20
When we got to the dressing room, Kate told me to stay. Michelle Sui and Adrienne Parker were there, hunched over a cracked console, somberly applying makeup. Adrienne was the music teacher’s daughter, and a very good cello player. Sometimes she played with Jack and Atomic Tangerine. The mirror was fingerprinty. Uncapped tubes and jars were everywhere. Clothes and shoes and stockings had been thrown all over. Two gray wigs rested freakishly on Styrofoam heads—the wigs were skewed, making me think of drunken monsters. I said I’d wait up front.
“You sure?” Adrienne said, her lips not moving a millimeter, her chin jutted out. She stroked each eyelid repeatedly with turquoise shadow until the glaze was thick and round like bakery cookies. None of them seemed to be terrified by the zombie mannequin heads.
“I’m sure.” I waved. “Good luck.”
Kate lingered in the doorway. Behind her, boys dressed as villagers held a karate match.
“Thanks for practicing my lines with me, Evie.”
“Oh,” I said, “it was fun. You know, I guess.” I stepped back, and back again.
My words sounded insincere, though they were not. I wished she hadn’t thanked me. Sometimes it’s better to suppress gratitude. Sometimes it puts the person you are thanking into a tiny crisis of cognizance. I told myself just to say nothing the next time I found myself overwhelmed with appreciation.
“See you,” she said, and I waved again.
The auditorium was still dim. At the top was a pile of programs. I took one. I walked to the ninth row from the stage on the right, draped my coat over my shoulders, and snuggled into the third seat over. In the booklet I found the paragraph devoted to Rourke. He’d acted professionally as a teenager, earned a BFA in drama from UCLA, and done small parts in film and television in Los Angeles for a year and a half before moving back East. The epigrammatic brief contained more information than I wanted to know. I did not like to think what a minor part of his history East Hampton represented, when it was all I knew of him.
California—I’d discerned no evidence of that place in him, which just shows that people can see only as far as the eyes can see and that no one can know your story unless you broadcast it, which is not seemly. I wondered if his work on Our Town would amount to a sentence in his next bio or just a name on a list. More than likely it would not appear at all, and like some sharp pain once preoccupying but since resolved, I would be forgotten. In a few hours we would be divested of common topics and shared episodes. We would have no reason to talk. I tried to devise a notable thing to say in parting. Good luck! Or, It’s been nice. Neither sounded particularly right.
There was a rush of cold. It did not come in a single draft but in a multiplicity of gusts, scrupulous and exacting. If the feeling had been a sound, it would have been the sound of bird wings flapping or guns discharging. And a fragrance—favorable, alien. Rourke took the seat alongside mine. I did not close the program; I did not care if he noticed the page.
We sat for several minutes, mute and unmoving, the staring-ahead way you sit when you go to the movies with someone you know very well and you’re waiting for the picture to begin, but you don’t feel like talking. Time tarried, as though there were nothing of relevance to mark or chronicle. I had one knee propped on the back of the seat in front of mine, and I was low, with my head coming only as high as his shoulder. He slouched a little too, but he was too big to do so with any sense of purpose. The effect was that he looked weary, which was perhaps the case. I thought of the way Jack slouched. No one could slouch quite as well as Jack.
I sighed in my mind, thinking, Los Angeles, as if things suddenly made sense, though they did not. I could not imagine Rourke spending all those years in the artificial pink glow, where people tour by bus the locked deco gates of stucco mansions, or him hanging out on the prairielike boulevards beneath the looming and incongruous Hollywood sign.
I felt a forward lurching. I thought he was getting ready to go. I wondered what did it mean when I’d been fine before he came, but then he came and then he was leaving and I was not fine.
But Rourke did not rise. And this gave me confidence. Just when I believed that nothing short of contrivance would make him stay, he stayed. Despite my silence, he stayed, proving there was a confluence of need between us. He rested his forearms on the back of the seat in front of him, his head on his wrists. His tie hung perpendicular to his body, his dress shirt stretched across his back. Through the taut fabric, I could see his shoulder blades protruding.
“How are you?” I asked in a voice I’d never heard myself use before. It was a voice of invitation and daring, deep and devoid of inflection. It was the voice of a woman. Sometimes in movies when enemies meet, they greet each other with deference and civility, acknowledging affiliations more profound than the competition itself, acknowledging a parity, an evenness of match. At the end of The Hustler, Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie say goodbye, and it’s sad, sadder even than when Eddie’s girlfriend dies, because life is full of tenderness where you would not think to find it.
Rourke tilted his head to his right and he regarded me. His face was square from forehead to jaw and graded mildly to the chin. His eyes were black; it was true. Eyes can be called black, but I didn’t think eyes could actually be black. Rourke’s were a reverberant black, a blackness of conviction, as if they had forfeited subordinate hues by decision, as if they were that way by will. They were the eyes of someone who reads the world in terms of opposition. And yet there was light. I could see where they were susceptible. I could see blind pools where the light hit and bounced back. Then, quick as it came, the light was gone, replaced by a cataract of grave insights.
“Looking forward to the end of this,” he replied. In the natureless dusk of the theater, he shamelessly memorized my face. I memorized his as well.
Suddenly the houselights went up. We discerned a milling gurgle, and Rourke stood. He walked to the basin of the auditorium, then disappeared into the vestibule where we had collided a week earlier.
I felt elated; I’d never felt that way before. I thought to go out to the lobby. I wanted to be where there were people; I wanted to mingle, to be one among many. I liked the idea of everyone crowded together, sheltered from the frigid March night by the walls of the theater. As I stood to go, Dan appeared at the base of stage left, sheet music under his arm. Jack stepped next from the obscurity of the corridor, grim, hunched, and scowling. He looked like the vampire in Nosferatu. I was surprised to see him, though of course I should not have been. Their instruments were right there, waiting for them.
“Hey, Evie,” Dan called softly up to me, taking a seat at the bench of the keyboard, adjusting the light, setting out sheet music.
Jack wouldn’t look at me; I knew he’d seen me with Rourke. He plied the brown felt keyboard cover with painstaking precision, pulling and folding, pulling and folding, reminding me of my crime with each gesture, challenging my conscience to profit from his misery. Behind the stage drapery, someone said, “Five minutes!” and the lobby doors swung apart.
All I recalled of the play after it ended was intermission. While everyone stretched their legs, Jack and Dan stayed bent over the keyboard, toying like alchemists. The music discharged from the corner of the auditorium as if from a void, radiating like steam from a crevice in the earth. The first piece was lush with nuance, busy with conversing chords—Dan’s. Jack’s song was less sophisticated, leaving nothing to chance, but far more beautiful. Its complexity came from layering, from a nagging superimposition of the central refrain, which had been written in a minor key, evoking heavyheartedness. Despite Jack’s tortured prophecies, people were enticed back from the lobby to hear him play. They listened attentively with their crisscross peanut butter cookies and warping paper mugs of cider. I felt pride for Jack, but also a sick, forward-moving fear. It was strange to experience in one night the difference between wanting something you cannot have and having something you cannot want. I wished it wasn’t my time to learn it. No one else seemed to be learning much of anything.
When the curtain call came, the audience stood, and Jack and Dan played again. I went backstage to find Kate. Kids scrambled to sign programs and solidify romances. Parents obstructed staircases and dressing room doors, kissing greased faces, bestowing obligatory bouquets. Paul Z. pushed a towering stack of chairs past me, and Richie adjusted the lamps behind the chapel. An increasing sense of unease came over me. The evening’s incidents kept playing out in my mind—Kate thanking me, Rourke and Los Angeles and the flickering in his eyes, the rush of the crowd, and Jack’s song. In my head and my heart, it rang and rang again. Jack is my hero, I told myself, with all his messages and abilities. And yet I had a troubling sense, a visionary sense. I felt like I was holding hands with myself, guiding my shell through an evening previously lived.
Rourke’s back blocked the door of the girls’ dressing room. Seeing it moved me—just the idea of him possessed the clarity that everything else lacked. I took two steps closer through the crowded hall. I could hear the sound of his words through the back of his chest, the vibrations. He was talking to them about the show. He must have sensed me because he turned to look, then he quickly stepped left, making room. He leaned against the side wall and folded his arms; I stood next to him. My left breast pressed lightly into his right arm, behind the elbow. I didn’t move; neither did he. All the talk drifted down to nothing.
“Congratulations,” I said to no one in particular.
“Are you coming to the cast party, Evie?” Adrienne asked.
“C’mon, Evie, everyone’s going,” Cathy Benjamin said.
Michelle said, “You’re coming, right, Harrison?”
“Only going if she’s going,” Rourke said, jerking his head slightly, referring to me. The girls giggled, except for Kate. He looked at the ground thoughtfully, taking a minute, nodding twice. “Well, thanks again for good work,” he told them. When he turned and stepped sideways to pass through the door frame, his body brushed flat against mine, his head bowing down, his face looking to my face. It’s a treacherous world, his eyes seemed to say. Unlike everyone else, he did not deny the treachery.
I staggered lazily up the theater aisle toward a group of people waiting for Jack and Dan. Dan’s father, Dr. Lewis, and his girlfriend, Micah, were there with Jim Peterson, the sax player from Dr. Lewis’s band. Smokey Cologne was there too, with Troy Resnick, Kathy Hanfling, Joss Mathers, and Nina Spear.
Dr. Lewis hugged me. “Fabulous sets! Where’s Irene?”
“A lecture, I think. She’s coming tomorrow. To the matinee.”
“What’s she teaching this semester, Evie,” Jim inquired. “Poetry?”
“Short stories.”
He nodded and they all nodded, saying to say hi.
Micah caressed my cheek with one finger. Her wrist bangles clattered lightly, reminding me of distant porch chimes. “Coming to our house for the party, Eveline?”
“Of course she is,” Dr. Lewis said emphatically.
Smokey stood, which meant Jack was coming. He crammed his hands into the pockets of his tattered herringbone coat and shook his purple hair from his face to little practical effect. Beneath Smokey’s bangs, his eyes were chronically claret and watery, making it appear as though he’d reached us by way of a channel. “Smokey is one strange dude,” Jack would say, “but a great f*cking drummer.”
Jack swung an open hand to Smokey in greeting. “Marvin,” Jack said, using Smokey’s real name. “What’s up?”
“Nice job, men.” Dr. Lewis launched a new round of applause. “Glad to know my gear is being put to good use.” His hand rested on Jack’s arm. Discreetly he asked, “Did your parents come?”
“He didn’t even tell them about it, Dad,” Dan informed his father, and we all headed for the door in a funny bundle.
On the brick path that led from the doors of Guild Hall to the street, we dispersed. Dan climbed into Smokey’s black Nova, and Jack and I headed east on Main Street, walking in the direction of the village. Jack unfolded his collar and pulled his Chinese Red Army cap to his eyes. I tucked my hands into my sleeves. He offered his gloves to me. As he wriggled one onto my left hand, the other slipped from under his arm and fell to the ground. We knocked shoulders as we both bent to retrieve it.
“What a load of shit!” he proclaimed, meaning the play. “What a criminal waste.”
“Your song was good.”
“That’s hardly an endorsement for the play. The acting sucked.”
“People have to start somewhere. You weren’t born a musician.”
“The difference is I’ve been playing every day since I was four. This is like handing out thirty guitars to people who’ve never played before, who’ll never play again, and trying to get something coherent in three months. And for what, five lame performances?”
“At least it’s not football.”
“No, no. It’s exactly like football. Half-assed recreation, a distraction for the kiddies. It’s about deceiving taxpayers into thinking juveniles are being kept off the streets, that they’re being offered concrete opportunities. It’s about college résumés.”
I tried to remember my point. I wasn’t sure I had one. “Kate worked hard, and—”
“And you worked hard,” he said, though I hadn’t even considered myself. “That crap was a waste of your time. Your church will be in the trash on Monday.”
I hadn’t considered that—the trash. I said, “You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, Ev-e-line.” Jack stretched my name to fully fill its three syllables. He faced me. “But do you know what you mean?” His blue eyes were bleached and even, making a strike through his face like the crossbar of the letter T. “Listen to yourself.”
Kids from the play closed in on us from behind. Jack slipped into the garden of the Huntting Inn, and I followed. He sat on an enormous rock, took a joint from his pocket, and lit it. Our eyes met above the embers. I wished to be drained; I wanted him to drain me.
“The whole thing got me down. The whole f*cking night.” Jack was referring to Rourke, though he would not introduce that name into our dialogue. He would not risk making it more real than he guessed it to be, as real as it was. I kicked the ground. He kicked the ground as well, setting a piece of ice to fly. “You’re headed down a bad road, Evie. I won’t be able to see you through this.”
The wooden porch of the Lewis house creaked under our weight. It was a moldy cedar-shake colonial on Pantigo Road, held together primarily by its odor—a composite of curry and candle drippings. Micah refused to live there, choosing instead to remain at their apartment on West End Avenue and Eighty-second. She visited East Hampton rarely, almost exclusively in summer. “The heat burns off the negative ions,” she once told me.
Inside was a sequence of rooms lined with instruments, dubious art, obsolete electronics, stacks of flaking scores, and mountains of damp books. Inside, you never knew exactly where you were or how to get out. The wainscoted hallways were papered in framed photographs of Dan’s father with greats such as Oscar Peterson, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Rollins. Besides being a musician and composer, Dr. Lewis was also a professor of music theory at Juilliard, which he called his day gig. He and the band traveled to places such as Newport, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Paris, and S?o Paolo. When in town, they would sit around discussing the evolution of jazz, debating East and West Coast composing signatures, and lamenting the loss of quality clubs and the declining musical interest among young people. My mother would sometimes be with them. She and Dr. Lewis had dated when Dan and I were in grade school, the winter before she met Powell. This was a big deal to Jack. Unlike his revulsion to the idea of me, Denny, and Peter as college roommates, he liked the idea of Dan and me as siblings and his coming to live with us and Mom and Dr. Lewis in one big jazzy, literary house with everyone being cared for by Bitsy, Dr. Lewis’s housekeeper from the Philippines. Bitsy wore ill-fitting sweat socks and threw down paper plates of muddy lasagna and yelled uniquely when Dan put his feet on the table. After yelling, she would squish his cheeks together and slap the side of his head. Bitsy was seventy-one and an avid golfer.
Jack joined Dan and Smokey in the living room, going straight to the piano, bowing over, his powdery white hair splaying in a fan. There was a guitar on the couch. I wished he would have selected the guitar instead. He was less sure of himself on guitar, and his vulnerability plus his refusal to relent was beautiful. I wished he would be beautiful.
Denny and Kate were at the base of the stairs, laughing. Kate’s face was flushed. I could see they’d been drinking. Denny caught me and reeled me in, squeezing like toothpaste. The smell of cheap Chablis mixed with the smell of his deodorant depressed me.
A flurry at the front door was accompanied by shouting and whistling. The teachers had arrived. Dr. Lewis, Micah, and Jim Peterson came in first, then Mr. McGintee, Toby Parker, and Lilias Starr. Rourke came last, shedding ounces of midnight cold as he filled the foyer.
McGintee complimented everyone. “Terrific job! Top shelf all the way! And that meeting house,” he said, giving me a firm wink. “The sets were the finest we’ve ever had.”
“Thank you,” Denny said, patting me on the back, using my arm to pat him on the back. He thrust my hand into the crowd. It stuck out like a little clock arm. “Her hand is like ice!”
“Maybe she’s anemic,” Lilias said.
“You do look pale, Eveline,” Micah agreed.
“My God,” Denny said to me, “don’t faint again.” And then to the crowd, “Last week I found her passed out on the darkroom floor.”
There were general expressions of concern for my health. Rourke reached for my hand, forgoing false propriety. He collected it as though taking up a baby, baby homeless something. In his hands my bones felt like bird bones, like crayons or small pencils. I demurred with a smile, and I pulled away. Not a smile, but a vague flickering. It was nice for a moment to have him, and sad to have to lose him.
I burrowed my hand into my jeans pocket, and looking down, I moved obediently to the living room, where I found Jack, leafing through a songbook, getting ready to sing. He appeared wafer-thin, wraithlike, there, but not there. My body moved about the perimeter of the grand piano which was already crowded with people who had come to listen.
Dr. Lewis joined Jack on the bench. A cigarette hung precariously from the corner of his mouth as he slapped his legs establishing a light rhythm prior to Jack’s playing. Then real banging—Smokey, whipping the lid of the piano with the heels of his hands. And Jack’s fingers hitting the keys, thump-thump, thump-thump-thump. And him singing Muddy Waters:
Who’s that yonder come walkin’ down the street?
She’s the most beautiful girl any man would want to meet.
I wonder who’s gonna be your sweet man when I’m gone?
I wonder who you’re gonna have to love you.
In his voice there was new weight, masculine weight. Jack had never been hurt by me before. At least I’d given him something, even if only just a passport into sorrow. When the last chord came, he jammed the piano one final time—bwomp—and he smiled mordantly into the crowd, his eyes latching on to no one and nothing. His rejection of me was correct; I understood it had to be that way. If in life there is flow, a current or a course, I had the feeling I’d found it. They began a second song, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, my favorite, he knew. He sang it so beautifully.
Past the piano on the southern side of the room, a wall of windows overlooking the porch extended from floor to ceiling. I moved behind the frayed drapes and went to the farthermost window, the top half of which was open. Pantigo Road lay ahead. The oily gloss of the street and the sound of passing cars suggested it was raining. Wheels on wet pavement make a very particular going-home sound, serene and conclusive. I wondered what Marilyn was doing. Maybe she was making tea, scooping stray leaves from a wrinkled paper sack with Golden Assam stamped in withering red. Maybe she and Dad were reading. If she was looking out the window at the rain, perhaps she was thinking of me.
“I’m leaving,” Rourke said, his voice coming practically from within my mind.
I was not surprised. Lots of things were in there—him too. My eyes didn’t leave the street. I was in some unattended place, some dangerously unattended place. He was on the porch, on the other side of the wall, leaning against my open window. I did not look to see him, but I could feel him, the way you can close your eyes and feel a hand above your skin. He emitted something electrical, and I responded, electrically.
“I want you to know,” he said, “that you’re very talented.” Quieter, down an octave. “I think you’re going to go far.”
A car passed. I traced its lights eastward. It was a curious thing to mention talent. He seemed to want to persuade me of something. I might have told him not to bother trying. Though I could not name the choice, it had been made the first time I saw him. My preference for him was unconditional, absolute—feral, as Jack would have said, the type of choice animals make. Jack was mistaken about the ability of conscience and moral reciprocity being the best means to move humanity. In the end it’s just natural will that inspires us to action. Love, hatred, hunger, desire, indigence—things that find no home in logic. What I felt for Rourke was a partiality that situated me. It defined and animated me.
He moved suddenly, his shadow changing radically from a lean vertical strip visible only from the corner of my eye to a carbon shield that obliterated the view, like a door swinging decidedly shut. His mouth came down on my cheek, the one farthest from him. With his jaw he pushed my face into the hard pocket of his inclined chest, and with loose lips he softly held it there. I was breathing, my breath wetting his chest, going down the tendons of his neck. Beneath the membrane of his lips lay the complete and threatening remainder of his body. I could feel the way he held himself in check. Just when he might have retreated, he lingered, noticing perhaps as I did the way his mouth had been shaped by God to fit the hollow beneath my cheekbone.
“I have to go,” he breathed in apologetically. When he withdrew, the skin of his lips and the skin of my face resisted separation. I wondered when we’d reached a place of apologies.
“Yes,” I said. “Go.”
Rourke leapt from the porch. He seemed dauntless, satisfied with himself, and with me. He reached his car—a 1967 cameo-white GTO with a parchment interior. I knew the details because I heard him talk about them the night he came to my house in the hailstorm. He opened the door, and his body vanished into what looked like a tank full of moonglow. I wished to vanish also, but I was bound by the things that professed to designate me—family, friends, school, culture, country. How had I fallen under their influence, when these things referred to something other than what I felt myself to be, when the care I received was diluted by their self-interest?
I was no prisoner, and yet, when faced with an occasion for determination, I was not to follow the lead of my will, but to endure in tedious familiarity. What is freedom when you’re too beholden to act spontaneously? What is desire that is absolute but untimely? Or obligation when you have ignored your soul’s conviction? Is sacrifice really a virtue when in your heart you feel not a shred of devotion? I knew all this and more, but for all that I knew, knowing did not bring him back, and knowing did not move me. Only he could have brought himself back, only he might have moved me. And that is just slavery of another kind—which was something to consider.
I listened to the push of his car in reverse—a steady, hard push, taillights coming back. I nestled into the glow, and then he cut out to the right, in the direction of Amagansett and Montauk. I was to go back and face Jack and Kate, my parents, school on Monday. I was to gather away the monster I’d become, and, in the meantime, count on Rourke for nothing. He had acquainted me with the next place, but he would not take me there. I felt slightly doubtful, the way caterpillars must feel in the instant they are awakened to become butterflies.
That was the promise I’d made to Rourke—to fly.
The piano was unattended, though the room was still packed with people. I moved to the kitchen at the rear of the house, where I found Jack and his friends, an androgynous, invertebrate puddle of flannel and denim, sitting in a sooty cloud of pot smoke. Jack was slumped so low in a ladderback chair that his head met the middle rung. One foot jutted across the dining table, and he was rubbing the gummy label from a beer bottle with a nail-bitten thumb. His friends looked smug. They didn’t like Jack with me; they thought I wanted something from him, who knew what, since Jack had nothing to give. “Unless it’s the flu,” Jack would speculate. “Or a hangover,” Denny would add.
One time Trish Lawton called me a calculating bitch.
“Who’s Trish Lawton?” I asked Jack.
“Troy’s sister’s friend from Michigan. From Flint.”
“Has Trish even met Eveline?” Dan inquired mildly.
Jack thought for a minute. “I guess not, no. Pretty sure she hasn’t.”
I didn’t care what they thought of me, but I didn’t like how little they knew of Jack. If they insisted on remaining blind to his capacity for manipulation, his hunger for intellectual ascendance and moral leverage, his aptitude for dealing abuse, then without me, he would be as good as friendless.
“I’m going,” I announced, and there were a few mumbled good nights.
Jack thrust back his chair, standing before the legs were square, so that it marched and threatened to topple. He stormed up behind me and tossed his coat over his shoulders. One limp sleeve skimmed my back.
The screen door slammed behind us, hitting twice. I left, and Jack followed. His feet punched the porch steps as he descended, and when our bodies were aligned, he zipped his jacket and handed me his gloves again. The cold was not the same tranquil cold as when we’d left the theater, but a sharp chill. Jack and I walked as we’d always walked, on the streets we knew so perfectly well, and as we did, the drama of the evening began to dwindle into distant nonsense.
At my house I washed and put on long underwear and socks, and I felt more like myself again, whatever that was. Or whoever. I joined Jack on the floor. He was picking threads from the torn knee of his jeans.
“I know what’s happening,” he said into his hands.
I didn’t ask what he meant. If I forced him to put his thoughts to words, they would appear to lack foundation. He could only say, I saw you two sitting together, not talking, or, I saw him take your hand after Denny offered it to the crowd. I could defend myself against accusations, but that was a lawyerly way to waste time, assailing an argument’s logic rather than conceding to its probability. Something was happening, it was true.
“I’m really upset,” he said.
I was also upset. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“You’re not losing me,” he said. “You’re forsaking me.”
Forsaking implied choice. I had no choice with Rourke. I said, “Jack, I love you.”
He tilted his head back and fell silent, for a long time, saying nothing. He was heartless to retain his grief, to inflict me with the knowledge that for once I was the cause of his torment, not the remedy. For purposes unknown I had been entrusted with the care of his soul, and so it was the most vile type of treason for me to have enriched his self-loathing. His existence suddenly seemed so tenuous to me, his figure so fragile. He was just one body, leading one life.
He breathed in, and three lines appeared in the middle of his forehead. He reached for me, and I folded into his arms, happy to give him the thing that I lacked—the object of his desire. I wondered if he’d felt happy when I’d told him I loved him, and was he relieved that I did not say different things—or worse, nothing at all. Through his sweater I assessed his breathing. I knew it by heart. It was shallow, like water you can hardly wade in, and unsynchronized, as if he could not match with the atmosphere.
“You’re shivering,” he said. He took the comforter from my bed and wrapped it around my shoulders and then his, making a nest. Jack stroked my hair and I kissed him. And we listened reverently to the night—to the chronic buzz of the refrigerator, to the occasional lurch and jerk of the boiler, to the dainty tink of the metallic numbers on my digital clock, flapping scrupulously. At three-thirty, he said that he should go home.
“Not yet,” I begged, “please.” I couldn’t be alone, not yet.