Life Among Giants (11 page)

“How was the locker room?” she said to my mouth. “All the victors having sex?”

We laughed at that, millimeters apart, and then I tried again, ducking in just as Emily did, our teeth clacking together. She cocked her head and we tried yet again, the thing suddenly working: we were sharing a kiss, a long, plain kiss, sharing a kiss through several bars of the fight songs and loud laments erupting all around us, kissing, Emily and I, a long, plain kiss.

O
N THE
M
ERRITT
Parkway in the increasing dark I studied every ornate bridge, every brutal abutment. Mom had crashed immediately, Linsey, too, his breath at my neck where I wished Emily's would be. But Emily was talking with Sylphide.

Who said, “I am knowing who your teachers are, dear.
Th
ey do talk about their better students.” Her accent, often barely noticeable, had grown thicker with weariness. “Come dancing for me one afternoon,” she said.

I turned as subtly as I could.
Th
e two dancers were snuggled face to face on the big seat. By way of answer, Emily imitated her father, Sergeant Bright—crisp, polished English over subtle Afro-American and military accents: “I'm to
finish
school and go
on
to conservatory and when I am
done
with that and I have
reached
my majority I can
start
to think about a pro
fess
ional life in
dance
if
such
a life still holds
interest.
”

“Oh, fathers,” said Sylphide. “What could be more simple?”

“Well, it's my mother.” Emily turned all Korean: “Dancer? Why dancer? Isn't it better to be doctor in audience?
Th
at way you can enjoy dance! So much less to suffer!”

Th
ey laughed, whispered more intimately. I felt I was losing them both.

But very soon we were in Emily's driveway. Very soon Dr. Chun was opening her door for her. Very soon again she was shaking my hand for her parents' benefit (their heads visible in an upstairs window), meaningful pressure in her fingers, a new light in her eyes.

A
T OUR HOUSE
Mom climbed out with Dr. Chun's help, deflated and miserable, her betrayal of Katy like a stone tied around her neck. Dr. Chun walked her to our front door—she needed his arm. I climbed out of the Bentley only slowly. Linsey was still snoring (impossible to wake him up, I knew; Dr. Chun would have to carry him when they got home). I walked around the beautiful car's sculpted, massive hood, leaned in the open rear door to say good-bye to Sylphide. She muttered something about Emily.

“Pardon?” I said leaning closer.

She leaned closer, too. I felt the heat of her, smelled jasmine. Repeating, she said, “Emily, she's a star.”

“I think so, too,” I said.

“So I am teaching you to kiss.” And abruptly she leaned and put her lips on mine. She pressed hard and plain a moment as Emily had, then something different: she actually kissed me, kissed me twice, three times, put a hand on my neck, drew me even closer, pulled me off balance, hungry sounds, kissed me a fourth time and a fifth, touched my teeth with her tongue, a kind of request, showed me some things about tongues, finally caught my lip in her own teeth, pulled away.

“
Whoa,”
I said.

Linsey grunted in his sleep.

“First lesson,” Sylphide said all sultry. “Not being made of wood
.
” And after another long and soulful kiss, timed perfectly to beat the return of Dr. Chun (or more likely it was
his
discreet timing), she shooed me out of the Bentley.

Undressing that night I found a little smooth stone in the back pocket of my blue jeans. I didn't remember the dancer's hand on my butt, but then again I did. A beautiful polished stone, flat and speckled, vague shape of a heart, just an inch or so across, weighty, cool, very smooth, greenish, heavy with meaning unclear.

O
NE FIVE A.M.
not a week later, Dad woke me. “You've got to get Crazy May on the phone,” he said, clearly panicked. Crazy May was his affectionate name for Kate.
Th
e original May had been one of my father's seven aunts, a woman who'd ended life a suicide, as had my father's father. And Dad practically pulled me down the stairs, gave me no time to clear my head, dialed the phone, thrust it at me. Katy was his girl, and he couldn't live without her, couldn't forgive Mom and me for pushing her away: “Gotta get her, Son.”

What a surprise when Katy-cakes answered.

Her tone was false: “Oh,
David,
it's been so
long.
Where have you guys
been
? I call and
call
.” You could make claims like that in the era before answering machines, but I knew from her voice that she hadn't tried, not once.

I said, “What are you doing up at five-thirty?”

“Tennis, Captain. How about you?”

“Dad got me up.”

“Good old Dad. Is he the best you can do for a conscience?”

With Dad listening I couldn't take that on, had to skip ahead several moves: “I'm sorry about the Princeton game. I wasn't thinking.”

Almost warmly: “Well, no, Mom was thinking for you.”

“Kate, Katy, what is it between you and Sylphide?”

Dad waved his hands: Jesus, don't ask that!

And he was right: Kate hung up, bang in my ear.

For my father's benefit, and to prove him wrong, if only to himself, I kept going, pretended to converse the full three minutes, an apostrophe full of the kind of lies that make up the story every family tells itself. Dad listened closely, nodded his head whenever I offered a positive note, starting with how sad Sylphide had seemed about the encounter at Yale, and how sad Katy herself must be about the whole thing, the “whole thing” being her falling out with the dancer, which I said must of course have been precipitated by Dabney's death, and that I didn't mean to excuse Sylphide for what must have been just
terrible
treatment of Katy, but hadn't all that been about the dancer's being in mourning? In shock? At any rate, whatever had happened between them surely wasn't Katy's fault.

My father nodded vigorously.

So I added some more about how sorry Mom was about being so insensitive, so
intrusive
(Katy's favorite descriptor for the old lady), how sorry I was to be an accomplice.
Th
e sands of time were running out, so after pretending to listen a moment, I added a final, more cheerful note: my coming year at Princeton! We'd both be college kids!

Dad pointed urgently at the timer.

Happy to oblige, I said good-bye to no one, put down the receiver quietly, and pushed past Dad to get my filthy self in the shower, where I stood till the hot ran out. Afterwards, I dressed in a fury, made a violent breakfast, a full dozen eggs well scrambled. Mom and Dad and I ate in silence, looking three directions at once: our theories of Katy didn't quite mesh.

Th
en it was time to walk with Dad to the bus stop. Because, embarrassingly, ever since the Blue 'Bu had been stolen, he'd been getting on the school bus with me, eccentric man, riding as far as the Post Road, walking from there to the station. Who had money for taxis? He didn't have friends to drive him around like Mom did! He was a hit on the bus, playing high school kid for laughs. He called it father-son time, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, walked along with me to the end of our street, waited there at my bus stop in the fall sunshine, talking investments: “Open-optioned, pre-treaty Carter-Jackson third-world cash markets,” for example, arcane stuff at a mile a minute, apparently practicing for his day working phones in the office, possibly making it all up.

And talking Kate: “I wish she'd find a major. She says maybe philosophy, but I don't believe her. Ancient Greek? What are you going to do with that?”

“When do you ever talk to Kate?”

“Whenever I fucking want, Chief.”

Dad did not normally curse. I could feel something quaking inside him; the very air between us seemed to vibrate with his emotion. I thought of that wrong-way train ride.
Ask
Daddy
what's going on.
He'd been coming home from work angry and mussed, unlike him, making big drinks, gargling them down (he'd been a teetotaler in younger years), accusing my mother of
pitying
him, of all things, strange battles. “You think I'm too much of a
sad sack
to make a
living
for this family?” Mom had broken Kate's heart, is how Dad put it, had put Kate in a compromising position. She'd set Kate up! I'd piped up during a severe altercation, taking the blame for the Princeton–Yale day (and meaning it: it was indeed all my fault, and what could be plainer?), saying that he was right, that Kate had been treated unfairly. Dad had turned on me, redoubled rage, pressed his chest against my belly, grabbed at my biceps, looked up at my chin, said, “
Kate?
What did you do to deserve
Kate
! I could fill one of Kate's oldest, smelliest sneakers with ten thousand of you and still have room for her
foot
!”

In a teenage word: weird.

After a long, sun-shot pause at the bus stop, maybe thinking I was changing the subject, I said, “What really happened to that briefcase of yours?”

You could practically see the insults making their way up from his bashed adrenals, through his throat, to his lips. But he held back, held back in the very sweet breeze, tapped his foot to a stop, rolled his neck. “I lost the briefcase on the train,” he said firmly.

Th
e bus came. I sat in the front seat Dad and I had been claiming, but he kept going, all the way to the back, sat with Fritzy Blatz the motorcycle kid (who was off his wheels and on parole, thus the bus). Weird again. He didn't say a word to me as he disembarked on the Post Road, nothing but a friendly thanks to Mr. Davis, our driver. And then he trundled south toward the station, a triumphant look on his face. His posture gave him away though: hunched and beaten.

S
ATURDAY—A FOOTBALL DAY,
so what—I got on a train to New Haven, not a word to my folks. I sprinted through that broken little city, found my way to Katy's college, quizzed everyone I saw, finally got the word: Kate had been staying with Professor Cross, Jack Cross himself, the author of
Everyday Joy,
a book I knew well from sardonic discussions with Kelly Fenimore (who'd reviewed it for the school paper), a classic of hippie thought, or, more charitably, an application of world philosophy to contemporary life, and such a huge bestseller that even Johnny Carson made fun of it on the
Tonight Show.
I'd actually read parts of it—Mom had bought it years before—a whole chapter on ecstasy, which was largely about sex and which I'd managed despite arcane language to jerk off to. Easy enough to find his offices, get his home address from a secretary: Drixel Point Road in Madison, just a few exits east on the Turnpike, a decommissioned church out on Long Island Sound.

Two rides hitchhiking and then a four- or five-mile sprint out to Drixel Point, the secretary's crude map in hand. I stood at the old church doors a long time cooling off, finally knocked, knocked louder. Shortly a tallish, well-tanned gentleman in a towel answered the door, his hair dripping, chest sunken and overly hairy, great handsome sculpture of a nose, which he turned up at me.

“Well,” he said, unswayed by my smile, his thoughts on his face: Who the fuck was this? Boyfriend? Seeker? Reporter for the
Yale Bulldog
?

Th
en Katy appeared, wrapped in a thick leopard-print robe, looking bewildered, very tan and taut, hair in damp strings. “It's my brother,” she said.

Her professor put a hand on her shoulder, claiming her.
Th
ey'd just gotten out of the shower, I realized. Everyday joy, all right. I was shocked and proud and titillated in equal measure. Professor Cross gave me a frank look. “Come in,” he said.

I waited in the living room while they got dressed upstairs.
Th
is took a long time, the two of them discussing what to do about me: he said have me to dinner, she said no, rustle of robes and towels, noises of emotional kissing, maybe more going on.
Th
e stairwell was big and open and the sound just carried right down. I didn't completely mind hearing the talk, since the truth was useful, but didn't want to embarrass them or myself. I got up quietly and walked through the blue-and-white beautiful kitchen and out onto the rocks over the inlet, a battlement of distorted cedars, the tide coming into the river in bright sunlight. I saw a striped bass jump, then another, saw a big trawler coming in, the drawbridge opening to allow it, horns and whistles, Sylphide's kiss, Emily's, the passage of time, something close to an hour, all chilly without my coat.