53
It’s nearly dark at Georgica Beach. There is no one there but me. I walk west, my legs pressing into the sand. I climb the jetty to the end, though the rocks are slippery. At the end I stand tall and lean over, like a carved figure on the prow of a ship, like a wooden mermaid. The wind makes gains; the sea surges, pounding the shore. Rain is coming. The clouds are walking to me, approaching like armies—shields very raised.
After the wedding, the limo driver left me in front of my house. No one was home so I went to the barn. I heard the familiar shotgun snap of the door as it ripped to the side—chuck chuck. I thought of Jack opening the door and Rourke standing once alongside it. And of Kate coming through it, and Denny too.
The inside was saturated by twilight; the room seemed to be the recipient of an interior rain. The wood walls were bare except for old pin marks from my drawings. My mother had taken them all down to protect them. Last year, or maybe the one before, my father had made a beautiful box lined with acid-free paper, and together my parents had given me my own drawings as a gift. They wanted me to open the box, to go through my early work, but I wouldn’t, not with Mark there. I just thanked them and returned the box to the barn.
The box of drawings was still on the dresser where I’d left it; I was about to open it when I saw the pile of mail. There’s mail for you in the barn, my mother had said on the day I’d arrived, one week before. I tied it with a blue ribbon.
I steady myself on the wet rocks and pull the package from my sweatshirt. The envelope is crimped and rumpled. The postmark is legible even through the clouds—New York, New York. There it is, not quite faded, not quite lost—in one corner, May 28, 1984; in the other, my address, my name, Jack’s handwriting.
Eveline Aster Auerbach
This is the last object he and I will have touched, an object with intention and direction, with energy passing direct from him to me—life energy. The water slaps the jetty, filling in around me. The ocean. Jack drifting, Jack alone. Alone again, alone some more. Jack, out there. I can almost feel him through the mist. I hold my breath and close my eyes to break the seal. The envelope doesn’t open easily. I have to tear it, and it saddens me to think how well he secured it. The contents slide into my hand—his black book. It’s been so long. The cuts and the scratches, many, many more than there were four years ago. It looks deepened. I flip through until I find a card stuck between two pages. It was the card he’d found in his room under the carpet that time, the holiday card: Eveline. On the pages themselves are two blocks of writing: a letter and a song. The song is written alongside musical notations and dense, uneven bars.
Jack’s handwriting is linked as if the pen never left the paper. Often we would write that way.
for the girl in despair
you must be in despair
foreigners always are and you are
a visitor to compromise, a seer, pity me i couldn’t
build a life to keep you in it.
beyond experienced time
and lived time there is pure time
together we found it what we found you can find again
every man needs to be a hero, i learned by your eyes
we all want the secret of your eyes—
your eyes say that it’s better to love than be loved.
you are the supreme generous and brave like hell
for giving the only gift that matters—
the soul, they say the soul transcends this is a fact because here
in the last hours there is only you.
and so i’ll be a bird to find a bird,
since a bird is what you’ll be.
you’ll know me, i’ll be the one who says,
there was a girl, there was a life
I used to lead in the grass in the sand through the air beneath the sky
under the waves through the rain
through the wind. I’ll say,
you remind me of the wind.
so until we meet again, listen for me.
I will sing to you, nightly
p.s. this is not an explanation of why i’m doing this since
you know that every time i cried no one came
only you made me numb, music made me numb dope made me numb
but you and music, well,
you have to practice that, play at it night and day
and dope, jesus, the shitty illiterate company you have to keep—
the one reassuring constant for me has been
the bizarre grandiosity of my despair it is
the closest thing i have to a friend. i really hate to lose it.
a few messages to the derelicts and limbless losers,
all the fakers at the funeral—
to my father—nothing, he is Satan in plaid.
to my mother—that’s good just like that. To my mother—
to liz—those records are not for you they’re for your kids
tell dan stop playing for the crowd he’s too good for the crowd
tell smokey take it easy and pick up the box i left
for him at duke’s on 14th street.
And tell jewel, i don’t know, you’ll think of something good.
tell Rene thanks for going in where no one else would go—
i’ve done what i had to do, tried to make it right can’t think of
anything else, for what it’s worth i loved you i love you
don’t come i don’t want you here it is not good here.
this is the song, ask dan to play it for you,
it’s called pretty when you wanna be
it goes, you are pretty but just be pretty when you wanna be—
I close the book. My first instinct is to run, fast and far. I make my way off the jetty, scrambling to the end, then I dive into the sand before cutting back across the beach. I go as fast as I can, making my way toward the parking lot. The wind draws down from behind to carry me along, and I feel like something light and dry and long forgotten. I push harder, using the wind to trample the spine of the earth. I want to move forward to reach prior points. I want to run back in time, to arrive at the day he died, to find the spot where his body lay. I want to lift him into my arms, clean him, dress him, fill the hole he made. I want to close his eyes. I want to mark the place he died; the leaving place. And then, running more, running again, not stopping until I collapse. Until a wall, there must be a wall. Am I mad? Yes, I think I must be. There is no wall in life, nothing to meet, nothing to hit, there is only running, and then more running.
I circle the block twice, checking for cars. When I’m sure it’s not there, and that Rob’s car is not there, I ride my bike onto the front lawn and lean it alongside the porch. I enter the main house through the porch door and go to the kitchen. The dishwasher is churning and cleaned crystal glassware is stacked on the pantry counter. The radio is playing Vivaldi’s “Summer.” I go to Consuela’s bedroom door. She appears in a red terry cloth T-shirt and matching shorts. Behind her, a television shows a weather map of Connecticut. Hanging over the single bed like mournful eyes are two wildflower drawings I made for her.
I am breathless and my legs are wet from sitting on the jetty.
She hands me a towel. “You okay?”
“I’m okay,” I say. I thank her. Then I thank her again. For everything. For the flowers in the cottage, the careful pressing of my laundry, the foods she knows I’ll eat. “It’s been hard,” I conclude.
Her eyes twinkle. “Yes, sí. Too different.” Meaning me and Mark, I know.
“I hope someday you can bring your son.” When she came to work in America she left her five-year-old son in Ecuador with her husband, who died one month after she went away. “The alcohol,” she confided when we first spoke of it. “When I leaving I begging him not to kill himself. Take care of the baby, I say. But anyway, he kill himself. That was with the drinking. Now I talk to my son on the phone but he don’t know me. He calling my sister Mommy.”
“Goodbye, Consuela. I’ll miss you.”
“I miss you too,” she says, as though I’m already gone, which I suppose in a way I am. “You do what you do,” she states, not meaning me, necessarily, but people in general.
“Yes,” I agree. “You do what you do.” That’s the whole tragedy.
A few wedding guests are still in the dance tent, about thirty of them. Another dozen or so are around the pool. It is nearly midnight. I pass unseen. In the cottage hallway, the bulb is blown, and the doormat is kicked out. I straighten the mat, then climb into a nest of cigar smoke. The smell is of many more cigars than Mark could possibly have finished alone. I wonder who has been there. At the top of the landing I take off my sweatshirt and leave it on the landing with Jack’s book. A chalk-white scuff marks the base of the built-in cherry closet where I am standing. I make a note in my mind to have it repaired—then I remember that I am leaving. The apartment door is open; in the living room area the stereo plays the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?”
I am the son and the heir, of a shyness that is criminally vulgar.
I am the son and heir, of nothing in particular.
Mark is on the terrace, specter-like against the artificial radiance in his seven-hundred-dollar tux, leaning back in his chair, his legs on the wooden rail. He looks exhausted, but powerful, like a movie director surveying the glow of a just-emptied set, like he is the master of his exhaustion. His hair falls around his face; his hair is nice, straight except around the edges, where it curls now that it’s long. It’s just hair, I tell myself. His eyes, only eyes. Remarkably, I feel a failure of nerve.
Though leaving him is something I expected, it feels no less traumatic than something unexpected—the grief of losing Rourke, losing Jack, of cherished things passing—Maman, a baby. When I ask myself whether I love Mark, the answer is yes. Because we were brought together, because we stayed together, because we are, in the black regions, compatible. Ours has been a parasitic compatibility, but it has also been an enduring one, and the sense that he is mine is uncomfortably clear.
Mine, not mine. There are things we feel we must possess; we believe that they define us. And yet there are the things that chance would have us possess, and these also define us. The difference between the two is like owning the tree you have purchased for your yard versus befriending the bird who comes by chance to nest in it. I don’t know which is more true, more real. I know only that the gentler acquisitions enter and honor you, simply by living freely alongside you, whereas the things taken and held by force—people, objects, ideas—stagnate, like standing water. They separate from their original purpose, lose their first nature and design. They become objects, and the holder the objectifier.
I sit alongside Mark, and together we watch the wedding’s uncivilized conclusion—girls in wet dresses shivering by the side of the pool and guys in pink shirts arguing across cocktail tables. The commotion could be miles away. In the space immediately around us there is a stillness, curious and taciturn, but charged, like the dynamic silence following a bomb blast.
“They told me about a girl,” Mark says, wiping his jaw with the back of his wrist. His hand is brown from sun, and the hairs are red like iodine. I know the weight of that hand, the persistence of it. “A girl.” He laughs. “Some girl.”
It doesn’t surprise me that he goes back to the night we met. I went there too, yesterday evening, in my mother’s kitchen. It’s as if he is responding belatedly to my half of that conversation. He speaks with abandoned reluctance, tired of feigning ignorance to my position, bored with keeping my state of mind separate from his state of mind. From reality.
“In your cheap thrift store clothes. In that shitty little shack by the train tracks.” He gazes into his drink, a full clear glass—vodka. I look for a bottle. I see broken pieces, a toppled chair. “God, you could dance.” He searches my face. “I felt like I was f*cking you already.”
I appreciate his candor. More men should try speaking so honestly; it must be good for the soul to set the filth free. They all think such thoughts. Why not just say them?
His legs drop off the rail, slapping the deck. He leans forward onto his knees and liquor splashes on the leg of his pants. He doesn’t even try to wipe it off. “I thought Harrison would try to kill me that night. When he didn’t, I knew I’d won. He didn’t want you seeing him for what he is. An animal. That’s why I told you—he’s a liar.”
Listening to Mark, I have the feeling I’ve taken part in a lockdown. This is how Jack felt his whole life. Like there was a plan for him, only he’d had no part of it. I go to the railing; Mark follows. In the tuxedo he seems smaller, shoe-black and knife-like. Like he is slicing through the haze.
“‘Bernadette,’” Mark snarls. “Do you remember?”
“On the jukebox.”
“You said you would never be loved so much.”
“You said you doubted it.”
“Do you know why?” Mark asks.
“Because you knew how you felt about me?”
“Because I knew how he felt about you.” Mark laughs. Not really. Not a laugh at all. “But he knew nothing about you. He thought you were independent. You’re too insecure to be independent. He thought you would wait. You’re too impatient to wait.”
That’s funny—impatient. I’d been waiting for years. I’d wait forever.
He catches my thinking. “You don’t think you’re impatient? Think again. Every time he hesitated, you penalized him. The first night we met. A year later, when he took off the second time. That’s why I never wait. I make sure not to. ‘Timing is everything to you,’ you always tell me. No, Eveline—timing is everything to you. I’m just a fast learner.”
I listen closely. Mark is good at talking. His reasoning is specious, but beneath the sophistry there is a plan. I can’t tell—is the plan to win, or simply not to lose?
“I did my part,” he says. “Affection, distraction. I led the way. You refused to follow. You stayed faithful to him in your mind. I let you have your mind. Frankly, the mind is overrated compared to the body. Unfortunately, your loyalty didn’t register with him. The only place that counts to a man like that is this.” He slaps his hand between my legs, stroking upward to my pubic bone, stopping and jamming in with his wrist. The heel of his palm hits my low belly, and his fingertips shoot up into me. Using that axis, he clamps down, pulling me closer. Mark whispers, “He’ll never forgive you.”
I knock the inside of his elbow to break his hold, but he returns, tighter and harder, practically sealing the gap between us.
“He knew I’d get to you. He came back to Montauk that summer because he couldn’t risk leaving you to me. He hid you away. He tried to infect you. I infected you back. I gave you more than love, more than money. I reversed a history of neglect. I trained you to live on impulse. You want to drive—have a car. You want shoes—buy six pairs. You want to paint—don’t work. You want food—there’s more than you can eat.
“What are you going to do now? Work in a restaurant? Sell your art at yard sales? Face it. You can’t go to him. He can’t afford you.” Mark’s face closes down quick on the right in a sort of spasm. “Go anywhere you like. The world will be empty without me.”
He releases me but doesn’t move. It’s a dare. If I run, he’ll grab me; it’s safer to stay. There are three or four inches between us. I can see the broken glass near our feet. I think I’d better get rid of it. I bend straight down to pick it up, my body in a line, and he lets me. First I get the circular base and use it as a canister for the rest. There are two stems among the shards. Maybe there was a toast, one of those wild party toasts. It suddenly occurs to me that Mark isn’t slurring. That he’s perfectly sober. He doesn’t even smell like liquor. Either the drink in his hand is the first, or it’s water.
He grabs a fistful of my hair and jerks me forward. I fall to my knees, swinging the hand with the broken glass just in time, keeping the palm raised. Mark holds my skull, and pulls my face into his thighs. I reach blindly to the rail, and twisting my left hand through the bars, I let go of the glass. It cracks against the brick below.
“Bleeding on the streets,” he says to the top of my head. “Destitute.” He spits when he talks. Specks of saliva prick the back of my neck. For a second I think it’s the rain, finally arrived. “Without that abortion you would have ended up dead. Like your junkie friend.”
The smell of his penis through his pants—it smells like soap or detergent. I turn my face away.
“It wasn’t an—”
“Spare me the revision. If your body hadn’t had the sense to dispose of the offending organism, you would’ve killed it anyway. You wouldn’t have gone to him. And though I was happy to pay for an abortion, I never would have raised his offspring. You might have taken it to your mother, she relishes subsocial behaviors, but you’d just gotten out. You had no intention of going back. And, by the way, you could have called anyone from the hospital that day—Dennis, your aunt, Sara, even a*shole Rob. But you were quick. You were devious. You called me. You knew it would crush him. You knew I would tell. And you knew how I would characterize the loss. I was impressed by the efficiency of your cruelty. I was shocked, actually, by how hard he took it.” Mark bends. “He was crying.”
He waits for a response. I say nothing. It’s hard to say nothing. It takes everything. I think of Jack, his moments alone with the gun. Deliberating, agonizing. Sitting there, back against a tree, coping with a lifetime of fear and failure, waiting and waiting, for nothing and for no one. Pulling the trigger in a final concession to solitude. Proof.
“Didn’t I tell you? He came to the apartment. To give me money. He’s so honorable. The night of that pathetic Mexican dinner. The night I took you back to my parents’ place. I told him, ‘I don’t need your money.’ Harrison said, ‘Then give it to her.’ I said, ‘Trust me. She’s not going to need it either.’ That was the first night we slept together, Eveline. You actually rewarded me.”
I say, “You should have just left me in the hospital.”
“No, no. You were too good to pass up. Besides, I liked the way you played—an eye for an eye. Biblical.” Mark kneels now too. He takes me down to the ground. Pulling me around, following with his chest, ready to bear down. “What did I say, earlier tonight, how long has it been—a week?”
Oh, that’s the part about his not drinking. He kisses me hard, and his tongue in my throat makes me gag. If I could scream, I would scream, but a scream—
There’s a noise. Something hits the cottage. The wall or the door, I don’t know, a rock or a brick. Our heads look toward the rail. In my mind is a picture of us that way, Mark and me, grafted like skin from one part of a body to another. Like living onto dead. “If you’re thinking it’s Harrison,” he says in a sort of under-growl, “you’re mistaken. He left with Diane. He’s probably screwing her right now.”
I have very little time. I look at his eyes. They look like discs of clay, like there is no soul on the other side. I look steadily, careful not to show lenience or restraint, not to enrage him further with highness or compassion. If he is a monster, I cannot help but wonder whether it was I who helped make him one. Didn’t I stay too far outside? Didn’t I stay untouchable? Didn’t I console him by turning slavish? Didn’t I give him access to places in me that were persuadable—poverty and heartbreak—in order to stay persuaded? I answered to something preexisting in him and he in me, and so what I threaten by leaving is far deeper than the motive to hurt Rourke.
He peels back my shirt, and I wait patiently, like getting dressed in bandages after an injury. My jeans—he starts on the buttons. Though there are five, and he knows there are five, he races through to three, and starts to pull.
I say, “Mark.”
He did not expect this, my speaking. He tilts his head, as if I can’t be heard completely, as if he’s picking up on an echo. And it’s weird, but I actually hear myself that way—his way, ringing out, bouncing back. I find my voice, capturing it, steering it center.
“It’s true you saved me. And it is possible I wouldn’t have survived without you. You never broke a promise, and you never left my side. I know you feel like you forced me into something. Like I never loved you. But you didn’t force me, and I do love you. It’s true that I have nothing and nowhere to go. Don’t you see? That’s not why I should stay; that’s why I can’t stay. I never want anyone to do that to you.”
He pauses. One hand, the hand supporting him, is on my arm, the other lingers on my abdomen. His eyes are ten inches from mine. I have pierced something, and yet he’s been stunned, not stopped. Minutes, I have minutes.
I say, “Don’t let hurting me be the measure of your manhood.”
Mark looks left again, then bleakens, then collapses, rolling off the top of me. We are side by side.
“I’m so f*cking tired of this place,” he says. “You did that to me.”
“You were born that way. You’re like your father.”
“Like my father.” He laughs. “That’s brilliant.”
“The only difference between you is that he tries to destroy himself and you try to destroy everything else.”
“That must be why he hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you, Mark. He envies you.”
For the brief remainder of our time together, we lie corpse-like beneath the gray sky above the Ross home, beneath the portion of the planet defined by them and for them. After the rain comes and goes, daylight will puncture the pallor, making way for a choir of ultramarines. In the morning comes the pacific drone of the pool filter and the premonitory stifle of the summer air and the dry creak of wicker as his mother sits to remove her shoes and lay out her robe before she swims. The mild slap of her arms hitting the water. And after, the distant tink of her spoon in a cup.
I remove the ring. I hand it to him.
“Sell it,” he says, refusing to take it. “You’ll need the money.”
I rise in degrees. I make it as far as the balcony, where I linger and fix my clothes. The gardens have never appeared more beautiful than at this moment, the moment of my leaving. Maybe once, maybe the first time, which is incredible when you think about it, since all through the middle they’ve been as good as mine.
“You almost went through with it,” Mark says. “Two more days and we’d be in Italy. You would have forgotten about him. You would have fallen in love with living well. You could have been set for life, Eveline. Now you’re straight back to nowhere. Cirillo f*cked it up. He got in over his head. I should have loaned him the money instead of letting him bring that stupid f*ck back—twenty-five grand. Pennies to keep you.”
“What would you have gotten?”
“Something pure,” he says. Adding, “Nothing’s pure.”
On my way out I leave the ring on the kitchen table. There is a substantial clink. I grab my sweatshirt and Jack’s book, and before hitting the stairs I hear Mark shout, “You’ll be back.”
The rain begins, lightly at first, like upward-floating flurries when it snows. I take my time cutting through the garden, in case Mark’s watching, and when I reach the sunporch I break into a run, leaving my bike behind. It’s harder to hide with a bike. At the street, I run faster. Beneath the lamplight the rain looks like jagged tinsel or chains of mercury. I tell myself to hurry. He’ll think me more likely to change my mind in the rain. At the corner I turn right toward Main Beach, heading away from town, away from home. He’ll go to town, to my mother’s house. I’ll wait under the pavilion at the beach until morning.
With the wind and the rain on my face, I don’t hear the sound of tires; I only think car when a fortress of light encroaches on me from behind and my own shape materializes on the ground. I stop. The car stops. I start, it starts. I think to hide—a yard, a garage. I look right, for a break in the hedges. When I look back, I realize that the light is not narrow but broad. Like a blockade. The car moves up, flanking me on the left. It is white, square. Not the Porsche. The GTO.
The door opens. Rourke says, “Eveline.”
Eveline—I’ve never heard my name spoken like that, as though there is some indivisibility between it and me. I take one instant, just one, learning the sound by heart, feeling—I don’t know—just feeling.
I climb in, fall in, exhausted, shocked, but grateful to have a friend, in the night, in the cold, in the rain. A friend who is knowledgeable of my heart. It’s not the first time I’ve received his help. Rourke was there when I broke up with Jack, only that night was dry and I was seventeen. And things were different at seventeen. I thought about what Rob said at the wedding about friendship, about needing someone to track you, challenge you. About a friend being a fortress.
He makes a series of deliberate turns until we arrive at a private road—we’ve been here before, the first night we were together. Soaking overgrown branches slap the windshield until we emerge on a grassy plain. Directly before us is Georgica Pond. He puts the car into park and reaches into the backseat for a towel, which he uses to dry me. The towel is stained with blood, blood from his eye, which now I can see. It is slit and stitched on top and hugely swollen, hemorrhaged and violet.
“You okay?” Rourke asks.
I shrug. “I’m okay.”
He draws the towel down my arms.
I ask him how long he was waiting.
“I watched you go in.”
“That was hours ago.”
“About an hour and a half.”
“I didn’t see the car,” I say.
“I wasn’t in the car. I was on foot.”
“By the street?”
“By the balcony. Where you were.”
“Did you hear?”
Rourke looks past the steering wheel toward the pond. His profile and his jaw look like a drawing of a profile and a jaw, the lines are that hard. “I heard enough.”
“He said you left with—”
“Diane? She left with her parents. He knew that.” Rourke turns back to me, turning very serious. “It would have taken me seconds to scale that wall. But you did fine on your own,” he says. “Better than I would have.”
Better than I would have. That’s what Mark had been waiting for. For Rourke to come. So he could trap him, confront him, have him arrested. I can’t even think about it.
My hand reaches for his eye. He does not pull away but breathes into my touch. His normal lid drifts closed, and beneath my fingertips the distended one throbs, as if the eye below is straining to see. In his heart there is a girl; she is me. No contract keeps her; she goes with him, she goes alone, precipice to precipice, on every ledge agreeing again to leap. She is with him, she has been with him, every minute. No one can know what we know. Just us. If you listen, you can hear it. In the wide sound of the rain—us.