Part 7 - River
June 1984
Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
47
The last time I saw him was on Broadway, half a block north of Houston. It was dark and cold, and Mark and I were walking downtown to an opening. It must have been my third year at NYU. In the middle of the street, a junkie was blocking traffic. There’s a gas station with a car wash right there—anyway, there used to be a gas station, by now it may be gone—and the fluorescent pink light it produced made the street into a kind of theater. In the vortex of this enormous auditorium was a hunched body—Jack’s.
“How disgusting,” Mark yelled above the car horns.
Jack. Death-like and emaciated and stalled in a choke of municipal chaos. Mark was right, it was disgusting. I could almost see the venom through the sheerness of Jack’s skin, like a million insects crawling.
“C’mon. Let’s go.” Mark tried to steer me away.
Would he come to me, would he know my voice? There was a way I used to say his name; if I used that voice, maybe he would come. If I tried to lead him from traffic, to a storefront, to a doorway, to some place of relative safety, would he let me?
But Mark didn’t know Jack or anything about Jack, and it would have been bad if I’d run out onto Broadway and reached for Jack’s hand, and Mark shouted not to touch the stinking filth of it. I would not want Jack to feel filthy or stinking in my eyes. If there were trouble and the police came, Jack would be taken into custody, not Mark. Never had I wished so desperately for a friend, for Rourke or Rob or Denny, for someone who trusted me. Usually you think of a friend as someone you trust. I’d never thought before of a friend as someone who trusts you.
Mark got me onto the curb. “You really are a sweetheart. The way you worry about people. And birds.”
Jack is so small, I thought as we walked to the corner. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to think that way when his version of manhood resisted dimension. Usually, you had only to look into his eyes to locate the power of him. But I had not seen his eyes; they’d been closed. Later, if there was to be a later for him, there would be shaking and profane rocking, a triangle of city streets to navigate that would seem to span miles—a stoop, a fire hydrant, the bumper of a car, and after that, a feeble search through some garbage cans, for what, not for food, he would not want food, a little leftover wine, maybe, in a precipitately trashed bottle. Later, in the ruthless and overbright morning, there would be a dilating consciousness more odious than I had ever encountered, as it labored like a half-chewed animal against the withdrawal of the pacific state he had found in his high.
Before turning west onto Houston Street, I looked back. I saw Jack bend lovingly into his addiction as debris from the street whirled like a symphony around him. The seat of his jeans was black. I wondered if he smelled like vomit. It occurred to me that I was fascinated by the look of him because the look of him was the feel of me—we were no different; we had ended up exactly the same, friendless and anonymous, ravaged on the inside. Whatever deficits had drawn us together in the beginning continued to bind us.
“These junkies are totally desensitized,” Mark informed me, throwing a shearlinged arm about my waist and tugging me. “You or I would end up dead, but that guy can drink out of a puddle and be back on the street tomorrow.”
It’s strange sometimes, the way stories interlock, like those plastic monkeys that connect by the elbow. I never imagined that Rourke’s and Jack’s lives would conform again in terms of theme or episode, but they did, coupled as they were by my peripheral involvement. When you allow your story to connect with the stories of others, you are either kind or crazy. There is a fine line, I think, between compassion and madness.
It did not occur to me during the fight to think back to Jack on the street, though I might well have—the drug making Jack’s skin a wall like Rourke’s skin had been a wall, protecting him against being hit. Each sought to pervert a natural gift—Jack by silencing his voice, Rourke by defacing his form. Each possessed enormous confidence, yet felt himself socially lame, utterly alone. Vargas beat at Rourke from the outside to weaken the underlying flesh, just as the heroin masticated Jack’s vitality, beating him on the inside with a lighter touch but greater strength. Every time Vargas made contact with Rourke, it was as if he were pounding a child’s body, no matter that Rourke was strong and had made himself hard. To me his flesh was tender, because all I’d ever done was treat it tenderly.
How could a man as clear as Rourke ignore the gross arithmetic of cruelty? How could a man so physically disciplined permit the consequence of his efforts to be defiled? And Jack, raping his treasured reason, making himself stupid. But me—I loved them both, and by both I was loved. What was it that I wanted so badly I needed it twice?
Andy’s Place is an all-night diner in Margate, New Jersey, two blocks south of where Rourke’s fight had been. When I left the auditorium during the fight that night, I had no idea which way to go. The streets were empty and the wind had turned wild. My clothes were whipping as if I were on a speedboat. As I walked, I could hear my name, near and far, as though the sea itself were calling. Evie! Eveline! Ev-e-line!
I discovered the diner and slipped inside. It was surprisingly good. It had a clean foyer with a clean working pay phone, and posted on the wall by one of those toy-grabbing games was a laminated list of numbers for car service companies to Manhattan. I got through on the first try to Monroe Limo and was told by a polite dispatcher that it would be about fifteen minutes before somebody came. I figured I should wait in back in case anyone came looking for me. I informed the waitress that a car was coming, then I ordered toast. I was a waitress once too. I didn’t want her thinking I had bad manners.
She had her elbow on the counter in front of the pass-through to the kitchen. She said, “White or rye?”
“Uh, rye.”
“Jelly?”
“No jelly.” I pointed to the bathroom. “I’ll go wash up, you know, and stuff.”
“G’head,” she told me knowingly. “I’ll knock when the cab’s here.”
——
Carlo wasn’t on duty, Al was. Al gave me forty dollars to cover the ride up from Jersey, plus a seven-dollar tip. I’d planned to keep the driver waiting while I went up to get cash, but Al pulled out his wallet. Mark would give him an extra twenty for the courtesy, so I said fine.
I got upstairs at 2:00 A.M. I know the time because the first thing I did was pack, starting with the sterling alarm clock Dad and Marilyn had given me for Christmas. I had no idea why the clock came first—maybe because of its honest, bright numbers or the effort they’d surely put into choosing it, debating its virtues against the virtues of all other clocks. For some reason they’d settled on this particular one, and, I don’t know—I just felt bad about it.
After that I packed my books, and last, all of my clothes. Luckily, Mark had just purchased a set of luggage for the trip to Italy we were supposed to take. I carried the four stuffed suitcases and a knapsack into the living room, and I arranged them in size order. Then I stacked them so they would consume the least amount of floor space. Then I stared at them, considering where to go and how to get there. No matter where I went, Mark would follow, and anyone who tried to help me would be dragged into a double mess, that being the mess of my reality, plus a whole new mess of Mark’s making.
When the phone rang, it was a relief. I hadn’t expected the phone. I’d expected the door—and Mark, standing there. It was Dan Lewis. “Sorry to call so late,” Dan said. “Hope I didn’t wake Mark.” Dan attended Juilliard, which was around the corner from Mark’s place, and often our paths would cross. Sometimes Mark and I went with friends to hear Dan play at the American, a dinner club in the theater district.
For a while he was quiet and I was quiet. It was 2:47; the silver clock was still in my hand. On the other side of the living room window, the wind was kicking up like crazy, like it wanted something out of me. Pieces of the street were making it up twenty-five floors. It was the same wind I’d felt outside the auditorium in Jersey, when I thought I heard my name in it.
I remember thinking, I guess tonight is the night. And then, of course tonight is the night.
“They found him in the woods. About two hours ago. At my grandfather’s farm.”
I’d been to the Lewis farm once during a February break when Dan’s grandparents had been in Florida. There was a blizzard, and we got caught upstate near the Catskills with no food and no phone. We tried to go snowshoeing with tennis rackets. I remember Jack informing us over a candlelit dinner of canned beans and toasted marshmallows that a wood p-ssy is a skunk. He and Dan argued that night, as usual, about changing the name of the band.
“How about ‘The Void’?” Jack had suggested.
Dan shook his head. “Sounds like emptying your bladder.”
“Not ‘to void,’ dumb ass, ‘The void.’”
“Oh,” said Dan, “as in space, as in illimitable distance.”
“Exactly,” Jack had said. “As in the gap between your f*cking ears.”
Dan cleared his throat. “You okay?”
I didn’t know. I said, “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” he said.
“How did they know, you know, where to look?”
“I guess he wasn’t showing up in the place he usually stayed. One of his friends, acquaintances, whatever, called Manhattan information for ‘Fleming’ and got Elizabeth, and his family started inquiring. My grandfather had called me from Florida just the day before to say that his caretaker had reported a missing gun. He described it to me because he has lots of guns. I knew exactly which one he meant. I just said, ‘Yeah, I know it. That’s the gun Jack loves.’ So I told Elizabeth, and the local cops started searching the property yesterday morning. They went through the night in case he was still alive. They looked for twenty-six hours. You know, there’s six hundred acres there. Mr. Fleming drove up today to identify him.”
I leaned over the suitcases, crushing the high part of my stomach into one of the handles. I couldn’t help but think of boots through leaves. And of dogs. Most likely they’d used dogs. I thought also of the freckle in the center of his lower lip and the blue of his eyes. And the gunshot—
“How long—was he—there?”
“One cop said three or four days. But according to my father, a second guy said maybe less, that Jack was, you know, ‘thin’ to begin with.”
“And his mom?”
“Not good. I just got off the phone with her. She decided to have a memorial service next week. On Friday evening. She’s hoping we’ll speak. A couple of us. You, me. Elizabeth.”
An enormous gust rattled the windows. Dan heard it too, since he was only a few blocks away. “It’s windy tonight,” he said. “Like November. Your birthday’s in November, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Funny that you would remember that.”
“How can I forget the night Jack gave you that necklace in the refrigerator box? The opal.”
I said, “Yeah, that’s right, the opal.”
“Well, take it easy, Evie. I’ll probably talk to you tomorrow. Tell Mark I’m sorry to call so late.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dan. He’s not even home.”