Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,164

of, to mix your tiny fate with the great fate of antiquity. All around the city, all around the world, there is a buzz.

Mark held me the first time I saw the Goya and stood admiring it. “Someday we’ll have money like that. Someday soon.”

Rob contrives reasons to see me. He brings poorly folded newspaper clippings about things like the MoMA reopening and van Gogh at the Met and current events articles about artificial hearts and test-tube babies. He asks for help filling out Lotto slips, then he makes plans for the things we’re going to do with the winnings. He teaches me creative accounting—game theory and magic tricks and hand signals for cheating at cards. Also how to decipher market data and racing forms and the science behind the daily number and the sucker schemes behind the boardwalk games, like the wood blocks placed behind the cats—those stiff flip-down dolls you throw hardballs at. They don’t even look like cats.

“She’s quick,” Rob says approvingly to Mark. “Very quick. I think she’s ready for under/overs and the vig.”

One day Rob came and talked excitedly about construction in Atlantic City, Harrah’s, and how great it was gonna be, and also all the action down at the Criterion. He talked about the Holmes-Cooney TKO the previous week, and when Mark said, “Let me tell you something, old-timers like Joe Louis and Jack Johnson could pummel today’s boxers,” Rob didn’t engage. He just glowered and said, “Fuck you, Mark.”

When Rob left that day, he seemed particularly torn. I walked him to the door of the apartment, and he faced me squarely with his hands on my arms to say goodbye. The look on his face was aggrieved, like the look of a healthy person leaving a hospital patient alone with their terminal disease. He glanced up at Mark, as though he was considering grabbing me and making a break for it. He started to speak, but Mark interrupted.

“Hold on. Let’s ask the boss,” Mark was saying to someone on the other end of the phone, Brett probably. He set the receiver on his shoulder, asking, “Sushi, baby, or Thai?”

I turned back and Rob had gone. The door ka-thunked against the vacuum of the hallway. I touched myself, feeling for effects. There ought to have been effects. I searched for signs of him—the cup he’d used, the newspaper he’d carried. There was a football on the coffee table that he’d rolled in his hands. He’d been wearing a tank top, and he had a new tattoo—a cobra on his right shoulder. Every time the ball spun, the cobra flickered.

“Ev says sushi,” Mark reported falsely. “We’ll meet you at Japonica at eight.”

A kiss at the beach, salt on my lips. I open my eyes to see but the sky is slit by a streak of bobbing pentacles, a blinding row of asterisks that cascade from the sun to me. I wonder if the sun can blind me.

Mark says no. “It cannot.”

He met some Harvard graduate school friends by the lifeguard station, Lisa and Tim Connelly. The Connellys are architects “talking to the Hilton” in Atlanta. If you ask what is the meaning of that, of “talking to the Hilton,” you will be told, negotiating a major contract. If you ask, “Doesn’t Atlanta have its own architects?” you will be told of the Connellys, “They’re hot. They just did Avon.”

There is logic to business, just don’t expect to find it. It’s really non-logic masquerading as logic, and it depends upon the fact that you, and people like you, are too stupid or too busy to make inquiries. When considering the convoluted principles of business deals, look for nepotism, cronyism, extortion, insider trading, ordinance evasion, or bulk airline fares.

“We’re meeting them at the Lobster Roll later.”

“No,” I say, squinting up. “Not the Lobster Roll.” I will never go back.

Mark stiffens, the hand at his jaw clutching a tiny peak of towel. He pats his face, drying it, and he smiles. “No problem. The Clam Bar.”

He goes no further. There is nothing to fix when he finds what he wants in the wreckage of me. Like a missionary, he is called upon to save—saving is atonement for his ascendancy. And like missionaries who marry natives, he is inspired to emancipate deeply, down to the level of the DNA. It doesn’t matter that I feel nothing, say nothing; it matters simply that I am docile. He is resolved and he is apt, and if he suffers from my apathy,