35

On the streets of Greenwich Village juvenile trees shaped like lollipops sat spaced like in collectible railroad towns, and when the wind went through them, it did not blow but hiss. Through the casement windows of the dormitory, I could hear the sound like the sound of suffering.

In classrooms and lecture halls, in the gym and the cafeterias, people stared as though they could see on my skin the stain of disgrace. Whenever possible, I avoided interaction; I led a solitary life. Days would pass when I didn’t even speak. For meals, I went to eat alone at Loeb Student Center, the commuter café on Washington Square Park, instead of the dorm cafeterias, where boys would invariably come to my table, saying, “Is this seat taken?” or “Aren’t you the girl from the gym?” At Loeb, everybody paid cash for lunch because they weren’t on the housing or meal plan. People there were grateful for college. They dressed nicely. They let you cut in line. They would sit for hours, Korean guys from Kew Gardens and Greek girls from Astoria, waiting safely between classes, ten or twelve at a table, reading the news.

I was obsessed with the news. I read papers everywhere, sometimes twice, snatching up any rag from counters, garbage pails, exercise bikes, asking strangers, “Is this your paper?” I was constantly thinking, Rourke’s out there, somewhere.

Just as he had been during the most difficult moments in high school, Jack was invisibly present during those months. Thoughts of him carried me. Having been loved by Jack I did not think that I could love Rourke better or more than Jack did me, or that my own heartbreak could surpass Jack’s. It was the single equivalency I could find; in fact, it was perfect. By my honest wish to make amends to Jack, I survived the loss of Rourke. I chose an ascetic life and dedicated my efforts to Jack and his well-being. I found contentment in conducting a private reconciliation with him. Sometimes I thought to try to find him, but I suspected there are some doors that are better off remaining closed, locked from both sides.

I had to pay Mark what I owed him.

Five hundred dollars for the private operation and the shot of Demerol, which was worth about four of the five. Lowie once said that a shot of Demerol is like a week in Bermuda.

“Forget about it,” Mark said. He preferred to erase the debt, to pick up after Rourke and own a piece of me, only he didn’t push because he was smart. He knew I would never allow anyone to lessen Rourke. If you ever saw Mark’s eyes, you would always see them figuring.

“I’ll pay you back anyway.”

“Take your time,” he said, fast. Mark spoke fast, giving the impression that nothing was new to him, putting you at a rhetorical disadvantage, giving his remarks the illusion of having been born of experience. “The longer it takes, the longer you stick around.”

——

On November 4th, 1980, the night of the Reagan-Carter presidential election, I got a job. I was out because Ellen had turned off the television.

“It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to my life who wins,” she’d said. Her face was obscured by a layer of chamomile face cream, which made her mouth stand out, like the Joker’s mouth from Batman, or like Pagliacci’s. I was sitting on my bed in half darkness, fully dressed, and feeling weirdly ungoverned, kind of solo. “You can watch the results with the sound off if you want,” she offered.

I started out looking for a coffee shop or some place with a radio. I ended up downtown, on the vast and virtually deserted Varick Street below Houston, in the printing district, where the only bodies I encountered were three men in the blackened doorway of a nightclub. I knew it was a club by the way the music thrashed against the doors from the inside, pleading like a prisoner.

One guy looked south into lower Manhattan toward the Twin Towers. “Where you headed, doll?” He had white hair and a crew cut, which had the effect of making his head appear shiny and thick, like a nickel. “Hate to tell you, but there ain’t nothin’ down there.”

A second guy said, “Better watch out you don’t get chucked in the backa some van.”

The guy with the nickel-head asked where I lived.

I said, “The Village.”

“Aureole’s on MacDougal, right, Phil?” he confirmed. “She can cab up with Aureole.”

Phil was boss—he had a clipboard. Anytime you saw a bouncer with a clipboard, he was boss. He jerked his head. “C’mon inside.”

I stepped forward to the door and looked up to Phil. “Are they looking for help?”

“Ask for Arthur,” Phil advised. With one bloated, I.D.-braceleted wrist, he waved me past the cashier and the second set of bouncers.

Inside was purple, like a black-light basement or creepy fish tank. The main room was huge and hardly filled. The place must have been a cafeteria during the day, because breakfast special menus hung near the ceilings, and the deejay was set up on a grill. The decorations were vintage neon diner signs. Ten or twenty customers stood at the perimeter of the cement dance floor, shuffling experimentally to Patti Smith’s “Because the Night.” Another fifteen or so hung off the ledge of a mammoth bar like there was nothing happening in the nation of greater consequence than vodka and cocaine.

“Where’s Arthur?” I asked a girl at the service bar.

She gestured over a tattooed collarbone. “Try the kitchen.” The tattoo looked like a banana and a dot. “Algerian flag,” she said, noticing my interest. “It didn’t come out right.”

“Are you Aureole?”

“Frankie,” she replied. “Aureole’s around somewhere.”

The enormous kitchen was spotless, as if it hadn’t been used for cooking in years, and vacant except for a guy leaning against one of several counters reading a folded newspaper. I could make out the granular sound of election results on his AM radio. The count was in: Reagan had won. I couldn’t help but think of Jack, where he was, what he was thinking. And my mother, and Powell, even Kate. I longed for the intellectual security of home. It felt wrong but somehow symbolic to find myself among strangers on such a night.

“Arthur?”

“Mike,” he said, swinging up, extending a hand. “Arthur’s the manager. I’m a bar-back.”

“I’m here for a job,” I said.

“Sure. I’ll get him.” Mike handed me his paper as he passed. It was the New York Times’ crossword puzzle. “Do me a favor. Help me out here. I’m too freaked out to finish.”

I answered as many as I could in the time it took for him to return from the rear of the kitchen with a case of Heineken on one shoulder. In his back pocket was an application. “Fill it out while you’re waiting. Use my pen.”

I marked Thursday through Saturday as my available days and gave the application to the elusive Arthur, a towering, sour-looking man in black leather and tinted glasses who appeared from nowhere and gave the impression of being dead or guilty.

Arthur scanned it impassively. “References?”

“None I feel like listing.” Our eyes met over the sheet. I couldn’t imagine him calling the Lobster Roll, which anyway was closed for the season. Besides, there is a trick to getting a job, which is not really needing it and only half-wanting it.

“Fine,” he said. “Start Thursday. Stick around and have a drink if you want. It’s been a rough night.” Without another word he left as he’d arrived, vanishing into concrete and neon.

I finished the crossword with Mike and had a Beck’s while we listened to Reagan’s acceptance speech. Reagan said he was “not frightened of what lies ahead.”

Mike chucked my empty bottle into a trash can, where it smacked the rim and broke. “Great. In a country of two hundred million, that makes one of us. He’ll reinstitute the draft. He’ll ban abortion. He’ll clear-cut forests. He’ll set us back thirty years. I mean, he’s nostalgic for the 1940s. We were at war in the 1940s! We were dropping atom bombs in the 1940s! I’m getting the hell out,” he confided, and he pulled out an accordion strip of wallet photos. “I’m taking my wife and kids to Australia.”

The club filled considerably after the results were in. I couldn’t imagine where all the people were coming from. Mike dropped me at the deejay booth while he restocked the bar.

A sign on the glass grill barrier said, D.J. JEROME. “Jim Jerome,” he clarified, extending a hand. He sounded Midwestern and sincere, like Mr. Rogers. “The sign is supposed to say ‘D.J. Jim Jerome,’ but they printed it wrong. Now everybody calls me Jerry.”

I introduced myself, and he said my name twice. “Eveline, Eveline,” he mused thoughtfully, as if imagining a place, trying to recall if he’d ever been there.

Mike returned with Aureole. He’d found her locked in the basement bathroom drinking Dewar’s. “I’m sick,” she said, regarding the election. “I don’t know what to do except drink.” Aureole blew her nose hard. Her hair was a swervy bob the color of Darjeeling tea, situated wiggishly over a pair of violet doe eyes ringed red from tears. On her left cheek was a mole. She looked like a young Liz Taylor, only not such an absolute knockout. “Sure, I’ll share a cab with you. I’d leave now, but I don’t feel like being alone.”

Jim pulled a new album and tucked one headphone cup between his ear and shoulder. He engrossed himself in the mix, fingering the album back and forth. Underneath the song that was already playing came the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden.” The absence of interruption in music as he went from one song to the next was nice; it was symbolic of cohesion in rough and fast times. It was as if no one could bear a second of silence.

As soon as the song became recognizable to the crowd, people peeled away from the bar. Their faces were familiar to me; they belonged to people my mother might have befriended, rebels and outcasts. Only I noticed a new lameness about them, an increased lack of relevance. They looked off message. It was as if within a matter of minutes, the avant-garde had become the periphery. The bodies crept to the edge of the dance floor, sitting on tables or standing next to them, swaying, nodding, soothed for the moment by the injection of the Stones’ familiar antiestablishment voices, though, as Jack would have said, The moment was bound to be brief.

“How’d it go?” Phil inquired when I left. He was alone outside, just standing there, staring thoughtfully toward the street.

“Okay, I guess. I start Thursday.”

He nodded. “Work out all right with Aureole?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s getting her stuff.”

Phil had bad skin and bulky wrists. I suspected that he was self-conscious about that, that he was sort of a lost gentleman, so when he offered a cigarette, I took it. I didn’t smoke, but Phil didn’t deserve a no, and sometimes that’s all a yes needs to be. We stood there for a while—actually, I leaned. Cigarettes make me dizzy.

“So, Reagan won,” I said.

“Yeah.” Phil evacuated the smoke from his lungs and flicked his butt to the curb. “The actor.”

Heartbreak was not a great club, it was an okay club, a dive actually, but an enduring sort of dive popular among idiosyncratic losers and peripheral celebrities, iffy brokers and borderline musicians, those haggard, nicotine-types in creased leather and reedy denim who sleep all day but somehow manage to earn livings. I worked three nights, eleven to four, earning shift plus tips. I did more dancing than drink-serving, but no one seemed to care.

The atmosphere was remarkably wholesome. Dad and Marilyn stopped by sometimes to see me. Like everyone working there—gentlemanly bouncers, family-minded bar-backs, timid deejays, law school waitresses—I was in it for the money. And like everyone else, I had a complicated past that made me insusceptible to entanglements and indifferent to wild times. If only the loneliness there could have alleviated the loneliness in me, if only a nightclub were not such an institute of longing, maybe I would have gotten better.

At two-thirty in the morning one Friday in December, Mark came in. I hadn’t seen him since the procedure in October. Every week I mailed him a money order for twenty-five dollars, which he always acknowledged with a phone call, and when he called, we would speak at length. I didn’t have to force myself—I liked talking to him. It was like a window open, small as a needle’s eye. But I never called him, no matter how reckless I felt.

“I can’t stay,” he reported. “I have a car waiting.”

I was holding a freshly loaded tray. “Okay. Let me get rid of this.”

I crossed the suddenly packed dance floor to deliver drinks to the guy who’d ordered them. He wiggled his blubbery ass and sang along as he fished leisurely through his pocket for a wallet.

He kept trying to dance with me, and I almost spilled the drinks before he finally handed me a twenty. It wasn’t good to think of where his hands had been, such as shaking himself over a urinal. When people say, Don’t put that money in your mouth, they basically mean someone like him had been holding it. Denny was always telling me to be careful because guys masturbate in bathroom stalls. And worse. The guy waited until I got the change together, then just told me to keep it. Six bucks, which was a lot, but somehow still inadequate compensation for having to deal with him. Good tippers are frequently the most despicable citizens—they pay you for tolerating them.

It’d been a nice night before Mark had arrived. Maybe it wasn’t fair to blame him, but nightclubs are places of explicit laws. It takes just one body to transform a benign gathering into an intolerable mob.

“Who’s the suit?” Mike shouted, meaning Mark. I was waiting for an opening to cross the floor.

“Just a guy I know,” I shouted back.

Aureole joined us. “He’s cute. Like, totally undone. It looks like he ran here.”

It was true. Mark’s tie was loose and his jacket unbuttoned and his hair made Caesar bangs on his brow. He’d obviously been drinking.

Mike leaned forward. “What the fuck’s he doing?”

“Is he busing tables?” Aureole asked, leaning as well, squinting. “Oh, my God, he is.”

Mark was emptying ashtrays into a gray plastic bucket, wiping them with cocktail napkins. All the tables around him had been cleared.

When I got over to him, I said, “What are you doing?”

He said, “I hate to have you touch filth.”

“We have a busboy,” I informed him.

“Obviously not a competent one. There’s shit everywhere.”

“Anyway,” I yelled. “What’s up?”

“I want to borrow you. For New Year’s Eve.”

“I’m working New Year’s Eve.”

“Take off,” he declared emphatically. “How much will you make?”

I didn’t know. I’d never worked on New Year’s before.

“Take a guess—a hundred, a hundred fifty?”

I shrugged. I’d never made more than fifty a night. “I don’t know, maybe.”

“I’ll double it,” he proposed. “I’ll give you three hundred.”

“That’s prostitution.”

“It’s not if we don’t have sex.” He kissed me and ran out.