Life Among Giants

by Bill Roorbach

  I walked her around the whole crazy place a half hour, she steering me with her hips, her feet clenching, her mouth at my neck, love bruises to take home with me in the dozens, a carnal tour of the Chlorine Baron’s strange legacy, till I fell with her onto a beautiful miniature psychiatrist’s couch done in soft leather, pumping at her furiously, not my style, not at all, the one time she didn’t giggle when she came, or went, as she would put it.

  18

  Our first trial run at Firfisle was on a Saturday evening in late October, nuts. We’d been inviting contractors for months, set up a full schedule of reservations, all these familiar faces and their families and friends. RuAngela acted as hostess in a sassy pink dress and nail extensions. Our wait staff amounted to two failed soap actors Etienne had found someplace, lovely manners and jocky good looks, no experience, panicky. In the kitchen it was only Etienne and I, also a dour but talented dessert girl who would have to double as salad person, peeving her mightily. No line cooks, as yet: Etienne and I were it, prepping right up against the opening bell. We had no signage and no exterior lights, so RuAngela carved a couple of pumpkins and put them in the street-side windows. And here came the guests, all in a crowd, better than ghosts, but still . . .

  Total collapse, a boisterous party with free food, no more than that, everything breaking down. We’d forgotten screws in two of the tables during set-up and they fell over, drinks, flowers and all. The pared-down menu went out in frenzied bursts, my tricky culinary-school ticket system as useless as Etienne had warned. And the toolbox crowd drank a lot. Outside, Olulenu parked the cars too tight, forgetting that people wouldn’t leave in the order they’d arrived, like working a Rubik’s Cube to extricate them.

  Some measure of the general confusion was my fault: I couldn’t get Sylphide out of my head, a cinema’s worth of images, great performances, scene after scene, a very sad ending. I’d awakened the last morning of my vacation and found my dancer missing, found one of the maids cleaning up, a squirrelly older gal called Maria, who crossed herself at the sight of me naked, no English at all, not a trace. She clucked when I tried Spanish—presented my clothing washed and folded, umpteenth time. For the first time in days I dressed, then, increasingly anxious, searched all the secret alcoves, but this was no game: my lover was gone. I let myself out, marched down the muddy lawn bereft and shoeless, leapt the brook. At home I dressed for work, work my one salvation.

  Etienne was alone in the restaurant, of course, early as it was. Hugs in the kitchen, happy greetings. It wasn’t till noon that I found the speckled stone, a rough heart sitting square in the center of my butcher-block workstation. No way I would have missed it, impossible.

  “Not me, bro,” Etienne kept saying.

  Neither of us had seen a thing, not so much as a shadow.

  THE FIRFISLE TEAM regrouped and the next dry run went a couple of light years better, and a lot less eventful. Our guests were people we’d met in the community, people who’d go forth for us, we hoped, like Dwight Leonard, like my dentist, like the priest from Mrs. Paum’s house, and a score or so of acquaintances Etienne and RuAngela had made, including the entertainment editor from the local paper, long and skinny and hurried, definitely not an eater.

  Eight o’clock and my sister arrived, a mere hour late, Jack on her arm. We’d reserved the best of the window tables for them, moonlight on wavecrests and slow-strobing lighthouse—all clear, all clear—and the green and the red running lights of commercial boats and the buoy lights blinking out there and the green light at the end of our cracked seawall, the view as dramatic as I’d dreamed. I stepped out to greet them—more practice, really, the calm chef in the midst of a maelstrom.

  “Just gorgeous,” Jack said.

  “How about a Bloody Mary,” said Kate sharply. She looked very thin, or maybe it was the dark velvet dress, purple or black you couldn’t tell, her eyes alight, every man in the place focused upon her.

  “Maybe a Virgin?” I said.

  “It hardly matters,” said Kate. “Just stuff it with fucking vegetables.”

  “Absolutely gorgeous,” Jack repeated, looking all around.

  “I’ll make a salad out of it,” I said. Didn’t Jack notice Kate’s moods anymore? He sat there with the most affable expression, perhaps leaving the heavy hand to me, keep the peace at home.

  “A Bloody Mary, David. And just keep ’em coming till it’s all one bloody mess.”

  “Kate,” I said gently.

  “A shot of gun on the side,” she said as if she were just making pleasant puns.

  “Jack?”

  He shook his head. People go crazy in increments, I thought; perhaps Jack had been lulled along and hadn’t noticed. He shook his head some more, put his hand on my wrist. “This time you help me,” he said, normal tones.

  “I looked up firfisle,” said Kate. “It took me four hours in that pretty library in Madison. You’d have thought I would have known it was fucking Norwegian.”

  “Kate,” Jack said.

  “I’ll feel better with some food,” said Kate, mocking him preemptively.

  He pretended not to notice, or maybe didn’t notice: “You always feel better when you eat, sweetie.”

  “My Bloody Mary, Firfisle. Or aren’t you the fucking bartender?”

  “Virgin,” said Jack.

  “Oh, that’ll never happen again,” said my sister, suddenly calm. RuAngela had slipped up behind me, took over the conversation:

  “Katy, where did you get that dress?”

  “In a dumpster,” Kate said, which wasn’t true, of course, and which was really funny, at least to Ru-Ru, whose manly laugh is hilarious to everyone, even Kate, even poor Jack, anyway we laughed.

  A FEW DAYS later, Halloween, we opened for real and put all our effort into a few brilliant dishes from the abundance around us: Etienne had harvested leeks that morning and braised them, for example, made tarts. Our grumpy dessert girl—Brie was her name, soon to be fired for the attitude—had all the greens she needed and nice tomatoes from under our hoop house, new sharp cheese from the dairy guy, E.T.’s help with a dressing. The final product looking oddly like a dessert, for which I gave her praise: sometimes that’s all people want.

  Thirty covers, nine tables, very easy, perfect service, our first cash receipts.

  I’d taken Kate up to McLean the morning previous. Jack couldn’t do it, not again, but got in his Volvo and went to work like any old day. It might have been she’d dosed or even overdosed herself on whatever meds she hadn’t been taking for however many weeks up to that point; anyway, she was awfully calm, quiet, abstracted, distant, little remorseful sighs: another failure, as she saw it, hard to take. It’s only about a three-hour drive, Madison to Boston, and that’s going slow, not a word to say the whole way, though I commented on the sights—the mouth of the Connecticut River at Old Saybrook and Lyme, the submarine base at Groton with a couple of nukes in port, stuff we’d loved spotting when we were kids, the big whaling ships on display at Mystic Seaport, where we had lunch.

  Over lobster rolls I said something about Dad, how he’d brought us there when we were little, how he’d gotten in a tussle with a Seaport guard because we were walking up the exit ramp to the ship instead of using the stairs, which of course was Dad all over, one of those formerly funny memories, vivid, so vivid, his white shirt ironed and his face growing dark, You can’t tell Commodore Hochmeyer what to do! And the wise ancient guard who knew how to shut him down: Sir, is this the kind of behavior you want to teach these beautiful kids?

  Kate gazed at me a long time, perfectly calm, a flag with no wind: “You think he was so ineffectual. You think he was such a poseur.”

  “I didn’t say that. Though he did try too hard. Socially, you know? And at business. I mean, he tried too hard to impress. He just wanted to please. And that was a strength, too. I mean as a parent he was incredibly warm and kind and loving and present. He’d do anything for us.”

  “You’re like the fucking Mom c
lub. ‘Trying too hard to please.’ ”

  I let a couple of breaths go by, spoke calmly as I could: “Her word was for him was inept. Remember? I never said it. She expected everything to run on schedule and per plan. But then, that was Mom’s strength. She was chilly, I agree. And she pushed him too hard, okay. She could be so critical of him, true. But she was totally practical, forceful, always with the plan and the schedule, not many hugs, but she’s the one who made athletes of us, for example. Am I right? She’s the one who pushed us toward elite colleges.”

  Not a ripple: “Oh, ‘elite.’ Oh, ‘for example.’ ” And then she sang, that mocking kid’s thing, two notes, one minor: “Mom club! Mom club! Mom club!”

  “Kate.”

  “Like, oh, Dad, such a loser. Oh, Dad, always with the putrid decisions. Oh, Dad, you got me killed.”

  “Okay, Kate.”

  “But you know that boyfriend of Emily’s?”

  “No, Kate. Katydid. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Commodore Hochmeyer wasn’t so fucking ineffectual about that kid.”

  “Katy, sister, eat something.”

  More mocking, a kid imitating her tormentor, real echoes of our father, Jack’s famous phrase: “ ‘You’ll feel better when you eat.’ ”

  “Exactly.”

  She picked up her pickle, seemed to swallow it whole, gagged a little, picked up her chips and crunched them in her teeth one by one by one, didn’t touch the lobster roll, which I wrapped for the ride back. Plus now the weirdness of having the poolhouse in common, no way to talk about it. I couldn’t ask about Brady Rattner, because how would I know? Brady with his hand up her skirt, Dabney buying world-class paintings for her at auction, Dad oblivious, just trying to get someone somewhere somehow to invest the big bucks so he could impress his monstrous boss. So it was Dad behind the pounding Mark Nussbaum took?

  Whoa.

  Shaking off the thought, and trying for something more honest, I said, “I hear Dad was at the High Side all the time.”

  “Yes?”

  “I hear he hung out in the poolhouse. All those fountains and forests and fancy toilets and stuff. Oxcarts to turn on the shower.”

  “You hear this,” she said.

  “And he hung with Dabney’s brother sometimes, huh?”

  “Oxcarts,” she said. And then she wouldn’t look at me, grabbed her lobster roll back, unwrapped it, ate it in three bites. “So much you haven’t told me,” she said, but not in a way that made me think she wanted to hear.

  “So much,” she kept repeating as we got in the car, as we drove. “So much you haven’t told me.” And then, “Firfisle.” Just that, over and over, thirty miles, forty-five, sixty: “Fir-fucking-fisle. So much you haven’t said, Lizard.”

  They greet you in the lobby, two big male nurses and a lady psychiatrist, all three of them people Kate seemed to know. You get just a few seconds to say good-bye, hug like a hockey check from Kate, no tears, never any tears from Kate.

  Me, I cried in the parking lot an hour.

  THOSE FIRST FEW months there were some very quiet nights at the restaurant, including a Tuesday when no one came in, not a single customer, pretty sobering. There was an amateurish, supposedly tongue-in-cheek review in the local paper, that skinny guy we’d fed for free (“Westport’s Tragic Son Makes Tofu Touchdown”), but that was it for media attention those lonely weeks and then months (and so irritating that I wrote the editor an ill-advised letter, or rant: I wasn’t anybody’s son and Restaurant Firfisle would never use tofu or other pre-processed foods in anything). On the positive side, the slow pace meant there was plenty of time to invent new dishes. Never have restaurant employees eaten so well.

  Spring and the advent of warm weather brought more people down to the waterfront, and with a little more traffic we started attracting more guests, and with some word of mouth attracting more. We had a string of busy Saturdays, and then full weekends, and then, suddenly, starting in June, we were honestly bustling four days a week, then five, then seven, never a lull. By the time Jillian Jeffries, the Times food critic, dined unbeknownst with her three tasting friends (two separate evenings and apparently a third evening solo), we were making and serving beautiful food consistently. I had no idea that Jeffries and Sylphide were such great friends, didn’t learn that till much later (and not to any chagrin, really, Jillian being a woman of integrity; the dancer had only steered her our way). The adulatory review came out just before Memorial Day (as part of a “Summer in the Country” series of articles), and entirely because RuAngela had always expected and planned for triumph, we were more or less ready for the onslaught that ensued. By July we were booked for the rest of the summer, all the way to September 15, when, incredibly, we started operating in the black.

  Somewhere in there, Kate had got out of McLean, a ten-month stay, very serious. She and Jack hadn’t let me know she’d been released, and this was hurtful, except that I hadn’t been in touch with them, had dropped away completely, Mr. Restaurant Man. Etienne finally made me do it, dialed the phone for me and handed it over. I thought I’d be speaking to Jack, had a whole script written in my head, how busy I’d been, how buried. But it was Kate who answered. She sounded heavily drugged, unnaturally ingratiating, as if her mouth and mind were full of sand.

  “Well, that’s enough chatter,” she said flatly, and flatly hung up. We’d spoken for no more than a minute.

  19

  Another year passed, Restaurant Firfisle a runaway train, pure excitement, like new love. Emily saw an article about us in The Miami Herald and deigned to write, just enough ink to say that she’d seen Sylphide on a recent European tour and had met the great ballerina’s sweet new boyfriend, the Swiss financier Daniel Tancredi.

  Great.

  Sylphide, it seemed, had hooked Emily up with a prestigious performance on German television. After, they’d all gone out to the boyfriend’s castle in the countryside for a champagne dinner, and she and Sylphide had stayed up till all hours like girls at a slumber party. Sylphide still thought Emily and I were such a great couple! So did Emily! She’d be home to see her folks one of these days, but I shouldn’t hold my breath! She sent love to Etienne. No love for the Lizard, just a quick xo.

  And a P.S.: Carter said hello.

  SYLPHIDE RETURNED THE following fall to choreograph a new production of her Madame Curie for the American Ballet Theater. I saw that in the Times, but not until the day after she and her new husband and Vlad Markusak and three society ladies appeared for dinner at the restaurant. I emerged from the kitchen mid-meal, shook everyone’s hand, kissed the women’s cheeks, my heart pounding, everything else sinking. I resigned myself, welcomed Mr. Tancredi with warm smiles, real smiles. He seemed like a good guy, seventy if he was a day. Daniel, they called him.

  The two of them were High Side for the next several months (you were never at the High Side, you were simply High Side). They only invited me to the biggest parties, parties too big for me to do anything but shake Sylphide’s hand and lean down to kiss her ear in a receiving line. At a soiree for her foundation I waited almost an hour, got to study her as she posed a couple of risers up on the grand stairway, finally had my moment, kiss-kiss. Anyone watching would have thought she didn’t know me, that she only greeted a fading sports figure, the up-and-coming restaurateur, but they couldn’t see how I slipped the speckled stone into the bodice of her tight, strapless dress, couldn’t feel how she let my fingers linger a moment against her breast, couldn’t hear when she whispered my name in my ear, and then a familiar Norwegian phrase, something from our time together, something we’d said over and over again, something a little shy of love, which was how she wanted it: jeg ar ohso glad i deg—“I am so very fond of you.”

  ANOTHER YEAR PASSED, and another, Restaurant Firfisle more an avalanche than a runaway train, a cavalcade of employees and regular customers, contractors making improvements, a thoroughgoing patio under a downpour-proof awning, a dock off the seawall to rece
ive guests arriving on boats, attractive to Jack and Kate, who began to visit monthly, a great relief: my sister was back, calm and rather neutral, effects of new meds, but really herself, Jack back on his game, as well, cruising toward retirement.

  I saw in Sports Illustrated that Emily Bright and Carter Jeffries had been wed in Miami, photos of their Cadillac procession to Dolphins Stadium, bride and groom standing up out of limo sunroof, double thrust of the knife of regret.

  And shortly thereafter, Desmond wrote to say he was ill, an extended battle with HIV. Just a few months later, I spotted his obituary in the local paper, a short column: born and raised in Dorcester, Massachusetts, the rough side of Boston, employed by Sylphide, survived by his mother and eleven siblings.

  His sad death explains why the note (I’ve still got it) is the only one I ever got from Sylphide in her own handwriting, an aspect of her personality I’d never seen, a tiny semi-script full of spelling errors. She’d never done school English, barely done school at all. What’s not explained is how the note in its gold-piped envelope got into my front pants pocket one day, to be discovered when I was at work. She certainly wasn’t in Westport. Time magazine, in fact, reported that she was taking a long-delayed honeymoon month at the Swiss-alpine estates of Daniel Tancredi, after which they’d begin their very public move to London and her directorship of the Royal Ballet.

  I waited till I was home at the kitchen table to open the stiff envelope, pulled out the stiffer card. Of course the lump tucked in the fold was the speckled stone. Which fell out and bounced off my lap and onto the floor, skittering. I recovered it, dropped it again, recovered it, clutched it too tightly, dropped it yet again, left it there for what would be several hours, let myself read, my hands trembling: