Anthropology of an American Girl (43 page)

Marty roused himself and hitched lamely over. “Sure, Robbie. I’m alive. Unless you happen to be a bill collector.”

“You’re startin’ to worry me over there,” Rob said. “I seen more blood run through a goalpost.” He lifted my glass and gestured with it, saying, “Gimme something to rinse the taste of this outta my mouth.”

“How about a shot of Red?”

Rob pulled a wad of bills from his pocket. “Nah, I’ll take a screwdriver.”
Sh-crew-driva
. “Want something else?” he asked me. “A little brake fluid, maybe? Some rubbing alcohol?”

I told Marty I’d take Courvoisier if he had it.

“That’s a giant leap,” Rob said, “from Schlitz on tap.”

“That’s because you’re paying,” I told him.

We got the drinks and toasted. “So, whaddaya think of Jersey?”

“It’s all right,” I said. The cognac burned my throat.

He said, “First time?”

Actually I’d been a few times. My dad and Marilyn had taken me on vacations to visit things such as underground railroad sites and revolutionary war battlefields. I said, “Not technically.”

“Not technically,” Rob repeated with a smile, and he signaled for another drink. He looked off, as if distracted by something, maybe just something in his head. He bit the inside of his cheek and jiggled the leftover ice in his glass, making a sound like a beaded instrument. I waited and watched, because that’s the thing to do with someone who is complicated and drinking heavily. I’d had lots of practice with Jack. Frequently, people try to act screwed up, but Jack really was. Sometimes you hear,
He was as strong as ten men!
Jack was not strong that way; he was screwed-up that way.

“So, you made it through,” Rob said. “You and Harrison. I’m surprised.” He took a drink, and his eyes skimmed the ceiling, lingering before returning to me. “So now what?” he asked.

I hadn’t thought about it; I hadn’t thought about much of anything. I glanced over my shoulder to Rourke; he didn’t look back. Music started, mournful music, making me feel kind of lost. I set down my glass and pushed it away.

Rob watched me for a minute, then said, “You like to dance. Come dance with me.” He took my hand and led me to a place between the bar and the empty dining room next to unused tables. His wiry arms held me square and polite.

“Remember you and Mark danced at the Talkhouse?”

I said that I did.

“I called you Countess,” he said, and I asked him why.

“Because,” he said, “you have rank.” He leaned close, whispering, “Just be careful.”

His words gathered at my ear. I felt something surge through his body, ragged and incongruous, frustrated in its effort to transfer smoothly. Then I felt myself traveling back—it was Rourke, pulling me away. Though he stood naturally, you could tell he was not happy. Rourke didn’t need to posture to intimidate, he just had to be within reasonable range of his object. His fingers closed tight on my wrist.

“Let’s go,” he said, taking a step, pulling me closer, my back to his front, like a hostage.

The road home was not the same as the one we’d taken on the way there. It was a local road, leafy and closing in, top-lit and wet. We made it back in minutes. The light in the third-floor room was lit; I liked seeing it. It made me feel safe. Rourke leaned over and popped my door. “You know where the key is?”

I nodded, getting out. “In the box.”

The car squealed in reverse, swung around, then shot forward. How able he was to exist in the misfortune of night. How afflicted he must have been, by ritual, by rivalry, by things mannish and abstruse, to go back out. I reached for the key, wondering how long it would take him to return, and whether he was going to have to drive those guys. It was strange to think that whatever safety home provided was inadequate compared to the riddling principles that moved him.

I stepped through into the dark, remembering a small iron lamp on the bookshelves. I searched for it and turned it on. On a low table in front of the couch was a dish filled with the beach glass we’d collected. I went into the kitchen and looked in the cabinets. They were empty except for a new set of dishes.

Just be careful
, Rob had said, and also,
So now what?
I wondered what else Rob might have said if Rourke hadn’t stopped him? Though I had no reason to mistrust Rourke, for some reason I trusted Rob completely.

I placed my palms against the bedroom door and pushed slowly. It was empty in there except for a bed and an antique metal table with a vintage work light and a black telephone. I took up the phone cautiously and listened for a dial tone. The closet was empty, but then, he’d just come back from months in Montauk. There were boxes in the hall. Like the rest of the apartment, the room smelled of cut wood. Possibly his parents had fixed it up because they intended to rent the place, though perhaps it had been done for Rourke. It was nice to think of him as loved, as the recipient of feelings that were worthy and true.

When I heard the car, I went to the door and waited. Rourke seemed as relieved to see me as I was to see him. He pulled off his sweater before
tossing it onto the couch. As he unbuttoned his shirt, his hand moved in practiced jerks. The thoughtful way he cast his gaze into space was lonely.

“He okay?” I asked.

Rourke nodded, saying, “Yeah, he’s okay.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “If I—”

Rourke pulled me near. I leaned against his chest and felt his head on mine, his hand on my lower back. “Forget it,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

What followed was less a kiss, less an embrace, than a precise exchange, a diving in from opposite ends and a rolling, gliding lull at center, like mammals swimming expertly beneath the sea. I felt known, I felt assimilated. I felt a gift from life that I hardly merited. He didn’t have to say that he loved me, not when I could see the gentle cast to his eyes and feel the puerile softness of his lips, not when I could sense the solitude in his hands resolved by touching me. If I didn’t know what he was risking to be with me, I could feel when he held me the consequence of his choice.

The next morning we stopped at Eddie M.’s house in Red Bank. They said that we were there to see a car and that Eddie M. was a friend from high school. Rob was there already when we arrived, taking a leisurely walk around a ’71 Corvette—yellow. It made me think of Mark’s Porsche, with the way it was sitting in the driveway like a lost shoe, like a princess slipper. The GTO and Rob’s Cougar looked like giant slabs of beef in the street. One day in Jersey, and I’d never look at cars the same.

“They didn’t do too bad a job on the paint,” Rob said to Eddie M. “The problem you’re gonna have with the Vette is the heat coming through the floorboards.”

“Tell him what happened to Jimmy Landes,” Rourke said, joining the conversation without ceremony. The two showed no sign of having argued in the bar the night before, if, in fact, it had even been an argument. There was a newspaper at the end of the driveway. I sat on the corner of the lawn, flipping through the pages, taking care not to look too hard. I didn’t want to know anything.

“My wife’s at her mother’s,” Eddie M. informed me, strolling over,
gawky like a farmhand. His eyes were electric and clear blue, like a husky’s. “Otherwise she’d make coffee.”

“Why can’t you make it yourself?” Rob called over, in disgust.

“Because I don’t know how to work the thing.”

“It’s a coffeemaker, not a backhoe.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rourke said to Rob. “We’re going out.”

“Where to,” Rob wanted to know. “Pat’s?”

Rourke said, “Yeah.”

“I’ll go with you,” Rob said. “He owes me fifty bucks.”

“I’ll come too,” said Eddie M. “I can’t sit around all day waiting for Karen.”

After Eddie M. put the Corvette in the garage, we took off in two cars, driving past the weeping willows, cyclone fences, and idle flags of the residential area onto the backstreets, where there were forlorn sidewalks and dwarfish brick buildings and the funereal reflection of ourselves as we proceeded in a long loose wave past the plate glass storefronts.

At a red light, Rob pulled up alongside us, his window inches from mine. The music from his car was deafening. He was singing,
“Be my love!”
When the light changed, he turned down the volume and shouted, “Hey, Contessa, what do you think of Mario Lanza?”

Morocco’s was a spherical diner, like a space station or an automotive air filter, set on the side of a four-lane roadway. The steaming hot air and the diesel exhaust from all the traffic going by formed a plane of smog to walk through. The men fell into a quiet line, with me in the middle. Rob and Eddie M. were thinking how Rourke and I had just had sex. I could feel on my skin the tread of instinct and imagination.

The waitress came to our booth. Rob asked, “Where’s Pat?”

“Which Pat’s that, doll?” she volleyed in a gravelly voice.

“What do you mean, ‘which Pat’?”

“It’s a big place. We got a lot of Pats—Pat Wolf, Cellar Pat, Patty G., Kitchen Pat.”

“Kitchen Pat?”
Rob repeated incredulously. Eddie M. bit his cuticles and smirked. “What do I look like, a bread salesman?”

“No offense, honey, but I didn’t bother to check.”

“You new here, or what?” Rob inquired.

“Yeah,” she said. “I just started about—sixteen years ago.”

“Sixteen years, and you don’t know Pat Webb—
Spider
Pat?”

“Night shift,” she informed him. “If you wanna talk to someone on night shift, you might wanna come at night. We don’t got dorms in back.” She lifted her pad to her chest. “Now, what’ll yas have?”

Rob ordered a turkey club with fries, Eddie M. got pancakes with sunny-side eggs on top, I asked for a grilled cheese, and Rourke pushed the menu toward the table rim. “Burger, medium rare.”

“Coffees?” she inquired, taking up menus.

Rourke said, “Yeah, for everybody.”

Rob pushed some quarters to the little jukebox suspended at the end of the table. He told Rourke to find something decent.

Eddie M. chuckled. “Find him ‘Stayin’ Alive.’”

“Fuck you, Eddie M.”

Eddie M. said, “You jellyfish. You love the Bee Gees.”

“You jerk off to Gordon Lightfoot.”

“Lightfoot’s a genius.”

“Genius!” Rob snorted. “Let me ask you something. ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’—
what is that?”
Rourke and I laughed, and Rob stated dryly, “I’m totally serious. What
is
that?”

“I’m telling you, he’s a poet,” Eddie M. muttered.

Rourke flipped the jukebox pages. He had the inside seat across from mine, so I couldn’t help but notice how his forehead was square and his cheekbones were prominent. His eyes had a black and avaricious clarity. The diner’s windows were coated with enormous transparencies to mitigate the view of the highway and to tenderize the inclement glare. The sapphire cellophane light gave the impression of things Mediterranean, of him where he naturally belonged, southern France, northern Italy, a village with battered streets along the coast of Spain—with me, in white, by his side.

“Want some?” Rob asked, gesturing to me with the ketchup.

I said no, thanks.

Eddie M. popped his eggs. “Seen Tommy, Harrison?”

Rourke said, “Yesterday.”

“At the gym?”

“Outside it.”

“I heard he got a fracture.”

Rob laughed.
“A fracture?
Some fracture. He looks like he got hit by a wrecking ball.”

“That’s right, and he’s still standing,” Eddie M. said. “Better watch your back, Harrison.”

Rob chucked a napkin at Eddie M. “You know what, Eddie M., shut up. And wipe the yolk off your mouth, for Chrissakes.”

Rourke put the money in the jukebox and Marvin Gaye came on. When the music started, we retreated, each of us, picking through the wilty last halves of fries and gazing into the theatrical stillness of the diner.

The dessert carousel stood sentry at the door. It was like a phosphorescent obelisk, twirling sleepily. The pastries marched around in a demented parade—towering meringues, tilting cakes, mammoth pies and puddings, balloon-like jelly rolls, surreal mousses. An older couple loitered at the register as they paid, satisfied and distracted. He was cleaning his teeth with a matchbox; she was straightening the vest of her peach summer suit. Past the window on the other side of the highway was another mall.

Everything looked different to me; everything
was
different. I felt an acuteness of being, a lonely fury of connectedness. It was as if I’d set off from home and its false promise of security and accidentally found sanctuary in the arms of my generation. Though I hadn’t gone far, I was worlds away. And being there was like occupying a place you have long feared, but in which you suddenly find yourself, and you think,
This is okay, this is really okay
.

Rob’s fingers drummed the tabletop. He and Rourke looked at each other. Something passed between them, something dark but not newly dark. It was as if they were each privately thinking the same thoughts, sharing the same concerns.

“You headin’ out?” Rob asked.

Rourke reached for his wallet. “Yeah, right now.”

Rob lifted his hand. “I got it.”

“Me too?” Eddie M. asked, somewhat surprised.

“No, you bastard,” Rob said. “You pay for yourself.” Then he reached over and slid my sunglasses from the top of my head. He cleaned them carefully, using the soft corner of his sweatshirt. “I’m gonna have to teach you how to take care of these things.”

“I spent a weekend in Jersey once too,” my mother reminisced as she filled two coffee mugs with cold Chablis. Rourke had dropped me off just hours prior, though the two had not met. I’d called her the day before to say that I was safe and with friends. “At Princeton. Very memorable.” She handed me a cup. “Sorry about the mugs. I’ll do the dishes tonight.” She joined me at the table. “It feels like you’ve been gone for weeks. Susan Parsons finally moved in,” she said.