Anthropology of an American Girl (61 page)

On one unseasonably warm day in March, after he put out his cigarette under the broken bench, Mr. Ross and I walked south toward the park entrance across from the Beresford, where the Ross family lived. We climbed to the top of one of those mammoth rocks with sides that look like the flaky Italian pastries Dad loves, the ones shaped like seashells, with all the layers, called
sfogliatelle
.

“Look at the sunset, Mr. Ross.” It was beautiful, like standing inside a purple pillow. “Those clouds aren’t
really
purple,” I said. “It’s the orange that makes them seem so.”

He set his briefcase between his knees and sat carefully. I put my hand out behind him. He was a big man, almost twice my size. Still, I felt compelled to catch him should he lose his footing.

“Do you think
all
animals notice color changes the way we do?” I asked. “I mean, even if they aren’t conscious of changes in the same way,
they still
experience
sunset, the serenity of it, the purple-sky feeling. It’s like a certain vibration. And of course, there are variations infinitely subtler than color which people know nothing about. Cats see in the dark. Pelicans catch fish you can’t imagine are there.”

Mr. Ross did not speak for several minutes. I thought he might actually have been unwell after all. Usually he was talkative like the rest of his family. He just lifted his face and squinted like Robert Mitchum into the still point of sundown as if fire-gazing.

“‘The vision is for he who will see it, and he who has seen it knows what I say,’”
Mr. Ross recited, adding, “Plotinus, third century A.D. Plotinus spoke of
‘The flight of the alone to the alone.’
”

I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, though he’d obviously moved beyond pelicans and cats
. The flight of the alone to the alone
—what a pretty thing to say at the close of a day, and an appropriate thing, and I was grateful as ever for his company. It’s interesting to think that in order to see, you must be
willing
to see, and that you can share what you have seen only with those who have also seen it, or with those who are similarly willing. Probably the best you can hope for in life is to journey as an individual and to share your vision with whomever you happen to meet along the way.
The flight of the alone to the alone
. I wondered if Mr. Ross meant to refer to me and him, or to me and Mark, or not to me at all, but simply to himself. Jack would often talk that way, to himself, through me, conducting a test of his most inward thoughts.

I shivered; he patted my leg. “C’mon, sweetheart. Let’s head back.”

We give congratulatory kisses and handshakes to Alicia and Jonathan. Mark coughs artificially into his napkin. “So,” he says, “when’s the big day?”

“In June,” Alicia replies. “After all the graduation ceremonies.”

“
June!
Are you pregnant?”

“Oh, stop it, Mark. Evie, when do you graduate?”

“May. Mid-May, I think.”

“Mine’s the twenty-sixth,” Alicia says.

“The timing on this is ridiculous, Alicia. It’s April. That gives you three months to plan a wedding.” Mark finishes off his wine.

“Jonathan’s parents are moving back to London in June. Besides, Mark,” she injects meaningfully, “Daddy’s health.”

“He’s lasted this long, Alicia,” Mark assures her.

“You never know. Sylvie’s father died in the hospital—while holding the baby.” She turns to Jonathan. “Did I ever tell you? His first grandchild.”

“Alicia,” Jonathan chides. “That’s hardly dinner conversation.”

“If you’re so worried about Dad dropping dead,” Mark says, “think what the bill for this thing is going to do to him.”

“I’ve already thought of that,” Alicia says. “I’m having it in East Hampton, at the house.”

Mark is silenced. Alicia has beat him again. She beats him at everything, even golf. She sets her empty champagne glass carefully near her plate. “Need the bathroom, Evie?”

I don’t, only I say I do.

“Great. Let’s go,” Alicia says, and she saunters elegantly away.

As soon as I enter the bathroom, she shoves the door closed behind me. “I’m dying for a cigarette,” she says. She leans her crocheted purse against her belly, then bends over it like she might dive in. “Please don’t say anything,” she implores as she fiddles first with the clasp and then with the matches. “I told Jonathan I quit, which I will, just—after the wedding.”

Her hands shake. It’s awful to see. She’s like a cartoon character vibrating after an electric shock, like Wile E. Coyote. “Here,” I say, taking the match. “Let me help.”

She relaxes into the initial surge of nicotine. “Okay, so tell me. What do you think?”

I’m not sure what she means.

“About Jonathan,” she adds. “Does he
really
love me?”

I think for a minute. Real love is tricky. It’s like an extremely subtle flavor that most people can’t even discern. All I
can
say is that
whatever
Jonathan feels, he feels for her alone. “I don’t think he loves anyone more.”

She shoots smoke through her nose. “Well, that’s diplomatic.”

I figure I’d better pee. It looks like we’re going to be awhile. Through
the split in the stall, I observe her as she completes her cigarette. It takes me a long time to finish. Maybe not. When you pee when someone you know is listening, it just feels like so much more than normal comes out.

I rejoin her, and as I wash my hands, she brushes her teeth. I watch her reflection. Her eyes are set apart, and floating on the outer corners are microscopic ruffles, like lines on a lake, or faraway birds. She dries her toothbrush and returns it to her bag.

With some difficulty she says my name,
“Evie.”
She is staring at her shoes. I look to see if she’s dropped something. “Jonathan—is—you know—”

The paper towel in my hand is wet, and the garbage pail is behind her. I would have to lean past her to reach it, but I don’t want to appear rude. I continue to dry my hands with the damp towel.

“Do you think I’m—I mean, I know you—” She leaves off again. “I’m sorry. I’ve embarrassed you.”

“Not at all,” I say, which is true. I’m not embarrassed in the least.

With the back of a hand, she sweeps at the atmosphere as if fatigued by the noise of herself, and she smiles, charmingly. “Let’s just head back.” Her gold earring catches on the neck of her sweater as she turns. I unlatch it, and we stand, face-to-face. Her hair is parted down the middle and drawn into a thick twist like good bread. Her nose is Roman; her lips naturally red. She is beautiful, like a Spanish princess, like someone who comes with a dowry of Andalusian horses. “I know about Harrison,” she says. “About what happened.”

There is a funny delay, like dropping an egg that doesn’t land right away. I don’t feel myself wince, but possibly I do, because she jerks forward, as if trying to catch something that’s flown from my mouth.

“I’m sorry. It’s just, the way Mark tells it, Harrison
ruined
you. Of course, Mark’s ridiculous. I’ve known Harrison since I was twelve, since they started at UCLA. He would never hurt anyone.” Softer then, “You two must have been completely in love.”

She’s waiting. She wants me to describe being in love with Rourke, which is like being asked to discuss a murder committed in a prior lifetime—it’s hard to say why it was so particularly important at the moment, though you have no doubt that it was. I can think only of fog, of
being consumed by fog, so much so that it appears as though nothing is out there, but
everything
is out there, brushing by, inches off. You’re powerless to correct your restricted perception, so you surrender to blindness. You survive by touch. You reach to know, reach to feel. You learn to live by sensation, and as soon as you become adept, you are released. Just like that, let go. And everything turns very explicit, and the explicitness is worse than the blindness. There’s no poetry there. Not there—
here
. I mean
here
.

“My God, listen to me,” she says. The faucet drips behind her. “I don’t mean to be nosy. I was just asking what you thought about Jonathan and me.”

“I think you’re very—passionate—about things. I hope Jonathan will give you the security you need to stay that way.”

“Is that what Mark does for you?” she asks.

I consider a lie, but what good is a lie? A lie will not affect her fate, and she’s been lied to enough. As for the truth, I prefer to spare her.

She raises a finger to her lips,
Ssshh
, and with those lips she kisses me. I feel the waxy double arc on my cheek, and I am incorporated into a plushy cloud of Chanel and into the society of those whom she adores. It is a fine society. With her thumb, she wipes lipstick from my face, then she nods and breaks into a gracious smile.

As we approach the table, the boys stand. “What happened?” Mark asks. “Did some pipes break?”

“Yeah, did pipes break?” Jonathan repeats.

Alicia takes up her napkin. “Girl talk, gentlemen.”

“That’s exactly what we’re afraid of,” Jonathan says. “We’re afraid you two might decide to make it a double wedding.”

After
Tristan und Isolde
we stop at Fellini’s for dinner. Mark feels like having a plate of fresh spinach pasta with pheasant sauce. The restaurant is practically empty because it is late, and the few remaining waiters leap to life. “Hello, hello. Good evening signore, signorina.” They seat us in the same place they always seat us—five tables back, against the southern windows. The table looks out over West Sixty-eighth Street, which is ghastly still like a scene from an Edward Hopper painting. I don’t know
what makes us deserving of this particular table, but each time they escort us to it with a smug sort of pride, as though surely they’ve pleased us immensely.

The waiter recommends Aglianico del Vulture, from the Basilicata region, a young wine, 1981—
delizioso
. When the bottle comes, Mark caresses it approvingly, after which he tastes the wine and nods, thanking the waiter, who pours obsequiously as Mark adjusts his cuff links, fluted platinum with onyx inserts. A gift from me with money he provided.

“That fucking soprano gave me an intense headache,” he says.

I knew the opera had been difficult for him—the rich king versus the dragon slayer, the estranged lovers devoted unto death. It didn’t help that the king’s name was Mark.

“So,” he says, drinking, and then pulling back his lips in a businesslike manner. “Let’s talk about what to do after you graduate. I don’t want you jumping into anything.”

I don’t answer; he seems relieved. I wonder, does he think if I get a job, I’ll leave him? How could I leave? I have no place to go. I have no friends or resources that are not his. How could I go when I have come to value things and have faith in them? Things mean distance between me and everything else. Diamonds mean I don’t have to talk to shopgirls with thumbtack eyes and perpetually suntanned cleavage who want to know where I got
those shoes
. Cars mean I don’t have to take subways that smell of vomit and urine, or cabs where drivers ask into the rearview mirror,
Have you been baptized?

Sex with Mark means I don’t have to wait tables and talk to drunks who say I look like one of the girls in the Robert Palmer video, or go home to my mother’s in the summer where memories of life and of living are everywhere. And sex with him is perverse. In the absence of desire, it’s good to be set upon without expectations of affection. At the end, when I’m overtaken by the same abject longing for things I will never have, I can get up and walk away, clinging to that loss without interference.

I will not leave Mark, because when I wander through the house at daybreak, repelled by the sight of the bed, by the wet circle in the center, by the place on the mattress I leave unoccupied, there is some small consolation in a refrigerator filled with thirty-dollar-per-pound smoked Scottish
salmon and organic strawberries and fresh-squeezed orange juice, and the fact that the mess in the sink can be left for someone else to clean. In the garage is a car I can drive to anywhere; in the top dresser drawer is all the cash I could ever need. If being in love is consolation when you are poor, money is consolation when you are not. Life is a trap not because I can’t leave Mark, but because there’s no reason to.

“The workplace is such a scene,” he’s saying. “The politics, the bullshit incompetence. I don’t want you ending up as the subordinate to some asshole who thinks he can coerce you into—situations.”

When the plates are cleared, the waiter brings two glasses of grappa. I don’t like grappa; Mark knows I don’t. He pulls my chair to his, grabbing a leg. He plays with my hair. “You can do anything—photography, painting, drawing. My mother will help. She’ll get your work out there.”

The coke snakes round and round on a framed picture Mark removed from the wall. I cannot say what the picture is; it’s covered with clumps. The caviar, like the cognac and the cocaine, is exceptional—hand-selected Tsar Imperial Beluga. If you want to know about
hand-selected
caviar, you can inquire, but you’ll be judged by your ignorance—and forced to endure an exhaustive account of the size of sturgeon, the shape of eggs, the cost per gram, the temperature of the Caspian, and the vulgar habits of the Slavs. You don’t inquire; you prefer not to learn.

Ignorance is as good as intelligence in this contradictory world, this dream landscape, where the sun shines at night and creatures mingle wrongly and seasons are without circumference—no beginning, no end. We are voracious, we are clever, we are the victors, which is the same as being victims because everything here is inversion. Like the bored members of a royal court, we are insular and divine. No one told me about this place; I arrived unprepared.

Mark’s friend Dara turns to me, apologizing for
shoptalk
. He has been discussing credit derivatives.

I don’t mind. It’s better than other things they discuss—the size of bonuses, breasts versus legs, all the Mexicans “crossing over.”

“Don’t apologize,” Mark tells Dara. “It’s about time Eveline learned some of the principles of economics. In fact, let’s give her a little tutorial.”