Life Among Giants

by Bill Roorbach

  She tried a few stretches at the barre, her joints popping shockingly, warmed to it. Humming absently, she pulled off her sweatpants, threw off the little sweater, made an elaborate yoga routine in her leotard alone, muscle group by muscle group, the rather worn cotton pulling this way and that and gaping to give glimpses of the most intimate skin if you looked: chest, armpit, crease of the thigh. She was all muscle. I joined her almost unconsciously at first, a half effort, then more so, leaning and bending, reaching and twisting beside her, two athletes, at least that much in common. I sweated in my nice blue school shirt: Dress for success, as Dad always said. And, Quit staring: Mom.

  “Dabney helped so many people,” she said. Another full minute of stretching, and: “The Children of War Foundation, that was being an expression of his deepest, most injured self.” More stretching, deeper stretching, both of us grunting with it. “He was being a child himself, never growing up. He was being a child of World War Two, a child of his parents’ domestical war, too. You remember the cover of the Children of War album? The plants blooming in the ruins, ja? Overcoming disaster with love. That is how he is talking. That is how he is thinking. That is how I am loving him best.” Onto our bellies. Grab the ankles, arch.

  She said, “I am seeing a long pas de deux for Vlad and me. Last night I dream it from beginning to end. This morning I sketch it. You will help me block it out, ja?”

  We sat up. She pointed to my feet. “Like Vlad,” she said.

  Vlad danced barefoot.

  I kicked off my sneakers, yanked off my socks, stood where she pointed, ready to be a dancer. She stood wearily, took a place in front of me, inspected me closely.

  “Fifth position, please.”

  “I don’t even know one through four.”

  She took this as a joke, didn’t like it, kicked at my instep, surprising force, knocked my feet into something like the form she was looking for. “Bend at your knees just a little, won’t you, lazy?”

  I bent my legs like squatting, my feet impossibly tangled.

  The dancer pushed behind my knees, pressed the small of my back, tangled me further. “Ja-ja. Exactly,” she said. “Very nice. Flatfooted is fine. Vlad is, um, status, and I am being the implacable force. You know status?”

  “Static?”

  “Or anyway, quiet and still.” She gazed at me critically, suddenly pulled my shirttails out of my blue jeans. Not enough. “Vlad will want his shirt off, I imagine.” She tugged my shirt up.

  I smelled the jasmine, first time that day. Her sweat, and something piquant from the deeps.

  “Don’t move your feet!” she barked.

  I laughed, held my awkward crouch, let her pull my shirt over my head. She took it from my hands, folded it nicely, placed it with her sweats. “And your trousers. Take ’em off? Vlad is being in tights, of course.”

  “Nah,” I said.

  But Sylphide plucked at the button of my Levi’s, and I went along with her vision, fell out of whatever position I was in, dropped my jeans (playing Vlad, who wouldn’t hesitate for a second), kicked them aside, stood in my BVDs—new BVDs, happily, bought by my hallowed mom not a week before, plain white. The dancer bent to retrieve the blue jeans, folded them as she had folded the shirt, retrieved my sneakers, balled my socks, collected her own sweats and tiny sweater, folded them, too, stacked all our items together, lined my huge shoes up alongside the pile, flexed and muscle-walked her way to a large drafting table, long legs on such a little person, her belly sculpted, that day’s breasts too matter-of-fact to be as compelling as those of the previous day, her own fingerprints in powder on her calves, the whole effect not especially feminine, suddenly, nothing sexy about her in fact, nothing nymphlike either, half her game illusion, I realized yet again. She leaned over some notebooks on the table, leafed through the pages of a huge drawing pad, pencil scrawls, great sweeping marks, little symbols. When she regarded me again it was a pillar she was seeing, something solid, a fluted column, or anyway it wasn’t me. Slowly (all those muscles dedicated to grace!), she floated my direction poised on the balls of her feet, then on her bare toes, making her legs longer yet. “Ease,” she said. “Make it look easeful.” All but naked, she looked like a shot-putter—how had I ever found her sexy? She kicked at my feet again. “Perfect,” she said, looking up at me. “I discover I am wishing Vlad was so big. You are something to climb. He will just have to dance tall.”

  I smiled easefully, great effort.

  “Do not grin,” she said. “You are not being Yorick’s skull, you are being a pillar in a garden and the day is fair, ja? You are a boulder in the forest. You are being solid, whatever you are, and you are being what you are. A menhir, ja? You know that word? Some stone thing left after civilization is dying. You have great mass. Your weight presses into the ground, you are rooted in bedrock. Sturdy, you are, everything solid.”

  Somehow that helped. I felt my feet sinking into earth, felt the rock under there, felt the air on my legs. Sylphide danced toward me, is the only way to put it, something different in her stride that made what had been walking into dancing, increased toward me, to get it just right, a growing, skirling thing, some sort of vine, one of the plants that bloomed after war. She patted at her belly, which was a plate. “Put your hand right here when I am ascending.” She sank to the wooden floor behind me, only very slowly let the floorboards produce her. She grew from my feet, one tendril climbing the back of my one naked leg, another tendril climbing the front more stiffly, then more tendrils, quite a few more, certainly more than a person should have hands to imitate, tendrils climbing in and around my thighs and up my back, climbing between my legs and up my front, and, after the tendrils had passed, her trunk rose, the vine itself, a kind of tropism, gravity-defying, impossible to see how she managed it all from my vantage point as pillar or menhir. When she was at full height, tendrils snaking around my neck and my face and up into my hair, climbing above my Doric capital—Doric was the simplest one, as I recalled—up there at the height of the eminence I had become and catching breezes, she began to hum some ancient song. Then she rose some more, left the floor, turned to face the same way I was facing while yet clinging to me, physically impossible. But no. Numbers, she was saying numbers, counting. I put my hand on her belly as she had instructed, kept my feet flat and properly aligned, my crouch as correct as I could manage, three-four.

  “Perfect,” she said, rare praise, “not bad timing,” and then made a preternatural forward lean, still humming, tendrils seeking, a couple of grunts, her feet on mine, or on my shins at times, even on my knees, a pulsing up and down, a slow rising from the roots, then falling, a drooping, too little rain perhaps, then new weather and a rising, tendrils encircling me impossibly.

  Okay, forget vine and pillar, implacable force and the sweep of time, forget tangled flat-foot stance, or fifth position, or whatever it was: the woman’s muscular and extremely solid butt was sliding in worn cotton from my mid thigh to my lower belly, sliding back again, the smoothest movement imaginable pressed implacably against me, hands reaching behind me, one leg wrapping my thigh. I was not Italian marble; I wasn’t some boulder in a field; though I didn’t move I was moved, and suddenly: the muscles of my corporus cavernosa relaxed, allowing blood to flow into the spongy spaces therein, with the entirely involuntary result that my penis stirred, began to rise. Meanwhile, my testicles climbed their own vines. The implacable little fanny seemed to know it, too, pressed harder into me, found a snaking path, a tendril at my backside pulling me closer. I lightened my touch on her belly, tried to give her butt some slack, tried mortified to think my way out of arousal: garbage truck, hot-day road crew spreading tar, math formulas, insects, marble, granite, feldspar, all to no avail.

  She stopped the dance abruptly. Stepped away from me. “Well,” she said.

  The heat moved up my rigid chest to my face, not stone. I just stood as Vlad, wavering on my big, burning feet, gave a tiny shrug.

  Not chilly, not warm, but looking
directly at the insistent form in my briefs, the dancer said, “Unintended effects.”

  She spun around behind me, rose on her toes so her voice was in my neck: “You’d best move past this phase so we can work. Just move past desire. Acknowledge it, move past it. Here.” She drew her hands down the jumping muscles of my torso, tugged on the waistband of my shorts, pulled them down incrementally. I stayed a pillar. “Like this,” she said. And her hand found one of my own hands, placed it on my first-class erection, then found the other, this expert arranging hands as she’d arranged feet. “Go on,” she murmured. She guided my movement, abruptly abandoned me to myself. “Don’t stop,” said the voice in my ear, more breathless. Her hands found their way up my chest. And because she was behind me and because her voice was in my neck and because in a way it had happened before many times (that album cover), I could manage it, my underpants around my bent knees, my pose unchanged. A tendril grew through my legs from behind, the timing I must say pretty altogether thoroughly exquisite. I shuddered out of position, lost my mooring on the bedrock, stumbled hard, spurting. My dancer held me a second then spun and ran and used the whole floor in an exaggerated and rather comical series of leaps, amazing air (I’d never seen anything like it up close), grabbed one of the dozen nice towels hanging on the barre, spun back, wiped the floor with a flourish, wiped me roughly, and finally pulled my shorts up for me, snapped the band at my waist.

  “Desire,” she said, as in no big deal.

  I reached for her.

  She let me hold her very briefly, her lips near mine as I bent to her, but then she slithered out of my hands.

  “I got what I am needing,” she said, perfectly professional. She meant for the dance.

  I watched her grab her things and breeze out of the room, stood there a minute half mortified, half exultant, also half naked. I dressed shaking my head and shivering, laughing out loud, then groaning in embarrassment. Some pillar I’d turned out to be. I had to get back to the office downstairs. Conrad was going to kill me. Desmond would know where I’d been.

  I skipped past the lap pool and through her private salon and out her private door and down the grand stone stairs of the very public foyer and to the office behind the no-Bonnard parlor and back to the ringing, ringing phone, big and fulsome and desirable and calm, a kid who’d found the very center of the cosmos.

  At the end of the day, Sylphide nowhere to be found, I rowed happily across the pond, trotted up the lawn and to the kitchen doors, found Dad and Mom sitting down to dinner, felt I loved them more than humanly possible, loved the food she was serving, loved the air in our house, loved even the tension, Dad all distracted, painful private thoughts, loved the thoughts, too, whatever they might be, loved the pain: it was his pain, and the pain was him, and might have something to do with Kate. I loved Kate, loved Kate abjectly, loved even her absence, loved having a new secret from her, a secret from them all.

  Momentarily the black cars would pull into our cul de sac, momentarily the FBI guys would pull their guns, momentarily they’d take the old man away.

  13

  The morning after the arrest, Mom insisted I go to school: we weren’t going to let things fall apart. I didn’t protest. I’d already skipped enough that week, didn’t want to break any more rules, never again. Mr. Davis on the bus asked where Dad was. “Arrested,” I said, and the sweet old fellow laughed: pretty good joke.

  School was surreal, the hallways dressed in black streamers and pumpkin cutouts, paper skeletons and ghosts. Mom had played it tough that morning, chain-smoked cigarettes though she’d long since quit, ate nothing. Her day in Danbury would consist of looking for legal representation for Dad and then for us—I noticed that distinction, the implication that we had legal interests separate from his. When the Bridgeport paper thumped on our doorstep she rushed out to get it, but there was nothing in there about Nicholas Hochmeyer: good news of its own kind, even if it was going to be temporary.

  When she was done searching the columns she offered me orange juice, asked how late I’d stay over at the High Side that night, all very businesslike, at least until she broke: “Good thing you’ve got work, darling, whatever it is. Because your fucking father didn’t leave a fucking cent in this fucking house, not a fucking cent in the fucking bank. There’s only the money in my fucking purse. Like eight fucking dollars.” Her eyes filled, but she didn’t cry.

  No one had called Kate, I kept realizing. But Kate couldn’t stay shielded for long. I climbed to my room, found my bag of quarters, brought them down to Mom. Businesslike again, she counted me back one dollar: lunch money. I was frightened but oddly giddy, worried about Dad but unaccountably ebullient, terrified for Bar-Bar, way afraid of what Kate would say—I knew I’d have to be the one to break the news—but weirdly thrilled by all of it, our disaster like some elixir I’d drunk.

  Emily was missing from the morning crush, nowhere to be found. I scrawled an inane quick note on the back of Sylphide’s invitation, wanting to be sure Emily knew who the messenger was, slipped it through the vent in her locker. She wasn’t in math class. She didn’t seem to be in French, either, big Lizard peering through the narrow window of her classroom door. At the buses Dwight said he’d seen her, all right: her parents had picked her up after lunch in the ambassador’s limo. “They’re on their way to Korea, Liz, just like every fall. It’s like Ancestor’s Day or whatever it’s called. They burn money so the dead folks can go out and get a decent meal.”

  “She’s already gone?”

  “She’s gone, Liz.”

  Not so much as a farewell to the likes of me. As I slogged aboard the bus to go home, Mr. Davis said, “I thought you was kidding,” and slipped me a rolled New York Post, afternoon edition, a slow Thursday in Newspaperland, no doubt. Anyway, the cover story was the scandal at Dolus Investments, big studio photos of two executives who’d been found dead in a Times Square hotel, apparent suicides. Another had been found shot in his driveway, familiar name, a guy from accounting my father had always hated, a do-gooder. On the inner pages were a dozen faces in two rows of studio headshots: the bad guys. And hapless Dad was among them.

  OFF THE BUS, I rushed home, desperate to get back to Sylphide’s, loud drums over there, like something carried on African wind. I hurried to eat something, found a terse note from Mom:

  Precious. Talked Daddy noontime. Heading for Danbury. Arraignment tomorrow a.m. Will spend the night. You are in charge of yourself. Mrs. Paumgartner next door in case. Please call Kate. You don’t have to tell her every little thing. Food in fridge, xo.

  I scrawled High Side on the back of an envelope, also Tried Katy, though this was not true. Mr. Kerklin had recently taught us the second law of thermodynamics, and here was proof: things actually do fall apart.

  AT SYLPHIDE’S THE cars were back, Cadillacs and Mercedes Benzes and Porsches and Jags. Also a Ferrari 512-S, one of only three hundred ever made, I knew, worth more than my family’s house by several times. “We’re surprised to see you,” Desmond shouted, opening the great doors, loud drums back in the ballroom. And behind him in the foyer, a return to bedlam: carpenters and soundmen, dancers and costumers, a half-dozen young women getting dressed, two of them stark naked right there in the wind of the doorway. Perfect gentleman, I didn’t stare.

  “Who’s we?” I shouted back, sounding like my father.

  “We here at the High Side,” Desmond said.

  “Show must go on,” I said.

  “She says you’re needed at home. She offers her support and her sorrow and releases you.”

  I said, “There’s no one at home.”

  “I’m to turn you away. Apologies.” He handed me one of the familiar envelopes, gold piping, something in there. I stuffed it in my back pocket. The next arrivals were at the door, a pair of ladies in perfume and fancy suits, another group of people behind them. Desmond, grandly formal, offered the dancer’s warm greetings. Lizard, for the moment forgotten, took the opportunity to slip inside.


  In the ballroom, the gut-punching boom of tom-toms came amplified out of stacked speaker towers stenciled STUDIO INSTRUMENT RENTALS. Why on earth did the drums need mikes? All but hidden inside a double battlement of tom-toms and snares and bass drums and stainless-steel stands and large brass cymbals was a big man playing them hard, sticks flying, long hair straggling down in reddish curls, an engine of sweat. I edged right up to the platform and it was like the drums were inside me, loudest thing I’d ever felt. “Ginger Baker!” someone shouted. I recognized him then, the drummer from Cream, whoa. His hands were a blur. He’d been friends with Dabney, everyone knew; Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce and Ginger, they’d all been friends with Dabney.

  Georges emerged from one of the many doors at the back of the room, clambered up onto the makeshift stage, a guy with talents and fame I couldn’t touch, a certain noble carriage, like some minor baron from days gone by. He made his way back to a Hammond B-3 set up high on a double platform, gradually took his place—drums throbbing, cymbals crashing—pulled stops, touched a key or two, struck a tentative chord. When at last I turned I saw that the ballroom had filled with people: designers and seamstresses and techies and maids and photographers, all sorts of assistants and dancers, even a nervous knot of High Side gardeners. Roadies were loading in even more speaker cabinets through big doors swung open like the place was an airplane hangar, the side yard out there. A stiff photographer was setting up reflectors, his assistant looking stressed under the ungainly equipment. The girls who’d been naked in the foyer came in dressed, did stretches. And then more dancers, men and women, many of them older than Sylphide, it occurred to me. And there was Conrad Pant, wearing an ascot now, and always the beret, chatting up the tweed ladies I’d seen arriving, the three of them pinching champagne flutes.