39
He sent one letter, on yellow legal paper, carefully folded. I opened it on an April afternoon as I cut through Central Park in a taxicab, going past dogwoods in full bloom. Every time I see dogwoods in bloom, I go back to the day of the letter, back to being in love, back to Rourke.
It was eight months after he left, back when Rob visited my dorm room, back when I still had hope. I remember thinking, isn’t life amazing—the letter flew on an airplane; the plane touched down. The paper was carried in a canvas sack, delivered to me by anonymous hands. At the end, his name; at the beginning, my own. My name, tenderly rendered. Clear, perfect—Eveline. Proof.
I have one photograph. This came to me much later. In it Rourke is young, maybe seventeen. I keep it with his letter in a box on Mark’s dresser, where my things are kept. I don’t fear discovery; discovery would change nothing. I would never hide evidence of Rourke or lie about him.
I remove the photograph to touch it—sometimes, when I can’t help myself. First it’s strange, like looking at a picture of fire, feeling no heat. Then I fall into the false dimension, and I feel him, warm like flesh, and soft.
He stands on the boardwalk and faces the water at an angle; the sun sets behind him. There are no lines in his face; his skin is clear, his cheeks are mesmerizing hollows. He is lean and solid and tall, self-conscious of his separateness from the crowd around him. I draw my fingertips along the line of his jaw. I want to know him then, kiss him then.
“That’s the Criterion,” Rob told me the first time I saw the photo in his wallet. Rob pointed to the second story of a yellow brick building in back, the one Rourke took me to that day on the boardwalk. “Harrison was 34–2 at the time. Just regional matches, but still, it was an awesome record. He was untouchable.” Rob lifted the wallet closer to my face. “That’s Eddie M. in back there, yanking up his pants. Remember Eddie M.? And over in the corner is Tommy Lydell—that big redheaded a*shole. And that’s Chris DeMarco. You had dinner with Chris and his wife, Lee, in Jersey that time. Remember? Take it out,” Rob prodded gently. “G’head, take it.”
I held the photo, thinking, Time is so important. Time is everything. It’s a mystery, the way time for us was wrong when time is right for so many useless things, when things that should be impossible are in fact possible. There are machines that divide atoms, jets that fly at the speed of sound. Flags on the moon. And yet, we could not be together.
“You keep it,” Rob said, folding his wallet back up. “I’ve got the negative somewhere.”
——
The rest is intangible. Events unfolded quickly and unexpectedly, like things exhaled and evaporated, so lacking in exactness and effect, it’s hard to say they even happened.
The phone would ring and I would run. I would know it was him, feel it was him. He would speak, and I could see him sprawled across his couch, lit by the lapis light of his stereo, in his underfurnished living room, wherever that room might have been. I never asked; he would not have answered. If he did say where he was, I would have left, going until I found him. I would hear his loneliness—it was all he would give. Still, I wanted him to be happy, but I wanted him to say that he was not, that like me, he was incapable. Why did you have to go away? I’d want to ask. Why are you back?
But I could say no more than “I dreamt of you last night.”
“I dreamt of you too,” he says. “You were beautiful.”
Over time I came to grasp the nature of my position among women. I came to see that despite what I knew to be the rarity of my bond with Rourke, my feelings of uniqueness were not unlike other women’s feelings of uniqueness. At bridal showers, at picnic tables, in dressing rooms and hair salons and kitchen gardens, I listened with compassion—if every woman has made herself available or has given herself over despite some better knowledge, isn’t that the same as faith, and aren’t women so faithful?
I began to pay attention when women talked; I learned to interpret the language of grief. Women who have suffered use talk as a way of addressing the baffling sea at their feet. They talk to make the abstract real. Like men who name flowers, viruses, and boulevards, women talk to stake ownership. They talk to reclaim the pride they feel they’ve lost.
In December of my sophomore year, after Mark and I had begun to see each other, Mark and Rob arranged for their friends from Jersey to come to an art show I was in. It was Rob and Lorraine, Chris and Lee, Joey and Anna, and Mark. Everything of mine was city rooftops. Chris and Lee bought a charcoal of Madison Avenue rooftops, and Mark bought an acrylic of a black bird sweeping over Murray Hill rooftops. Afterward we all walked through the snow to Patisserie Lanciani in the West Village for coffee and dessert. Halfway through pastries Lorraine ran out because of something Rob said; I didn’t hear what. It must have been bad, because the men looked down and shook their heads and Anna and Lee followed Lorraine, taking their coats to the bench in front of the café. Through the glass Lorraine’s hair fanned against the picture window like a corona of hooks and coils. It looked like a squid sucking up against the side of a tank.
“F*cking guy,” Chris said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know how you expect to keep a woman,” Mark said.
Rob said, “I don’t want a woman to keep, just one to f*ck.”
“Yeah, well,” Mark replied, “any woman worth f*cking is a woman worth keeping.”
“Yeah, well,” Rob said, copying Mark’s voice, “exactly my point.”
I figured I’d better leave. Lorraine and I weren’t exactly friends, but it wasn’t right to listen to the men discussing her. I joined the girls on the bench. It was cold but pleasant. West Fourth Street is beautiful in snow, with flesh-colored lamplight seeping through branches and everybody with dogs and packages, going slow. Lorraine was relieved that I’d come, though I couldn’t say precisely how that relief was communicated.
Lee was striving to boost Lorraine’s self-esteem, but Lorraine’s head was junked up with crazy information. By the pool at the Ross house one day when they visited us there, she saw an article in Cosmopolitan called “Keeping Your Man Satisfied—10 Tips to Great Sex.” Just as I thought, What a profitless bit of journalism—a damp cushion could satisfy a man, Lorraine tore out the article, folded it, and placed it in the back flap of her date book. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the woman who’s afraid that she isn’t satisfying her man is being satisfied herself. Is anyone giving him tips?
Lorraine kept blowing her nose and shaking her head, saying she lives in constant fear of Rob getting arrested or busted-up or “worse,” but when she asks him things, she’s told to mind her own business.
“Mind your own business?” Lee repeated indignantly.
Lee could become very indignant. She was not the average Jersey girl; she was going places. You could tell by the impeccable way she dressed.
“If only he would talk to me,” Lorraine sobbed, guilty suddenly to have impeached Rob’s character. “It’s just, he won’t even talk to me.”
“Don’t defend him!” Lee snapped. “His behavior is inexcusable.”
I thought it was okay for Lorraine to feel guilty. Life is complicated, and she and Rob were complicated, and it’s often difficult to render in language the dynamics of the heart.
After the café we walked around the Village in twos and threes, looking into the parlor windows of brownstones, saying how great it would be to live in this or that house. Just as we were about to turn the corner from Bleecker onto Eleventh, Lorraine stopped me.
“Thanks a lot for listening back there,” she said. “It helped me out. You know, us girls sticking together.”
Something about the skittish look in her eyes and the freckles around her nose and her plump hand lying mildly on my wrist made me wonder if there’s a formula to humanity—such as all anyone wants is to be loved, even the employees at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Lorraine wasn’t necessarily hateful. It was her frustrated love for Rob that made her seem that way. When they first met, that love had likely been an agreeable love, but at some point it changed. Maybe he’d been too opaque, maybe she’d pressed too hard for answers. Maybe she should have quit back at the best time, while feeling capable and desired.
Just as I started thinking that Lorraine should have kept custody of that first love, I could see myself—cinched behind a screen of heartache, committed to the legend of my own sorrow, clinging to something spent, holding out for something hopeless, contributing to the disintegration of whatever Rourke and I had once shared that was good and true and private.
I remember that moment. I remember setting it all to drift like a stick in a river. I remember telling myself, Just let go.
“No problem, Lorraine,” I said. “I hope things work out for you guys.”
The bottommost item in the box was a scrap of paper with phone messages taken the week after that art show by my roommate, Corrine. Corrine became my roommate in sophomore year, when Ellen got an apartment, a hygienic duplex on East Twenty-first Street with a terrace facing the Empire State Building. Sometimes I would go to Ellen’s for dinner, sometimes with Mark. He felt she was my one respectable friend, and she felt he was equally respectable and unquestionably clean, and they were both happy for me and happy over the stalwart and prosperous fact of each other. Once Ellen had a cocktail party and asked me to come early to help set up, and she introduced me to guests as her best friend from school, which depressed me. I felt she deserved better.
Corrine was an economics major who danced to the Go-Go’s and Cyndi Lauper and Katrina and the Waves in orange shirts with cutoff collars and turquoise leg warmers. She would do splits and backflips in the room. That’s all I knew of her, since I never slept in the dorm again after freshman year. Beginning in sophomore year and going through to graduation, I stayed at Mark’s. We didn’t make a big deal out of it, it just sort of happened that way. I only stopped by the room to shower and dress on busy days or after using the gym if Mark wanted to go out someplace downtown like Il Cantinori or Chanterelle. But by my junior year, Mark kept telling me, Go off of housing, for God’s sake.
When Corrine called me at Mark’s apartment about the calls from Rourke, I jumped on the subway, got off at Sheridan Square, then ran fast to East Tenth Street to pick up the message.
12/18/81. 7:50 pm. Harrison Rourke
Harrison again, 10:30 pm.
HR 1:15 am. Meet him at the Mayflower Hotel, Room 112.
I gripped the list of messages, turning it over—it was pale green, accountant’s green, torn from one of Corrine’s graph books. As I turned it, I wondered if Corrine had written while on the phone with him, or if she’d written after she’d hung up. For some reason it mattered. She told me that she’d tried calling me until 2:00 A.M., but there was no answer. Mark and I were at his company’s holiday party.
Instead of going to class after getting the messages, I went back uptown to Mark’s, walking the whole sixty blocks. Once inside the apartment, I stared at the phone and thought about calling. Possibly Rourke had not yet checked out. Possibly he was sitting there by the phone, waiting for it to ring. I stared and thought, thought and stared, and one complete day transpired that way, with me not leaving the apartment. Tuesday became Friday, and by then I thought it had become too late to call.
“You must be getting home after dinner,” Mark said when he arrived home from work that Friday night. Typically Mark left the apartment before me in the morning and returned after I did. “Manny told me he hasn’t seen you all week.”
“Actually, I’ve been staying in,” I told him. “Headaches.”
A few days later, the phone rang at Mark’s. It was Christmas Eve.
I was quick to pick up. I knew it was Rourke.
“I got in to the East Coast a week ago,” he said. “I left six messages at your dorm. Then there was no answer. I guess your roommate went home for the holiday.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, slipping the phone around the corner into the hall. That wasn’t a lie. I was sorry. For everything.
“I’m flying into Boston the day after tomorrow.”
“What for?”
“A fight.”
“Oh,” I said, “a fight.” Him getting hit. Him bleeding. Him being watched. Imaginations laying claim. “Are you fighting?”
“Not me,” he said. “A friend of mine. Jerry Page. I can get you a plane ticket.”
I thought of—I don’t know what. Nothing good. Lorraine, waiting, “minding her own business.” My parents, how they had loved each other and still loved each other but it wasn’t enough. And Jack. I thought of Jack. Everything damaged, everything broken, everything lost. No effort, it seemed, could ever be good enough.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I can’t.”
When he hung up, I hung up. I sat numbly, like I’d just received news of death. To get out of it, I kept telling myself that I was not some possession that he had lent, that he could not appear out of nowhere to reclaim me, that I’d already done the work of losing him. But the words in my head sounded stilted, like when you memorize a phrase in a foreign language or a phone number when you have no pen.
“Who was that?” Mark asked. He was half-wrapped in a towel at his dresser, holding a glass of Cabernet, looking for collar stays.
I said, “Harrison.”
Mark froze. “Harrison? What did he want?”
“He wants me to meet him in Boston for the weekend.”
Mark set down the glass he was holding and it teetered and nearly fell. He caught it, then sighed with annoyance because wine splashed out.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I told him I couldn’t.”
And then that was it. After that, there was nothing. No more calls. No messages. No letters or visits. I got what I wanted, something to hold, to control. Something dead—a memory.