30
The anonymous green-and-white cottage sat at the crest of a hill overlooking the bay on a street called Fleming Road. The reminder of Jack was unfortunate, but the connection ended with the name. The house was unlike any other I’d been in. The constant currents of light and air it received made it seem invulnerable to misfortune; and yet, it was modest, like a tent or teepee. Each day there was a new day, with nothing carrying over from the previous one—when morning came through the window, it came as if by surprise. The sun would advance upon my skin, reminding me to be grateful, and his arms would take me tighter.
It was there that I met myself, there that I discovered my soul’s invention, the feminine genius of me. I often thought about life beyond the summer, acknowledging that an end was imminent, that I needed to prepare. The world sloped against our door like a barren belly—I could feel it. Had I been sentenced to death, I could not have interpreted time with a fiercer consciousness—every twilight seemed to be the last, every rain the final rain, every kiss the conclusive aroma of a rose, gliding just once past your lips.
If he loved me, love wrought no change in him. He did not speak of such things, and neither did I, because words and promises are false, resolving nothing. I was an American girl; I possessed what our culture valued most—independence and blind courage. From the beginning he had been attracted to the savagery in me that matched the savagery in him, and yet, what bound us was the prospect of that soundness unraveled. I began to unlearn things I’d been taught. Often I was afraid, but my fear was a natural fear, a living fear, a fear of the unknown. I would not have exchanged it for a wasteland of security. It kept me vigilant through the night.
No matter what was to happen between us in the end, he would not be to blame. If I were to be wounded, it would not be because he wanted to wound me. His battles lay elsewhere, with things of which I was reluctant to conceive—time and obligations, ambition and money. I wished it didn’t have to be that way. I wished there were no place in life to go. I wished for his sake that I were older, stronger, better, that I might have sheltered him.
Sometimes when I lay in the cradle of his arms, he would draw me closer, squeezing as if to concede something. Sometimes when his exhausted weight landed against my breasts, and his hair invaded my parted lips, and all I could hear was silence, a palisade so sullen and arid that nothing could possibly breach it, I would say, “Rourke.”
The days were simple, numb, and narrow. My impressions collected in layers like generations of rock beneath earth, impacted to form a single idea—that I was happy. I didn’t write; I didn’t draw; I kept no record of conversations or clothes, places passed or inhabited. Each moment that expired was a butterfly escaping, imperial in hue and contour, membranous and sheer, fluttering magically, slipping off to the gaping enormity of liberty and oblivion. Like whispers through grasslands or heath entwined with dew, in my mind and in my memory, what remains of that summer is an overriding sense of completeness.
Though my body’s demands for nature were met by days spent outdoors and evenings working in a roadside restaurant, by expressions of flesh and trials of desire, I found no end to my interest in the wild. Wherever I looked, I wanted to lie, though that was not always possible. It was like being hungry for blood and smelling it everywhere around, hearing it drive, and you do not mind it touching you when you are it and it is you. If, at night, I would have dared to leave his side, I would have walked into the velvet stealth, knowing that nothing would ever hurt me there. That summer I felt the casing of my skin dissolve. I felt myself connect as pools connect.
In the mornings, I would sit on the step beneath the chipped front door after a shower, waiting for the sun to dry the water from my skin. I would push my heels into the grass and warm dirt, thinking, God really is everywhere. Rourke would join me, coming to the porch with a pot of coffee and a cup for us to share. A space between the houses across the road revealed the smoky blue bay, and through that slender break we would look to the west. And him reaching, his hands touching my hair. And pain, a knowledge of the advance of time, an instinct that luck does not last, a feeling of modesty in regard to the opulence of my circumstances. And a sense that we had to hurry.
“Is it time?” I would ask.
“Yeah,” he would say. “I bet you’re hungry.”
The GTO would barely drop speed before veering to the shoulder at Four Oaks, where we bought breakfast—either there or at Herb’s in town. Our doors would pound in unison, and I would walk a little behind, watching the even force of his legs as they hit the street. Sometimes Doreen, the cashier, would wave before we reached the door, and Rourke would toss up his arm. If you didn’t know already that Doreen drank Jack Daniel’s, you could tell by the purple swell of her face. Once at Tipperary, Rourke bought her a drink. She thanked him, and when she lit a cigarette, the hand gripping the match trembled. The bartender brought a rocks glass filled with rust-colored stuff, not bothering to ask what she’d like, and she sat back in her chair and sipped like she was comfortable, more comfortable there than at home.
Inside the deli, the floor tiles felt stark under my bare feet, and the air was so cold it seemed to come from my bones. Near the coffeemaker was a platter of collapsed and sorry Danish. I would dig through for a few free of flies while “Piano Man” played on the radio. If people were talking to Rourke, as often they did, I would wait by the creaking novelty rack, spinning it to see the latest yo-yos and water pistols, and the guys behind the counter would stare, calculating the circumference of my ass. My eyes would pass over theirs, as if to say, Do you honestly think you could do to me the things he does?
Sometimes he would scan the headlines while we waited for sandwiches, other times he avoided them, in either case striving to follow his way. He would run a hand through his hair, then turn to find me, as if afraid that I might have vanished. Upon seeing me he would return to summer, seduced again, despite some sounder verdict of which I remained unaware. It was as if everyone had been evacuated, but by some miracle of stupidity we remained.
“That everything?” Rourke would ask, pulling bottled water and peaches from my arms, and tossing knots of cash on the counter.
At the beach, we would eat. He would run several miles and swim several miles, and I would read and sleep, and if he thought I was getting too much sun, he would lay a shirt on my back—the cotton dropping down like a parachute. When he stood or walked, women would adjust their glasses and arch the bridges of their ribs. If they lay on their bellies, they would tug the strings of their suits higher around their lifted bottoms and spy him through the fragrant triangles between arms and blankets. Jealousy was not possible; no one could love him better or more. I would just turn away and face the sun, feeling it heal the flesh he’d used. The women didn’t know what I knew. They knew nothing of unconditional discretion or singleness of heart, or femininity, when femininity is madness and uncertainty and vertigo in his arms. By two o’clock he would pull his jeans over his shorts, fastening them. During our procession to the car, everyone would watch solemnly, even children and dogs.
He would knock the front door open with his thigh because his hands would be full, and after shaking the blanket and hanging the towels to dry, we would meet by the side of the bed. The influence of his body would weigh down the mattress, and for a moment we would sit. Tenderly, we would touch, each striking lightly against the skin of the other. Sex in the day can be sad. It is to risk in light, to reach for things there and not there, to confess that you are searching, despite what you have found. In day, his face was a reflection of my own, his features flushed with innocence and a reassuring lack of sufficiency. At times, I could not bear the monuments there. At times, I felt sick from the sight of the child I’d been, lost until found in his eyes—and him, a child too. I often thought to say something. It was possible that he wished to talk.
I never once felt the way I’d felt with Jack—baffled and agitated, unable to articulate some grave humiliation, some feeling that I’d been wrongly used, despite Jack’s maudlin concerns and conceited timidity. Jack’s tenderness was like a barrier, a reef you dared not swim through. He expressed care because he saw cause for anxiety; if you responded to it, it would prove his anxiety correct. But with Rourke there was dignity in indifference and grace in separateness. As I’d suspected, Jack had been wrong—desire is not deviant. To seek resolution through intimacy and to achieve it is to rise with your feelings confirmed, and not as if things have been unclosed and will remain that way until they are unclosed some more, each time a little wider. After sex with Rourke, the nerves in me would be stilled. Afterward he did not disgust me with tenderness. Afterward I said nothing, and he said nothing, and the look of my underwear on the floor did not depress me.
While I showered and dressed for work, he would make phone calls; I didn’t know to whom. I didn’t think about where his money came from. I never asked what he did while I worked at night. I never looked through his belongings. His discreteness was sacred to me; inside, I preferred it. It’s hard to explain, except to say that when Jack and I used to walk, we would crash into each other, listlessly, lazily. But Rourke and I never bumped into each other. If ever we intersected, it had meaning, new meaning, not mine, not his, but a third meaning. The only thing that changed noticeably was that every Tuesday was more difficult than the one that preceded it. Tuesday was my day off, but not his. He would get up before sunrise, throw on some clothes, and before leaving the room, he would turn his head incompletely, saying, See you later. And when, late on a Tuesday evening, he returned, I would not go to him; I could not even necessarily move. I would just watch him, overwhelmed by the need to vow something, secure something.
Montauk was the Vegas of my imagination, a dwarfish Vegas, with garish toylike motels and two-story arcades bright as airfields, and tourists in unscrupulous attire. Men in black socks played miniature golf at Puff ’n Putt with beet-skinned ladies in extra-large T-shirts, while teenagers secreted off to the muddy seclusion of paddleboats. Chesty guys from the boroughs named Sisto and Vic who ate three- and four-pound lobsters but never got a drop of lung on their shirts swatted at their kids’ heads, and checked me out through my sweater, while their wives bought miniature lighthouses and driftwood seagulls and boats inside bottles. Locals I never saw but read about in the paper grew pot in their gardens and kept arsenals in their basements, and celebrities hid like game in the cliffs. Steps away from the midget scrub pines of the village was the ocean. Not a tranquil ocean, like the lagoonish satin-lit backdrops of Florida or the Caribbean, but a northern one that coerced you into the confidence of its fury. When you swam at midnight in Montauk, you waived everything—you surrendered. Montauk was not pretty; it was something else entirely.
Sometimes we’d go to the Tattler, or to the Montauket for sunsets. The Dock was the place to get coffee after midnight, black or with Baileys. At the Dock, the tables would fill up with people Rourke knew from slow-pitch or the beach and occasionally with people I knew, like Lisa Tobias or Sam the Dominican waiter from the Lobster Roll, and his girlfriend, Lou, from the Surf Shop. The first time we went, Ray Trent and Mike Reynolds walked in, and they were surprised to see me. I introduced them to Rourke, and the three of them sat around until closing, talking about rugby, the start of the Olympic Games in Moscow, and whether or not Ali stood a chance against Holmes in Nevada in October. I left them alone, like leaving three toddlers in a room with toys, and when Rourke pushed back his chair that night to go home, I pushed back mine as well, kissing those guys goodbye. Rourke didn’t seem to mind them anymore, not like he had the day of the St. Patrick’s parade.
If Rob was in town, we would go to Gosman’s for dinner and wait for an outdoor table even if it took twice as long, because Rob didn’t come all the way from Jersey to sit indoors. “If I wanted to sit inside,” he’d snap at the hostess who’d make the obligatory inquiry: inside or out? “I coulda stayed in Jersey watchin’ Love Boat with my grandmother.”
From the cocktail patio near the docks, we would observe the eerie cortege of yachts slinking to berth after a day of lusty immoderation, the strings of spotlights on deck shining into the sable wax of water. You couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be those people on the yachts, with arrowhead jaws and matted hair and wrinkled whites, flesh alive with the stink of coconut oil and vodka. The luxuriant smell of tar would blend with the grasping stench of fish, and hostile gulls on pylons would face off with you. When the hostess would call out—“Cirillo party”—we would leave our daiquiris and go slow, the three of us, like we were somewhere else in the world, somewhere with stepped streets, cobbled and precariously narrowed, where bread is wrapped in paper and wine in wax and string, someplace where it does not hurt to be happy, where there are no necessary ends, where it’s not humiliating to end up exactly where you start out.
Rob stayed on the couch. He would wake up first because he didn’t sleep well except in his own bed, which was a Sealy Posturepedic. He would rap on our door two times fast, and Rourke would sit up, throwing his legs over the side of the mattress, tossing a piece of the sheet over my hips, though he didn’t have to do that. It didn’t matter if Rob saw me. There was nothing I needed to hide from him.
“Yeah,” Rourke would say.
The door would creak open, and Rob would hop up onto the door frame and hang from his fingertips to do a few chin-ups, saying, “C’mon, let’s go get some eggs.”
On the walls of Salivar’s, there were fish carcasses of an affecting diamond blueness, befitting equally the subterranean depths of seas and the paneled walls of saloons. Rob would make fast friends with strangers at the counters, talking about how much weight DeNiro gained for Raging Bull, and the Islanders winning the Stanley Cup, and bizarre marginalia from the papers such as streaking or Texaco making gasoline from corn or the surgical detachment of Siamese twins.
“Leave ’em,” was his solution to the Iranian hostage crisis. “Anyone dumb enough to go to Iran in the first place is up to no good. Either they’re missionaries or monkeys for industry.”
Rob never sat at the beach. He paced restlessly, talking to everyone. He organized volleyball games with burly guys in True Value towels wrapped high on waists, and he played paddleball with every adolescent like it was his personal duty. He threw balls to lonely dogs, he built castles with kids, and he always only faced the sun. “Why should I bother getting a tan on my back? If I’m walkin’ away from you, I don’t care what you think.”
When Rourke was gone, it was Rob’s hand on my waist or his coat on my shoulders, Rob’s voice suggesting we get a cup of coffee or a couple of sandwiches and go do laundry.
“We’ll be right back,” he told Rourke one morning after fishing out on the Viking Star, a charter boat Rob liked to go on. Rourke was hosing off bluefish in a plastic tub. Rob ran me across the street to Zorba’s Inn, a dilapidated motel near Gosman’s that looked like a lean-to. He pulled an Instamatic from his sweatshirt pocket. “Get a shot of me in front of Zorba’s. I’m gonna tell Jimmy Landes this is where Harrison is living.”
Sometimes when I was at work, they would go over to the OTB in Southampton and then to the Woodshed by the Bridgehampton drive-in to see some waitress Rob had a thing for. I met her one night at the carnival in North Sea; her name was Laura Lasser. Laura wore blue eyeliner and stonewashed jeans with an eyelet T-shirt and skinny white skip sneakers from Caldor. She was pretty but heavy, which was okay by Rob, who frankly liked a big ass.
When Rob took her on the rickety old Ferris wheel that night, Rourke told him, “Jesus, be careful up there.”
Like wayward objects from the sky, the guys would just show up at one of the picnic tables behind the Lobster Roll, usually around ten, straddling the benches and talking shit about Johnny Rutherford doing 142 miles per hour to win the Indianapolis 500 or Ottis Anderson’s 1600-yard rushing season or the Steelers or the Lakers or Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon jump, or just old times in Rob’s ’68 Challenger or on the boardwalk with Daisy and Pongo and the Chinaman.
When Rob’s friend Bobby G. died that August from complications following the motorcycle accident he’d had in March, Rourke met Rob in the Bronx one Sunday for the service. They showed up in Montauk after midnight with Rob hanging limp off of Rourke’s shoulder, both of them wearing navy pinstripe suits. Rourke jerked his head for me to leave the room, but Rob said no. “Don’t make her go, Harrison. I don’t want her to go.”
Rob halfway undressed, and he straddled the arm of the sofa in his sleeveless undershirt and his suit pants, clutching a bottle of Cuervo. Rourke made egg sandwiches, and I watched the topography of Rob’s skinny tattooed arm flicker as he folded and unfolded a matchbook from Ruggerio’s Funeral Home. It was a beautiful arm, tapered and muscular, like a junkie’s arm. When the deejay on WPLR said, “This is Dana Blue. The request line is open,” Rob waved the bottle left and right, going, “Get me the phone, get me the phone.” As if by some supernatural occurrence, he got through to the station, and we three drew together in a memorable trinity—Rourke holding a plate of eggs and hovering over Rob, Rob on the sofa, legs apart, knees high, holding the receiver, and me kneeling on the floor with the phone like an offering, all of us still except for the manic push of Rob, the life and guts of him.
“I just lost a friend,” he said. “You know what I’m saying—he’s dead.” Dana Blue must have said sorry and asked what could she do, because he thanked her, then cleared his throat. “Can you send out Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ to Bobby G.? Tell him it’s from Robbie and the Chinaman.”
If they came to pick me up before my shift ended, I would bring them beers and fries, which made Rob happy. Rob liked to get a deal, it was a matter of pride, it made him feel less cheated by life. His was in a tough predicament. It’s tough when the things that make you proud—family, heritage, home—are the same things that shame you. One reason Rourke meant so much to Rob was that Rourke was like one foot in and one foot out. And Rourke was conscious of that line. Whenever Rob was around, Rourke tightened up, like trying not to stumble or risk hurting Rob in any way. Sometimes they would talk quietly, and when I’d pass by, they’d get quieter still. I’d pick up the empty fries baskets and the beer bottles and wipe down the table, and Rourke would unfold his arms and reach for me, taking me by the hips into his lap or running a hand up the inside of one thigh and down the other.
Sometimes Rob would manufacture fake conversations when I would come by to hide the fact that they’d actually been speaking of Mark Ross. “So, this girl Rudy married, right, she’s a born-again. They’re over there in Stuyvesant Town now.”
Once in August, Alicia came into the Lobster Roll to see me, and she told me they’d all had dinner together the previous night at the Driver’s Seat in Southampton—Mark, Rob, Rourke, Alicia, and her boyfriend, Jonathan, and some other people I didn’t know, friends of Mark’s probably. I realized they’d probably been seeing one another all along. I wanted to ask her how Mark was doing, how was his new job and apartment in Manhattan, but I didn’t want to open any closed avenues. I wondered if Mark had heard I’d been living with Rourke, and what he thought about that. For a long time I’d forgotten to remember Mark, then it all started returning to me—this knowledge that he was waiting. That’s how you know summer’s almost over, when things start returning to you.
Last time I saw Rob that summer was a Tuesday, near the end—at least it seemed near the end. Possibly there had been a previous end, another day that I hadn’t noticed.
After Rourke left that morning, I rode my bike to the beach, stopping first at Whites Drug Store for gum. The air was still, and the tide was low, so I placed my towel near the waves, and I opened my book—Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Two white-haired babies ran around a sand castle, and a boom box played Pink Floyd.
Hey you, out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old.
Can you feel me?
Hey you, out there on your own, sitting naked by the phone.
Would you touch me?
“You waltzed right past me.” It was Rob, bending for a kiss. “I’m playing volleyball.”
“What are you doing here? It’s Tuesday. Don’t you have work?”
“I came out this morning. I told everybody I had jury duty. Come on over.”
I shaded my eyes. There were a lot of people. “I’ll just wait here.”
“Come over.” He gestured with my book as we walked, slapping it twice in his palm. “Good book,” he said. “Brett Ashley, that’s you.” He spread my towel near his, by the net.
“Hey, Rob,” one of the guys called. “Sometime this century.”
“Keep your shorts on,” he barked back, then he put his cap on my head, adjusting it until it was low near the bridge of my sunglasses. “Red Sox,” he said. “Don’t lose it.”
My bike just about fit into the trunk of the Cougar, and Rob threaded his tank top through the metal coupling and tied a knot to hold it in. He had white surgical tape around his wrist. I could not see his tattoo from where I sat because it was on his left bicep and he was driving. It was a lightning bolt through the word Zeus. At the carnival that time, Rob told Laura Lasser that Zeus came down to fertilize the earth. He peered into her blushing face. “You know what I’m talking about, to fertilize, right?”
We dropped the bike at the house and left a note for Rourke to meet us, then we grabbed some pizza and ate it on the hood of the car, watching the mellow defervescence of day. In the waning heat, the village seemed a place of endless possibilities. Everyone waved like they knew us.
“That’s because they do,” Rob said. “Everybody knows you.”
On the way down Old Montauk Highway to Surfside, I was thinking that life is like being born into a prison that is you, and there comes one opportunity to escape, one second when everything coalesces into something like perfect timing, and you dash, or you don’t. Maybe everyone gets a chance to run, but not everyone goes for it. That summer I had the feeling of being on the outside, of having crossed over. I was thinking about that, and about bravery and identities that are original, about my grandparents getting on boats alone when they were fourteen and coming to America from Europe. I was thinking of opportunities my father never had because of risks taken by his own parents, and whether my mother had wanted me. If my mother hadn’t wanted me, she must have felt bad about that, over time, through the years. And I was thinking of Rourke, how he could not be possessed, how I loved him for it, but at the same time I knew I couldn’t ever let go. I wanted to ask Rob. I had the feeling Rob would have something to say about releasing things you love.
“Today’s my birthday,” he said as I reached for the door handle.
“Oh,” I said, turning back in. “Happy birthday, Rob.” I reached to kiss him, leaning far because he was still at the wheel. It was nice that he wanted to spend it with me.
Surfside was in that peculiar state of restaurant nothingness before the full staff arrives, when the kitchen and bar are the only points of activity, and the main room is set but sleepy and unpeopled. When I was little, my mother used to waitress part-time at Bobby Van’s in Bridgehampton, and sometimes she’d take me to work with her. Between jobs such as polishing spots off silverware or folding napkins, I would eat pan-fried hamburgers and do homework and draw on Guest Check pads. Before closing, I would get chocolate ice cream in the overbright kitchen, then fall asleep in a back booth until my mother was done. She would put her feet up and count cash.
“What are you thinkin’ about?” Rob asked. We were in the doorway, white ocean light behind us. Probably we looked cool like thieves or ranchers.
“Nothing,” I said. “My mother.”
The bathroom was frilly, like a man’s idea of a ladies’ room. I brushed the sand from my skin and washed my hair under the faucet. It had gotten longer and lighter over the summer; it went straight below my jaw, and I had bangs. I removed my bathing suit. Two white triangles marked my breasts, and one marked my bottom. I threw on khakis and a white top I’d taken up to the beach with me so I could go shopping before riding my bike home. My breasts had gotten bigger. I wondered how long had they been that way. Maybe from birth control pills.
Rob was at the bar. I walked over, and the bartender stopped cutting limes. He smiled, saying his name was Val. I returned the Red Sox hat to Rob, and I said my name was Eveline. Val was a curious name for a man, I thought, without obvious origin. Rob and I drank two mint juleps each, and when Val started to make us another, Rob said, “Just one. No more for her.”
“Why, what’s the problem?” Val wanted to know.
“With the Contessa over here? I gotta keep my eye on her,” Rob stated matter-of-factly. “She’s very loosely wrapped.”
Before the dinner shift started, Val went on break. Rob and I joined him out back behind the building, cutting through the kitchen. We headed through a screen door so covered in gunk that it didn’t even bang when it slammed shut. It made a sound like a donkey—hee haw. Then—nothing. Right away Val lit a joint. It had been months since I’d gotten high, the last time was the night I broke up with Jack. I didn’t really feel like it, but I didn’t want to say no since it was Rob’s birthday. It hit me quickly. I’d forgotten the way everything leapt to life: the smell of creosote from the retaining wall, the growl of the walk-in refrigerator, the insects sawing noisily, the uneven clamor from the kitchen, the waitresses calling early orders, the newly sizzling things, the clinking racks of last night’s glasses exiting the dishwasher. I felt myself shiver. My skin felt sunburned, which is to say both cold and warm at the same time. Rob removed my sunglasses to clean them, and I thought about Val’s name, whether it was Valery or Valentin.
“Vallejo—it’s my last name. My first name’s Rick,” he said. “My grandfather was Juan Vallejo, a matador from Pamplona who got pinned in the ring. The bull’s horns came on either side of his chest. He survived, but he had scars here and here.” Val opened his shirt and pointed to the pockets beneath his arms. His body was like his name, sleek and curiosity-inspiring.
“Funny coincidence,” Rob said. “Evie’s reading Hemingway—the bullfighting book.”
The cook came up to the kitchen door. He pulled a navy bandana from his pants pocket and tied it ceremoniously around his head. “You guys feel like eating?” he asked.
Rob said, “Absolutely!”
Within the half hour, three plates of grilled tuna hit the bar. The tuna steaks were shaped like triangles with charcoal stripes, and the vegetables were twigs stacked like teepees. There was a little ball of wild rice. I couldn’t imagine eating; it made me sick just to look.
“I’m gonna take a walk,” I proposed.
“What are you talking about?” Rob asked incredulously. “The food just got here.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing, which seemed to make him nervous. Instead of arguing, he gazed into his plate like it was a far-off horizon. “Where to?” he asked, taking a bite, chewing, not looking up.
“The bathroom.”
“The bathroom,” he repeated, processing. “You planning to use it, or are you just going sightseeing?”
I said, “Sightseeing.”
“At least she’s honest,” Val said.
“Let me tell you something,” Rob said, “I’d rather watch somebody’s dog than their girlfriend.” He tapped my plate with his knife. “C’mon, eat first, babe,” he advised. “It’s on the house.”
——
Montauk Daisies are sturdy low bushes that grow in sand, and out by the road where Rob parked there were several, a few beginning to bloom. It was early for flowers. Usually they don’t flower until mid-September.
One of the bushes was by the rear fender of Rob’s car, so I propped open the driver’s door and sat sideways in the seat, facing the plant, facing south over the ocean, kicking my feet through the renegade sand that had made its way to the roadside. The ground had begun to turn cold, the way it does on late summer evenings. I brushed my hair and put on lipstick and played around with Rob’s eight-tracks—the Four Seasons, the Stones, the Del Vikings, Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra. Though it was totally outdated, he kept an eight-track in his car so nobody would steal his tapes. The floor was littered with empty Chinese take-out containers and flaccid newspapers, and there was a box of Wash’n Dris on the dashboard. Rob was a fanatic about clean hands.
On the back of a cocktail napkin, I drew the daisy for Rob and I composed a birthday note, which contained the usual sort of wishes, Happy Returns and so on, except that at the end, right before my name, I wrote I love you. I set it under the steering wheel on the glass pane in front of the meters and indicators. For a long time I stared at the words, positive of meaning and sure of fact but uncertain as to why that love was suddenly so emphatic, and I began to cry. In the mirror I saw my tears. They were like little missives, tiny flags and trumpets, announcing messages from the inside of me to the world beyond, though I could not think of what the messages were because at that moment Rourke appeared. Through the passenger window I saw him jog onto the restaurant’s porch, and my tears disintegrated, everything vanishing upward. I heard myself say, “Oh.”
Rob stepped out of the front door before Rourke stepped in, and Rob gestured to me in the car: Rourke must have asked where I was. It was nice to think that he had come for me. If Rourke did not exist, then maybe I would have ended up with someone like Val, who would have been nice to kiss, though it would not have been love or anything like it. It would have been something lonely and fascinating, like occupying someone else’s house for a night or two, if it happened to be a particularly nice house.
Rourke propped his shoulder firmly against a porch post and began to talk. From where I sat it looked as if he were keeping the building from folding in upon itself. Rob turned and leaned on the rail. I could only see his back, but I could tell by the uncharacteristic way he slumped, with his arms hanging lifelessly, that he was upset. Rourke I could not read; his body was organized as usual by an economy of action and emotion. I assumed they were arguing. Soon Rob stood and walked back into the bar. Rourke remained in place, staring out, no doubt deciding what to do—wait for me or go in after Rob. He turned and went in.
I locked the car and took the path back to the restaurant, walking slow. I had the impression I’d forgotten something. I felt for Rob’s keys in my hand, making sure they were there. I looked to my shoes. They were there too. Behind me was nothing. Just Rob’s car and Old Montauk Highway and the ocean, far down.
The bar had become crowded, but it wasn’t hard to find them. A room changed wholly when Rourke was in it—energy tagged about him in a sort of helix. They observed my approach as I squeezed through the pack to reach them. Rourke put out his arms, jerked me to his chest, and lifted me onto a stool. He touched my halter top, saying, “This is a little revealing to wear in public, isn’t it?”
“Leave her alone, Harrison,” Rob said dismally. “I picked her up at the beach. She wasn’t there with a suitcase.”
For the remainder of the night the two of them hardly spoke, though Rob made sure to get one more free meal for Rourke. No matter how angry Rob was, it wouldn’t have been in him to cut Rourke out of a deal. While Rourke ate, Rob kept drinking whatever Val put in front of him. The more Rob drank, the more he kept reaching out to others, greeting old friends, making new ones, until eventually we’d become a sizable crowd. Rob commandeered the pool table and hustled six players before turning to Rourke and challenging him to “a serious game.” Rourke consented, standing without a word, as though he’d expected the invitation. It occurred to me that Rob had intended to play Rourke from the start; that all the other games had been leading to this one.
They each laid down two twenty-dollar bills. Though the bar was noisy, there was the impression of silence in our area. The men concentrated on the table, moving around it like it was theirs and theirs alone. As one would shoot, the eyes of the other would lock on the ball pattern, memorizing the layout. The game had a different quality than the preceding ones; not only was it an even match, but Rob and Rourke had obviously played together thousands of times. In the end, Rob won, but it was unclear whether Rourke had simply let him.
“C’mon,” Rob said. “I’ll give you a chance to win your money back.”
Rourke handed Rob the twenties and said, “Happy birthday.”
I stood off my stool and gave it up to Rourke, who sat and pulled me onto his lap. I felt his thigh between my legs. Next up against Rob was Roger, the captain from the slow-pitch team, but by then I’d stopped paying attention. I was distracted by Rourke; he was distracted too. I could tell by the death-like tranquility of his hands. Through my stupor, I could only register the knock and split of the balls, the slugs of color whizzing across the verdant felt, the thuckish gulps of the pockets swallowing balls, the ups and downs of drunken conversation.
“He’s doing really good,” I said to Rourke. “Too bad there’s no girl to impress.”
“There is,” Rourke said. “You.”
We were outside—midnight, a little after, walking to the cars. Ahead was the sea, and behind, the chime of Rob’s keys kicking up irregularly, which gave us an indication of how he was walking.
Roger and the guys were taking him to meet some girls.
“You’re not driving,” Rourke turned and said. “Remember?”
Rob took his time answering, as if relishing the messy power he had, as if he could not be completely perceived, as if his drunkenness concealed him.
He made his way around the rear of Rourke’s car, moving with the confidence of a heavily armed man. “We’re going dancing,” Rob slurred as headlights appeared behind him—a car approaching from Montauk. “She loves to dance,” he said of me, his eyes gazing inches beyond my face, somewhere to the left. And then to me, Rob said, “Come dance with us.”
Rourke grabbed Rob by the shoulders and lifted him forcefully onto the fender just as the car shot past. The rush of wind blew their jackets open.
Rob tried to shake Rourke off. “I’m all right. I’m all right.”
Rourke gripped him tighter, shoving him farther. Rob’s gaze trawled upward from Rourke’s chest, its focus continuously adjusting until arriving at Rourke’s face. Rob’s mouth split into a solemn smile of recognition, and when another car came, the headlights glinted off his teeth, and his eyes looked like dry tobacco rings. He threw his arm around Rourke, falling into him, and for a time they were speechless. Rourke slid the keys from Rob’s hand.
Roger and his friends jogged down the restaurant steps to meet us. “C’mon, birthday boy, let’s go get laid.”
Rob lurched away with the pack of guys and settled into the front seat of the first car, which was Roger’s Camaro. Roger was a student at Brooklyn Law who made three grand a summer waiting tables at Gosman’s. He flashed his lights and leaned on the horn as they pulled away, and all the passengers screamed out the windows—“Yahhhhhhhh!”
Rourke seemed lost in thought on the ride home, so I didn’t speak. Back at the cottage I cleaned up a little, then showered while he washed dishes, and when the water turned hotter, I knew he was done. I was cold so I dressed in one of his sweaters, and I knelt alongside him in the living room. He was deconstructing a camera. I had never seen the camera before. I didn’t know where it had come from or what was broken about it. In the action of his hands I tried to follow the action of his mind. He was studying the blown-out mess like it was a chessboard midgame, like he had looked at the pool table with Rob. His hand hovered in studious benediction over the parts before settling on the pieces to replace. I was thinking a fire would be nice.
Later we went to the bedroom and he undressed me before the mirror. His chest was a block of copper; my skin was copper too, both of us dark from sun. His head was inclined and his lips moved down my neck from ear to shoulder. In bed he drew me onto his chest, not letting go, just holding me, and it was there I remained through to morning. I slept very little, him not at all. Anytime I stirred, he would rock me back to sleep.
The next day was normal. I showered like normal, and after Rourke picked up Rob at some house on West Lake Drive, and they got the Cougar from Surfside, he and Rourke acted normal, whatever normal was for them—broken bones and film trivia, plates of eggs and engine options and sisters in trouble. One thing was different—when Rob got into his car to leave for Jersey, he kissed me and said, “I love you too.”
Later that afternoon, when Rourke was driving me to work, he swung the car off Montauk Highway and onto the overlook. He downshifted to the edge of the lot, rolling dangerously close before pulling the brake. It occurred to me with a degree of fascination that maybe he intended to just, like, fly off. It made me happy to think of dying with him; in fact, of all possible ends for us, it was the one I would have preferred. I recalled the guy Jack had told me about when he’d come back from Outward Bound the previous summer, the one who had fallen off the ridge while hiking. I remembered how Jack and I imagined him floating in space, suspended, like a flag flapping to nowhere.
Together Rourke and I confronted sundown, and I collapsed into the shadow of his lap, facing him, tracing my name into the parchment of his abdomen. And he sighed, laying his hand upon my bare back, fingering the straps of my shirt.