Life Among Giants (13 page)

I stared at my French homework for an hour, gave up. I was onto a secret: Dad was in desperate need of money. I had an idea, a way to make some, and quickly. Flush with my inspiration, I wrote a neat note to our neighbor:

Tenke, hello. Not like Katy's job, but I would like to ask if there is any work for me over there? I can help mow and I fix things very well and paint or shovel snow, things like that, really anything at all. I don't have a car, so working so close to home would work out well for me. After school and on weekends. Not expensive.

Nothing more than a job application when you thought about it. Sealing it in an envelope made it safer. I tucked it in my shirt, slipped downstairs and out the back door (Dad preoccupied at the fireplace, putting a match to his trash pile), silently jogged over to the High Side, slipped my missive under the great doors. Sylphide's kisses, Emily's, my head swirling with confusion: these women. A few minutes later I was home in my own backyard, lurking—I could see that Dad had moved into the kitchen, and I didn't want to have to explain myself. But then, oddest thing, he slid the patio door open, hurried out into the night carrying a big manila envelope. He didn't look around, certainly didn't see me, hurried down to our rowboat, crossed the pond with efficient strokes, trundled up the long hill to the High Side.

We were both back in our rooms when Mom got home from her tennis match. I could hear Dad murmuring, heard the tone of her answers: they were talking about money.
Th
e situation was extreme. But Mom had lost the usual advantage because of her mistake with Kate: she could hardly call him out for his money troubles after what she'd done.
Th
ey were going to have to cooperate.

Late, I heard them making love, closed my door tight.

T
H
E NEXT MORNING,
Emily wasn't in school. I went to the principal's office at the appointed time, no sign of Nussbaum, either. I told Mr. Demeter exactly what had happened between Mark and me. He nodded fondly, no love lost on my brash classmate, nothing but trust for me. He said, “Of course, David. And since it's his complaint, and with your permission, we can let it drop. He's got enough trouble at home, believe me.”

“I agree, sir. And I can take care of myself, sir. But the person with the real complaint is Emily Bright.” I rushed into his confidence: “He forced himself on her.”

“Sexually, you mean.”

“I guess, yes.”

“Well, that's a horse of a different color, David.
Th
at's serious stuff. I'll have to have a word with our man.”

Whoa. “I'm not so sure about that, sir.”

“Worried about Emily's honor, are we? Trust me, I'll treat the matter delicately.”

Th
e next day, I waited till I was late for homeroom, then till I had
missed
homeroom (and had to go to Mr. Demeter's office for a blue slip, he kindly as ever), but Emily didn't turn up. It wasn't like I could phone her, not in those days, when phone calls were practically dates.
Th
en, oddly, she was in math class, something different about her. Clothes, for one thing—she looked like a church girl, all in yellow with bows in her hair. Aloof, for another: she didn't so much as raise her hooded eyes to greet me. I hooked my feet in the rungs of her chair, lifted her off the ground, but she didn't even turn, made herself heavy. At the bell she hurried out of the room, pointedly avoiding me.

She didn't turn up at the Rocks (I'd made big plans for the Rocks, had a blanket in my gym bag), and then she wasn't in the senior parking lot after school. Wednesday she was even more elusive. I spotted her near her locker after lunch, but she skipped math altogether. It was
Th
ursday before I finally cornered her against the retaining wall, having spied her at the bus line. She couldn't hold my eye, and I noticed again that she was wearing someone else's clothes, a cable-knit sweater, white Dacron pants you could only call slacks, hideous. Plus her hair was out, carefully brushed, long down to her elbows, glossy black. She'd even been forbidden her signature braid! In place of her sandals, sensible pumps and Pedi-Sox. And, the ultimate indignity, there she was waiting for the bus: her BMW had been taken away.

“I'm grounded,” she said flatly, and would say no more.

W
HEN I GOT
home there was a note taped to the front door, definitely not Desmond's writing, no scent of jasmine, embossed
HIGH SIDE,
a maid's handwriting perhaps, anyway, feminine: “Sylphide would like you to know she's in Europe these coming weeks. Meantime, your note about work has been placed on the desk of her manager, Conrad Pant, and a copy forwarded.”

Th
at was one efficient household.

6

What had happened to our nice, normal family? Kate at college, swell, but living with her professor and a near-priceless Bonnard liberated from the home of the greatest dancer on earth. Mom, well, she'd been in the dark about all that, still moped about her treatment over a silly football game, spent her time with ladies who had better things to do: tennis and martinis. Dad was still taking the bus with me, still liked to give me a hard time, though he was the one sneaking off to the High Side with his big manila envelopes, no one home over there but the watchman and a skeleton staff: Sylphide and her retinue and her retinue's retinue were overseas.

I've long since lost the photo I'd clipped from the
Times,
but the image remains fixed in my memory: the ballerina poised and pleasant, Linsey wide-eyed just behind her, Georges Whiteside slouching in the background, Queen Elizabeth II beaming—a posthumous knighthood for Dabney Stryker-Stewart. I started to call my sister Lady Kate, though not to her face, and not around my folks, not aloud at all.

R
ANDOMLY ON A
Monday night after Dabney's elevation, the lights came back on at the High Side. I mean all of the lights. By the next afternoon, exotic cars were parked helter-skelter like boats off their moorings, in the driveways, on the lawn, wherever they'd been left. Huge trucks pulled in and out of the service road unloading mysterious crates and pallets back by the garages.
Th
e Bentley came and went, came and went, ferrying arrivals from the train station. I heard guitars tuning up, a loud P.A. system being tested. My mother perked her ears as I did.

“We'll be invited for the party,” she said.

I was hard on her: “Yes, you and me and Kate.”

“Certainly we won't tell Kate!”

And of course there were things Kate and I wouldn't tell Mom.

And things Kate wasn't telling anyone.

Mr. Demeter, our noble principal, came to the door of my history class that Wednesday, interrupting Miss Butterman so that Dr. Chun could present me with a letter—that gorgeous note paper, the intoxicating scent of jasmine, Desmond the butler's handwriting, his sense of humor, too, no attempt to sound like the ballerina, small words:

GET YER HUNKY BUTT OVER HERE

I was being summoned. Always one for the arts, Mr. Demeter formally excused Linsey and me, and Dr. Chun drove us to the High Side. Desmond at the door gazed up into my eyes.

I took advantage: “So. You knew all about Dabney and Kate.”

“Sir, I know only that you are expected in the ballroom immediately.”

“What about my dad's shoes?”

His gaze fell to my belly. “
Th
e shoes didn't match, sir. Very close, sir. As it turned out, sir. But not a match. And I know nothing about any stolen paintings. So don't ask me about that, sir.”

“Sir yourself,” I said. “Who said anything about paintings?”

He said, “I, sir. It was I who said it. May I just . . . Sir, may I punch you in the stomach?”

I lifted my T-shirt for him, and he took a shot, bam.

“Ouch,” I said, to please him.

“Like cement,” he said.

I raised the shirt a little higher. “Kate and Dabney,” I said.

“
Th
e poolhouse,” he said. “
Th
at was their domain.
Th
e old carriage house.”

“And my father,” I said. “Did my father know?”

He gazed at my belly. “I've made you pink,” he said.

“Did Nicholas know?”

“No sir, no. A great effort, in fact, was mounted that he should not.”

“Does he know now?”

“You will have to ask him.”

I dropped my shirt. A harried man wearing a black beret burst into the foyer as if from another dimension—there were a lot of doors leading in and out of there, several under the stairway.

“Perhaps sometime you and I could box,” Desmond said. “You might be surprised at my prowess.”

“Ha,” I said.

Desmond hurried: “Your father was banned. By Sylphide. He isn't welcome here and has not been since Mr. Stryker-Stewart's death.”

Th
e beret man was Conrad Pant. His handshake was a slice of pressed turkey, limp and cold. Desmond introduced me as Sylphide's new executive assistant. I mouthed the title back to him. He didn't seem to be kidding. Pant looked up at me with huge disdain, bid me follow, led me at warp speed to the Chlorine Baron's old ballroom, which I'd seen only in my imagination—Kate's stories—a startling, ornate cavern the size of a school gym but with mirrors and barres installed on two long walls, chandeliers hanging from gilded plaster escutcheons, high-arched doorways, no windows, stage lights on a retractable rigging of pipes and cables, a convertible theater. My guide looked me over once more, sneered and stormed off, leaving me in the midst of a careless understory of music stands, instrument cases, duffel bags—people, too, all haphazard, apparently on some kind of break: dancers stretching, musicians chatting and running licks, a dark-skinned techie in dreads measuring the floor and laying out precise lines in black gaffer's tape.

I kept wondering: How did Dad's actual shoes not match his actual footprints in the actual High Side parlor? Had he been there with Kate or not?

Shortly, Georges slipped in without a look in anyone's direction, sat at the biggest piano, slumped and stared lugubriously, his satyr's earring glinting in the light tests. One of the female dancers—a plump woman with a strange, long face—showed the others a step on flat feet, and then they all tried it, laughing. Vlad Markusak came in from the patio—the Cavalier himself, dressed in tights that showed his bozzer quite plainly, no shirt, no shoes.

A suite of teenage girls flounced into the hall from the double doors at the back, all in tights and bare feet after the day's classes.
Th
ey saw Vlad and flew to gather around him. He bussed their cheeks, both sides, each girl, lifting them up at the waists to his height, enormous strength, perfect control. I thought of the driveway full of cars. Hard to imagine any of these people getting on a train or driving—more likely they had drifted in on currents of air like spiders casting silk.

Suddenly Conrad was back, vast shift in attitude. Clearly he'd been yelled at. “It's Lizard, then,” he said, all transparent. “Let me apologize for my earlier greeting. You just seemed so young. Like a newborn calf, no offense. A wet, enormous, staring, stupid, mucous-covered newborn calf, for which image I apologize. Here's what's going on: Sylphide is forming a new company, ongoing auditions, old friends, lots of the folks you see here, plenty of new young dancers. Youth the watchword, eh? She's determined to mount Dabney's benefit, the one he always waxed on about, dance performances in the form of rock concerts, untold millions for Children of War. All right? Of course she's going to ruin her reputation and mine in the process, but there you go.”

“A mucous-covered wet calf,” I said, impressed.

“You and I, we're going to get along fine,” Conrad said.

Children of War was Dabney's foundation, everyone knew, a big part of why he'd been knighted, funded by the robust proceeds of his most remarkable album,
Children of War,
every song a hit, all those kids' voices. He himself had traveled to places like Borneo and Laos and Colombia—and of course Vietnam—always at great personal risk, supposedly, went wherever the wars were, free concerts, meetings with world leaders, visits to schools and hospitals, the fierce media focus he brought to bear like sunshine.

Pant said, “
Th
e lady's got commitments from all of Dabney's old friends, and we're gathering new commitments every day, concerts around the world. Listen to this: Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Grace Slick, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Page, all the Beatles but McCartney, Mick Jagger.
Th
ey all want to be involved, which means everyone else wants to be, a whole new audience for Sylphide and her dancers, of course.” Apparently her plan for the New York engagement (“I have stopped arguing,” Conrad said) was to go up against every Christmas event—
Nutcracker
and Rockettes and
Messiah,
all that stuff rock fans didn't care about, all the stuff ballet fans did, and sell out a week or ten days of shows, every night different.

“Whoa,” I said.

“And as Sylphide's executive assistant, you are going to help make it happen.”

“I don't know what to say.”

“Good. Don't say anything. What we need now is a theater. Two thousand seats give or take.” He handed me a neatly typed sheet of addresses, phone numbers. “You're going to call these people, explain what we're doing, drop all the names I've been dropping, and make appointments. Be snooty, lord it up. You're somebody, now. You're Dabney Stryker-Stewart and Sylphide put together, with all their clout behind you. Tenke said she'd be down in a minute to show you to a phone.”

I fingered the smooth stone in my pocket, lurked and watched the action, considered my father's shoes.

W
HEN
S
YLPHIDE FINALLY
appeared, she flew right at me, grabbed me by the hand, full speed to the kitchen, where several cooks were at work in front of the famous Victor range. I thought I'd be getting a snack, but no: she pulled me into the pantry, of all places, vortexed me up a spiral staircase into a storage loft, lots of empty boxes. She slid a secret panel aside as if it were nothing strange, pulled me into a dark passageway and to another panel, which she slid aside with a flood of light: a sudden, sumptuous dressing room, no windows, no obvious doors, just rows of hangers heavy with costumes, ceiling so low I couldn't stand straight.

“My office,” she said. And indeed under piles of clothes and torn envelopes and note cards and books and polished rocks and seashells there was a huge old oaken eminence, like a dance floor with drawers. She pushed some papers aside so I could sit, tossed a bralike thing to a waiting chair, gave me a shove.

I felt a strong sensation of falling toward her, when in fact I was falling away, sat on the desk. “How was London?” I said to save myself.

She put long fingers to my lips, stood between my legs, hands on my thighs, continued to hold my eye. “London was lovely,” she said, leaning close, then closer, levitating somehow (going up on her toes no doubt), kissed my forehead, kissed my mouth. Before I could respond, something came visibly over her, some air of gravity. She backed away, became a businessperson, calm and articulate: “Now, let us get to work. Conrad has filled you in,
ja
? You have got the list? I am finding the phone.”

She drifted to a buried dresser, stripped out of her sweatpants and leotard. Naked, she found a sheer kind of frock in a drawer, held it up to herself, slowly put it on. Trick of the light, you could still see her body. She seemed muscular to me, not perfectly attractive.
Th
e phone was on the floor. She dug it out, bending from the waist. I watched every movement from the very edge of my vision, every inch of her legs.

“I should not kiss you so,” she said abstracted.

“It's okay,” I said.

“Good boys cannot live in my world.”

“Good boys could try.”

“Just something to keep in mind: Good boys
cannot.
”

“So Georges is not a good boy?”

Th
at got her attention. She stood and faced me, said, “He is teaching me some little yummy somethings. But he is a troll, not a good boy at all. He should be living under a wooden bridge in a swamp somewhere nasty, with fog and mold and Spanish moss.”

“He's incredible, really. At piano, I mean.”

“Oh, he is incredible,
ja.
Dabney was being very, very fond of him.” She poked her chin at me, a pointed thing. A lick of pink fire had risen up from the collar of her frock into her neck—I wanted to put my hand there, or anywhere. She found a slight pair of underpants in her drawer, pulled them on under the shift with no particular modesty, someone used to dressing in front of others.

She caught me looking. “Oh, Lizard,” she said. “I have not had a normal life. I am emotionally stump-ted.”

“Stunted?”

“
Ja
-
ja,
that's so.”

I gathered my thoughts, a vision of her through binoculars, said, “I don't think I know what that means, emotionally stunted. Or anyway, it doesn't sound true. I mean, you seem pretty grown-up to me.”

“Did you want to know something? Georges is my first lover. And you, you are the first man I ever kissed.”

“Just that thing in your car?
Th
at's what you're talking about?”

“And just now, ungrateful you.
Th
e first,
ja.
I can't stop thinking of it.”