31
When I came out of my room and into the kitchen, my mother set down her book and slid it to the center of the table. She was sitting exactly where I’d left her when I moved out in June. I wondered if that was a good omen or a bad one. She leaned back in her chair. The milk in her coffee pooled to caramel streaks at the top.
“How’s the packing going?”
I said, “Almost done.”
“Feel like going shopping tomorrow?”
“For what?”
She thought for a moment, pulling back her lips. “Shampoo. Do you have shampoo?”
“I figured I’d just take some from upstairs.”
“Do you still have things in Montauk?”
“Not really. Anything left will fit into a bag.”
I visited her once a week to do laundry, mow the lawn, call my father. It wasn’t necessary, but it kept my parents from having to ask questions, which they preferred not to do. As far as they were concerned, I was miles ahead of where they’d been at my age—I was working, going to college, and paying my own way. My father had left home at seventeen to join the army, and when my mother turned seventeen, she married my father. They had no means to help me financially, and no intention of finding the means—they were not about to take out loans or find second jobs. So whatever right they might have had to inquire into my affairs had been relinquished.
She rotated her feet at the ankles and stretched her legs, then reached for her book. She caught herself and put it down again.
“Well,” I said. “I’d better go finish.”
“What time does Lowie get here?”
“Four, I think.”
“Okay,” she said. “Try to hurry.”
Lowie and David were going to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for Labor Day weekend, so they’d offered to take my things into Manhattan to the NYU dorm. All I really had was one suitcase and some art supplies. I went out to the barn with an empty wooden milk crate. I draped brushes in fabric and placed charcoals in plastic bags and paints in old coffee and cookie tins with lids that did not exactly fit. I tied pencils into logs with rubber bands. Once the box was full, I reviewed the contents. It was strange—I could remember touching them, using them, speaking shyly through them, but I could not recall what I thought I’d needed to say. The girl I’d been seemed far off, vaporous, like a cloud. There was a purity that was gone, a purity of essence—in its place stood something else, something I did not know how to name.
Mom and I left that night at the same time. As I turned at the end of the lane, she drove off toward the college with a merry wave. Rourke had asked me to meet him at Herrick playground; he was filling in for someone on the Montauk Rugby Club.
I walked to the far corner of the field and stood next to Mike Stern, from high school, who was in a neck brace. He’d been injured on a construction site.
Mike turned stiffly and glanced at me. “How you doing, Evie?”
I said, “Hey, Mike.”
Rourke was in center field. His hair cleaved and spindled softly against his forehead. His thighs were a smutty green; his knees were black. He looked young, eighteen maybe; though I knew he was closer to twenty-five.
In rugby, there’s shouting. There’s the accumulation of bodies like an unlit pyre, then all of them treading as one before a rapid and unaccountable break—a maul. And in the moments preceding penalties and free kicks, there are slack hands on hips and aimless walks, and heads tossed to the sky, or stretched in jerks to either side, or dropped, chins to chests. It’s a very particular sport, sometimes less like a sport than a brotherhood. At the end comes the departure from the field, the resounding emancipation, like every creature on earth freed at once from its cage. There is the adrenaline-fueled backslapping and hip-slapping and the ritual approach to losers. When you say hello to one of them, there is a pause followed by a vague sharpening as they reconnect with the world around them. Sometimes you get not quite a coherent response—“Hey how you doing?”
“Thanks again for filling in, man,” Mike said to Rourke. “See you down at my place, right?”
Rourke wiped his forehead with the tattered sleeve of his shirt, shoving up, so the dirt mixed with sweat into a streak. “We’ll try to stop in on our way home.”
The car was on Newtown Lane, facing the village. “You can shower at my mother’s if you want,” I said. “The house is empty.”
It was a queer feeling that came from being with him again in that house; the dimensions of everything had changed. We had become larger, and home hideously reduced. We were like giants, colossi, Apollo at Rhodes, or Alice in the Rabbit’s house, limbs poking through casements, heads cramming through chimneys.
The only shower was in the upstairs bathroom. I led him up the narrow stairs and through Kate’s former room to reach it. Her bedroom was bare except for the bed she’d used. Rourke removed his dirty clothes and laid them on the sink. Kate and I had stood at the sink on the night she cut my hair. That was the first day I’d seen Rourke. It was also where I’d stood drinking whiskey the night we all went to the Talkhouse.
I waited while he showered, feeling heavy, feeling blue, not feeling pain, exactly, but a universal sort of weakness. I sat backward on the toilet seat, straddling it, and I looked out a miniature window into the enclosed front yard. I’d been looking through that little window for years; I knew the view well. Earlier that day my mother had spoken of the possibility of having to move because the rent was going to be increased. It would be sad if she lost the house—so many things had happened there. I wondered where she would go, and from where her new memories might come.
When drops of water began to tap my shoulders I knew Rourke was behind and above me; he was bending and looking out too. I leaned back lightly against his hips. One of his hands came around my throat and caressed my neck—his fingertips flattening the muscles, petting the trachea, measuring the fragile cervix, calibrating the breaths, as he seemed to consider the enormous burden of loving me.
On the way back to Montauk we stopped at Mike’s house in Springs. Trucks and cars lined both sides of the street, so Rourke pulled onto the front lawn. Before we got out, we could hear the thud of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” Da na na na nat. Da na na na nat.
As we approached the porch, a shredded screen door flew open. It had no spring, so it cracked against the side of the shingled house, sounding like gunfire. Rourke instinctively grabbed my arm and pulled me behind him. Mike shoved some kid through the door, saying, “Jesus, do it outside,” and the kid flew down to the bushes to vomit.
“Sorry about that, Harrison,” Mike said, and he adjusted his neck brace. “I just don’t wanna get one of those chain reactions going. Next thing you know it’s a big mess of puke to clean.”
Rourke said not to worry about it, though the sound of the kid in the bushes was hideous. I loosened my grip on Rourke in case I was next to go. Rourke steered me through the door.
“It’s a little crazy in there already,” Mike warned. “You two might not want to stick around too long.”
Mike was right: the house was packed. Inside the first room, we hit a wall of about twenty guys, and just a few girls. I tugged the hem of my shorts down lower on my thighs and straightened my shirt to conceal my breasts, which were perceptible through the cotton. I should have thought to change at my mother’s when Rourke showered. I should have known better. Men are free, but women are not. Men cannot be held accountable for their reactions to your negligence. Sometimes you’re just too busy leading your own life to remember theirs.
Rourke had vanished into the crowd. There were people he knew from somewhere, Jersey, maybe, or college. I walked toward the back of the house to find him, making a turn into a dining room that was empty except for two bicycles propped beneath a regulation dart board. The board was surrounded by a ring of hole pokes, and wider beyond that ring the sheetrock walls were scuffed and torn. To my right was an open kitchen with avocado-colored appliances. Rourke was there, leaning on the counter, talking to a huge man with red hair and a hulking back. It was that guy we’d seen outside the gym that day in Jersey, that guy Tommy, with the strange ears. Between them there were two pretty girls. Maybe they weren’t pretty, maybe they just seemed that way with long hair to toss, hair that probably smelled of florid shampoo, hair he could not help but inhale. Rourke looked different, his face a sort of mask. Maybe it was the smile, with his top and bottom teeth meeting and his dimple cutting in like fire. He didn’t see me, so I moved on.
Past the bikes, through a slit in the side of an almost closed door, came the insubstantial flickering of a television. I looked through and saw five bodies sitting around a coffee table. The sound was turned down on the set; by the light I could see that they were doing coke. Suddenly cocaine was everywhere. It had trickled down from rich people to all the rest of us. Jack blamed corrupt foreign policies; in one of his last rants before we broke up, he said, “Cheap blow is U.S. government issue, just like bulk cheese.”
I walked into the room anyway; I had nowhere else to go. The walls were covered with warped paneling, probably from the sixties, and two lamp shades were draped with yellow towels. The room was dreary. I straddled the arm of an empty vinyl recliner, and just sort of sat there.
“Hey,” a voice said. It was that guy Biff again. “Eveline. How you doing?”
“Hey, Biff. I’m okay.”
“You hang with a pretty rough crowd,” he said and laughed.
“Yeah, well, how else would I ever get to see you?”
Biff was quick to talk, which meant that he had no drugs. As a rule, the one with drugs is not so quick to talk. Across the way, perched on the rim of the couch and focusing on nothing in particular, was a skinny guy with ruddy skin and tame blond hair that grazed the shoulders of his Jimmy Buffet concert shirt. “This is Chet,” Biff said. “Chet comes up to Montauk from Florida for summers.”
He nodded; I did too. I wondered was Chet short for Chester. “Florida is hot,” I said.
“Not hot enough for me,” he stated, averting his eyes as he drove a heap of powder to the center of a plate and began to chop. The muscle beneath his right eye shuddered. Chet nudged the results in my direction.
“Oh,” I said, “no thanks.” I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so I came closer, kneeling on the floor.
His eyes met mine; he wore thick glasses. “Go ahead. It’s okay.”
“No, I just—I feel a little—dizzy, I guess.”
Biff quickly took up the plate in my place. He said, “That’s too bad.”
Two of the other guys, one still in a muddy rugby shirt, were talking about weather—forecasters, maps, advancements in accuracy. Somehow this led to a heated disquisition on world wars and political scandals, with Biff joining in. I wondered how they could sit still even though they were so high. You must just hit a critical point of intoxication, a mortal sort of limit, and your body goes into shock, becoming indisposed to motion. I waited until they had done another round before I stood to leave, which was on my part an excruciating gesture of propriety.
“Taking off?” Chet said.
“Yeah, I guess. Nice to meet you, though. Good luck in Florida.”
“Come on back,” Chet said. “We’ll be here.”
On my way out, I heard a voice say, “Harrison Rourke.”
Rourke hadn’t moved from where I’d left him; he was still in the kitchen, leaning on the counter, holding two beers. No one seemed to notice that he was disconnected from everything about him, that his smile was a lie, that he hated Heineken. No one noticed his eyes furiously fixed on the door I’d just exited. Rob would have seen, but Rob wasn’t there. Maybe it was because he was mad, but he looked sexier than ever. His eyes were narrow, impervious as marbles, tilted slightly down at the outer rims. The tousled heaviness of his hair, the conceited set to his jaw, the form beneath the clothes. I thought of how lucky I’d been to f*ck him, how vicious would be my physical loss. I became conscious of my breasts, of their desirability. I wanted his hands on them, his mouth. He beheld me stiffly, inertly, as if staring at a compelling design on the wall. I moved on.
I passed through a set of sliding doors onto a deteriorating deck that faced a wall of scrubby adolescent oaks. There was a dented sweating keg surrounded by bodies. To the right were voices. To the left, past a cluster of taken chairs, an empty stretch of rail. I went over and looked down. It was a short drop to the ground. It was not impossible to jump and run—Springs Fireplace was the nearest road, but then I might never see him again. If I waited, at least I would see him again. I considered going back to Biff and Chet, but it would not have been good. It wasn’t worth making Rourke upset.
After Rob and I had finished eating at Surfside on the night of Rob’s birthday, Val and Rob and I took another stroll out back to the walk-in. The kitchen staff just glanced up as we passed, then went casually back to work. They seemed accustomed to people cutting through. Once inside the cooler, Val removed from his silk shirt pocket a brown glass vial with a baby spoon attached by chain. He stuffed the spoon full and offered it to me.
“No thanks, man,” Rob said. “I’ve been off that stuff for a while. And, as for her, she stays clean.”
“Jesus,” Val said. “No liquor, no coke. What kind of a*shole is this boyfriend, anyway?”
“Not the kind you want to swap punches with,” Rob said, adding, “He fights.”
“So what? Everybody fights. What do you mean fights?”
“Fights, fights, you know, bing, bing,” Rob jabbed at a gigantic mayonnaise jar on a shelf. “He’s a light heavyweight. One seventy-eight,” Rob said. “Exact.” Eggzact.
“Professional?”
“Amateur so far. This past winter would have been his first Olympics.”
“Oh, shit,” Val said. “Then the U.S. boycott happened. What’s he gonna do now?”
“He’ll turn, probably. Maybe. We’ll see. He has offers.”
“More money to be made in professional.”
“There’s money to be made in everything,” Rob said. “If you know what I mean.”
Later that same night we were lying in bed, Rourke and me; around us things were strangely quiet. The lupine night came through the windows, haggard, sinuous, haunting, hunting.
I asked him, “Do you fight?”
He did not seem surprised by the question. He said yes.
“Is that why you have scars?” He had several.
He pointed to his chest above his heart. There was a three-inch line. “That I got when I was fourteen. In a fight over my father. After he died.” He pointed to his left arm. “This one on my arm like a star is from a dog. A pit bull. See, it puckers.”
“This one?” It was on his thigh. I touched it.
“You don’t want to know about this one.”
“How come you don’t do drugs?”
He breathed out thoughtfully. “Because they involve debts to people not worth repaying. Because they show up in blood and urine. Because they destroy the body and the character.” He yanked me higher up on the flat of his chest by the swell of my ass. He aligned us, naturally, perfectly. In an undertone he added, “Because I don’t like to paralyze myself.”
“What did you win? Prizes?”
“Prizes, sure,” he told me. “And bets.”
——
Someone grabbed my shoulders. It was Mark Ross. He was behind me on the deck, bending to kiss me. The beginnings of a beard sprouted from his chin. I reached to touch his face. “How are you?” he inquired with diligent concern, as though I’d survived an ordeal, which possibly I had.
I didn’t bother to ask what he was doing down there in Springs at a rugby party, since somehow I’d ended up there too. He must have guessed my thoughts. He slipped a hand into his khakis and said, “I’m here with Tommy. Tommy Lydell. He’s out for the weekend.”
“The big guy?” I asked. “From Jersey?”
“That’s right.”
I didn’t understand how Mark would have known him. “Did he go to college with you guys too?”
“Tommy? I doubt he made it past the eighth grade. I met him at UCLA several times. He would visit us, mostly for fights. We kept in touch. He’s actually staying at my house tonight with his girlfriend and her sister.”
I had the feeling there were things he was leaving out. Rourke and Rob had left them out too.
“You should get out of here,” Mark said. “This isn’t the place for you.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Trust me. You haven’t. The night is young.”
I stepped away, and he followed, closing in on me, parting a fan of leaves above my head that was obstructing his view. When they flopped back, he snapped off the shoot, twisting it crudely, throwing the piece down. I looked at it on the deck, uncurling slightly, as if in a final sigh. I leaned on the rail. Mark leaned as well, his forearm skimming mine. The stars were far—I pointed.
“Look how far they are,” I said. “September’s coming.”
“No, Eveline,” Mark said. “September’s here.”
At the driver’s door, Rourke paused. “Mind driving?”
I knew he hadn’t been drinking. Anyway, I said sure. When we changed places, our bodies brushed at the front of the car, which was unsettling. Behind the wheel, the view was his view; this was also unsettling.
“Ever driven standard?” he asked.
I pressed back into the seat to stop shivering. “No.”
“Take the stick.” He covered my hand with his own and jiggled it. “This is neutral. Now turn the key.”
I started the engine, and the car came alive. Though I’d often heard talk of the car’s specifications—a 400 cubic V-8 engine with 335 horsepower and a 4-barrel Rochester carb—I hadn’t until then understood their meaning. It sort of lifted and hovered.
“Step on the clutch,” Rourke said, “and put it into first.” With his help I guided the bar to first, where it nuzzled into a nook. There was no need to ask if I was in gear—nothing feels so right as an exact fit. “Come off slowly, as you press the accelerator.”
The car churned down and pulled forward, making me think of sled dogs. It seemed to want to go faster, farther. It was as if I was holding it back. He told me to hit the clutch again, and he drew down my hand, helping me pop it up into second, and next third.
We went to the ocean, to one of the private beaches in Napeague. It was where he wanted to go. Despite the mildness of the night, the deserted beach seemed inhospitable, practically haunted, like the ruins of a building following a raging fire. I didn’t feel well. I started to shiver.
“Still cold?” he asked, looking to the shore. There was a blanket in back that smelled of sweat and wilted grass, and when he wrapped it around me, sand from the morning trickled down.
He asked about my family.
I said I didn’t have one.
“You have a mother,” he said. “I’ve met her.”
Strange that he had, strange that he’d kept it to himself. Probably he’d met her with Kate. Maybe Kate had called her Mom, saying, Harrison, this is my Mom, and maybe Rourke shook my mother’s hand and told her what a great girl Kate was, all the while searching in my mother for traces of me.
“And a father too,” he added.
I didn’t know what he was getting at, but I was convinced of my parents’ irrelevance regardless. I thought of his house in Spring Lake, his apartment, those giant rhododendrons. And his chest, disfigured in a fight over his dead father. You didn’t need to know his parents to feel them; they were incorporated into the boy they’d raised. Whatever it was that had attracted him to me was the result of absence, not presence.
“It’s not what you might think,” I said, though it was too late, really, to speak of myself. “It’s like something else, like never having been heard.”
He laid his hand on my thigh, and for a moment we froze, immobilized by the insinuation of sex, by its promise to restore us to conditions of denial, to get us past the putrid business of relating. I focused on the dashboard.
Rourke withdrew his hand with excessive caution, as if from a house of cards, and he lifted my face—reverently, like a chalice. “Something,” he said, kissing me, “about you.”
His mouth, that mouth, nearing, advancing, seeking in vain to capture all that I did not have and could not give. His wrists joined beneath my chin, supporting my head. His thumbs pressed my cheeks.
“Do you know what I feel?”
I said yes, yes I did. I knew a kiss was not enough and sex was not enough and living with him was not enough. I knew the irony of having failed despite the extremes of our consummation, that it was not conceivable to reach the place we needed to go. Around his eyes were beautiful creases. His knuckle dug into my jawbone, forcing my head sideways, my ear to his lips.
“And you,” he said. “You would do anything.”
“Anything,” I said.
I began to cry. I thought to wipe my eyes, but I liked looking as I felt, a thing half-dead. He covered my mouth with his palm, and he waited, breathing, driving himself back. “Then I’ll ask for what you can’t give,” he said. “Nothing.”
The light from the moon off the ocean beat against the car like a stationary rain, bathing us in a pool of white, turning everything the color of bones. In such light I could see: I could see he was alive, extraordinarily alive, and I could see his will to persevere. I could see that he had abandoned that will when he’d met me, and that he needed to return to it. I could see the hatred that followed from his need, the rage at his defeat in wanting me. It was the fiend he believed himself to be that expressed itself in the light.
We remained in the car until daybreak, and we had sex for so long that inside I hurt. I thought I understood. We had to go until there was no going back, until it was certain that we could not meet again without recalling the degradation of our final night, until all that we’d shared had turned irreclaimable. His eyes never stopped staring. They seemed to shed their own color, like casting off black. The wry malice in his face, the animosity, the challenge to his successor—could he see him? It seemed that he could see him. Rourke seemed to be leaving in me some message or a sign, changing me for good.
In the end, the car was moving, and I was receding, every second thinning more. Through my mouth, my breaths sounded like those of a felled animal. I could hear the hydraulic thunder of the engine, like a sound from some contiguous time, and the fizz of the wind through glass. I raised one hand to my window. My hand was heavy like lead reaching into the dead sunrise.
I dreamt I was hauling boxes through tides of sand. I was alone, and the terrain was rugged. I passed a figure suspended in the cliffs, red and robed and supported by string, warning me. Ahead of me was my destination, a camp—snakelike, ophidian, like a low, slinking train of lantern lights. From the camp I knew I could be seen walking alone. On the way, I met a woman. She was crying, and on her face were burnt braids. These have not disappeared, she said, since coming to America. Disappeared is a beautiful word, I thought—appeared, dis-appeared. I also met an eagle, decrepit and drooling. It said, Your mother was luxurious and your father was luxurious. I asked the eagle what I must be, and he said, What you were meant to be. The last part of the dream was about a figure, several figures melded to one. They lifted me; they pulled away; I levitated. There was an imposing wetness on my legs and around my neck. And hands, sure and soft, there but hardly there.
I felt for my head—my hand couldn’t find it; it hurt to think where it had gone. I did not move from my back. I could not. Slowly and by degrees, questions formed in my mind, not many, only so many as my intellect could tolerate. I felt pressure in my pelvis. I wondered if I needed to pee.
“What happened?” I asked, or tried to ask.
A cup met my lips. “You had a fever,” he said.
My eyes, they opened, and my hand drifted up to stop the sunshine. Rourke raised my shoulders inches from the pillow and shifted me to face away from the window. Beneath the sheets I was naked.
“How long—”
He said two days.
Two days. I remembered speaking. “What did I say?”
He moved to where I could see him easily. “You just slept.”
I met his eyes; they had grown small. He’d spent two days alone with his trespass and his lust. Two days to think what it meant to abandon me, betray me. I wondered did he f*ck me while I was sleeping.
“What did I say?” I repeated.
“You apologized,” he said, cautious not to tender his voice. “You said you were sorry.”
He carried me to the bath, and set me down in the water, feet first, then his hands on my arms, helping me to sit. He sat too, on the rim of the tub. I straightened my legs and shivered as he trickled water from his hands onto my head, my back, my chest, and he helped me wash. I looked up, and he looked down, and there was an admission in his eyes that matched the feeling of admission in my own. It was not supposed to have ended this way, with him clinging so kindly to the shell of me and our eyes meeting. Had we left each other after the car, we would have had only the worst to sustain us. But the accident of my illness had ruined everything. His presence by the bed, the remedial caress of his hands, the way he’d nursed me like a dressless doll through an anxious sleep, the pouring of water, the pouring of water—I couldn’t think anymore. My heart was thoroughly broken.
“I thought—I guess I thought you would go someplace close.”
He looked at me carefully, so there could be no doubt, and he said, “It won’t be close.”