33
“You can’t bring that bird in here.”
The bird twitches lamely in my scarf. Mark approaches from the couch, dropping his Wall Street Journal, crossing over.
I don’t understand. I say, “It’s already here.”
“You can’t keep it here. It’s full of disease.” He ushers me onto the terrace. “Set it free.”
I look down twenty-five floors. I say, “It can’t fly.”
“It’s a bird,” he says. “It’ll figure it out.”
Mark doesn’t know about birds. We once saw a documentary about condor eggs stolen from their nests and hatched in captivity. The narrator said that those eggs were the last, and the risk of them being eaten by predators was very great. In the movie, puppet bird heads nursed chicks through rubber gaskets in incubators, and wildlife technicians scaled mountains to set fattened chicks in place of the eggs they’d stolen. The camera remained on the babies as they sat blinking and shivering, awaiting the likely rejection of their mother.
“Why are you crying?” Mark had asked. “They’re being rescued.”
He could not conceive of the depth of the mess. He could not see the calamity of a genetic last chance, of having your offspring stolen because you cannot be depended upon to provide. In his way, he tried to help.
“Let’s fly to Washington, D.C.,” he suggested soon after, “to see the cherry blossoms. And the zoo.”
On the airplane the stewardess in first class catered to us. Her tag said Jana. When Jana bent, she bent low. She served us croissants and fruit salad with real silverware and mimosas in real glass, and when we dropped things like sunglasses or sugar cubes, she retrieved them. Jana seemed to think she could get something from us, or anyway, from Mark, like maybe he would leave me on board and take her instead. Humans are remarkable in terms of need. We all have plans like maps in the mind.
“Here y’all go,” Jana said, leaning down to hand me aspirin, revealing exquisite cleavage. The saturated color of her eyes bled into the white, making a subordinate color, which was spooky. If I had eyes like that, I might have become a stewardess too.
In our room at the Hay-Adams, I played with the curtains, opening and closing them—White House. No White House. When Mark went for a run, I ended up in the lounge. The bartender seemed to think I needed a margarita, and after I finished it, I thought I needed another. There was a stack of cocktail napkins, and I had the urge to draw—not so much to draw as to feel the pen squish into the cushion of paper. I drew intertwining things—feathers and patchwork quilts, corncobs and tatters of burlap.
Eventually Mark rushed in. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” He talked overloud as if to a dog he’d left tied to a parking meter. Mark doesn’t like people to think he is not tending to things. He over-tipped the bartender, then steered me toward the door. “So you’ve been drawing!” he said, loudly. He was always trying to get me to draw.
In the early morning before the zoo, we went to the cherry blossoms. We were the first there, and it was nice to circle beneath the continuous, low, and protective parasol of flowers. The Washington Monument appeared unexpectedly here and there through the branches like a stylus referring to the infinitude of heaven. Actually zoo is incorrect. Zoos are conservation societies now, which is why there are pie charts and bar graphs in the doorways of every exhibit. But visitors who do not want to read about the importance of environmental equilibrium can still enjoy the sight of submission. They can see primal needs confront civility.
Mark told me the animals have no memory of home. And yet I could see traces of savagery and pride. In order to persevere, they assign home to a position within themselves; they store it, safeguard it. By their eyes they say—We will return. Look into the eyes of anyone who has suffered diaspora and you will find a home, implicit and original, glinting like specks of starlight. You will envy them. You will wish their home were your home. You will know irony because you have nothing as substantial to assist your identity.
Maybe home is elusive to so many because it is not a place we should be seeking, but a zone of self-determination. In order to arrive there, you must first relinquish false knowledge of a false self. You must allow your learned rendition of reality to turn back to conjecture, allow your life to grow small again, like someone beloved left at a railway station, growing narrower and shallower as the train pulls away, a hugeness waning. And then when it’s far gone, you can actually see it. Your home. Yourself.
“There’s one there.” Mark pointed to a tiger. “Blanche.”
She was high in the grass, the fake zoo grass. I saw her eyes and chocolate flame markings. I saw her panting at rest. It seemed to me that she was missing the moonlight. I wondered if she missed the moonlight as much as I missed drunken walls of cattails by the bay and barefoot walks across parking lots coated with the frailest layer of sand, blown like glitter from the palm of a giant hand. Could she still hear the thudding bluster of wind against the night the way I could still hear the roaring fortress of the sea? Did she too hate her hunger—when her appetite stirred, did a plate appear? The most awful hunger is the type that is satisfied too soon, before it moves you, before you are moved by it, before it becomes protracted and superior, a motivating business, making you honorable, graceful, clever—a hunter.
I turn in from the terrace. The broken bird jerks and trembles. “I’ll keep it someplace small,” I say. “I won’t catch a disease.”
Mark sees we have reached an impasse. On certain subjects I cannot be moved. “Let’s get Manny,” he declares brightly.
Manuel the super is in his office in the swill-green subbasement, pouring black wax coffee from a thermos. He drinks ten cups a day. He is diabetic. When I said that to Mark, he asked how would I have come to know such a thing. I said I assumed that anyone who drinks that much coffee is not drinking it for caffeine but for milk and sugar. The next time Mark saw Manny, he asked him directly, and Manny confirmed my guess, only he didn’t use the word diabetic. He said, “Technically, yes. I have a litty touch of The Sugar.”
On an otherwise vacant metal desk is a miniature TV showing The Dukes of Hazzard. While Mark explains the situation with the bird, Manny glides evenly to the cradle of my arms, steaming cup in hand. “Twisted wing,” he surmises, using one pinky to check. His voice dips beneath Mark’s, speaking only to me. “Don’t worry,” he says with a wink. “She’s not broken.”
There is a cardboard box in a cove behind the service elevator, and when Manny kicks it out, a thousand keys jounce like sleigh bells against his uniformed navy thigh. Manny builds a bed of rags. “We’ll keep it in the boiler room. I’ll tell Frank to lock the cats.”
It takes four days for the bird to heal. Manny constructs a Popsicle-stick splint, though we never actually use it, and Frank, the assistant super, buys it a seed ball. It isn’t a very pretty bird, just a sparrow.
“Technically,” Manny says, when we finally release it into the courtyard, “we could have freed her sooner.”
Everything with Manny is always technically this and technically that. We watch the bird skip and flutter. Spring is here. There are crocuses. It scares me to see them poking out like little green horns. How did spring come again so quickly? It seems just to have passed. It’s strange, but I’ve lost track of birthdays and seasons; in my memory there are islands that have turned dark.
“But it was happy,” Manny concludes. “Maybe it needed a vacation. It’s gotta be tough, being a bird like that in a place like this.”
We drink Stolichnaya at Café Luxembourg, and we lament the decline of America. We blame groups. Blaming groups shows that you yourself are not involved but that you are intellectually connected, especially if the group you blame appeared in Sunday’s New York Times. When I say “we” I do not mean me, though I cannot exempt myself insofar as I am present. When a pack of wolves mangles a carcass, it doesn’t matter which one’s not eating that much.
“You and Mark are so cute!” Naomi exclaims in the bathroom. Everything happens in the bathroom. The clock stops. There is a kink in the spin of the world. She comes out of the stall sniffing, pinching her nostrils. “It must be wonderful to be in love.”
I don’t think I’m in love. I don’t know, maybe I am. I smile, sort of. I think I smile.
We return to the table, me behind her, her ravishing ass ticking like a metronome set high. She hits shoulders, practically, of men in chairs on the way. We sit side by side. Naomi is a model. Sitting next to Naomi is like sitting next to a Kleenex. When you ask a question, she tilts her head and flits her eyes and asks you to repeat yourself, which you don’t bother to do, because whatever you asked the first time was already so abridged for her benefit that it does not bear repeating. We order the same meals. That is to say, she copies mine.
“Yeah, that,” Naomi simpers on the heels of my order, handing back an unopened menu. It occurs to me that she cannot read.
Mark and Richard Spencer switch to Chivas Regal Royal Paisley, and they discuss supply-side economics, the $235 price of Hanson Citation ski boots, fluctuations in the index, and fishing in Argentina, which is the place to buy land. Richard is Mark’s boss; he is the one with the dent in his head that makes him appear cleavable. “Mia and I are going in September. Why don’t you join us?” Richard says of Argentina, adding discreetly, “Everyone there is white. It’s not what you’d think.”
Richard’s girlfriend Mia’s name is not pronounced Mee-a, but My-a. This you must know without being told. If you cannot intuit this, it confirms your lack of sophistication. Then you will be ostracized and Mark will never make partner at work.
Mia loves September. “All the new fashion!”
Mark looks at me, his eyes wide, his manner encouraging. I’m supposed to reply. His head makes miniature downward jerks as if he’s watching me struggle to tap out a dance he’s already perfected.
“Fashion—and—September,” I say. “Yes, I think so too.” This is a lie. To me September is watermelon rinds with panes of ants, monarch butterflies migrating to Mexico, chestnut leaves like shriveled stars fallen to the ground, luminescent dragonflies catching the sun off the cliffs in Montauk, cranberries on the bogs out in Napeague, sweet autumn clematis hanging over fences in Sag Harbor.
Brett snaps a match and lights a clove cigarette. Brett is Mark’s best friend. They met in kindergarten at Collegiate. Brett is sort of a 50-percent man—not 50-percent like left or right, but 50-percent like partial or deformed. Brett is into bonds; he says bonds are the thing. Naomi is Brett’s date. Brett dates only models. The men are talking, cataloging the ravages of nature—earthquakes, fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, mud slides, plagues, killer bees. I wonder, why do they expect the earth to remain passive as we pave it?
“Let’s head to Xenon after chow,” Brett brays like an old quarter horse.
A few tables down, a girl cries into her drink. I feel bad about that. I think I know how she feels.
——
At the curb I announce that I am not going. The curb is the place for such announcements, especially when everyone is half in a waiting cab. That way it’s too late for objections.
Mark’s grip on my elbow tightens. He turns to me; his brows are furrowed. “What is it?”
“I have some reading to do, you know, for school.” I wave lightly into the taxi, into the frosty aggregate of heads. “Good night.” They do not wave back.
Mark has Brett and Naomi hold the first cab, then hails me a second one. He pays in advance. It’s not that he doesn’t trust me with cash; it’s his way of controlling outcomes. If ever there are ways to control outcomes, Mark discovers them. “Things tend to happen to you,” he always says. “You’re like a magnet that way.”
“Drive safely,” Mark tells the driver. “Very safely. Keep the change.”
He adjusts the collar on his cashmere overcoat and kisses me, lingeringly. He wants to come, but it would not look right. It would seem like something it should not. You can always count on Mark to conform, which is good. A girl has to be able to count on something.
The cab pulls out, and I submerge myself into the duct-taped vinyl seat. It feels good to sink into a taxi seat after you’ve been drinking. It’s like settling into a steamy bath or removing tight shoes. I’m happy to be relieved of having to socialize, or more accurately, to appear, somewhat like a logo. There is that flowery smell in the cab, that peculiar taxi smell, lazy and reliable and without obvious origin—not aerosol, not incense, not those little hanging pine trees. Denny says the glass crowns on dashboards contain magic tinctures and essences—vanilla and vetiver and frankincense—but tonight there is no crown. I remind myself to call Denny. Tonight, I’ll call. Possibly tonight. Or maybe tomorrow.
The city snakes past—very safely past, and I pretend to fly. Sometimes in a taxi you can pretend you are flying. I blur my eyesight like I am swooping, skimming the surface of the planet.
When we turn off Tenth Avenue onto West Sixtieth Street, Carlo jogs out to the curb and waits. It’s like a relay race, and I am the baton passed palm to palm, Mark to Carlo. Carlo is the night doorman. I wonder what he does with his days. His children are at school and his wife is at work at a blood lab on Lexington Avenue. Does he sleep past noon, eat cold pork chops, go to the barber or the bank? Sometimes I see him walking to work from the subway in a dress shirt and jacket. The toes of his good shoes are woven like kitchen chair caning. Invariably there is a storm of aftershave.
He grips the handle and assists me, steering me clear of the vehicle while closing the door and nodding professionally to the driver.
“Thank you, Carlo,” I say. The alcohol on my breath vines up about us. I wonder if he pities me. Sometimes you can’t help but pity the people you meet.
He whisks me through the entry and gestures to a hideaway by the mailboxes. “There’s cleaning.” He looks me over and reconsiders. “No problem. I wait for Mr. Ross.”
“It’s okay, Carlo. I’ll take it.” He hands it over, and I topple. “Wow,” I smile. “Heavy!” Mark sends everything out; even jeans get cleaned and pressed. Carlo tries to get the stuff back from me. There’s a minor tussle. “I’m fine,” I say, spinning the load behind me and involuntarily going half-around again to face the wall. I right myself. “I need something in here. A nightgown.”
He’s unconvinced but too circumspect to confront me on the subject of lingerie. Anyway, the Solomons are at the curb. He taps the elevator button and backs cautiously away. “You sure you’re okay, Evie?” I nod through the hangers, and he says, “Okay, then. Good night!”
Sandalwood candles line the black Lucite and chrome console that runs beneath the picture window in the bedroom. I light them. Sandalwood is an aphrodisiac, Mark says. Mark says some men wear it for potency. I don’t like the smell, but they’re the only candles in the apartment. Near the candles there is an antique mirror Mark bought for me, hand-beveled from Czechoslovakia with sterling corner clips. In it I see a reflection of a reflection, something cubist and delusory.
“You get more beautiful every day,” Mark often tells me.
I don’t know why he says that, why he bothers. He doesn’t have to work so hard; nothing matters to me. One night I saw myself in another woman, a redhead with dark eye circles and orchid lips. She seemed luckless and afflicted, damaged and indifferent. I could see how a man would want to possess a woman like that. I wondered how she’d made it to that state—breakable with secrets. Did she start out in high school too—just a girl, like me?
I sleep, I wake. I toss, I turn, I brood and flip, and flip, concentrating just to breathe. The ultra-fine texture of my pillow, the detergent smell of the sheets, the genteel tangle of my nightgown. On the bedside table is a bouquet of drying tulips. Every time a petal falls, it cracks when it hits. I reach for my journal but I can’t think of what to write. I wonder how long Mark will stay out. Sometimes you depend upon the sight of yourself in someone else’s eyes. Babies bat at toys to confirm their existence; touch proves that they are. Mark is my proof. I play with the telephone, dialing, dialing, dropping it, dialing. The receiver is extra heavy when no one is listening.
Mrs. Ross arranges a job for me at Mary Boone Gallery, where she buys art. I work four days a week year-round, making ten dollars an hour. I never had so much money. I don’t really need it for living, so it sits in the bank. My mother went on welfare and worked as a waitress to put herself through night school, and my grandmother sent her children away when her husband died so she could work two full shifts a day. They each refused to remarry; they would not allow themselves to live off the beneficence of a man. There’s a difference, I think, between a woman who would do that and a woman who wouldn’t.
“Women must make themselves financially self-sufficient,” Mrs. Ross says one day at the Ross’s New York apartment. She rifles through her closet, handing her unwanted clothes to me. “It’s never too soon to start.”
“Mom, you don’t work,” Alicia flatly states. “You never have.”
“For money,” she says dismissively. “A technicality.” Mrs. Ross is a volunteer for the National Organization for Women. She is an ardent feminist, a soldier in the fight for the ERA, Title IX, and right-to-choose legislation, counting such women as Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Marilyn French, Marlo Thomas, and Frances Lear among her closest friends.
The art Mrs. Ross buys is experimental, but she claims it will be worth something someday, and she really does know art. She was an early collector of Andy Warhol’s and Robert Rauschenberg’s. In her latest Hamptons collection there are canvases with broken plates and electronic readout signs and photographs of headless baby dolls. The entire house was painted white last summer to feature it all.
“It looks like a Yugoslavian burn ward,” Mr. Ross complained when he saw it.
In the New York apartment the art is much nicer, though there is no Goya in the living room. One of Mr. Ross’s clients has a Goya in the living room of a Fifth Avenue apartment where maids wear black-ruffle French uniforms with sheer aprons like in porno films. We went there once for an event. Those people must have felt very important to have purchased that painting, to possess something of such historic value, to control its destiny. There is a buzz, sort of, to mix your tiny fate with the great fate of antiquity. All around the city, all around the world, there is a buzz.
Mark held me the first time I saw the Goya and stood admiring it. “Someday we’ll have money like that. Someday soon.”
Rob contrives reasons to see me. He brings poorly folded newspaper clippings about things like the MoMA reopening and van Gogh at the Met and current events articles about artificial hearts and test-tube babies. He asks for help filling out Lotto slips, then he makes plans for the things we’re going to do with the winnings. He teaches me creative accounting—game theory and magic tricks and hand signals for cheating at cards. Also how to decipher market data and racing forms and the science behind the daily number and the sucker schemes behind the boardwalk games, like the wood blocks placed behind the cats—those stiff flip-down dolls you throw hardballs at. They don’t even look like cats.
“She’s quick,” Rob says approvingly to Mark. “Very quick. I think she’s ready for under/overs and the vig.”
One day Rob came and talked excitedly about construction in Atlantic City, Harrah’s, and how great it was gonna be, and also all the action down at the Criterion. He talked about the Holmes-Cooney TKO the previous week, and when Mark said, “Let me tell you something, old-timers like Joe Louis and Jack Johnson could pummel today’s boxers,” Rob didn’t engage. He just glowered and said, “F*ck you, Mark.”
When Rob left that day, he seemed particularly torn. I walked him to the door of the apartment, and he faced me squarely with his hands on my arms to say goodbye. The look on his face was aggrieved, like the look of a healthy person leaving a hospital patient alone with their terminal disease. He glanced up at Mark, as though he was considering grabbing me and making a break for it. He started to speak, but Mark interrupted.
“Hold on. Let’s ask the boss,” Mark was saying to someone on the other end of the phone, Brett probably. He set the receiver on his shoulder, asking, “Sushi, baby, or Thai?”
I turned back and Rob had gone. The door ka-thunked against the vacuum of the hallway. I touched myself, feeling for effects. There ought to have been effects. I searched for signs of him—the cup he’d used, the newspaper he’d carried. There was a football on the coffee table that he’d rolled in his hands. He’d been wearing a tank top, and he had a new tattoo—a cobra on his right shoulder. Every time the ball spun, the cobra flickered.
“Ev says sushi,” Mark reported falsely. “We’ll meet you at Japonica at eight.”
A kiss at the beach, salt on my lips. I open my eyes to see but the sky is slit by a streak of bobbing pentacles, a blinding row of asterisks that cascade from the sun to me. I wonder if the sun can blind me.
Mark says no. “It cannot.”
He met some Harvard graduate school friends by the lifeguard station, Lisa and Tim Connelly. The Connellys are architects “talking to the Hilton” in Atlanta. If you ask what is the meaning of that, of “talking to the Hilton,” you will be told, negotiating a major contract. If you ask, “Doesn’t Atlanta have its own architects?” you will be told of the Connellys, “They’re hot. They just did Avon.”
There is logic to business, just don’t expect to find it. It’s really non-logic masquerading as logic, and it depends upon the fact that you, and people like you, are too stupid or too busy to make inquiries. When considering the convoluted principles of business deals, look for nepotism, cronyism, extortion, insider trading, ordinance evasion, or bulk airline fares.
“We’re meeting them at the Lobster Roll later.”
“No,” I say, squinting up. “Not the Lobster Roll.” I will never go back.
Mark stiffens, the hand at his jaw clutching a tiny peak of towel. He pats his face, drying it, and he smiles. “No problem. The Clam Bar.”
He goes no further. There is nothing to fix when he finds what he wants in the wreckage of me. Like a missionary, he is called upon to save—saving is atonement for his ascendancy. And like missionaries who marry natives, he is inspired to emancipate deeply, down to the level of the DNA. It doesn’t matter that I feel nothing, say nothing; it matters simply that I am docile. He is resolved and he is apt, and if he suffers from my apathy, he shows no sign of it. There is much at stake in the rescue of me—I cannot begin to guess what.
I feel his shadow growing over my body. He kisses me again, saying, “I love you.”
I believe that that is true. He truly loves the lie that is me.
“I’ll go tell Lisa and Tim that there’s been a change. It might take me awhile. You want something to eat before we go, an apple, a peach?”
I don’t answer. I don’t eat fruit anymore. He knows I don’t. I can’t bear the idea of seeds or pods. I close my eyes again and lift my hips to straighten my towel. In my mind there is a place to hide, padded and small like a cell. No one gets in. No one dares to try.
In my dream, we are together again. There are three separate locations. The first is at his sister’s house, though he doesn’t even have a sister.
“Come in,” she says, inviting me into her kitchen. I can still see it perfectly; it will never leave me—the orientation, the light, the furnishings. The counters are the color of putty, the walls are stone-yellow. From someplace close there is the faint sound of children, like the crackle of fire or the sotto voce gurgle of sewer water.
Her husband comes in directly behind me, tossing down his keys and patting her waist. He calls the kids, nodding to me as he passes. He is a good husband, I think. My eyes trail him as he disappears down the corridor.
At the end of the hall is Rourke. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him. He smiles. I smile too; I’m happy. I feel distinctly that this happiness is wholly new. He is going to take a shower. He asks, “Do you mind waiting?”
When he goes, his sister hands me a letter he’s written. In it he confesses so much. I hold it in my hand, gripping it tightly.
He and I begin to walk through a deserted village. There is a soft wind, like shrouds blowing softly. As we walk, we pass houses and churches and graveyards, and we decide things, though for me there is nothing to decide.
In the hallway of an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I attend the future. Rourke is there—but only visiting. This I know because his feet do not touch ground. Children chase children throughout the apartment. It is a party, a birthday party. He and I speak to each other with undivided attention. There is the knowledge that I have withdrawn my feelings from a strictly guarded place, like jewels from a box.
The children burrow in a train under the bridge of his legs, and one stops, the one that is mine. I know it is mine by the way Rourke pauses to admire him, and the boy peers up with peculiar tilted brown eyes. In my dream there is a perceptivity about the boy. He seems to see what we are unable to see, though we have been powerfully seeking. I see the tiny hands hold the giant leg. And Rourke touching him, raising him up.
Mrs. Ross gets four tickets to see Betty Comden and Adolph Green perform excerpts of their work at Guild Hall in East Hampton. “And then we’ll go to The Palm after the show.”
“Great!” Mark says. Mark says great, though he knows I don’t want to go. I don’t ever want to go back to Guild Hall, where the play was held in high school, but I can’t decline. That would require discussion. It’s pointless to discuss anything with anyone.
The theater has a musty and untrafficked smell. It’s as though nothing has moved here in the intervening time, or as though I’m not visiting an actual place but some sort of eyeless pit inside myself. Everything has been strangely preserved. There are things I once touched—walls and chairs and scenery items—that probably have not been thoroughly cleaned of my prints, and that is sad, like I was here in fact, but, in fact, it doesn’t matter. I have ceased somehow, yet only in portion. To have ceased completely, well that would be something.
Rourke is present all around, clear in my memory and in my mind. All the areas where I remember him to have been are brought into focus. There are the seats we sat in on the night of that play, the night he said he was looking forward to the end of all this, the night he kissed me on the cheek at Dan’s house. And, though it is not cold, I feel cold, and I recall the way that I loved him, and the blind faith of seventeen. I was never afraid then, though I’m always afraid now, which is incorrect, since the worst has already happened. Perhaps at first he did not love me, perhaps he never loved me. But if he wanted me only for sex and readiness, at least that’s better than being with a man like Mark who wants you for reasons you cannot even fathom. Without the knowledge of why you are desired, you are powerless, an object. Love is not reciprocal.
At The Palm we will eat meat, and I will be made to speak. Not much, maybe just what did I think of the show and is my food okay. “They’re going to mention Christmas at the Breakers,” Mark warned. “Try not to say anything negative about Florida. Or about being afraid to fly.”
From the moment we arrive at the restaurant, Mrs. Richard Ross—Theo—will capture the attention of every decent gentleman, as she is breathtaking and ageless, with cascading blond hair and a sea-salted, rose-hip-oiled body, and silk blouses skimming skirts that go narrow to her knees. Over a succession of chilled vodkas, Mr. Ross will tell stories of celebrities and money, because that is what is expected of him, but when he digresses inevitably into tales of his youth, he will address me to the exclusion of the others. Unlike the others, I know what it is to have nothing and to lose everything. Unlike the others, I am not imperiled by my need or his nostalgia. He was just a man once, unprivileged, a fighter of sorts, much like Rourke, and I see that—that is to say, I grasp that, and he senses my grasp. He senses what I truly feel—that few things in life are more beautiful than the bareness of a man.
In any event, he is kind, as is his wife. It’s kind of them to take care of me and to treat me like family when I am not. It is right to respect your children’s choices. And the Ross family is a nice family to have if you have no other.
I stop by to visit my mother on a Sunday morning one weekend in East Hampton. I hear her through the screen door before I see her.
“Well, the apple and the fly symbolize sin and evil,” she is saying speculatively. “And the cucumber and the goldfinch are redemption.”
“I need seven letters,” my aunt says. “Symbol of Christian sway—how about cypress?”
“Cypress is longevity,” Powell replies.
“Try crosier,” my mother says. “The bishop’s staff, the shepherd’s crook.”
“That fits,” Lowie says. “With an S or a Z?”
I step in past the door, saying hi.
Mom leaps to greet me. “Eveline!” Right away her face darkens. “Have you been sick?”
Powell also stands. He kisses me and steps back, squinting as he regards me. “She looks good to me, Babe. Same as always.”
“She just grew,” Lowie insists quietly, drawing her cane in front of her, but not getting up. “Come over here, honey. Sure you did.”
“She has at least four inches on me, Low,” my mother remarks indignantly. “And she’s no heavier. She needs at least ten pounds.”
Powell tips his head. “Maybe your mother’s right. Maybe.”
Mom lectures me on the perils of health foods. She is biased against health foods. She thinks if you use them, you belong to a giant mind-control society. As if consumers of cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, and soda do not belong to a giant mind-control society.
“You don’t have to work in the city this summer, Eveline,” she suggests. “Stay at home. We’ll install a bathroom in the barn. You can work at the Lobster Roll again.”
It’s nice of her to think of me, but sometimes even the nicest plans are unbearable. “The gallery is fine,” I reassure them. “I answer phones and file slides and design invitations to openings. And New York is nice in summer with no one there.” In the mornings SoHo is like Paris, damp and hueless blue. “I’ve been thinking of calling Dad and Marilyn soon. Maybe we’ll go to the movies. Or try one of those walking tours they take, like through Harlem or Brooklyn Heights.”
My mother’s brow contracts. She and Powell seem unmoved. But if she is contemplating my dishonesty, she’s also calculating the effort required to engage with it. She decides to let it go, and frankly, who can blame her? I wouldn’t want to try to talk to me.
After catching up with all the stories over several cups of coffee, I walk the two miles back to the Ross’s Georgica house, depressed to leave but comforted somewhat for having been vigorously treated. I’m always handled so delicately by Mark and his family. Sometimes I find him staring at me the way you might stare at a fish you keep, like he’s convinced I don’t see him back. How ironic—Mark thinks he’s so considerate, so cultured, such a gentleman, and yet, I’m apparently so adversely altered by his company that people who have never worried about me before, not even when I was in really bad shape, suddenly worry.
The city glints amiably beneath a mannerly drizzle, so I go slow, taking the long way from the Varick Street station to the East Village, pausing to read the plaques on brownstones, stopping at the record store on Carmine Street and the chess shop on Thompson. In the chess section of the newspaper, you read of cornering and abducting, lunging and capturing, yet here players sit face-to-face, inert and imperturbable, insouciantly grazing knees and sharing breath. The combination of mental vigor and physical inertia is weird, like the glacial way reptiles hunt. And the little chessmen are regal and fiendish, like from gory visions you might have had. I buy myself a knight.
“A replacement?” the man asks.
“Yes,” I say. “A replacement.”
McSorley’s is so packed there’s not enough room to choke if you had to. Whenever a girl walks past the sign shop in tight clothes, Tony Abbruscato says to my dad, “Hey, Anton, take a look at this. There’s not enough room to choke in there if you had to.”
Mark and his crowd are in back, half-sitting, half-standing at a table. There is the attorney they’ve all slept with, Marguerite, who’s been engaged unsuccessfully four times. Brett’s with his new girlfriend, Rachel, who is not a model but a former model. There’s a difference: a former model is just as vain as a working model, only a former model is just so happy to be out of the industry. Mark’s friend Anselm is with his fiancée, Helene de Zwart. They’re all calooshing their mugs like it’s Oktoberfest in Germantown. Mark’s tie is flapped over his shoulder as if blown by a strong wind. I know exactly the kind of night it’s going to be.
They see me and wave. I unzip my coat. Brett leaps to his feet and croons loudly; he used to be in a band.
“There she was just a-walkin’ down the street, singin’ …”
The bar joins in,
“Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do.”
Right off, a couple of guys step in front of me, blocking my way, asking would I like to stop at their table instead of where I’m headed. Mark and Brett bust over, and there is nonsense shouting and miscellaneous intimidation, culminating in a few clapped backs and an upturned chair or two. As our group gets escorted out, Marguerite stands, fashionably posed, toe-deep in sawdust, clutching the milky top to her Chanel Pierrot suit, paying the tab. Marguerite always manages to be fashionable, even in the midst of picking up the bill during a bar fight. Shopping is her life. She will tell you all about the three Bs—Bendel’s, Barneys, Bergdorf’s—and how she never wears underpants because they corrupt the clean line of slacks. She rarely speaks to me, though she does stare an awful lot, and once I caught her in Mark’s bedroom, going through my drawers.
The first time we met, she looked me over and exclaimed to Mark, “Au naturel!”
Mark always apologizes for her, which is unnecessary. She’s one of those women who make you sad, no matter how scrupulously they dress or how much money they claim to make or what fabulous event they supposedly attended the previous evening. Of course there are women who have the opposite effect, inspiring complete admiration and awe. They wear blue jeans but no makeup and they have gorgeous eleven-year-old sons. All the best women have good skin and gorgeous eleven-year-old sons.
Outside on a murky unlit Fifth Street, the group straightens their ruffled jackets and calculates what to hit next—Odeon for burgers or Chinatown for pork fried rice. Brett pees in a doorway. The urine makes the shape of a lizard on the ground.
Marguerite takes my hand. “Oooh, how short your nails are! So easy to manage!”
Mark picks me up at the gallery after lunch on Fridays and we go to East Hampton. Other employees stay until six, and some work through the weekend. I never asked for the abbreviated schedule; Mark arranged it. It doesn’t make me tremendously popular with the staff, though the salespeople are careful to remain friendly in case I have any power over Mrs. Ross.
“You’re there to build a résumé,” Mark says, “not to make friends.”
Each week he pulls onto the curb and bounds up to retrieve me because I don’t always recognize the car. There’s always a different car—he is perpetually testing, borrowing, buying, trading vehicles. The beloved 356B Porsche remains in East Hampton, except for those special occasions when he needs to make a dramatic impression. Whenever I hear that, I think of the first time he showed it to me—and how, yes, I was dramatically impressed.
Today Sara Eden is there. She has just arrived from Washington, D.C., for a family reunion, so she is driving out with us. As Mark escorts me to the car, Sara steps out and moves toward me. I’d forgotten how beautiful she is. I hang my head slightly, feeling ashamed.
She kisses me hello and her fingers make a circle around my wrist bone. “You’re white as a sheet. When was the last time you saw a doctor?” she whispers sharply once Mark is out of earshot.
Mark drives south down the cobblestoned Mercer Street; he likes to take the Manhattan Bridge straight off of Canal. The architecture in SoHo deceives. Loading docks and freight elevators allude to industry, though there no longer is any. Behind the cast-iron fa?ades, abandoned factories have been gutted and sterilized to make loft apartments. No one cares to think too long or hard about the long-term consequences of the loss of American manufacturing. Except my father, whose first job was at Shuttleworth Carton Company, a die-cutter on West Broadway, and who complains that moving industry to where it can’t be seen isn’t stopping industry. He always says that we’re still polluting the same goddamned planet.
“Every idiot thinks they’re entitled to flushing toilets and a space station future, but nobody can make a cardboard box anymore,” he would lament when he and Marilyn walked west to SoHo to see me. “If we keep sending the dirty work overseas, what happens in the next depression?”
My father is always talking about the next depression like you can set your clock to it, though if it’s coming, no one in New York seems concerned. They’re there to get what they can for themselves for as long as possible before cutting out to follow their dream. Chiseled blondes in Agnès B. miniskirts, hip Asian girls in obtuse shoes from Tootsi Plohound, and gray-haired gallery directors in tortoiseshell eyewear sell transparencies of Jesus and close-up photos of genitalia and elysian landscapes in oil copied off of overhead projections. At openings, girls with body-painted breasts serve drinks but fail to hold anyone’s attention. Faces whoosh at you as though ejected from fireplace bellows saying, What a fabulous show! During lunch, people swarm the pay phones like flies on fruit, waiting peevishly to call their answering machines, the latest must-have devices. They bang in numbers with lightning-fast accuracy, desperate for messages, for recognition, for distinction among the masses.
Lately I’ve been thinking of Cuba. I imagine it to be the last original place. All you ever hear of Cuba is, There is no freedom there! Television is state-controlled! Yet for all the supposed freedom in America, there is a confounding deficit of ingenuity in terms of thought and taste. Style is dictated by the controlling influences and concerns of a mass marketplace. People are trained to be dutiful consumers—we all want the same stuff, not because it’s good or useful, necessary or lasting, but because we allow ourselves to be convinced that we can’t live without it. We forgo all logic of quality and durability.
If you travel internationally, you will feel shocked by contemptuous talk of America. To hear your fellow citizens characterized as barbarian shoppers who know nothing of love, food, health, and religion, but everything of lawsuits, fast food, and guns, is to experience a national fidelity of which you may not have thought yourself capable. And yet, you’re at a loss for a convincing defense. It’s difficult to refute the accusation of misapplied liberties when rifles are sanctioned but public breastfeeding is not.
At least in Cuba, television doesn’t pretend not to be state-controlled, and supermarkets don’t stock pre-decorated cakes. In the United States, supermarkets carry pre-decorated cakes, walls and racks of them viewable through specially molded plastic flip lids. There are probably factories where women and children labor without protection and bathroom breaks to make lids for those cakes, and that place is undoubtedly governed by exactly the sort of despots Americans vilify. It’s impossible that all the supermarket cakes are purchased and eaten—where do they go when they expire? Do they expire? Why do we need so many? What is so psychologically valuable to the American public about the idea of excess and its obvious corollary—waste?
Sara has been to Cuba through an international program. She says I would love it.
“Don’t say such things,” Mark says as he pulls onto the Manhattan Bridge. “You might not realize it, Sara, but Castro makes prostitutes of his women.”
“Most men make prostitutes of their women, Mark,” Sara says pointedly.
Mark might not be wrong about inequity in Cuba, because Cuba is a dictatorship. Then again, Sara cares about equity and Mark doesn’t. So, his attack on Cuba is insincere but valid, and her defense is sincere but incomplete. Talk is funny; it’s like a volley with no one getting anywhere; it’s better not to bother trying. If it’s blasphemous to imagine running away to someplace different, I remind myself that we are a nation of refugees, and so it would not be so very un-American to reject one orthodoxy for another in pursuit of more pertinent freedoms.
“It’s beautiful, Evie,” Sara says fearlessly. Was she always so unafraid of him; I can’t recall. “It seems untouched by time. Everybody sings.”
Quite often in summer, Mr. and Mrs. Ross will go out to Los Angeles to conduct business. During those weekends, the East Hampton house loads up with chic yuppie strays. Consuela loses dominion of the kitchen to heavyset debutantes with sweaters wrapped around undulating waists, and perfect Bordeaux-colored toenails poking out of high-heeled mules. They assemble tuna shish kebabs, chug Chardonnay, discuss diaphragm sizes, and play house to the combed-down boys on the patio. There’s always this squall of perfumes and constant talk of fat. I never knew until then that cherries were so fattening.
“Everything has a fat content,” Mark’s cousin Luce says with a wink. “Everything.”
Mark knows they don’t like me. He misses no opportunity to force them to endure public displays of affection. He defers to my judgment on the most mundane matters and calls me his better half. Frequently he will grab me and break into an impromptu slow dance. The girls flick mascara-crusted eyes over pink drinks with paper umbrellas that perforate rows of fattening fruits, and they watch us scornfully, thinking foul thoughts of what it is I must do to make him condescend to want me. At the lavishly set patio table, outfitted with Mrs. Ross’s best crystal, linen, and sterling, Mark interrupts any prolonged conversations I might be having with other men, saying things like, “I worked too hard to catch her, Aaron. I’m not about to lose her.” If it’s suggested that we join the others for the nightly skinny-dipping, Mark laughs loud. “Forget it,” he’ll say. “I’m not sharing.”
Despite annual overhauls, the Ross house is essentially the same as the first time I saw it, big and breezy with bound copies of entertainment and fashion magazines in the bookshelves along with the complete works of great authors such as Dickens and Twain and Austen, which are not really books but trompe l’oeil containers for stowing valuables. Of course, classic law texts and journals line the coniferous-green walls of Mr. Ross’s office, but they are of little interest to me as that room is too dismal to visit. Even when Mr. Ross uses it for private phone calls, he drags his armchair out into the hallway. It is the only fixed space in an ever-changing décor.
“What the hell happened here?” Mr. Ross demanded of his wife after one particular renovation. He’d just returned from L.A. to find vines stenciled and painted on all the walls, connecting room to room. “Are those supposed to be leaves?”
“Blakely calls it Byronic,” Mrs. Ross replied matter-of-factly. Blakely is the decorator.
“Byronic!” Mr. Ross removed his jacket at the entrance and stepped tentatively into the living room, looking skyward into bogus foliage. “It looks like Pan might skip through!” He loosened his tie. “Now you listen to me, Theo. An East Hampton home is a country home, and a country home should have a country atmosphere. This place looks like a Lily Pulitzer whorehouse!”
Mark won’t let Blakely near the cottage. He knows I like it as it is, serene as an attic in Europe, with the lambent tread of light coming everywhere at once like little footprints of little animals. He turns off the central air and we lie in front of fans, and through the parted shutters pieces of the beyond blow in—rushes of pollen and random butterflies and flower petals like baby bonnets. At night when the moon is high, I see them skate down the stray prongs of light, and I pretend they are fairies, dancing.
It’s the Friday before Washington’s birthday. The art studio is empty; I am alone. To my right is a pile of contorted tubes, and fresh paint dots line the tray I use as my palette. Today’s paint looks pulpy and alive alongside the scraped and raked stains of old paint. I light candles and turn up the volume on the music, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.
Come una mosca prigioniera—l’ali batte il piccolo cuor!
On the canvas is a female figure, a face and bare shoulders. She first arrived before Christmas, and I examined her as though I’d discovered a dead bird in the house—I tilted my head, wondering where she’d come from, and how to get rid of her. Her body is like living resistance; it cuts across the canvas in two directions and in multiple fields, like stop-motion photography or time-lapse film. The muscles of her chest and shoulders are pronounced as she leans to escape the frame, though her face contradicts her body by addressing the foreground. She connects with the observer despite risk; that is, the risk of exposing her leap as a leap to nowhere. After all, she is trapped in paint.
Yet she has lessons. In revealing intention, she admits the possibility of failure, so she is courageous. Despite her imprisonment, she clings to the idea of freedom, so she is faithful. She reminds me that faith is better than hope. Hope is blind expectation; faith awaits nothing. It is a means of preserving the self, regardless of outcome. With faith, every day of constancy is itself a good day.
In the first review of the new term, Don Matthews, my teacher, told the class that my figure’s story was one of “entrapment and emancipation, a discrepancy not unlike that of Jesus on the cross—wood and flesh, bondage and deliverance, defeat and triumph.” It made me think of how Jack used to call the crucifix the perfect corporate logo. Don was an older version of Jack, if Jack happened to be an irritable art theorist from Dublin with round gold-wire eyeglasses and a full-time job teaching at NYU. It would be good if Jack had a teaching job and glasses. Apparently he didn’t even have five dollars. The most recent news I’d heard about Jack was him hitting up Denny for cash on St. Mark’s Place. When I asked Denny if he knew how to find Jack, he looked at me and said, “It wouldn’t be a good idea right now, Evie.”
I look at my painting once more before preparing to leave the studio. Though I rendered what I thought I saw, the image bears no resemblance to the model used by the class, or, for that matter, to the paintings of the others. For a while it looked like stacks of color until it looked like a woman; then you couldn’t see it the first way anymore. Sometimes you perceive a secondary figure in an image, like the etching of a cube that changes orientation when you blink or the goblet that is obviously a goblet until it is two faces kissing. Sometimes you get stuck in the subordinate state, and that is stranger still, because you recall most clearly that there was an original way of seeing, yet you can’t return to it. When people talk about seeing like a child, they are referring to a state in which the eye and mind are fluid, and can pass easily from specificity to ambiguity. Like when strings of letters look like shapes, not just words.
From a dented El Pico coffee can, I select the black handle of a putty knife and drag it through the wet paint. “I’m sorry,” I say to the figure, saying the words to her that no one ever says to me. And my knife moves. Horizontally, one side, the other, dissecting with new oil the meringue cliffs and ponds of paint that have comprised her image. My hand makes olive lines, repeating, crossing over, bars, and between these, I use a rust color, integrating the two tones, corrupting them, marrying them. Yes, marriage—a corruption—a gain, a loss, a twisted sort of balance.
The room blackens; two hands mask my eyes. The hands are scented like soap from a recent washing. “Don’t move,” Mark whispers into my ear, holding for a minute, kissing the back of my neck. He pulls away and hits the light switch. The fluorescents creak and yaw in their casings, then surge to life. Mark always sneaks up on me. Don Matthews calls him “the ferret.” Don didn’t tell me this directly; I overheard him.
Mark gasps. “Evie! You ruined her!”
I like how she looks. She seems to have satisfied some pressing desire. She adjourns contentedly into paint, defenseless to the very nature of herself, as if only that which made her unique and which gave her substance has the genius to deprive her of continuance. She’d just been so—locked in.
“Consider the importance of process,” Don once said to me. “There is no end greater than the means. Buddhist monks spend days and weeks making sand mandalas, grain by grain. They drop streams of colored sand through the tapered ends of these minuscule funnels to create magnificent patterns intended to graph the order of the universe. At the end, the mandalas are just swept away.”
The painting was nothing. Just paint, just canvas, just work in time. And the time, in turn, is a fragment of my existence. If I had not been living with Mark or taken that class or gotten to know Mr. Matthews, the image would not have materialized—at least not through me. And of course, if she did begin in me, then she hadn’t vanished at all. She’d simply withdrawn, the way turtles’ heads squirm back into shells.
Farewell, I say. In my mind I say it, then my wrist arcs to obscure her entirely.
Mark sighs, exasperated. I wonder what he could possibly think he’s lost. She seems so exclusive to me. I would not want to hang her at his home. Or at Brett’s. Brett bought two other paintings of mine, one of rooftops and one of a bird’s nest. Whenever we go to Brett’s loft, I avoid the bedroom. If Mark forces me to go in, I see the paintings and I end up thinking, Oh, babies, poor babies.
Denny and I are on Bleecker Street under the awning at Figaro’s, and it’s raining. Rain falls, it disappears, more comes. There is a beautiful sizzling sound it makes, like bacon frying. People huddle in doorways. A man in a saturated white parachute suit and Birkenstocks passes. His toes are black.
Denny takes a forkful of deep-dish apple pie. “Know what my mother calls this?” he asks, then answers his own question. “Pandowdy. Want some?”
I shake my head.
“So you’ll do it?” he asks. Denny got money to produce the clothes for a music video one of his friends is shooting. He wants me to design the sets.
“I don’t know. I’ve just been so busy. I really don’t know where the time goes,” I say.
“What are you talking about? You have too much time. You have no life outside Mark or the gallery. And you still look exhausted.”
I am exhausted. It’s exhausting to give up the past as I do, as I have done. It’s like having an autoimmune disease. I fight against myself, against everything that is natural: love, memory, autonomy, desire. I don’t want to breathe. There’s this balance I need to maintain that breathing upsets. I don’t know what it means not to breathe, but I heard Lowie say that everything you have ever done is written into your respiration.
“It’s just, the seasons,” I try to explain to Denny. “And time. I can’t tell if it’s spring, fall, winter. Days of the week run together. I lose track. I don’t even—”
There is a cloudburst, then a downpour. The rain is torrential, a covalent, sticking rain. The building across the street has scaffolding, and the raindrops cascade like marbles through a maze of planks and pipes. It reminds me of that game Mouse Trap. Scaffolding is awful. The other day I was thinking how nice the city will look when all the construction is done. Then I remembered: it will never be done.
Denny sets his knapsack on an adjacent chair, where his cane is hanging. An air conditioner fell out of a fifth-story window on Christopher Street awhile ago and smashed to the ground in front of him. A piece of metal flew into his leg and he had to have surgery. He ended up winning a twenty-four-thousand-dollar settlement.
“If I’d been one step forward,” he’d confided with shock and horror at the time, “it would have killed me. It just wasn’t my time.”
If Denny had been killed by a falling air conditioner, everyone would have said that it was destiny. People would have to say that, just to give meaning to something seemingly meaningless. But he didn’t die, and so the incident becomes irrelevant and remains largely undiscussed, which is regrettable, because of all the remarkable things about life, the most remarkable are the near misses.
When he arrived, he said he’s almost ready to get back to dancing and that we should sign up for instruction soon. He’d bought us a series of lessons for Christmas last year, or possibly the year before. Mark kept telling me it was too dangerous to go, that those dance studios are really just money-laundering fronts.
“Getting any sleep at all?” he asks.
“Sort of. Not really. A little, I’ve been dreaming.”
“Well—good! Dreaming is good. It’s brain work. It’s a sign of health. You know, I read somewhere that death row inmates have disproportionately fewer dreams than the rest of us,” Denny says as he pays the check. “And that a majority of them choose Dr Pepper as their last drink. Wouldn’t that make a great ad campaign?—‘The last word in soda—Dr Pepper.’”
The weight of the rain lifts; the sun presses through. The street dries rapidly, making me think of those hooded rollers in car washes. Denny and I make eye contact through the picturesque vapor, which is awkward—awkward because I want something from him, which feels like asking for money to buy pills. I want him to remind me of where we started, since where he started and where I started is the same. I wonder if he retains the impression of me and of Rourke like keys to a former house.
I ask Denny, “Do you remember me then?”
“Very well,” he says. “You were happy.”
“You need some rest.”
“Rest is all I get,” I tell the doctor.
She says, “Obviously not the right kind.”
I didn’t even know there were different kinds.
Dr. Mitchell replies, “Well, first of all, rest at home is cheating. You still have the phone and bills and mail and shopping and cooking to deal with. You know, cleaning and laundry.”
I do not bother to tell her I do nothing, pay for nothing. It’s too embarrassing.
She prescribes Halcion and an extended vacation.
“Don’t you have a school break coming up in February?”
“Yes,” I say, thinking, Mark has put her up to this.
Jamaica is hot, hot like you will need emergency services. It is a lonesome and detestable heat, a broad, blinding heat, like being tied to a post at a crossroad. Like there is no shelter, no friend. No help in sight. Just you, left to burn.
In the tropics I think without reprieve; maybe it’s the heat or maybe it’s the medicine, with outside sounds that grow softer and inside ones growing louder. There is a long dock with a thatch-roofed awning at the end; in the morning I go out there to where the world is orderly, where it is arranged in plates of color—white and blue and blue. Like the candle we used to look at in high school, discussing whether the bird was flying on the plane of the sea or on the sky. I wonder about that conversation, about why we kept having it, and about all the probing conversations of our adolescence. There was a simultaneous coming to consciousness. It was like a circle of ladders wide at the base and tapered at the top—with each of us stepping up together, testing in tiny rises the ideal of a singleness of perspective, gaining by rungs new things to swear by, going as far as we could possibly go before forsaking the ascent altogether.
What is it that we were hoping to obtain? Did we speak in the pursuit of unity because we could not speak in the pursuit of power? Is that why early allegiances are discontinued, because eventually you must demand of friendships some advantage? I certainly don’t need to become more politically liberal or artistically aware or socially open-minded to survive; as a matter of fact, my opinions often cripple me. Was it that we had nothing pertinent to give one another anymore, such as sound investment advice or better career credentials? All Mark’s associates just make one another richer. It feels incredible, how hard I tried, how much I lost—the luxury of time and friends and poetic aptitude, the modest opulence of home, where definitions of success extended no further than the pleasant close of the day you were in, where dreams of paradise were enough to sustain you.
Through these thoughts, thoughts of Rourke appear. Is this soul preservation I am feeling, or the vanity of sorrow returning? I don’t mean to go back to grief. It’s just, there are memories of days when I did not have to do, but only to be, when I was desired for the little grace I was. I tell myself, We all lose such days. Why should I be any different?
Mark helps me to advance, despite my own aversion to my betterment. It hardly seems just with so many going untended in their despair, but somehow I feel cheated. I feel dispossessed of leverage. The fact of my living a life of privilege precludes me from reflecting on privilege—there are rules about thinking or saying too much about your place if your place is an especially comfortable one, even if you arrived there by accident. Though I’m conscious of the comparative ease of my position, I can’t access it in my head—it’s like pushing peas through molasses. If privileged is not how I feel, it is how I look, and how I look is how I am viewed, and view is everything. It’s irrelevant that I myself possess nothing, that I am more destitute than ever. If I am dependent, if I am subjected to views with which I disagree, if I live a life of compromise, it’s a life I’ve chosen. I am wholly responsible.
My mind turns naturally to my parents: to my mother’s struggle to support us while she attended college and graduate school, though she could have married anyone she wanted and attained financial security; to my father in his Ray-Bans and khakis, ready for a drive in his Plymouth station wagon to Gaslight Village in Lake George or the Danbury Fair in Connecticut, grateful for the inglorious luxury of a two-day vacation and a full tank of gas. Stuffed into the visor there would be maps and site brochures to caverns and motel recommendations and a leather pouch filled with change for the tolls. In a cooler would be the lunch he and Marilyn had made when they’d gotten up at five in the morning.
The day Mark and I pulled up to the sign shop in the Porsche, Dad came out with Tony. When I introduced my father as an artist, he shook Mark’s hand and said, “Actually, son, I’m a sign-painter.”
And me, not an adult, but a sick shell, void of fury, purpose, instinct. Not even a sellout, since sellout implies that there is some superior identity I’ve left behind.
Mark is coming. I feel the bob and creak of the dock with every step he takes—forty-seven steps. It’s time for breakfast. At breakfast, the tables are immaculately set upon a curved concrete lagoon beneath huge tracts of cranberry-red bougainvillea where middle-aged Teutonic couples who do not touch in the night suck back poached eggs from thick silver spoons like sucking back oysters off of shells, and where the silence is uncanny until the arrival of our party—we are twelve. When we arrive, we create chaos. There is turbulent chair-switching and table-shifting and off-menu ordering. There is the flamboyant tying of slipped bikini straps and the indecent cross-table sharing of food and the rummaging through beach bags for cameras and aspirin, lotion and sunglasses.
Mark kneels behind me on the dock and puts his arms around my waist. “What are you looking at?”
“Home,” I say, because as a couple, we are not without our virtues. I speak the truth when asked, and I never care to hear what he chooses not to tell. He doesn’t mind that in my heart I betray him. I steal because I’ve been stolen from. It would take forever to replace all that has been taken from me. He knows that.
“Did you take your pill this morning?” Mark asks. I tell him yes, I took two.
Ocho Rios is about an hour’s drive from the Half Moon Hotel, where we are staying. To get there, we rent motorcycles. Brett found six Triumph Bonnevilles through a British expatriate in Montego Bay. We take off east down the road—steep and angry highlands to the right, tranquil Caribbean to the left. We stop for beer at a place called the Famous Lovely Lynn’s, a roadside shanty made of sundry timber and corrugated tin painted a caustic berberine-yellow.
A Jamaican man with an elongated head and spooling facial hair observes us from an aluminum folding chair. Lynn opens twelve tepid bottles of Red Stripe—there is the limp chzzt, chzzt of bottle caps snapping off. She sets the beers next to piles of bananas and neat rows of pineapples and peeled-back coconuts. I know she’s Lynn because right away Brett asked, “Are you the famous Lovely Lynn?”
The man in the chair wants to know my birth date, which I give. He tells me my number. “Eight.”
I turn my bottle in my hands and think of the number eight—stacked Os, a pair of glasses, segments of an earthworm, bubbles fused.
Mark takes a swig and makes a gratified sound. Lynn smiles at him. He inquires about her bracelets. Her arms are loaded with them—silver, gold, colored plastic.
“Fifty-two,” she says, dangling her wrists in air. “One for each week.”
“These three are identical,” Mark says. “They only count as one.”
The man continues to inspect me. “Whatever happened to you happened through eight.”
“We started going out when she was eighteen,” Mark chimes in.
“No. Not eighteen,” he reports flatly to Mark, all the while his eyes boring into me. “Seventeen—one plus seven—eight. She knows what I’m saying.”
Yes, I know what he is saying. Rourke.
Mark stiffens. He pays for the beers, then gives the guy twenty bucks. “Buy your lady another couple of bracelets.”
At a local happy hour club named Bloody Mary’s Jerk Pork BBQ, we all dance on a stage that cuts through the tables like a runway. For some reason, it’s dressed on the sides in drooping velvet. It looks like a fancy coffin—a catafalque, a draped casket for presidents and kings. I remind myself to smile and to be pretty. It’s hard to remember anything when I have the heavy feeling that Rourke is looking, that he’s coming, though it’s not likely that he will find me, since it’s dark where I am. I wonder—when Rourke left, did he give me up to Mark consciously, like laying a baby on the steps of one particular house?
We dance until dark, moving the way the Jamaicans do. The men press their penises against the women’s thrust-back asses, and the whole place is a party. From outside you could probably see the little shack shaking, going side to side.
Back at the hotel there is the sanitized rendition of Jamaican culture. We reenter the walled and gated property, return the motorcycles, and end the evening with a civilized stroll by the water’s edge. We stop at the bulletin board to sign up for upcoming activities. The next day we take the glass-bottom boat tour at ten, and in the afternoon I rest by the pool while Mark goes with Richard to work on his swing. I don’t ask if swing means tennis swing or golf swing. In New York, it means squash swing. Dinner that night is followed by a rum punch festival in front of a calypso show with steel drums, limbo dancing, and crab racing. The crabs get soaked in beer. I don’t like the crabs part. It makes me sick, but I stay anyway, because, just because.
Dudley arrives with a cup of Blue Mountain Coffee for me. His grandmother drinks several cups a day, he told me one afternoon, and she is ninety-six. Dudley is our waiter; every day and night we get him. He is soft-spoken, clear and proud, with prominent cheekbones upcurving like stripes beneath his eyes. He is a king from another time. Now he clears tables and rectifies silverware, making all things parallel and perpendicular. When he puts down the china cup, the act is delicate, though if he wanted, he could crush it. I look at Dudley and am overcome by shame. I honestly don’t know what to do about the nauseating fact of myself. He understands, I think. He nods to me, knowingly, quietly, pushing the coffee cup closer.
The world beyond our suite is silent. The sea is not far beyond our terrace, but I can’t hear it because the sea doesn’t move where we are. There is just the sound of the ceiling fan over the bed blowing my hair and the ribbons of my dress. Tick, tick, tick.
Mark tosses down a box, and the bed rocks. It is long like a pen box, only heavier. Unless it’s a very nice pen. I try to remember the weight of a nice pen, but my mind is a mess from rum and Halcions. I can’t remember how many pills I’ve had. Nothing can eradicate the images of the flat sea and stifling air, the coarse sand and ever-present air-conditioning, the walled hotels and unhappy island inhabitants.
“Open it,” Mark says.
I roll from my back to my side, my head coming last. The hinges on the box snap to bite. Like crocodile jaws. Inside I find a diamond bracelet, a queue of ivy leaves or linked arrowheads. It seems to move, so I pull away. Mark unfastens it and lays it flat on the starched sheet. It looks like a procession of angelfish. Once clasped, the fish will swim nowhere, just in a perpetual ring about my lame wrist. How sad, my wrist, a universe.
“That was funny today,” he says, “that woman and her bracelets.”
I touch each link, count each fish. There are eight—oh, eight, my number, another coincidence, one to leave unmentioned. It will be my secret, my secret way to wear the bracelet, something to think about as I am forced to tolerate the talk it will generate. Everyone will say how lucky I am, how lucky we are. Mark is so generous, so kind, so faithful—I’ve never seen him look at another woman! It’s true. He works hard to keep me, since we are joined by nothing of substance—just filament and fiber; it would take so little to set me adrift. Everyone believes he is nice, which he is unless you happen to be sleeping with him, in which case he is not, with the things he wants to do to you. It doesn’t even matter to me what he does, and that is worse. When you don’t care what a man does, he comes up with new things until you do. I feel bad that he cannot get through, that my tolerance is high, that my indifference exposes him for what he is—contemptible in the dark. Perhaps all men fall under the spell of their perversions when given the chance.
He drops onto the bed, first his knees, then his hip and thigh, then his elbow by my ribs. My wrist goes up; the cold metal slaps around. I feel him fasten it once, then again, hitting a special lock. I lie back, floating, my body in free fall, and yet some determined piece of my mind keeps jerking me back. It is as if I am on the brink of discovery, but of what? My mother calls the feeling presque vu, the almost seen, a lost word or phrase that rests on the tip of the tongue, the nagging feeling that there is something you have forgotten to remember. It has to do with Jack, and the night a long time ago when he gave me the opal necklace and a pill to drug me. But I am looking for something more elusive than that connection, a deeper realization having to do with the incentive to give such a thing. Jack was terrified of losing me then, and it was the appearance of Rourke that terrified him. Maybe Mark is terrified too. My eyes pop open. Suddenly I think, Rourke.
He has a flu. He smells like illness, and the bedroom in the apartment stinks like a teenage boy room, like semen and budding funk. I wash his tanned back and legs with cool water, then I go to the bathroom and flush my prescription pills, and also all the aspirin. I tell Mark we are out of aspirin, and that I have to go buy some. Without lifting his head he waves. He knows I’m lying. He also knows I’ll be back. I have nowhere else to go.
Carlo is at the front door. “Where you going, Miss Eveline?”
“For aspirin. He’s sick.” I don’t bother to say “Mark.”
“I have aspirin downstairs. It’s too late to walk alone.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “He needs other things too. From the pharmacy.”
“What pharmacy? No pharmacy’s open this late.”
“On the East Side. There’s an all-night pharmacy.”
I take Broadway to Columbus Circle, and as I walk I watch my reflection in the store windows—my hair swept back, my lips the color of lilacs. Beneath my eyes the bones make a V. I behold something imposing but tragic, resistant but capitulating, something like the flag of a poor but proud nation. I cut east on Fifty-ninth Street at Central Park South. And then at the Plaza, I head south for a few blocks, though the pharmacy is north.
When people say time heals, they are wrong. Time simply extinguishes hope. New mothers are told to let infants cry at night to learn to sleep alone—Just a week, and you’re free! Yes, it takes one week of hysteria for the child to learn it can count on no one. It takes one week of abject misery to break the spirit, to inure it to abandonment and betrayal. Maybe it took longer with me, but by then I was grown. If I’ve devoted myself to Mark’s happiness it’s because I can’t see well or perceive well. If he laughs or is happy, then I know things are okay. If he feels cold, I take a sweater. In the absence of true love and true joy, maybe it’s best to treat happiness like any other need—hunger, exhaustion, thirst—factually recognized, functionally resolved.
Rain finally comes. I want it to rain hard. When I hit Madison Avenue and turn uptown, it begins to fall swiftly, and I swallow drops. I walk until I am drenched, until there is a feeling in me that is clear, shining like the street, slick like the slush of a city bus.