43
I meet Rob at a garage, and we are happy, both of us, and free. I follow him to the back, where it smells of incubated diesel and desiccated oil—safe, a world of men. Beneath one of the cars is Rourke. He rolls out. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him. I want to touch his face, but I cannot reach it. Rob says to try, so I try, and when I do, I feel him, his skin, and things begin to grow—the light and the warmth and my sense of myself, growing from the bottom up, like plants.
Rourke and I are in a room. It’s brightly lit without windows; the door is ajar. He leans over a suitcase. Being close to him feels provisional or probationary, like being reunited with someone dead. Like soon he will go again. Like time is marked.
He kisses me, saying he will be back in a few hours. I will wait, though I know he will not come back. He doesn’t mean to be untruthful. He simply doesn’t know what I know.
I’m not sure about time passing, if any has. But Mark has come, and the room Rourke and I shared is in Mark’s apartment. Someone called for you, Mark says. Some guy, calling your name—Eveline. Eveline. From the bedroom, Mark says. Go on in.
Beneath the covers is a shape. Is it Rourke? I go under the blankets. It’s dark; he is naked. He brushes back the hair from my face. We lie, close and broken apart, known, unknown.
Baby, he says. I missed you, baby.
I am wearing a slip with buttons. He unbuttons, expertly. One hand holds me still while the other—Now he is in me. I feel him. We lie on our sides, hardly moving. I find his pulse. I strive to be an organ to him, sightless, mindless, attached. Is it true, could it be true, has he come back?
I’m sorry, I say. For doubting you. I love you. I tell him I love him.
Yes, he says, starting to push faster now. I love you too.
And I—my eyes—they squeeze shut, they will not open, they know not to open. The sight of Mark would kill me. It kills me.
Before Mark gets up I take cash from the dresser and I go get the BMW from the garage. I’m going to see Rob at church. It’s his family church, where he goes every Sunday at nine, by his parents’ house, in Rumson. I know the way because I’ve been there a few times, twice for Easter, once for Christmas Eve, and once for Charlie’s communion. Charlie is Rob’s nephew and godson, Joey and Anna’s son. I would have called to say I was coming, but I didn’t want to take the chance of Mark hearing me and waking up. After I got home from being at Pinky’s last night with Rob, Mark was out and he didn’t come home until after I’d gone to bed.
I wait on the church steps in the drizzle and listen to the end of Mass. The priest is talking about the Knack. He says the Knack is the ability to live in the present, which is something God has and Lucifer wants. I’m not sure about that, about the Knack. Priests have a way of extrapolating a lot, then neglecting to explain themselves. I guess he’s implying that God—or, the goodness in people—is satisfied with the gifts of each ordinary moment, and that Lucifer—or the maleficence in people—is obsessed with the shadowy and elusive things lying ahead and behind—like dreams and regrets.
Rob dips out with both Mrs. Cirillos, his mother and his grandmother on his father’s side. Coincidentally, they share the same first name too—Fortuna. He opens their collapsible umbrellas, one, then the other. They hook on to him at the elbows so when he walks he has to stretch his neck above the fabric arch they make. When he sees me, he stops in his tracks, they all do, in a line. The elder Mrs. Cirillo loses her balance. He steadies her.
“What happened?” he demands of me.
“Nothing.”
“You’re okay?”
“I’m okay,” I say. “I’m fine.”
“Jesus, give me a friggin’ heart attack, why don’t you?”
Both women slap him in sync. “What is wrong with you?” his mother says quickly, like this happens all the time. “You just walked out of church.”
“He’s gonna get struck dead,” his grandmother warns. “It happened to my cousin.” She makes a hatchet move with her hand. “Dead.”
I kiss the ladies hello. Rob’s mom is dressed in a union-blue shirtdress with a Peter Pan collar and darts beneath the breasts. Nonna Cirillo is wearing a pressed housecoat with a black crocheted sweater around her shoulders, and with her free hand she clings to her bag, tight, like somebody might snatch it. She doesn’t remember me, but that’s okay since she never remembers anything other than obscure details from her past such as the shoe sizes of dead sisters and the price of tomatoes from the grocery store the family used to operate on First Avenue.
“You’re soaking wet, Eveline,” Mrs. Cirillo says, taking out a tissue from her sleeve, wiping my face. “How come you didn’t come inside?” She turns to Rob. “How come she didn’t come inside?”
Rob looks around. “How did you get here?”
I point to the BMW.
“Which one. The 3.0 CS? Whose car is that?”
Mark bought it. For me. Only I don’t say that. I say, “Mark’s.”
“That’s a nice car. He never told me about that car.” Rob shakes his head in queasy disbelief. “Follow me back to the house. My father’s making lunch.”
At Vinny-O’s they added a partial wall to make a dining area. Otherwise the place looks the same as it did four years ago, except for a maximum occupancy sign and a Heimlich Maneuver poster.
“You like those signs, huh?” Rob says. “All they need now is a chef and a kitchen. A couple customers. Some food. Maybe a menu.”
He takes over like he owns the place, like he’s back at the dining room table of his parents’ house. He leans on the bar and grabs the phone and pops off a few calls. There’s a bandage on his right palm that wasn’t there the night before when we were at Pinky’s. He fingers the tape as he talks on the phone, saying something complicated to somebody about the under/over being 100/80, so he lighteninged the over 200, and there he was, 8,200 down, and how he swears he would get the rest next week because he’s got something big about to break, bigger than big, which you can get a piece of if you want.
I gesture for money to play the bowling game. He tucks the phone in between his neck and his shoulder, reaches into his front pocket with his good hand, and gives me a fistful of change. I cross the room and drop a quarter in the slot and the lights flash slow. Left-right, left-right. They haven’t upgraded the design of the game since the sixties. The cartoon boy is wearing pegged-leg pants with two-inch cuffs, and the cartoon girl has teased hair and a headband and a linguini-thin belt around the waist of her dress. They seem carefree. I whoosh the shooting disc around and get that feeling of the metal platter swilling back and forth over the sawdusty alley. I take it to my belly and shoot it. Bee-Baw. Tough luck! A split!
“Not enough force,” Rob says, coming up to me from behind. “You get that from height. Try again.” He lifts me. I draw the disc to the far left and shoot it diagonally right where it slides under one pin, meets two points of the corner, and ricochets left, sliding to a standstill right under the second pin—Chick-ching. Aces! A spare!
“Nice job,” he says, lowering me slow, straightening out his pants around his penis.
At our table, I stack the leftover quarters in front of Rob. He flicks one up and spins it on the tabletop. He blurs his gaze into the twirling coin. “You didn’t say anything last night, did you?”
“I was asleep when he got home.”
“Does he know where you are right now?” Rob asks.
I say no; Rob says good.
“Watch yourself,” Rob advises. “He’s snapping.”
“Rob,” I say, “sometimes when we—when he and I—sometimes in my sleep—I make a mistake and I think Mark is Rourke.”
Rob slaps down the coin. He looks up. “Does Mark know?”
“I think so,” I say. “Yes.”
Rob nods, small nods, minor nods, his head tilted somewhat right. In the light his hazel eyes are green. Most days they are like cork. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s take a ride.”
When we leave, he swings the front door open and props it for me to go past, forgetting his bad hand. “Shit,” he says, shaking it. I ask what happened, and he says, “Nothing glamorous. I was eating salted peanuts out of a can.”
In Spring Lake people have the Knack. They wash cars and clip hedges and there is this feeling that the worst is over, that there is nothing going on in the world besides you and the miniature sliver of action in your immediate vicinity. We pass a ball game in the street and Rob brings the car to a crawl. “Hey, who taught you to hold a bat?” he asks a kid. “The vacuum salesman?”
As we approach Rourke’s house, I get the sensation of coming home after a war or a long stay in a psychiatric institution. Everything looks the same—the butterfly rhododendrons, the flickering of the asphalt driveway, the carbonated green of the garden hose. I wonder if everything looking the same is worse than everything looking changed, since of course nothing is the same; three years have passed since the morning I was last here, the morning I walked out on Rourke and hitchhiked back to New York. I’d been thinking of it so much lately; it all seemed recent to me.
A figure in khakis and a denim blouse kneels in the front garden, and at the throaty sound of Rob’s car, she turns and squints. I wonder if she thought it was Rourke. When she stands she is not small or big—my size, no, a little bigger.
Rob turns down the driveway; he hesitates before cutting the engine. “Listen,” he says, “there’s something you should know. There’s gonna be a fight.”
“What kind of a fight?”
“The comeback kind, with long f*cking odds. The kind where Harrison beats the shit out of somebody and we make a lot of money.” Rob flips the key. “Frankly, I’m in a bit of a situation. I asked your fiancé there to lend me some money, but nothing doing. Meanwhile the vig is killing me. You remember what that is?”
“Yes,” I say. “Interest.” Thinking, Rourke’s coming back.
“Exactly,” he says. “I would’ve told you about it, only Mark told me not to say anything. And until Pinky’s last night, I wasn’t sure where you stood with things.”
“When will it be?”
“Soon as I can swing it,” he says as he turns the ignition off. “Just be careful.” He nods toward the figure approaching on the grass. “She’s pretty touchy about fights.”
“She’s not going to mention fights to me—is she?”
“Hard to say.” He leans to open his door. “She’s got, like, ESP. It’s weird.” He swings around to my side, snap-jangling his keys and stretching a bit. He helps me to a stand, then tosses an arm over my shoulder, bending down into me. “Ready?”
Our footsteps clap on the crisscross brick. There is the thsst-thsst-thsst of a sprinkler and the thwock of a ball and a voice—“Gloria-aaa.” And again, birds. Maybe the same birds as the other times I came, maybe different ones. I’ve forgotten the life span of a bird. Kate once had an African finch that lived for five years, but that is not the right type of bird. Funny to think of Kate’s bird, but not Kate.
Rob says hi. She offers her cheek. He kisses it. “This is Eveline. Evie, this is Mrs. Rourke.”
She plucks off her gardening gloves and extends a hand. “Eveline. Happy to meet you.”
Her skin is the softest I’ve felt not on a baby. Her smile, her hair, her eyes—it’s really very hard. I bite the bottom skin of my lip, inside my mouth where no one can see. Like her son, she projects an aura of radiant health. Her manner of speaking is faintly aristocratic. She married beneath herself, I think—she married for love. Rourke has that kind of beauty, the kind that comes from people in love.
“How are your parents, Rob?” she inquires.
“They’re at each other’s throats, so they must be okay.”
“That’s right. It’s when they stop scrutinizing each other that you have to worry,” she says with regal detachment.
Rob reaches for a cigarette, then recalls his hand. I’ve never seen him so edgy, except the time with Uncle Tudi. “Listen, Mrs. R., I gotta grab some stuff from the basement.”
“Help yourself,” she says. “When you’re finished, I’d like you to carry down some boxes from the attic. They’re stacked beneath the street-side window.” She turns to me. “I’m giving everything away. You’d be shocked by what accumulates over a lifetime.”
“A lifetime,” Rob chides. “From the look of it, you’ve got at least two more of those to come, Mrs. Rourke.”
“Careful with the compliments, Rob. You’re liable to make me suspicious. Eveline and I will be inside. Come find us when you’re finished.”
He falters as he backs away, nearly tripping over a row of boxwoods. He straddles it, asking me, “You gonna be all right?”
“I won’t rough her up, Rob,” Mrs. Rourke says. “Promise.”
She takes my arm to climb the porch. Each broad step of the five we mount is one upon which Rourke sat or walked, as a child, as an adolescent. Surely, at some point, the outline of my foot fills the melted-away outline of his foot.
Inside is cool. The corridor walls are papered with frail caramel pinstripes and columns of cyan. Tucked behind the curve in the base of the mahogany banister is an oval writing table with a silver-and-white pitcher full of purple irises.
The kitchen is airy and brightly lit, and what is wood is a pallid milk-ice blue. It is a cook’s kitchen, spacious and fully implemented, with inflections of red—the clock, the dish towels, the moiré swirls in platters. I am seated at a table for eating, and in the corner to my right is another for working, which has a cherry-checked vinyl cloth. It is covered with an assortment of split-open cookbooks and textbooks with frayed paper page markers. She puts heat under the kettle and busies herself, withdrawing cups and plates from the china cabinet and a beer glass for Rob. Although I would not have expected her to be lonely, I’m amazed by how busy she is—the pile of mail, the ringing telephone. The world whirls about her.
I watch for signs of Rourke. They have a physical resemblance, but the bond between them is clearest to me in the subtleties of environment. There is nothing arduous or sentimental about her domesticity. Like his masculinity, her femininity is uncontrived. She moves too fast and too well to be false. Like her son, she’s good because no one else is better. The house is charming, and yet I don’t feel covetous. It’s easy to be seduced at the Ross houses, or at the houses of their acquaintances, to become desirous of things you don’t even want, such as Baccarat dolphins and inlaid walnut humidors. Here, instead, I feel pressured to comply with her independence of vision—though I barely know her, I don’t want to disappoint. I feel she has faith in me, simply because she shares her time. I begin to count the minutes before I have to leave, before her influence will be lost. That too is familiar.
“This one’s on pies.” She’s talking about cookbooks; she has written three. “I’ve baked and tasted just about every pie you can imagine—from apple to quince crumb to mincemeat.” Mrs. Rourke rests back on the counter, facing me. Her eyes are like the dark of sky between stars. “I despise spice pies,” she says. “Do you despise spice pies?”
“I don’t know,” I say softly. “I’ve never tasted one.”
“Well, in this case, I’d say you’re better off for your ignorance.”
I think of Maman. If I am reminded of Kate’s mother rather than my own it’s not just because I loved her more, but because I have a limited inventory of imagery to draw upon when it comes to the business of the kitchen. But the comparison extends beyond food, beyond admiration and wonder; Mrs. Rourke has reached the same empty place in me that Maman filled. It makes me think how lucky I was to meet Maman when I was a girl. How auspicious for a woman with an abundance of resources to come upon a child with a surplus of lack. And, of course, how inauspicious to have died in the midst of that. I recall our awareness of the barter—it was like a tutorial. Next, in an unwelcome leap, I recall the germinating deadness of Maman’s home, the picturesque dryness, the claiming-back process of nature.
I feel Mrs. Rourke’s hand on my shoulder.
“Why don’t you make a trip to the pantry while I pour the tea. There are cookie tins on the left. I’m giving my niece a baby shower. No one will notice if any are missing.”
The right side of the slope-ceilinged room is lined with shelves, and to the left is an old meat safe or pie safe, which is where I find the canisters. There are three full ones; I take the one with children dancing. I turn to leave; the pantry door has drifted partly closed. On its back I see marks in the wood—a growth chart, his. My parents never measured my growth, not once, though that is nothing to me now. Now I see only Rourke, metamorphosing downward through the years. I kneel, touching each strike, knowing that he was there every time one was carved. I arrive at last at the first—twenty-nine inches, not much higher than my knee. I feel heart-stricken and regretful, as if flicking in reverse through a photo album of a child I gave away, at once jealous of and beholden to the woman who kept this simple study of him, this careful anthropology.
“This last one is Thanksgiving 1978.” She is above me, on the other side of the door jamb. Through the narrow gap I see the cherry-printed dish towel in her hand. “Six-four. Although he might actually be taller now. He refuses to stand for me anymore.”
No, I think, he is six-four exactly.
“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” she inquires. She finds in the gruesome clarity of my eyes what she surmised from the moment we met. She does not look away. Most people look away, unable to bear the sight of him there.
I say yes, and we go, leaving the tea untouched.
The tour she gives is not merely a tour of his childhood—where he smashed his head, where he carved his initials, where he took his first steps—but a scholarly sort of assessment, as if we are in professional accord as to the relevance of the obscurest technicalities of our shared passion.
She leads me to her room, the one I have seen from the street. An IBM Selectric rests on a table between stuffed barrister bookshelves, and there is a chintz chair with a cashmere blanket folded over one arm. Photographs of Rourke are everywhere—him upside down at two; him swinging a bat at eleven, his muscles already standing out; him brown at the beach, grown-up, hugging her, by a palm tree.
“Hawaii,” she says. “We went for Christmas once. When he was still at UCLA.”
There are old black-and-white photos, the square kind with scalloped edges, and bleached ones, in color, of a man—her husband. There is the boy on his father’s knee in green; the two emerging from underwater in a pool, two faces the same; the infant tucked in the crease of his father’s arm. Her fingers stutter over the photos.
“My husband and I eloped,” she explains. “My mother refused to help us financially, though she was capable. My grandmother left this place to me, and soon after we moved in we had Harrison. Of course my mother fell in love with the baby and had an immediate change of heart. Every week new furniture would arrive, or silverware, or china. Bill’s colleagues from the police department would visit and accuse him of accepting graft.”
On a shelf with iron brackets, there is a row of random items. “Trinkets,” she says, lifting one, tilting it. “Things I find in the garden—thimbles and buttons—rocks Harrison gave me when he was a boy. Beach glass. He was forever giving me beach glass.”
I follow her to the end of the hall. Her left arm lengthens against a door and she pushes it, flattening back, allowing me to pass.
Rourke’s room. There are trophies and ribbons and fight posters from the Olympic stadium in L.A., the Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia, and Madison Square Garden—Palomino vs. Muniz, Jersey Joe Walcott vs. Rocky Marciano, Ali vs. Frazier, and also ones from the Criterion—Harrison Rourke vs. Little Tommy Lydell, vs. Johnny Amato, vs. Piggy Harding, vs. Chester Honey Walker.
To the right is a dresser, a mirror, the keeper of his image, the bank of his appearances. It is not neutral; it seems to undulate. I can see him standing before it at various stages through the years, contemplating the twinness of self—the real and the reflected—coming up against the riddle of being. I think of him at twenty-four, when we first met, with me just seventeen, hardly anything really, negligible and slight and completely unable to help him comprehend the mysteries he surely must have been facing.
“He was born here,” she says, looking at the bed. It is a double bed, perfectly made, as if she expects him home this very evening. On the bedpost is an autographed glove—Ray Mancini’s. I sit and lift the glove, holding it in my lap.
“My husband was a detective assigned to lower Manhattan, to the First Precinct. He raced home, but Harrison was already halfway out.” She gestures with a short toss of the head to the memorabilia. “Some of these belonged to Bill. He was a fighter in Ireland originally, in Belfast. I don’t know how much you know.”
“Only that he died.”
“Fifteen years ago April.” She lowers her eyes, then raises them. The charm of her eyes is accentuated by black bangs and prominent cheekbones. The remainder of her shoulder-length hair is pulled into a twist. I wonder about her ancestry. She is beautiful in the locked-off, genetically undiluted way of a Senegalese or a Norwegian. Perhaps she is Russian. “I gave this room to Harrison after he got into a knife fight. The doctor said he was fighting because he needed space. As if it’s not in his blood.”
She tours the room, adjusting artifacts like a museum proprietor. “After Bill died, it was like having a bull in the house. My sister suggested acting. For years I shuttled Harrison to and from New York for commercials, auditions, lessons. The idea was that if he was making money with his face, he would have some incentive to keep it presentable. Well, he tolerated acting, but he didn’t stop fighting. He just became more selective about it.”
There is a leonine clarity to her voice as she speaks of her son, as she visits the place her devotion is kept. She says to me, “They would bet, you know.”
I did not know. Maybe I did. Maybe he told me. Yes, and Rob told me too. There’s gonna be a fight. The comeback kind.
“He and Rob made a fortune when they were teenagers before I found out and threatened to have them arrested. Those were trying times. Thankfully, they met an elderly Chinese gentleman who taught them martial arts and introduced them to a trainer from the Criterion, Jimmy Landes.”
I nodded. “I’ve heard of them.”
“Despite my reservations, Harrison turned into a fine fighter. I don’t know whether his father would have been proud or horrified.” She looks up. “Have you ever seen him fight?”
I shake my head.
There is a flicker, a smile, instantly disappearing. “Naturally, everyone wanted him to turn professional. Naturally, I wanted him to go to college, and since his father would have wanted it as well, he consented. The boys were accepted to UCLA, which was the best of both worlds—they would be together, Harrison could pursue his interest in acting, and L.A. is full of gyms.” Mrs. Rourke sits alongside me on the bed. “Rob majored in economics and went on for a second degree—he has an uncanny competence for numbers. Harrison stuck around and did some acting and some fighting, mostly fighting. He intended to get through the Olympics and then use the credential to get investors. He and Rob wanted to develop an athletic club, a few clubs. Somehow, it fell apart. Even before the Olympic boycott, it fell apart.
“When Rob received his master’s degree, we all flew to California. Rob had a black eye—completely hemorrhaged, swollen shut. He was lucky his cheekbone hadn’t been broken. We all knew that Harrison had done it. I felt awful for Mr. and Mrs. Cirillo. Their whole family was there. Fortuna’s parents had flown from Bologna. I took Rob aside. I said, ‘Robert, your eye.’ ‘Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Rourke,’ he assured me, ‘It was all my fault. I said something stupid.’ ‘What could you possibly have said to deserve this?’ I asked. And he said, ‘The wrong thing.’ Do you know, I still wonder what the wrong thing could have been.”
I pour the reboiled water; she sets cookies on plates. Rob makes the last of several trips to the attic. There is the machine gun stomping of footsteps. She likes the noise; it’s been a long time. We lift our steaming cups, eyes connecting above china.
“I’m glad you came,” she says. “I hope it won’t be the last time.” Her eyes search my face. She reaches across the table, touching my hair. “It’s longer now. It used to be very short.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s a picture he carries. You were in the high school when he took it, he said. In a gymnasium.”
——
On our way down the porch steps, she calls out for us to wait. She returns with a letter for Rourke, asking Rob to mail it. Rob is farther than I am, so I reach, taking it in my hands.
“Goodbye again,” she says, grasping my hands. I feel something pass from her to me: courage, confidence, soundness.
If you think it’s impossible to feel worse than the worst you’ve ever felt, you’re wrong. Worse than numb, worse than solitude and despair, is to possess one particle of hope, to feel the feel of fate brushing so close you think you will die. I say goodbye as well.
Rob honks twice, and we back out and drive away. He pulls up at the first mailbox.
“Not this one,” I tell him. “The next.” I hold the letter tightly—his name, knowingly printed.
He leans on the accelerator.
“How did his father die?”
Rob reaches to smack down his visor. We must have turned west. The sun, going down.
“He was murdered. By the brother of a guy he killed. He was on duty; he threw a punch and killed a guy. A fluke. A robbery on Chambers Street. The kid’s brother came down from Detroit to settle. He got killed too. Billy Rourke’s partner shot him. In the face. It was bad. It was a f*cking mess.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen. We were fourteen.”