Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,189

close, there was no chance of drifting into intimacy. Anselm needed only the woman with whom he was in love, or some qualified replacement capable of satisfying his family’s demands for status and affluence. And as for my part, I could never settle for anything less than a renegade and a runaway, a descendant of greatness capable of voluntary disinheritance. Someone who would choose self-governance or death. An American.

When the music got good, we stood simultaneously, and went to the living room where we were first to dance, and that was triumphant but lonesome, like being the first of your group to swim.

Fire. The way you walk and talk really sets me off—

The floor filled soon after we arrived, and for a while things were manageable, until someone started to bump, then everyone started to bump, bones and bits of flesh tipping bits of flesh and bones and a forest of arms overhead, wintry and erect, like limbs attached to bodies begging to be exhumed. Something about the bareness of the arms plus the unity of the bodies made me feel claustrophobic and terrified.

I withdrew to the window and looked at the snow-covered streets. The stormy sky was pretty, a white-pink city haze. I wished someone would come get me, but there was no one. That might have been a common thought to have on New Year’s Eve; in all the world I was surely not the only one thinking that way. The trick, I supposed, is never to have that thought, never to stray far from those who would give anything to rescue you. Such people are friends and typically they reside at home. One year before, I’d been in my living room with Jack, Dan, and Kate.

That night, for the first time, I began to understand the graphics of hardship, which I saw as a fraction with failure on bottom and time on top. It’s close to impossible to carve even a moderate fortune from a society that is locked; the math of the fraction is the impermeability of the culture divided by your desire to make it permeable.

Mark appeared, like an emissary or ambassador, just as I was discovering a whole new low.

“My God,” he said, petting my jaw in upstrokes with the back of his hand, like I was catlike, like I was cunning, “I am so in love with you.”

It was past dawn when Mark and I headed back to the dorm. He stayed several yards in front, facing back. He wanted to watch me walk, he said. At my door he held me, but I did not kiss him. I did not have to. I’d already compromised so much.

He brushed his cheek against mine, keeping it there just for a moment. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

The bad part was to come. The bad part was going inside alone, lying alone, waking alone. He must have known how it would end for me because in fact he did not leave me alone. He’d left an envelope when he was in the room earlier with me and Anselm. Beneath my pillow. Inside was three hundred dollars cash.

“Listen to me. You can’t get a word in edgewise.”

We were at Le Bernardin. It was two days before Valentine’s Day. Mark was too clever for Valentine’s Day. Though had he asked, I would have accepted. I didn’t mind being with Mark. Time with him was public time. There was no need to do anything but project outward from the sphere we occupied. He knew Rourke; he knew Rourke’s effect. He was not repulsed by my heartache or impeded by my devotion. He searched for Rourke in me the way an archaeologist might crawl through caves, feeling for gouges, testing for oxides and ochres. When I was with Mark, I could feel Rourke alive.

“Jesus, what did he do to you?” Mark said.

I liked that he said that—Jesus, what did he do to you?—and erotic thoughts of Rourke became intertwined with erotic thoughts of Mark, and I had to work to keep the two separate. The effect of the remark was such that I wondered whether he had anticipated my response. It was possible that he had given it as a gift, but more along the lines of a degenerate gift, not to please but to test. He wanted to measure the profundity of my need, as if by exacting those dimensions he could gain some advantage against Rourke.

For the remainder of the night we ate sculpted nouveau meals in