Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,270

room, a disheveled black circle.

He had met most everyone over the years but never all at once and never with them sober and nicely dressed. Usually when Mark visited, he would get this look of unfolding shock, as though viewing a particularly revolting striptease. But that evening, like a politician suddenly recognizing the voting power of a marginal constituency, he walked in and worked the room, shaking hands, offering condolences.

“Thank you for being there for Eveline,” he said as he passed from person to person. “I would have been there too, but my grandparents flew in from the coast for my sister’s wedding, and I had to pick them up at JFK. Considering the tragic circumstances, I should have sent a car for them, but my grandfather’s ninety, and my grandmother has Crohn’s disease.”

In the kitchen, Mark sat at the table, in the chair nearest the stove, the place he’d sat the night we met four years before. As it happened, I was standing where I’d stood then, against the counter in front of the sink. Like dominoes, the days fell flat; I returned to the time when I knew what I wanted but had no means of achieving it, as opposed to having the means to achieve without the knowledge of any exceptional end.

“Do we have to sit in here?” Mark wanted to know.

Looking in his eyes, I could see the things I’d missed when we’d first met—the undisclosed designs, the skimmingness about the mind, the restless arrogance. Before going further, I was visited by a second memory—one of Rourke—in the same room, back on that same night, and me, caught in the crucible of adolescence but braver than I’d ever been. The memory of Rourke was so positive and tactile as to clear my mind. I felt a gaping sorrow, elegant and actual. Me thinking, Oh, what I’d lost, what I’d become.

Sensing crisis, Mark changed directions. It was amazing, how well he knew me. “You’re going to break my father’s heart if you don’t come to the dinner tonight. Never mind the wedding tomorrow.”

I called upon the only authority I possessed—artistic instinct and imagination. I established a scene, and I entered it. The kitchen, so overrun with memories of family and friends, became something purely physical, a set or stage, something onto which Mark and I had been thrust. He took on the look of a puppet, only not innocuous, and the things of which we spoke began to sound stilted. I could interpret his script. I could see that his promise to shelter me was based upon the premise of my homelessness. I wondered what was it he wanted from me in exchange. What did I possess that he needed to take away?

My feet were bare; I set them firmly into ground, all points touching. Though it was June, the floor was cold. It was the same coldness that had always been. The coldness that belonged to my mother’s house, and so to my memory and perception of it and of me. That coldness was precisely what I needed to name; it was the paintable thing. And in my head there was a quote my mother used to say that always made me think of facing facts. It was T. S. Eliot’s, I think.

The ways deep and the weather sharp. The very dead of winter.

I walked myself through the years. I had attended college and I had a job in an art gallery. Mark and I shared an apartment on West Sixtieth Street, and there was a car for me to drive. In the bank I had eleven thousand dollars. Any time I paid for something during my time with Mark—books, food, gifts, clothes—the money reappeared in my account.

I tried to think of Saturdays, any Saturday. I had some fractional memory of him on the grenade-green leather couch in the living room, phone in one hand, channel changer in the other, pulling me down to join him. And Saturday places—restaurants, nightclubs, benefits, Nantucket, the Vineyard, Cape Cod, East Hampton. Balding men, spidery women, the superfluous sounds of sex from his friends in adjoining rooms. Mark’s sex was silent. It was stealthy and habitual like some dark routine, like he was addicted to the feeling of getting his money’s worth.

And me, there with him, imprisoned by the impregnability of his position, lost in a world purged of sincerity and rife with conceit. Like him and every other member of his society, I was just another creaturely thing, defined