called my name; I met him in the corridor outside the bathroom. He was wet with a towel around his waist. On his hips and on his sides, the muscles were like cords and knots. There were drops remaining on his chest; I touched one, and the water parted. The shower was still
running, so I passed Rourke, undressed, and stepped in. The heat of sunset warmed the bathroom window, and also the stall.

When I came out, he was there, dressed in jeans, holding a towel. He dried my neck and shoulders, then wrapped me up and drew me in, leaning his face on the top of my head, and I began to cry. When the tears came, we did not speak of them, either of us. Maybe it was the closeness of him, the excruciating nearness. Maybe as a vessel I was too delicate for a love so whole: it felt beyond my capacity to keep. Hanging limp over the doorknob was a dress that we’d bought on the way home from the beach—rayon red and moody, with a high waist and a halter top. He held it for me to step into. The zipper tugged at the curve of my back. In the mirror we were enigmatic, my eyes so tragic, my dress so low, and Rourke, a triumph of masculinity. He drew on a navy sweater with a short zipper at the neck, and he watched as I combed back my hair with my hands, put on lipstick, and fastened my shoes. I felt no shame before him. Shame was a luxury. We had no time for shame.

Everyone stopped and stared when we walked into Mineo’s. Waiters made way, flattening their chests and inclining their heads. Rourke escorted me through the cramped space, the broad heat of his palm making an impression on the small of my back. People were waving from a booth in the rear. They seemed to be expecting us. Rourke introduced me to a woman named Lee who was pretty like a doll, and her husband, Chris, who was twice her size and who had skin like polished metal. I’d never seen skin like that. Later Rourke told me it was that way from taking steroids. The other guy was Joey, Rob’s brother, whom I’d met the night before in East Hampton.

“At the beach,” Joey told Lee and Chris with a jerk of his head. It seemed as though they’d been talking about it. I wondered if they’d mentioned Mark. Joey kissed me, then told Rourke he was sorry his wife, Anna, couldn’t make it, but she had to stay home with the kids. “We tried to get a sitter but
nothing doing
on a Sunday. And my mother was at church all day, so she’s wiped out.”

“What are you talking about? How can anyone get ‘wiped out’ at church?” Chris snapped derisively. “She just has to sit there.”

“Who knows what she does. I think they got her cleaning. She comes home and naps.”

The three of them sat on one side of the booth, and I slid sideways across the bench opposite them with my back to the dining room, gripping the table to steady myself. I wasn’t very steady. I tried to copy the others; they seemed more or less sure of distances and weights. I left a place for Rourke but he just stayed standing at the end of the table.

“Where’s Rob?” he asked.

“Good question,” Chris said.

Everyone looked to Joey, who shrugged. “I’m not his keeper.”

Rourke scanned the restaurant, then excused himself. When he was gone, I felt self-conscious of my body in that dress—my breasts beneath the halter top and my thighs under the skirt, the bare way they were touching.

“So you’re an artist,” Lee said, leaning sweetly over. “I wanted to be an artist,” she confided. “But my parents didn’t think it was—not that there’s anything wrong with—actually, I mean, I think they were afraid I’d marry a—well, you know. It’s just—it takes confidence. You must be confident.” Lee’s eyes were millimeters too big for her head, and when she talked, she talked fast, captivating you with insecurities. She and Chris picked at the antipasto simultaneously; they had matching wedding bands. “Do you eat meat?” she asked. “I don’t. But there are these stuffed pork chops that everybody gets that look really good.”

When Rourke returned, he came up behind the waiter, who was reciting specials. As soon as the waiter realized everyone was looking behind him, rather than at him, he turned and said, “Oh, sorry, Harrison.”

Rourke slid in next to me, and our two bodies notched together like pieces of a puzzle. He seemed better, lighter: I figured he’d found Rob. As soon as the waiter started talking again, Rourke cut him off, saying, “We’ll take two swordfish.”

Chris collected his menu and Lee’s menu and tapped them on the tabletop before handing them over to the waiter. “Make that four.”

And Joey said, “Five.”

“So, what happened?” Chris asked Rourke. “You find him?”

Rourke said, “I just saw his car in the lot. He’s parking.”

I pressed lightly into him, and beneath the table, he touched the top of my thigh. My hand drifted shyly into the complicated space between his legs.

“So you went to the Jersey beach today,” Lee said. “It’s different from East Hampton, right?”

“Very different,” I said, and nodded.

“Hey, Evie,” Chris said, “did Harrison tell you he used to run Skee-Ball at Coin Castle?”

I looked at Rourke. “No, he didn’t.”

Rourke smiled. “Must have slipped my mind.”

“That’s where he met Rob,” Lee said. “How old were you guys, thirteen?”

“Thirteen,” Rourke said. “That’s right.”

“And it was love at first sight,” Chris joked.

“Not quite,” Joey said. “Rob always tried to hustle him.”

Rourke said, “
Tried to
is right.”

Rob stood at the head of the table and hunted through his pockets for something, withdrawing nothing. He’d come with Lorraine, the redhead from the day before. She said hello and distributed kisses, but Rob said nothing, not to me or anyone, though his eyes frequently darted to Rourke’s. Though he was in a bad mood, I felt better with him there. Everyone did. You could tell by the way they shifted in their seats, coming up higher and adjusting the bands of their watches. Rob gave you the feeling that everything was going to be okay, that there was nothing going on in the world that he did not already know about and have an opinion on.

Rob pulled a chair to the head of the table, and bumped up next to Lorraine. I figured she was his girl. She acted bored like she was. “I had rust comin’ out of my pipes all day,” he reported with miserable enthusiasm. “It was like clay.”

“You gotta call,” Chris said.

“I
did
call,” Rob said, leaning back in his chair. “I go, ‘I’m supposed to shower in this shit?’” His left shoulder wrenched up. “I go, ‘What, am I supposed to make coffee outta this crap?’”

As the waiter delivered two pitchers of wine and checked on Rob’s and Lorraine’s orders, I wondered who in Jersey took such calls.

Rob scanned the table and said, “What did you guys get, the swordfish?”

Everybody said yeah, yeah, swordfish, yeah.

Rob flipped his hand. “G’head, Ronnie, make it two more.”

“They must’ve been working on a main line,” Joey speculated about the water pipes. “They probably stirred up sediment. Give it a day.”

Lorraine rearranged her bag and laid a pack of Larks near her plate. She looked like the kind of girl with brothers, the kind with a knowledge of pistons, lures, and end zones. The frayed tips of her ginger hair reached in a fan of kinky curls as if to capture creatures. It was like underwater hair. “I keep telling him—
use bottled.”

Rob clicked his tongue. “It’s the pipes, Lorraine, not the water.”

“Lemme tell you something,” Chris informed all of us, “that bottled water thing is
bull
. New York State tap is best. Studies show.”

“Lot of good that does us here in Jersey,” Rob said.

Chris said, “Yeah, well. I’m just saying.”

Lee cut in, leaning toward Lorraine and asking how was Mark Ross’s house in the Hamptons.

Lorraine swiped her hands through the air and said, “Unbelievable. Gorgeous.”
Gaw-jus
.

Rob shook his head with disgust and shot back the first of several glasses of wine, going, “Fuckin’ guy.”

After dinner Lee and Lorraine went home. Lorraine didn’t feel well. At least, that’s what she said, though it was obvious she and Rob were fighting, probably about his drinking too much because she took the car.

“Leave me stranded,” Rob called after the taillights. “G’head. I don’t give a shit. I’ll make new friends.”

Lee said she had to work in the morning. She was a market analyst for Lehman Brothers on Wall Street. It sounded like a big job, in terms of responsibility, somewhat like being a surgeon or a bus driver. I wondered how somebody so little gets a job so big, and what she’d been doing out with us, drinking pitchers of sangria. She slid behind the wheel of their
new white Cherokee, her head rising inches above its northern arc. “It is Sunday, isn’t it?” she checked with Chris. “I have work tomorrow, right?”

Chris kissed her through the open driver’s window. “Yes, babe. It’s Sunday. Go home.”

“Keep an eye on him,” she requested of me with a wink.

“Okay,” I said, though it seemed like a major obligation. I watched her pull out and wondered at her husband’s iron constitution. I would not have been able to let my wife go like that, into the night like a lame firefly, buzzing off sideways into an immeasurable wood.

“Let’s get outta here,” he said, climbing into Rourke’s car. “Let’s head over to Vinny’s.”

Vinny-O’s was the kind of place my dad would have called a beer garden. It was booze-logged and corrosive and lit primarily by backward neon. How we ended up there I wasn’t sure, except to say that Rob had to meet somebody, and nobody was very happy about it. I didn’t ask about the names of the establishments—Mineo’s and Vinny-O’s. I got the feeling it was a Jersey thing.

We walked into the clatter of pinball and the
ching
of the bowling game and “Two Tickets to Paradise” by Eddie Money. I went straight to the bathroom, which was filthy and poorly rigged. There were convoluted instructions on how to flush posted over the toilet, and they were yellowed, not necessarily from age.

I looked, but there was no sink and no hook. There
was
a string—but it was wet. Needless to say, the toilet had not been flushed for some time. Voices came through the wall from the men’s room, low and intermittent. When I came out, Rourke was near the front door, deep in conversation with Joey, so I went to the bar and bought myself a beer.

“Bottle or tap?” the bartender asked.

“Tap,” I said. It seemed like the thing to say.

The louvers to the bathroom corridor flagged again on their spent hinges; I turned to see Rob and Chris coming out with a third guy, who cut through the front and disappeared. Theirs had been the voices I’d heard. At first I suspected they’d been buying coke, though they didn’t look high. Maybe it had to do with gambling. Chris breezed past to join Joey and Rourke by the window, but Rob came to me, tossing his arms slightly out, grinning as though he hadn’t seen me for so long.

“Holdin’ up the bar, gorgeous?” He landed at my side and shifted in half circles, like a cat getting ready to lie down. Eventually he settled, lit a cigarette, and examined me. Each of his features looked as if it had been broken twice, yet there was something irresistible about the urgent way they all pieced together, like a skyline. He took a sip of my beer and grimaced. “What the fuck is that?”

I thought it might be Schlitz.

“Schlitz?”
He looked over his shoulder to the bartender. “Hey, Marty.” Marty didn’t move. His arms were folded across his chest, his eyes fluttered back. “Jesus,” Rob mumbled to me, then he shouted,
“Marty!
You alive?”