Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  “I guess—”

  He interrupted me. “Where’d youse meet?”

  “Montauk,” Rob answered.

  Somebody said, “Montauk! She fishes?”

  “I ever tell you, Pat,” one of the guys said to another, “the transmission in my car has five settings—park, drive, neutral, reverse, and ‘Montauk.’ I adjust the arm and it goes.” His flattened palm cut into the air, Bzjump.

  Through his teeth, Rob said to his uncle, “At Harrison’s place.”

  “At Harrison’s place,” Tudi repeated as he organized his money, lining up bills by denomination, then folding the packed knot into his shirt pocket. He coughed a little, repeating, “Harrison,” then he coughed more, and the room got quiet. He picked up a napkin and held it over his mouth, and he stayed still and everybody stayed still. I had the feeling Rob was going to get hit.

  Tudi shouted, “What the hell’s the matter with you, walking around with a girl this time of night? It’s meat packing out there, you moron, not the boardwalk!”

  “Which one’s Harrison?” Pat murmured. “The fighter?”

  The others nodded.

  Tudi stood and adjusted his collar. “You got some numbers for me?”

  Rob said, “Yeah.”

  “Gentlemen,” Tudi stated formally. “If you don’t mind.”

  We followed him to the door, and he just squeaked through by making a slight corkscrew motion with his belly. Outside, Rob exchanged the contents of his pocket for ten fifties.

  His uncle perused the sheets. They were photocopies, lined and filled in neatly with numbers in Rob’s writing. “How’d it work out?”

  “Good,” Rob said, sounding normal again, which is to say, confident. He always sounded confident when referring to numbers.

  Uncle Tudi must’ve felt bad about yelling or good about the papers because he slapped Rob tenderly on the cheek then laid a barrel-size arm around my shoulders. “Listen,” he said. “You seem like a nice girl with a modern name. Don’t get me wrong, but don’t come down here again, understand?” His face was inches from mine; it was like kissing the moon. “I hate to think what Harrison would do if he knew Rob had you here at five in the morning.”

  I promised I wouldn’t come back, and Uncle Tudi seemed satisfied.

  He jerked his head to me, asking Rob, “She met your mother?”

  “Not yet,” Rob sputtered, and his uncle shot him a look. Rob threw up his hands. “Whaaat?”

  “Lemme tell you something,” Tudi said to me. “My sister, Fortuna, is a lady. Rob was raised decent, with manners. But he was a change-of-life baby for her. That’s why he’s spoiled.” He lifted a finger to Rob but said nothing. Rob also said nothing, then he nodded and kissed his uncle again.

  Before we got to the door, Uncle Tudi called out. He was waddling to catch us. “Boneless pork,” he said breathlessly, handing me a package the size of a shoe box. “It’s nice.”

  “She doesn’t have a stove, Uncle.”

  “Whaddaya mean no stove?”

  “She lives in a dormitory.” Rob backed away, taking me along. “You know. College.”

  “Next time I see you two,” he warned as he withdrew the pork, “it’s in daylight!”

  We spent what remained of the night on a stoop on Horatio Street. A jaundiced glow from the inside filled a second-story window across the way, and we watched it like a movie. Something had come over Rob, something not unfamiliar to me. A constitutional shift, sort of a shutdown. Sometimes he just stopped, like a machine idling.

  “How long have we known each other?” I asked.

  “One year,” he said. “St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “Seems like longer than a year.” That meant that eight months had passed since I’d seen Rourke.

  He lit a cigarette. “Seems like a year.”

  “I liked you as soon as I saw you,” I confided.

  “Oh, yeah?” he said. He jiggled his knee lightly.

  “What did you think when you saw me?”

  “I thought you were good-looking.”

  “Did you tell that to Rourke?”

  “Not in those exact words.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember.”

  I had the feeling that I owed him an apology. I thought to say sorry. I thought to thank him for coming. Only I couldn’t thank him, or say sorry, or say anything really, not when I would have had to look at him with gratitude in my eyes and still let him know he’d failed. He was the closest thing to Rourke, but he was not Rourke.

  “How you been?” he wanted to know.

  “Good,” I said. “I’ve been good.”

  “You been all right?”

  “I’ve been all right.”

  I lied because Rob didn’t need to know details. He didn’t need to hear how Rourke stalked the periphery of my nights, stealthy as a feline in my dreams, mad as a dream cat. How my heartbreak kept me alive, keeping me whole the way your skin keeps your pieces in. You cannot live without skin. You don’t think to manufacture it, but absently you do. Every seven days it’s new again. I didn’t tell the truth because Rob might say, Try to be happy. People often say that. But it’s difficult to move beyond certain losses. Fire, for instance, as Rob had said, and death. It gets to where you can’t even talk to people who haven’t suffered as you have. I lied because I didn’t want him to know what it means to be sick. All the time, sick. I lied because he knew the truth anyway.

  “I haven’t slept with Mark, you know.”

  Rob drew in for the last time from his cigarette. “Not yet,” he said. “You will.”

  Spring 1984

  Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity. Those are its awful lines; see that you seize on those, whatever else you miss.

  —JOHN RUSKIN

  38

  The Water Club is near the heliport on the East River. If you’re careful about where you sit, you can avoid the sorry sight of dormant helicopters, which look like women with wet hats. That is where Alicia and Jonathan announce their engagement, over dinner, the four of us alone. The announcement is no surprise. Mrs. Ross had told us weeks before; she’d wanted to prepare Mark.

  “He’s a pansy,” Mark had said bitterly. “The asthma, the Mercury Zephyr, the backgammon. He’s allergic to mesquite. How can anyone be allergic to mesquite?”

  “Jonathan treats her well,” Mrs. Ross said. “She’ll be deprived of nothing.”

  “Except in the bedroom,” Mark mumbled.

  His mother smacked him on the shoulder. “Oh, stop it.”

  Mr. Ross shrugged. He tries to think of the big picture. His children are nice-looking, well-off, and connected, and that’s going to have to be enough since he’s dying and will soon be dead. He doesn’t have the stamina for the minutiae of survival; as far as he’s concerned, no one is going to go shoeless.

  I know because he tells me things. I always come early for dinner—family dinners are on Thursdays—and I meet him at one of the cocktail tables at 21 or in the Oak Room or at Tavern on the Green. Every now and then we eat at Doubles, a club in the Sherry-Netherland. He lays down his cigarette before he stands to greet me. Then he grabs the waiter’s sleeve to order me a Tanqueray and tonic, which I accept even if I don’t feel like having it, because I made the mistake of ordering one once, and from that point on, Mr. Ross thought it was my preference. One law of being a gentleman is to know a lady’s preference, and it’s not good manners for her to keep switching on him. When my drink arrives, we eat nuts with brown husks, the kind that look like pussy willow buds.

  Sometimes I find him smoking across the street from his house, on a bench by Central Park. If it’s somewhat depressing to see Mr. Ross huddled on a bench like a bum—especially one of those broken benches without back slats to connect the exposed cement posts—it’s a clever place for him to hide, because no one would ever think to lo
ok for him there. He’s not supposed to smoke because of his health. Everyone always yells at him, but it never does much good. I usually try to take his mind off death for a few minutes.

  He’s been talking about dying since I met him, and according to all reports, for some time before that. But since he returned to work following his heart surgery five years ago, no one seems particularly alarmed by his fears. Maybe he talks about dying to try to get people to take better care of him. Or maybe he secretly wishes to be done.

  “The soul seeks equilibrium,” my father speculated when I asked why a man who loves his family and his job would smoke and drink in defiance of medical advice. “People who are responsible and successful often act recklessly to counterbalance all that selflessness. If you’re ninety percent accountable for others, chances are you’ll fill up the remaining ten with unaccountable behaviors.”

  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.”