Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,284

storm. I never realized before how frequently I am concerned for my own safety, not only physical, but psychological. For three days I claim sanctuary—I can be me, think me, show me.

There is a piano bar on West Forty-fourth Street that we pass every night when we are out. Through the window it seems somber but sincere, like it was once popular but now is on its last legs. One time going by Rourke asks if I feel like going in, and I say I do. Inside the ceiling is low. His head seems to touch.

“This one is for all you Johnny Mathis fans,” the piano player says, though counting everyone, we are seven. He plays “Misty.”

The Ukrainian cocktail waitress leans on the far side of the grand piano; there are smudges in her reflection on the instrument. I know about the Ukraine because I asked when she brought us drinks and a small dish of salted nuts. She has a visa for school to study nursing and an aunt in Brighton Beach. Watching her across the piano, I wonder whether I will be alone like her someday, working in a bar in a foreign country, living with a distant aunt and going to school, not necessarily for my subject. I wonder whether Rourke will come for me at forty, whether at forty I will be waiting.

“If only there were a way to live in night,” I say.

“There is no way,” he says, watching me watch her. “I tried. After you, I tried.”

He turns off the air conditioning, and the room goes hot. When he knocks the windows up and open, he leans for a moment, looking out. Past his wrists, night slips in, bringing the sounds of the city.

He moves and I memorize him. Though I know him, though I have lived with him, everything he does is new. If I am conscious of the fact that time is of the essence, that there are practical means to attend to, I can’t move past the smallest moments with him. He is tranquil and orderly. When he touches things—buttons and keys and combs and me—he touches without false delicacy, as conscious of his strength as of the refinement of his object. The authenticity is somehow crucial to me, more so than talk.

One night we heard a girl crying in the hall. “Luis, Luis.”

I saw his instinct fly to life. He reached automatically for his jeans and shirt. He buttoned two buttons and walked out. Through the closed door I heard him speak, just a word or two. There was the sound of sobbing and the sound of voices, mixing imperfectly down the hall, first two voices, then three.

While I waited, I decided to dress. I opened his suitcase where my clothes were kept, next to his clothes. I pulled out a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I brushed back my hair and found some lipstick in the pocket of my jacket. I looked out over West Fifty-eighth Street, waiting with confidence that the right thing would be done for that girl, complete in the luxury of being a partner to a man like Rourke, thinking, Why can’t the world be mine—when I need no more of it than this?

I wake to the sound of his breathing. Someone said, Should my eyes be lost and my hearing remain, my ears could see the sound she makes. A painter, I think. Degas, maybe, though I’m not sure. By Rourke’s breath he is sad. I unbury my face from his arm and slide my chin up his chest, where I can see from my perch the distance between his eyes.

“What are you thinking?”

“If we’d had a son,” he says, “would he have been gentle like you.”

He sits on the edge of the bed; I curl around his back. A composite of sea-pink and frost-yellow light presses and swells past the gold drapes. The room is like a jewel box. In the light, his skin appears uncommonly fair. He looks like a white wolf or the fragile product of a hothouse, though he is neither. There is a painting, a Caravaggio, of John the Baptist. John is naked and thoughtful—boy and man, object and subject. You feel the promise of masculinity, the anticipation of action, the crisis of uncertainty. He is ready; you are waiting.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “About everything.”

He pushes into the sound of my voice as if rolling his head into a rush of wind. Reaching back with an arm,