Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,145

singleness of heart, or femininity, when femininity is madness and uncertainty and vertigo in his arms. By two o’clock he would pull his jeans over his shorts, fastening them. During our procession to the car, everyone would watch solemnly, even children and dogs.

He would knock the front door open with his thigh because his hands would be full, and after shaking the blanket and hanging the towels to dry, we would meet by the side of the bed. The influence of his body would weigh down the mattress, and for a moment we would sit. Tenderly, we would touch, each striking lightly against the skin of the other. Sex in the day can be sad. It is to risk in light, to reach for things there and not there, to confess that you are searching, despite what you have found. In day, his face was a reflection of my own, his features flushed with innocence and a reassuring lack of sufficiency. At times, I could not bear the monuments there. At times, I felt sick from the sight of the child I’d been, lost until found in his eyes—and him, a child too. I often thought to say something. It was possible that he wished to talk.

I never once felt the way I’d felt with Jack—baffled and agitated, unable to articulate some grave humiliation, some feeling that I’d been wrongly used, despite Jack’s maudlin concerns and conceited timidity. Jack’s tenderness was like a barrier, a reef you dared not swim through. He expressed care because he saw cause for anxiety; if you responded to it, it would prove his anxiety correct. But with Rourke there was dignity in indifference and grace in separateness. As I’d suspected, Jack had been wrong—desire is not deviant. To seek resolution through intimacy and to achieve it is to rise with your feelings confirmed, and not as if things have been unclosed and will remain that way until they are unclosed some more, each time a little wider. After sex with Rourke, the nerves in me would be stilled. Afterward he did not disgust me with tenderness. Afterward I said nothing, and he said nothing, and the look of my underwear on the floor did not depress me.

While I showered and dressed for work, he would make phone calls; I didn’t know to whom. I didn’t think about where his money came from. I never asked what he did while I worked at night. I never looked through his belongings. His discreteness was sacred to me; inside, I preferred it. It’s hard to explain, except to say that when Jack and I used to walk, we would crash into each other, listlessly, lazily. But Rourke and I never bumped into each other. If ever we intersected, it had meaning, new meaning, not mine, not his, but a third meaning. The only thing that changed noticeably was that every Tuesday was more difficult than the one that preceded it. Tuesday was my day off, but not his. He would get up before sunrise, throw on some clothes, and before leaving the room, he would turn his head incompletely, saying, See you later. And when, late on a Tuesday evening, he returned, I would not go to him; I could not even necessarily move. I would just watch him, overwhelmed by the need to vow something, secure something.

Montauk was the Vegas of my imagination, a dwarfish Vegas, with garish toylike motels and two-story arcades bright as airfields, and tourists in unscrupulous attire. Men in black socks played miniature golf at Puff ’n Putt with beet-skinned ladies in extra-large T-shirts, while teenagers secreted off to the muddy seclusion of paddleboats. Chesty guys from the boroughs named Sisto and Vic who ate three- and four-pound lobsters but never got a drop of lung on their shirts swatted at their kids’ heads, and checked me out through my sweater, while their wives bought miniature lighthouses and driftwood seagulls and boats inside bottles. Locals I never saw but read about in the paper grew pot in their gardens and kept arsenals in their basements, and celebrities hid like game in the cliffs. Steps away from the midget scrub pines of the village was the ocean. Not a tranquil ocean, like the lagoonish satin-lit backdrops of Florida or the Caribbean, but a northern one that coerced you into the confidence of its fury. When you swam at midnight in Montauk, you waived everything—you surrendered. Montauk was not pretty; it was something else