Anthropology of an American Girl (29 page)

Jack swung an open hand to Smokey in greeting. “Marvin,” Jack said, using Smokey’s real name. “What’s up?”

“Nice job, men.” Dr. Lewis launched a new round of applause. “Glad to know my gear is being put to good use.” His hand rested on Jack’s arm. Discreetly he asked, “Did your parents come?”

“He didn’t even tell them about it, Dad,” Dan informed his father, and we all headed for the door in a funny bundle.

On the brick path that led from the doors of Guild Hall to the street, we dispersed. Dan climbed into Smokey’s black Nova, and Jack and I headed east on Main Street, walking in the direction of the village. Jack unfolded his collar and pulled his Chinese Red Army cap to his eyes. I tucked my hands into my sleeves. He offered his gloves to me. As he wriggled one onto my left hand, the other slipped from under his arm and fell to the ground. We knocked shoulders as we both bent to retrieve it.

“What a load of shit!” he proclaimed, meaning the play. “What a criminal waste.”

“Your song was good.”

“That’s hardly an endorsement for the play. The acting sucked.”

“People have to start somewhere. You weren’t born a musician.”

“The difference is I’ve been playing every day since I was four. This is like handing out thirty guitars to people who’ve never played before,
who’ll never play again, and trying to get something coherent in three months. And for what, five lame performances?”

“At least it’s not football.”

“No, no. It’s exactly like football. Half-assed recreation, a distraction for the kiddies. It’s about deceiving taxpayers into thinking juveniles are being kept off the streets, that they’re being offered concrete opportunities. It’s about college résumés.”

I tried to remember my point. I wasn’t sure I had one. “Kate worked hard, and—”

“And
you
worked hard,” he said, though I hadn’t even considered myself. “That crap was a waste of your time. Your church will be in the trash on Monday.”

I hadn’t considered that—the trash. I said, “You know what I mean.”

“
I
know what you mean, Ev-e-line.” Jack stretched my name to fully fill its three syllables. He faced me. “But do
you
know what you mean?” His blue eyes were bleached and even, making a strike through his face like the crossbar of the letter
T
. “Listen to yourself.”

Kids from the play closed in on us from behind. Jack slipped into the garden of the Huntting Inn, and I followed. He sat on an enormous rock, took a joint from his pocket, and lit it. Our eyes met above the embers. I wished to be drained; I wanted him to drain me.

“The whole thing got me down. The whole fucking night.” Jack was referring to Rourke, though he would not introduce that name into our dialogue. He would not risk making it more real than he guessed it to be, as real as it was. I kicked the ground. He kicked the ground as well, setting a piece of ice to fly. “You’re headed down a bad road, Evie. I won’t be able to see you through this.”

The wooden porch of the Lewis house creaked under our weight. It was a moldy cedar-shake colonial on Pantigo Road, held together primarily by its odor—a composite of curry and candle drippings. Micah refused to live there, choosing instead to remain at their apartment on West End Avenue and Eighty-second. She visited East Hampton rarely, almost exclusively in summer. “The heat burns off the negative ions,” she once told me.

Inside was a sequence of rooms lined with instruments, dubious art, obsolete electronics, stacks of flaking scores, and mountains of damp books. Inside, you never knew exactly where you were or how to get out. The wainscoted hallways were papered in framed photographs of Dan’s father with greats such as Oscar Peterson, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Rollins. Besides being a musician and composer, Dr. Lewis was also a professor of music theory at Juilliard, which he called his
day gig
. He and the band traveled to places such as Newport, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Paris, and São Paolo. When in town, they would sit around discussing the evolution of jazz, debating East and West Coast composing signatures, and lamenting the loss of quality clubs and the declining musical interest among young people. My mother would sometimes be with them. She and Dr. Lewis had dated when Dan and I were in grade school, the winter before she met Powell. This was a big deal to Jack. Unlike his revulsion to the idea of me, Denny, and Peter as college roommates, he liked the idea of Dan and me as siblings and his coming to live with us and Mom and Dr. Lewis in one big jazzy, literary house with everyone being cared for by Bitsy, Dr. Lewis’s housekeeper from the Philippines. Bitsy wore ill-fitting sweat socks and threw down paper plates of muddy lasagna and yelled uniquely when Dan put his feet on the table. After yelling, she would squish his cheeks together and slap the side of his head. Bitsy was seventy-one and an avid golfer.

Jack joined Dan and Smokey in the living room, going straight to the piano, bowing over, his powdery white hair splaying in a fan. There was a guitar on the couch. I wished he would have selected the guitar instead. He was less sure of himself on guitar, and his vulnerability plus his refusal to relent was beautiful. I wished he would be beautiful.

Denny and Kate were at the base of the stairs, laughing. Kate’s face was flushed. I could see they’d been drinking. Denny caught me and reeled me in, squeezing like toothpaste. The smell of cheap Chablis mixed with the smell of his deodorant depressed me.

A flurry at the front door was accompanied by shouting and whistling. The teachers had arrived. Dr. Lewis, Micah, and Jim Peterson came in first, then Mr. McGintee, Toby Parker, and Lilias Starr. Rourke came last, shedding ounces of midnight cold as he filled the foyer.

McGintee complimented everyone. “Terrific job! Top shelf all the
way! And that meeting house,” he said, giving me a firm wink. “The sets were the finest we’ve ever had.”

“Thank you,” Denny said, patting me on the back, using my arm to pat him on the back. He thrust my hand into the crowd. It stuck out like a little clock arm. “Her hand is like ice!”

“Maybe she’s anemic,” Lilias said.

“You do look pale, Eveline,” Micah agreed.

“My God,” Denny said to me, “don’t faint again.” And then to the crowd, “Last week I found her passed out on the darkroom floor.”

There were general expressions of concern for my health. Rourke reached for my hand, forgoing false propriety. He collected it as though taking up a baby, baby homeless something. In his hands my bones felt like bird bones, like crayons or small pencils. I demurred with a smile, and I pulled away. Not a smile, but a vague flickering. It was nice for a moment to have him, and sad to have to lose him.

I burrowed my hand into my jeans pocket, and looking down, I moved obediently to the living room, where I found Jack, leafing through a songbook, getting ready to sing. He appeared wafer-thin, wraithlike, there, but not there. My body moved about the perimeter of the grand piano which was already crowded with people who had come to listen.

Dr. Lewis joined Jack on the bench. A cigarette hung precariously from the corner of his mouth as he slapped his legs establishing a light rhythm prior to Jack’s playing. Then real banging—Smokey, whipping the lid of the piano with the heels of his hands. And Jack’s fingers hitting the keys,
thump-thump, thump-thump-thump
. And him singing Muddy Waters:

In his voice there was new weight, masculine weight. Jack had never been hurt by me before. At least I’d given him
something
, even if only just a passport into sorrow. When the last chord came, he jammed the piano
one final time—
bwomp—
and he smiled mordantly into the crowd, his eyes latching on to no one and nothing. His rejection of me was correct; I understood it had to be that way. If in life there is flow, a current or a course, I had the feeling I’d found it. They began a second song, Leonard Cohen’s
Suzanne
, my favorite, he knew. He sang it so beautifully.

Past the piano on the southern side of the room, a wall of windows overlooking the porch extended from floor to ceiling. I moved behind the frayed drapes and went to the farthermost window, the top half of which was open. Pantigo Road lay ahead. The oily gloss of the street and the sound of passing cars suggested it was raining. Wheels on wet pavement make a very particular going-home sound, serene and conclusive. I wondered what Marilyn was doing. Maybe she was making tea, scooping stray leaves from a wrinkled paper sack with Golden Assam stamped in withering red. Maybe she and Dad were reading. If she was looking out the window at the rain, perhaps she was thinking of me.

“I’m leaving,” Rourke said, his voice coming practically from within my mind.

I was not surprised. Lots of things were in there—him too. My eyes didn’t leave the street. I was in some unattended place, some dangerously unattended place. He was on the porch, on the other side of the wall, leaning against my open window. I did not look to see him, but I could feel him, the way you can close your eyes and feel a hand above your skin. He emitted something electrical, and I responded, electrically.

“I want you to know,” he said, “that you’re very talented.” Quieter, down an octave. “I think you’re going to go far.”

A car passed. I traced its lights eastward. It was a curious thing to mention talent. He seemed to want to persuade me of something. I might have told him not to bother trying. Though I could not name the choice, it had been made the first time I saw him. My preference for him was unconditional, absolute—
feral
, as Jack would have said, the type of choice animals make. Jack was mistaken about the ability of conscience and moral reciprocity being the best means to move humanity. In the end it’s just natural will that inspires us to action. Love, hatred, hunger, desire, indigence—things that find no home in logic. What I felt for Rourke was a partiality that situated me. It defined and animated me.

He moved suddenly, his shadow changing radically from a lean vertical strip visible only from the corner of my eye to a carbon shield that obliterated the view, like a door swinging decidedly shut. His mouth came down on my cheek, the one farthest from him. With his jaw he pushed my face into the hard pocket of his inclined chest, and with loose lips he softly held it there. I was breathing, my breath wetting his chest, going down the tendons of his neck. Beneath the membrane of his lips lay the complete and threatening remainder of his body. I could feel the way he held himself in check. Just when he might have retreated, he lingered, noticing perhaps as I did the way his mouth had been shaped by God to fit the hollow beneath my cheekbone.

“I have to go,” he breathed in apologetically. When he withdrew, the skin of his lips and the skin of my face resisted separation. I wondered when we’d reached a place of apologies.

“Yes,” I said. “Go.”

Rourke leapt from the porch. He seemed dauntless, satisfied with himself, and with me. He reached his car—a 1967 cameo-white GTO with a parchment interior. I knew the details because I heard him talk about them the night he came to my house in the hailstorm. He opened the door, and his body vanished into what looked like a tank full of moonglow. I wished to vanish also, but I was bound by the things that professed to designate me—family, friends, school, culture, country. How had I fallen under their influence, when these things referred to something other than what I felt myself to be, when the care I received was diluted by their self-interest?

I was no prisoner, and yet, when faced with an occasion for determination, I was not to follow the lead of my will, but to endure in tedious familiarity. What is freedom when you’re too beholden to act spontaneously? What is desire that is absolute but untimely? Or obligation when you have ignored your soul’s conviction? Is sacrifice really a virtue when in your heart you feel not a shred of devotion? I knew all this and more, but for all that I knew, knowing did not bring him back, and knowing did not move me. Only he could have brought himself back, only he might have moved me. And that is just slavery of another kind—which was something to consider.

I listened to the push of his car in reverse—a steady, hard push, taillights coming back. I nestled into the glow, and then he cut out to the right, in the direction of Amagansett and Montauk. I was to go back and face Jack and Kate, my parents, school on Monday. I was to gather away the monster I’d become, and, in the meantime, count on Rourke for nothing. He had acquainted me with the next place, but he would not take me there. I felt slightly doubtful, the way caterpillars must feel in the instant they are awakened to become butterflies.

That was the promise I’d made to Rourke—to fly.

The piano was unattended, though the room was still packed with people. I moved to the kitchen at the rear of the house, where I found Jack and his friends, an androgynous, invertebrate puddle of flannel and denim, sitting in a sooty cloud of pot smoke. Jack was slumped so low in a ladderback chair that his head met the middle rung. One foot jutted across the dining table, and he was rubbing the gummy label from a beer bottle with a nail-bitten thumb. His friends looked smug. They didn’t like Jack with me; they thought I wanted something from him, who knew what, since Jack had nothing to give. “Unless it’s the flu,” Jack would speculate. “Or a hangover,” Denny would add.

One time Trish Lawton called me a
calculating bitch
.

“Who’s Trish Lawton?” I asked Jack.

“Troy’s sister’s friend from Michigan. From Flint.”

“Has Trish even met Eveline?” Dan inquired mildly.

Jack thought for a minute. “I guess not, no. Pretty sure she hasn’t.”

I didn’t care what they thought of me, but I didn’t like how little they knew of Jack. If they insisted on remaining blind to his capacity for manipulation, his hunger for intellectual ascendance and moral leverage, his aptitude for dealing abuse, then without me, he would be as good as friendless.