Anthropology of an American Girl (69 page)

“I won’t be able to get away this weekend after all. I head out first thing Saturday morning, at about five.” He came forward, his head tapping my head. His neck stretching, his lips touching mine softly, once, twice. “You wouldn’t consider taking a ride cross-country with me, would you?”

I remember his drunken breath on my neck was warm, and the fragrant smell of the alcohol plus the smell of him was dizzying. I remember listening and hearing, like when you listen to a shell and hear the sea. There was remorse, but also unspeakable things—ambition, surely. Cruelty, perhaps. Did he hear me too? Did he hear that I could never go back to waiting, could never become another of his faithful friends, preserved in time, occupying the cherished but forsaken asylum of his youth? Did he hear that I would sooner move on than allow myself to be aligned with things in his heart that were dead?

Whether or not he was sincere about the drive cross-country, I answered as if he was, because, in fact, he should have been, because, in fact, he wished to be. Sometimes men hate themselves for not being heroes, and they need to know they can be forgiven. Sometimes when you love someone, you need to pass their tests.

“I don’t think it would be good—for me, you know, to go—like, not such a great idea.” I imagined the flight home alone, the sight of this great nation moving in reverse, west to east, me leaving him behind. It would have been impossible. He knew that. “It’s just—I haven’t been well.”

Rourke pulled my hands deep into his lap and manipulated them thoughtfully, tracing the veins. I was free to regard him—exposed and illogical and lame and drunk, and so very
sorry
. Was he crying? I thought he was crying. If only I’d thought to ask about what, but I was too moved by the completeness of my feelings—compassion, fury, desire, tenderness, fear, love.

“You don’t understand,” he slurred, nodding downward. “You’ll never be what I am.” I asked what that was, and he said, “Exactly what you see in front of you. A failure.”

“Do you remember,” he asked, “how to drive shift?”

His legs were parted and his knees skimmed the dashboard. His head drifted back onto the seat, and he closed his eyes. I started his car, keeping to my side, though I was small. Being next to him right then was like being a Lilliputian, like stepping with due caution about a slumbering giant—by his size you knew that the setback was only temporary. I drove him back to Jersey because he’d asked me to, because I loved him, because I trusted no one else. I remember moving through the quills of highway light that seemed like a forest. And the music on the radio, the music like a watcher, like it had intellect, like the box had eyes.

A precise halo of clove-pink light marked out the room on the top floor of his house—the same room I’d noticed the first time I visited—
his mother’s. From the street I could just make out the wallpaper, indigo with ropes of yellow rising like blossom ladders. She must have been waiting for him. In the driveway was a white Oldsmobile; I pulled up alongside it. I did not have to wake him. He had been roused instinctively by the impression of the streets near his home. For some time he had been staring ahead, grim in the grim richness of his thoughts, and this consoled me, ironically.

I accompanied him to the door of his studio. I retrieved the key from the grass when he dropped it, and though I did not help him undress, I laid his clothes on the chair. When I turned, he was curled like a deserted boy on his left side, which was peculiar since I’d known him always to sleep facing up. He was in his underwear. It was true he was bigger since I’d seen him last, but his weight was decisive, controlled. Once Rob told me and Lorraine that when Rourke hit fighting weight, he had to maintain it to the quarter pound. Rob had said, “He sucks the water out of lettuce and spits green.”

It was awful to see him drunk, to see him give up. Gently I journeyed like a pilgrim to the wall of his back, close enough without touching to reclaim some of the life of which I had been dispossessed. I kept watch over him through the night. I could be forgiven for seeking out memories of Montauk—of being sunburned, of being in love. After passing one last time through these halls of memory, I sealed them off like rooms locked from the inside. I would not go back. I would ask no more of life than that it allow me in all fairness to hold the perfect knowledge of perfect things. I told myself maybe love can be love regardless of the absence of its object—and devotion, devotion—so long as you are willing to be captive to it, and you stow it secretly, like a mad relative in the attic. Maybe there was an invisible way to love him, like a radio frequency. Maybe if I listened at night, I could draw it.

He stirred, raising himself onto one elbow, the muscles of his infolding abdomen making a miniature city, and he drank from the glass of water I’d set by the bed. He was not surprised to see me, which was bittersweet. It was as though I had infringed upon his nights as often as he had upon mine. His arms went around my hips and his fingers slipped through the empty belt loops of my jeans, and I drew my fingertips across his jaw, and he breathed softly, coming closer.

From where I sat, I could see the bathroom door. Once we showered there, and I had cried, and he’d been good about that, not asking questions. Next to the bathroom was another door to an interior staircase, leading to the first floor, and the second, and at the very top, the indigo room. If I climbed those stairs, I would find her, still awake, reading in her robe. Mothers who wait up read and wear robes; I knew because I’d never had such a mother, so she existed perfectly in my imagination. If I went to her, would she be the sort to solve everything, or possibly the sort to say nothing—to let you make your own mistakes and to hope for the best.

I wondered when as a man Rourke had been proved. After the fight over his father, the one that had given him his scar? I wondered would we die without meeting again, or would we meet and smile in the slightly embarrassed manner of former lovers, with all the intervening seasons of regret coming to life in our eyes. And if I died, would he come to my funeral, and who would call to notify him, and would he grieve—yes, he would grieve; but would he know that if I could be given one day, one hour, one minute more to live, that I would accept only if I could spend that time with him? I thought how a baby conceived in July would have been born in April. That would have been a biological coincidence, to have been brought together for conception and then again for the delivery. People like to say babies come for a reason. If so, was ours taken away for one?

As I watched the ascension of day, with every ripple of light coming like drops to fill a bucket, I held him, and I persuaded myself to come to terms. How strange that I felt most gloriously alive just as I prepared to withdraw from the hazards of sensation. Like some animal gazing into the wondrous world through the door of its dank cave before bowing off to voluntary sleep, I breathed greedily as if each trapped ounce of his vitality could be called upon to sustain me through hibernation. And I became seized by a whole new sorrow, a loving sorrow. Although once again it was Rourke who was leaving me, this time I knew I would bear the burden of the sacrifice. I was turning him over—to soul corruption, to the inclemency of survival.

I said, “Mark Ross is not going to give up.”

Rourke answered, “I know.” His breath on my wrist.

I left as he slept, the worst and hardest thing I’d ever done. I knew that if I stayed, it would have made everything worse. I knew also that by leaving I was giving up every possibility of coming to some understanding. At daybreak, I walked to the main road, then I hitchhiked as far as the highway, where I hitched again. Feeling forlorn as I did, and lacking a destination, I might have traveled on as far as the road would have taken me, Albany or Boston, Canada maybe, except that I got a ride directly into the West Village from two co-workers, a Polish guy and a diabetic woman, best friends, they said, who left me safely at the corner of Hudson and Morton.

At a Mexican restaurant on Columbus Avenue, Lee and Chris held a goodbye dinner for Rourke. Lee had called me that day from her office on Wall Street.

“I initially planned this for Sunday, since he said you two were going to Atlantic City, but I just found out he’s leaving tomorrow. It’s been crazy getting organized.”

I didn’t want to go; yet, I couldn’t stay away. I arrived on time, but instead of going in I walked around—north, west, south, then east again, making a fifteen-block square. By the time I climbed the restaurant’s staircase to its balcony and joined the party—there were nine people, including Mark—they were finishing dessert—dishes of flan and fried ice cream were scattered around the table.

“You’re here,” Lee said, rising to give me a kiss. “I’m so glad.”

Rourke didn’t speak or move to greet me. Everyone else mumbled hellos but fidgeted uncomfortably, not knowing what to do or expect. They were even more ignorant of the goings-on between Rourke and me than we were ourselves, and that uncertainty, mingled with his disappointment, was like a critically elevated temperature. As Rob would say,
Things were pretty dicey
.

Lee called over the balcony to the waiter for another espresso and an ice water, and she drew out a chair at the table’s head, which I dragged to Rourke’s side, so I did not have to see him, though I could sense him, everything about him. He was in the room with me, I was thinking morbidly. Soon he would not be in the room with me anymore.

Mark raised his café con leche. “Well, best of luck, Harrison.”

No one else raised their glasses or cups because Rourke did not accept Mark’s toast; he just stared, then stood. He had to get going, he said to Lee; he wanted to spend time with his mother. There was squelching chair scraping, but he lifted his hands, telling everyone to stay put, and giving Lee a quick kiss before walking out.

I remember wanting nothing more than to get up and leave with him, to apologize for having left him that morning, to figure out what had to be figured, to go and meet his mother, to help him pack, to have a private goodbye, and that moment of all moments is most maddeningly vivid to me; it was the last honest need I experienced for years. In a heartbeat, he was gone. I knew I’d never see him again.

Chris paid the check, and we finished in silence. They all stood and grabbed their jackets. Mark thanked Lee and Chris.

Rob lifted my sweater off the back of the chair. He said, “Let’s go. I’ll give you a ride.”

I told him no. Looking down.

“C’mon,” he said darkly. “I’m taking the Holland. I’ll go straight down Ninth Avenue, take Bleecker to Tenth, drop you there, and then shoot west to Seventh on Ninth Street.”
Boom, boom, boom
.

I’d be okay.

Rob swung his chair closer, then glanced over his shoulder at the others. “Look at me.”

My eyes looked at his, facing off.

“Once you do this,” he said, “there’s no going back.”

“There’s already no going back.”

“Would you like to walk a bit?” Mark asked as the cars pulled away.

“Thanks,” I said. “Home just seems like—” I waved one arm.

“Like home,” Mark said. “Say no more.”

The night was magnificent, as such things go, and we infringed upon it mildly, strolling up one side of Columbus Avenue and down the other, gazing into store windows. We passed many of the same places I’d walked by when I was alone earlier in the evening.

“You look like an Italian movie star,” he said to our reflection. “With your sweater over your shoulders and just the top button done.”

I tried to remember if I’d ever told Mark about Marilyn and Dad comparing me to Monica Vitti. But then again, it was just the type of guy Mark was, the kind who makes you think he’s gotten hold of your file.

We turned east on Seventy-sixth Street and headed toward Central Park. I climbed onto a low wall and reached for his shoulder as I walked. When he helped me off, I slid through the shaft of his arms.

“Like an angel,” he said, “just descended.”

“Fallen, you mean.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean.”

He guided my face back and he kissed me, and I let him because my lips were deserving lips wishing to be kissed and my body was a deserving body wishing to be touched and because there is a moment in every life when you hit the lowest possible point. In that moment you are not you but a monster of you, a creature stalking the cloisters of your own despair. The monster urges you on—
come, come
—and so you do. In fact, you feel better in there, crazed and incautious, capable and free. You feel you have reached the other side, that you have passed through the pain, though you have only capitulated to it. And you are lucky you do not have a gun. If you had a gun, you’d shoot yourself.

“This is where I live.” We are at the Beresford on Central Park West. “Actually, my parents live here.” He escorted me through the set of doors facing the American Museum of Natural History.

“Good evening, Mr. Ross,” the doorman said.

Mark shook the doorman’s gloved hand. “Ralph, this is Miss Auerbach.”

Ralph greeted me warmly and walked us to the elevator. I wondered what he was thinking. Men are always thinking things, doormen in particular.

The Ross apartment was august and sublime, a quintessential New York prewar apartment. If ever Manhattan could be smelted and poured, it would take the shape of an apartment like that. The difference between it and the house in East Hampton was dramatic—the plaster walls, the original detailing, the chain of elegant rooms connected by high-ceilinged corridors. A Steinway grand was situated near a bank of windows overlooking the park. My thoughts turned to Jack. I wondered
where he was and how I had managed to stray so far. I saw the art—a de Kooning, a Stella, a Diebenkorn, several Picasso etchings. Mark had bought the Diebenkorn at a gallery in California, he told me, and had given it to his parents for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. In the bedrooms were lithographs by Miró, a charcoal by O’Keeffe, a series of photographs by Stieglitz.