Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,175

mind is a mess from rum and Halcions. I can’t remember how many pills I’ve had. Nothing can eradicate the images of the flat sea and stifling air, the coarse sand and ever-present air-conditioning, the walled hotels and unhappy island inhabitants.

“Open it,” Mark says.

I roll from my back to my side, my head coming last. The hinges on the box snap to bite. Like crocodile jaws. Inside I find a diamond bracelet, a queue of ivy leaves or linked arrowheads. It seems to move, so I pull away. Mark unfastens it and lays it flat on the starched sheet. It looks like a procession of angelfish. Once clasped, the fish will swim nowhere, just in a perpetual ring about my lame wrist. How sad, my wrist, a universe.

“That was funny today,” he says, “that woman and her bracelets.”

I touch each link, count each fish. There are eight—oh, eight, my number, another coincidence, one to leave unmentioned. It will be my secret, my secret way to wear the bracelet, something to think about as I am forced to tolerate the talk it will generate. Everyone will say how lucky I am, how lucky we are. Mark is so generous, so kind, so faithful—I’ve never seen him look at another woman! It’s true. He works hard to keep me, since we are joined by nothing of substance—just filament and fiber; it would take so little to set me adrift. Everyone believes he is nice, which he is unless you happen to be sleeping with him, in which case he is not, with the things he wants to do to you. It doesn’t even matter to me what he does, and that is worse. When you don’t care what a man does, he comes up with new things until you do. I feel bad that he cannot get through, that my tolerance is high, that my indifference exposes him for what he is—contemptible in the dark. Perhaps all men fall under the spell of their perversions when given the chance.

He drops onto the bed, first his knees, then his hip and thigh, then his elbow by my ribs. My wrist goes up; the cold metal slaps around. I feel him fasten it once, then again, hitting a special lock. I lie back, floating, my body in free fall, and yet some determined piece of my mind keeps jerking me back. It is as if I am on the brink of discovery, but of what? My mother calls the feeling presque vu, the almost seen, a lost word or phrase that rests on the tip of the tongue, the nagging feeling that there is something you have forgotten to remember. It has to do with Jack, and the night a long time ago when he gave me the opal necklace and a pill to drug me. But I am looking for something more elusive than that connection, a deeper realization having to do with the incentive to give such a thing. Jack was terrified of losing me then, and it was the appearance of Rourke that terrified him. Maybe Mark is terrified too. My eyes pop open. Suddenly I think, Rourke.

He has a flu. He smells like illness, and the bedroom in the apartment stinks like a teenage boy room, like semen and budding funk. I wash his tanned back and legs with cool water, then I go to the bathroom and flush my prescription pills, and also all the aspirin. I tell Mark we are out of aspirin, and that I have to go buy some. Without lifting his head he waves. He knows I’m lying. He also knows I’ll be back. I have nowhere else to go.

Carlo is at the front door. “Where you going, Miss Eveline?”

“For aspirin. He’s sick.” I don’t bother to say “Mark.”

“I have aspirin downstairs. It’s too late to walk alone.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “He needs other things too. From the pharmacy.”

“What pharmacy? No pharmacy’s open this late.”

“On the East Side. There’s an all-night pharmacy.”

I take Broadway to Columbus Circle, and as I walk I watch my reflection in the store windows—my hair swept back, my lips the color of lilacs. Beneath my eyes the bones make a V. I behold something imposing but tragic, resistant but capitulating, something like the flag of a poor but proud nation. I cut east on Fifty-ninth Street at Central Park South. And then at the Plaza, I head south for a few blocks, though the pharmacy is north.

When people say time