27
The families of graduating seniors emptied out of cars, sheepish in uncommon splendor, like milling clans at the origin of a parade. There is something spent about the families of teenagers; possibly it’s the look of exhausted loyalties. Perhaps it’s only right that we grow overbig in someone else’s space. Perhaps we need to tire and differentiate, leave and adapt.
“Hey, Evie,” people kept saying, and I kept saying, “Hey.”
Sara Eden joined me on the curb in front of the school, where I was sitting, waiting for the ceremony to begin. Sara looked especially pretty all dressed up. Her eyes sloped at the farthest edges, like the opened wings of a tropical bird. Her skin was rich dark brown like a friar’s robes, her teeth perfectly even. A car engine quit alongside us. Sara waved. I listened to the tinkling fuss of her bracelets. “That’s my cousin. Marika.”
“What a pretty name,” I said. “Marika—like a spice.”
Sara pulled her braids back incompletely on the side nearest me in the disarming way that some girls have. Though I had not felt sad before, with Sara there I felt sad. She was going to Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., and D.C. is one of those places people never come back from. They don’t necessarily stay, but they almost always go from there to elsewhere. Sara was asking me about Alicia’s graduation party. I’d already said no, to Alicia and also to her, but it occurred to me that I might not see either of them so much anymore.
“So what do you think? I’ll pick you up at five, okay?”
Sure, I said, five is fine.
I’d remained in place for fifteen days after Rourke moved away, not leaving my house, moving only to touch the things I knew he’d touched—the door frame, the bookshelves, the couch, the paper dolls and the sailboat I’d made, the section of the kitchen counter on which he’d leaned. I kept my schoolbooks on a windowsill in my mother’s bedroom upstairs, where I labored to observe beyond the greening leaves the street his car had traveled. There was a chair, petite with a round swirling mauve seat and painted black wood. It was not a comfortable chair, but it was there that I sat every day until dark, except for brief hours at school, briefer hours in bed. Everyone was good to me and kind, deferring, always deferring. They seemed afraid for me, though it wasn’t necessary. They didn’t know me. They didn’t know that my path had been decided, that when I moved through the present, it was as if through a paraffin corridor. I would have spoken of such things, but it was likely that I would not have been heard. When anyone asked what I was doing, I would say, studying. If no one answered the ringing phone before I got to it, I would lift the receiver and drop it. It was always just someone calling, just a person, not Rourke.
From a quilted, sequined sack, Kate withdrew a tangle of bobby pins. She secured her graduation cap, tilting her head into the light at funny mannequin angles, contemplating space beyond the cafeteria window. An impeccable razor line separated the two halves of her hair. How long ago had the strands at the bottom been by the scalp? Maybe the ones on the bottom were there last time Maman cooked veal for dinner. I’d never thought of hair length as a measure of time. It’s sickening actually, the way hair sprouts from pores, squeezing up like famished worms even after a body is dead.
“Still in a bad mood?” Kate asked.
On my hand I was drawing a cup. I had no idea why a cup. I was looking down, trying to avoid the last circus of my peers. A red construction paper sign on one of the doors had been changed from PICK UP GOWNS HERE to PICK UP GIRLS HERE. Paulie Schaeffer and Mike Stern were wrestling by the kitchen, Dana Anderson was applying a second coat of nail polish, and Regina Morris was crying because her school ring had dropped behind a radiator—janitors were on the way. Marty Koch was drinking an orange soda. Dressed in his gown he looked like the nebbish cousin of a vampire. Others milled wistfully—Kiki Hauser and Min Kessler, Adam Sargent and Lynn Hyne—each borne down with memories, and yet each preparing to step experimentally into the half-light of a new life.
Cameras were flashing—zic-zhing, zic-zhing.
Have a great summer!
Good luck out there!
See you next life!
Jack appeared. I didn’t see from where. He thrust his gown at Kate. “Fix this piece of shit. The snap’s busted.”
“I can’t believe you broke it already,” she said.
“The snap sucks. All snaps suck. Snaps are for fags,” Jack said blackly.
As Kate hunted for a safety pin, he turned to face me. It was like meeting a puppy I’d given away. I found myself searching for signs of neglect. Wine-colored sacs hugged the undersides of his eyes, attaching like nesting cocoons, like bloody slings. The knuckles of his right hand were badly scraped. Skin flapped over in certain parts and was missing entirely in others. The blood looked dry but not old. His T-shirt said, It’s cool to love Jesus. I was surprised to see him. I had not expected to see him.
“How are you?” he wanted to know.
“I’m okay.” I extracted a strand of hair from the corner of his mouth. “You? You okay?”
“Me? Oh, yeah, sure. I’m okay.”
He’d come before dawn, just six hours before graduation. I was sleeping lightly. I heard the barn door creak. He climbed the ladder, and from halfway up he tossed a bottle of liquor onto the bed. I could feel it hit the mattress; I could hear the cramped slosh of fluid. It sounded one-third empty.
“What time is it?” I asked, sitting up.
He said, “Night.” His legs swung off the ledge of the loft. I had the idea he might jump, though he would not have gone far. If I could have taken his pain, I would have, because my love for him was undiminished. You hear of paralyzed people who send signals to sleeping limbs. Or amputees who feel phantom tingling in parts that no longer exist. Despite his violent removal, all the space around me that he had occupied still belonged to Jack. Not a day passed without me sending signals to missing pieces.
“I could cut my wrists,” he said, “put a bullet through my skull. If I thought I could reach you. But nothing can reach you.”
I guided his head to the basin of my lap. I brushed back his hair, and unraveled the many knots. If I was cruel, I did not feel cruel. I felt new. I’d met the darker side of life; I’d met its animal. The animal came to me because it knew me. Jack understood what I’d become. I could tell by the wonder and the disgust in his eyes.
“Every time I see a flower,” he said as he wept, “it’s your favorite.”
——
Kate fanned the air as she fastened his robe. “You reek of alcohol.”
Jack lifted his chin. “Quick,” he said sarcastically, “hand me a mint.”
“Where’s your cap?” she asked him as we stood to take our places in line.
“Daniel!” he bellowed. Dan’s head emerged from the crowd. Jack clapped, going, “Chuck it.” Dan snapped his wrist, and the hat came gliding over like a square Frisbee from line L-Z to line A-K.
The band began to play the school song, and we all inched through the halls in two lines. Andie Anderson and Brett Lawler were each the head of a line, and the first to reach the auditorium doors. They stopped, and we all stopped in succession, crashing somewhat. Andie’s legs were jiggling beneath her gown as she waited for her cue—her knees were poking like horse noses running a race in tandem. At the first note of “Pomp and Circumstance,” Andie and Brett received the signal to go, while every next person was held by the shoulders for a count of two, then released with a solemn press to the small of the back.
Inside, the auditorium was inky and stifling. Parents and extended families filled the seats, and teachers papered the walls, craning their necks, fanning themselves with programs—all eagerly bearing witness to our indoctrination. We were being given over, who knows to what. The sad truth is that there is no original future. From my chair on the platform, I had an unobstructed view of Denny’s mother, Elaine, who was weeping in the front row. The shank of doughy flesh under her arm wagged as she leaned down to hunt through her pocketbook for a tissue. To prevent Denny from being late, she had changed all the clocks in the house, and she got him to the school two hours early. Unfortunately, it was so early that Denny went downstairs to sleep in the wrestling room and nearly missed the whole thing anyway.
In his valedictory speech, Stephen Auchard spoke of promises and responsibilities while everyone was thinking primarily of the rewards of lunch. He could not say what he really thought, whatever it was that that may have been, if in fact his real thoughts were even known to him. But he had not been singled out for the inventiveness of his sentiments. He’d been chosen as the one most brilliantly weaned of idiosyncrasy. Stephen returned to the seat next to mine, and I bumped against him, giving him a small thumbs-up. Poor guy. He wanted to be a surgeon. One day we would meet again, one day in the distant future, one day when I required surgery, though at the time it was hard to imagine what part of me might need to be cut.
Principal Laughlin beamed and shook my hand like he meant it when he presented my diploma. On it, my name had been carefully written in veering script: Eveline Aster Auerbach. People shouted that name exactly as I read it—people I knew and others I did not know, all clapping loudly. Clapping is bizarre. Powell says in certain places people do not do it. In certain places they call out in repetitive hoots, going, loo, loo, loo.
Afterward, my parents were in the lobby, Marilyn and Powell too. It was strange to see them there, representing me. From a distance they seemed credible, semi-sociable, and nicely dressed, making it hard to tell strictly by the look of them that they knew nothing about me. They were standing with Coco’s parents, discussing college acceptances as though they’d played some part in the process, as though they’d helped with applications or offered money. Mr. and Mrs. Hale had visited ten schools with Coco, often staying at four-star hotels, where Coco got massages.
“I can’t believe Coco’s going to Amherst,” Denny said one day during finals when he came to see me at my window in my house. He pulled his chair closer to mine. “For political science. Bitch.”
He came every day to keep me company, bringing presents—chocolates and hyacinths and rocks he’d painted, these portraits in gouache. I had eleven, all propped against the window screen: Alicia, Sara, Kate, Stephen Auchard, Lilias Starr, Mom and Powell and Denny’s mother—all on one rock, Eddie from the record store, Marty Koch holding the new yearbook, Coach Slater, the new logo Denny had designed for Atomic Tangerine, and of course, Elvis. “Which is your favorite?” he asked.
I pointed to Elvis. It looked exactly like Denny.
“Really? I happen to like Coach Slater. I mean, I know she’s not your favorite person, but the workmanship is by far the best. Do you know she sat for three hours? Did I tell you?”
He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and removed the latest. There wasn’t much room left on the window. I’d have to start a second row.
“Your father mailed me a photo,” he said as he placed it in front of me. On the irregular saucer-sized rock was a masterful replica of Chihuahua Man. He was wearing a starched yellow dress shirt, and all four dog heads were floating around him like alter egos. “I used a toothbrush to do the fur,” he said. “I cut off all but ten bristles then melted back the toothbrush wall with a blowtorch.”
I thanked him, and together we looked out the window.
“I forgot to tell you,” he remarked soberly. “L.B. got off the waiting list at Tulane. He’s going for pre-med. I mean, can you imagine getting him as your gynecologist? Or Coco as a lobbyist for the lumber or sugar industry? It terrifies me to think of these people with checking accounts and voting rights. They’ll reverse the progress of the entire preceding generation! We’re doomed.”
I pressed my Chihuahua rock against my cheek. It was warm. Denny must have had it on the dashboard in his car. It was strange how much things had changed since we were kids, or since we’d started high school. No one was liberated, not the way my mother and her friends had been—free from consensus and imitation. No one wore homemade clothes or marched on Washington anymore. The closest we’d come to history was Jack and Smokey getting arrested at Shoreham power plant for climbing the fence during an anti-nuke demonstration.
Record store Eddie hadn’t received a single inquiry in the “Ask Eddie” box for months. Everyone just read Rolling Stone as if there were nothing to learn about music beyond what magazine editors saw fit to present, as if published information could ever truly be free of advertiser influence. “It’s not that they don’t care about answers; they don’t even know how to ask questions anymore,” Eddie told me and Kate.
Even feminism had been stripped of its legitimacy and relegated to tasteless jokes about women picking up dinner date checks or carrying their own luggage or standing on buses while men sit. There’d been some collapse, some shattering of invisible walls, some backlash from liberalism, some conservative revival. And yet, no matter where you stood idealistically, your involvement couldn’t be willed away: everyone bore some responsibility. If Denny, Jack, Kate, Dan, and I represented one extreme, and Coco, L.B., Pip, and Nico represented the opposite, we were still relatives of the hour. Society had never felt more like a bizarre arrangement.
“Have you ever seen something normal magnified that ends up looking like tubes?” I asked.
“Yes,” Denny said right away. “Bark.”
“Once I saw something,” I said, “possibly bark. It was a gnarled mass of tunnels. Maybe there’s similar architecture to society, only more fragile, like a nest of twisted glass that gives us shape but that can shatter at any instant from the slightest stress.” Jack’s absence was conspicuous; I felt the trauma of not having him to complete me, to interpret for me. I added, “I imagine they look like glass canals.”
“Neat,” Denny said, encouragingly, obviously relieved that I was talking. “Like an ant colony, only positive space, not negative.”
Denny seemed to understand, so I continued. “It’s like, we work and work to construct these systems for the good—civil rights, the environment, mind expansion—then they all shatter, like fragile avenues, like they were too delicate to sustain weight. Maybe there’s a limit to human tolerance for idealism.”
“It’s true. For a while we were doing well,” Denny said. “But no change is ever secure so long as someone else has the incentive to blow it off. Look at reconstruction in the South. You get the tragedy of the Civil War, the beauty of the Gettysburg Address, the death of Lincoln, and racists still figure out how to segregate the South—through legislation!” Denny adjusted his chair. “Then again, difference is essential to freedom. And to adaptation. No one wants a fascist state.”
“Maybe everything that gets built has to fall apart,” I said.
“Maybe. The process shakes us from complacency, and inspires us to build new avenues. In fact, it might not even be mechanically possible to have acts of liberalism without conservatism, or heroism without cowardice, or revolution without tyranny—”
“Or love without loss,” I said, and I don’t know, with Denny there, I just started to cry.
He reached to hold me. “Don’t worry, honey. He’ll be back.”
——
“Eveline is going to NYU,” my mother was telling Coco’s parents, “to study art history.”
I stood a little behind them. Coco was there too, with shiny coral lips and newly frosted hair, sipping cola from a clear plastic glass.
My father looked confused. He turned to Powell. “What happened to art?”
Powell just shrugged. “Or photography?”
I did not wish my parents any harm; however, I didn’t know why I should have wished them well either, beyond the obvious fact that they were nice people. I didn’t even think I had anything good to inherit. The dictionary says a parent is any animal, organism, or plant in relation to its offspring, and so of course, in that explicit regard, I was their child. Yet they’d set my soul adrift, tending to themselves with the urgency due me, believing me capable because they needed me to be capable, never guessing that their faith in my strength would not make it fact, or that I might grow dangerously weary of sufficiency. Maman had seen through my mask of adequacy. She’d loved without hope for profit the girl she’d found, but Maman was dead. Rourke had not insisted upon my competence either. He had not even seemed to notice it. There was something else in me he wanted, something small and discrete—the frailty in me, and my frailty adored him.
My father tugged his jacket cuffs. His hands were beautifully proportioned. My hands were the same, and it depressed me somewhat to be faced with my DNA like that. Maybe everything was hopelessly predetermined, them to me, me to the next.
“Thanks for coming,” I said to the four of them, and they said that I was very welcome.
Sometimes a day is a symbolic day, and you behave symbolically. Sometimes you search inside for a feeling, and, finding none, you remember that no feeling is frequently the most possible feeling.
At Spring Close House for graduation lunch, it was me; Mom; Dad; Marilyn; Powell; Kate and her brother, Laurent, and sister-in-law, Simone, with their baby, Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude was cute except for the way his head came together at the temples like he’d been plucked out with cob tongs. Laurent also had a head shaped that way, sort of like a guitar. Looking out the window, I felt mostly lonely. It was the kind of loneliness that cannot see past itself, a skulking suspicion that the world was not mine to inherit. I listened as they spoke, laughed when they laughed, raised my glass as such moments presented themselves, all the while marking time. I was sorry for the way everyone imagined my life to be my own, for the way they really did seem to like me, asking did my fish still have bones, and how pretty I looked. I wished I could give something back. But yet, I knew that all that they wanted from me was all that they needed from me, and that is a treacherous path to consent to travel, in the sense of suppressing things sought for the self. That is to say, you being solely what others want you to be.
After appetizers, Dad neatened the table, scraping crumbs with the flat of a knife, and Jean-Claude gnawed his mother’s necklace. When the strand snapped, everyone dove and hunted on their knees for scattered pearls, which was a strange and spirited sort of family happening.
Marilyn brushed her skirt and sat again. “When do you leave for Montreal?”
Laurent deposited a handful of beads into the ashtray. “In an hour or two. We’re hoping the baby will sleep before we stop for dinner.”
“Have you finished packing, Catherine?” Simone asked.
Kate shrugged. “Except for what I’ll pick up in August.”
“And what about you, Powell,” Marilyn asked. “Your next job’s in South America?”
“Brazil,” he said, putting his arm around my mother. “I actually leave this evening.”
My lips paused over the rim of my drinking glass, which smelled the dusty way water smells if you stop to let it. A smell like a long thin tedium, listless like an elderly neighbor’s kitchen with cracked linoleum and spilled prescriptions and overpainted cabinets that do not sufficiently shut. Like the knowledge of passing things.
“What was that man saying to you?” my mother whispered audibly to my father when he returned from paying the check.
“Which man was that?” Dad wanted to know.
“The tall one with the fish tie.”
“Fish tie,” he pondered, looking around. “I think I would have remembered a fish tie.”
Back at home, Kate flitted in loose circles, gathering up the last of her things. I sat on a wicker hamper stuffed with all her fabric scraps and sewing notions and waited while she zipped and tied the last of her luggage. Beneath me the basket bent and squeaked with that slightly bending wicker sound. I wondered how Kate would do. I wondered whether a femininity so refined is not ominously reliant upon the beneficence of circumstance. I guessed she would do fine. Lots of women are out there, doing fine.
“Isn’t this pretty?” she said of her dress. “It’s chambray.”
When she finished packing, we took Mom’s car for a drive down Three Mile Harbor Road to the bay. Darts of sun pierced the trees, breaking up the retiring darkness with pools of apricot. We listened to “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” by The Beatles, hitting rewind on the tape deck whenever it ended. First I did it once, then twice, then she did it. And when she did it, it was different. It was like pouring bronze over a bird’s nest, casting the moment in metal. There was this understanding that of all the songs we’d heard together, that one would be the last. The beach was empty, despite the early June heat. She parked near the fishing station, by the channel, where the strip of sand was curved and rocky.
“Careful,” she said to me. “There’s a broken bottle.”
We lay on the stony sand and watched the boats return to harbor. The water was twinkling and distinguished. In the theater you can make water by waving bolts of silk from one end of the stage to the other, and sometimes real water looks that way.
Kate began to cry; I thought about the song. But instead she said, “I keep thinking about Harrison.” Her tears congealed in her eyes like pudding. I was thinking what a simple creature she was—we were. Maybe I would take her hand and lay it on my neck, make her say his name again, have her feel my throat convulse. Feel the acid echo, the disease in me.
“Here,” I said, stretching my shirt to wipe her eyes. Above us the birds soared triumphantly, arcing, diving, chasing each last swoop.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “for ruining our last afternoon.”
I rested my head on her middle. Her babies would come from there. How sad, not to know them. “Don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry.”
Sara asked if I was okay. She was driving. I said I was fine. If I said it uncertainly, it was because the armrest was pressing into my spine. I was facing her, not the street—I could not bear to face the street. The street was like a plank shooting off into nothing. There’s this cartoon where the main character drops black vinyl circles onto the ground behind him for his pursuer to fall into. It’s a scary concept—circles being holes, and strange to explain, but in fact that was exactly how I was doing.
“I’m sorry I missed Kate,” she said. “Was it hard to say goodbye?”
“Not really. The baby was crying.”
There were no more places to park by Alicia’s, so we drove to Apaquogue Road and walked back. The Ross house was shaped like a sideways barn, only it was a mansion. On the right was a screened terrace room, and on the left was the driveway, which, like the walkway, was lined with paper bags filled with sand and burning candles.
“Look at this tree,” I said, pointing up as we passed it. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Is it a maple?”
“No,” I said, “it’s a copper beech.”
Though we could see that guests were gathered on the lawn behind the house, we went through the main entrance. The porch was gracious and white with pink geraniums. Sara put her pocketbook in the front hall closet, and she handed a graduation gift for Alicia to a uniformed woman. I offered a bunch of wildflowers I’d picked from the garden near the barn.
The woman said, “Sí, sí, gracias.”
“Gracias, Consuela,” Sara said, introducing me in Spanish.
Consuela replied in English, “Yes, hello. Yes, hello. Yes, this way.”
We were escorted through an impeccable hallway and down two stone steps into a living room with an ivory carpet and furniture that was snowy and low as if it had settled in a frost. Wooden stairs without risers went up to our right, and, on the far wall, single-pane glass doors faced the eastern end of a crowded brick terrace. Consuela led us through the formal dining room, which was attached to an enormous kitchen by a skylighted butler’s pantry. Here, the doors to the patio were open: a reggae band was playing on the other side. Consuela set my flowers on the kitchen table and looked for a vase. She made a fuss over how beautiful they were, but I couldn’t help feeling the gift was not right, that it was primitive, and me too, that I was also primitive.
Her eyes twinkled at me; I remember that, her eyes twinkling.
Sara and I made our way out, pausing for hellos and introductions. People we knew from school were in ties and skirts and freshly ironed clothes. Past the terrace, there was an open lawn that was decorated with giant paper ball lanterns suspended from bamboo poles, and in the center of the expanse was a fountain, with a bronze sculpture of a cube standing on one corner, and a stone bench wrapping around. A pool the gray-blue color of goslings sat alongside a gardener’s cottage and connected garage that ran perpendicular to the main house. The structure was at least three times the size of my mother’s house.
“Do you mind if I go out to see the sculpture?” I asked Sara.
“Not at all,” she said. “I’ll find Alicia and let her know we’re here.”
I took a seat on the concrete ring of the fountain. I raised my head and breathed deeply, giving in to the celestial gardens and lurking servers, the smells of grilled meat and freshly baked goods, the chinks of genuine glass. My back straightened; my head found center. Feeling heartened, feeling sure, feeling finally more than meek, I took my place in that robust utopia. I imitated the want of humility of my hosts, and in my mind I became a guest—someone special, chosen.
At the edge of the packed terrace I spotted Mark, Rourke’s friend from the Talkhouse. He was moving toward me as though swimming with necessity. The graphic reminder of Rourke filled me with a barbarian sort of hope.
He crossed the lawn, calling, “Eveline!” Then he gestured to himself, saying, Mark, as though I’d forgotten. He was actually very handsome. By the dark of the night we’d met, with Rourke there, I hadn’t noticed.
“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“This is my house,” he said, and he smiled. “Alicia’s my sister.”
I instantly recalled the day in art class last winter when Rourke came in to talk about the sets for the play. The way Alicia was laughing and touching his jacket. That’s how they knew each other—through Mark.
“Mind if I sit?” Mark asked. The fountain surged brightly as he came down next to me. “Alicia and Sara told me you haven’t been going out. I was worried you might not make it.”
I looked at the house. It was strange that my name had been mentioned there. Was it in the hallway or on the stairs or in the butler’s pantry? I considered asking. I had the feeling I could ask him anything.
“Is it true that you haven’t left your room?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “My mother’s room.”
“Oh, your mother’s room,” he repeated with a nod.
And then Mark began to speak; he spoke for a long time. He’d attended UCLA, then he’d gone to Harvard for his MBA. Crew was his sport. He’d biked across Nova Scotia and golfed in Scotland. He’d been hired by a Wall Street firm named Drexel Burnham to work on mergers and acquisitions, something about asset valuation, vertical integration, four in the morning, activity in Japan. He would be moving into his own apartment on West Sixtieth Street, twenty-five stories up, with a terrace overlooking the river.
“The trick to marinating bluefish,” he said, “is milk. It kills the fishy flavor.”
The tone of his voice was artificial and intensely sure, pungent and dry as the inside of flowers. It was as if he spoke without allowing his vocal cords to vibrate excessively. The sound was controlled and hypnotic, and I felt subdued by it. I felt a faraway feeling, a night and a dead feeling. Through the sliverish gap formed by our bodies, I trailed the crystal swirl of water. When I looked up, Mark was staring. I perceived the ignition of his desire. I wasn’t sure what to do about that. Probably it was too late to do anything. My own desire for Rourke, for all things indirectly related to him, including Mark, surely only made matters worse.
“If you need a shot of culture this summer, come visit me,” he proposed as the sun began to set, its phosphorescence slinking unevenly off, like the thin straps of a dress from a woman’s shoulders. “We’ll hit the Met. Get lunch. Have you ever been to the Stanhope?”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t have to. I had the feeling he preferred my indifference. I was not offended. He was cunning and agreeable and so obviously without ethics that he aroused me—perversely.
“So, Kate leaves today. Alicia told me.”
“She left already.”
“Canada. Is that right?”
“Yes, her brother lives there.”
“And in September, she’s going to McGill.”
I nodded once. “McGill.”
“Montreal is beautiful. You’d love it there,” he stated with certainty—already certain that I’d never been, certain as well of the things I’d love. “The old city is an island in the St. Lawrence named after Mount Royal, the mountain at its center. The French say, ‘Mont Ray-al.’ In America, we say ‘Mon-tree-all,’ which, of course, is misleading. We’ll have to visit her sometime.”
Sara stepped off the patio, moving toward us. Mark stood to greet her. Their voices coupled warmly, turning festive, buoyant, ruffling like emancipated doves. It was clear that they’d known each other for a while. Mark relieved Sara of glasses and napkins, and he extracted a plate from the crook of her forearm. I wondered why they were not in love when they were so beautiful together, when the world they inhabited was legitimate with manageable particulars, when their mindfulness seemed to extend no further than the moment they occupied. They would have had a normal love, a confiding union felt to the core, not the desperation I’d known with Rourke, the panic I felt when he was gone. Mark spoke amiably, though the pressure from his mind to mine was serious and unceasing. His was an exceptional power—he was blessed, he had no doubt. I wondered how he had gotten Sara to get me to come to the party. She seemed like the type who would be immune to influence.
They were talking about collections. Sara kept keys.
“Nonsense,” Mark teased. “Keys. I keep cars.”
“Oh, well, cars,” she said and shrugged. “Naturally.”
Mark turned to me. “And you, Eveline?”
I had none that I could recall except the rock portrait collection, which technically Denny had started, so it probably didn’t count. I was not interested in keys, though I agreed that they were collectible, with the way they clink and cleverly hang.
“What do you think about cars?” Mark asked.
“I don’t know much about cars.”
Sara laughed at Mark, “Ha!”
“Not so fast,” Mark said. “She hasn’t seen it yet.”
“It is nice,” Sara conceded. “Actually, Evie, you might like it.”
“It’s so nice, the previous owner didn’t want to sell it,” Mark said. “He finally gave in to persuasion.” Persuasion is the type of word only certain people can use. I’d never persuaded anyone of anything. Mark took my hand and drew me to my feet. “Let’s see what you think.”
As we descended the mild grade to the gardener’s cottage, he said, “This is my place. And this,” he announced as we made the turn onto an opened garage door, framed on both sides by a fan of wild roses, “is my new car.”
We faced off with a gorgeous gunmetal-gray Porsche with an elliptical body. I touched it, bending prudently, as if to pet a sleeping animal, my fingers skimming the semi-scripted chrome lettering that flickered and repeated in the light.
“1967,” he said, leading me deeper into the impeccable garage, popping the door handle, taking me by the elbow, helping me sit. My legs drew up involuntarily, and when he shut the door, it made a solid seal like the lid of a coffin. The leather interior was supple and medicinal, the color of coffee ice cream. The glove box was at my knees. I was thinking, Once it held gloves.
Mark joined me, bringing himself behind the wheel. Though it felt wrong to be with him, I did not feel responsible for my loneliness or for his desire to violate it. People had been speaking to me for weeks, and yet only Mark had gotten through. I waited for him to refer to Rourke; it was exactly the right time to refer to Rourke. If he didn’t, it was clear that he had a plan.
“So,” he said, “NYU. We will both be in New York.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling something sinking. “It’s strange.”
He started the engine. “Not strange, Eveline. Fate.”
The rest until the end was fast. Frequently there is more time to think than there are things to think about, and you sit around contemplating the most trifling details. Other times it feels you live your life in a minute. Not in the sense of things racing past, though there is that, but of things spilling out in an undulating twist, simultaneous and unoriented, flat and circular, present and future, like a M?bius strip. Because although I was surprised to see Rourke, I’d also been expecting to see him. And though I knew not to trust Mark, I’d been unable to break away.
The Porsche coasted past Georgica Beach, but then Mark hit the brakes and popped the car into reverse. We swung into the parking lot. Many cars were there, including Rob’s and Rourke’s. As we pulled past the GTO, I saw the ghost of my name still etched on the little window in back. Eveline. From the night at the Talkhouse.
Let’s go back, I said. I thought I said.
Mark killed the engine anyway, and we coasted like an arrowhead into the heart of the lot.
Three figures appeared at the crest of sand—a guy in a Red Hook Fire Department T-shirt and two girls in sundresses. Mark pulled the emergency brake and hopped out. He kissed the girls and shook hands enthusiastically with the man, both of them pumping until their palms swung down. Something was coming up from the direction of the water, from behind the girls. I saw Mark’s face stiffen.
Through the planes of twilight came Rourke, a silhouette ascending the slope of sand from the west. He passed Mark and the others, moving silently and directly to the car, which was not even as tall as his waist. He stopped at my door, staring down.
I heard Mark say, Eveline. This is Lorraine, and this is Anna, and this is Anna’s husband, Joey, Joey Cirillo—Rob’s brother. Mark pointed loosely from me to Rourke, from Rourke to me, and with an uncharacteristic trace of sarcasm or maybe pity, he said, And of course, you two know each other.
Rourke continued to look at me. If I had not been sickeningly aware of my compromise, I would have found proof of it in his eyes. His left hand entered the pocket of his Levi’s and his white dress shirt hung like paper from his shoulders. The wind blew back his hair and his body blocked the sky—no, skies. The one over him and me, and the other one.
What brings you all out here? Mark asked.
Harrison dragged us, Joey said. We had lunch in Montauk and a day at the beach. The girls did a little shopping in East Hampton. We just passed your house—looks like you’re having a party.
For my sister, Mark said. She graduated today. Why don’t you come by?
How about it, girls, you up for it?
Heads! A voice. Rob’s. A football appeared from the direction of the water, boring cylindrically up to us. Rourke reached above my head to catch it. I could feel the breeze made by his arm.
Watch yourself, there, Mark said to Rob.
Well, well. Look at the new toy, Rob said. And the car’s nice too.
Everyone laughed and Rob clapped once for the ball. Rourke threw it back. I observed his arm—the lengthening, the retracting, the feverish white of his shirt against his dark skin.
Let’s go girls, Rob said, let’s go. Harrison. C’mon.
See you in a few, Joey said.
Mark said, See you in five.
Rob turned back and snapped, Harrison. Now.
Rourke jerked imperceptibly, then he moved, saying Later. I did not know to whom, maybe to me, probably to me.
Probably all three cars arrived at the same time. Probably when Mark and I went through the crowd down the driveway to the garage, Rob and Rourke went to park on the street. I was thinking about where to find him. Inside, I thought. I’d begun to shiver.
Mark automatically led me to the screened porch on the side of the house. The roof was low and flat like a tarp, and through the walls the night moved like gentle water. People were lounging on rattan sofas, and there was music. He chose the porch because he knew I wouldn’t go to where I could not easily be found. I began to perceive the scope of his project—it involved not simply a win, but an eventual, strategic win. It was as if he was helping me with Rourke, feeding an addiction, making me dependent on him.
Alicia knelt at my chair. Is she okay?
She’s cold. I was driving with the top down. Very foolish of me.
Is that true, Evie? Alicia asked, glaring at him. Are you just cold?
My eyes found Mark’s. Yes, I said, it’s true.
She said, Mark, I could kill you.
Kill me, please, Alicia dear, he said playfully, smiling. Then slower, to me alone. Not smiling, mouthing the words again. Kill me. And then, aloud again, I’ll get some cognac.
Honestly Evie, he drove us crazy for weeks to get you here, then he gives you pneumonia. Alicia gave me her sweater, pulling it off, one side, the other. There was an extra hole in her left ear, and in it a diamond that flared in the light, like a miniature exploding thing.
Sara came in from outside. Why don’t I just take you home, she offered.
Let’s try the cognac first, Mark suggested and Sara retired to the window to check on the status of the night, her gauzy slacks undulating. I’ll be right back, he promised me, and as soon as he left the room, I wanted him to come back.
Within moments, Rourke filled the doorway between the porch and the living room. A luminous band etched the perimeter of his body, giving him the aspect of hanging forward. There was a precision about him. I didn’t need to guess his purpose. I felt surrounded; I felt myself at his center.
Sara said hello to him, and they spoke briefly. I wondered what she felt. Did she feel what I felt? Did she feel an anthem in her heart? Did she see the lines of his face and think they were beautiful? Did she think if she could not hold him, she would die? Was she sorry for everything she’d ever done?
Mark returned, passing through, saying hi to Rourke, and excuse me, then coming to me, blocking my view of Rourke, giving me a glass. This is for you. Mark’s voice originated from elsewhere; it was detached from his body. Exactly as he handed me the tumbler, I stretched to see Rourke, but he was gone. The glass slipped through my hand, smacked the tabletop and broke. There was a fanning slosh of liquid.
Sara pulled back the throw rug. Someone crammed a newspaper against the side of the table to catch the widening stream. I slapped my hand down to catch the pieces of glass.
Mark shouted, Evie, no! Consuela!
It was too late. A fragment cut into my palm. Blood mixed with the liquor along the slice and it stung. Sara took me through the crowd to the bathroom, and she left me.
The door clicked shut; the dim tiled room; in the mirror, my face, so pale. And Rourke. His likeness behind my own, swelling like smoke to encircle me. I did not wonder where he’d come from, nor did I think as he lifted me onto the counter and attended to my wound. When it was clean, he pressed his lips to my hand, then to my mouth. The kiss, the first, penetrating and inquisitive, with each of us trying to capture all that had become active, the mysterious traits of a mysterious desire, now miraculously, and perhaps just tentatively, in hand.
I need to get out of here for a couple days, he said. I thought I could leave you. I can’t. With my mouth I could feel him speak. His voice was like underwater vibrations, like the inky scuffs and thuds you hear in a submarine. He held my chin. Understand?
Yes, I said, nodding.
All right, he said, let’s go.
There was a place near a pond where the trees divided to accommodate the belly of the night. It was there that we stopped. The moonlight was like a body dropped to earth, a luminous stellar wreck. Rourke eased the car forward to where the issue from the moon was widest, and he jerked the brake to park. Beyond the windshield, day was making minor gains on the night, coming and retreating in whispers like the pull and the push of his breath. By his hands, I was carefully considered, as if it were not me he wanted but something I possessed. I could feel the burden of his eyes upon me, a hunter’s eyes, keen and suspicious, as if I were the keeper of some conclusion that he had intuited but of which he had no evidence.
Say it, he said, the words caught at the base of his throat. No one.
No one, I said, I swore, but you.
I said it because it was true. There was no one but him, and there never would be. I loved him with pain and with something greater than pain, with a barren ache that pealed not in the heart but in the desert dry alongside it. I knew it was so even then: if in his arms I was a woman, beyond them I was nothing.