Life Among Giants

by Bill Roorbach

  I MADE CALLS till after six, left a lot of messages at the theaters on Conrad’s list, got busy signals, felt deflated, depressed even, finally a receptionist who was indifferent till I said I worked for Sylphide. Her boss would call in the morning! She called me Mr. Hochmeyer, then, let her voice grow breathy, whoa. Then more busy signals and long-ringing phones and perfunctory answering services. Restless I stood and paced with my neck bent under the low ceiling, paced up and down all the rows of dry-cleaned clothes and costumes, whole deep shelves of accessories: wings, halos, hats, tails, feathers, scarves, wristlets, anklets, silver corsets, golden girdles, leather thongs, pants and panties and pantaloons, jewelry fake and jewelry real, all full of meaning, no doubt. I’d have to skip school in the morning. I’d skip school and come straight back to the High Side, where a man like myself was needed.

  I thought to leave a note for my dancer, for it seemed with kisses she had given herself to me. Flowery phrases crossed my mind but there was no pencil anywhere, no pen, not a typewriter. At Sylphide’s dresser I touched her bra-thing, thought of how she’d undressed right there in front of me, that boundless physical aplomb. Which was married, I suddenly saw, to her surprising sexual insecurity. I brought the slight garment to my face: jasmine, sweat, warm cotton. On impulse I stuffed it into my pants pocket. In its place on the dresser I left her the pretty, speckled stone. Definitely the shape of a heart. That would have to do for a note.

  Downstairs the High Side was entirely empty, dark and silent, not even Desmond to be found, not so much as a chambermaid coughing in the wings. Abandoned, I left my list of calls and phone messages on the butler’s little dais for Conrad, let myself out, made my way down the lawns and to the pond, rowed home from my first day of work, dazzled, confused, exhilarated, spent, but supremely ready for whatever crazy thing was going to come next.

  PART TWO

  Firfisle

  7

  Eighteen-some years later, trading on a fairly undistinguished Miami Dolphins career and hometown fame, I opened a bistro back north in Westport. I’d returned from Miami to the family home, which against Kate’s better instincts we had never sold but rented. And as it happened the place had come empty just at my most aimless moment in the desultory years after my retirement from the NFL.

  (But more about all that later.)

  On a particular morning in the autumn of 1994, Restaurant Firfisle’s fifth year (yes, I named the place Firfisle, and yes, I was still stuck on the dancer), our mushroom man brought in a prodigious selection of fresh forest mushrooms: porcini, king oyster, yellow and blue chanterelles, all these great textures and shades. With the night’s menu still in question, our famous and colorful chef, Etienne LaRoque, simply commanded me to make mushroom sausages—an item I’d never made and never heard of—offering nothing but a quick idea of how I might proceed. From his head to my work station: sauté both coarse and fine-chopped mixed wild mushrooms and tiny wedges of green cherry tomato from our garden in olive oil and butter, equal-equal, add finely rubbed sage, add garden basil and more than you’d think of our fiery Thai chilies, plenty of salt, a little onion, a little shallot, a handful or two per pot of milled rice as a binder. Then press the mixture into cold glass bowls and cure all afternoon in the walk-in, stuff just before service into the handsome, somewhat elastic soy skins our impulsive chef had found someplace.

  He grilled only one to test, just an hour before the first orders came in, skin of the balls, as he would put it, his confidence in his own mastery not misplaced: gorgeous sausages, fat and firm, speckled and textural, juicy, jazzy, subtlest mushroom flavors. He’d made green-tomato fries for the side, fresh pasta for the base, a silky leek cream to finish: beautiful.

  I recall the invention of that dish vividly, not because of the muscular mushroom textures of the sausage, and not because of the compliments all night (regulars sticking their heads in the kitchen to enthuse, wait staff beaming), not even because it became a seasonal bestseller that no one in any other kitchen anywhere could imitate, but because it’s what Mr. Perdhomme ordered when he came in.

  Yes, that Mr. Perdhomme. My father’s boss.

  I’d seen the name on the reservations list, which as any evening got going I liked to check for friends, regulars, celebrities, critics. I brooded—Perdhomme!—grew grumpy, stalked the stations of the kitchen giving orders. But probably there were lots of people with that name. Why should this Perdhomme be mine? I checked the book again. Whoever it was had requested our one best table, a nice, square four-top in the biggest of the beachside windows, dinner timed for an autumn sunset: inside information.

  I peeped out of the kitchen at 5:50, peeped at 5:55, peeped at 6:00. His guest and he arrived just after that, it seemed, because when I peeped out again at 6:05 they were there, definitely they, two devils who’d figured large in my imagination for over twenty years, my father’s old boss, all right, same old air of command, in his early seventies perhaps, erect and polished. And accompanied by the man my father in surprise had called Kaiser—really he, indisputably he, the very Kaiser, my parents’ killer, a perfectly nice-looking man in a very expensive suit.

  My heart pumped scattered thoughts through my head; I felt the strain on every vein and artery along the way. Because here was proof, no more allegations—Kaiser and Mr. P. were connected. But their appearance together at my restaurant wasn’t a mistake, and it wasn’t a confession, either. Instead, it seemed a calculated threat: We know where to find you. Dolus Investments had been in the news—they were tangled in the savings and loan scandals, congressional and criminal probes in progress. Perhaps they feared old crimes coming to light, old witnesses.

  Whatever, they got the best treatment they had ever gotten or would ever get at a restaurant. I told the staff that Kaiser was a critic, the old guy maybe his boyfriend—they did seem a couple—and as the evening progressed everyone paid subtle, graceful attention. Back in the kitchen, I personally plated their orders, personally arranged the brilliant green-tomato fries, personally lined the mushroom sausages side-by-side-by-side, personally drizzled the leek cream, a gorgeous dish.

  In the end, the Kaiser guy paid in cash. Later, the staff would complain about his cheapness—shouldn’t reviewers tip like anyone else? Mr. Perdhomme was an ungodly long time in the bathroom. I took the opportunity to slip out to the parking lot, quickly found Olulenu (chief of valet, was the joke, Darfur refugee, was the truth, a state department placement in Bridgeport, big machete scar from his forehead to his chin, slightly walleyed from the injury). I slipped him what was in my pocket, four twenties, no amount too high, said, “Follow the Jaguar. All night if needed. Tell me where they go.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I watched then from the kitchen window, a long wait. But finally Mr. Perdhomme fell into the low-slung car. Kaiser closed his door, looking like any rich guy’s younger friend. Maybe just a coincidence, I told myself, two old dudes checking out a hot restaurant on their way back from a leaf-peeping trip, no idea at all how close they’d come to me.

  Olulenu followed them out of the lot in his girlfriend’s sputtering Rabbit.

  Not even an hour, and he was back. I dropped the plate I was working on, intercepted him, too anxious to act as I’d planned, like it was all a lark. He stared up at me with the one eye first, then the other, his face shining black, a person who did not ask questions, a person who just did his job.

  “They drove northwards,” he said. “Bloody slow. And north again up on the Weston Road, there. Took them a left on one eerie old road. And then, sir, a right. Stone towers, sir. A duppie castle, sir! I hastened back.”

  “The High Side,” I said.

  “Fuckery,” said Olulenu, offering a handshake in which he skillfully passed me back my eighty dollars.

  8

  I don’t know why I’m so dismissive of my National Football League years. Regret, perhaps, a kind of mourning, what might have been. Though when you think about it, the whole thing is pretty impressive, a h
istory few can claim. I guess I just don’t actually think about it much. But I promised to fill those years in. So:

  After my solid career at Princeton, and after a particularly big senior year (record running yardage, record scoring in the league, positive winning percentage), I reluctantly entered the NFL draft, where I was a seventh-round pick of the Miami Dolphins. My initial salary wasn’t stratospheric but more than my father had ever made, about standard for rookies at the time: $42,500.

  The kind of thing you call your folks about, but of course I couldn’t do that: my folks were dead. Instead I stood in the hallway of my dorm, gloomy March afternoon, and called Kate.

  “Dickhead,” she said.

  By then I didn’t expect much more from her: “Kate, it’s a big deal.”

  “You can talk to Jack.”

  It took a while for him to come to the phone—maybe she just threw it down for him to find—me there in my regular student housing, not a guy to join any fraternities or secret societies or even to live off campus—but when he finally answered he was generous. He had no clue about professional football or the NFL draft; still he was warm and excited for me, apologetic about Kate. “She’s climbing out of it,” he said, the usual optimism. Climbing out of her tailspin after college, he meant.

  And he said, “She’s playing tennis again. Wants to get on the tour. A rough road, David, as you know. But by god, she’s finding her way, four years since she touched a racket.” A year or so after the deaths of our parents she’d quit the Yale team, but not before she’d made a scene or two, flinging herself on the clay of a tournament court her very last game and crying into it after winning, no tears of joy, her face and her whites completely orange by the time they picked her up. “She’s back up to weight, she’s beating the club pro. I mean drubbing him, little cocky bastard, nice to see. She’s going to Forest Hills unseeded next month, if all goes well.”

  “I was insensitive,” I said.

  But Jack didn’t catch any irony: “You have every right to your excitement, David. And she can’t wait to see you play. We can’t wait.”

  “Well, you’ll have to wait, I guess. I’m just going to be a scrub, and only if I make the spring cut.”

  “You’ll make the cut, David.”

  I made the cut, all right, didn’t call with the news.

  THAT JUNE, WITHOUT Kate’s particular blessing, I rented out the family house and furnishings and drove to Miami, same old Volvo wagon Jack had loaned and then gifted years before, taking only what would fit. A beautiful city, I quickly decided, scruffy and a little mean, with shark’s teeth among the shells on the beaches and good Cuban music clubs back in the neighborhoods, black beans and rice. Which I mention because I was more excited about the shark’s teeth and beans and music than about football, or anyway quite numb about football, nothing new, a vacuum of feeling that Coach Keshevsky had tried to fill repeatedly, talks in his office, talks at his home, talks in the bleachers at Big Brothers/Big Sisters boxing matches in Trenton: “You’re an all-time great, David. If only you’d love the game. You must love it more than life itself!” He also liked to point out that there were some five million kids playing high-school football, some fifty-five thousand playing NCAA college ball, but only some twelve hundred in the NFL, only about two hundred draftees each year, of which at most ten were quarterbacks. I’d barely made it, was my only observation.

  On the Dolphins I was third quarterback behind the superstar Bob Griese and the remarkable Don Strock, both of them single-minded lovers of football—life itself, you bet—never quite my friends, though frequent hosts on their deep-sea fishing boats off-season and in their handsome houses. I worked very hard at football, arrived early for practice every Wednesday through Friday, got to the airport two hours early on Saturday mornings, or got to the team’s (secret) Miami hotel on Saturday afternoons, first player there.

  I played nearly every game those first few years, it’s worth remembering, if only to set and hold the ball for Garo Yepremian, our brilliant All-American Armenian-Cypriot place kicker. I was cycled in for particular running plays, too, short yardage mostly, fourth and one. Don Shula, of course, was head coach, a guy who always had time for me, who called me in nearly weekly my first couple of years. “Son, you were great.”

  Great? I felt I’d done nothing, game after game.

  “You’re part of the master plan, mister. You’re right in the middle of it. Big picture. Future payoffs. Work your way up. Pay your dues.”

  He’d put me in his beautiful creaking leather chair at the big desk in his chilly office at the stadium, rub my shoulders absently. “It’s a mental game,” he’d say, kneading away. “And you are great at it. One of the very best. A mental game. But try telling your body that! Body says, follow me!” And having separated mind and body, he’d enumerate my flaws, which were all in the area of attention, focus, concentration, edge, the dumb body taking over and leaving mind behind. “Mental, mental. A mental game.”

  Coach Shula seemed to know an awful lot about me that I hadn’t told him, asked the team for silence in the locker room on or near every October 30, “In memory of a great dad and mom.” I’d play like a monster next couple of games, get to play whole quarters, even an entire second half once when Strock puked from the flu, a good half, too: three touchdowns (the first a faked field goal), nearly 200 yards passing, over 200 rushing, big spread in the Miami Herald in the armchair edition next day. And several of the other teams in the league developed the “Lizard Defense” against my goal-line work: the backfield standing as tall as they could behind their frontline, a nice idea, though they forgot I could pass, always left me a receiver.

  The professional game is much faster than the college version, much more painful both physically and emotionally, far more intense, more cerebral, too, as Shula never stopped saying, less fun, never a moment to rest, twice as many games to pump up for, always the game coming at you, the coaches, your teammates, the opposing players, all of it bearing down, very much more a business than college ball (which is a business, too, just not your own). Your NFL contract states that you are paid to practice. The games, they’re just supposed to be gravy.

  I memorized playbooks and signals and patterns like an understudy learning the big role; at practice I played the part of opposing quarterback and took the blows in blitz-formation trials. I threw the ball in pattern drills, too, nailed the receivers (many of whom I’d idolized from my junior high school years forward), passes as hard as I could make them, which was very hard most days, drew complaints. But Coach only grinned and said to throw harder. I was surrounded by men as hungry as I, hungrier, and all of them more dedicated. I was no longer the fastest man on the field, and no longer tallest, no longer smartest either, not even most tragic (that honor went to Cleveland Morris, whose entire family had famously died in a hotel fire at his sister’s wedding). And I was not the best quarterback, though I could put on a pretty good show.

  Those were winning years, the Dolphins’ golden era, and really, it was more than I ever thought I deserved: two Super Bowl rings, muscular pay raises year after year, plenty of attention, expiation for the sin of quitting on my father, I mean quitting football way back when, quitting the game when the game was our only bond.

  KATE CLAIMED IN later years to have never finished at Yale, but she does have a degree—I’ve seen the diploma. It must have come in the mail, or maybe Jack picked it up: she refused to attend her graduation. What she didn’t finish was tennis, so maybe that’s the confusion. Anyway, I was privy to almost nothing in her life at that time, and anything I did know was because of Jack, who called every Tuesday and filled me in. Kate would seldom take the phone, and the times she did she was overexcited, often incoherent. Jack tended to leave out the bad news, talked a lot about tennis. Her game was erratic when she resumed playing after Yale, but she was more powerful than ever when she was on, and eventually she got seeded on the women’s tour, peaking at number eighteen or so—eighteen in the worl
d, I mean, very serious. She had a serve no one could hit; she was strong and car-crash fast. She was beautiful, too, sneer and all, and that made her a natural for certain kinds of endorsements, the tough girl, the rebel, the babe: Virginia Slims, Victoria’s Secret, cervical caps and spermicidal jellies (“I whack ’em with my racket” was her joke). There’s no way not to count her a success.

  But Kate could do strange things under pressure, especially when ahead, impulsive acts that got her disqualified from matches, like leaping over the net and hitting her own lob back to her own empty court. How do you score that? She spanked a line judge with her bare hand, bent him over, pulled down his shorts, and walloped him, film that made the evening news. Really, everyone loved her—easy when you didn’t know her. She lasted three seasons before the final blowup. I still don’t know all the details, just that her team’s plane had to make an emergency landing at Heathrow, where she was met by security and jailed, later hospitalized, her first full-blown breakdown, something in the bipolar range, certain doctors said; schizoid tendencies, said others. This was before people began to realize how serious the symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome might be, and how delayed, not that I’m offering a diagnosis.

  Back in the states, months of misdirected rehab, and then, with her usual furious energy, she started on a graduate degree in social work, left after a partial semester, her usual paranoid complaints. No matter—Jack had a grander vision, the two of them traveling to Egypt then camel-trekking through all of North Africa to Morocco, where they lived in some splendor for an entire expatriate sabbatical year. There were weekly letters from Jack, occasional notes and gifts from her (a fez!). Home again, she got it into her head to begin a career, though she had no particular career in mind. So several years of assorted jobs, from Christmas-tree farmhand to furniture salesperson, from executive assistant at an alternative energy company to philosophy-bookstore clerk (where she may have had an affair with the hunchbacked owner), from day-care manager to tennis-camp coach. I’m filling all this in from later stories she’d tell when the mood struck her, wildly funny stories, and dark ones, very dark. Whatever steam she managed to build up at each job, she got fired from all of them.