Anthropology of an American Girl (51 page)

There is logic to business, just don’t expect to find it. It’s really non-logic masquerading as logic, and it depends upon the fact that you, and people like you, are too stupid or too busy to make inquiries. When considering the convoluted principles of business deals, look for nepotism, cronyism, extortion, insider trading, ordinance evasion, or bulk airline fares.

“We’re meeting them at the Lobster Roll later.”

“No,” I say, squinting up. “Not the Lobster Roll.” I will never go back.

Mark stiffens, the hand at his jaw clutching a tiny peak of towel. He pats his face, drying it, and he smiles. “No problem. The Clam Bar.”

He goes no further. There is nothing to fix when he finds what he wants in the wreckage of me. Like a missionary, he is called upon to save—saving is atonement for his ascendancy. And like missionaries who marry natives, he is inspired to emancipate deeply, down to the level of the DNA. It doesn’t matter that I feel nothing, say nothing; it matters simply that I am docile. He is resolved and he is apt, and if he suffers from my apathy, he shows no sign of it. There is much at stake in the rescue of me—I cannot begin to guess what.

I feel his shadow growing over my body. He kisses me again, saying, “I love you.”

I believe that that is true. He truly loves the lie that is me.

“I’ll go tell Lisa and Tim that there’s been a change. It might take me awhile. You want something to eat before we go, an apple, a peach?”

I don’t answer. I don’t eat fruit anymore. He knows I don’t. I can’t bear the idea of seeds or pods. I close my eyes again and lift my hips to straighten my towel. In my mind there is a place to hide, padded and small like a cell. No one gets in. No one dares to try.

In my dream, we are together again. There are three separate locations. The first is at his sister’s house, though he doesn’t even have a sister
.

“Come in,” she says, inviting me into her kitchen. I can still see it perfectly; it will never leave me—the orientation, the light, the furnishings. The counters are the color of putty, the walls are stone-yellow. From someplace close there is the faint sound of children, like the crackle of fire or the sotto voce gurgle of sewer water
.

Her husband comes in directly behind me, tossing down his keys and patting her waist. He calls the kids, nodding to me as he passes. He is a good husband, I think. My eyes trail him as he disappears down the corridor
.

At the end of the hall is Rourke. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him. He smiles. I smile too; I’m happy. I feel distinctly that this happiness is wholly new. He is going to take a shower. He asks, “Do you mind waiting?”

When he goes, his sister hands me a letter he’s written. In it he confesses so much. I hold it in my hand, gripping it tightly
.

He and I begin to walk through a deserted village. There is a soft wind, like shrouds blowing softly. As we walk, we pass houses and churches and graveyards, and we decide things, though for me there is nothing to decide
.

In the hallway of an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I attend the future. Rourke is there—but only visiting. This I know because his feet do not touch ground. Children chase children throughout the apartment. It is a party, a birthday party. He and I speak to each other with undivided attention. There is the knowledge that I have withdrawn my feelings from a strictly guarded place, like jewels from a box
.

The children burrow in a train under the bridge of his legs, and one stops, the one that is mine. I know it is mine by the way Rourke pauses to admire him, and the boy peers up with peculiar tilted brown eyes. In my dream there is a perceptivity about the boy. He seems to see what we are unable to see, though we have been powerfully seeking. I see the tiny hands hold the giant leg. And Rourke touching him, raising him up
.

Mrs. Ross gets four tickets to see Betty Comden and Adolph Green perform excerpts of their work at Guild Hall in East Hampton. “And then we’ll go to The Palm after the show.”

“Great!” Mark says. Mark says great, though he knows I don’t want to go. I don’t ever want to go back to Guild Hall, where the play was held in high school, but I can’t decline. That would require discussion. It’s pointless to discuss anything with anyone.

The theater has a musty and untrafficked smell. It’s as though nothing has moved here in the intervening time, or as though I’m not visiting an actual place but some sort of eyeless pit inside myself. Everything has been strangely preserved. There are things I once touched—walls and chairs and scenery items—that probably have not been thoroughly cleaned of my prints, and that is sad, like I was here in fact, but, in fact, it doesn’t matter. I have ceased somehow, yet only in portion. To have ceased completely, well that would be something.

Rourke is present all around, clear in my memory and in my mind. All the areas where I remember him to have been are brought into focus. There are the seats we sat in on the night of that play, the night he said
he was
looking forward to the end of all this
, the night he kissed me on the cheek at Dan’s house. And, though it is not cold, I feel cold, and I recall the way that I loved him, and the blind faith of seventeen. I was never afraid then, though I’m always afraid now, which is incorrect, since the worst has already happened. Perhaps at first he did not love me, perhaps he never loved me. But if he wanted me only for sex and readiness, at least that’s better than being with a man like Mark who wants you for reasons you cannot even fathom. Without the knowledge of why you are desired, you are powerless, an object. Love is not reciprocal.

At The Palm we will eat meat, and I will be made to speak. Not much, maybe just what did I think of the show and is my food okay. “They’re going to mention Christmas at the Breakers,” Mark warned. “Try not to say anything negative about Florida. Or about being afraid to fly.”

From the moment we arrive at the restaurant, Mrs. Richard Ross—Theo—will capture the attention of every decent gentleman, as she is breathtaking and ageless, with cascading blond hair and a sea-salted, rose-hip-oiled body, and silk blouses skimming skirts that go narrow to her knees. Over a succession of chilled vodkas, Mr. Ross will tell stories of celebrities and money, because that is what is expected of him, but when he digresses inevitably into tales of his youth, he will address me to the exclusion of the others. Unlike the others, I know what it is to have nothing and to lose everything. Unlike the others, I am not imperiled by my need or his nostalgia. He was just a man once, unprivileged, a fighter of sorts, much like Rourke, and I see that—that is to say, I
grasp
that, and he senses my grasp. He senses what I truly feel—that few things in life are more beautiful than the bareness of a man.

In any event, he is kind, as is his wife. It’s kind of them to take care of me and to treat me like family when I am not. It is right to respect your children’s choices. And the Ross family is a nice family to have if you have no other.

I stop by to visit my mother on a Sunday morning one weekend in East Hampton. I hear her through the screen door before I see her.

“Well, the apple and the fly symbolize sin and evil,” she is saying speculatively. “And the cucumber and the goldfinch are redemption.”

“I need seven letters,” my aunt says. “Symbol of Christian sway—how about
cypress?”

“Cypress is longevity,” Powell replies.

“Try
crosier,”
my mother says. “The bishop’s staff, the shepherd’s crook.”

“That fits,” Lowie says. “With an
S
or a
Z
?”

I step in past the door, saying hi.

Mom leaps to greet me.
“Eveline!”
Right away her face darkens. “Have you been sick?”

Powell also stands. He kisses me and steps back, squinting as he regards me. “She looks good to me, Babe. Same as always.”

“She just grew,” Lowie insists quietly, drawing her cane in front of her, but not getting up. “Come over here, honey. Sure you did.”

“She has at least four inches on me, Low,” my mother remarks indignantly. “And she’s no heavier. She needs at least ten pounds.”

Powell tips his head. “Maybe your mother’s right.
Maybe.”

Mom lectures me on the perils of health foods. She is biased against health foods. She thinks if you use them, you belong to a giant mind-control society. As if consumers of cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, and soda do not belong to a giant mind-control society.

“You don’t have to work in the city this summer, Eveline,” she suggests. “Stay at home. We’ll install a bathroom in the barn. You can work at the Lobster Roll again.”

It’s nice of her to think of me, but sometimes even the nicest plans are unbearable. “The gallery is fine,” I reassure them. “I answer phones and file slides and design invitations to openings. And New York is nice in summer with no one there.” In the mornings SoHo is like Paris, damp and hueless blue. “I’ve been thinking of calling Dad and Marilyn soon. Maybe we’ll go to the movies. Or try one of those walking tours they take, like through Harlem or Brooklyn Heights.”

My mother’s brow contracts. She and Powell seem unmoved. But if she is contemplating my dishonesty, she’s also calculating the effort required to engage with it. She decides to let it go, and frankly, who can blame her? I wouldn’t want to try to talk to me.

After catching up with all the stories over several cups of coffee, I walk the two miles back to the Ross’s Georgica house, depressed to leave but
comforted somewhat for having been vigorously treated. I’m always handled so delicately by Mark and his family. Sometimes I find him staring at me the way you might stare at a fish you keep, like he’s convinced I don’t see him back. How ironic—Mark thinks he’s so considerate, so cultured, such a gentleman, and yet, I’m apparently so adversely altered by his company that people who have never worried about me before, not even when I was in really bad shape, suddenly worry.

The city glints amiably beneath a mannerly drizzle, so I go slow, taking the long way from the Varick Street station to the East Village, pausing to read the plaques on brownstones, stopping at the record store on Carmine Street and the chess shop on Thompson. In the chess section of the newspaper, you read of
cornering
and
abducting, lunging
and
capturing
, yet here players sit face-to-face, inert and imperturbable, insouciantly grazing knees and sharing breath. The combination of mental vigor and physical inertia is weird, like the glacial way reptiles hunt. And the little chessmen are regal and fiendish, like from gory visions you might have had. I buy myself a knight.

“A replacement?” the man asks.

“Yes,” I say. “A replacement.”

McSorley’s is so packed there’s not enough room to choke if you had to. Whenever a girl walks past the sign shop in tight clothes, Tony Abbruscato says to my dad, “Hey, Anton, take a look at this. There’s not enough room to choke in there if you had to.”

Mark and his crowd are in back, half-sitting, half-standing at a table. There is the attorney they’ve all slept with, Marguerite, who’s been engaged unsuccessfully four times. Brett’s with his new girlfriend, Rachel, who is not a model but a
former
model. There’s a difference: a former model is just as vain as a working model, only a former model
is just so happy to be out of the industry
. Mark’s friend Anselm is with his fiancée, Helene de Zwart. They’re all calooshing their mugs like it’s Oktoberfest in Germantown. Mark’s tie is flapped over his shoulder as if blown by a strong wind. I know exactly the kind of night it’s going to be.

They see me and wave. I unzip my coat. Brett leaps to his feet and croons loudly; he used to be in a band.

“There she was just a-walkin’ down the street, singin’ …”

The bar joins in,

“Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do.”

Right off, a couple of guys step in front of me, blocking my way, asking would I like to stop at their table instead of where I’m headed. Mark and Brett bust over, and there is nonsense shouting and miscellaneous intimidation, culminating in a few clapped backs and an upturned chair or two. As our group gets escorted out, Marguerite stands, fashionably posed, toe-deep in sawdust, clutching the milky top to her Chanel Pierrot suit, paying the tab. Marguerite always manages to be fashionable, even in the midst of picking up the bill during a bar fight. Shopping is her life. She will tell you all about the three
Bs
—Bendel’s, Barneys, Bergdorf’s—and how she never wears underpants because they corrupt the clean line of slacks. She rarely speaks to me, though she does stare an awful lot, and once I caught her in Mark’s bedroom, going through my drawers.

The first time we met, she looked me over and exclaimed to Mark, “Au naturel!”

Mark always apologizes for her, which is unnecessary. She’s one of those women who make you sad, no matter how scrupulously they dress or how much money they claim to make or what fabulous event they supposedly attended the previous evening. Of course there are women who have the opposite effect, inspiring complete admiration and awe. They wear blue jeans but no makeup and they have gorgeous eleven-year-old sons. All the best women have good skin and gorgeous eleven-year-old sons.

Outside on a murky unlit Fifth Street, the group straightens their ruffled jackets and calculates what to hit next—Odeon for burgers or Chinatown for pork fried rice. Brett pees in a doorway. The urine makes the shape of a lizard on the ground.

Marguerite takes my hand. “Oooh, how short your nails are! So easy to manage!”

Mark picks me up at the gallery after lunch on Fridays and we go to East Hampton. Other employees stay until six, and some work through the weekend. I never asked for the abbreviated schedule; Mark arranged it. It
doesn’t make me tremendously popular with the staff, though the salespeople are careful to remain friendly in case I have any power over Mrs. Ross.

“You’re there to build a résumé,” Mark says, “not to make friends.”

Each week he pulls onto the curb and bounds up to retrieve me because I don’t always recognize the car. There’s always a different car—he is perpetually testing, borrowing, buying, trading vehicles. The beloved 356B Porsche remains in East Hampton, except for those special occasions when he needs to make a
dramatic impression
. Whenever I hear that, I think of the first time he showed it to me—and how, yes, I was dramatically impressed.