Anthropology of an American Girl (47 page)

Roger and the guys were taking him to meet some girls.

“You’re not driving,” Rourke turned and said. “Remember?”

Rob took his time answering, as if relishing the messy power he had, as if he could not be completely perceived, as if his drunkenness concealed him.

He made his way around the rear of Rourke’s car, moving with the confidence of a heavily armed man. “We’re going dancing,” Rob slurred as headlights appeared behind him—a car approaching from Montauk. “She loves to dance,” he said of me, his eyes gazing inches beyond my face, somewhere to the left. And then to me, Rob said, “Come dance with us.”

Rourke grabbed Rob by the shoulders and lifted him forcefully onto the fender just as the car shot past. The rush of wind blew their jackets open.

Rob tried to shake Rourke off. “I’m all right. I’m all right.”

Rourke gripped him tighter, shoving him farther. Rob’s gaze trawled upward from Rourke’s chest, its focus continuously adjusting until arriving at Rourke’s face. Rob’s mouth split into a solemn smile of recognition, and when another car came, the headlights glinted off his teeth, and his eyes looked like dry tobacco rings. He threw his arm around Rourke, falling into him, and for a time they were speechless. Rourke slid the keys from Rob’s hand.

Roger and his friends jogged down the restaurant steps to meet us. “C’mon, birthday boy, let’s go get laid.”

Rob lurched away with the pack of guys and settled into the front seat of the first car, which was Roger’s Camaro. Roger was a student at Brooklyn Law who made three grand a summer waiting tables at Gosman’s. He flashed his lights and leaned on the horn as they pulled away, and all the passengers screamed out the windows—
“Yahhhhhhhh!”

Rourke seemed lost in thought on the ride home, so I didn’t speak. Back at the cottage I cleaned up a little, then showered while he washed dishes, and when the water turned hotter, I knew he was done. I was cold so I dressed in one of his sweaters, and I knelt alongside him in the living room. He was deconstructing a camera. I had never seen the camera before. I didn’t know where it had come from or what was broken about it. In the action of his hands I tried to follow the action of his mind. He was studying the blown-out mess like it was a chessboard midgame, like he had looked at the pool table with Rob. His hand hovered in studious benediction over the parts before settling on the pieces to replace. I was thinking a fire would be nice.

Later we went to the bedroom and he undressed me before the mirror. His chest was a block of copper; my skin was copper too, both of us dark from sun. His head was inclined and his lips moved down my neck from ear to shoulder. In bed he drew me onto his chest, not letting go, just holding me, and it was there I remained through to morning. I slept very little, him not at all. Anytime I stirred, he would rock me back to sleep.

The next day was normal. I showered like normal, and after Rourke picked up Rob at some house on West Lake Drive, and they got the
Cougar from Surfside, he and Rourke acted normal, whatever normal was for them—broken bones and film trivia, plates of eggs and engine options and sisters in trouble. One thing was different—when Rob got into his car to leave for Jersey, he kissed me and said, “I love you too.”

Later that afternoon, when Rourke was driving me to work, he swung the car off Montauk Highway and onto the overlook. He downshifted to the edge of the lot, rolling dangerously close before pulling the brake. It occurred to me with a degree of fascination that maybe he intended to just, like, fly off. It made me happy to think of dying with him; in fact, of all possible ends for us, it was the one I would have preferred. I recalled the guy Jack had told me about when he’d come back from Outward Bound the previous summer, the one who had fallen off the ridge while hiking. I remembered how Jack and I imagined him floating in space, suspended, like a flag flapping to nowhere.

Together Rourke and I confronted sundown, and I collapsed into the shadow of his lap, facing him, tracing my name into the parchment of his abdomen. And he sighed, laying his hand upon my bare back, fingering the straps of my shirt.

W
hen I came out of my room and into the kitchen, my mother set down her book and slid it to the center of the table. She was sitting exactly where I’d left her when I moved out in June. I wondered if that was a good omen or a bad one. She leaned back in her chair. The milk in her coffee pooled to caramel streaks at the top.

“How’s the packing going?”

I said, “Almost done.”

“Feel like going shopping tomorrow?”

“For what?”

She thought for a moment, pulling back her lips. “Shampoo. Do you have shampoo?”

“I figured I’d just take some from upstairs.”

“Do you still have things in Montauk?”

“Not really. Anything left will fit into a bag.”

I visited her once a week to do laundry, mow the lawn, call my father. It wasn’t necessary, but it kept my parents from having to ask questions, which they preferred not to do. As far as they were concerned, I was miles ahead of where they’d been at my age—I was working, going to college, and paying my own way. My father had left home at seventeen to join the army, and when my mother turned seventeen, she married my father. They had no means to help me financially, and no intention of
finding
the means—they were not about to take out loans or find second jobs. So whatever right they might have had to inquire into my affairs had been relinquished.

She rotated her feet at the ankles and stretched her legs, then reached for her book. She caught herself and put it down again.

“Well,” I said. “I’d better go finish.”

“What time does Lowie get here?”

“Four, I think.”

“Okay,” she said. “Try to hurry.”

Lowie and David were going to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for Labor Day weekend, so they’d offered to take my things into Manhattan to the NYU dorm. All I really had was one suitcase and some art supplies. I went out to the barn with an empty wooden milk crate. I draped brushes in fabric and placed charcoals in plastic bags and paints in old coffee and cookie tins with lids that did not exactly fit. I tied pencils into logs with rubber bands. Once the box was full, I reviewed the contents. It was strange—I could remember touching them, using them, speaking shyly through them, but I could not recall what I thought I’d needed to say. The girl I’d been seemed far off, vaporous, like a cloud. There was a purity that was gone, a purity of essence—in its place stood something else, something I did not know how to name.

Mom and I left that night at the same time. As I turned at the end of the lane, she drove off toward the college with a merry wave. Rourke had
asked me to meet him at Herrick playground; he was filling in for someone on the Montauk Rugby Club.

I walked to the far corner of the field and stood next to Mike Stern, from high school, who was in a neck brace. He’d been injured on a construction site.

Mike turned stiffly and glanced at me. “How you doing, Evie?”

I said, “Hey, Mike.”

Rourke was in center field. His hair cleaved and spindled softly against his forehead. His thighs were a smutty green; his knees were black. He looked young, eighteen maybe; though I knew he was closer to twenty-five.

In rugby, there’s shouting. There’s the accumulation of bodies like an unlit pyre, then all of them treading as one before a rapid and unaccountable break—a
maul
. And in the moments preceding penalties and free kicks, there are slack hands on hips and aimless walks, and heads tossed to the sky, or stretched in jerks to either side, or dropped, chins to chests. It’s a very particular sport, sometimes less like a sport than a brotherhood. At the end comes the departure from the field, the resounding emancipation, like every creature on earth freed at once from its cage. There is the adrenaline-fueled backslapping and hip-slapping and the ritual approach to losers. When you say hello to one of them, there is a pause followed by a vague sharpening as they reconnect with the world around them. Sometimes you get not quite a coherent response—“Hey how you doing?”

“Thanks again for filling in, man,” Mike said to Rourke. “See you down at my place, right?”

Rourke wiped his forehead with the tattered sleeve of his shirt, shoving up, so the dirt mixed with sweat into a streak. “We’ll try to stop in on our way home.”

The car was on Newtown Lane, facing the village. “You can shower at my mother’s if you want,” I said. “The house is empty.”

It was a queer feeling that came from being with him again in that house; the dimensions of everything had changed. We had become larger, and home hideously reduced. We were like giants, colossi, Apollo at Rhodes,
or Alice in the Rabbit’s house, limbs poking through casements, heads cramming through chimneys.

The only shower was in the upstairs bathroom. I led him up the narrow stairs and through Kate’s former room to reach it. Her bedroom was bare except for the bed she’d used. Rourke removed his dirty clothes and laid them on the sink. Kate and I had stood at the sink on the night she cut my hair. That was the first day I’d seen Rourke. It was also where I’d stood drinking whiskey the night we all went to the Talkhouse.

I waited while he showered, feeling heavy, feeling blue, not feeling pain, exactly, but a universal sort of weakness. I sat backward on the toilet seat, straddling it, and I looked out a miniature window into the enclosed front yard. I’d been looking through that little window for years; I knew the view well. Earlier that day my mother had spoken of the possibility of having to move because the rent was going to be increased. It would be sad if she lost the house—so many things had happened there. I wondered where she would go, and from where her new memories might come.

When drops of water began to tap my shoulders I knew Rourke was behind and above me; he was bending and looking out too. I leaned back lightly against his hips. One of his hands came around my throat and caressed my neck—his fingertips flattening the muscles, petting the trachea, measuring the fragile cervix, calibrating the breaths, as he seemed to consider the enormous burden of loving me.

On the way back to Montauk we stopped at Mike’s house in Springs. Trucks and cars lined both sides of the street, so Rourke pulled onto the front lawn. Before we got out, we could hear the thud of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.”
Da na na na nat. Da na na na nat
.

As we approached the porch, a shredded screen door flew open. It had no spring, so it cracked against the side of the shingled house, sounding like gunfire. Rourke instinctively grabbed my arm and pulled me behind him. Mike shoved some kid through the door, saying, “Jesus, do it outside,” and the kid flew down to the bushes to vomit.

“Sorry about that, Harrison,” Mike said, and he adjusted his neck brace. “I just don’t wanna get one of those chain reactions going. Next thing you know it’s a big mess of puke to clean.”

Rourke said not to worry about it, though the sound of the kid in the
bushes was hideous. I loosened my grip on Rourke in case I was next to go. Rourke steered me through the door.

“It’s a little crazy in there already,” Mike warned. “You two might not want to stick around too long.”

Mike was right: the house was packed. Inside the first room, we hit a wall of about twenty guys, and just a few girls. I tugged the hem of my shorts down lower on my thighs and straightened my shirt to conceal my breasts, which were perceptible through the cotton. I should have thought to change at my mother’s when Rourke showered. I should have known better. Men are free, but women are not. Men cannot be held accountable for their reactions to your negligence. Sometimes you’re just too busy leading your own life to remember theirs.

Rourke had vanished into the crowd. There were people he knew from somewhere, Jersey, maybe, or college. I walked toward the back of the house to find him, making a turn into a dining room that was empty except for two bicycles propped beneath a regulation dart board. The board was surrounded by a ring of hole pokes, and wider beyond that ring the sheetrock walls were scuffed and torn. To my right was an open kitchen with avocado-colored appliances. Rourke was there, leaning on the counter, talking to a huge man with red hair and a hulking back. It was that guy we’d seen outside the gym that day in Jersey, that guy Tommy, with the strange ears. Between them there were two pretty girls. Maybe they weren’t pretty, maybe they just seemed that way with long hair to toss, hair that probably smelled of florid shampoo, hair he could not help but inhale. Rourke looked different, his face a sort of mask. Maybe it was the smile, with his top and bottom teeth meeting and his dimple cutting in like fire. He didn’t see me, so I moved on.

Past the bikes, through a slit in the side of an almost closed door, came the insubstantial flickering of a television. I looked through and saw five bodies sitting around a coffee table. The sound was turned down on the set; by the light I could see that they were doing coke. Suddenly cocaine was everywhere. It had trickled down from rich people to all the rest of us. Jack blamed corrupt foreign policies; in one of his last rants before we broke up, he said, “Cheap blow is U.S. government issue, just like bulk cheese.”

I walked into the room anyway; I had nowhere else to go. The walls
were covered with warped paneling, probably from the sixties, and two lamp shades were draped with yellow towels. The room was dreary. I straddled the arm of an empty vinyl recliner, and just sort of sat there.

“Hey,” a voice said. It was that guy Biff again. “Eveline. How you doing?”

“Hey, Biff. I’m okay.”

“You hang with a pretty rough crowd,” he said and laughed.

“Yeah, well, how else would I ever get to see you?”

Biff was quick to talk, which meant that he had no drugs. As a rule, the one with drugs is not so quick to talk. Across the way, perched on the rim of the couch and focusing on nothing in particular, was a skinny guy with ruddy skin and tame blond hair that grazed the shoulders of his Jimmy Buffet concert shirt. “This is Chet,” Biff said. “Chet comes up to Montauk from Florida for summers.”