Anthropology of an American Girl (57 page)

Jim pulled a new album and tucked one headphone cup between his
ear and shoulder. He engrossed himself in the mix, fingering the album back and forth. Underneath the song that was already playing came the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden.” The absence of interruption in music as he went from one song to the next was nice; it was symbolic of cohesion in rough and fast times. It was as if no one could bear a second of silence.

As soon as the song became recognizable to the crowd, people peeled away from the bar. Their faces were familiar to me; they belonged to people my mother might have befriended, rebels and outcasts. Only I noticed a new lameness about them, an increased lack of relevance. They looked
off message
. It was as if within a matter of minutes, the avant-garde had become the periphery. The bodies crept to the edge of the dance floor, sitting on tables or standing next to them, swaying, nodding, soothed for the moment by the injection of the Stones’ familiar antiestablishment voices, though, as Jack would have said,
The moment was bound to be brief
.

“How’d it go?” Phil inquired when I left. He was alone outside, just standing there, staring thoughtfully toward the street.

“Okay, I guess. I start Thursday.”

He nodded. “Work out all right with Aureole?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s getting her stuff.”

Phil had bad skin and bulky wrists. I suspected that he was self-conscious about that, that he was sort of a lost gentleman, so when he offered a cigarette, I took it. I didn’t smoke, but Phil didn’t deserve a
no
, and sometimes that’s all a
yes
needs to be. We stood there for a while—actually, I leaned. Cigarettes make me dizzy.

“So, Reagan won,” I said.

“Yeah.” Phil evacuated the smoke from his lungs and flicked his butt to the curb. “The actor.”

Heartbreak was not a great club, it was an okay club, a dive actually, but an enduring sort of dive popular among idiosyncratic losers and peripheral celebrities, iffy brokers and borderline musicians, those haggard, nicotine-types in creased leather and reedy denim who sleep all day but somehow manage to earn livings. I worked three nights, eleven to four,
earning shift plus tips. I did more dancing than drink-serving, but no one seemed to care.

The atmosphere was remarkably wholesome. Dad and Marilyn stopped by sometimes to see me. Like everyone working there—gentlemanly bouncers, family-minded bar-backs, timid deejays, law school waitresses—I was in it for the money. And like everyone else, I had a complicated past that made me insusceptible to entanglements and indifferent to wild times. If only the loneliness there could have alleviated the loneliness in me, if only a nightclub were not such an institute of longing, maybe I would have gotten better.

At two-thirty in the morning one Friday in December, Mark came in. I hadn’t seen him since the procedure in October. Every week I mailed him a money order for twenty-five dollars, which he always acknowledged with a phone call, and when he called, we would speak at length. I didn’t have to force myself—I liked talking to him. It was like a window open, small as a needle’s eye. But I never called him, no matter how reckless I felt.

“I can’t stay,” he reported. “I have a car waiting.”

I was holding a freshly loaded tray. “Okay. Let me get rid of this.”

I crossed the suddenly packed dance floor to deliver drinks to the guy who’d ordered them. He wiggled his blubbery ass and sang along as he fished leisurely through his pocket for a wallet.

He kept trying to dance with me, and I almost spilled the drinks before he finally handed me a twenty. It wasn’t good to think of where his hands had been, such as shaking himself over a urinal. When people say,
Don’t put that money in your mouth
, they basically mean someone like him had been holding it. Denny was always telling me to be careful because guys masturbate in bathroom stalls.
And worse
. The guy waited until I got the change together, then just told me to keep it. Six bucks, which was a lot, but somehow still inadequate compensation for having to deal with him. Good tippers are frequently the most despicable citizens—they pay you for tolerating them.

It’d been a nice night before Mark had arrived. Maybe it wasn’t fair to blame him, but nightclubs are places of explicit laws. It takes just one body to transform a benign gathering into an intolerable mob.

“Who’s the suit?” Mike shouted, meaning Mark. I was waiting for an opening to cross the floor.

“Just a guy I know,” I shouted back.

Aureole joined us. “He’s cute. Like, totally undone. It looks like he ran here.”

It was true. Mark’s tie was loose and his jacket unbuttoned and his hair made Caesar bangs on his brow. He’d obviously been drinking.

Mike leaned forward. “What the fuck’s he doing?”

“Is he busing tables?” Aureole asked, leaning as well, squinting. “Oh, my God, he is.”

Mark was emptying ashtrays into a gray plastic bucket, wiping them with cocktail napkins. All the tables around him had been cleared.

When I got over to him, I said, “What are you doing?”

He said, “I hate to have you touch filth.”

“We have a busboy,” I informed him.

“Obviously not a competent one. There’s shit everywhere.”

“Anyway,” I yelled. “What’s up?”

“I want to borrow you. For New Year’s Eve.”

“I’m working New Year’s Eve.”

“Take off,” he declared emphatically. “How much will you make?”

I didn’t know. I’d never worked on New Year’s before.

“Take a guess—a hundred, a hundred fifty?”

I shrugged. I’d never made more than fifty a night. “I don’t know, maybe.”

“I’ll double it,” he proposed. “I’ll give you three hundred.”

“That’s prostitution.”

“It’s not if we don’t have sex.” He kissed me and ran out.

T
he dorm on New Year’s Eve had a cinematic emptiness that called to my mind the evacuated ministries in European wartime movies or the hospital where they put Don Corleone in
The Godfather
. Most everyone had gone home for the holiday break; only a handful of students remained—me, some resident advisers, a few internationals.

Anselm from Berlin was on my bed. He and Mark had met at Harvard, though he was at Columbia now, earning his doctorate in American history. His burgundy shirt was unbuttoned beneath an orangutan-orange leather coat, and his chest was bare. He was not so much a man as a symbol of one, like a dictionary illustration or a figure on a lavatory door. He was a gorgeous unfortunate, one of those people in whom vanity overwhelms sexuality to become a preoccupying sort of project. He was a little tragic overall, a little east-west, a little male-female, childishly divided, like the city he’d come from.

We made a champagne toast. “To 1981,” Mark said.

“1981,” Anselm repeated with a nod.

I told him that I liked his jacket. “You look good.”

“Looking good is what he does best,” Mark said, taking out his credit card to cut a pile of coke.

I pulled on a pair of gray jeans and a peach T-shirt with a lazy ruffled neckline. I dressed in front of them because modesty seemed solemn and unnecessary, because sometimes a night has a natural drive, and you are transported past the conceit of your despair. Sometimes you can’t help it—your constitution is strong despite yourself.

The three of us stayed in my room for a few hours, with them talking and me dancing, half-listening, always agreeing. It didn’t matter what they were saying, or what anyone said anymore—everyone kept conversation light. Days were different without people like Jack in
them. No one was smart enough to take exception, no one dared to object or go too deep; if you tried, you would encounter walls in the faces of your friends. And anyway, life moved faster than expostulation would allow.

Earlier that day, I’d picked up some classic Motown albums at Bleecker Street Records. We were listening to “Love Child” by the Supremes.

“Psychedelic soul,” Anselm remarked above the music, examining the album cover—it was a picture of Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Cindy Birdsong waltzing in flowing pink caftans.

“Not exactly Parliament,” Mark said, “but an attempt at a social statement nonetheless.”

“C’mon,” Anselm said. “‘Love Child’ knocked ‘Hey Jude’ off the number one spot on the charts. Parliament couldn’t have done that. The masses move in baby steps.”

“Okay, since you’re the expert on American culture, what’s your prediction for the eighties?” Mark asked.

“Disempowerment of youth, dismantling of liberalism,” Anselm said without hesitation. “In order to restore the right, which has suffered repeated blows since the fifties, Reagan has to destroy the legitimacy of the left. Alternative thinking and living will become synonymous with failure. It is a big ideology.”

“I guess it worked for Hitler,” Mark said.

Anselm said, “Precisely.”

“Luckily, Reagan’s no mastermind.”

“
Un
luckily, it’s all too simple. Look at any totalitarian regime. They succeed by feeding greed, inspiring terror, rewarding complicity. By eradicating shades of gray, by promoting contrasts—black-white, good-evil, in-out, us-them. For those who play, there is wealth, security, respect. For those who do not, there is the pathetic echo of their own enlightened but impoverished voices. It’s all theater, which is why there’s no better messenger for the moment than an actor.”

“No uprisings?”

Anselm shrugged. “Drugs will silence us.”

“In the sixties,” Mark said, “drugs provided impetus for change.”

Anselm toyed casually with the radio. With his right wrist he spun the
receiver dial while his body leaned left. I was not sure if he knew what he was saying, but it sounded good when he said it. In all the gum and whoosh of his German accent, everything he said sounded jurisdictional.

“I would not say
change
. I’d say
review
. Nothing changed, per se, otherwise, how could we find ourselves
here
, at the mercy of a conservative regime? The difference is that drugs were once in the service of creating common ground. Now they are in the service of narcissism. In the sixties people were emboldened by the draft—not drugs. Reagan would have to reinstate the draft,” Anselm said, adding, “which is why it’s nonsense to think that he will. He won’t risk activating people. He wants us to sleep.”

Mark noticed I had stopped dancing. He spoke my name abruptly, as though I were a child eavesdropping on an adult conversation. “Eveline. Put on some lipstick; it’s a holiday.”

I looked to him, startled, for an instant unable to recall how we’d met, how he’d come to know me. I felt myself on unfamiliar ground. And yet, I knew that in order to come through, I needed to conform, regardless of the calling of my heart to the contrary.

I applied lipstick. Mark was behind me, sharing my mirror. “Good girl,” he said.

There were no cars in SoHo. We walked down the middle of the street, and Mark greeted everyone—huddled couples, dog walkers, lost and rambling revelers—saying “Happy New Year” with great congeniality. Mark was congenial. It was hard to despise him for it when affability is a skill of survival. He took my hand, I took Anselm’s, and we walked, united by darkness and dope. If you tried, you could almost feel the newness; you could turn susceptible, the way you can relax and sense a phone about to ring. It truly was the eve of an almost something, something not yours perhaps, but connected to you nonetheless. If what Anselm said was correct, and change was inevitable, I wished it would come already, even if it meant change for the worse.

Snowflakes together with the wind blinded me, leaving me dependent upon the mercy of the men. It had been just one year before that I’d seen Rourke in the record store. I told myself to set the thought aside; it was a dead thought. And yet, one year ago was easy to recall—if I was remembering,
I realized, so was he. Wherever he was, he was thinking of me. My step quickened.

“You seem happy all of a sudden,” Mark said. “I’m glad.”

We turned from Prince onto Thompson and raced to where we were going. In the yellowed stairwell leading up to the fifth floor, the pathetic odor of currently cooking things mixed with years upon years of long-ago cooked things, packing up the passage like a dam. Each landing was dressed for the season with a paper snowman head and a sorry bit of garland tacked beneath a feeble hall light. Where the linoleum was peeling away there were those little black and white floor tiles. It was exactly like the building my father lived in.

“No kidding,” Mark said. “Where does he live?”

“On Elizabeth Street. And Spring.”

Two apartments on the top floor joined in front to form one large living area. Through strings of lights that made
Xs
across the windows, you could look north over the roofline of the tenement buildings on the opposite side of the street. The floors were painted glossy white, and the furniture was pale wood. There were glass tube lights with chrome caps that looked like devices from old science movies. A red-and-yellow tapestry was hanging on the wall above a pumpkinish burl sofa. I was not sure about the word
burl
. It was all I could think of.

“So,” a voice said, “this is the little girl I’ve been hearing about.”

The voice was like cellophane melting. It belonged to a man with close-cropped hair, and brown eyes with pupils like leaping fish. He had sunken cheeks with razor stubble. The drooping contour of his hairline was like the shadow of a suspension bridge. He looked, I don’t know,
Carpathian
. He took my coat and passed it to unseen hands.

“I am Dara,” he said, and his words emerged as if spaced by slender blocks. Dara led me into the gathering, and Mark waved an encouraging farewell. I felt like a social experiment along the lines of Eliza Doolittle. We made our way toward the cryptic posterior of the apartment, where fashionable people fashionably gathered—Italians, Jordanians, French. “As an American,” Dara said, with a condescending sneer, “you will find you are among the minority.”

If he was somewhat racist and sexist, I excused him. I told myself he was cultured and European, and practiced as a gentleman, and practiced
European gentlemen think of women differently than American women are accustomed to being thought of. I told myself that it’s not reasonable to expect uniformity of perception, that it’s actually nice to be held to lesser standards, to be kept unaccountable, to listen until being called upon to reply—so long as the reply is brief. It was a relief to be asked to contribute only the gift of grace—the lips, the ankles, the fragrance of the hair. Such are the marks of worth when you have no others. These were the things I told myself.