Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,91

into my sleeves. He offered his gloves to me. As he wriggled one onto my left hand, the other slipped from under his arm and fell to the ground. We knocked shoulders as we both bent to retrieve it.

“What a load of shit!” he proclaimed, meaning the play. “What a criminal waste.”

“Your song was good.”

“That’s hardly an endorsement for the play. The acting sucked.”

“People have to start somewhere. You weren’t born a musician.”

“The difference is I’ve been playing every day since I was four. This is like handing out thirty guitars to people who’ve never played before, who’ll never play again, and trying to get something coherent in three months. And for what, five lame performances?”

“At least it’s not football.”

“No, no. It’s exactly like football. Half-assed recreation, a distraction for the kiddies. It’s about deceiving taxpayers into thinking juveniles are being kept off the streets, that they’re being offered concrete opportunities. It’s about college résumés.”

I tried to remember my point. I wasn’t sure I had one. “Kate worked hard, and—”

“And you worked hard,” he said, though I hadn’t even considered myself. “That crap was a waste of your time. Your church will be in the trash on Monday.”

I hadn’t considered that—the trash. I said, “You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean, Ev-e-line.” Jack stretched my name to fully fill its three syllables. He faced me. “But do you know what you mean?” His blue eyes were bleached and even, making a strike through his face like the crossbar of the letter T. “Listen to yourself.”

Kids from the play closed in on us from behind. Jack slipped into the garden of the Huntting Inn, and I followed. He sat on an enormous rock, took a joint from his pocket, and lit it. Our eyes met above the embers. I wished to be drained; I wanted him to drain me.

“The whole thing got me down. The whole fucking night.” Jack was referring to Rourke, though he would not introduce that name into our dialogue. He would not risk making it more real than he guessed it to be, as real as it was. I kicked the ground. He kicked the ground as well, setting a piece of ice to fly. “You’re headed down a bad road, Evie. I won’t be able to see you through this.”

The wooden porch of the Lewis house creaked under our weight. It was a moldy cedar-shake colonial on Pantigo Road, held together primarily by its odor—a composite of curry and candle drippings. Micah refused to live there, choosing instead to remain at their apartment on West End Avenue and Eighty-second. She visited East Hampton rarely, almost exclusively in summer. “The heat burns off the negative ions,” she once told me.

Inside was a sequence of rooms lined with instruments, dubious art, obsolete electronics, stacks of flaking scores, and mountains of damp books. Inside, you never knew exactly where you were or how to get out. The wainscoted hallways were papered in framed photographs of Dan’s father with greats such as Oscar Peterson, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Rollins. Besides being a musician and composer, Dr. Lewis was also a professor of music theory at Juilliard, which he called his day gig. He and the band traveled to places such as Newport, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Paris, and São Paolo. When in town, they would sit around discussing the evolution of jazz, debating East and West Coast composing signatures, and lamenting the loss of quality clubs and the declining musical interest among young people. My mother would sometimes be with them. She and Dr. Lewis had dated when Dan and I were in grade school, the winter before she met Powell. This was a big deal to Jack. Unlike his revulsion to the idea of me, Denny, and Peter as college roommates, he liked the idea of Dan and me as siblings and his coming to live with us and Mom and Dr. Lewis in one big jazzy, literary house with everyone being cared for by Bitsy, Dr. Lewis’s housekeeper from the Philippines. Bitsy wore ill-fitting sweat socks and threw down paper plates of muddy lasagna and yelled uniquely when Dan put his feet on the table. After yelling, she would squish his cheeks together and slap the side of his head. Bitsy was seventy-one and an avid golfer.

Jack joined Dan and Smokey in the living room, going straight to the piano, bowing over, his powdery white hair splaying in a fan. There was a guitar on the