46

The day of the fight he fucks me very hard, like he knows it will be the last time. “Shit,” Mark says when he is done, “you are a sweet taste in the mouth.”

The Cougar is double-parked outside Astor Place haircutters. I toss my bag through the open window onto the front seat. I get in and shut the door and Rob takes off.

“Nice haircut,” he says. “Reminds me of the old times out in Montauk. You gotta check out this French flick, Breathless. Jean Seberg plays this little American girl with chopped hair and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s cut really tight.”

He bounces in his seat as he drives. The night is hot and Rob likes when it’s hot. That’s because he’s a Leo, and Leos are sun kings, and Napoleon was a Leo. On Rob’s chest is a new tattoo—inside the globe of a plankton-green sun, it says Roi de Soleil. He got it in New Orleans, at Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras tattoos bring luck. I switch on the radio.

Cisco Kid was a friend of mine. Cisco Kid was a friend of mine.

The car turns widely off Houston and onto the Bowery. Outside my window the skies are marbleized blue-black, like out of mythology. Skies like a storm is coming, only no storm is coming. Skies that make you homesick, only there is no home. When we hit Delancey Street, the prostitutes tap the hood of the car. They wave to Rob. Hey.

“A case of mistaken identity,” Rob says to me. “I mean it, baby, I swear.”

In the Cirillos’ driveway, Rob’s sister, Christine, says, “Everybody in the pool. That’s the law.” Christine works the watch counter at Bloomingdale’s. If you want a watch, go to her. “I’m giving you five minutes, Evie,” she warns. “A grace period. Then I’m coming to find you.”

The first time I went to Rob’s parents’ house, I made the mistake of heading for the front door. “What are you,” Rob asked, “the mailman? The last people to go in that way were relatives from Italy.” It-lee.

The back door by the barbecue leads to the kitchen, which is full of aunts and grandmothers and elderly female neighbors. You can see the ladies through the screen, briefly making contact, like flies against a window. Arms to the elbows appear to hand off trays of peppers and sausages to fry.

Mrs. Cirillo works the grill. “In most families, Eveline,” she explains as she flinches into the charcoal smog to flip a rack of ribs, “this is a man’s work. But, what happens is, Dom gets to talking and everything burns.”

“I’ll do it, Ma.” Rob grabs at the tongs. “C’mon.”

“No, Robert,” she says, “take care of the company.”

From the upstairs bathroom window I can see the family swept up in a sort of insular and happy confusion that is enviable but that can’t possibly last. Christine has everyone running in the water to make a whirlpool, while Rob’s father leans wearily on the ladder, spraying non-comers randomly with the hose.

“Christine’s the ambassador of the pool,” Mr. Cirillo calls out. “I’m the artillery.”

In the far corner of the yard, Joey hovers protectively over his wife, Anna, who sits sideways on a lounge chair feeding the baby, who’s almost five now, though they still call him “the baby,” and their older son, Charlie. Everybody pretends that Rob is no good and Joey is the family man, but Joey’s the one they worry about. Rob’s lawlessness has a complementary decency, but Joey’s righteousness is forced, like he’s bored of it, like any day he’s gonna snap. There’s another brother, in L.A., Anthony, good-looking. No one mentions Anthony; there are no pictures—except one buried deep inside Rob’s wallet.

Joey removes his shirt and adjusts the band of his shorts. “C’mon, Charlie. Let’s go swamp Aunt Chrissie.”

Directly beneath the bathroom window is the back porch and the keg, and Rob filling pitchers. I can see the top of his head. Christine splashes at him. “Rob. Get ova here.” Without even looking, he steps casually to the side so the water can’t reach, like he knows the exact measurement from the pool to the keg.

“Forget about it,” Joey taunts as he climbs the ladder behind Charlie. “He won’t let Evie see him in a suit.”

“Nonsense. Robert hates to get wet,” Mrs. Cirillo chides. “He always has. He’s like a cat.”

“In my day a kid never passed up water,” Mr. Cirillo says. “It’s not natural.”

“What do I want to get cold for?” Rob says. “It’s been a long winter. I’m just starting to heat up again.”

When I come back out, I join the tangle of bodies, strollers, and pocketbooks clustered around the tables in the driveway. Christine’s Dominican boyfriend, Ray Peña, is passing out clear keg cups high to the brim with daiquiris decorated with umbrellas and naked ladies. Rob says the plan is to get people in the betting mood.

“Big bets are already down,” Rob explained to me earlier on the car ride over, “but ringside is critical. You can really rake it in ringside.”

Lorraine is there with a bunch of girls, cousins probably. Everyone’s either a cousin or they work in the meat or the fish market. All you hear is, eat the fish—it’s fresh; eat the beef—it’s fresh. Lorraine lights a cigarette on one of those mosquito coils, and the live ash reddens her French tip manicure. I haven’t seen her in a while. Her hair is straight and she’s skinny. She’s wearing a sleeveless white blouse and a straight black skirt.

“Lorraine looks pretty,” I tell Joey.

“Yeah, well, she’s on her way,” Joey says. “First Chris DeMarco got her that job at the Newark DA’s office as a receptionist. Next thing you know, she enrolls at Fordham Law. Now she’s a paralegal. She only wears pinstripes,” he adds, “even on weekends.”

Rob comes over for two coladas. “Who you guys talking about? Ironside?”

I go to see her. I say, “Hey ya, Lorraine.”

“Hey ya, Evie.” She kisses me. I kiss her too.

“You look pretty,” I say. “Your hair and everything.”

“Thanks. I like yours too,” she says, taking a look around at the back. Touching it. “Jeez, you really went ahead and chopped it off.”

“Yeah, well. Summer’s coming.”

“I can’t believe it. Summer already.”

“I hear you’re going to Fordham. That’s great.”

“Yeah.” She smiles. “Upper West Side. Right by your apartment—Mark’s, whatever. I saw you one time, you were on the other side of the street. With Mark’s sister.”

“You should have stopped me.”

“I didn’t want to bother you.”

“It wouldn’t have been a bother.”

“Next time,” she says, and she nods.

“Yeah,” I say. “Next time.”

“Mark’s here?” She looks around. “I didn’t see him.”

“Not yet, I guess.”

“He’s coming here, or there?”

“Not here. I think there. Either here or there.”

“Big night tonight,” she says, turning to face me.

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“You ever seen him fight?”

I shake my head.

“Sit with me. Just in case.” Lorraine looks down at her table. “Hey, did you ever meet any of these guys?” she asks. “This is Anne, Kathy, Allegra, Donna—Donna’s my cousin. This is Evie,” Lorraine tells them. “A friend of Robbie’s. A friend of mine.”

At seven, everybody makes their way to the street, drifting in twos and threes. Nobody gets into cars. They just get ready to get into cars, sitting on hoods, cleaning out glove compartments. Rob pops open all the doors to the Cougar and puts in an eight-track. Then he turns the volume up real loud.

My cherie amour, lovely as a summer day.
My cherie amour, distant as the Milky Way.

Christine and Ray Peña start dancing in the street, and everyone starts dancing, even Mr. and Mrs. Cirillo. When Christine dances, her pool-damp hair swings, and all the kids come to see. In the neighborhood, she is the one to emulate. She is defiant in her contentedness, outward about having accepted the small circumstances of a small life. As with a priest who has actually done some living, there is a dangerous intelligence to her limited aspirations that makes her behavior especially worth the watch.

Rob takes my arm and draws me close; we dance too. It’s good to dance on the city streets in summer, the narrowness of the road and the expanse of the sky, the heat bleeding up through your thin shoes.

You’re the only girl my heart beats for.
How I wish that you were mine.

Three cars slither up the street in a lights-on procession, and the dancing ends. There is a conversion back to the sweeping contagion of real time—people breaking apart, fixing clothes and hair. Rob’s mother steps to the darkened rear window of the first car.

“Late as usual, Tudi. Everything’s ice-cold.”

Uncle Tudi creaks out to kiss her, and over her shoulder, through the inky rounds of his jumbo sunglasses, he eyes me in Rob’s arms.

He says to Rob, “You ready to head out?”

Rob says, “Yeah, I’m ready. You ready?”

“Yeah, I’m ready. I been ready.”

“What do you mean you’ve been ready?” Rob releases me. “We’ve all been waiting for you.”

“You wanna stand around all night and discuss technicalities?” Tudi asks.

“Shit no. Let’s go.”

“All right, then, let’s go.”

What I feel at that moment is a start, an ignition, a sense that what is happening belongs less to what has preceded it than to what is yet to unfold. Rob discharges me to Lorraine, who is somewhere behind me, calling my name. It sounds like calling a child through an open window: sweet, faraway—Eveline. Ray Peña’s powder-blue Lincoln pulls up readily, like it’s been idling nearby, and Rob and Joey get in, kind of getting vacuumed down or going fast-motion in reverse. They take off, and when they make a right at the end of the street, I see Rob’s forearm hanging out the window, striking against the door frame. It has a warlike look, and in my stomach I get a sick feeling. It’s not usual for him to reveal himself.

Christine, Lorraine, and I arrive at an auditorium somewhere on the Jersey shore, a decrepit building with a grand, tame face like that of a former picture palace. There are lots of people arriving. The look of them rushing to get in is anarchical—oblivious and opportunistic and everywhere at once, like rats shooting through dumpsters. We drive past twice looking for a place to park.

An empty ticket kiosk in the center of the clamshelled entrance is filled with framed memorabilia from the fifties and sixties of performers like Sammy Kaye at Point Pleasant and Fred Waring in Ocean Grove. There is a vintage Drink Coca-Cola sign and a Pokerarcade mini-marquee. Christine stops to find her reflection and apply lipstick. It amazes me how like Rob she is. Her lack of shame is somehow forward-reaching and mature. While most of us linger reticently on the sill of adaptation, she is already over and on the other side, surviving just fine.

She pats my waist. “Don’t look so glum, kid. It’ll be over before you know it.”

Through a set of double doors leading to the main arena, through the congestion of the crowd, I see the glow of the preliminary fight. This is the first thing I notice, the location of the glow, which is the location of the ring. The girls cut in through the right. I follow.

Mark is in the center of the auditorium, surrounded by people. Everyone he knows is there—Richard, his boss, and Richard’s fiancée, Mia; Brett; Anselm; Miles and Paige; Jonathan and Alicia; Marguerite, his shopaholic lawyer friend; Dara; that guy Swoosey Schicks; cousins and co-workers and guys from the pit whom I’ve never met. I can tell they’re from the pit by the pens in their pockets.

“Sorry I couldn’t make it to Rob’s parents’ house,” Mark says, pulling me from Lorraine, helping me down the aisle, giving me a kiss. “I was leading the convoy. Twelve cars!”

He passes me to Jonathan and Alicia. Alicia takes my hand, squeezing tightly. Lorraine is about ten feet behind me. She smiles before heading in another direction, as if to say, Sorry, but what am I gonna do? She shouldn’t feel sorry. I’m used to it. Everyone does what Mark says. Everyone believes in the supremacy of money.

The first fight is almost over. To prepare myself, I think back to all the times I’ve seen Rourke on display—a field, a gymnasium, a theater, a classroom. I remind myself that nothing I have seen so far has been random. I’ve been made ready.

There is a way they tell you to draw trees. A tree should not be a blot on the landscape, stripped of obliquity. A tree should express contour, core, crevasse. A tree should lift off the paper. To render contour, you have to draw back and forward and down. To render core, you must envision center. Center is not the dead point between two edges, or the geographic median of some object you happen to see, but the soul of the O, the heart of vastness, the umbilicus, the basic order of the nature of a thing, the fixed innerness from which unfixed outerness originates. To render its scars, seek the tree’s fortune. Conceive of the tree wholly. Every tree grows up and down and out with an equivalency of energy. If you look you will find a carnival of direction—perpendicularity and pendancy, lift and transverseness, convexity and indentation. A tree rises with grandeur when it meets with no obstacle; it skews sharply to prevail against adversity; it thickens incrementally, gaining girth with years; it bears down into the bed of the earth with its talons. Like a child, it bruises back in response to cruelty and obstruction. Like a saint, it drives to the light.

In every tree there is a system of softness beneath the armature, a velvet refuge, an underside, a whisper-sweet sanctuary where potential is stored. Underside, because there is truth and beauty in what is rejected by sight. Underside, because in every king there is a boy.

Antonio Vargas has gypsy skin and black hair tied back. He looks like the kind of guy who is good to kids and aging relatives and to the girls who love him. As it turned out, Tommy Lydell backed out at the last minute. When Mark got the call, he kicked the coffee table and broke it. After Mark heard Vargas’s stats—twenty-two years old, one hundred ninety pounds, six-foot-one, 25–3 with 20 KO’s, and a lefty—he felt good enough to kneel down and check the damage. The leg had split, so he had Manny take it to the basement.

“You want me to glue it?” Manny asked, leaning at the door with the table. It looked like he was holding a dead Labrador against his chest, legs out. “I have the clamp!”

“Throw it out,” Mark said. “I’ll buy a new one.”

Rourke is double-jabbing, steering Vargas backward around the ring with ambling, edgy grace, his feet hardly touching the canvas. He fights easily, like it’s nothing. I don’t get the feeling I often get from seeing him in public, when he’s there but not there, and transcendent somehow to his own performance. From the first bell, when he walked out to center, he looked at Vargas, lifted his hands, and began to fight. Vargas seemed caught by surprise, by the lack of formality. I know how he felt. I know what it is to be completely unprepared for a being so instinctive. I know what it is to face him that way, when it is just you he sees.

In the fourth round, Rourke gives Vargas a sickening combination—a right to the jaw, followed by a smooth uppercut left, also to the jaw, then a clean right to the face in the indent between nose and cheekbone, and there is shouting, in a roar, like a train popping from a tunnel. And a bell. And a retreat, to the corners. I keep my eyes on Vargas, watching in spite of the blood. His nose sheds an amber stream from one nostril. His mouth guard gets slipped out, and water goes down his face and chest from the corner man squeezing a sponge. Ice goes on the cheek, and the cut man checks the eyes. His head tilts back and people talk at him, giving coarse encouragement.

Rob appears opposite from where we stand, on Vargas’s side, about ten feet from the corner, talking to Vargas’s brother. I think it is the brother, by the resemblance. Rob’s face floats mat level. It surprises me to see him there, though I suppose it doesn’t matter where Rob stands. The men in the ring and out of it are the same: there is an equivalency between the sides. Mr. Xinwu spoke of respect between adversaries, and I honestly feel no animosity toward Vargas. What I feel primarily is curiosity. His heart, his mind. The bed he sleeps in, the layout of his kitchen, who talks to him through the bathroom door? I have the feeling people talk to him through doors, that, like me, he is never alone. No one talks to Rourke that way.

Seconds remain before the next round. Corner people pull back. Vargas is joined by his brother, who hangs down, just for a moment, one arm linked to the corner post. As the brother speaks to Antonio, both look over to Rourke, like they are viewing a horizon. Is Rourke watching; does he see them? I don’t look; I can’t. I haven’t once looked in his corner.

“Two grand,” Swoosey shouts to Mark, “for every round Harrison lasts after this one.”

Mark and Swoosey shake. Not really shake so much as touch hands. “Four grand,” Mark wagers, “that he won’t last this one.”

A bell rings. I don’t know which—the fifth, I think. Vargas shoots over like a junkyard dog. There is a roar of approval as he crosses into Rourke’s vicinity. With his right arm and his body, he keeps Rourke in a limited region as his left fist makes contact. Rourke’s abdomen, Rourke’s face. Vargas goes at him, again and again, five times, ten times. Rourke accepts the force of each short thrust, trembling thickly like a gong, withstanding, absorbing, not losing footing—he has root. I think back to Montauk, to the stoic self-sacrifice, to the almost ghastly oneness, to the minuscule and endless preparations required for such a massive exertion. It is awful to see him hit, but worse to see him step so expertly into pain.

Rourke’s right eye swells and turns hard. I imagine the blood inside gathered like sheep, though blood does not come in flocks; I just picture it that way, caught inside, lost and stray. He’s having trouble seeing: he has to dodge blind. On the next strike to the face, Rourke’s head flies back as if he is following the trail of a jet. For a moment, his neck is exposed before the weight of his head rolls back around onto his chest, reminding me of a swan getting shot. The referee is there, giving a standing count. Everyone in the room is waiting for Rourke to fall. Maybe Mark was right, maybe the plan for Rourke is to go down. A part of me wishes it were true; yet, another part wants him to keep fighting. Needs.

Vargas trots triumphantly; his people call his name. Vargas. Vargas.

I grip the seat in front of me. My eyes begin to admit just color. The brown lines in his body, the brown lines in the ring, and in the room beyond, the brown sea of heads. If anyone is calling to Rourke he doesn’t hear—I don’t think he can hear—and yet he is still standing. Though it doesn’t surprise me that he won’t go down, I do wonder who it is that he is fighting.

The next moment is impacted. I have the sense of multiple end points, of time spilling over like water to define adjoining, previously hidden places. I see Rourke testing those places, preparing to test them. The stiff hull of his skin and muscles, superficially hard but on the inside open and opening further to pain, to all the pain he has not yet incorporated. It’s like he is allowing himself to feel, which moves me more than his blood and blindness. I see his father missing. I see his reluctance to claim the space left empty by his father to which he felt by nature disentitled. I see the inability to protect and to be protected. I see down, all the way down, down into the mat—it’s like a well—and I think how good it must feel to go back, to return to the place he was left alone, the place he was marked. I know the feeling. I often go back. To the day, the hour, the minute of losing him.

No one sees me leave. I retreat to the back of the auditorium. I look one last time as the crowd begins to roar. Rourke is coming off the ropes on the deep left. He seems to stand in glowing water. He tries to right himself. He rises then tips, and his gloved hands jerk toward his ears.

The referee holds one hand back, keeping Vargas in check. Rourke staggers forward; one step, two steps, each time getting closer to Vargas. Every eye in the house is on him. He arrives at center, finding it despite his confusion. Time seems to stop; the ring hangs from his feet. He turns at an angle to face Vargas, as if to say to some acquaintance on the street, Oh, and by the way—then out of nowhere, Rourke hauls his right arm back and cracks Vargas across the jaw. Vargas flies, stunned. Rourke takes the moment and moves in, starting on the body. Clear and sure. Again, again, a machine.

From where I stand, there is light, a spilling visionary light, from where it comes I don’t know, possibly my imagination. The light spawns globes about the heads of the fighters like the pre-Renaissance halos of Giotto’s saints, like these are men of sacrifice, like they are martyrs, though in fact there is nothing epic about them. They are common, common because we all begin with dreams but end with nothing, nothing more than what we, in our battered humility, can make of ourselves.

And voices, a hot sea, chaos rising. Rourke, Rourke, Harri-son, Harri-son.