I said, “Katy will kill us.”
My mother sat up straighter yet. Judicious whisper: “Listen, Bub, all these years? Did Katy ever once invite me to meet these people?”
I whispered back. “Mom, come on, they had you in for dinner!”
“Dinner with Linsey and Kate is what I had! In the kitchen at a card table!”
“Didn’t Dabney say hi?”
“Dabney stuck his head in, yes.”
Famous snub story. I was baiting her. Mom had gone over there in furs and best jewelry.
She imitated the rocker: “ ‘Yer ol’ lady’s a looker, she is!’ ”
“So now you’re getting back at Kate.”
“Ye gods and little fishes!” Mom said brightly so as to prove my observation had had no effect on her, and no basis in truth.
There was an actual wet spot on my trousers, now, and it was growing. I’d have to cover it to stand or avoid standing—it’d never dry with us sitting there drinking tea. The wave of mortification built into a wave of guilt. I had to bring Katy and Mom together, had to do it soon if Katy were not to be lost to us both down Dad’s warren of rat-holes. Suddenly a solution presented itself. Hardly thinking, I said, “Mom, come up to the football game with me in New Haven. Kate’ll be there. I mean, I invited Katy. Maybe a couple of her friends. And Dad could come, too, wouldn’t that be nice? A family day? We’ve got six tickets.”
“ ‘A looker!’ ” she said, British tones, wagging her head to imitate the rocker.
Suddenly a rumpled tuxedo staggered into the room, landed on the piano bench without acknowledging us, took a couple of big sniffs of air, began softly to play. The guy had a large blue earring, something in my sheltered existence I’d never seen on a man: queer? His nose was a like a potato left in a drawer too long. He sniffed audibly at every pause in the music.
“Chopin,” my mother said, too pleased with herself.
Next a maid trotted in, dark eyes, dark hair, heavyset, black uniform, white apron, a very friendly face, not a peep from her mouth, large silver tray tinkling with china in her nervous arms. This she set carefully on the low table in front of us. Desmond followed immediately, carrying a sort of miniature samovar, and the two of them performed an elaborate ritual that resulted in four perfect steaming teacups sitting prettily on four matching plates, four teaspoons, four lace napkins. The parlor maid hurried out, hurried back with an assortment of tiny cookies. The Chopin swelled.
Desmond put a hand on my shoulder, squeeze-squeeze, slipped something into my shirt pocket, all one smooth motion. He didn’t break character for a second, didn’t catch my eye again, just snapped his heels together for my mother’s benefit, bowed and left us. She stared after him, thoroughly impressed.
I took all my cookies in a handful, stuffed my mouth. The piano player worked expressively—this was the real thing, very beautiful, Chopin at concert pitch.
Surreptitiously I pulled the little card from my shirt pocket, just a blank rectangle with the butler’s famous block letters:
DO NOT FOLLOW IN YOUR
FATHER’S FOOTPRINTS.
Seconds later Sylphide popped in, damp hair combed out plain, sweatshirt over a leotard, black tights, bare feet, not a trace of make-up on her face, acne scars for all the world to see, gentle smile for my mom (who rose and curtsied), something a little more ironic for me (who stayed put, hand over the front of his pants, feeling he’d been caught out). The great ballerina walked unnaturally, each step the result of thought, the effect more awkward than graceful, a quality of being a forest creature caught indoors. I cast down my mortal eyes. Her feet looked as if they’d been smashed and glued back together poorly, toes knobbed and bent. Clearly she’d been dancing before we came, and for hours.
“Guess who’s home?” she said warmly, tiniest increment of a smile.
And Linsey tumbled into the room! He laughed to see me, his favorite classmate by dint of being Kate’s brother, his former quarterback, too (he was the team equipment man, the only one of the fellows to quit on my behalf), bowled into my chair. No way around it, I had to stand, accept his sticky hug.
“Woo,” he said, holding on tight, face ducked into my belly, deformed hands gripping my belt. He smelled of bologna and mustard. He wriggled to get closer to me.
“Sylphide,” my mother said.
“Call me Tenke,” the dancer said kindly.
“Wizard,” Linsey said.
“Tenk-a,” Mom repeated, like it was the most difficult foreign word. She stood up tall, seemed to measure herself against the tiny dancer. She was more than a decade and a half older, at the near end of her forties, but anyone would have guessed that they weren’t far apart, Sylphide’s world-weariness, perhaps, Mom’s immaturity, like a couple of sisters who’d been dealt wildly divergent hands, and the unfairness was surely what darkened Mom’s face, the same hurt look she got when losing at tennis, which was very, very seldom.
I pounded Linsey’s back, like pounding a pillow, extricated myself from his grip, indicated he should hug my mom.
He blushed, took my hands instead. “Smell her,” he said clearly.
No way to hide, I said, “Thank you for the binoculars, Tenke.”
My mother shot me a look. Those binoculars. And who was I to call the dancer by her familiar name?
Sylphide was unperturbed: “Ah, ja, ja—I was thinking you’d like them. Dabney thought them treasure. Sometimes I was thinking he’d pay more attention to me if I were rainbow or robin redbreast or eclipse of the moon!”
“Oh, well, I doubt that,” my mother said.
We took our seats. The piano mounted and mounted, the performer’s heaving shoulders and flung fingers giving us a place to look—mounted yet more to the end of the movement, dropped away suddenly to a ringing silence. Mom and I picked up our teacups as if on cue in the quiet, found the tea on cue to be too hot, placed the cups back in their saucers.
“Eclipse of the moon,” said Sylphide absently.
“Smelling smelly smells,” Linsey said, such that I at least could understand it, apparently not taking to my mother’s perfume.
Abruptly Mom said, “We’re so sorry for your loss. Mr. Stryker-Stewart, I mean.”
“Ah,” said Sylphide. “I am sorry for it, too.”
Exquisite timing, the parlor maid tripped in with a tinkling silver tray of little sandwiches on plates, dropped them in front of us. She poured more tea into each rattling cup. The second she was gone, Linsey and I lunged at the food. My mother ignored hers—such was her training—but Sylphide was only a beat behind Linsey and me. And when she saw my mother wasn’t going to eat, she took that sandwich too, gobbled it unapologetically.
Linsey burped, a signature report.
Sylphide took no notice but pulled herself up, clapped her hands gaily. She said, “Georges, give us some acid rock for these long-haired boys, ja?”
I thought the piano player would be insulted, but in fact he leapt to his feet, comically kicking the piano bench away, threw his hands at the keyboard, the loud opening chords of “Manic Depression,” the great Jimi Hendrix power song, complete with a cruel, raging bass line in the left hand, remarkable. Suddenly I recognized him: Georges Whiteside! From the Dabney Stryker-Stewart Band! Those ethereal organ chords on “Love Me Later,” that famous crying solo that half the world can whistle? That was Georges! I still thought of him as a teenager, the lucky rocker he’d been on Ed Sullivan years before, all swagger and moxie. The guy in front of us had seemed more irritation than anything, a notch or two in High Side service status below Desmond, little pot belly forming, cummerbund awry, leather pants straining at their buttons, hair unwashed in long strings around his shoulders. But suddenly his hands were wild animals again, this way and that up and down the keyboard.
“Kate would love this,” my mother stated dryly, unable to love it on her own, struggling up and onto her very high heels, clapping off the beat, clearly feeling she’d lost her moment with the dancer. Linsey vaulted fr
om his chair, spun monkey-style to Georges’s side, patted the famous shoulder happily, then spun through the wide doorway and gone. The dancer rose like heat from her chair, glided to me, extended long hands, pulled me to my feet with surprising strength. My mother’s eyes closed to slits and she turned profile, feigned an interest in Linsey’s exit.
I had my own problems: the skin at the tip of my penis had glued itself to my underpants, tore itself from the cloth incrementally with exquisite, shrinking pain. Sylphide pulled me to her, placed her right hand on my back, started us around the room—she wasn’t going to follow. Linsey came tumbling back in, hooting, chortling, dancing. Plainly, he’d wet his pants. In that, I supposed, we were brothers. I found myself dancing my partner backwards in an ungainly foxtrot, the great ballerina just as awkward as I, her bare feet barely escaping my brutish steps. She turned me this way, led me that, leaned at me confidingly in all the noise, perfectly pleasant smile, those green eyes, that pocked skin. The air of the room grew close with the smell of Linsey’s pee, and jasmine, jasmine. I leaned down to hear whatever she would say, but she said nothing.
“Linsey must miss Katy,” I said conversationally, but with the same impulse as my mother: bring the source of our guilt into the room.
The greatest ballerina of her time slid her hand up my back, gripped my neck, pulled me down so she could speak in my ear: “Let us not be talking of Kate.”
We made a turn in front of Linsey, who lunged at us ungainly; we swept past my mother, who gave a needy wave. I leaned to the dancer’s ear, flood of loyalty in my breast: “She says it’s you who’s trouble.”
“Ja, well. I am forgiving her for that, too.”
We lurched past the blank spot on the wall. Sylphide’s pelvis was at my thigh, her face no higher than my chest. She pulled me close as the song reached its pinnacle, a crisis of black keys and white, Georges’s hands sure and powerful, effortless crescendo. Then bang, it was done, steep silence. The dancer didn’t let go of my fingers, didn’t take her hand off my back—we stood there frozen like one of my mother’s porcelain scenes, all these quaint and comical couples with no troubles of any kind. Except perhaps proportion: a giant and a nymph.
I was trying to form my words—poor Kate, battling such a personage—when one of Linsey’s attendants appeared, a sleek Asian woman in a nurse’s uniform. She pointed him out of the room, ignoring his protests, tough as slate, impassive. He butted her chest; she tugged him harder. He kicked off his piss-soaked loafers; she pulled his shirt over his head to subdue him. His belly was soft and white as bread dough, and his pants were soaked through. She gathered his shirttails in one little fist, expertly retrieved his shoes, led him away like a blindfolded prisoner.
“Katy was the only one who could control him,” said Sylphide, but not to me. She let me go, almost thrust me away from her.
Mom worked to layer a look of pride over her frustration: I’d hogged our host just as Kate had done.
“We were very fond of her,” said the dancer, no trace of irony, and taking my mother’s arm as the Chopin began once again.
“Fond as soda pop,” said my mother, ambiguous as always. The two of them sat close in the Queen Anne chairs, finally the intimate chat my mother had dreamed of.
“ ‘Let’s not be talking of Kate,’ ” I said unheard, almost happy to know that my sister and Sylphide had had some kind of falling out, that there really had been rancor between them and not only Kate’s delusions. I slipped over near the piano and watched Georges closely, that famous craggy face, that rheumy gaze, the expressive hands, the presence of genius. Noticing me he bent harder to the keys, played with selfless attention, pure emotion: his heart had been broken, too.
MARK NUSSBAUM’S LITTLE friend Dwight rushed up to me as I ducked off the ignominious school bus. I mean, Dwight Leonard charged up to me like a hobbit, pimples first.
“Mark fucked up!” he hissed.
Emily!
I hustled to the student parking lot, found her slumped over the steering wheel of her nice little car, a boxy BMW her father’s employer had loaned her as a reward for good grades. I waited till she’d finished crying, tapped on her window.
She turned angrily to see who, wiped at her eyes. I pointed at my wrist: time for homeroom. She shook her head, looked bitten. I twirled my fist to say open the window. But no.
Later I looked for her in the lunchroom, scanned the crowd. I could have any girl in that school, my mother was fond of saying. There was Patty DeMarco, her miniskirt rolled high at the waist to make it crotch-shot short for lunchtime. She’d given me half a hand job on a blind date back when she first came to town from the Bronx, ninth grade. I say half because I’d stopped her—some kind of embarrassment that I mistook for chivalry. I should have been nicer to her, after, but didn’t know any better. Kelly Fenimore read a thick book at the dark end of the room. She was editor of the school paper, lab-beaker glasses, cutting wit, prim cardigan, ruffled blouse, breasts straining at the thin material like repressed thoughts. And Teensy Bowman, whom I’d kissed just once, back behind the YMCA after a dance in seventh grade, her shocking thick tongue. And Ally Mott, chubby Ally, whose pants I’d managed to unbutton in a make-out session freshman year, an après-school pool party, further moves thwarted by her cheerful, expert hands: she’d had a million boyfriends. And over there Petra Johanssen, the exchange student from Denmark, known to be dating some old-guy businessman from Greenwich, but always flirtatious with me, terrifying beauty, no known hobbies. All of them tomatoes, as my father would say. Why did I bother with Emily Bright, who wanted nothing to do with me?
I skipped out of the lunch line, trotted the long way around the school buildings to the student lot, found the girl back in her car—if she’d ever left—knuckles in her mouth. Again the faked smile. She rolled down her window, said, “I should have gone with you to tea.”
Long pause as I groped for something to say: “Well. You had a date.”
“Some date.”
I let that sink in. “I don’t see Mark around today.”
“Mark is a little fucking prick.”
The mouth on her! She opened her door hard into my knees, climbed out, a complicated unfolding of legs, perfect posture, none of the self-love of the football girls. Her dress that day was a gray-brown fuzzy thing like a pelt, unflattering, telling: it was the same garment she’d worn the day before. She noticed me looking, tugged at the hem.
“Want to take a lap?” I said. That was Staples High lingo for a stroll around the perimeter of the campus, not strictly off limits, yet suggestive—pot smokers took laps; class skippers took laps; lovers took laps.
“No,” Emily said. But she began to walk.
Come spring, the lunchtime lawns and playing fields would be covered with kids again, but that day the air was crisp and almost cold, and Emily and I were alone out there except for Jerry Dice (a likable kid with rough edges, always getting picked up by the cops for small infractions like loitering and shoplifting) and Jerry DeMarco (one of Patty’s twelve brothers, a striving second-stringer on the football team), the two of them throwing a Frisbee. Emily hurried along, led me to a big ornamental boulder under cherry trees. We climbed it backwards together, an awkward process of shifting our butts up onto the high surface of the massive, cold thing, the shape of the rock putting us hip to hip in the end. I felt the bones of her.
“I hate fall,” she said.
“I like the leaves,” I said.
“Disgusting,” she said, “everything dead and blowing around!” And then without transition, and apropos nothing obvious, she said, “My grandmother was a holy roller, like, a Jehovah’s Witness. Door to door and everything, and Daddy did that, too, but he rejected the whole thing when he went into the army, duty and honor. Now his religion is, like, groundskeeping and landscaping and ass-kissing. My mother is Buddhist—that you can’t reject, you know, it’s a mindset. She accepts my father’s suffering. That’s a joke, Lizard, don’t be so serious. But she�
�s Korean, too—no way she’ll accept her own suffering. You’re allowed to smile. I’ve got guilt from all sides, Buddhist guilt, Jehovah’s Witness guilt, Korean guilt, Afro-American guilt. They’re all a little different, so you never get a break, shame from all sides. I assume you’re some kind of smug Protestant?”
“Guilty,” I said.
Emily gave me a brief, pained smile, looked out across the lawns to the playing fields, disgusting leaves cartwheeling nowhere in the chill breeze. I felt the increasing warmth of her thigh. Sylphide’s pale green eyes came to mind unbidden, vivid, as if she were spying on us. The two Jerrys ran through the cherry trees in front of us with loud shouts of greeting and long looks: What were we up to?
I waved, not Emily.
Same tone, she said, “My parents were away to see Chuck. He had some kind of ceremony at the academy.” Chuck was her older brother, as I well knew, a West Point cadet. She pulled her braid around in front of her, turned it in her hands atop her thick dress. Her neck was marked by seven or eight hickies just shades darker than her skin. She meant me to see them, obviously, a kind of confession. She blurted the rest: “So I stayed over at Mark’s. That was our plan. I don’t know what I was thinking. He was awful. He promised dinner. Vodka and orange juice. That was it. A few kisses and he’s out to here, Lizard.” Graphic hand gesture. “He ripped my dress.” Briefly, she showed me a torn seam at her shoulder, then pointed out the safety pins she’d installed all the way down to her waist, glimpse of exposed skin in the breach, another hickey at her hip. She said, “I suppose it was all a lot of fun.”
Life Among Giants Page 6