42
Rob said to think, so I do, though it is difficult to find in myself what happened. Though the memories are there, my mind has transformed them, remaking them over the years into a thing finally crippled, finally deformed, abbreviated, in measure like bones missing from a body.
The first thing is the letter from Rourke, just checking in. The next is the night in the meat district, when Rob came to my dorm room. That was in April 1981, months after Rourke, but still before me and Mark. I’d seen Mark three or four times, never seriously. There was Rob’s sudden phone call—I’ll be over in twenty minutes—and then the delicate way he acted when he saw me, like he was picking up petals that had fallen off a flower. Obviously Mark had told him by then.
After that is a Sunday, one week later. Rob and Mark showing up at my dorm. They were going to play football. “It’s a beautiful day,” Mark said, swinging open my closet door, “you should get out.”
I can still see them standing there looking in at the empty hangers, then down to the ground at my suitcase, realizing that I’d never even unpacked from the start of the year. Rob turned away like he didn’t want to see, but Mark kneeled and went through my stuff like a surgeon, careful not to disrupt the piles that were folded and belted.
“This is perfect,” he said, withdrawing something white. He placed it on my shoulders. “C’mon, let’s head to Central Park!”
Rob’s Cougar was double-parked on Tenth Street. I sat up front next to Rob and we pulled out, turning down Broadway. There was a deli on the northeast corner of Ninth Street. Mark ran in for coffees and sandwiches and a pack of Wrigley’s for Rob. While Mark was in the store, Rob combed back his hair with his fingers, then threw a lithe muscular arm over the back of the seat. I could feel the electricity behind my neck.
“He’s coming back,” Rob said, clearing his throat as though he wanted to be very precise. “For a couple days. He’d like to see you. You gonna be okay about this,” Rob inquired gravely, “or what?”
I said I’d be fine.
According to Rob, Rourke had been fighting full-time down in Miami with a world-class trainer, but was coming up north because he had agreed to help a friend on a job in Rahway, in Jersey. The trainer in Miami was that guy Jimmy Landes; the friend in Jersey was the Chinaman, and the Chinaman needed Rourke because Rourke knew martial arts and could defend himself, and Rahway was dangerous. No one told me any of this direct or outright; I learned in pieces that day. They must have thought it was the best way to tell me, in pieces.
“What’s Rahway?” I asked Rob later. We were sitting in the grass, on the Great Lawn.
“It’s a prison,” he said. “Maximum security.”
Three days after that I saw Rourke.
We all met at a restaurant at a marina in Jersey. There were sail masts towering disproportionately from the low, flat ground as if to tear night from the sky. And stars like shattered dishware, recklessly strewn. And the excruciating clarity of the vast beyond; the clinking, chiming ropes; the welted slap of the water against the wharf; the flap-flap-flap of plastic grand-opening flags that draped the raised butts of dry-docked boats. I had to walk on my toes to keep my heels from sinking into the sandlot.
“Rob ever take you here in summer?” Joey asked Mark.
“Couple of times,” Mark answered.
“Nice sunsets, right?”
“Gorgeous,” Mark agreed. “I was here with you guys for Eddie’s wedding.”
“That’s right,” Joey said. “Eddie M. That bastard.”
Under his breath, Rob said, “He is a bastard.”
Mark palmed Lorraine’s back as we walked up the stairs. “What do you think, Lorraine? Nice place for a wedding.”
Rob stopped at the landing, facing us. “I’ve often thought about marriage. But it always ends up being just that—a thought.” He busted out laughing. Lorraine gave him a whack and walked on.
“Why you gotta say such stupid shit?” Joey wanted to know, he and Rob walking abreast. “I swear.”
We approached a round candlelit table in a room to the left of the restaurant’s entrance, and right away, before sitting, Rob excused himself. He had to make a couple calls. He looked at me before he left, and he winked like everything was gonna be okay. I watched him fold into the crowd at the bar. Then I couldn’t see him anymore, but I stayed staring into that same spot just in case he might return to fill it.
“Sit down, Eveline, sit down,” a voice was saying. The voice belonged to Lee, the same Lee from the year before, who was there with Chris, her husband. That was the first time I’d seen them since the previous summer, when she said she’d wanted to be an artist. I sat and pulled my chair all the way in.
“You have your driver,” Mark was saying, “your mid-iron, your putter, and your spoon.”
“There’s also a brassie, a mashie, and a niblick,” Brett added.
“A niblick!” Joey’s wife, Anna, said. “You guys have got to be joking!”
Brett had driven out with Mark and me. I’d never met him before that night. They picked me up at school after eighteen holes in Eastchester. On the way down to Jersey they spoke of peaches. Open-heart peaches, open-rock, open-seed. “Freestones are the ones from which the pits are easily removed.” Mark drummed the syllables on the dashboard for my edification—Free-stone. “Get it?”
But from the moment we arrived at the restaurant, Mark didn’t talk to me. He just watched, as if eventually I was going to fall, and he was going to have to catch me.
“Lobsters all around,” Joey said to the waiter. “Three two-pound, lemme see, five three-pound.”
When Rob returned to the table, Joey started in on him, asking what he was up to and who was he calling. Rob picked sesame seeds off of bread sticks and ate them one at a time. As he chewed, his jaw flexed, making two dark creases that arced parenthetically from his cheekbones.
“From running fights to running numbers. And my mother had big hopes for him,” Joey said. “Her baby.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not dead yet.”
“Yet is right,” Chris said. “You don’t have a bodyguard anymore.”
Rob tilted back his chair. His arms hung straight off his sides and his thighs were apart. “My mother wants me to be an accountant. I go, ‘Ma, think of me as an accountant with a mobile office.’”
“Very funny,” Joey said. “Four years of college, then grad school, and he’s standing on street corners. My parents had to take out a second mortgage to pay tuition.”
“I don’t stand on corners.”
“Run slips, whatever. You’re in the wheel. You’re a spoke.”
“I don’t run slips either. You know what, Joey, you don’t know what the f*ck I do. Wheel. Spoke. Where do you get this shit from—Baretta?” Rob’s chair slapped down; Lorraine shifted an inch to the right. “First of all, if there was a wheel, I’d be at the hub. Number two, I paid back Mom and Pop three times over. And while we’re at it, do you think major brokerages recruit guys like me? Harvard Mark and his buddy Brett over here’ll each make partner at Goldman in a couple years, but I’d be walled up in some cubicle, crunching numbers, making fifty grand, thinking up scams. You know how easy it is for me to think up scams?” Rob mashed his teeth together. “There’s a big difference between a prison-bound entrepreneur and a prison-bound clerk.”
“True,” Chris said. “Only one can afford a good lawyer.”
“Besides,” Rob added, “Lorraine over here is very high maintenance. Very Park Avenue.” His hand slipped up from her shoulders into the uncivilized nest of her hair. She rolled her eyes. If Lorraine had been a cat, she’d have been a calico—pretty but peculiar. She carried a huge pocketbook, which always contained the thing Rob needed most. “Hey, Rainy,” he’d say, flicking his fingers into his palm, “got a deck a cards?”
“How come your father can’t get Rob a job at some corporation?” Joey asked Mark. “Something honest.”
“Corporations honest?” Rob mocked. “Ha! Go back to pissin’ on fires, Joey.”
“No problem,” Mark said convincingly. “My father loves Rob.”
Lee leaned over to me. “So, how’s everything with you? School?”
“Yeah, how’s it going, Eveline?” Chris inquired.
“It’s going okay.”
“She’s all A’s,” Rob said. “Forget about it.”
“And it happens to be a very rigid curriculum,” Mark added.
Rob said, “It’s not like she sits around drawing pictures all day.”
I wondered why they felt they had to defend me. I wondered if I seemed dumb.
Past the heads of Lee and Chris was a plastered archway leading to the packed central dining area, and on the far side of that, another archway going to the kitchen. Red-vested waiters passed from the back arch into the main dining room, one on top of the other like out of a musical, each carrying sweltering aluminum platters, and one time through the steam came Rourke.
I remember thinking, How did he get into the back? Did he get there before us, or did he come in through the kitchen?
The seven months had left him altered, heavier, harder. His skin was dark; he was letting his hair grow. Above his left eye, a whole new scar. I noticed a mechanical efficiency, a half-human impassivity. It was like having an animal enter the room, and the animal is also a machine—if you can picture the way animals occasionally simulate machines, if you can picture a fascinating confluence of aspiration and design. I would not have thought it possible for him to be sexier, but he was. If he were a killer, I would not have known whether to run or stay and be killed—I would not have wanted to miss a moment of him.
If it’s sad to reflect upon the wrongness of that particular impression, of him as capable of killing, it is germane, I think, to the history of my failure. Because, in fact, I’ve never known anyone with such a reverence for the sanctity of the body and the independence of the spirit. It’s easy to speak in favor of freedom and strength, but grueling to live a life of emotional economy and physical reserve as Rourke did. His capacity to cause real harm obliged him to exist mindfully. Ironically, it was his sober self-containment, his refusal to equivocate, that threatened and hurt people most. I know because nothing has ever threatened or hurt me more than the moderation of his heart.
I felt conspicuous in my need; I felt wrong to be there. Before he even reached the table, I wanted to leave. I reminded myself that I was not very smart and not very pretty. That my eyes had dark circles and my skin was pale like potter’s clay. That I did not have a nice haircut like Lee did or good makeup from Saks like Anna or gold hoop earrings like Lorraine. Surely everyone noticed my five-dollar haircut. Five dollars because at Astor Place Haircutters, Dominic charged me the men’s rate since I hardly had hair. Probably they could guess that beneath my clothes my underwear had lost its original elasticity and in my pocket was all I possessed—a work-study paycheck for sixty-six dollars. Rourke must have recognized me to be the pathetic liability that I was. That was my feeling. Sometimes a feeling is all you get.
“Hey, hey, it’s the grifter!” Joey said, rising first to greet him.
The women rushed Rourke, and the men stood, and the waiters came too, gathering around. He greeted them all, then he looked in my direction, and nodded, smiling, softly saying, “Hi.”
I said hi, and after that everything went slowly. I remember the twist of my shoes against the floor.
Chris squeezed Rourke’s shoulders. “You ready, or what? Look at this!”
“He’s training to go one-on-one with me,” Joey said.
“I’d pay big money to see that,” Mark said sarcastically, reaching and shaking hands with Rourke. “Harrison, you remember my friend, Brett.”
“Good to see you again,” Brett sputtered with a deluge of respect.
Rourke shook hands and moved on to Rob. The two embraced. Rourke’s arm locked onto Rob’s back, and his face inched over Rob’s shoulder, his black eyes cutting through space.
Rob patted him genially. “How you doin’, man?”
“I’ve been good. You?”
Rob pulled back and his head tilted modestly. “Same old shit.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“It’s been a long f*cking time,” Rob said, shaking his head.
Rourke nodded, saying, “Longest ever.”
“I’ve been following things,” Rob said. “You know, checking in.”
Rourke took the chair across from mine. “I know,” he said. “Jimmy tells me. My mother says you stop over every week. Thanks.”
When the food arrived, Joey proposed a toast, lifting his lobster seriously and ceremoniously. It looked like a heave offering, like some kind of tithe or religious gift. “Welcome home to Harrison, the next light heavyweight champion of—”
“The neighborhood,” Rourke said, and everyone laughed.
Others took turns toasting him, and the lobster hung there, horizontal in the air, wilting ground-ward at its two ends. Rourke reacted to the compliments as if in response to narrowing roominess. His friends didn’t seem to notice his discomfort. One fact of life is that it’s simpler to live vicariously than to live free. They singled him out because he’d gotten away and they hadn’t, and obviously that would reflect badly on them unless he happened to be specially endowed.
He looked at me. I looked away. Despite Rourke’s attentiveness—his voice as it petitioned my ears, the tenderness I saw in his eyes—I couldn’t act as I felt. Though I longed to assure him of what he already knew, that nothing had changed, that I loved him all the more the less he tried, my head was reeling. I had the sick sense that I was facing another confrontation, another loss. I could not bear another loss.
Rob broke into talk about St. Patrick’s Day in Montauk, about the day he and I met. “Evie gets off a red Ducati driven by this big blonde and she walks away like she doesn’t even know the girl. She passes off her helmet to some guy with a club foot, and two huge dogs start following her. German shepherds. And in the background they’re playin’ that accordion thing, the thing the fire department plays. What is that thing? Jesus, I’m drawing a blank. C’mon, help me out here.”
Lorraine poked her stirrer through her drink like she had a job to do, which was to perforate the bottom of the glass. “The bagpipes.”
“That’s it,” Rob said. “The bagpipes. I was thinking, This girl is different. Very different. Right, Harrison?”
Rourke nodded, once. “Very different.”
After dinner, they decided to stop off and get dessert at a fancy pastry place. In the parking lot there came the usual figuring out of who was going in which car. Lee, Mark, Brett, and Chris went in Mark’s new Saab because Chris was thinking of buying one. Joey and Anna rode with Rourke in the GTO because there was a thunking noise in the rear on hard acceleration that Joey was pretty sure could be cleared by re-routing the parking brake cables. Rob didn’t give me a choice. He just said, “C’mon, you ride with us in the Cougar. It’ll give me an excuse in case Lorraine gets any ideas.”
All three of us sat up front, with Lorraine in the middle. She kept putting lotion on her hands. Whenever it vanished, she would begin again. Rob was singing.
You’re just too good to be true. Can’t take my eyes off you.
You’d be like Heaven to touch. I want to hold you so much.
As he sang, Lorraine looked out the windshield at nothing. The perfumey heat of her against my left side and the cold of the door on my right combining with the smell of Jergens was nice, but bittersweet. I figured Rob didn’t want me to ride with Rourke because Rourke didn’t want to ride with me.
We had to stop at Rob’s house to walk the dog. Rob was the only one who could walk it because it was a Doberman he’d rescued from a gas station. Rescued meant stolen, but Rob had no problem with that, since the dog had been abused and the stinking f*ck owed him money. The idea of Rob having to rush home a couple times a day to walk the dog was funny. He was always shooting off to deal with something urgent and unexplained—picking up the cake for his nephew’s communion, catching the end of a Little League game of some troubled kid, getting his grandmother at the hairdresser’s, shoveling snow at a neighbor’s house, dropping off a deposit at the bank for his father.
The place where Rob was living at the time was cramped, and with all of us inside it felt like a Winnebago or the cabin of a boat. We barged in on his roommate, a guy they called Uncle Milty, who was lying on the floor watching the Rangers play Edmonton. He leapt to his feet and tucked in his shirt when we came in, and he made us a snack platter.
“You should’ve told me you were coming,” Uncle Milty said from the kitchen. “I woulda bought sodas for the girls.” He was short; just his chest and head were visible over the island that divided the two rooms. He loaded up a cutting board with olives and leftover tuna and a couple of tubes of Ritz crackers still in wax paper.
“Damn, Uncle Milty,” Joey said, grabbing some cheese cubes. “You’re hospitable.”
He and Chris were on the sofa, checking out the end of the game. Mark too. Brett was using the phone. Rourke was in the kitchen leaning on the counter. I was near him, leaning too. Neither of us spoke. I was ashamed to stand so close to him, but I didn’t know where else to be.
Rob walked in. “What’s wrong with you cafones? You just ate.”
“What do you care?” Uncle Milty asked. “It’s my food. You last the week on a jar of peanut butter.”
“I’m just sayin’,” Rob huffed. The muzzled dog sniffed at the bare platter. “You coulda saved a couple olives for the dog, that’s all.” Rob gave the chain collar a jerk. “C’mon, Cujo. They don’t give a shit about you.”
By the time we reached the dessert place, I’d lost all sense of direction. While the guys went up to the counter to pick out pastries, I sat with the women and played with packets of sugar, trying to figure out where I was geographically.
Rourke was leaning against the coffee bar in his midnight-blue cotton bomber jacket, and he was telling a story about golf. I could tell because at one point he had simulated a golf swing, tossing up an arm, waving flat into the horizon as if to hail an imaginary party onward. His hair swept about his face. With one hand he righted it, then said something to make everyone laugh. To watch him was to feel again what I’d felt exclusively with him—like a woman, feminine and frail, light and in love. I remembered how with Jack, I’d always felt we were intrinsically the same, and though there was refuge in that, there was also a forfeiture of individuality. With Rourke, I experienced opposition, like the simple reflex of a knee when you knock it—legitimate and artless and completely beyond your control.
Mark came to the table first, saying good night. “We’re gonna take off before dessert,” he told us as he distributed kisses. He and Brett had each had a double espresso at the bar, he said, and they were ready to shoot back to the Big Apple. They had to work in the morning.
When he bent to my ear, he whispered, “Why don’t you catch a ride with us?”
Though I felt ashamed of his familiarity, I knew I should not be. I reminded myself that he had been generous. I’d been clear, but he’d been clear too. It was not impossible that I’d misjudged things, and in the process, that I’d misled him. Often, I misjudged things.
I pulled away, saying, “Good night.”
Mark moved closer. He took my hand and shoved cash into it. Forty dollars. “It’s a long walk back to New York,” he warned. Then he turned and passed through our little crowd like a mayor, smiling and shaking hands. Was it possible that Mark knew something I didn’t? Could he see what I couldn’t see? Maybe Rourke had been standing there all along, saying of me, What’s with her?
I kicked out my chair, grabbed my coat, and started to run after him. But before I reached the closing door, Rob casually stepped out and stopped me, saying, “Where to, Countess? This is Jersey.” There is a sensation, lifelike in me still, of Rob holding me, inducing me gently back from the door, steering and stepping like a competent dance partner, delivering me to the haven of Rourke’s arms.
And then Rourke’s mouth on the base of my neck, the mouth I’d waited for, like for proof of God. We kissed, lightly—the first new kiss, and I wondered at the taste, like a willowy almond after-flavor. I had to stretch to reach him, and he had to bend, lifting me a little.
“Did you get my letter?” he asked.
“Yes, I got it.”
And hours later in the car, outside Rob’s place again, the two of us clinging tightly to the heat and pulse of the other.
Are you really here?
Yes, I’m here. Are you? Are you here?
Then when it was nearly dawn, I remember him looking at his watch. It was thick stainless steel with a marine-green face, and the silken hairs of his arms were pressed beneath it. It was five minutes after four.
“I have to be in Rahway,” he said, “at the prison, in an hour. Rob is going to take you back to the city. That okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s okay.”
He pulled me closer. “I’m done on Friday morning. When’s your last class this week?”
“Thursday afternoon.”
“Feel like taking off for a few days?”
“I would like that,” I said.
“I’ll call in a little while, as soon as I’m done.” Rourke kissed me on both eyes, and I remember thinking, He seems happy. I wanted to be happy too. We kissed once again before I left with Rob, and it was nice, like home again, or anyway, as close as you can come.
Ear Bar is on Spring Street, and by the time I arrived that Thursday night, everyone was there. Everyone except Mark; his absence was conspicuous. Rob was near the door, with Eddie M. and Lorraine and Lorraine’s friend Tracy Hollis, a dental hygienist. The elastic cast of rum stretched like a girdle about them. One of Eddie M.’s hands was cupped on the base of Tracy’s ass. No wonder they called him a bastard. I wondered about his wife, Karen, whether she was over at her mother’s. Karen was always over at her mother’s. I’d never met her. “Me neither,” Rob liked to say, “except that time at the wedding.”
Rob kissed me distractedly, without breaking from his story. It was unlike him. He was criticizing Lorraine—something derogatory about bowling. “First off, she’s got her own ball, some designer thing. She gets it up over her head, see, like this, but she can’t insert her fingers all the way because of the nails—so the ball isn’t too secure—and she starts toward the pins. And I’m just sittin’ there thinking, If anybody so much as sneezes, she’s gonna break her back.”
Rourke was halfway up the bar, flushed and tilting forward on his stool. He wore a sweater. He looked heavy and broken. He looked exactly like what he was not—a drunken Irish boxer. It was awful to see him that way. I glanced back at Rob, who remained emphatically preoccupied. He wouldn’t even look to check. Normally he was always looking to check.
I approached Rourke slowly. He watched me approach, lifting his beer bottle to his mouth, dipping his head, swallowing hard.
He said, “Hey.”
I said, “Hey.”
“How was school?” he asked. I could hardly hear him.
I said that it was fine.
“What classes did you have?” he asked.
“Sociology. Drawing from life.”
“Drawing, that’s right. You said you’re drawing rooftops.”
“Rooftops, yes.”
His eyes searched my face. “Did you bring any with you?”
I said no, I didn’t.
“Oh. Too bad.” Rourke seemed to wait, or prepare, or gather something stray. “I talked to Black Jack today—did I tell you about Black Jack?”
“No,” I said.
“One of the inmates I worked with this week. A former fighter. There are a couple boxers in there. He ran guns through Jersey in the fifties.” Rourke slurred when he spoke, and struggled to find the right words. “He took the fall for a murder he didn’t commit. That’s what he told me. A trooper. No witnesses.” Rourke looked at me, and then beyond, eyes darting around table legs, over floor tiles. “He’s been in twenty-six years. His wife remarried. He’s never seen his son.”
It was a strange story to tell. It was as if he were entrusting me with something important, as if there were more that he wanted to say. I suppose I should have inquired further, but as it happened, the moment of his openness coincided exactly with the moment I resolved to defend myself against it. I’d contented myself for so long with his opaqueness that I actually preferred it. I trusted it more.
“Sorry I couldn’t call you earlier,” he said. “You got the note, right?”
He’d left a note at the front desk in my dorm saying he couldn’t pick me up as planned, but that I should meet them tonight at Ear Bar. I’d almost missed the note. I’d been waiting in my room for his call when Juanita the guard had called up instead.
The bar was cold; I drew my sweatshirt tighter. Rourke whistled to Rob, gesturing for him to close the front door, then Rourke took my hands in his own. I remembered the night in high school after the play at Dan Lewis’s house when he’d done the same thing.
The bartender came by with two shot glasses. “Here you go, Harrison. Rob sent them over. One’s for your girlfriend,” he said, meaning me.
Rourke reached for a shot glass and offered it to me, but I declined. He emptied one, then another. “I’m celebrating,” he stated. “I took a job—a regular job.”
I didn’t understand. “When?” When wasn’t right.
“Six hours ago.”
“Where?”
“Out West. Colorado Springs,” he said. “Training. Other fighters.” His jaw ticked left.
“No more fights?”
“No more fights. A few fights. A couple commitments. Then I’m done.”
Colorado seemed far, farther than the last place he went. Florida. And before Florida, California. He had also lived in New Jersey and New York. Five states, maybe more; Rourke made me think what a big country America is. You could really get lost out there. Training other fighters. I didn’t like the sound of that. I didn’t bother to say I was happy for him; he wouldn’t have wanted me to lie. What I felt primarily was an acquiescent and moving sorrow, like seeing a bird flying very far in the sky or a tiny cortege passing in the rain.
“I won’t be able to get away this weekend after all. I head out first thing Saturday morning, at about five.” He came forward, his head tapping my head. His neck stretching, his lips touching mine softly, once, twice. “You wouldn’t consider taking a ride cross-country with me, would you?”
I remember his drunken breath on my neck was warm, and the fragrant smell of the alcohol plus the smell of him was dizzying. I remember listening and hearing, like when you listen to a shell and hear the sea. There was remorse, but also unspeakable things—ambition, surely. Cruelty, perhaps. Did he hear me too? Did he hear that I could never go back to waiting, could never become another of his faithful friends, preserved in time, occupying the cherished but forsaken asylum of his youth? Did he hear that I would sooner move on than allow myself to be aligned with things in his heart that were dead?
Whether or not he was sincere about the drive cross-country, I answered as if he was, because, in fact, he should have been, because, in fact, he wished to be. Sometimes men hate themselves for not being heroes, and they need to know they can be forgiven. Sometimes when you love someone, you need to pass their tests.
“I don’t think it would be good—for me, you know, to go—like, not such a great idea.” I imagined the flight home alone, the sight of this great nation moving in reverse, west to east, me leaving him behind. It would have been impossible. He knew that. “It’s just—I haven’t been well.”
Rourke pulled my hands deep into his lap and manipulated them thoughtfully, tracing the veins. I was free to regard him—exposed and illogical and lame and drunk, and so very sorry. Was he crying? I thought he was crying. If only I’d thought to ask about what, but I was too moved by the completeness of my feelings—compassion, fury, desire, tenderness, fear, love.
“You don’t understand,” he slurred, nodding downward. “You’ll never be what I am.” I asked what that was, and he said, “Exactly what you see in front of you. A failure.”
“Do you remember,” he asked, “how to drive shift?”
His legs were parted and his knees skimmed the dashboard. His head drifted back onto the seat, and he closed his eyes. I started his car, keeping to my side, though I was small. Being next to him right then was like being a Lilliputian, like stepping with due caution about a slumbering giant—by his size you knew that the setback was only temporary. I drove him back to Jersey because he’d asked me to, because I loved him, because I trusted no one else. I remember moving through the quills of highway light that seemed like a forest. And the music on the radio, the music like a watcher, like it had intellect, like the box had eyes.
Juliet, when we made love you used to cry
You said I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you ’til I die
A precise halo of clove-pink light marked out the room on the top floor of his house—the same room I’d noticed the first time I visited— his mother’s. From the street I could just make out the wallpaper, indigo with ropes of yellow rising like blossom ladders. She must have been waiting for him. In the driveway was a white Oldsmobile; I pulled up alongside it. I did not have to wake him. He had been roused instinctively by the impression of the streets near his home. For some time he had been staring ahead, grim in the grim richness of his thoughts, and this consoled me, ironically.
I accompanied him to the door of his studio. I retrieved the key from the grass when he dropped it, and though I did not help him undress, I laid his clothes on the chair. When I turned, he was curled like a deserted boy on his left side, which was peculiar since I’d known him always to sleep facing up. He was in his underwear. It was true he was bigger since I’d seen him last, but his weight was decisive, controlled. Once Rob told me and Lorraine that when Rourke hit fighting weight, he had to maintain it to the quarter pound. Rob had said, “He sucks the water out of lettuce and spits green.”
It was awful to see him drunk, to see him give up. Gently I journeyed like a pilgrim to the wall of his back, close enough without touching to reclaim some of the life of which I had been dispossessed. I kept watch over him through the night. I could be forgiven for seeking out memories of Montauk—of being sunburned, of being in love. After passing one last time through these halls of memory, I sealed them off like rooms locked from the inside. I would not go back. I would ask no more of life than that it allow me in all fairness to hold the perfect knowledge of perfect things. I told myself maybe love can be love regardless of the absence of its object—and devotion, devotion—so long as you are willing to be captive to it, and you stow it secretly, like a mad relative in the attic. Maybe there was an invisible way to love him, like a radio frequency. Maybe if I listened at night, I could draw it.
He stirred, raising himself onto one elbow, the muscles of his infolding abdomen making a miniature city, and he drank from the glass of water I’d set by the bed. He was not surprised to see me, which was bittersweet. It was as though I had infringed upon his nights as often as he had upon mine. His arms went around my hips and his fingers slipped through the empty belt loops of my jeans, and I drew my fingertips across his jaw, and he breathed softly, coming closer.
From where I sat, I could see the bathroom door. Once we showered there, and I had cried, and he’d been good about that, not asking questions. Next to the bathroom was another door to an interior staircase, leading to the first floor, and the second, and at the very top, the indigo room. If I climbed those stairs, I would find her, still awake, reading in her robe. Mothers who wait up read and wear robes; I knew because I’d never had such a mother, so she existed perfectly in my imagination. If I went to her, would she be the sort to solve everything, or possibly the sort to say nothing—to let you make your own mistakes and to hope for the best.
I wondered when as a man Rourke had been proved. After the fight over his father, the one that had given him his scar? I wondered would we die without meeting again, or would we meet and smile in the slightly embarrassed manner of former lovers, with all the intervening seasons of regret coming to life in our eyes. And if I died, would he come to my funeral, and who would call to notify him, and would he grieve—yes, he would grieve; but would he know that if I could be given one day, one hour, one minute more to live, that I would accept only if I could spend that time with him? I thought how a baby conceived in July would have been born in April. That would have been a biological coincidence, to have been brought together for conception and then again for the delivery. People like to say babies come for a reason. If so, was ours taken away for one?
As I watched the ascension of day, with every ripple of light coming like drops to fill a bucket, I held him, and I persuaded myself to come to terms. How strange that I felt most gloriously alive just as I prepared to withdraw from the hazards of sensation. Like some animal gazing into the wondrous world through the door of its dank cave before bowing off to voluntary sleep, I breathed greedily as if each trapped ounce of his vitality could be called upon to sustain me through hibernation. And I became seized by a whole new sorrow, a loving sorrow. Although once again it was Rourke who was leaving me, this time I knew I would bear the burden of the sacrifice. I was turning him over—to soul corruption, to the inclemency of survival.
I said, “Mark Ross is not going to give up.”
Rourke answered, “I know.” His breath on my wrist.
I left as he slept, the worst and hardest thing I’d ever done. I knew that if I stayed, it would have made everything worse. I knew also that by leaving I was giving up every possibility of coming to some understanding. At daybreak, I walked to the main road, then I hitchhiked as far as the highway, where I hitched again. Feeling forlorn as I did, and lacking a destination, I might have traveled on as far as the road would have taken me, Albany or Boston, Canada maybe, except that I got a ride directly into the West Village from two co-workers, a Polish guy and a diabetic woman, best friends, they said, who left me safely at the corner of Hudson and Morton.
At a Mexican restaurant on Columbus Avenue, Lee and Chris held a goodbye dinner for Rourke. Lee had called me that day from her office on Wall Street.
“I initially planned this for Sunday, since he said you two were going to Atlantic City, but I just found out he’s leaving tomorrow. It’s been crazy getting organized.”
I didn’t want to go; yet, I couldn’t stay away. I arrived on time, but instead of going in I walked around—north, west, south, then east again, making a fifteen-block square. By the time I climbed the restaurant’s staircase to its balcony and joined the party—there were nine people, including Mark—they were finishing dessert—dishes of flan and fried ice cream were scattered around the table.
“You’re here,” Lee said, rising to give me a kiss. “I’m so glad.”
Rourke didn’t speak or move to greet me. Everyone else mumbled hellos but fidgeted uncomfortably, not knowing what to do or expect. They were even more ignorant of the goings-on between Rourke and me than we were ourselves, and that uncertainty, mingled with his disappointment, was like a critically elevated temperature. As Rob would say, Things were pretty dicey.
Lee called over the balcony to the waiter for another espresso and an ice water, and she drew out a chair at the table’s head, which I dragged to Rourke’s side, so I did not have to see him, though I could sense him, everything about him. He was in the room with me, I was thinking morbidly. Soon he would not be in the room with me anymore.
Mark raised his café con leche. “Well, best of luck, Harrison.”
No one else raised their glasses or cups because Rourke did not accept Mark’s toast; he just stared, then stood. He had to get going, he said to Lee; he wanted to spend time with his mother. There was squelching chair scraping, but he lifted his hands, telling everyone to stay put, and giving Lee a quick kiss before walking out.
I remember wanting nothing more than to get up and leave with him, to apologize for having left him that morning, to figure out what had to be figured, to go and meet his mother, to help him pack, to have a private goodbye, and that moment of all moments is most maddeningly vivid to me; it was the last honest need I experienced for years. In a heartbeat, he was gone. I knew I’d never see him again.
Chris paid the check, and we finished in silence. They all stood and grabbed their jackets. Mark thanked Lee and Chris.
Rob lifted my sweater off the back of the chair. He said, “Let’s go. I’ll give you a ride.”
I told him no. Looking down.
“C’mon,” he said darkly. “I’m taking the Holland. I’ll go straight down Ninth Avenue, take Bleecker to Tenth, drop you there, and then shoot west to Seventh on Ninth Street.” Boom, boom, boom.
I’d be okay.
Rob swung his chair closer, then glanced over his shoulder at the others. “Look at me.”
My eyes looked at his, facing off.
“Once you do this,” he said, “there’s no going back.”
“There’s already no going back.”
“Would you like to walk a bit?” Mark asked as the cars pulled away.
“Thanks,” I said. “Home just seems like—” I waved one arm.
“Like home,” Mark said. “Say no more.”
The night was magnificent, as such things go, and we infringed upon it mildly, strolling up one side of Columbus Avenue and down the other, gazing into store windows. We passed many of the same places I’d walked by when I was alone earlier in the evening.
“You look like an Italian movie star,” he said to our reflection. “With your sweater over your shoulders and just the top button done.”
I tried to remember if I’d ever told Mark about Marilyn and Dad comparing me to Monica Vitti. But then again, it was just the type of guy Mark was, the kind who makes you think he’s gotten hold of your file.
We turned east on Seventy-sixth Street and headed toward Central Park. I climbed onto a low wall and reached for his shoulder as I walked. When he helped me off, I slid through the shaft of his arms.
“Like an angel,” he said, “just descended.”
“Fallen, you mean.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean.”
He guided my face back and he kissed me, and I let him because my lips were deserving lips wishing to be kissed and my body was a deserving body wishing to be touched and because there is a moment in every life when you hit the lowest possible point. In that moment you are not you but a monster of you, a creature stalking the cloisters of your own despair. The monster urges you on—come, come—and so you do. In fact, you feel better in there, crazed and incautious, capable and free. You feel you have reached the other side, that you have passed through the pain, though you have only capitulated to it. And you are lucky you do not have a gun. If you had a gun, you’d shoot yourself.
“This is where I live.” We are at the Beresford on Central Park West. “Actually, my parents live here.” He escorted me through the set of doors facing the American Museum of Natural History.
“Good evening, Mr. Ross,” the doorman said.
Mark shook the doorman’s gloved hand. “Ralph, this is Miss Auerbach.”
Ralph greeted me warmly and walked us to the elevator. I wondered what he was thinking. Men are always thinking things, doormen in particular.
The Ross apartment was august and sublime, a quintessential New York prewar apartment. If ever Manhattan could be smelted and poured, it would take the shape of an apartment like that. The difference between it and the house in East Hampton was dramatic—the plaster walls, the original detailing, the chain of elegant rooms connected by high-ceilinged corridors. A Steinway grand was situated near a bank of windows overlooking the park. My thoughts turned to Jack. I wondered where he was and how I had managed to stray so far. I saw the art—a de Kooning, a Stella, a Diebenkorn, several Picasso etchings. Mark had bought the Diebenkorn at a gallery in California, he told me, and had given it to his parents for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. In the bedrooms were lithographs by Miró, a charcoal by O’Keeffe, a series of photographs by Stieglitz.
White cabinets towered from floor to ceiling in the main cooking area, but there were also cabinets in the hall that was a sort of larder. The floor was made of those classic black and white square ceramic tiles, and near the maid’s room, a door with dead bolts led to a service elevator. Garbage was placed there; invisible hands retrieved it.
Mark rummaged through the refrigerator. “You didn’t eat tonight. Let me make you something.”
When the kettle whistled, Mark transferred boiling water for tea into a beautiful china pot. It was light turquoise with handpainted geese in flight and gold foliage and a gold border. He showed me the black stamps on the bottoms of the matching cup and saucer. The set was Japanese, from the turn of the century.
“Nippon,” he said, referring to the mark. “It simply means ‘Japan’ and refers to the country of origin. In the 1920s, U.S. Customs law changed and demanded the marks read: ‘Made in Japan,’ which doesn’t sound as nice as ‘Nippon,’ does it?”
I said no, that it didn’t. By the kitchen clock, it was nearly three-thirty Mark and I had walked for hours. Rourke was finished packing. He was alone in his apartment, thinking of me. Just a day ago, I’d been there too.
“Where are your parents?” I asked Mark, banishing thoughts of Rourke. There was the seedy smell of rye bread toasting.
“Milan,” he answered. “On vacation. Then it’s up to Monte Carlo for a little gambling, then they shoot through Nice over to Cannes for the film festival.”
I was sorry I’d asked; somehow, it made everything hurt worse.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let me show you around.” We left the dishes on the table for someone else to clean and soon we were moving through hallways. It was strange, but I could see us—moving. One room we passed had window seats and long boxes of flowers—pansies. I hesitated; it was so pretty there.
“Alicia’s,” he said.
Mark’s former room was at the very end. It was smaller and darker than his sister’s but nicer. There were built-in cherry bookshelves and a cherry rolltop desk and hanging things such as photographs, pennants, diplomas—Collegiate, UCLA, Harvard. The room was like one of those hidden coin pockets in your Levi’s, the perfect place if you happen to have the perfect thing to fit inside.
I understood that Mark had taken me there instead of to his new apartment because there was a chance I would have declined. The visit to his parents’ house felt accidental and edifying, and I did not mind being there; in fact, I felt safe, unfindable, like deep in the tail of a snake.
It seemed that Mark was always right—anyway, his instincts were, and fortune was with him, and these are superior traits in a man when you can find no others.
At the edge of his bed, he kissed me again and he unbuttoned my blouse slowly, methodically. It was cotton, a doeskin color with pearl buttons—I still have it. Next Mark lowered the straps of my bra, thumbing down the lace.
“Am I dreaming?” he murmured to himself. “I must be dreaming.”
I did not bother to stop him. I did not bother to say no, not when the sun would soon be rising, not when he had walked me through the labyrinth of the night, not when he had worked so hard for so long, and he had waited—one whole year.
Rourke was no god, no king—he was a solitary, solitary man. I had no reason to wait for him. If it was true that Rourke wanted me, perhaps it was also true that he needed to forsake me. Perhaps his sacrifice helped him to proceed; there are men like that, men who need loss to exempt them, who feel unconsecrated without forfeiture.
In any event, did it really matter, days alone or days with Mark, when his eyes had seen Rourke’s eyes and my eyes and the exchanges between them? When his loathing of Rourke was so vital as to move him to claim me? Those were the things I told myself.
Mark, kissing my neck, his hands slipping to my waist and my pants. When he followed the line beneath the elastic of my underwear with one finger, his lips hung apart and he caught his breath. He steered me back onto the bed and removed the rest of my clothes, though not his own—for a long time he did not remove his own. He went very slowly, staring the entire time. I did not dare move. I’d read somewhere that power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims. I did not want him to think I was ungrateful.
When he tossed my jeans onto the floor, there was the sound of coins rolling. My money, falling out. He said not to worry. “I have all the money you’ll ever need.”