41
I throw my legs over the side of the bed. My head is pounding, though I had nothing toxic the previous night. Mark is on the phone in the living room. When he hangs up, he comes in carrying juice, and he sits, facing me. His face looks stiff like a shield.
“If you’re not too disgusted, I’d like to apologize.”
I shrug. “Whatever.”
“No, not whatever. Don’t say whatever. Say what you feel. I behaved shamefully.”
I say nothing. He can’t handle what I feel. I feel released. “It was embarrassing, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry you were embarrassed. What else?”
I have nothing to add. “That’s it,” I say.
He reaches over and pets my hair. “I was drinking gin. You know I can’t drink gin.” He follows me to the bathroom and watches me wash and dress. “It’s not like I was with another woman. C’mon, I’m a wreck about this.”
This is only a partial lie. Obviously he’s a wreck about something. “Forget it, Mark.”
“Oh, no,” he states with sudden menacing rectitude, “just the opposite. I won’t forget it. In fact, I’ve called everyone. I just got off the phone with Rob. I took all the blame.”
I brush my teeth. I wonder if there’s a difference between taking the blame and being to blame. If there’s a difference, he’s referring to it. At the door, I grab a coat and my knapsack.
“Where are you headed?”
“School.”
“The gym?”
Mark doesn’t like me to go to the gym. He says it’s a pickup scene. If I promise to avoid the basketball courts and the weight room, and just go to the pool and sauna, he’ll say that’s worse because of the lesbians. Once I said, “What are you talking about? I’ve never noticed any lesbians,” and he said, “That’s precisely the problem.”
“The library. I have to finish my papers.”
“I thought you finished your papers. Aren’t they due Tuesday? You should have told me. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have dragged you out last night and we could have avoided this entire mess.” At the elevator, he kisses me on the forehead, speaking into my temple. “I have your graduation present. I spoke to the travel agent this morning. We’re going away the day after Alicia’s wedding. I wanted to surprise you, but we’ll need to have your passport ready. What would you say to Italy?”
Italy, I think as I board the elevator. It’s the least he can do.
I spend the day walking around the city, and when it starts to rain I take a twelve-dollar cab ride to Pinky’s, Rob’s cousin’s bar in Brooklyn. Rob’s over there at least once a week, though he lives in Jersey. It has something to do with gambling. The driver takes Third Avenue to the Queensboro Bridge because there’s been an accident on the Williamsburg and the Manhattan is closed for repairs.
The streets glisten from an evening rain. Outside is warm, even for May. Through my window I hear the tick of tires against wet pavement, and on the radio, I listen to a lecture about relationships.
“Consider, for example, what happens when we walk,” the speaker explains. “Our intrinsic reality is, quite simply, that we are moving in a given direction toward a given destination. Extrinsically, however, we are reliant upon the earth beneath our feet. If the earth were as absent in reality as in our perception of reality, our legs would swing in air.
“People seek equity in love as though love is a business. They look for equitable investments and gains. But relationships,” he continues, “can possess equities separate from those that can be easily named or known. Equity can exist, independent of interpretation of equity, which, of course, is variable. By seeking quantifiables, we lose sight of mystery—the real binding power.”
The taxi slows to a stop at Fifty-eighth Street and Third Avenue, near Alexander’s department store, before making the turn onto the bridge ramp. Creaking up to consume my entire field of vision is that bizarre mural of globular buttons over Alexander’s corner doorway, like a collection of random hemi-sected eyeballs, like some insane manifestation of things urging me to see. And so I see.
If it never occurred to me to move beyond the idea of having been abandoned by Rourke, it’s not because I’d been victimized, but because in my mind one is a victim when one does not triumph. The parts of me that came to life with Rourke were parts I could not have conceived of alone; naturally I believed that if the best I could be was with him, then without him I was nothing.
When he left, I told myself that I was not good enough, that he wanted someone better. My anguish rendered me insensible. At the time, I forgot that life is strange and long and beautiful, and that something so extraordinary in its success could hardly be ordinary in its failure. I persuaded myself that he did not love me, that he never had; and yet, not once when we were together did I need to tell myself he did. It should have been enough to love and be loved, but there was more, I thought—I must have thought—because at some point everything changed from my simply wanting more of him to my wanting more of something else—something substantive, something normal—all the while denying the egocentricity of my aspirations, and forgetting the universe we’d made.
The cab is on the lower roadway; the cables and girders are thoomping past, animating the steel beam windows of the bridge.
I feel shame to have doubted him, especially when I recall his absence of artifice, the way he knew me when he met me, the way he worked to move us despite obstacles of age and position, the way he trusted that I would feel as he felt, the way he was patient and true. And so, the way he let me go—let us go—surely must have been just as deliberate.
Since he knew things at the beginning, maybe at the end he knew things too. That we had gone as far as chance would take us. That nothing is more sacred than youth or more hopeful than turning yourself over to someone and saying, I have this time, it is not a long time, but it is my best time and my best gift, and I give it to you. When I revisit my youth, I revisit you.
I had not been walking on air. Rourke had been there, pressure, earth beneath my feet, always.
At Pinky’s everybody’s watching a game on television. Rob is down at the end of the bar, in his usual place, by the telephone. His mood has not improved since fighting with Mark—the stiff hunch to his back, the shaking leg. He does not smile when he sees me; he just kicks out a stool. I drop my book bag and climb up. Something happens in the game, and the men shout in unison—“Ho, shit!” Rob’s voice joins the chorus. He concentrates on the set, pretending to ignore me. Eventually he turns, his eyes drifting toward my lap. My legs are crossed, and with the pants I’m wearing, the crevice between my thighs is revealing. I slide my hands to cover myself.
Rob grabs a couple of bar napkins and blows his nose hard. “I’m allergic to something in here.” He looks over each shoulder. “Must be somebody’s cologne.” He gestures to my knapsack. “More school? It seems like you’ve been in school longer than anyone ever—why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t, huh?” he says. “Well, when are you done?”
“I have three papers due Tuesday.”
“And that’s it?”
“And a presentation.”
“A presentation, oh, excuse me. What’s that, like Darrin Stephens?”
“Kind of. Only no witches.”
He faces the bar, puts his elbows up, and wipes his nose one more time. “Where’s the ring?” he asks, talking into his napkin.
“I left it at home.”
“Home,” he repeats facetiously. “That’s not fair play. Some poor slob might get the idea you’re available. Unless of course you weren’t allowed to wear it. Did he tell you I’m gonna steal it and hock it?”
“He doesn’t—”
“The future Mrs. Ross,” Rob says, repeating Dara’s remark from the previous night. “I should have popped that vampire a*shole. He was asking for it. Tell you the truth, I’d rather you were gonna marry that queer friend of yours. Dennis. He’s actually a good guy.”
“Mark’s okay.”
“Yeah, sure. Okay. Capital O.”
“Do you hate him because he’s rich?” I ask.
“Do you sleep with him because he’s rich?” Rob snaps back. “Oh, no, I’m sorry,” he taunts, “you sleep with him because you love him.”
“No, I—”
“No? Then why do you sleep with him?”
“I—I’m not sure. He was there—”
“Lots of people were there. I was there.” He slaps his chest. “How come you never f*cked me?” His fingers come together. “I’ll tell you why. Because I know the code.” He clenches his jaw, leans back, pulls out his wallet, and drops a fresh ten on the bar. Rob’s wallet is full of cash. Rob’s wallet is always full of cash. The bartender draws two tap beers and pushes them to us. Rob says, “Thanks, Pink.”
Pinky leaves the money untouched. “How you doing, sweetheart? Long time no see.” Pinky’s an albino. They call him Pinky because he looks like the inside of a conch. I had a cat like that once, like Pinky, with two different-colored eyes, only my cat was deaf. Pinky can hear just fine except for a vague ringing sometimes. He keeps thinking there’s a break-in at the pork factory across the street.
“Sorry, Pinky,” I say. “I’ve been busy with school.”
“She graduates next week,” Rob reports. “A 4.0 average, dean’s list. She got a certificate. One of these rolled-up parchment jobs.”
“If she’s so smart, what’s she doing with you?” Pinky cackles as he chugs off, sideways and slow, like a failing tug.
Rob lifts his mug and polishes off a third of the contents in one swallow, then bends in like he’s got a secret. “You wanna know what I think? I think you’re with him because he doesn’t care that you don’t love him. Any other guy, any normal guy, shit like that matters. But you don’t want anything normal. You’re holding on to the past. He knows it. That bastard worked your … your—situation to his advantage. Just like a crook, he saw an open window, and he climbed in.” Rob’s eyes screw up tight like the lens of a camera. “Lemme tell you something about Mark—he don’t come through. You know what I mean, come through? Principles, ethics, the code. He knows the code. He knows it and ignores it.”
“What difference does it make?”
“It makes a difference,” Rob says. “Certain things you don’t do.”
“Nobody owns me, Rob. And anyway, Rourke left.”
“He had no choice.”
“He had a choice.”
“Don’t tell me. I was there.” Rob wipes the bar around our mugs with another napkin. “The reason Harrison took that job in East Hampton with those kids in the first place was Diane backed out.”
“Diane who?”
“Diane who,” he repeats.
“I’m serious. I’ve never even heard of her.”
“Nobody over there ever mentioned Diane Gelbart? A Mr. and Mrs. Gelbart? Does Mark open your mail too? Take your calls?”
“Do you mean Mark’s old girlfriend?”
“Oh, so you have heard of her.”
“I guess I just forgot.”
“I’d like to forget her myself. All the bad luck started with her. Let’s just say she’s overaccustomed to getting what she wants. And what she wanted at the time was—well, you can imagine.”
He doesn’t have to say. I can imagine. She wanted Rourke.
Rob stares into his mug. “I’m surprised you two haven’t run into each other. She’s always flying back and forth from California—like a carrier pigeon. Her parents are friendly with Mark’s parents. They have one of those places in Southampton. Between the ocean and the pond.”
“Gin Lane,” I say, sounding outside myself.
“Yeah, that’s it, Gin Lane. Very swank. She tried to persuade Harrison to live there that winter, but forget about it. He’d rather live in a cold-water shack and have his freedom, if you know what I mean.”
I shift on my chair, lifting my ribs roof-ward, breathing deep. I try to remember what I’ve heard about Diane, something about Rita Hayworth and nightclubs and never looking at stars. Surely she’s beautiful and glamorous. Probably she visited Rourke’s house in Montauk, telling him it was quaint. Maybe the plans he’d had that first New Year’s Eve were with her. And during the summer we spent together, Rourke probably went to Gin Lane when I was working at the Lobster Roll, going to play tennis or eat dinner by the pool house, and when he left that September, he probably—No, Rob is right. Unlike me, Rourke had integrity. He would rather live in a shack and have his freedom. You know what I mean, Rob said. Unfortunately, I know all too well.
Oh, I remember what Mark had said about Diane. Everyone wanted her, but only I could get her. I suddenly feel sick to my stomach. I rest my head in my hands.
Rob’s hand touches my shoulder. “You okay?”
“It’s—hot in here.”
“That’s because Pinky’s a cheap bastard. He hates to put the air on before, like, August. I keep telling him it’s gonna kill business, but he has the brilliant philosophy that heat makes people drink more. I go, ‘Yeah, Einstein, at the bar down the street.’” Rob whistles. “Hey, Pink! Spend a couple dimes and hit the AC! She faints easy!”
Without removing his chin from the saddle of his hand, Pinky breaks from the television to acknowledge Rob, then heads out from behind the bar to flip the toggle by the front door. The machine in the transom sputters to life and starts to spit through its grubby vents.
Rob makes a squeaking noise with the side of his mouth, and stares at the ceiling. He looks like Reverend Olcott the time we talked about God. Like he has a whole reserve of information but is afraid to release it too fast in case it overwhelms me. And yet, he knows I want the truth, and he wants to be truthful. I see him take a walk through the conversation a couple of times, weighing the dangers of honesty against the opportunity for personal gain. He hates Mark. There may not be another chance like this one.
“Okay. So, Diane’s two years younger than the rest of us. When we graduate back in ’77, me and Harrison stick around L.A., doing our thing. He fights, I do grad school for accounting, Chris DeMarco comes back east to NYU Law, and Mark heads to Harvard, not breaking off with Diane. He doesn’t want to keep her, but he doesn’t want to lose her. He prefers to string her along. It’s one of those things a*sholes do. He met his match in her, though. There’s no bigger a*shole than Diane. Right off she demands attention from a distance; she doesn’t waste a minute. She hooks up with a bad crowd—booze and coke mostly but, like, a lot of coke. Several grams per week is my gentlemanly estimate. UCLA puts her on probation, her parents threaten to cut off the cash and ship her off to some Minnesota rehab—but she just keeps going. Finally she ends up at some party in the Hills where her girlfriend drowns. Very big deal. Diane paid for the drugs. Mark is worthless, of course. He flies out with her folks for one day—one day—the day she makes the declaration to the cops. That’s it. Her parents offer to send them on a vacation. A couple weeks in Europe, the Caribbean. But Mark’s too busy with school, he claims, he can’t spare the time, et cetera, et cetera. Basically, she’s a total f*cking liability, and he’s worried about his reputation. You know, he wants to run for office someday, have a seat on the Exchange, whatever—that’s why he hangs around with those addicts from Washington.”
“Because they have money?”
“Lots of people have money. They have connections. Anyway, Mark backs out; Diane calls Harrison. She’s alone, she’s scared, but basically, she’s vindictive. Of course Harrison steps in—me, I wouldn’t have bothered—and one, two, three, she’s clean. Nobody knows what he did to get through, but he got through.”
Oh, but I know. Just his eyes alone, looking at you.
“Naturally her parents are grateful. They pull some strings to get him a big shot agent who right off the bat hits him with decent stuff. Bit parts, but decent—commercials, voice-overs, print, extra work in TV, in a couple of movies—but it turns out to be a deal with the devil. Harrison is under obligation now to Diane and this agent—Eliot something, from William Morris. Of course, the agent wants him to quit fighting, and behind Harrison’s back goes head-to-head a couple times with the trainer out there, Charles Lopez, Chucho Lopez, who happens to be connected himself, and who’s counter-pressuring Harrison to get serious, get management, and start the climb for a title. He’d been fighting for years by then, and he’d established an unbelievable record. But it’s a tough climb; it takes focus. Maybe Harrison has it in him, maybe not. I don’t know if you realize the kind of money that’s at stake.”
I shake my head.
“Could be millions. Could be many millions. I’ve been to houses that would make that Gin Lane place look like a trailer. And the owner will be some twenty-five-year-old living with twelve friends, eight Mercedes, and a basketball court off the kitchen. Harrison is smart, mature, and—whatever.” Rob tosses up his hand like it’s a lost cause. “Anyway, that agent Eliot gets his tires slashed and other unsavory shit I don’t care to get into, and in the middle of it all, we can’t shake Diane. She’s showing up at the fights, hanging around the gym. Every day she’s at the f*cking gym. Once she got her teeth in, she infected everything, like a rabid dog.”
“Were you guys planning to stay in L.A.?”
“We had no plan.”
“Did he want to turn professional?”
“Yes and no. Yes, because of money. No, because of interference. Let’s just say he’s got a problem with management. I could take on some small stuff, but as far as cutting title deals, I was twenty-four. Just one guy. Obviously I’ve got access to organizations through my uncle, and I could work for whoever. But signing on to anything separate from Harrison would’ve meant a break. I wasn’t interested in repping other fighters. On top of it, with the acting thing a distinct possibility, he’s suddenly not so keen on ruining his face. He’s been lucky so far. Luck like that doesn’t last.
“So,” Rob continues, “spring rolls along—it’s 1979 now—and Diane graduates. Her parents want her in New York so they can keep an eye on her. She’s not saying nothing, but you can see the writing on the wall—she’s gonna stick to Harrison like shit on a shoe. Her folks give her a trip to Europe for the summer and then set up that cozy job on Long Island for September, dressing it up into a “career opportunity” by making a couple anonymous donations here and there, figuring it’s East Hampton in winter—if she goes berserk on dope again, nobody’s gonna be the wiser. Meanwhile, did anybody think for a second about those kids stuck with that freak? Well, surprise, surprise, she refuses to leave him in L.A.
“That’s when Harrison decides to go for the Olympics. It’s the honorable way out all around. Jimmy Landes, the trainer he’s had in Jersey since he was a kid, was working in Brooklyn with two other guys for the Games, and to top it off, the Olympics is just about the only organization big enough to intimidate Diane. Harrison commits to moving back east, in order to convince her to come back too. Diane agrees, but fate steps in and a big television job opens up for her—she’s some kind of entertainment reporter now. With a little added incentive from her folks—new house, new car—she falls for it. The whole package was too good to pass up. Even a cokehead like her could see that.
“Then Harrison offered to take her spot in that school job to help her parents save face and to throw Diane off the scent, so to speak. It boiled down to, like, ten hours a week for him, but it was worth it to make Diane think he’s on board so she stays out of trouble in L.A. until she settles into the new life. He figured she’d settle. Nobody else believed it. But he was right. Her parents owe him big-time. Very smart maneuvering on his part.”
Rob breaks to drink some of his beer. I remember Alicia asking about Rourke. You two must have been completely in love, she’d said. She must have known about what he’d done on Diane’s behalf. He would never hurt anyone, Alicia had said.
“Now you see why Mark hates him. Harrison saves the day and looks like a prince, whereas Mark dumps his nightmare on the rest of us, runs for cover, and comes across like the rat he actually is. Mark’s father almost disowned him for it, but he had a massive coronary instead. I’d like to say it was related, but I know you love the old man, so I won’t. Let’s just say that Mark being in the spotlight looking like a dick didn’t exactly lower the household stress levels. Mr. Ross had open-heart surgery, but he can’t take a day off because he’s afraid of the damage his son will do. And he’s counting on you to make Mark a better man. Good f*cking luck.”
“Were you upset to leave California?” I ask.
“Me, nah—I hit bottom out there. That’s another story for another day. Anyway, Harrison was better off coming home. It got Diane’s claws out of him. You know me, I’m superstitious. Last thing I wanted was her bad blood hanging over his head or mine.”
Rob clears his throat. “Long Island turned out to be a good deal. Harrison was ready to focus on the Games, get his mind off—things. And Jersey full-time was out of the question. The temptation would’ve been too great to make money. Between his talent and mine, it’s like sitting on a gold mine. Montauk was perfect, not just because of the kind of shape he got into physically, but mentally. After L.A. he needed a wash. He was running, biking, swimming, coming into Brooklyn on the days he wasn’t teaching at the school, four, maybe five a week, to train with Jimmy—doing qualifiers, the Pan Am Games, the Eastern Trials, the whole bit. Next thing you know, the Soviets invade Afghanistan that December, President Carter starts talking boycott in January, and by the end of March, it’s official. Poof, that’s that. No more Olympics.”
He takes a minute to reflect. We both look at the television set. There’s an ad on for Michelob Light Beer. It shows a couple of white guys with headbands playing racquetball. The men in the ad seem worlds away from the guys at the bar.
“Remember the night in the meat district?” Rob asks. “You asked what I said the first time I saw you.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“And I’m not going to now.” He sucks back his cheek again, and his head twitches right. “Something dumb, not bad, just the kind of thing guys say to each other. Well, it practically got me killed. I was like, Jesus.” He returns his gaze momentarily to the television. He drags a finger around the top inside of his glass. I wonder what he’s thinking about.
“I never told you this,” Rob says, “but if I hadn’t been there that day, I think that blond kid you were with would’ve taken a short walk off that cliff. Like joined the parade from top down.” His hand makes a diving motion.
“Ray Trent. He’s a nice guy.”
“Nice alive guy,” Rob adds. “With nice operative legs.”
“He wasn’t my boyfriend.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t just a friend either. That was clear to Harrison at least. Was he wrong?”
“No,” I said. “He wasn’t wrong.”
Rob holds his jaw with one hand and smiles, shaking his head. “That’s funny,” he says of Rourke. “F*cking guy.”
I feel something peculiar on my face, something cold. A tear. Strange, I thought all the tears had dried. Like bouquets of upside-down flowers. Rob reaches to catch it.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Rob says, handing me one of his cocktail napkins. “You’re thinking, He left her, he left me; he lied to her, he lied to me. You’re making a comparison, only there’s no comparison. First off, with Diane he was dealing with a hysteric and a cheat. The thing about cheats is, they don’t just cheat you, they make you cheat. That’s their objective—the failure of your character.” His voice deepens. “With you, it was different. You would never cheat to hang on to someone. You did Harrison a favor. You let go.”
That’s not what I’m thinking, but it’s sweet of him to feel this way and to have been feeling this way all along. As if I hadn’t become hysterical, hadn’t lied, hadn’t cheated Rourke, Mark, myself. Perhaps a stronger woman, a better woman, one with a good family, a house, a car, and a job—an entertainment reporter, for instance—would have fought for her rights. Mrs. Ross calls them go-getters. “Go-getters!” my mother said in disgust when I once mentioned the term. “Every woman is a go-getter. Go get me a cup of coffee! Go get the groceries! Go get the kids! Go get undressed.”
The bar phone rings. “Take a number, Pink,” Rob says, not even looking.
“Did he—did they—”
“He never touched her, if that’s what you’re asking. Not that I know of. Even if she’d been halfway sane, he wouldn’t have touched her.”
“Because of Mark.”
“Because of the code. Because Harrison doesn’t just follow the code. He wrote it.” Rob is so close I can feel the downward stamp of his breath. “He wasn’t gonna stay in Montauk that summer, Evie. After the Olympics fiasco, he was just gonna come back to Jersey to fight for cash. He was in shape, he had the apartment in Spring Lake, contacts in Atlantic City. The idea was to stay strong, make money, figure things out. A gym, maybe. We always said we’d open a gym, a chain—Jersey, L.A., Miami, Vegas, the Bronx. Maybe we’d reach out to kids in trouble. Give back what we got.”
I consider all that Rob has lost. It’s there in his face—a grasping sadness, a lonely frenzy. No one likes to surrender the best place to be. It’s like forfeiting riches. It’s not like that; it’s exactly that.
“But that shit wasn’t happening once he met you. Especially once Ross got into the picture. What a f*cking judgment lapse. I think about the night we all went to that place in Amagansett. What could Harrison have been thinking? My guess is he introduced Mark for a reason. He wanted to force his own hand, force himself to come back. And he did. What did he last in Jersey, like, two weeks before turning back to get you?”
“Fifteen days,” I say.
“Fifteen days,” Rob says with a smile. “Well, he trained hard for fourteen of them, sparring every night, wiping out the entire local roster. Everybody’s going crazy—radio, newspapers, the whole boardwalk is coming to life. On the fourteenth day, we set up a fight—very casual. He kicks the shit out of Chester Honey Walker, who hasn’t missed a day in the ring since he was born. Harrison cracks his jaw, right in the second round. You could hear the snap through the auditorium, and we had a couple hundred people there, then he lays him out with a body shot—Rourke’s impeccable on the inside.
“Next day he says to me, ‘Let’s take a drive.’ I’ll never forget it. ‘Let’s take a drive. Two cars.’ Okay, I say. We go to Montauk, East Hampton, we show the girls around—the beach, the town, shopping. We go to your house. Just me and Harrison. You’re not home. Your mother is—nice lady, by the way. She sits on the back of the little couch there and folds her arms. She says to Harrison, ‘Eveline hasn’t left the house for two weeks. Are you the one she’s been waiting for?’ Harrison just goes, ‘Yeah, I’m the one.’”
You have a mother, Rourke said to me the last night in Montauk, I’ve met her.
“She tells us where she thinks you are, at Alicia Ross’s party, that some girl from school drove you over. Harrison realizes Mark’s involved and he shuts down. Before we go find you, I make him stop at the beach. You know, toss a ball, cool off. I figure with the way he’s been fighting, he might take lives. What happens? You pull up with Mark—in that freakin’ car.” Rob looks at me. “I will tell you what I was thinking at that moment. I was thinking, This girl’s dangerous.”
“I never would have—”
“That was obvious. How you felt was obvious. Obvious as how Harrison felt. Obvious as what Mark was doing. The whole situation was painfully f*cking clear. Remember I told you that night in Jersey—Be careful?” He points to the counter. “This is what I was talking about. This very day. Mark made his decision the first time he laid eyes on you. He mastered the obvious. Here we are. Four years later.”
Pinky hands me a half-empty soft pack of tissues. I thank him.
“The rest is history. You come to Jersey for a couple days. Harrison goes to Montauk for the summer. And who could blame him? No sense rushing out to get hammered when you got a thing—a girl—you know, whatever.” He nudges me with his shoulder. “We had a lot of fun that summer, didn’t we?” His voice darkens. “Sooner or later, a man’s mind turns back to money, usually from some money to big money. Harrison had to get back to reality. What was he supposed to do that would’ve been better or faster than fighting? Maybe he didn’t want you watching him get beat up—it’s not pretty stuff. Maybe he thought you should focus on your own life, school, what have you. Maybe he didn’t do the right thing. Maybe he didn’t know what to do. He just figured you’d be okay. I guess he had more faith in you than he did in himself. That’s what I mean by saying he had no choice.”
He takes a tissue from me, “F*cking allergies.” He blows his nose hard. “The part that threw me was him going alone. At first I was pissed. You were there—on my birthday, out at Surfside in Montauk. He told me that night he’d bought a ticket to Miami, that Jimmy Landes hooked him up for four months with some killer Cuban coach. Right off with the way he was talking, I knew I wasn’t part of the plan. ‘We’ll meet up later,’ he said. ‘A couple months.’ I wanted to f*ckin’ kill him.” Rob shakes his head. “Miami.”
He tears open a pack of Halls and tilts it in my direction. I decline. He pops one out, unwraps it, sets it in his mouth. “Eventually I chalked it up to a misunderstanding. I mean, no promises were exchanged. I never asked anything; he never said anything. He’s not exactly chatty—as you know.” The cough drop flips around between his teeth. I hear it click; I smell eucalyptus. “But I checked out on him for a long time. Eight months went by, the longest we ever went without talking.”
Eight months. April of my freshman year. When Rourke sent me the letter; when Rob came to see me in my dorm.
“Harrison called in April. We hadn’t spoken since that night in Montauk. He was coming to New York. He wanted to see you. He figured you and I’d kept in touch. I set him straight, but said, no problem, I’d find you. There was no listing in Manhattan. NYU had your dorm, the one on East Tenth, but no student phone number—I figured your roommate got the phone. I would have tried your mother, but her name is different from yours. Like an idiot, I called Mark, thinking he could get your number through Alicia. Well he’d been waiting for that.”
Rob stammers into a burdensome silence. Suddenly it hits me. I know what he’s referring to. Mark told Rob what happened to me. Rob told Rourke.
“Mark said you didn’t want anything to do with Harrison, then he explained why in no uncertain terms. How you were found practically dead in the street, how he had had to deal with the hospital, how he paid the doctor, how he cleaned up after that animal, how he was the only thing standing between you and a nervous breakdown.”
I must be in shock, because the first thing I think of isn’t Rourke. The first thing I think of is Mr. Ross. I can almost hear Mark say, Dad, I need to have a private conversation. How like Mark to use the tragedy of my private circumstances to elevate his image and dismantle Rourke’s. I can’t believe I’d allowed it. No wonder they’d all tiptoed around me. Next I think of Rourke, how I’d hurt him. Last is Mark. How Mark hurt him.
“First of all,” I say, “Mark loaned me money. I paid him back.”
Rob lays his elbows on the bar and rubs the inside of his eyes with his fingertips. “Sure, sure. Mark blew it out of proportion. The fact is, you could’ve called me. You should’ve called me. You gotta understand, men are funny about—well, you can’t have another guy stepping in like that—I mean—well, you know what I mean. It’s a big decision.”
“It wasn’t a decision. It was an accident.” He turns to me; our faces are practically grazing. “You know, like, a loss,” I explain. “I woke up in E.R. I didn’t know what happened until after it was over. Did Mark tell you that I—” I leave off with the question; I already know the answer. Mark had told Rob I’d been found practically dead in the street. Didn’t that imply I’d done it to myself, like with a coat hanger?
Beneath Rob’s eyes are the hard lines of misfortune. You cannot read him through his eyes. They defy, they oppose. Rob’s eyes are not how you see in, but how he sees out. He’s in shock, like me, only my shock is less and his is more. I live with Mark. I belong to a circle of people who are duplicitous, to a world in which friends are disposable. Rob’s is a world in which blood ties extend beyond blood. It’s difficult to see him forced to confront questions of betrayal among friends. It’s like he’s got rats in the house. It’s a shitty lesson, that of all the reckless ways to live, the most reckless of all is an absence of influence over your own affairs.
“What was I supposed to do?” he says. “Everybody knowing Harrison’s business but him, it wasn’t right. I had to tell him. If he ever found out that I knew too, it would be bad. Ever since his father died, it’s like he’s got this pressure. Everything goes back to that.” Rob shakes his head. “It’s bad luck all around. Except for Ross. He scored a triple win—retribution for Diane, a shot at you—which, I mean, he never stood a chance—and Harrison—he never fought again. Mark called him an animal, and he believed it.”
Rob shakes his head. “You know, it’s taken me a while to figure it out. I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid. Harrison left without me twice, not because he didn’t want me to come, but because he wanted me to stay. He wanted me to look out for you, once in Montauk and then later, after finding out about this. And I failed—twice.” He drums his hands on the bar and cracks his back to the right. I wonder what he’s going to do. He looks like he’s going to do something. “Do me a favor,” he says to me. “Don’t say anything yet. Just think. Think back on everything. And remember what I told you in the beginning—be careful.”