54

We go into Manhattan to an anonymous hotel. No one knows where to find us. There are no messages, no calls. One call, one call out. I knew because I woke to the sound of his voice talking on the phone, though I’d heard no ring.

I’d spoken with my mother before we arrived, saying I was safe, that I needed to figure things out, that I’d call again soon. I called for Rourke’s sake more than for hers or my own; I intended to preempt Mark. I wouldn’t give him the opportunity to suggest to everyone that I’d been taken against my will. He would never hurt Rourke again.

Being there with Rourke feels right; it feels like the only possible thing. It’s like being in a command center in a movie, one of those steel-fortified tents where the power congregates while war is raging—strategizing, studying maps, decoding messages, drinking cognac. We have shut ourselves in to accomplish something brainy and strategic. We prepare, but for what?

We sleep in the day if we sleep at all. At night we walk through Manhattan—up Broadway or across Central Park or down Tenth Avenue into Hell’s Kitchen, through scaffold castles, past lapsed construction sites where the plywood ramps rumble when you stomp them and the makeshift walls are covered with graffiti. Rourke walks and people make way. He is fierce and exact and his face is a terrifying mass of bruised flesh. If there is trouble, I don’t doubt the outcome. It’s like walking under an umbrella through a heavy 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, he finds my waist and pulls me closer.

“I should never have asked Mark for help in the first place,” I say, and I add. “He said I did it to hurt you.”

Rourke’s eyes close. The bad one is healing; the blood has gone down. I touch it every day, running my fingertips across, dragging them over, bringing the nerves back to life. “I know what he said.”

“Mark says I used him.”

Rourke looks at me, dipping over. I don’t have to wonder what it is he sees because I feel myself appear. Like a flare cutting through space, erupting into a sea of stars, I see me. He says, “Use is the thing he exchanges.”

In the muscles on his chest, there are shapes. Beneath his collarbone, a whale, surfacing. By his abdomen on the left, a flattened swan. I move in, coming in around his hip bone, resting my head on his thigh. I know he feels guilty, for going against his own instinct, for thinking somehow I’d be better off with Mark. Deep down it made sense to Rourke that Mark should win. It proved his worst fears—the value of money and lies, the uselessness of strength and character.

His throat stretches to the ceiling. “I’m not sure how far back to go,” he says. “How much to ask.” When he speaks, his manner is steely but not disapproving. It seems we have come up against something he understands better than I, something at the hands of which he has suffered uniquely—me. “You could have been hurt Saturday.” Rourke waits, but not for an answer. “Once I leave, he’ll be back.”

I know that. That’s why we didn’t stop at my mother’s after meeting in the rain. Why Rourke drove straight to the city. Why we are here, unable to leave without a plan.

“Next time he comes,” he says, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

I think of the trust Rourke has always placed in me, the constancy of it. I consider the elusiveness of happiness, and the fact that the reason I don’t have it is that I have not yet earned it. Rourke is not alone in his guilt; I am also to blame. From the start I’ve been content to remain more conscious of his effects than his cause, which is like admiring a bridge without acknowledging the land the structure joins. He never once expected more than I could give, and yet I abused that. I gave away what he would not take.

I confront the myth of self-determination. Independence has not made me free, nor has it diminished my devotion. In spite of my liberty, I loved him—I love him. I think what it means to love. First, of course, there is the fact of you, then the sensation of loving a person, then somewhere along the way, there is the fact of the person. This last fact you cannot ignore. What you do with it—accept, adore, deny, or suppress—determines everything. There are points of intersection, these divine assignments of the heart that complete you.

“My mother lost one of us to fighting,” he explains, slowly. “I can’t let her lose another.”

I tell him that I understand.

“I need to get back to work. I need two months to get through the Olympic Games. I have obligations. I need to know you’re going to be all right until I get back.”

“I can stay with Denny.”

“No. Mark’s too credible to the outside world. He’ll get reckless and irrational. He’ll blame others for whatever mess he makes.”

Rourke waits a minute or two, then he draws my hands down. “You said at the funeral that you should have done something when you had the chance, that you should have held Jack accountable.”

The funeral. He was there. They were there. Rob saying, You seem shaky. You shaky?

Jack’s name from Rourke’s lips. Him saying “Jack” like he knew him.

I sit up, coming next to him. “What do you think we should do?”

Rourke says, “I was thinking Spring Lake.”

The phone call he made from the hotel room when we first arrived. His mother. The house, the baking, the books, the furniture, the attic. A policeman’s widow. Mark wouldn’t stand a chance. If she called for a restraining order against him, there would be no question. Besides, she probably has a gun in the house—no, she definitely does. And she knows how to use it.

“The Games end mid-August. I’ll be back then. You can come visit me anytime. With Rob, without him. Whatever you want.”

“Does she expect me?”

“I think she’s been expecting you since you two met.”

It would be nice, I think, to spend a summer there, drawing flowers in the yard, listening to her typing. “I’d like to go to your house,” I say. “It’s a nice house.”

One thing I never thought I’d see is tears. Even the bad eye, it cries.

The sheets are soft and dry, like cooking flour when you are little and you dig in with a metal spoon. Lying there with him is like unfurling in clouds or swimming in silk or crossing from air to water. He holds me like he is unwilling ever to release me, and though his face is rough, I feel no roughness. He braces himself on one elbow, his fingers going down each rib, counting them as though I might have lost one since last he checked. His palm trails the underside of my left breast. He secures my hips; his knee slips up between my legs, bracing them apart. He looks into the gap between our bodies. I look too, at his chest tapering into the drum of his waist, at his abdomen, at the curvature of me beneath.

He breathes in. “The first time I saw you,” he says, “it was like seeing a river. Something that could be touched but not held. Something there but not there. I never wanted anything so much in my life.”

Before checking out, I spoke to Mark’s father. My instinct was that it would be right to call, and Rourke agreed.

I reached Mr. Ross at his office. His secretary put me through directly, which broke my heart. I didn’t mention Mark, I couldn’t. I guess he couldn’t either, because he didn’t.

“And your things, Eveline?” Mr. Ross asked.

“I guess they’re still at the cottage.”

“What would you like me to do?” he asked.

“Maybe someone can take them to my mother’s.”

“I’ll take them myself,” he said. “I’d like to see your mother.”

I thanked him. I felt Rourke’s hand on my shoulder, staying, waiting.

“Am I overstepping if I ask whether you’re all right?” Mr. Ross asked. “I’ll keep your confidence, of course, but I do feel—well, you understand. It’s as though you’re—”

“I’m all right. I’m fine.”

“You’re with Harrison?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Well, then,” he said, and he repeated, “Well, then.” He didn’t sound sad, but he didn’t sound happy; he sounded like he felt what I felt, which was a little of both. “I suppose it was meant to be.”

“Yes, I think so,” I said, and I thanked him again, from the bottom of my heart. Those were the last words we ever spoke. Six months later he was dead.

——

The GTO is brought around to the hotel entrance, and he helps me in. The door closes and also the trunk, and those closing sounds join other closing sounds from other cars and cabs with other luggage. In the heat it all makes a thick and thumping collage.

We regard the changing landscape as we drive from Manhattan to the airport. There is that colossal cemetery in Queens with all the forgotten dead, looking like a knee-high metropolis, with its skyscraper tombstones. We pass beneath furry tails of jet exhaust, letting every other car go by. Even school buses outpace us. If he is trying to miss his plane, he won’t. Not today. Today I feel a way I’ve never felt. In a cup on the dashboard are the pieces of beach glass we found that first day in Jersey, the day at the shore. I reach for them, pouring, palm to palm.

My mind draws pictures. The house I was born in—a brownstone, a door leading to an apartment on the left, another door, a couch behind it, the television my father watches at night, the one my mother collapses in front of, crying when the president is assassinated. The tub where I play when I bathe, twirling and sliding, up and down; and my mother—when she walks past, she sings. I remember a tune that haunts me still.

When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, and it’s Eastertime too—

Mornings are cold. My clothes are warmed on the open oven door, me sitting in front, wrapped in a blanket while she moves, singing still. There is one dress of magenta velvet, a dress she made for me. It has a tiny trail of pale yellow flowers on the collar. To this day I try to paint the colors.

In another home, I am five. Five is not three. Three is when you see things and do not know enough to remember. Five is when you see and try to forget. My parents stand together, though they are no longer married, which means I am sick. A doctor is there. Another Sunday in that same room, my father returns me after a weekend spent with him, and my parents talk in the hall. And I draw and draw, my face very close to the paper, and when I erase it all, my dad comes to say goodbye, towering over me. Not too fast, Evie, you’ll tear the paper.

And other places, other homes, all with the same reeling loneliness I felt until Rourke.

“The first time I saw you,” I confess, “I had a premonition. I had the feeling I’d found the thing I’d been waiting for. The next time I saw you, it was the same. And every time after it’s been the same.”

His hand reaches for me.

“I don’t want to lose you again.”

“You won’t,” he says. “You can’t.”

At the terminal, we get out. The sun beyond the concrete awning is high and the hot air is brutal, though there is wind. There is always wind at JFK, even in suffocating heat. I tie my sweater around my shoulders. I slide my sunglasses to the top of my head, and wait—for nothing. There is no more next, no more longing, no more separation of the soul. The feeling of nothing is so profound, so sure, it’s a guarantee.

Rourke draws his bags from the trunk. There are two; one is a garment bag. The trunk closes, thoom. One of his hands holds the luggage straps, and with his free arm he reaches for me. When we hold each other I feel it everywhere, low and high. I go closer, and he comes in as well. I remember how I used to look out the window for animals in the night, for creatures keeping warm beneath leaves; I remember being relieved that they could. I hope that we are that way, he and I, that we’ll be okay. I hope that love is a miracle, this love and all love and love like ours that is contingent upon nothing—and enriched wholly by concessions.

Rourke looks at me with gratitude, as if he knows what I’m thinking. Every man wants the secret of your eyes, Jack wrote. It’s better to love than be loved. Rourke kisses me—once, twice, his lips to my cheek.

He hands me the keys to the car. “So you know where you’re going?”

“Yeah,” I say, touching the GTO—careful, like it’s alive. “I know.”

“August,” Rourke says.

“August,” I say, “yes.” August. “Or sooner.”

I go on my toes, and he comes down—and in the middle we meet. My lips print against his lips, soft. There it is, the stain of my devotion. And once more, then, he goes. And I follow him through the lens of the terminal glass, watching him fold in and away. How meager the bags look, how small the crowd. The bodies and faces are real, and the colors real, and the stories real, and yet, only he stands out.

Three planes mark the horizon. It’s roulette to guess which is his. Planes are modern angels, silver-winged and supernatural, carrying away cargo that is precious. I don’t like to think of him up there, in airborne machinery, though it is right somehow for him to vanish this way, cutting through the flat dividing lines of time, soaring West.

And him. Does he search the paling membrane of the planet from the brightness of his cabin? Does he find me—minuscule, anonymous? Does he see me the way I once was, or the way I have become? In August I will thank him—for leaving me rich, for leaving me courageous, a fighter. For leaving me with everything I have ever wanted. I am an American girl. I stand with my feet firm on the soil of a nation.

“Oh, Jack,” I say out the car window, the world flying by. “Now that you’re gone, I swear to be filled with twice the life.”