Life Among Giants (26 page)

“
Th
ey are very fine,
ja?
Dabney always said so.” She smiled slowly, seemed suddenly to notice what her fingers had been doing, quit with the nipple, pulled the little sweater thing tighter around her shoulders. She looked at me such a long time, like maybe a real answer was forming, something direct about the magic she'd used to get me into that tree fort.

I must have looked away, looked at the phone.

“You want to make calls,” she said.

“Conrad wants me to. Or asked me to. Told me to.”

“And do you work for Conrad?”

“No, I work for you. A theater for you.”

“I am working on a dance,” she said. “But Vlad is in Houston. Always in demand, our Mr. Markusak. I'm needing a stand-in. Someone tall.” She slid off the arm of my chair, floated to the open door, disappeared. I understood that I was to follow, trailed her through the parlor with its missing Bonnard and Picassos and into the foyer and up the grand stone stairs to her suite, glimpse of the famous bed, then leftwards through another little parlor and then a tiny kitchen, through a tiny maidservant's room with single bed tightly made, finally through a long room with a lap pool, a luxury I'd never heard of, a single long lane in crystal blue, then out the far door into a large dance studio with its own piano and mirrors and barres and perfect shiny wood floor, pretty view out across the side yard I'd just been looking at, the endless High Side grounds.

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: “
Th
e 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?
Th
e plants blooming in the ruins,
ja?
Overcoming disaster with love.
Th
at is how he is talking.
Th
at is how he is thinking.
Th
at 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.
Th
is 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.

Th
e 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.
Th
e 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.
Th
en 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.
Th
e 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.

Th
e 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.