Anthropology of an American Girl (70 page)

White cabinets towered from floor to ceiling in the main cooking area, but there were also cabinets in the hall that was a sort of larder. The floor was made of those classic black and white square ceramic tiles, and near the maid’s room, a door with dead bolts led to a service elevator. Garbage was placed there; invisible hands retrieved it.

Mark rummaged through the refrigerator. “You didn’t eat tonight. Let me make you something.”

When the kettle whistled, Mark transferred boiling water for tea into a beautiful china pot. It was light turquoise with handpainted geese in flight and gold foliage and a gold border. He showed me the black stamps on the bottoms of the matching cup and saucer. The set was Japanese, from the turn of the century.

“Nippon,” he said, referring to the mark. “It simply means ‘Japan’ and refers to the country of origin. In the 1920s, U.S. Customs law changed and demanded the marks read: ‘Made in Japan,’ which doesn’t sound as nice as ‘Nippon,’ does it?”

I said no, that it didn’t. By the kitchen clock, it was nearly three-thirty Mark and I had walked for hours. Rourke was finished packing. He was alone in his apartment, thinking of me. Just a day ago, I’d been there too.

“Where are your parents?” I asked Mark, banishing thoughts of Rourke. There was the seedy smell of rye bread toasting.

“Milan,” he answered. “On vacation. Then it’s up to Monte Carlo for a little gambling, then they shoot through Nice over to Cannes for the film festival.”

I was sorry I’d asked; somehow, it made everything hurt worse.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let me show you around.” We left the dishes on the table for someone else to clean and soon we were moving through hallways. It was strange, but I could see us—moving. One room we
passed had window seats and long boxes of flowers—pansies. I hesitated; it was so pretty there.

“Alicia’s,” he said.

Mark’s former room was at the very end. It was smaller and darker than his sister’s but nicer. There were built-in cherry bookshelves and a cherry rolltop desk and hanging things such as photographs, pennants, diplomas—Collegiate, UCLA, Harvard. The room was like one of those hidden coin pockets in your Levi’s, the perfect place if you happen to have the perfect thing to fit inside.

I understood that Mark had taken me there instead of to his new apartment because there was a chance I would have declined. The visit to his parents’ house felt accidental and edifying, and I did not mind being there; in fact, I felt safe, unfindable, like deep in the tail of a snake.

It seemed that Mark was always right—anyway, his instincts were, and fortune was with him, and these are superior traits in a man when you can find no others.

At the edge of his bed, he kissed me again and he unbuttoned my blouse slowly, methodically. It was cotton, a doeskin color with pearl buttons—I still have it. Next Mark lowered the straps of my bra, thumbing down the lace.

“Am I dreaming?” he murmured to himself. “I must be dreaming.”

I did not bother to stop him. I did not bother to say no, not when the sun would soon be rising, not when he had walked me through the labyrinth of the night, not when he had worked so hard for so long, and he had waited—one whole year.

Rourke was no god, no king—he was a solitary, solitary man. I had no reason to wait for him. If it was true that Rourke wanted me, perhaps it was also true that he needed to forsake me. Perhaps his sacrifice helped him to proceed; there are men like that, men who need loss to exempt them, who feel unconsecrated without forfeiture.

In any event, did it really matter, days alone or days with Mark, when his eyes had seen Rourke’s eyes and my eyes and the exchanges between them? When his loathing of Rourke was so vital as to move him to claim me? Those were the things I told myself.

Mark, kissing my neck, his hands slipping to my waist and my pants.
When he followed the line beneath the elastic of my underwear with one finger, his lips hung apart and he caught his breath. He steered me back onto the bed and removed the rest of my clothes, though not his own—for a long time he did not remove his own. He went very slowly, staring the entire time. I did not dare move. I’d read somewhere that power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims. I did not want him to think I was ungrateful.

When he tossed my jeans onto the floor, there was the sound of coins rolling. My money, falling out. He said not to worry. “I have all the money you’ll ever need.”

I
meet Rob at a garage, and we are happy, both of us, and free. I follow him to the back, where it smells of incubated diesel and desiccated oil—safe, a world of men. Beneath one of the cars is Rourke. He rolls out. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him. I want to touch his face, but I cannot reach it. Rob says to try, so I try, and when I do, I feel him, his skin, and things begin to grow—the light and the warmth and my sense of myself, growing from the bottom up, like plants
.

Rourke and I are in a room. It’s brightly lit without windows; the door is ajar. He leans over a suitcase. Being close to him feels provisional or probationary, like being reunited with someone dead. Like soon he will go again. Like time is marked
.

He kisses me, saying he will be back in a few hours. I will wait, though I know he will not come back. He doesn’t mean to be untruthful. He simply doesn’t know what I know
.

I’m not sure about time passing, if any has. But Mark has come, and the room Rourke and I shared is in Mark’s apartment. Someone called for you, Mark says. Some guy, calling your name—Eveline. Eveline. From the bedroom, Mark says. Go on in
.

Beneath the covers is a shape. Is it Rourke? I go under the blankets. It’s dark; he is naked. He brushes back the hair from my face. We lie, close and broken apart, known, unknown
.

Baby, he says. I missed you, baby
.

I am wearing a slip with buttons. He unbuttons, expertly. One hand holds me still while the other—Now he is in me. I feel him. We lie on our sides, hardly moving. I find his pulse. I strive to be an organ to him, sightless, mindless, attached. Is it true, could it be true, has he come back?

I’m sorry, I say. For doubting you. I love you. I tell him I love him
.

Yes, he says, starting to push faster now. I love you too
.

And I—my eyes—they squeeze shut, they will not open, they know not to open. The sight of Mark would kill me. It kills me
.

Before Mark gets up I take cash from the dresser and I go get the BMW from the garage. I’m going to see Rob at church. It’s his family church, where he goes every Sunday at nine, by his parents’ house, in Rumson. I know the way because I’ve been there a few times, twice for Easter, once for Christmas Eve, and once for Charlie’s communion. Charlie is Rob’s nephew and godson, Joey and Anna’s son. I would have called to say I was coming, but I didn’t want to take the chance of Mark hearing me and waking up. After I got home from being at Pinky’s last night with Rob, Mark was out and he didn’t come home until after I’d gone to bed.

I wait on the church steps in the drizzle and listen to the end of Mass. The priest is talking about the
Knack
. He says the Knack is the ability to live in the present, which is something God has and Lucifer wants. I’m not sure about that, about the Knack. Priests have a way of extrapolating a lot, then neglecting to explain themselves. I guess he’s implying that God—or, the goodness in people—is satisfied with the gifts of each ordinary moment, and that Lucifer—or the maleficence in people—is obsessed with the shadowy and elusive things lying ahead and behind—like dreams and regrets.

Rob dips out with both Mrs. Cirillos, his mother and his grandmother on his father’s side. Coincidentally, they share the same first name too—Fortuna. He opens their collapsible umbrellas, one, then the other. They hook on to him at the elbows so when he walks he has to
stretch his neck above the fabric arch they make. When he sees me, he stops in his tracks, they all do, in a line. The elder Mrs. Cirillo loses her balance. He steadies her.

“What happened?” he demands of me.

“Nothing.”

“You’re okay?”

“I’m okay,” I say. “I’m fine.”

“Jesus, give me a friggin’ heart attack, why don’t you?”

Both women slap him in sync. “What is
wrong
with you?” his mother says quickly, like this happens all the time. “You just walked out of church.”

“He’s gonna get struck dead,” his grandmother warns. “It happened to my cousin.” She makes a hatchet move with her hand. “Dead.”

I kiss the ladies hello. Rob’s mom is dressed in a union-blue shirtdress with a Peter Pan collar and darts beneath the breasts. Nonna Cirillo is wearing a pressed housecoat with a black crocheted sweater around her shoulders, and with her free hand she clings to her bag, tight, like somebody might snatch it. She doesn’t remember me, but that’s okay since she never remembers anything other than obscure details from her past such as the shoe sizes of dead sisters and the price of tomatoes from the grocery store the family used to operate on First Avenue.

“You’re soaking wet, Eveline,” Mrs. Cirillo says, taking out a tissue from her sleeve, wiping my face. “How come you didn’t come inside?” She turns to Rob. “How come she didn’t come inside?”

Rob looks around. “How did you get here?”

I point to the BMW.

“Which one. The 3.0 CS? Whose car is that?”

Mark bought it. For me. Only I don’t say that. I say, “Mark’s.”

“That’s a nice car. He never told me about that car.” Rob shakes his head in queasy disbelief. “Follow me back to the house. My father’s making lunch.”

At Vinny-O’s they added a partial wall to make a dining area. Otherwise the place looks the same as it did four years ago, except for a maximum occupancy sign and a Heimlich Maneuver poster.

“You like those signs, huh?” Rob says. “All they need now is a chef and a kitchen. A couple customers. Some food. Maybe a menu.”

He takes over like he owns the place, like he’s back at the dining room table of his parents’ house. He leans on the bar and grabs the phone and pops off a few calls. There’s a bandage on his right palm that wasn’t there the night before when we were at Pinky’s. He fingers the tape as he talks on the phone, saying something complicated to somebody about the under/over being 100/80, so he lighteninged the over 200, and there he was, 8,200 down, and how he swears he would get the rest next week because he’s got something big about to break, bigger than big, which you can get a piece of if you want.

I gesture for money to play the bowling game. He tucks the phone in between his neck and his shoulder, reaches into his front pocket with his good hand, and gives me a fistful of change. I cross the room and drop a quarter in the slot and the lights flash slow.
Left-right, left-right
. They haven’t upgraded the design of the game since the sixties. The cartoon boy is wearing pegged-leg pants with two-inch cuffs, and the cartoon girl has teased hair and a headband and a linguini-thin belt around the waist of her dress. They seem carefree. I whoosh the shooting disc around and get that feeling of the metal platter swilling back and forth over the sawdusty alley. I take it to my belly and shoot it.
Bee-Baw. Tough luck! A split!

“Not enough force,” Rob says, coming up to me from behind. “You get that from height. Try again.” He lifts me. I draw the disc to the far left and shoot it diagonally right where it slides under one pin, meets two points of the corner, and ricochets left, sliding to a standstill right under the second pin—
Chick-ching. Aces! A spare!

“Nice job,” he says, lowering me slow, straightening out his pants around his penis.

At our table, I stack the leftover quarters in front of Rob. He flicks one up and spins it on the tabletop. He blurs his gaze into the twirling coin. “You didn’t say anything last night, did you?”

“I was asleep when he got home.”

“Does he know where you are right now?” Rob asks.

I say no; Rob says good.

“Watch yourself,” Rob advises. “He’s snapping.”

“Rob,” I say, “sometimes when we—when he and I—sometimes in my sleep—I make a mistake and I think Mark is Rourke.”

Rob slaps down the coin. He looks up. “Does Mark know?”

“I think so,” I say. “Yes.”

Rob nods, small nods, minor nods, his head tilted somewhat right. In the light his hazel eyes are green. Most days they are like cork. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s take a ride.”

When we leave, he swings the front door open and props it for me to go past, forgetting his bad hand. “Shit,” he says, shaking it. I ask what happened, and he says, “Nothing glamorous. I was eating salted peanuts out of a can.”

In Spring Lake people have the Knack. They wash cars and clip hedges and there is this feeling that the worst is over, that there is nothing going on in the world besides you and the miniature sliver of action in your immediate vicinity. We pass a ball game in the street and Rob brings the car to a crawl. “Hey, who taught you to hold a bat?” he asks a kid. “The vacuum salesman?”

As we approach Rourke’s house, I get the sensation of coming home after a war or a long stay in a psychiatric institution. Everything looks the same—the butterfly rhododendrons, the flickering of the asphalt driveway, the carbonated green of the garden hose. I wonder if everything looking the same is worse than everything looking changed, since of course nothing is the same; three years have passed since the morning I was last here, the morning I walked out on Rourke and hitchhiked back to New York. I’d been thinking of it so much lately; it all seemed recent to me.

A figure in khakis and a denim blouse kneels in the front garden, and at the throaty sound of Rob’s car, she turns and squints. I wonder if she thought it was Rourke. When she stands she is not small or big—my size, no, a little bigger.

Rob turns down the driveway; he hesitates before cutting the engine. “Listen,” he says, “there’s something you should know. There’s gonna be a fight.”

“What kind of a fight?”

“The comeback kind, with long fucking odds. The kind where Harrison beats the shit out of somebody and we make a lot of money.” Rob flips the key. “Frankly, I’m in a bit of a situation. I asked your fiancé there to lend me some money, but nothing doing. Meanwhile the
vig
is killing me. You remember what that is?”