The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  I’d also seen her dance in a less magical way at a venue known as the Catwalk. In college, long before we dated, when she was a mere acquaintance, a young girl too interested in men who wore tattoos and cologne to be taken seriously, I remember seeing her and her roommates do things at the Catwalk that would’ve qualified them, I am fairly certain, for psychiatric evaluation. They tried doing the motorized-buttock thing, which proved difficult given their general lack of buttocks, so they concentrated on their upper bodies, doing what looked to be a combination of cheerleading and enthusiastic aircraft carrier flight crew training. They danced mostly with one another. No guys allowed. Occasionally, I would have a total eclipse of the heart right down through the middle of their girl party, but they’d just ignore me and shuffle off to the bathroom.

  Early in our courtship, nearly a full decade later, I decided to find out just what sort of music she liked. On our second date, feeling roguish enough to pry open her case of compact discs, I discovered names like Creed and Edwin McCain and the Backstreet Boys, which made me wonder: Is this woman emotionally stable? Only moments before, she had seemed so healthy, so beguiling, so richly manifold in her proclivities, and yet her musical tastes suggested an undiagnosed mental illness.

  On one of our first dates, she pushed one of these discs into its felted playing slit.

  “Backstreet’s back, all right!” she sang.

  “Where have they been?” I yelled, over the music.

  “What?” she said, turning it down.

  “I was just wondering where they went.”

  “Where who went?”

  “The Backstreet Boys,” I said. “They said they were back. Where’d they go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe they went to hell.”

  “Maybe that’s where you can go,” she said.

  It was hard not to love a woman with timing like that.

  Like Scarlett and Rhett, we honeymooned in New Orleans, which I felt afforded an opportunity to redeem her musical failures and show her what real dancing looked like. I would take her to the Maple Leaf.

  “Wear comfortable shoes,” I said, smoking a cigarette on the balcony.

  To say that my wife was attractive would be silly. Her body had been shaped by decades of balletic exertion. In public, heads turned, people wondered what sort of drugs I had given her to hypnotize her into a relationship with me.

  “How do I look?” she asked, stepping onto the balcony in a fitted dress and heels that made me feel ashamed at having fooled her into marrying me.

  “I said comfortable shoes.”

  “These are all I have.”

  “You can’t dance in those.”

  And she did not dance. Instead, she stood on a bench, against the wall, two feet above the boiling heads of the crowd, far and away the best thing to look at in the building, friendly enough to allow young Tulane boys to present her with offerings of gin and flattery before introducing them to the modest array of gems and precious metals on her ring finger.

  “I’m married,” she yelled over the music.

  “To who?” they yelled up at her.

  “The one by the stage, having a seizure,” she said.

  A year later, we went back to New Orleans, and I took her to see another brass band, but by then the Saturnalian glow of our honeymoon had dimmed, and instead of standing on a bench, she stood in the bathroom and cried. She hated the music, she said. It was too loud. It hurt her ears. She covered them with her hands and asked me to take her home. There would be no dancing.

  All the usual metaphors for what it means to dance with someone played through my head. Had I married the wrong woman?

  In those first happy childless years of our marriage, we’d be in the truck, and I’d put something entirely pleasant and fun and lively into the stereo—James Brown, Zeppelin—but always, she hated it, turning off the music just as it was getting good.

  “Oh my word,” she would say. “This music is making me crazy.”

  “Don’t ever do that again,” I’d say.

  But she would, again and again.

  “It makes me sad that you hate my music,” I said.

  “It’s just so loud.”

  “It’s joyful.”

  “It’s noise.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The woman listened to the radio. The radio. She could memorize entire songs by pop starlets and other melodious necromancers in two or three listens, like some kind of savant. I’d long since stopped taking her to bars, saving myself the disappointment of having the most beautiful woman in the room refuse to dance with me yet again.

  Occasionally, we found ourselves at galas and other fundraising events where middle-aged men in wingtips got weird with their thick-necked wives, jowl to jowl, hobbling ever so lightly to “Mustang Sally”—just the sort of place where I suspected my father might have started hurling my mother around the parquet. I knew better than to have a total eclipse of the heart in such a place, or to shake anything larger than a finger or have one of my mechanized buttock seizures, but I did ask my wife to dance.

  “No,” she said.

  “Come on.”

  She glowed brighter than the other wives, I felt. Heads never failed to turn, the righteousness of her neck and back, the shoulders possessing a firm grace that suggested wings, a posture so courtly you could practically see the underside of her jaw. There was no arrogance in it. It was natural, as natural as the uncontrollable gyrations of my chassis during “Brick House.”

  “Stop it,” she’d say.

  “Why won’t you dance with me?”

  And then I’d wander off by myself, to look for some drunk old coot whose husband was dead or bedridden, and we’d cut rugs together.

  “I just don’t understand,” I’d say, on the way home. “Wives are supposed to dance with their husbands.”

  “What you do is not dancing.”

  “Then why don’t you show me how to do it right?”

  But this she ignored.

  I tried to change. Sometimes, if I could get enough gin down her gullet, I might get her out on the floor, sway with her sweetly for a few bars, but then something would come over me, and before you knew it, I’d find myself spanking her like a pony who wouldn’t behave.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Hush, little pony,” I’d say, and she would run off to greener pastures.

  She’d be mum all the way home, and the next gala, the next fancy ball, the next good band in town, she’d make excuses, say she had nothing to wear, say she was ill, or wasn’t in the mood, and before I knew it, I was going to all the events by myself. I’d dance all night with fading bachelorettes with a taste for conga lines.

  Hadn’t my wife promised to honor and cherish me, in sickness and in health? And didn’t I cherish her? And wasn’t my dancing a kind of sickness?

  When I die,” I said, “I hope you’ll at least dance at my funeral.”

  “What are you talking about?” my wife asked, the first time I brought this up.

  “It will be a jazz funeral,” I said. “It’s in my will.”

  I lied, of course. I didn’t have a will.

  “We’ll just have a normal funeral,” she said.

  “You know, drums and horns and whatnot. Maybe a sousaphone.”

  “A phone?”

  “No.”

  “At your funeral?”

  “It’s a tuba.”

  “There will be no tubas at your funeral,” she said.

  “And trumpets,” I said. “A whole parade.”

  “This is a funeral you’re talking about, right?”

  “Don’t you love me?” I said.

  She paused. She had to think about it.

  She wanted to believe she was the pragmatist, the realist, the adult in the marriage. This, from a woman who once spent thirty minutes trying to explain to me how humans breed with vampires.

  “Would you at least be sad?” I asked my wife. “If I died first?”
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  “A little,” she said. “Maybe.”

  “Would you get married again?”

  “Um, yeah,” she said. “A real doctor this time. Also, he will be nice to me. A nice, gentle anesthesiologist, who dances normal.”

  “You two sound very happy.”

  “We will be.”

  She was funny, you had to give her that much. Then one night, she said the funniest thing of all.

  “Do you want to go country line dancing?” she said.

  “Ha ha,” I said.

  There we were, in a vast dark room lighted on one end by a television the size of a Flemish tapestry and at the other end, a spotlight projecting onto a mechanical bull, and in the middle, a dance floor, and against one wall a large boot the size of a small Soviet satellite, in which a disc jockey presumably hid himself out of shame. The name of this bar, she explained, was Saddlebags.

  People gathered around the dance floor, and the music began. I like country music, I do, but I do not like line dancing, or any sort of dancing where men hold their belts like their jeans might try to run away, as any sensible pair of jeans would want to do in such a situation.

  “Are you two going to dance?” one of our friends asked.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  And yet, to my surprise, there she went. My wife. Dancing. Without me.

  This woman, I mean.

  A woman with posture and grace like that stands out on any floor, and it was no different that night, as the cowboys and hillbillies and swamp angels gathered around to watch. She was so pretty in the lights, a map of stars playing over her face.

  The music started, and she danced, and honestly, it was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen happen on a dance floor. Was this how my dancing seemed to her? I tried to imagine her asking me to have country line dancing at her funeral. I’d have laughed, too.

  She was right, maybe dancing with your wife should generally not involve spanking, or treating her like a pony, or a burro, or any sort of farm animal.

  I had a lot to learn about dancing, and marriage, and this woman.

  She did not know the steps of this particular line dance, but after a lifetime of learning Swan Lake, it did not take her long. I found purchase on a step above the dance floor, to see her better, over the heads of the gathering horde, my wife, skinny jeans tucked into a pair of cowboy boots she’d borrowed from the babysitter. She kicked her boots, turned, laughed, still the best thing to look at in the building, and I made a mental note to schedule an important meeting with her later.

  “Is she with you?” a cowboy asked.

  “I think,” I said. “I hope.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The Great and Holy Siege of Vicksburg

  Do you want kids?” my wife had said, back when she was barely my girlfriend, and we were on our second date. The honest answer to such a question, I knew, was to open the door and throw myself from the car, in hopes that my extensive background in watching television had prepared me to roll in such a way as to not die.

  “Kids?” I said.

  I tried to remember if I’d ever actually seen one. At the time, the ideas of “a child” and “children” were but Platonic notions that hovered in the rear parlors of my brain, somewhere near other concepts that had nothing to do with me, like “cholera” and “hair care products.”

  I can still remember when my first good friend had a baby.

  “It’s a girl!” he said.

  “Wow,” I said. “I just bought some new socks.”

  And yet, when the prettiest woman in the world asks you if you want babies, you should probably say yes, because there’s always a chance that she might want to make them with you. This woman, she was pretty, and funny, and she liked me back, which was all I’d ever really wanted in a wife, not to mention all the qualities she had that I’d never even thought of wanting, such as hair and an unhealthy fear of bridges. Did I want to have a baby with this gorgeous, funny woman? She might as well have asked me if I wanted to ride a unicorn across a prairie of starlight.

  Besides, what is a baby? A baby is an idea, a theory, really, abstractly good in the way that life insurance and riding lawn mowers are good.

  “Sure, I like babies,” I said. It was true. I had been a baby my whole life.

  “Show them how you can read,” my mother would say, and I would read something, and all the women would applaud.

  “Show them how you can dance,” an aunt would say, and I would do my funny dance, and they would cheer.

  “Do your memory verse,” an aunt would say, and I would recite a psalm in my best Ronald Reagan voice, and they would laugh and laugh, turning me into the monster I would become.

  “My baby’s so smart!” my mother would say.

  I was the baby of the family, blessed with the gift of ignorance. When I was eleven, I still held out some hope in the reality of Santa Claus, and when I was twelve, after hearing about masturbation for a couple of years, I had come to the conclusion that it must be some sort of advanced first-aid procedure. At thirteen, I still didn’t fully understand how babies were born. I had seen enough farm animals to know the basic mechanics, but that didn’t stop me from believing that babies came out of the anus.

  “No they don’t!” a girl on the bus said.

  “I know!” I said, lying.

  One day, six months into our marriage, when we were having soup, she announced that she was out of birth control pills, and I suggested she get some more, and she suggested I did not love her, and I suggested that I was confused, and she suggested I was selfish to not want a baby, and I suggested that nobody had been talking about babies, and she suggested that now was the time to have a baby, and I suggested that now was the time to finish our soup, and she suggested that I perhaps look into making travel arrangements to Hades, and then she started crying and throwing dishes into the sink, and I made a mental note to contact an exorcist.

  “We hear you don’t want children,” my wife’s aunt said, arms crossed, standing at my front door a few weeks later.

  “Eventually,” I said.

  “We’re praying that God will change your heart.”

  “Yeah, well what if Jesus doesn’t want us to have babies?” I said.

  “Then he will close her womb,” the aunt said, pointing at my wife’s abdomen. My wife just stood there, enjoying her womb’s moment in the sun. This is what happens when you move back to Mississippi. Your wife’s relatives show up and try to make your penis a part of God’s plan. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing, and my wife stopped taking the pill, and I did what I was told.

  We made sex for a long time. Years, it seemed. I found this quite enjoyable, but also upsetting that it should take so long to make a baby, given the ease with which others became pregnant in my youth, such as high school cheerleaders, who could get tossed up into the air during a football game and come down to the earth bearing twins.

  What I would learn is that the whole process of making a family is quite ugly. There’s yelling, biting, the rending of garments, the setting of fires, and that’s just the sex part.

  Why had nobody told me it would be this hard? The world was full of liars.

  The first lie is how long it takes to make the actual baby, which sounds like great fun, having sex over and over again, like eating delicious pizza and never getting full. More pizza, please! Nope, not full yet! This is how it was at first, while my wife cried in the corner.

  I wondered, Why is she crying? Everyone likes pizza!

  My wife would mark the calendar on the days we were supposed to consume the pizza, and we would shuffle into the bedroom and eat in silence. Occasionally, my wife would say something especially sweet, like “Are you still awake?” or “I can’t breathe.” We tried just about everything short of having a fertility specialist mate with my wife for me.

  We had a very small bed, which compelled us, when sleeping, to fold our bodies into a Celtic knot, and if you do that long enough, eventually you’re going to pe
netrate something besides an eye. I guess that’s what happened.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said, shocked.

  It was a relief. We could finally stop having sex.

  We now lived in a small village called Port Gibson, a lovely little town with more churches than people, a town known largely for U. S. Grant’s uncharacteristically noble decision not to set fire to it, because, as he said, the town was “too beautiful to burn,” although he was also overheard saying he was “out of matches.”

  It was a verdant paradise, the Natchez Trace Parkway running through our backyard, the Mississippi River a few miles off the front porch, the most fecund soil in creation, nothing but horses and trees and barely a quorum for the dying Sons of Confederate Veterans. The perfect little place to have a baby, especially if we wanted our baby delivered by a veterinarian.

  My wife prepared largely through books, empowering volumes that spoke of the birth canal as though it were an embattled isthmus of Palestine, holistic books about how to grow a baby while eating nothing but gingerroot and one’s own hair, and books about how to “listen to your body,” which I assumed was saying something like, “Stop eating your own hair.”

  There were books by enlightened activists who wanted us to have our baby in a solarium filled with hibiscus, and books by wizened midwives who wanted us to return to the purity of the eighteenth century and give birth to our baby on a kitchen table, preferably while someone nearby died of injuries inflicted by Choctaw.

  The strangest books were the oldest ones, from the 1970s, books on natural childbirth that were full of ancient photographs depicting women giving birth in meadows, women who were naked in almost every picture, as were their husbands.

  “This is pornography,” I said.

  “This is how I want to do it,” my wife said. “Natural, like Mom did it.”

  If my wife had a calling, it was being a mother like the one who’d made her, a woman who died too soon, in a heartbreaking story that’s better told another time, and who left behind her a cloud of witnesses who would’ve told you that when it came to mothers, they didn’t make them any better than her. A part of me thinks my wife must have wanted to suffer, as a visible sign of the suffering she had already passed through in the unseen corridors of her heart.