Anthropology of an American Girl (53 page)

Denny and I are on Bleecker Street under the awning at Figaro’s, and it’s raining. Rain falls, it disappears, more comes. There is a beautiful sizzling sound it makes, like bacon frying. People huddle in doorways. A man in a saturated white parachute suit and Birkenstocks passes. His toes are black.

Denny takes a forkful of deep-dish apple pie. “Know what my mother calls this?” he asks, then answers his own question. “Pandowdy. Want some?”

I shake my head.

“So you’ll do it?” he asks. Denny got money to produce the clothes
for a music video one of his friends is shooting. He wants me to design the sets.

“I don’t know. I’ve just been so busy. I really don’t know where the time goes,” I say.

“What are you talking about? You have too
much
time. You have no life outside Mark or the gallery. And you still look exhausted.”

I
am
exhausted. It’s exhausting to give up the past as I do, as I have done. It’s like having an autoimmune disease. I fight against myself, against everything that is natural: love, memory, autonomy, desire. I don’t want to breathe. There’s this balance I need to maintain that breathing upsets. I don’t know what it means not to breathe, but I heard Lowie say that everything you have ever done is
written into your respiration
.

“It’s just, the seasons,” I try to explain to Denny. “And time. I can’t tell if it’s spring, fall, winter. Days of the week run together. I lose track. I don’t even—”

There is a cloudburst, then a downpour. The rain is torrential, a covalent, sticking rain. The building across the street has scaffolding, and the raindrops cascade like marbles through a maze of planks and pipes. It reminds me of that game Mouse Trap. Scaffolding is awful. The other day I was thinking how nice the city will look when all the construction is done. Then I remembered: it will never be done.

Denny sets his knapsack on an adjacent chair, where his cane is hanging. An air conditioner fell out of a fifth-story window on Christopher Street awhile ago and smashed to the ground in front of him. A piece of metal flew into his leg and he had to have surgery. He ended up winning a twenty-four-thousand-dollar settlement.

“If I’d been one step forward,” he’d confided with shock and horror at the time, “it would have killed me. It just wasn’t my time.”

If Denny
had
been killed by a falling air conditioner, everyone would have said that it was
destiny
. People would have to say that, just to give meaning to something seemingly meaningless. But he didn’t die, and so the incident becomes irrelevant and remains largely undiscussed, which is regrettable, because of all the remarkable things about life, the most remarkable are the near misses.

When he arrived, he said he’s almost ready to get back to dancing and that we should sign up for instruction soon. He’d bought us a series of
lessons for Christmas last year, or possibly the year before. Mark kept telling me it was too dangerous to go, that those dance studios are really just money-laundering fronts.

“Getting any sleep at all?” he asks.

“Sort of. Not really. A little, I’ve been dreaming.”

“Well—
good!
Dreaming is good. It’s brain work. It’s a sign of health. You know, I read somewhere that death row inmates have disproportionately fewer dreams than the rest of us,” Denny says as he pays the check. “And that a majority of them choose Dr Pepper as their last drink. Wouldn’t that make a great ad campaign?—
‘The last word in soda—Dr Pepper.’”

The weight of the rain lifts; the sun presses through. The street dries rapidly, making me think of those hooded rollers in car washes. Denny and I make eye contact through the picturesque vapor, which is awkward—awkward because I want something from him, which feels like asking for money to buy pills. I want him to remind me of where we started, since where he started and where I started is the same. I wonder if he retains the impression of me and of Rourke like keys to a former house.

I ask Denny, “Do you remember me then?”

“Very well,” he says. “You were happy.”

“You need some rest.”

“Rest is all I get,” I tell the doctor.

She says, “Obviously not the right kind.”

I didn’t even know there
were
different kinds.

Dr. Mitchell replies, “Well, first of all, rest at home is cheating. You still have the phone and bills and mail and shopping and cooking to deal with. You know, cleaning and laundry.”

I do not bother to tell her I do nothing, pay for nothing. It’s too embarrassing.

She prescribes Halcion and an extended vacation.

“Don’t you have a school break coming up in February?”

“Yes,” I say, thinking,
Mark has put her up to this
.

Jamaica is hot, hot like you will need emergency services. It is a lonesome and detestable heat, a broad, blinding heat, like being tied to a post at a
crossroad. Like there is no shelter, no friend. No help in sight. Just you, left to burn.

In the tropics I think without reprieve; maybe it’s the heat or maybe it’s the medicine, with outside sounds that grow softer and inside ones growing louder. There is a long dock with a thatch-roofed awning at the end; in the morning I go out there to where the world is orderly, where it is arranged in plates of color—white and blue and blue. Like the candle we used to look at in high school, discussing whether the bird was flying on the plane of the sea or on the sky. I wonder about that conversation, about why we kept having it, and about
all
the probing conversations of our adolescence. There was a simultaneous coming to consciousness. It was like a circle of ladders wide at the base and tapered at the top—with each of us stepping up together, testing in tiny rises the ideal of a singleness of perspective, gaining by rungs new things to swear by, going as far as we could possibly go before forsaking the ascent altogether.

What is it that we were hoping to obtain? Did we speak in the pursuit of unity because we could not speak in the pursuit of power? Is that why early allegiances are discontinued, because eventually you must demand of friendships some advantage? I certainly don’t need to become more politically liberal or artistically aware or socially open-minded to survive; as a matter of fact, my opinions often cripple me. Was it that we had nothing pertinent to give one another anymore, such as sound investment advice or better career credentials? All Mark’s associates just make one another richer. It feels incredible, how hard I tried, how much I lost—the luxury of time and friends and poetic aptitude, the modest opulence of home, where definitions of success extended no further than the pleasant close of the day you were in, where dreams of paradise were enough to sustain you.

Through these thoughts, thoughts of Rourke appear. Is this soul preservation I am feeling, or the vanity of sorrow returning? I don’t mean to go back to grief. It’s just, there are memories of days when I did not have to do, but only to be, when I was desired for the little grace I was. I tell myself,
We all lose such days. Why should I be any different?

Mark helps me to advance, despite my own aversion to my
betterment
. It hardly seems just with so many going untended in their despair,
but somehow I feel cheated. I feel dispossessed of leverage. The fact of my living a life of privilege precludes me from
reflecting
on privilege—there are rules about thinking or saying too much about your place if your place is an especially comfortable one, even if you arrived there by accident. Though I’m conscious of the comparative ease of my position, I can’t access it in my head—it’s like pushing peas through molasses. If privileged is not how I feel, it is how I look, and how I look is how I am viewed, and view is everything. It’s irrelevant that I myself possess nothing, that I am more destitute than ever. If I am dependent, if I am subjected to views with which I disagree, if I live a life of compromise, it’s a life I’ve chosen. I am wholly responsible.

My mind turns naturally to my parents: to my mother’s struggle to support us while she attended college and graduate school, though she could have married anyone she wanted and attained financial security; to my father in his Ray-Bans and khakis, ready for a drive in his Plymouth station wagon to Gaslight Village in Lake George or the Danbury Fair in Connecticut, grateful for the inglorious luxury of a two-day vacation and a full tank of gas. Stuffed into the visor there would be maps and site brochures to caverns and motel recommendations and a leather pouch filled with change for the tolls. In a cooler would be the lunch he and Marilyn had made when they’d gotten up at five in the morning.

The day Mark and I pulled up to the sign shop in the Porsche, Dad came out with Tony. When I introduced my father as an artist, he shook Mark’s hand and said, “Actually, son, I’m a sign-painter.”

And me, not an adult, but a sick shell, void of fury, purpose, instinct. Not even a sellout, since
sellout
implies that there is some superior identity I’ve left behind.

Mark is coming. I feel the bob and creak of the dock with every step he takes—forty-seven steps. It’s time for breakfast. At breakfast, the tables are immaculately set upon a curved concrete lagoon beneath huge tracts of cranberry-red bougainvillea where middle-aged Teutonic couples who do not touch in the night suck back poached eggs from thick silver spoons like sucking back oysters off of shells, and where the silence is uncanny until the arrival of our party—we are twelve. When we arrive, we create chaos. There is turbulent chair-switching and table-shifting
and off-menu ordering. There is the flamboyant tying of slipped bikini straps and the indecent cross-table sharing of food and the rummaging through beach bags for cameras and aspirin, lotion and sunglasses.

Mark kneels behind me on the dock and puts his arms around my waist. “What are you looking at?”

“Home,” I say, because as a couple, we are not without our virtues. I speak the truth when asked, and I never care to hear what he chooses not to tell. He doesn’t mind that in my heart I betray him. I steal because I’ve been stolen from. It would take forever to replace all that has been taken from me. He knows that.

“Did you take your pill this morning?” Mark asks. I tell him yes, I took two.

Ocho Rios is about an hour’s drive from the Half Moon Hotel, where we are staying. To get there, we rent motorcycles. Brett found six Triumph Bonnevilles through a British expatriate in Montego Bay. We take off east down the road—steep and angry highlands to the right, tranquil Caribbean to the left. We stop for beer at a place called the Famous Lovely Lynn’s, a roadside shanty made of sundry timber and corrugated tin painted a caustic berberine-yellow.

A Jamaican man with an elongated head and spooling facial hair observes us from an aluminum folding chair. Lynn opens twelve tepid bottles of Red Stripe—there is the limp
chzzt, chzzt
of bottle caps snapping off. She sets the beers next to piles of bananas and neat rows of pineapples and peeled-back coconuts. I know she’s Lynn because right away Brett asked, “Are you the famous Lovely Lynn?”

The man in the chair wants to know my birth date, which I give. He tells me my number. “Eight.”

I turn my bottle in my hands and think of the number eight—stacked
Os
, a pair of glasses, segments of an earthworm, bubbles fused.

Mark takes a swig and makes a gratified sound. Lynn smiles at him. He inquires about her bracelets. Her arms are loaded with them—silver, gold, colored plastic.

“Fifty-two,” she says, dangling her wrists in air. “One for each week.”

“These three are identical,” Mark says. “They only count as one.”

The man continues to inspect me. “Whatever happened to you happened through
eight.”

“We started going out when she was eighteen,” Mark chimes in.

“No. Not eighteen,” he reports flatly to Mark, all the while his eyes boring into me. “Seventeen—one plus seven—
eight
. She knows what I’m saying.”

Yes, I know what he is saying. Rourke.

Mark stiffens. He pays for the beers, then gives the guy twenty bucks. “Buy your lady another couple of bracelets.”

At a local happy hour club named Bloody Mary’s Jerk Pork BBQ, we all dance on a stage that cuts through the tables like a runway. For some reason, it’s dressed on the sides in drooping velvet. It looks like a fancy coffin—a catafalque, a draped casket for presidents and kings. I remind myself to smile and to be pretty. It’s hard to remember anything when I have the heavy feeling that Rourke is looking, that he’s coming, though it’s not likely that he will find me, since it’s dark where I am. I wonder—when Rourke left, did he give me up to Mark consciously, like laying a baby on the steps of one particular house?

We dance until dark, moving the way the Jamaicans do. The men press their penises against the women’s thrust-back asses, and the whole place is a party. From outside you could probably see the little shack shaking, going side to side.

Back at the hotel there is the sanitized rendition of Jamaican culture. We reenter the walled and gated property, return the motorcycles, and end the evening with a civilized stroll by the water’s edge. We stop at the bulletin board to sign up for upcoming activities. The next day we take the glass-bottom boat tour at ten, and in the afternoon I rest by the pool while Mark goes with Richard to work on his swing. I don’t ask if
swing
means tennis swing or golf swing. In New York, it means squash swing. Dinner that night is followed by a rum punch festival in front of a calypso show with steel drums, limbo dancing, and crab racing. The crabs get soaked in beer. I don’t like the crabs part. It makes me sick, but I stay anyway, because,
just because
.

Dudley arrives with a cup of Blue Mountain Coffee for me. His grandmother
drinks several cups a day, he told me one afternoon, and she is ninety-six. Dudley is our waiter; every day and night we get him. He is soft-spoken, clear and proud, with prominent cheekbones upcurving like stripes beneath his eyes. He is a king from another time. Now he clears tables and rectifies silverware, making all things parallel and perpendicular. When he puts down the china cup, the act is delicate, though if he wanted, he could crush it. I look at Dudley and am overcome by shame. I honestly don’t know what to do about the nauseating fact of myself. He understands, I think. He nods to me, knowingly, quietly, pushing the coffee cup closer.