Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,227

your sweater over your shoulders and just the top button done.”

I tried to remember if I’d ever told Mark about Marilyn and Dad comparing me to Monica Vitti. But then again, it was just the type of guy Mark was, the kind who makes you think he’s gotten hold of your file.

We turned east on Seventy-sixth Street and headed toward Central Park. I climbed onto a low wall and reached for his shoulder as I walked. When he helped me off, I slid through the shaft of his arms.

“Like an angel,” he said, “just descended.”

“Fallen, you mean.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean.”

He guided my face back and he kissed me, and I let him because my lips were deserving lips wishing to be kissed and my body was a deserving body wishing to be touched and because there is a moment in every life when you hit the lowest possible point. In that moment you are not you but a monster of you, a creature stalking the cloisters of your own despair. The monster urges you on—come, come—and so you do. In fact, you feel better in there, crazed and incautious, capable and free. You feel you have reached the other side, that you have passed through the pain, though you have only capitulated to it. And you are lucky you do not have a gun. If you had a gun, you’d shoot yourself.

“This is where I live.” We are at the Beresford on Central Park West. “Actually, my parents live here.” He escorted me through the set of doors facing the American Museum of Natural History.

“Good evening, Mr. Ross,” the doorman said.

Mark shook the doorman’s gloved hand. “Ralph, this is Miss Auerbach.”

Ralph greeted me warmly and walked us to the elevator. I wondered what he was thinking. Men are always thinking things, doormen in particular.

The Ross apartment was august and sublime, a quintessential New York prewar apartment. If ever Manhattan could be smelted and poured, it would take the shape of an apartment like that. The difference between it and the house in East Hampton was dramatic—the plaster walls, the original detailing, the chain of elegant rooms connected by high-ceilinged corridors. A Steinway grand was situated near a bank of windows overlooking the park. My thoughts turned to Jack. I wondered where he was and how I had managed to stray so far. I saw the art—a de Kooning, a Stella, a Diebenkorn, several Picasso etchings. Mark had bought the Diebenkorn at a gallery in California, he told me, and had given it to his parents for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. In the bedrooms were lithographs by Miró, a charcoal by O’Keeffe, a series of photographs by Stieglitz.

White cabinets towered from floor to ceiling in the main cooking area, but there were also cabinets in the hall that was a sort of larder. The floor was made of those classic black and white square ceramic tiles, and near the maid’s room, a door with dead bolts led to a service elevator. Garbage was placed there; invisible hands retrieved it.

Mark rummaged through the refrigerator. “You didn’t eat tonight. Let me make you something.”

When the kettle whistled, Mark transferred boiling water for tea into a beautiful china pot. It was light turquoise with handpainted geese in flight and gold foliage and a gold border. He showed me the black stamps on the bottoms of the matching cup and saucer. The set was Japanese, from the turn of the century.

“Nippon,” he said, referring to the mark. “It simply means ‘Japan’ and refers to the country of origin. In the 1920s, U.S. Customs law changed and demanded the marks read: ‘Made in Japan,’ which doesn’t sound as nice as ‘Nippon,’ does it?”

I said no, that it didn’t. By the kitchen clock, it was nearly three-thirty Mark and I had walked for hours. Rourke was finished packing. He was alone in his apartment, thinking of me. Just a day ago, I’d been there too.

“Where are your parents?” I asked Mark, banishing thoughts of Rourke. There was the seedy smell of rye bread toasting.

“Milan,” he answered. “On vacation. Then it’s up to Monte Carlo for a little gambling, then they shoot through Nice over to Cannes for the film festival.”

I was sorry I’d asked; somehow, it made everything hurt worse.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let me show you around.” We left the dishes on the table for someone else to clean and soon we were moving through hallways. It was strange, but I could see