know?”
Jack capitulated, plunging his arm to his lap. “Because Dan’s been talking about it for three fucking weeks.”
“Dan?”
Jack said, “Yeah, Dan.”
Kate set her coffee down and shuddered slightly, repeating “Dan.” She stood and padded out of the room, saying “Dan” again. Moments later her bedroom door slammed, and there was the distant sound of sobbing.
“What the hell’s wrong with Dan?” Jack demanded. He leapt off the counter and moved to the table and began plucking mushrooms from the pie.
I rubbed my face in circles with both hands, wondering what to do. It felt a little perverse to be in my position. Jack was contemplating me. The longer I remained silent, the greater the opportunity for him to construe that silence as evasion. It was amazing, the work his mind could do. He let the pizza lid float to a close. Stamped in red ink on the cover was a mustached guy in a chef’s hat holding a steaming pizza. He looked happy.
Jack raised my coffee cup. “Caffeine? Are you trying to kill yourself?” The mug smacked the table and coffee looped over the lip. “Dennis called me. He said you fainted.”
“I guess I—I fell. Or fainted.” I wasn’t sure what had happened.
He was behind my chair. “Stay still,” he urged, then he tilted my head to examine it. “Christ, Evie, there’s blood on it. Where’s the first aid kit?”
“Upstairs. In the bathroom.”
“Well, I can’t go up there. I might slap her,” Jack said. “You’d better go.”
I headed up slowly. I thought it was contradictory for Jack to get so upset over blood and caffeine, considering the abuses he leveled against himself. Besides, I hadn’t caused myself to faint, it just happened. Some people get bloody noses, others sleepwalk. Marilyn can get the hiccups for three days straight and Dad sneezes in series of thirteen—I faint. I’ve fainted at the Guggenheim, at Woolworth’s on 23rd Street, and at an International House of Pancakes in Cape Canaveral. Whenever Dr. Scott checks my blood pressure, he says, “Eighty over fifty. It’s a wonder you’re alive.”
I nudged Kate’s door. She was in bed, crying. “You don’t understand,” she said.
If she meant I didn’t know what it felt like to be in love, and in love with Rourke, she was wrong. But if she meant that I didn’t understand her love for him, she was right. If it was love that she felt, it was the sort of love that conveniently bypassed natural law and practical reality.
I felt a little light-headed, so I moved to her bed. I looked back to the spot I’d been standing in. I tried to imagine what it was like to talk to me. Was it hard or easy? Jack had said the blood was fresh. Maybe it was running down my back like a mane or tail.
“You think you know everything,” Kate said.
I thought she was alluding to sex. I wondered if she felt it was time, that to venture further into virginity would be to attach unwanted magnitude to that state. Maybe she hoped to resolve it, just as some people have to get their driver’s license at sixteen, though they have nowhere to go. It’s a perilous business, devising to be taken—the flouncing and cuing, the skittish surrender of reason. Sex demands equality because sex involves the will—someone’s will, preferably one’s own. Maybe I didn’t know everything, but unfortunately, I knew that much.
“One thing’s for sure,” I said as I moved to get the first aid box from the bathroom. “He’s not crying right now. He’s not crying over the Valentine you didn’t send.”
18
I dreamt I was a paper doll. I was one in a row of paper doll cutouts sitting on a swing set. We wore triangular lime-green dresses and had shoulder-length flip hair, like from the sixties.
At lunchtime I tried to draw the dream, but couldn’t. Beyond the doll bodies, there had lain a sleepy hint of magic, something astral and sublime that continued to insinuate itself upon me, like an ocular echo. After school I rummaged through my mother’s bossa nova records. There were ones by João Gilberto, Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim. I finally settled on Getz/Gilberto because it had Astrud Gilberto singing “Corcovado.”
I stripped to my long johns, leaving my clothes in a pile near the hearth, and I listened to the song, closing my eyes to reconstitute the dream’s elusive vitality, its lightness and lift. The song was delicate and de-emphasized, melodious and modern, serene and insurgent, similar to the feel