Life Among Giants (8 page)

Mom worked to layer a look of pride over her frustration: I'd hogged our host just as Kate had done.

“We were
very
fond of her,” said the dancer, no trace of irony, and taking my mother's arm as the Chopin began once again.

“Fond as soda pop,” said my mother, ambiguous as always.
Th
e two of them sat close in the Queen Anne chairs, finally the intimate chat my mother had dreamed of.

“ ‘Let's not be talking of Kate,' ” I said unheard, almost happy to know that my sister and Sylphide had had some kind of falling out, that there really had been rancor between them and not only Kate's delusions. I slipped over near the piano and watched Georges closely, that famous craggy face, that rheumy gaze, the expressive hands, the presence of genius. Noticing me he bent harder to the keys, played with selfless attention, pure emotion: his heart had been broken, too.

M
ARK
N
USSBAUM'S LITTLE
friend Dwight rushed up to me as I ducked off the ignominious school bus. I mean, Dwight Leonard
charged
up to me like a hobbit, pimples first.

“Mark fucked up!” he hissed.

Emily!

I hustled to the student parking lot, found her slumped over the steering wheel of her nice little car, a boxy BMW her father's employer had loaned her as a reward for good grades. I waited till she'd finished crying, tapped on her window.

She turned angrily to see who, wiped at her eyes. I pointed at my wrist: time for homeroom. She shook her head, looked bitten. I twirled my fist to say
open the window.
But no.

Later I looked for her in the lunchroom, scanned the crowd. I could have any girl in that school, my mother was fond of saying.
Th
ere was Patty DeMarco, her miniskirt rolled high at the waist to make it crotch-shot short for lunchtime. She'd given me half a hand job on a blind date back when she first came to town from the Bronx, ninth grade. I say half because I'd stopped her—some kind of embarrassment that I mistook for chivalry. I should have been nicer to her, after, but didn't know any better. Kelly Fenimore read a thick book at the dark end of the room. She was editor of the school paper, lab-beaker glasses, cutting wit, prim cardigan, ruffled blouse, breasts straining at the thin material like repressed thoughts. And Teensy Bowman, whom I'd kissed just once, back behind the YMCA after a dance in seventh grade, her shocking thick tongue. And Ally Mott, chubby Ally, whose pants I'd managed to unbutton in a make-out session freshman year, an après-school pool party, further moves thwarted by her cheerful, expert hands: she'd had a million boyfriends. And over there Petra Johanssen, the exchange student from Denmark, known to be dating some old-guy businessman from Greenwich, but always flirtatious with me, terrifying beauty, no known hobbies. All of them tomatoes, as my father would say. Why did I bother with Emily Bright, who wanted nothing to do with me?

I skipped out of the lunch line, trotted the long way around the school buildings to the student lot, found the girl back in her car—if she'd ever left—knuckles in her mouth. Again the faked smile. She rolled down her window, said, “I should have gone with you to tea.”

Long pause as I groped for something to say: “Well. You had a date.”

“Some date.”

I let that sink in. “I don't see Mark around today.”

“Mark is a little fucking prick.”

Th
e mouth on her! She opened her door hard into my knees, climbed out, a complicated unfolding of legs, perfect posture, none of the self-love of the football girls. Her dress that day was a gray-brown fuzzy thing like a pelt, unflattering, telling: it was the same garment she'd worn the day before. She noticed me looking, tugged at the hem.

“Want to take a lap?” I said.
Th
at was Staples High lingo for a stroll around the perimeter of the campus, not strictly off limits, yet suggestive—pot smokers took laps; class skippers took laps; lovers took laps.

“No,” Emily said. But she began to walk.

Come spring, the lunchtime lawns and playing fields would be covered with kids again, but that day the air was crisp and almost cold, and Emily and I were alone out there except for Jerry Dice (a likable kid with rough edges, always getting picked up by the cops for small infractions like loitering and shoplifting) and Jerry DeMarco (one of Patty's twelve brothers, a striving second-stringer on the football team), the two of them throwing a Frisbee. Emily hurried along, led me to a big ornamental boulder under cherry trees. We climbed it backwards together, an awkward process of shifting our butts up onto the high surface of the massive, cold thing, the shape of the rock putting us hip to hip in the end. I felt the bones of her.

“I hate fall,” she said.

“I like the leaves,” I said.

“Disgusting,” she said, “everything dead and blowing around!” And then without transition, and apropos nothing obvious, she said, “My grandmother was a holy roller, like, a Jehovah's Witness. Door to door and everything, and Daddy did that, too, but he rejected the whole thing when he went into the army, duty and honor. Now his religion is, like, groundskeeping and landscaping and ass-kissing. My mother is Buddhist—that you can't reject, you know, it's a mindset. She accepts my father's suffering.
Th
at's a joke, Lizard, don't be so serious. But she's Korean, too—no way she'll accept her own suffering. You're allowed to smile. I've got guilt from all sides, Buddhist guilt, Jehovah's Witness guilt, Korean guilt, Afro-American guilt.
Th
ey're all a little different, so you never get a break, shame from all sides. I assume you're some kind of smug Protestant?”

“Guilty,” I said.

Emily gave me a brief, pained smile, looked out across the lawns to the playing fields, disgusting leaves cartwheeling nowhere in the chill breeze. I felt the increasing warmth of her thigh. Sylphide's pale green eyes came to mind unbidden, vivid, as if she were spying on us.
Th
e two Jerrys ran through the cherry trees in front of us with loud shouts of greeting and long looks: What were we up to?

I waved, not Emily.

Same tone, she said, “My parents were away to see Chuck. He had some kind of ceremony at the academy.” Chuck was her older brother, as I well knew, a West Point cadet. She pulled her braid around in front of her, turned it in her hands atop her thick dress. Her neck was marked by seven or eight hickies just shades darker than her skin. She meant me to see them, obviously, a kind of confession. She blurted the rest: “So I stayed over at Mark's.
Th
at was our plan. I don't know what I was thinking. He was awful. He promised dinner. Vodka and orange juice.
Th
at was it. A few kisses and he's out to here, Lizard.” Graphic hand gesture. “He ripped my dress.” Briefly, she showed me a torn seam at her shoulder, then pointed out the safety pins she'd installed all the way down to her waist, glimpse of exposed skin in the breach, another hickey at her hip. She said, “I suppose it was all a lot of fun.”

Th
e first bell rang. I felt a surge of violence. I would have liked to have been there to pull him off her. But I felt tender, too: Emily had picked me as her confidant.

She said, “I should have gone to tea with you, is what I'm saying. Do you think there will be more chances?”

I
N OUR OLD
stone house, in my bright room, in my large closet, there was
Th
e Dancer
cover to study. Out to here! I was. I saw masturbation as a weakness in those days of generalized adolescent guilt; it had to be all but accidental (awake from a dream in the night, or maybe rushing to dress before a tea party) for me to accede. And anyway, I wanted to be true to Emily. I put the album cover away, thumped downstairs, lifted the lids on all the pots, sniffed.

“What's got into you?” Mom said. “How'm I supposed to cook with you racketing around? Make yourself useful. You could finish those leaves, for one thing.”

In the backyard I found no surcease but pulled my scattered leaf pile and Dad's together with the biggest rake we had, urged them furiously to the Butt, set a match to the huge pyre they made, watched the flames, the ascendant sparks.
Th
e familiar smoky fragrance was comforting, but only barely.

At dinner, Dad had a long, not exactly funny story about something complex that had gone wrong at work, a package of documents mailed instead of messengered, a missed deadline, an unusually lucrative contract canceled, several mid-level execs called on the carpet by the nasty Mr. Perdhomme—Dad himself among them—all followed by a week of gloom around the office, rumors that his whole team might be demoted or even let go.
Th
en had come that day's news: the generous little firm that had canceled the contract—Tetron Mechanical—had been suddenly indicted as a Mafia money-laundering front, a long list of horrendous crimes, which Dad listed: “
Th
rew one guy off the Brooklyn Bridge, just an accountant at a bakery, this guy. And chained four guys from a ticket agency together and hung them off the scaffolding at a job site. Yeah, yeah, Tetron Mechanical! And apparently these guys are tied to the Dick Fortin thing!” Dick Fortin was a Westport lawyer, everyone knew: gentle, peaceable man, he'd been taken from his office in broad daylight by two men in fake police uniforms, never to be seen again. Any firms doing business with Tetron had been named in the court papers, and indictments were set to roll. “So me and my half-assed colleagues have accidentally saved Concept Credit Corporation!” Dad stilled called it Concept though the name had been changed to Dolus Investments some five years before, sore point with Mom, who made a face. “Mr. Perdhomme owes me big time!” At the thought of all the missed carnage he laughed, and listed a few more grisly crimes. Which somehow seemed very funny. At least Mom and I laughed as he told us.

“And yet until now you've said nothing to us,” Mom said, her laugh drying crisp.

And Dad said, “I wanted to spare you, is all.” His beard was coming in scruffy, well beyond the usual shadow. Had he failed to shave that morning?

“Dad,” I said. “Just tell us. What's going on?”

He said, “
Th
is is between your mom and me.”

“And between you and Kate?” I said bravely.

“Kate nothing,” he said.

“Honey,” my mother said to me, her hardest look: I was way off base.

And quickly the discussion excluded me, drifted far from any secrets Kate and Dad might have: Mom wasn't going to put up with his lies anymore! Dad was doing his dead-level best to make a living for all of us! Mom was sick unto death of his self-righteous rubbish! Why couldn't he be a man and stand up to Perdhomme! Dad didn't understand how Mom could be so ungrateful, all the slaving he did for our sakes! Mom was sick of his floundering, and
what kind of man put all his earthly wealth in a briefcase and left it on a train!
Th
at last sally marked a large escalation and the battle went thermonuclear, real shouting. Soon the dinner plates would be flying, if we had any left, these people who loved each other. I sauntered out into the living room, put on the TV—nothing but news—left it on loud and went to the front door to check the mail. No one had touched the pile. My heart pounded with the dark emotion of my parents' argument, the ugly picture of Mr. Perdhomme, all of that bile layered over dark visions of Emily and Mark. I thought a little desperately that maybe there'd be a
Life
magazine to look at before homework (a ton of math, a little Spanish). I seldom got actual mail. No
Life,
but under a grocery-store flyer there was a silver-piped envelope, fragrant, elegantly addressed to my mother. Sylphide!

I opened it carelessly—Mom had opened mine, after all—and read the note, breathing the fragrance as my mother shouted something to my father about
ineptitude,
and now, uh-oh, his haplessness,
haplessness!

Th
e butler's efficient, blocky handwriting, Sylphide's swooning scent:

Dear Mrs. Hochmeyer:
Th
ank you for your kind note.
Th
e answer is yes. Linsey and I will attend. And with your kind permission, the High Side will provide transportation and victuals for the Tailgating Picnic you describe so beautifully. We cannot wait for the game, and the chance to visit with Katy. And please let your Lizard know there is an eclipse of the full moon this very night at ten-fifteen, an excellent opportunity to try his new binoculars!

As if acting upon my own sudden flood of fury—Sylphide invited to
my
game at
Katy's
college behind both Katy's and my backs?— Dad stormed out of the house and shortly roared off in the Blue 'Bu. He wouldn't be home that night, I knew, might be gone for days. He'd take a late train into the city, which would force Mom to call a taxi to get to Westport Station in the morning if she wanted to use the car.