Part 3 - Montauk
Summer 1980
At first, one is struck by his peculiarity—those eyes, those lips, those cheekbones … that face reveals … what any face should reveal to a careful glance: the nonexistence of banality in human beings.
—JULIA KRISTEVA
28
Rourke drove through the last remaining darkness. The preliminary azure cool of morning was coming up full around us, clear as the whistles birds make. The ground ascended like a platform into day, and across it we shot, passing from one highway to the next—rolling west, rolling south, with the sun rising and the ellipse of the planet beneath. I felt defiant and alive, like a criminal in the midst of a crime—visionary and dissolute and removed from the world about me. I felt I had entered the tempo of my era. When you study explorers such as Magellan or Cortés, you follow lines across oceans and continents. The miles and the perils, the forfeiture of lives and hearts, the years lost and monies disbursed, are all reduced to trails of dots and arrows. Rourke and I were that way—no more than the eye could see, paving paths through the universe, the look of us amounting to the entirety of our story.
He said to sleep if I wanted to; I didn’t want to.
At the end of an exit ramp, a Volkswagen Beetle waited to turn. The GTO cruised down and closed in on it. We turned as well, left then right, going up a hump into a gas station. Rourke’s wrist flipped, and the engine shut, and you could hear a ring through the silence.
“Better use the bathroom,” he said.
Our doors closed simultaneously, whump, whump. As Rourke reached for the pump, a graying man in a windbreaker approached from the garage office. Al was stitched on his jacket opposite the Texaco logo.
“Good morning, there,” Al said, setting his hand on the pump. “You’re out early.”
Rourke said something I couldn’t hear, and Al laughed, answering, “You bet.”
My head was hanging as I stepped over oil stains and embedded chips of glass in the asphalt. There were patterns, and in the patterns, gleaming variations—tiger likenesses and fighter pilots. If you looked, you could find them. Also I saw my legs, my knees and calves, and beneath them the carob dirt unpacking, smoking up as I walked, adhering in a film to my bare feet and ankles. In my hand were my shoes from the graduation party the night before. I put them on before going into the bathroom.
The dented steel door creaked mightily. I rinsed my hands and face with cold water and combed down my hair with my fingers. I wondered what Rourke felt like to wait for me. He’d never been mindful of my needs before. I hoped he wouldn’t think less of me for them. Being in love is like leaning on a broken reed. It is to be precariously balanced, to teeter between the vertical and the horizontal. It’s like war: it’s to demand of one’s sensibilities the impossible—to expect paranoia to coexist with faith, chance with design, to enlist suspicion insensibly in certain regards and suppress it blindly in others.
He was inclined against the hood on the driver’s side. His arms were folded, and his legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankle. His feet were on the oval island that housed the pumps. My stomach felt weak to see him again, the fullness of his shoulders, the gesture of his body. When I neared, he looked over, turning because he knew to turn, because of messages sent between the sex of us. Al spoke, and Rourke answered, not taking his eyes off me. I knew what he experienced when he watched me walk, because I felt my body’s response. I felt myself become at once everything I was originally and everything he had taken and touched. I felt my skin assume the burden of the sunrise. I felt the luxury of flesh beneath my dress. My lips were chapped and my hair damp and unbrushed, and when I stepped, my foot touched down with the beneficence of angels. In my heart dwelt a primitive kindness. Mostly what I felt was relieved to live for his regard.
“I don’t know which is prettier, young lady,” Al said, “daybreak, or you.”
Rourke stretched back across the hood to hand me a Coke. He must have gotten it from the soda machine while I was in the bathroom. I cracked open the can and drank. The sugar was shocking.
“That’s no breakfast,” Al chided as we climbed into the car. He rested one arm on Rourke’s open window. The other waved in some unseen direction over the roof. “Try Adrienne’s—it’s a truck stop up the road.” The hand on the window was mottled and chapped, with the thumb splaying stiffly. I found myself hoping that Al had been in love once, that when he was in his prime, he fulfilled it.
Rourke thanked him, and as we turned onto the service road, he asked if I was hungry.
I told him no, not really.
No one had been awake when we’d stopped at my mother’s house after Alicia’s party. Rourke parked at the head of the driveway, and our feet made even sounds on the gravel as we walked, though his sounds were heavier than mine. I hadn’t asked him to accompany me, and he hadn’t offered. It was just that when I got out of the car, he got out also, and when we met at the hood, he took my hand. Of course we would not encounter resistance on the inside. In my mind it was not a possibility or even a consideration. My entire life had led to that moment of autonomy, and I was grateful for the authority I’d been given over myself.
Rourke opened the back door to my bedroom for me, propping it with his arm and drawing me through. He looked around sweepingly, assessing everything. As the things he viewed came to life, these things as I had known them turned dead. I knew without question that I would never again live at home. If I was mistaken, if, in fact, I would be driven back, it would be because I had failed or because I had brought failure upon myself. I would not fail. He stood with me by my dresser, him leaning on the wall and me opening drawers. I emptied out the art supplies from a small canvas tool bag, and in it I packed two T-shirts, a pair of jeans, a pair of shorts and a dress, my favorite sweater, one pair of shoes, a bathing suit.
“Anything else you need,” he said, “we’ll pick it up.”
Highways narrowed as we shot down the New Jersey coast, taking the Garden State past Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Sea Girt, and then numbered routes that turned to single-lane stretches flanked by hilly embankments with painted houses. At the shore we trailed the flight of the boardwalk, and a hot wind caressed my face. I wondered if I climbed through the window, would I float. It seemed like the air out there formed a belt of heat and salt, a parallel place to crawl upon.
“This one’s for Leeanne out in Mountainside,” the deejay said. Then came “Bennie and the Jets.”
She’s got electric boots, a mohair suit,
You know I read it in a magazine.
I was changing my clothes. He was driving, and he’d told me to.
I reached through my bag for my bathing suit, and when I found it, I put it on, sliding my dress above my hips and pulling up the bottoms, and slipping the shoulder straps off my shoulders and tying the top piece around my chest. In the side-view mirror I could see the elongated hollow at the base of my neck, the downward pools of my collarbone, the rules of my chest, and above that ladder, my face. New lines marked the skin beneath my eyes, preclusive new lines. I pushed back my hair. Somewhere were my barrettes, in the seat or on the floor.
We pulled into a parking lot at Point Pleasant and stepped out onto the already steaming tar. I could smell the unctuous glue of it. We walked up the ramp, and at the top I shaded my eyes from the glare. The boardwalk spilled out in either direction like a carpet, like a platform that made you spectator to the sea. It seemed to extend along the entire coast. I imagined it dipping intermittently—tucking underground, coming back up, like sewing stitches. It was awful, yet somehow democratic, with all the people there talking and reading, walking and running. There were old people strolling with cups of coffee. You hardly ever saw old people at the beach in East Hampton.
Near the water he dropped the towels he’d carried from the car. The sand was not like the sand at home; it was flatter and darker. I pulled off my dress and waded into the ocean, going until my feet didn’t touch. Rourke was sitting contemplatively in the morning light; the ice-blue dress shirt he’d worn since the party was half-open and wrinkled. Behind him the arcades and game galleries were creaking uniformly to life, forming a low-rising headland of noise and neon, despite the early hour. The sky ride and the photo booth, the Ferris wheel and the merry-go-round, the batting cage, the signs for strollers and umbrellas for rent—the antediluvian relics all securely fastened, looking as though nothing short of a flood could remove them. He undressed and entered the water also, and soon his arms were around my waist. I wrapped myself around him. He carried me farther out, just the two of us, and water, water all around.
When I opened my eyes from sleep, I knew where I was but not how long it had been. It had gotten very hot. I could hear a common whirr, a public rustle. My head was heavy from the heat; I could hardly raise it. Through the glare I saw that hundreds of people had settled around us while we slept. I reached for Rourke, but he was gone; alongside me in the sand was the impression left by his body. He must have been waiting for me to wake up, because exactly when I wished for him to reappear, he did, coming from the direction of the water, blocking light and noise like a spread cape or carbon overlay. Moisture traveled from his skin, and cold.
He kissed me. I could taste salt from the sea. He said, “Let’s get out of here.”
I stood and went to the water to cool off. I was glad it was still June. In June, nothing bad happens; old songs sound new again and all of summer remains. Only hours had passed since we’d started, I reminded myself, and hours is not so far in. When I got back, he was in his jeans and shirt, and the towels were draped over his shoulder.
The way we walked was smooth, two of us moving as one. His arm cut across my back, high to low, and his fingers gripped the handle of my hip bone. I observed the things around me—the Mechanical Gypsy Fortune Teller, Jenkinson’s Aquarium, the Daytona Driving Game, and those stuffed cats you knock down with softballs—Three down wins choice. Dolls must be flat. There were the rides that once you died for—the Whip, the Ski Bob, the Swings. There were fat ladies in skirted bathing suits and peddlers hawking baby hats with names in Day-Glo toothpaste script, racks of flexible sunglasses, and raffles—Ten chances to win a red Corvette. And that game with the gun that shoots water into the clown’s mouth with the bell that screeches long and hard and forever-seeming. Through the waves of heat came the nauseating gum smell of honey-roasted peanuts and the greasy snap of sausage and the crack of frying zeppole. Children waving beehives of cotton candy and picking carameled apple from their teeth, going, “Let’s go to the bumpa cauz.”
At a storefront with the sign “Psychic Readings by Diana,” a girl in a tangerine miniskirt and a bikini top leaned in the arch of the curtained door and called to us. “Come, come.” Rourke ignored her, and I felt relieved, though I wasn’t sure what I was afraid she’d say.
It was a Sunday, so adults were everywhere—leather-skinned women squinched into belly shirts and stripped-down guys with chains and nesty chests and meandering scars. All of them occupying the top of the food chain, all of them immune, impermeable, oblivious—the cutting edge of evolution.
We slowed when we approached a low brick corner building with no marking other than faded red letters at the top that were modern and straight and missing in part. C-R-I-T-E-R——N. As we neared the entrance, we saw a couple of guys with gym bags go in. One stopped when he saw us, and he waited at the unmarked door. He was overbuilt so his head appeared smaller than it actually was, and his hands did too, perhaps because of the thickness of his wrists. His eyes were bloodshot. He had red hair and red freckles beneath random bruises, and his ears were knuckled up like knotty growths. His jaw was enormous on the left. It looked as though it had just been broken.
Rourke said, “Looking good, Tommy.”
Tommy ignored Rourke, confining his gaze to me. He checked me out like I was meat and he was shopping. I wasn’t afraid with Rourke there, but still, I didn’t like to think of those freckled hands.
Rourke pulled out an envelope and handed it to Tommy. “Give it to Jimmy.”
“Not goin’ in?” Tommy mumbled. It sounded like gargling.
“Not today,” Rourke said.
Tommy shook the envelope near one weird ear. “What is it,” he chuckled, “a Dear John?”
Rourke stepped forward twice, coming close to Tommy, dangerously close. He inspected Tommy’s jaw, first the good side, then the bad. Tommy stood frozen. He reminded me of a dog getting sniffed by another dog: it was in his best interest to be polite, but he might decide to bite anyway.
“Not a chance,” Rourke said, and he took my waist, pulling me away.
On the way back to the car, Rourke bought two ice-cream cones, and we sat in the shade of the carousel house to eat them. I wasn’t hungry, so I gave what I couldn’t finish to Rourke, and we watched the ride go round. Something about it made me sad—the riderless horses, the exhausted wheeze of the calliope, and the greasy flicker of the mirror pendants.
He pulled me close. There was a space between his arm and his chest that seemed to have been made just for me. It was warm and I could feel his heart beat. “What is it?” he wanted to know, his voice soft and unobstructed, free from the burden of other listeners.
“It was such a long time ago,” I said, “when I was little.”
We walked along the water’s edge the rest of the way, silently collecting pieces of beach glass that we found in the sand, jagged peppermint treasures. I gave them to him, and he put them into his shirt pocket, saving them for me, for later, which was nice. Nice to think there would be a later. Back at the car, he kissed me, and a breeze picked up out of nowhere. A wish, I thought, granted.
The house was the color of silver wheat. It was upright and immaculate, Victorian but modest. Some of the houses we’d passed really drew attention to themselves, but not this one. Its face was guarded by mammoth rhododendrons, with clusters of pink flowers set high and low, quivering like choirs of butterflies on the bendable ends of branches. I wondered about his parents, and as I did, Rourke became clearer to me: it obviously had taken special talent on their parts to manage something so wild.
The car idled at the front of the driveway while he emptied the mailbox. He walked back over, sifting through papers, extracting certain pieces and examining one envelope in particular before getting in, wedging the pile on the dashboard, and easing the car to a stop at the driveway’s end. He turned off the engine, and we sat. And it was nice, and it was strange, because though it was not home, it was as good as home, and in fact, it was better—it interested me more.
A brick walkway led from the car to the backyard, passing through a wooden gateway. On the other side was a garden in full bloom, enclosed on three sides by a high wall of yew. There were birds, their calls colliding, creating a miniature symphony of sound. Rourke reached into the iron frame of an outdoor light fixture and withdrew a key, then he unlocked the door to a ground-floor apartment.
I followed him into a sun-filled studio. The mottled plaster walls were off-white and bare, and the woodwork was charcoal-gray. It smelled like recent construction, as though it had just been renovated. To our left, two glass-paned doors opened onto a brick patio, and in the corner opposite the entry, there was a modest kitchen with new appliances.
He set my bag on top of a stack of packed cardboard boxes that lined the entry. I figured they were from when he moved out of his house in Montauk the previous month, though I supposed it was possible he had not unpacked because he was leaving again to go somewhere else. Rourke moved to the kitchen counter and rifled through the remainder of his letters, popping a few apart. The room was hot, so I stepped around the couch and unbolted the doors to the yard, splitting them for air.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, and he disappeared down the hall.
When he left, a certain heaviness in me was alleviated; I felt my consciousness seep back into my body. Sometimes you see people on television get awakened from hypnosis. There’s a dumb blink followed by an apish inner inquiry as to how long they’ve been witless and what degradations might have occurred. If it is a cartoon or a comic, there are stars about the eyes.
I just remained in place at the patio doors, waiting for him to return. Watching the day lower like the curtain on a play you wished would never end. I could hear the summertime nothingness, the haunting children’s voices, advancing, then waning. And yet, I did not slip beyond Rourke’s field of influence. It was as if we were sharing the same web or net: no matter what position he occupied, I would be moved.
His voice called my name; I met him in the corridor outside the bathroom. He was wet with a towel around his waist. On his hips and on his sides, the muscles were like cords and knots. There were drops remaining on his chest; I touched one, and the water parted. The shower was still running, so I passed Rourke, undressed, and stepped in. The heat of sunset warmed the bathroom window, and also the stall.
When I came out, he was there, dressed in jeans, holding a towel. He dried my neck and shoulders, then wrapped me up and drew me in, leaning his face on the top of my head, and I began to cry. When the tears came, we did not speak of them, either of us. Maybe it was the closeness of him, the excruciating nearness. Maybe as a vessel I was too delicate for a love so whole: it felt beyond my capacity to keep. Hanging limp over the doorknob was a dress that we’d bought on the way home from the beach—rayon red and moody, with a high waist and a halter top. He held it for me to step into. The zipper tugged at the curve of my back. In the mirror we were enigmatic, my eyes so tragic, my dress so low, and Rourke, a triumph of masculinity. He drew on a navy sweater with a short zipper at the neck, and he watched as I combed back my hair with my hands, put on lipstick, and fastened my shoes. I felt no shame before him. Shame was a luxury. We had no time for shame.
Everyone stopped and stared when we walked into Mineo’s. Waiters made way, flattening their chests and inclining their heads. Rourke escorted me through the cramped space, the broad heat of his palm making an impression on the small of my back. People were waving from a booth in the rear. They seemed to be expecting us. Rourke introduced me to a woman named Lee who was pretty like a doll, and her husband, Chris, who was twice her size and who had skin like polished metal. I’d never seen skin like that. Later Rourke told me it was that way from taking steroids. The other guy was Joey, Rob’s brother, whom I’d met the night before in East Hampton.
“At the beach,” Joey told Lee and Chris with a jerk of his head. It seemed as though they’d been talking about it. I wondered if they’d mentioned Mark. Joey kissed me, then told Rourke he was sorry his wife, Anna, couldn’t make it, but she had to stay home with the kids. “We tried to get a sitter but nothing doing on a Sunday. And my mother was at church all day, so she’s wiped out.”
“What are you talking about? How can anyone get ‘wiped out’ at church?” Chris snapped derisively. “She just has to sit there.”
“Who knows what she does. I think they got her cleaning. She comes home and naps.”
The three of them sat on one side of the booth, and I slid sideways across the bench opposite them with my back to the dining room, gripping the table to steady myself. I wasn’t very steady. I tried to copy the others; they seemed more or less sure of distances and weights. I left a place for Rourke but he just stayed standing at the end of the table.
“Where’s Rob?” he asked.
“Good question,” Chris said.
Everyone looked to Joey, who shrugged. “I’m not his keeper.”
Rourke scanned the restaurant, then excused himself. When he was gone, I felt self-conscious of my body in that dress—my breasts beneath the halter top and my thighs under the skirt, the bare way they were touching.
“So you’re an artist,” Lee said, leaning sweetly over. “I wanted to be an artist,” she confided. “But my parents didn’t think it was—not that there’s anything wrong with—actually, I mean, I think they were afraid I’d marry a—well, you know. It’s just—it takes confidence. You must be confident.” Lee’s eyes were millimeters too big for her head, and when she talked, she talked fast, captivating you with insecurities. She and Chris picked at the antipasto simultaneously; they had matching wedding bands. “Do you eat meat?” she asked. “I don’t. But there are these stuffed pork chops that everybody gets that look really good.”
When Rourke returned, he came up behind the waiter, who was reciting specials. As soon as the waiter realized everyone was looking behind him, rather than at him, he turned and said, “Oh, sorry, Harrison.”
Rourke slid in next to me, and our two bodies notched together like pieces of a puzzle. He seemed better, lighter: I figured he’d found Rob. As soon as the waiter started talking again, Rourke cut him off, saying, “We’ll take two swordfish.”
Chris collected his menu and Lee’s menu and tapped them on the tabletop before handing them over to the waiter. “Make that four.”
And Joey said, “Five.”
“So, what happened?” Chris asked Rourke. “You find him?”
Rourke said, “I just saw his car in the lot. He’s parking.”
I pressed lightly into him, and beneath the table, he touched the top of my thigh. My hand drifted shyly into the complicated space between his legs.
“So you went to the Jersey beach today,” Lee said. “It’s different from East Hampton, right?”
“Very different,” I said, and nodded.
“Hey, Evie,” Chris said, “did Harrison tell you he used to run Skee-Ball at Coin Castle?”
I looked at Rourke. “No, he didn’t.”
Rourke smiled. “Must have slipped my mind.”
“That’s where he met Rob,” Lee said. “How old were you guys, thirteen?”
“Thirteen,” Rourke said. “That’s right.”
“And it was love at first sight,” Chris joked.
“Not quite,” Joey said. “Rob always tried to hustle him.”
Rourke said, “Tried to is right.”
Rob stood at the head of the table and hunted through his pockets for something, withdrawing nothing. He’d come with Lorraine, the redhead from the day before. She said hello and distributed kisses, but Rob said nothing, not to me or anyone, though his eyes frequently darted to Rourke’s. Though he was in a bad mood, I felt better with him there. Everyone did. You could tell by the way they shifted in their seats, coming up higher and adjusting the bands of their watches. Rob gave you the feeling that everything was going to be okay, that there was nothing going on in the world that he did not already know about and have an opinion on.
Rob pulled a chair to the head of the table, and bumped up next to Lorraine. I figured she was his girl. She acted bored like she was. “I had rust comin’ out of my pipes all day,” he reported with miserable enthusiasm. “It was like clay.”
“You gotta call,” Chris said.
“I did call,” Rob said, leaning back in his chair. “I go, ‘I’m supposed to shower in this shit?’” His left shoulder wrenched up. “I go, ‘What, am I supposed to make coffee outta this crap?’”
As the waiter delivered two pitchers of wine and checked on Rob’s and Lorraine’s orders, I wondered who in Jersey took such calls.
Rob scanned the table and said, “What did you guys get, the swordfish?”
Everybody said yeah, yeah, swordfish, yeah.
Rob flipped his hand. “G’head, Ronnie, make it two more.”
“They must’ve been working on a main line,” Joey speculated about the water pipes. “They probably stirred up sediment. Give it a day.”
Lorraine rearranged her bag and laid a pack of Larks near her plate. She looked like the kind of girl with brothers, the kind with a knowledge of pistons, lures, and end zones. The frayed tips of her ginger hair reached in a fan of kinky curls as if to capture creatures. It was like underwater hair. “I keep telling him—use bottled.”
Rob clicked his tongue. “It’s the pipes, Lorraine, not the water.”
“Lemme tell you something,” Chris informed all of us, “that bottled water thing is bull. New York State tap is best. Studies show.”
“Lot of good that does us here in Jersey,” Rob said.
Chris said, “Yeah, well. I’m just saying.”
Lee cut in, leaning toward Lorraine and asking how was Mark Ross’s house in the Hamptons.
Lorraine swiped her hands through the air and said, “Unbelievable. Gorgeous.” Gaw-jus.
Rob shook his head with disgust and shot back the first of several glasses of wine, going, “F*ckin’ guy.”
After dinner Lee and Lorraine went home. Lorraine didn’t feel well. At least, that’s what she said, though it was obvious she and Rob were fighting, probably about his drinking too much because she took the car.
“Leave me stranded,” Rob called after the taillights. “G’head. I don’t give a shit. I’ll make new friends.”
Lee said she had to work in the morning. She was a market analyst for Lehman Brothers on Wall Street. It sounded like a big job, in terms of responsibility, somewhat like being a surgeon or a bus driver. I wondered how somebody so little gets a job so big, and what she’d been doing out with us, drinking pitchers of sangria. She slid behind the wheel of their new white Cherokee, her head rising inches above its northern arc. “It is Sunday, isn’t it?” she checked with Chris. “I have work tomorrow, right?”
Chris kissed her through the open driver’s window. “Yes, babe. It’s Sunday. Go home.”
“Keep an eye on him,” she requested of me with a wink.
“Okay,” I said, though it seemed like a major obligation. I watched her pull out and wondered at her husband’s iron constitution. I would not have been able to let my wife go like that, into the night like a lame firefly, buzzing off sideways into an immeasurable wood.
“Let’s get outta here,” he said, climbing into Rourke’s car. “Let’s head over to Vinny’s.”
Vinny-O’s was the kind of place my dad would have called a beer garden. It was booze-logged and corrosive and lit primarily by backward neon. How we ended up there I wasn’t sure, except to say that Rob had to meet somebody, and nobody was very happy about it. I didn’t ask about the names of the establishments—Mineo’s and Vinny-O’s. I got the feeling it was a Jersey thing.
We walked into the clatter of pinball and the ching of the bowling game and “Two Tickets to Paradise” by Eddie Money. I went straight to the bathroom, which was filthy and poorly rigged. There were convoluted instructions on how to flush posted over the toilet, and they were yellowed, not necessarily from age.
LIFT TANK TOP [CROSSED OUT] TOP OF TANK TO SINK. PULL STRING, HOLD OR TIE TO HOOK BY LITE AND REPLACE TOP. TAKE OUT STRING TO EXIT.
I looked, but there was no sink and no hook. There was a string—but it was wet. Needless to say, the toilet had not been flushed for some time. Voices came through the wall from the men’s room, low and intermittent. When I came out, Rourke was near the front door, deep in conversation with Joey, so I went to the bar and bought myself a beer.
“Bottle or tap?” the bartender asked.
“Tap,” I said. It seemed like the thing to say.
The louvers to the bathroom corridor flagged again on their spent hinges; I turned to see Rob and Chris coming out with a third guy, who cut through the front and disappeared. Theirs had been the voices I’d heard. At first I suspected they’d been buying coke, though they didn’t look high. Maybe it had to do with gambling. Chris breezed past to join Joey and Rourke by the window, but Rob came to me, tossing his arms slightly out, grinning as though he hadn’t seen me for so long.
“Holdin’ up the bar, gorgeous?” He landed at my side and shifted in half circles, like a cat getting ready to lie down. Eventually he settled, lit a cigarette, and examined me. Each of his features looked as if it had been broken twice, yet there was something irresistible about the urgent way they all pieced together, like a skyline. He took a sip of my beer and grimaced. “What the f*ck is that?”
I thought it might be Schlitz.
“Schlitz?” He looked over his shoulder to the bartender. “Hey, Marty.” Marty didn’t move. His arms were folded across his chest, his eyes fluttered back. “Jesus,” Rob mumbled to me, then he shouted, “Marty! You alive?”
Marty roused himself and hitched lamely over. “Sure, Robbie. I’m alive. Unless you happen to be a bill collector.”
“You’re startin’ to worry me over there,” Rob said. “I seen more blood run through a goalpost.” He lifted my glass and gestured with it, saying, “Gimme something to rinse the taste of this outta my mouth.”
“How about a shot of Red?”
Rob pulled a wad of bills from his pocket. “Nah, I’ll take a screwdriver.” Sh-crew-driva. “Want something else?” he asked me. “A little brake fluid, maybe? Some rubbing alcohol?”
I told Marty I’d take Courvoisier if he had it.
“That’s a giant leap,” Rob said, “from Schlitz on tap.”
“That’s because you’re paying,” I told him.
We got the drinks and toasted. “So, whaddaya think of Jersey?”
“It’s all right,” I said. The cognac burned my throat.
He said, “First time?”
Actually I’d been a few times. My dad and Marilyn had taken me on vacations to visit things such as underground railroad sites and revolutionary war battlefields. I said, “Not technically.”
“Not technically,” Rob repeated with a smile, and he signaled for another drink. He looked off, as if distracted by something, maybe just something in his head. He bit the inside of his cheek and jiggled the leftover ice in his glass, making a sound like a beaded instrument. I waited and watched, because that’s the thing to do with someone who is complicated and drinking heavily. I’d had lots of practice with Jack. Frequently, people try to act screwed up, but Jack really was. Sometimes you hear, He was as strong as ten men! Jack was not strong that way; he was screwed-up that way.
“So, you made it through,” Rob said. “You and Harrison. I’m surprised.” He took a drink, and his eyes skimmed the ceiling, lingering before returning to me. “So now what?” he asked.
I hadn’t thought about it; I hadn’t thought about much of anything. I glanced over my shoulder to Rourke; he didn’t look back. Music started, mournful music, making me feel kind of lost. I set down my glass and pushed it away.
Rob watched me for a minute, then said, “You like to dance. Come dance with me.” He took my hand and led me to a place between the bar and the empty dining room next to unused tables. His wiry arms held me square and polite.
Sometimes when I’m feelin’ lonely and beat,
I drift back in time, and I find my feet, down on Main Street.
“Remember you and Mark danced at the Talkhouse?”
I said that I did.
“I called you Countess,” he said, and I asked him why.
“Because,” he said, “you have rank.” He leaned close, whispering, “Just be careful.”
His words gathered at my ear. I felt something surge through his body, ragged and incongruous, frustrated in its effort to transfer smoothly. Then I felt myself traveling back—it was Rourke, pulling me away. Though he stood naturally, you could tell he was not happy. Rourke didn’t need to posture to intimidate, he just had to be within reasonable range of his object. His fingers closed tight on my wrist.
“Let’s go,” he said, taking a step, pulling me closer, my back to his front, like a hostage.
The road home was not the same as the one we’d taken on the way there. It was a local road, leafy and closing in, top-lit and wet. We made it back in minutes. The light in the third-floor room was lit; I liked seeing it. It made me feel safe. Rourke leaned over and popped my door. “You know where the key is?”
I nodded, getting out. “In the box.”
The car squealed in reverse, swung around, then shot forward. How able he was to exist in the misfortune of night. How afflicted he must have been, by ritual, by rivalry, by things mannish and abstruse, to go back out. I reached for the key, wondering how long it would take him to return, and whether he was going to have to drive those guys. It was strange to think that whatever safety home provided was inadequate compared to the riddling principles that moved him.
I stepped through into the dark, remembering a small iron lamp on the bookshelves. I searched for it and turned it on. On a low table in front of the couch was a dish filled with the beach glass we’d collected. I went into the kitchen and looked in the cabinets. They were empty except for a new set of dishes.
Just be careful, Rob had said, and also, So now what? I wondered what else Rob might have said if Rourke hadn’t stopped him? Though I had no reason to mistrust Rourke, for some reason I trusted Rob completely.
I placed my palms against the bedroom door and pushed slowly. It was empty in there except for a bed and an antique metal table with a vintage work light and a black telephone. I took up the phone cautiously and listened for a dial tone. The closet was empty, but then, he’d just come back from months in Montauk. There were boxes in the hall. Like the rest of the apartment, the room smelled of cut wood. Possibly his parents had fixed it up because they intended to rent the place, though perhaps it had been done for Rourke. It was nice to think of him as loved, as the recipient of feelings that were worthy and true.
When I heard the car, I went to the door and waited. Rourke seemed as relieved to see me as I was to see him. He pulled off his sweater before tossing it onto the couch. As he unbuttoned his shirt, his hand moved in practiced jerks. The thoughtful way he cast his gaze into space was lonely.
“He okay?” I asked.
Rourke nodded, saying, “Yeah, he’s okay.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If I—”
Rourke pulled me near. I leaned against his chest and felt his head on mine, his hand on my lower back. “Forget it,” he said. “It’s complicated.”
What followed was less a kiss, less an embrace, than a precise exchange, a diving in from opposite ends and a rolling, gliding lull at center, like mammals swimming expertly beneath the sea. I felt known, I felt assimilated. I felt a gift from life that I hardly merited. He didn’t have to say that he loved me, not when I could see the gentle cast to his eyes and feel the puerile softness of his lips, not when I could sense the solitude in his hands resolved by touching me. If I didn’t know what he was risking to be with me, I could feel when he held me the consequence of his choice.
The next morning we stopped at Eddie M.’s house in Red Bank. They said that we were there to see a car and that Eddie M. was a friend from high school. Rob was there already when we arrived, taking a leisurely walk around a ’71 Corvette—yellow. It made me think of Mark’s Porsche, with the way it was sitting in the driveway like a lost shoe, like a princess slipper. The GTO and Rob’s Cougar looked like giant slabs of beef in the street. One day in Jersey, and I’d never look at cars the same.
“They didn’t do too bad a job on the paint,” Rob said to Eddie M. “The problem you’re gonna have with the Vette is the heat coming through the floorboards.”
“Tell him what happened to Jimmy Landes,” Rourke said, joining the conversation without ceremony. The two showed no sign of having argued in the bar the night before, if, in fact, it had even been an argument. There was a newspaper at the end of the driveway. I sat on the corner of the lawn, flipping through the pages, taking care not to look too hard. I didn’t want to know anything.
“My wife’s at her mother’s,” Eddie M. informed me, strolling over, gawky like a farmhand. His eyes were electric and clear blue, like a husky’s. “Otherwise she’d make coffee.”
“Why can’t you make it yourself?” Rob called over, in disgust.
“Because I don’t know how to work the thing.”
“It’s a coffeemaker, not a backhoe.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rourke said to Rob. “We’re going out.”
“Where to,” Rob wanted to know. “Pat’s?”
Rourke said, “Yeah.”
“I’ll go with you,” Rob said. “He owes me fifty bucks.”
“I’ll come too,” said Eddie M. “I can’t sit around all day waiting for Karen.”
After Eddie M. put the Corvette in the garage, we took off in two cars, driving past the weeping willows, cyclone fences, and idle flags of the residential area onto the backstreets, where there were forlorn sidewalks and dwarfish brick buildings and the funereal reflection of ourselves as we proceeded in a long loose wave past the plate glass storefronts.
At a red light, Rob pulled up alongside us, his window inches from mine. The music from his car was deafening. He was singing, “Be my love!” When the light changed, he turned down the volume and shouted, “Hey, Contessa, what do you think of Mario Lanza?”
Morocco’s was a spherical diner, like a space station or an automotive air filter, set on the side of a four-lane roadway. The steaming hot air and the diesel exhaust from all the traffic going by formed a plane of smog to walk through. The men fell into a quiet line, with me in the middle. Rob and Eddie M. were thinking how Rourke and I had just had sex. I could feel on my skin the tread of instinct and imagination.
The waitress came to our booth. Rob asked, “Where’s Pat?”
“Which Pat’s that, doll?” she volleyed in a gravelly voice.
“What do you mean, ‘which Pat’?”
“It’s a big place. We got a lot of Pats—Pat Wolf, Cellar Pat, Patty G., Kitchen Pat.”
“Kitchen Pat?” Rob repeated incredulously. Eddie M. bit his cuticles and smirked. “What do I look like, a bread salesman?”
“No offense, honey, but I didn’t bother to check.”
“You new here, or what?” Rob inquired.
“Yeah,” she said. “I just started about—sixteen years ago.”
“Sixteen years, and you don’t know Pat Webb—Spider Pat?”
“Night shift,” she informed him. “If you wanna talk to someone on night shift, you might wanna come at night. We don’t got dorms in back.” She lifted her pad to her chest. “Now, what’ll yas have?”
Rob ordered a turkey club with fries, Eddie M. got pancakes with sunny-side eggs on top, I asked for a grilled cheese, and Rourke pushed the menu toward the table rim. “Burger, medium rare.”
“Coffees?” she inquired, taking up menus.
Rourke said, “Yeah, for everybody.”
Rob pushed some quarters to the little jukebox suspended at the end of the table. He told Rourke to find something decent.
Eddie M. chuckled. “Find him ‘Stayin’ Alive.’”
“F*ck you, Eddie M.”
Eddie M. said, “You jellyfish. You love the Bee Gees.”
“You jerk off to Gordon Lightfoot.”
“Lightfoot’s a genius.”
“Genius!” Rob snorted. “Let me ask you something. ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’—what is that?” Rourke and I laughed, and Rob stated dryly, “I’m totally serious. What is that?”
“I’m telling you, he’s a poet,” Eddie M. muttered.
Rourke flipped the jukebox pages. He had the inside seat across from mine, so I couldn’t help but notice how his forehead was square and his cheekbones were prominent. His eyes had a black and avaricious clarity. The diner’s windows were coated with enormous transparencies to mitigate the view of the highway and to tenderize the inclement glare. The sapphire cellophane light gave the impression of things Mediterranean, of him where he naturally belonged, southern France, northern Italy, a village with battered streets along the coast of Spain—with me, in white, by his side.
“Want some?” Rob asked, gesturing to me with the ketchup.
I said no, thanks.
Eddie M. popped his eggs. “Seen Tommy, Harrison?”
Rourke said, “Yesterday.”
“At the gym?”
“Outside it.”
“I heard he got a fracture.”
Rob laughed. “A fracture? Some fracture. He looks like he got hit by a wrecking ball.”
“That’s right, and he’s still standing,” Eddie M. said. “Better watch your back, Harrison.”
Rob chucked a napkin at Eddie M. “You know what, Eddie M., shut up. And wipe the yolk off your mouth, for Chrissakes.”
Rourke put the money in the jukebox and Marvin Gaye came on. When the music started, we retreated, each of us, picking through the wilty last halves of fries and gazing into the theatrical stillness of the diner.
Mother, mother, there’s too many of you crying.
Brother, brother, brother, there’s far too many of you dying.
The dessert carousel stood sentry at the door. It was like a phosphorescent obelisk, twirling sleepily. The pastries marched around in a demented parade—towering meringues, tilting cakes, mammoth pies and puddings, balloon-like jelly rolls, surreal mousses. An older couple loitered at the register as they paid, satisfied and distracted. He was cleaning his teeth with a matchbox; she was straightening the vest of her peach summer suit. Past the window on the other side of the highway was another mall.
Everything looked different to me; everything was different. I felt an acuteness of being, a lonely fury of connectedness. It was as if I’d set off from home and its false promise of security and accidentally found sanctuary in the arms of my generation. Though I hadn’t gone far, I was worlds away. And being there was like occupying a place you have long feared, but in which you suddenly find yourself, and you think, This is okay, this is really okay.
C’mon, talk to me, so you can see
What’s goin’ on. Yeah, what’s goin’ on.
Rob’s fingers drummed the tabletop. He and Rourke looked at each other. Something passed between them, something dark but not newly dark. It was as if they were each privately thinking the same thoughts, sharing the same concerns.
“You headin’ out?” Rob asked.
Rourke reached for his wallet. “Yeah, right now.”
Rob lifted his hand. “I got it.”
“Me too?” Eddie M. asked, somewhat surprised.
“No, you bastard,” Rob said. “You pay for yourself.” Then he reached over and slid my sunglasses from the top of my head. He cleaned them carefully, using the soft corner of his sweatshirt. “I’m gonna have to teach you how to take care of these things.”
“I spent a weekend in Jersey once too,” my mother reminisced as she filled two coffee mugs with cold Chablis. Rourke had dropped me off just hours prior, though the two had not met. I’d called her the day before to say that I was safe and with friends. “At Princeton. Very memorable.” She handed me a cup. “Sorry about the mugs. I’ll do the dishes tonight.” She joined me at the table. “It feels like you’ve been gone for weeks. Susan Parsons finally moved in,” she said.
“Here?” I hadn’t figured Kate’s room would be so quickly filled.
My mother furrowed her brows. “Not here. Into an apartment in town. You remember Susan. She was in the car accident by the bowling alley.”
“David and Lowie’s friend?” I asked. “The caterer?”
“No. That’s Suzanne. Susan’s the astronomer. Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she said, changing the subject. “Since Powell’s in Brazil through September, you can use his car for the summer. It’s gotten too dangerous for the bike. The city people are insane.”
I thanked her, saying that it would be great to use Powell’s car.
“I’m going to an art opening tonight at Ashawagh Hall, for an artist named Ortega. He mounts bowling balls on wedges. They look like giant olives on giant cheeses. Very geometric. Feel like coming?”
“I’m pretty tired. Maybe next time.” She smiled, but I knew she was down. It would have been easy to tell myself that my leaving home would mean nothing to her, but I kind of felt bad to take myself away.
On the mail table there were two phone messages from Kate and several from Denny and Sara Eden and one from Dad. There were envelopes from the NYU bursar’s office and the NYU School of the Arts and a single tattered card from Jack, postmarked the day before graduation. It was a vintage photograph of East Hampton, with cows in the middle of Main Street, and, huge on the right, the tree we loved. Jack had written a long note that I didn’t really want to read, so I set the card writing-side out on the windowsill by the kitchen sink. I stepped back to regard it, noticing that his writing reeled and lurched to form the shape of an owl. From where I stood it looked like a relief or woodcut. It did not inspire sadness exactly, but something that moved in the mask of sadness, influenced as it was by the infancy of summer and the recent invincibility of my heart.
In the basement, damp towels from the weekend were piled on the dusty, cold concrete floor. I sat against the washing machine, removing from my bag the pieces of clothing I’d worn to Jersey, pressing each one to my face, deep and close like an oxygen mask, smelling my sweat and his, soaking in each kiss, and the last—especially the last, the one in the driveway with his palm taking the ladder of my neck, drawing me in.
“You know where to find me?” Rourke had asked.
I didn’t really, but I said that I did, then I released myself from his grip, slipping out. He would be in the same cottage in Montauk he’d stayed at all winter. Before we’d left Jersey that morning, I’d heard him call the owner and arrange to take back the house and keep it through the end of August. I’d never been there, but I remembered the St. Patrick’s Day parade when Rob said Rourke lived across the street from where we’d been standing.
The night that followed was a long one. Through the length of it, I felt many contradictory things—I felt alive, but I felt also and intensely the part of me that was dead. If I was unattended, I was not lonely. I was kept tranquil through the hours by the memory of the tenderness of his hands, by the devotion in his eyes, by the glorious opposition between us that could never be lost to me, not even if he was lost to me.