26
The row of budding wildflowers ran like tiny tombstones alongside the barn. Delphiniums and phlox will come first, then irises and astilbes. Tiger lilies are always last. It’s usually not until July that they ascend and promptly collapse, their overlong necks buckling beneath the heft of their blossoms. There’s a lesson in that, I’m not sure what, but I liked tiger lilies least.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and regarded my painting. The canvas was five inches square, depicting celery-green shoots with darjeeling-purple tips, little Vs that had lost the logic of perspective. V as a shape is piercing and effective—the head of an arrow, the edge of a blade, a plow, a beak, the tip of a plant that creaks up through soil, the cooperative formation of migratory birds and schools of diligent fish.
My mother walked over, coffee cup in hand. “Eveline, that’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it for me?”
“Sure,” I said. “You can have it if you want.”
“What a gorgeous day!” she exclaimed, as though it were the first she’d ever lived. She breathed deeply. At thirty-eight, her skin was clear and firm and her body was slender. She’d had the good fortune of exacting revenge on the standards of beauty popular during her adolescence. In the 1950s, she was considered scrawny, but in the sixties and seventies, she was an ideal, perfect for fashions that did not work on shapelier women—wide link belts and paisley A-line dresses and bodysuits with twin bear-ear cutouts around the abdomen. Even poverty became her. It enhanced the atmosphere of liberty and luck you felt in her company. When she entered a room, people stood, recalling like a crisis all the hopes they had.
It was a gorgeous day; all the colors had come alive. The sky was candy-orange, the color of those spongy Easter treats—not Duck Peeps, but the melony ones called Circus Peanuts that taste like bananas. Why are they shaped like peanuts when they taste like bananas, and what did the circus have to do with it? It was a strange set of falsifications. Jack and I placed some on the tracks once to see if they would widen, but instead they disappeared, possibly sticking to the train wheels. “Well,” Jack said that day as we watched the last car vanish around the bend, “I hope at least we slowed the f*cker down.”
My mother sat alongside me, and she took a sip from her mug. “Can you believe I was married at your age?” she asked out of nowhere. Her observation was largely scientific, making the fact that I was the product of that union into something only slightly more than extraneous. “You’ll have so much fun at the Talkhouse tonight,” she continued. “Kate’s excitement is infectious. Don’t forget to say hi to Kevin Fitzgerald, if he’s tending bar.”
I pressed my palms into my eyes. If I pressed hard, maybe I could erase myself.
“What’s wrong?” she asked uncomfortably. “Is it Jack?”
“Jack?” I said, surprised. “Kate maybe, but not Jack.”
“Kate?” She seemed surprised too. “What about Kate?”
“I don’t know. We’re just—not clicking.”
“What do you mean not clicking?”
“It’s like, we’re going at different speeds,” I said, striving for clarity, though to hear myself, I didn’t sound very clear. “We’re, like, not close anymore, you know, spatially.” I amended that. “Not spatially—I don’t know.” I gestured with my hands. “She’s not moving.”
Unfortunately, my mother thought she understood. Things were usually better between us when she didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about. “The first thing you need to do,” she said, “is to get over the idea of growth as measurable by speed and distance.”
As she spoke, I began to gather the paintbrushes that I’d strewn on the grass. It was difficult to see them in the twilight, and I felt bad about that, about them maybe feeling lost.
“Linearity and progress are completely male notions,” she counseled. “Evolution is not necessarily linear. You can’t think in terms of you girls having been shot from the same pistol. You come from entirely different guns. One has bullets, the other has—”
“A flag,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said. “A flag.”
I counted slowly to ten, then stood. She stood also, and she hugged me, whistling as she returned to the house. She seemed satisfied with herself for having been there for me.
Kate’s door would not open. “Watch the ironing board!” she called.
I squeaked through the gap and discovered her testing shoes of various heights. The light from a candle flirted against her, throwing her shadow upon the wall. I sat for a while and watched as she dressed. I wondered if being loyal meant being honest or being kind. If there had been a cohesive truth to tell Kate about Rourke and me, it would have felt cruel to relate it, and yet it didn’t feel right to say nothing either. It was hard to see her employ her best strategies to win—something. She wasn’t even sure what.
“What do you think,” she inquired. “Collar up or collar down?”
“Down,” I replied. “I guess.”
“You guess, or you’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Sure down, or sure up?”
Neither was good, actually. “Up.”
“Ugh,” she said, ripping off the shirt. “What is wrong?”
Maybe something was wrong, since my mother had asked the same question. The change in our friendship didn’t seem to bother Kate in the least. She didn’t seem to care that we were forging ahead blind and dumb, relying on habit in the absence of devotion. Maybe such breaches are obligatory in the biological sense. Maybe it would not do for girls to evolve beyond pubescent attachments, to exceed basic constancy.
“Can you at least try to be friendly tonight?” Kate was saying.
I said yes, that I would try, though I was so convinced of the meaninglessness of my own will in relation to the night that I wasn’t even planning on participating actively. Free will is an illusion. People like to believe their choices are singular and circumspect, when in fact they are completely trifling. Despite the odds, we had all strayed into the night—Kate and me and Rourke and however many others—our fates assigned, our histories synchronized.
“Why don’t you go take some aspirin?” Kate said. “That will make you feel better.”
Alongside the oven there was a cabinet where the liquor was kept. I didn’t realize it was my destination until I found myself filling a coffee mug with brown stuff—Jim Beam, whatever, whatever. Bourbon, whiskey, rye. Label, proof. I didn’t comprehend any of it. All I knew for certain was that no one would notice the loss of alcohol, except Jack, and he wouldn’t be coming by so much anymore. It was amusing, actually, the idea of his visiting sometime in the distant future and right away going, “Hey, who polished off all the whiskey?” Jack was amusing, unlike most everyone else.
My arm reached to the shelf where the medicine and spices were kept. The unopened spices had been a wedding present to my parents, which made the jars and the contents older than me. I did not like to touch them: it was as if they measured me or my life. I plucked the aspirin bottle from a field of caps, popped the lid, and shook out two pills, thinking how medicine and spices are similar since both are concentrates. Savory, cumin, marjoram, and mace are totally weird substances that probably even the greatest chefs don’t know how to use.
When I passed back through the living room, Mom was talking on the telephone to Lowie. “Yeah, but then,” Mom said, “I had to rewrite the entire curriculum.”
I drank some whiskey and listened. My mother is talented on the phone. She always sounds connected. I never even feel that connected in person. I wondered if the connectedness she finds there is real or imaginary. There. People say “there” as though it means something. Where is There? Maybe There is where They live. I swallowed the aspirin with a giant gulp of liquor. Aspirin or aspirins. I wasn’t sure.
In my closet I had just one dress. I’d bought it at a thrift shop in the city on Greenwich Avenue near Charles Street. I grabbed the dress, refilled my mug with whiskey, and went back upstairs to get showered, this time avoiding Kate. I did not want to be influenced by her monstrous good cheer. Not monstrous. What was the word my mother had used? Infectious.
I locked the bathroom door and turned the radio loud, because I kept hearing Kate through the door, bouncing around like a loose balloon. Shuffle-shuffle-skid-shuffle. I sat on the sink edge, taking several swigs. Pieces were repositioning inside, jockeying about, here and there. I figured I might as well finish the mug of whiskey because, well, just because. The liquor started to move down easily, going into my throat instead of through my sinuses. I wiped my chin with the back of my hand, and I hiccupped, once, then twice. I said, “Shit!” since shit is the thing to say when you get the hiccups. To get rid of them, I employed a method invented by my aunt.
“Close your eyes,” Lowie would coach, “point at your forehead, and gradually move in to touch a pretend spot. Breathe.” Because she was a midwife, Lowie was always coaching you as though you were in the middle of giving birth, whether you were backing out of the driveway or making an omelet. “You can do it. Just focus. Breathe. Breathe.”
“The principle,” she would explain academically after she had rid you of the offending problem, “is to concentrate electrical energy above the neck, thereby depriving the diaphragm of the means required to spasm.”
I hiccupped again and closed my eyes. My finger journeyed to a hypothetical spot, which my mind made into a pinwheel, lightly spinning. My forehead sensed the erotic nearness of my finger. Erotic because there was fighting back. As soon as I thought to double-check, the hiccups were gone. Too bad Kate wasn’t with me. If Kate were there, she’d be sitting on the edge of the tub and she’d say something funny, and we’d laugh. When I tried to think of the funny thing Kate might say, my mind drew a blank. When I tried to think of a funny thing Kate had ever said, my mind still drew a blank.
Alcohol crept through my veins, pooling in areas. It was hard to distinguish what I was feeling, something vague but clear, crooked but straight, like a beach blanket in the wind. I wondered why no one ever listed patience as characteristic of wild animals; I felt patient, the wild animal way. In the medicine cabinet mirror I looked for the woman Rourke saw. If I looked with his eyes, I could see her. It was good to trust his vision since I could not trust anyone else’s. He had no preconception of me, no idea at all beyond the fact that we fit. Rourke would never call me feral. I was a package in his eyes, the best and the worst I could be—a cowgirl, a jaguar, a soul to cleave.
I found a lipstick the color of brown shoes and applied some, then I leaned into the mirror, close and closer, observing my green eyes through half-closed lids. I didn’t like the oblong way I looked if you were kissing me. Jack had neglected ever to mention that. Jack, I thought, with an awful sorrow. This sorrow grieved me, and grief made me thirsty. I raised my mug. “To Jack,” I said, “my very special regret.”
“Here’s David Essex and ‘Rock On,’” the deejay said, and when the song started, it gushed from the radio onto the floor and over to my feet, boiling up my legs like liquid rubber. I began to move, dancing, peaceful, unburdened.
Hey kids, rock and roll. Rock on! Ooh, my soul!
I inched a pair of stockings over my legs. Then I put on shoes, last the dress. The dress had cost three dollars. It was plain and tight and short—no longer than a skirted bathing suit. It had long sleeves and a crew collar and darts at the breasts. The fabric was a complicated green—not trees, not grass—turtles possibly. I reached back and tugged the zipper up in portions. The girl in the thrift shop had said that the dress was “a de la Renta, for a fact, circa ’66 or ’73, and for a fact it was worn to Studio 54 by Bianca Jagger.” I did not bother to ask the girl how she had managed to establish such facts, since, if the facts were not facts but fictions, they were affable fictions with the effect of contributing positively to my state of mind and undoubtedly to hers. When I tried it on, she peeked into the bathroom. Her pumpkin hair formed a cone on her head, like one of those Halloween corn candies. I wondered if she could receive signals. “I’ll be your mirror,” she said, as there was none. Softly adding, “Oh, my, it’s celestial.”
From the top of the stairs I heard voices. I wondered how long they’d been waiting—I had no sense of public time. I walked down the stairs slowly. I wished I’d been born to a better staircase, to a sophisticated flight of marble with a wrought iron handrail and a quarter turn at the bottom. I wanted to step into a portrait-lined receiving hall with black and white square floor tile, a gilded mirror, a grandfather clock, and a table adorned by a single wax-sealed envelope.
As I turned the corner into the kitchen, I saw Rourke and he saw me. There was a change in his face. It did not liven or lift so much as it latched squarely on. By the rigor in his eyes, he tried to guide me. I labored to sustain my way.
Sitting at the table was Rourke’s friend from the parade, the one who looked like a bookie or a short-order cook, and another guy, and Kate, who was dressed all in yellow. The kitchen was crowded with those big bodies in it.
Kate said to me, “This is Rob and this is Mark. These guys all went to UCLA together.”
Mark was well-dressed and collegiate, and Rob was the same as the first time—shifty, like he was looking for a fight. Rob didn’t mention to Kate that we’d met before; neither did I.
“I’m sorry,” Mark said, and he stood. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“That’s because no one said it,” I replied. “I’m Eveline.”
Rourke was leaning on the counter, leaning massively, his waist hard and flat, like a safe place to encamp. I wanted to feel him. I needed to feel him. It was frustrating that his body belonged to him and what belonged to him was not mine. I set my cup on the peak of undone dishes, then turned away from the sink, facing out. The guys at the table looked away, flinching a little, like I was swinging a sharp object. My arm brushed Rourke’s sleeve, and I was mindful of the impact, of the way the spectacle of us reduced the room to silence.
I bit my tongue in a fine line between my front teeth. “So, are we going?” I felt ready, loose in the limbs, tight in the trunk. If I were to play ball right then, I would not miss a catch.
“Impatient?” Rourke said, speaking quietly.
“Hardly,” I answered, thinking of big cats. “Just the opposite.”
“We were ripping down Bruckner Boulevard at four in the morning,” Rob said as I slid over to the place behind the driver’s seat. “We passed some cops, but they didn’t budge. Ten seconds later, Bobby G. cracks up. He was doing sixty-something when he hit. He flew up like a friggin’ rag doll.”
“Harrison told me his spine is destroyed,” Mark said.
“Legs too. One leg. Yeah, he got busted up pretty bad.”
“I’ll take the middle,” Mark offered as Rob began to climb in back.
Rob ignored him, continuing over, coming next to me. “Nah,” he said. “I like the hump.”
Behind us, Rourke paused on the driveway—I knew because my body was keeping his body in range, tracking it. “Better put that in here,” I heard him say to Kate. The car bounced as he opened the trunk, put her pocketbook in, then shut it again.
“Anything you need to put in the trunk, Countess?” Rob asked me.
“Yeah,” I said, “a corpse.”
“That’s funny,” he said, elbowing me. “A corpse.”
Mark squeezed in next to Rob, and Kate won by default the seat next to Rourke up front. There were sounds—a door, another door, a cassette, the men talking, the engine starting, the mincing snitch of leather against vinyl. Rourke hit the tape deck; Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” came on. In the rearview mirror, Rourke’s reflection consulted with mine. Our images floated like we were co-conspirators passing in a crowd, like we were acting on plan. I closed my eyes to preserve the image—it was like saving a fallen leaf.
On the way to Amagansett, Mark said he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a tetanus shot. “I practically get one a year,” Rob stated, adding something about a flooring nail that recently went through his fist.
“You’re an idiot,” Mark said. “You only need one like every ten years.” He shifted, and Rob shifted in turn, moving closer to me. Mark leaned to see me. “Got enough room?”
I said I did. I felt bad about having so many people embroiled in the business of my destiny. I wondered if they felt bad too, or if they felt at all peculiar, like parts or materials.
Rob folded a piece of gum into his mouth, then flicked the pack in my direction. I took a stick. The oblique flare of the streetlights plunged rhythmically across his jaw. I could see him chewing, sucking his cheek to his molars. His eyes were obscured by the blind of the roof. “What’s up with that Porsche?” he asked Mark.
“Working on it,” Mark said with a sigh, plowing his fingers through his hair. “I should have it by the end of this month.” He was not necessarily being untruthful, he just seemed it. Some people are unfortunate that way.
“Good, because it’s been, like, three years already.”
Next came talk of Syd Barrett of the original Pink Floyd going crazy from too much LSD, Mark said, but Rob said no, it was from photoepilepsy brought on by stage light displays. Then they moved on to a ’68 Challenger being sold by a guy from Jersey named Pat, and also various engine options—a 426 hemi, a 440 with a six-pack, a 383 magnum. It’s strange that cars and guns and liquor share terminology. Somehow it’s indicative of something. According to Rob, the two biggest sports upsets were the Mets against Baltimore in the ’69 series and something to do with Sonny Liston. This was followed by a discussion of classic fights—Marciano KO’s Louis, Robinson beats Basilio, Jersey Joe gives bad count, Frazier wins Olympic Gold in ’64, Rumble in the Jungle, Thrilla in Manila—and some obscure questions Rob had for Rourke about Sam Langford’s blindness and Stanley Ketchel’s murder. I stared out the window, letting everything that was said turn otherworldly, like a foreign language. I leaned onto Rob’s shoulder, and he leaned back, giving me a little more. It was nice, him knowing I needed a little more.
The Stephen Talkhouse is a roadside bar named after a Montaukett Indian who walked all over Long Island. According to legend, Talkhouse could walk to Brooklyn and back in a day.
“I believe his name was Pharaoh,” Powell told us one time when we were fishing for fluke in Shinnecock Bay. Actually, Powell was fishing; Jack and Denny and I were tying knots and spearing sand eels, or just hanging quietly over the side, trying to spot the large fluke Powell called “doormats.” “Or maybe Faro, with an F,” he speculated as he cut the engine, and we drifted into the shallows. Powell liked skinny water. He said it gave fish the chance to ambush the bait.
“Not much was recorded back then, and what was recorded was not carefully recorded, seeing as how we were experts in the language of record but they weren’t. The only time we adopted native words and ways was when it came time to buy their land. A couple blankets and a dog for thousands of acres. We liked those terms fine.”
Powell cast out, hipping smoothly up into one shoulder, the hook touching down like the soft cluck of a tongue. In his wallet was an Indian Status card. Though he has Nanticoke blood on his mother’s side, on his father’s side he’s white. He’s the first to admit that the crimes of his paternal ancestors afforded him advantages for which many of his mother’s ancestors are ineligible. “Plumbing, for starters,” he’ll say.
The Nanticokes were tidewater people who believed all things possess a unique spirit. The Nanticokes are. They still exist. I wrote about the tribe for seventh-grade social studies. I’d interviewed Powell’s sister Esme on the phone from her home in Salamanca, New York. She’s married to Jim, an Iroquois. Coach Peters, who was teaching history that year, gave me a B for improper sourcing—which he spelled sorecing. When my mother saw the graded paper, she called a meeting.
“The purpose of the assignment, Mrs. Ruane,” said Mrs. Schmidt, the middle-school principal, “was to encourage encyclopedia use.”
“The purpose of an encyclopedia, Ms. Schmidt,” my mother said, “is to assist those who have limited access to reputable information. Encyclopedias are hugely reductive. Their scope is confined to the interests of the publisher and its constituents. They should be used as supplemental, not primary references, which is exactly how my daughter has used them—that is, pursuant to point of view.” In her most serious tone, my mother added, “I want it to be a matter of record that I consider that gym teacher to be as qualified to teach academics as he would consider me to teach football. If you intend to promote white supremacy, I suggest that you go out and find some whites who are, in fact, supreme.”
The next day Coach Peters sent a note saying that my grade on the paper had been changed to an A. Mom sent a note back. Your lesson has proved invaluable. Let the B stand.
Two bouncers sat slumped like vultures on the wooden ramp that led to the Talkhouse. I wondered if I would have a problem getting in—Kate was eighteen, but I had six months to go. Rob placed his hand on my lower back and escorted me up the ramp. Rourke came next, then Kate and Mark, lagging behind. “What are the damages?” Rob asked, spreading his wallet.
“Five bucks a head,” one guy said. The lump in his neck journeyed unevenly. The second bouncer leaned to get a better view of me. Rob threw a shoulder to block him.
“Relax, man,” the guy told Rob, and then he said, “Hey, Scorpio!”
I peered over Rob’s shoulder.
“It’s me.” He swatted his chest. “Biff.”
“Oh,” I said. The hitchhiker. “Hi.”
He seemed glad to see me, which was nice. No one ever seemed that glad to see me. Three other people squeezed past, paid the cover, and went in. Sounds of the bar swelled out in a dull ruff, then night silence again.
“I didn’t recognize you,” he said. “You know, with the legs.”
“How’s rugby?”
“I just got back from San Diego. I played all winter. Where’s your friend?”
I pointed behind me, calling Kate. “Oh, my God!” she said. “Biff! I can’t believe it.”
Rob returned to his wallet. Biff waved his hand, and the second guy opened the door to motion us through. Biff winked at me. “See you later.”
Inside was woodsy and damp with the moldy stench of saturated alcohol. We entered in single file, inching through a yeasty shaft of bodies wedged between the bar and a partition separating the tables. I kept moving in, my body caressing unfamiliar bodies, the curves of me conforming to the curves of them. I waved to Mom’s friend Kevin Fitzgerald, who used to swing me in the yard when I was little. He waved back from behind the bar, blowing kisses, making a big deal over seeing me.
Rob muttered into the back of my ear, “Nice going, Countess.”
“Don’t thank me. Kate’s the friendly one.”
“She might be friendly,” he said, as we paused to let someone with drinks pass, “but she’d never get five through the door.”
I turned back to Rourke. He was behind Rob, just a body away. When my eyes found his, he looked away. I understood. I didn’t like getting in for free. It appeared as though the hitchhiker was repaying a favor. Probably he had not done so with foresight or malice, but by letting us in that way he had staked a piece of me, and the piece he’d staked already belonged to the men I’d come with—or so they thought. Biff had been to my house to visit my mother, obliging him to protect me—or so he thought. The free entry was not a favor but a signal, a warning, a message between men. It’s tiring, keeping track of them—the posturing and the egos, the private worlds of their private minds, the strengths so directly compensating for weaknesses. In public they feign leniency and affect simplicity, but in private they want you to know how very damaged they are.
My mood was lapsing. I’d lost the sensation of being connected to Rourke, and that loss dispossessed me of motive and prudence. I forgot who I was and what I was doing and what was the point of everything anyhow. I had the idea of walking through to the rear exit and then out. It would have been funny to go without telling him, except for the part about no car. I felt unhinged: if things couldn’t get better, I wanted to make them worse. I felt myself become acquainted with my capacity for extremes. I had the idea I could be completed by risk. I began to like the bodies touching mine.
Rob handed me a beer over my shoulder and gestured with his chin to a vacant booth on the far side of the partition. Together we cut around, and when I inched across the seat on my knees to the farthest end, he followed. Then came Kate, and last Rourke on the end opposite me. Mark swung a chair to the outside of the table and he straddled it. Rob arranged the clutter left by previous occupants, building a meticulous mountain of plastic, paper, and glass.
“So, Monday’s D-day,” I heard Mark say to Rourke. “Departure day.”
Rourke said, “Yeah, Monday’s the day.” I wondered if Rourke was happy when he talked or not. He didn’t seem happy.
“Too bad. We could have all been out here together this summer.”
“We still can be, Mark,” Rob said. “We’ll just stay at your parents’ house—for free.”
Mark laughed. “Anytime you need a place, you have one.”
I was peeling the foil from the neck of my beer bottle. Rob nudged me. “You know what they say about people who do that?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That they’re sexually frustrated.” He winked and took a swig of his own drink.
“I haven’t found that to be true,” I told him. “But I’ll take your word for it.”
“Ha!” Mark said. “She got you!”
Kate whispered to Rourke. He inclined his head obligingly. A slender lock of hair fell by his face, skimming with caution the lashes of his right eye. With her he seemed easy, approachable—a boy, a brother, a son, a friend. It pained me to see him that way. I could not evoke that in him. I smiled despite my epic disgust, because it was impossible not to admire the handsome look of him. Kate said he was nice. Maybe that was true, maybe to her and to all the world he was.
Hips moved across the dance floor exactly at the height of my eyes. The hips belonged to normal people having normal fun. I wished I were one of those people. I wished I’d left the building when we’d first arrived, when I’d had the chance. I wished there was a way to leave but stay. That’s the appeal of drinking and drugs—leaving but staying. It was good that I didn’t have anything more than a beer. Sometimes you see some girl slooped up against a wall, half-unconscious. Basically she felt the way I did, only she’d gotten her hands on liquor and drugs. I looked around for Mick Jagger. He’d been to the Talkhouse several times. That would be good, to see Mick Jagger—you know, like, not a totally wasted night.
Mark stood. “I’m gonna take a walk,” he said. “Be right back.”
The table felt different without him, uneven, as if missing a critical component. I didn’t know Mark well enough to name the missing part, but I suspected I’d lost an ally.
I stood, saying I was going to take a walk too.
Rob shifted. His instinct was to accompany me, but he had Rourke to consider. Rob would never disappear with me, especially if it meant leaving Kate and Rourke alone together. They could all get up, but Rob would never give up a good table.
Mark was at the jukebox. I walked toward him and looked down into the meadow of luminous tags.
“I knew you’d come,” he said.
I believed him, though I didn’t even know I’d come. Having exercised my freedom, my freedom felt good.
“Pick some songs,” he suggested.
My finger floated above the glass. “M-Five. A-Seven.”
He inserted the quarters, pushed the buttons, then faced out, watching the dancers, not really watching. “That’s quite a dress,” he said, his lips hardly moving.
“It cost three dollars,” I confided, still reading the tags.
“That works out to about a dollar an inch,” he said, looking at me for just as long as he thought I could bear. There was a slippery quality to him, like if you set down an object it would slide. “Next time I see you, I hope you’ll be wearing a two dollar dress.”
He was no more than a foot away, in the near darkness. I looked away.
“He can’t see,” Mark said, cutting straight through to the place I was. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Oh, you want him to see.”
Actually, I didn’t want that.
“If you’re uncomfortable,” Mark said, “let’s go back.”
I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to go farther into the crowd; I wanted to embed myself. There was a post between the jukebox and the bathrooms, and I moved to it. I leaned back and the wood pushed between my shoulder blades. Mark propped his arm on the post alongside my neck, facing me, making a barricade between me and all the rest. I liked the wall he made.
The jukebox finished a song, then whirred to a new start. It was the Four Tops.
Bernadette. People are searching for—
the kind of love that we possessed.
Some go on searchin’ their whole life through
And never find the love I’ve found in you.
“Do you know the lead singer’s name?”
“Levi Stubbs,” Mark said matter-of-factly.
I reached for his sleeve. “Listen,” I said, adding his name, “Mark. I love this part. The false ending. The way he screams her name. Bern—a—dette.”
Mark nodded as we listened.
“I’ll never be loved like that.”
He shook his drink, looking into it. “I doubt that.”
I wondered why he was there. There must have been a reason. I asked, “Why are you here?”
“In East Hampton? My parents have a house here.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“You mean—tonight.”
“Yes, tonight.”
“To see you,” he said. “To find you.” That’s when I first saw the eyes. They were gunmetal gray and speckled like the underside of certain fish. His hair was straight and sand colored, long around his face. I eased the glass from his hands and swallowed some of what was inside, coughing up a little cranberry. “Would you like one?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I told him. “I’ll just share yours.”
The song changed and he drew me to the center of the blackened floor. Before pulling me in, he said something, I wasn’t sure what, but I smiled and held him, laying my head on his shoulder, grateful that he had stepped up and given me shelter when I needed it. Being in a bar is somewhat like being homeless if you cannot be with your friends. You wander and linger and land wherever there’s room and heat, sometimes getting in trouble, sometimes not.
Tell me somethin’ good, tell me that you love me, yeah.
Mark was good, better than Denny. Maybe it just felt better to dance with Mark than with Denny. He wrapped one hand around my waist, bracing my back, and our hips affixed, bone to pelvic bone.
Your problem is you ain’t been loved like you should
What I’ve got to give will sure enough do you good.
We oscillated, bending and rising in controlled, compact arcs, our torsos hanging slightly back. My left arm dangled loosely, my right arm held him. There was resistance in my abdomen and a tautness in my legs, and our shadows trespassed long against the tables, transfixing the crowd, restoring Rourke’s customarily heavy countenance. I was glad. It hadn’t been good to see him happy, knowing for certain he was not.
By the time we returned, Kate had moved into Rourke’s seat and Rob had slid into mine. Rourke had taken Mark’s chair and turned it away from the dance floor. Rob was bending over a plate, halfway finished with a burger. There was the broad smell of onions.
Mark gestured to the dance floor. “Kate?”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Please, no.”
“Thank God,” Mark said, pretending to collapse back against Kate, nudging her farther in.
“What’s wrong? Need a bed?” Rob said derisively, not meaning Mark, but me and Mark.
Mark ignored the comment. He reached across for Rob’s plate, lifted the bun, and said, “Brave man.” I could see that Mark was not the type of person who would waste time with innuendo and sarcasm or who would let anything work at cross-purposes to determination. I’d never thought of sarcasm as a waste of time, but it’s true—it is. And Mark was fast. He’d reached me quickly, quicker than anyone. I hadn’t even noticed him coming.
I set my left knee on the edge of the banquette, and my right thigh pressed into the rim of the table near where Rourke was seated. The waitress delivered a drink to Mark, which he pushed in my direction, and I pulled out a few pieces of ice to eat. My stomach swelled in tandem with my chest. Rourke leaned back in his chair and stared into the middle distance. I thought I knew what he felt. He felt what I’d felt the day I’d seen him in the gym. The time his legs came on either side of me and the lip of his underwear was visible beneath his shorts. When he was wet and there was the smell of sweat. I’d wanted to leave, but I couldn’t move.
“You know,” Kate said in a sarcastic voice, “there’s a hole in your stockings.”
Everyone looked. I raised the hem to see—the dress didn’t have far to go. Kate was right, though I didn’t like the way she’d called attention to me. I took the stirrer from Mark’s glass and inserted it into the hole, jerking my wrist. The crossed edge of the stick scratched my leg, and the nylon shredded like a limited web.
Kate said, “Christ, Evie!” and Mark said, “Shit,” and Rob muttered something I couldn’t hear.
Rourke managed to express gross disinterest. I didn’t care what he thought or what anyone thought. If he wanted to leave me free, he could not exactly object to the applications of my freedom. I was no more than the shameless thing they’d made of me—a woman, a fiend, my own lowest form. There was a trippingness to it that I liked, a capability I’d been missing. Why remain polite but powerless, in love but a beggar?
“You take the front,” Rourke directed Mark over the roof of the car, then he propped the driver’s seat forward and took my arm, guiding me in behind him.
“Hey, no complaints from me,” Mark said. “It’s cramped as hell back there.”
He sped back through the fog. We were going so fast I wondered if we would crash and disintegrate into mist. Kate was on the other side of Rob, sleeping lightly. Rob remained serious and silent, staring ahead through the windshield from his place in the back as though he might have to grab the wheel and take over at any instant. Mark just kept chatting professionally with Rourke, who kept replying, professionally as well.
I wished it was winter. In winter you can scrape ice on the inside of your window. I wanted to scrape ice. I wanted my window to be coated in that shattery type of window frost. I breathed onto the glass and with my finger spelled out my name—Eveline. Was I still me when I did not feel like me? Was I the girl my mother bore, my father adored, the one Jack loved? Jack. I thought an unthinkable thought, something about asking for mercy, about going back in time, back to him.
The car thrust to a laborious and inexact stop at the intersection by the post office in East Hampton. The placid mechanical hum and puckered clicks from the streetlight slit the air, and the bloody electric haze it made warmed Rourke’s face as he looked left into the dead May night. Though he was in profile, I could see his eyes. I could see his fear, and in it, the place where I resided.
Rob’s voice came, soft under his breath, breaking through to Rourke, “Green light.”
When we pulled into the driveway, Mark and Rob stepped out of the car, with Mark helping Kate, asking when she thought she would be heading to college.
Rourke leaned down and gave me his hand, lifting me out. In the slender murk produced by our bodies, his hair touched my hair and his breath mixed with mine. When I turned to go, his left hand caught my waist, cupping it, his body pushing up behind me. Bending slightly, his right hand came down around my front to grab my right inner thigh. I was lifted slightly as his fingers found the run in my stockings, and through the shreds he found my skin, clutching up into obscurity.