Life Among Giants (12 page)

Kate found me out there. She was flushed and mottled and freshly screwed in a blue, pale turtleneck and very much more beautiful than I recalled, hair more strawberry than I recalled, more reddish, even, with streaks darker, almost auburn, eyebrows dark, too, like Dad's I realized, busy eyebrows as she inspected my face in turn, finding Mom, no doubt: “You're forgiven.”

“
Th
anks Kate.”

“I know who engineered the whole thing. And I know it wasn't you.”

“At least Emily Bright was along.”

“You're dating Emily!”

“You made quite an impression.”

Glimmer of a smile: “No doubt. How's Mrs. double-martini handling the racial issue?”

“Is there a racial issue?”

Kate's eyebrows rose.

“Okay,” I said. “Dad calls her Negress. Mom's okay about her, I think.”

“Mom's okay about nothing,” Katy said.

We just looked at the ocean.
Th
e breeze was picking up, the tide turning. I said, “So . . .”

“So how did Tee-Tee like the game?”

“She said it was a dance.”

“Everything's a dance to her, Captain.”

And that was it for talk. Luckily there was a huge freighter out there to observe, luckily a dozen sailboats. What a beautiful place the professor had. I said so, maybe a touch clumsily.

Anyway, Kate took offense. “I'm always in a secret,” she said. She sat on the ground suddenly, stopped herself crying almost before she'd begun, put a finger to her nose, blew snot onto the lawn one nostril at a time, true tennis player. Bluntly she said, “Oh, David. One time years ago? Dabney tied my shoe. He bent down and tied my shoe in London. My Adidas clay shoes, you know, three green stripes.”

I put my hand on her back and watched the water and heard seagulls somewhere up in the sky behind us and sometime in the last four years the most famous rocker on earth had bent down and tied my sister's shoe. I understood the intimacy of that gesture, but somehow it didn't go with the tears and didn't seem much of a secret, what with Jack Cross a hundred yards away no doubt feeling pretty good. Now the tide was roaring in, filling the river's mouth, purple and red and yellow seaweed billowing in the current, mythic tresses.

And then suddenly, thick-headed jock, I figured out what anyone outside of me and Mom would have known years back, what Dad must have figured out at some mysterious point, what in hindsight seemed like the most obvious thing in the world, duh: my sister and Dabney Stryker-Stewart had been
lovers.

I
NDOORS A LITTLE
later, the famous Jack Cross and my big sister gave me a tour. Vast living room, partly sunken, once the church sanctuary, tall windows in rows on both sides, spectacular sunlight.
Th
e kitchen had been the choir loft, with new windows that saw the water and the twisted cedars we'd been standing among. And so forth, room by room, just magnificent, huge stone basement full of old tools, Jack's hobby next to boats. I was feeling suspicious of him, suspicious of everything in his house, like it was all just an elaborate seduction machine, well greased. He had a little office off the dining room, glowing marble sculpture in there (bright white, nude goddess), state-of-the-art IBM Selectric typewriter. He had a photo of himself younger with what looked like a Buddhist monk, the two of them trying not to grin.
Th
ree guest bedrooms upstairs had been Sunday school classrooms, very spare, almost no windows, nothing on the walls.
Th
e bathroom still had four sinks, four toilets, room for a whole seminar's worth of Yale girls to hose down before sex with Jack Cross.
Th
e enormous master bath had been a classroom, too, towel heaters, deep Jacuzzi, fixtures black, fittings gold.
Th
e master bedroom had been the chapel, stained glass surrounding an oval window to the Sound, rumpled round bed the size of a playground. Jack had probably already made a million on his book, and a million meant something in those days.

“Look,” Kate said.

I turned and at first didn't see it in its grandeur, but suddenly there it was: on the wall opposite the sea in an ornate frame hung a big painting, an exquisite orange view of a garden through a tall, mullioned window, light more real than light itself, visionary vernal palette, something imminent in the scene, something about to take place, a party perhaps, something consequential, transcendent.

“Bonnard,” Jack said grimly.

“It's mine,” Katy said, reading my face. “ ‘
Th
e Afternoon Meal.' Dabney bought it for me, and it's mine.”

Dad's boot prints in the High Side parlor!

“Where are the small paintings?” I said, maybe more accusingly than I wanted.

“What do you know about small paintings?” Kate shot back.

“You gave them to Daddy,” I said, everything coming suddenly clear.

“
Th
ey were Picassos,” she said. “And they were mine, too. We had to pay my tuition.”

“Please, let's not lie to absolutely everyone,” Jack said sharply. When he turned to me, I knew there was much more to the man than I'd thought, much more to his relationship with Katy than I'd thought. He'd already devoted himself to her: “We pay her tuition, Kate and I.
Th
ose paintings she gave your father were worth any number of dozens of Yale tuitions.
Th
e man came begging. Katy lent a hand.”

“Okay,” Kate said, something lifting off her. “Oh, David. I just wanted my painting back from the High Side.
Th
is one right here. I didn't care about the others. Dad helped me, and I helped him. I wouldn't call it begging.”

“
Th
e painting is hers,” Jack said, poor guy, caught between love and ethics. “I have the paperwork.
Th
ough the method of reacquisition may have left something to be desired.”

L
ATER,
J
ACK LOANED
me one of his cars, a black Volvo that had belonged to his deceased wife, slightly older model, but with fewer than eight thousand miles on it. Kate saw me off, showed me how to run the seat all the way back so I'd fit.

“
Th
e paintings are mine,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Dad just helped me.”

“Okay,” I said again.

“Sylphide doesn't think so, but they're mine.”

“Okay. I believe you. Kate, I believe you.”

“And don't tell Jack, but . . .”

“Uh-oh, Katy. Don't even tell me.”

“I think Daddy may have taken something else. A little gold bust. It wasn't mine. I just made the mistake of pointing it out. On a table in the foyer there. Okay, it was Sylphide's. It's of one of her famous dancers. I didn't
see
him take it. But that coat with the huge pockets? I just have the feeling. A souvenir. Heavy as shit.”

“Good old Dad,” I said.

She couldn't suppress a mirthful grin, the first I'd seen in ages. “His coat was clonking against everything. He was leaning to one side, I swear.”

I grinned, too, said, “It's good to see you happy.”

“Happy,” she said.

She pecked my cheek and I wore that little kiss all the way home to Westport in the nice new car.

5

I asked Emily to the Rocks for Friday lunch, a pretty daring suggestion, the Rocks being off school property and officially off-limits, deep in a private forest. Just my having told Kate that Emily and I were an item made me bolder.

A perfect afternoon, as it happened, balmy, dry. We hurried through the parking lot and down the infamous path into the trees, a ten-minute walk, the drums of the Friday pep rally behind us. I carried the big basket she'd brought—she'd gagged at the thought of my bologna sandwiches. She was silent so I filled the woods with my voice, bits and pieces of the story of my visit with Kate, but not the big news: Kate and Dabney!

We spread the tablecloth I'd brought on the biggest, flattest boulder. Inside her basket was a deft wooden chest, and inside that, glimmering cloth bags and precious bottles and tiny thermoslike jars, all kinds of fragrant leaves, curious noodles in a pungent broth, gelatinous beads in various sizes, a big block of rice molded in a wooden bowl, finally a selection of sauces and unfamiliar vegetables.

“Daikon,” Emily said, and poked something piquant in my mouth with her chopsticks. “Ginger sauce. Pak choi. Lemon grass. Glass noodle. Kimchi.”

Each bite a revelation. Each revelation a little too spicy for me. My family didn't use garlic or anything hotter than a radish—not so you could taste it, anyway—and never an herb except parsley on boiled potatoes or a dash of oregano in spaghetti sauce. I gulped water from the canteen I'd brought.

Emily laughed, fed me more. Some kind of tart cauliflower. “My Auntie Oh in Seoul used my pantyhose to strain pickles. She pretended it was a mistake.”

“You had pantyhose?”

“Not after that. And there's Auntie Bo, and Auntie Tik.
Th
ey steal my shoes. I have to bring three or four pairs each year!”

Each year in October were the big Korean holidays, everyone traveling home to honor ancestors. Emily put a bite in my mouth, clearly pleased by my interest in her family.
Th
ere had been two brothers on her mother's side, both lost in the Korean civil war, the Noodle-Loving Boys, as they were called.
Th
ere were endless other relatives as well, stepaunts and stepgrandmothers, cousins from a month old to seventy-seven years. Emily's grandpa, the reigning patriarch, was ninety, still sharp and loquacious. He'd outlived three much younger wives, was preparing to wed a teenager named Bo-Kyung Kim. Nothing so scandalous, though, as Emily's mom marrying the American sergeant.

Th
e last bites were squid, which I had always thought of as bait. I licked them and pressed them with my tongue, couldn't soften them.

“I'm full,” Emily said.
Th
ere were times she looked Afro-American and this was one of them, her pretty, wide nose, her full, exotic lips, whatever trick of sunlight and passing cloud shading her skin darker. Her teeth were unbelievably white. Her neck was slender, slender. Her eyes were upon me, dark and Korean, possessive.

“Me too,” I said, far from it. How could people subsist on so little? We packed everything up, tidied it all back into the chest and that into its basket.

A breeze rattled the dead oak leaves above, and a shower of them fell around us, drifting quickly down and clattering on the ground. I took Emily's hand, all very dry and simple. When I turned to her it was as if I had actually put words to my desire, she blushed so hard. She looked down, seemed to be staring at my pants.

She picked up on something I'd told her on the walk: “
Th
ey'd been in the shower together?”

“
Th
ey came to the door in towels.”

“And you won't tell your
parents
?”

“Why would I tell my parents?”

“She wanted you to know!”

“Nah. She didn't even know I was coming.”

“He's her teacher!”

“He's very nice. Nice and solid.”

Her voice went husky. “And they went back upstairs and . . .”

“I think so, yes.”

“In the
afternoon
?”

“It was still morning, really.”

She thought about that a minute. A chilly breeze started up, grew stronger, chillier. She said, “Okay. I know all about how you and Jinnie went steady. And all about that girl in seventh grade, Mary Louise who moved to San Diego. Anyone else? Did you have any girlfriends when I was at conservatory?”

“Sara Slaughter,” I said. “For about maybe a month.”

“I heard rumors.”

“We didn't get along very well.”

“How far did you go with her?”

“About an inch,” I said.

She dropped my hand and caught her knees, leaned back, gazed up at the sky, seemed to float up and off the rock. Dreamily, she said, “I asked my dad if I could have another date with you.”
Th
en more businesslike: “I mean, if you ever were to inquire, like a real date, at night. He said yes, sort of, but he has to meet you this time, and he has to talk to your father first and then make the decision. He didn't like it that that chauffeur guy came to the door the other day and not you. But mainly it was that my mother hates Chinese.”

“Would you like to go out this weekend? I won't bring Dr. Chun.”

“He's a doctor?”

“Tell your mom that! Banished by Mao!”

She said something in what I took to be Korean, looked briefly like her mother—very cross—then returned to her own face and the discussion at hand: “How far did you go with Jinnie?”

“More than an inch.”

Emily leaned closer, said, “How far?”

“You know. We liked to make out. In their rumpus room.”

“All the way, rumpus?”

“Not quite all the way, rumpus.”

“But what?”

“Touching and stuff.”

“Touching like where?” Her voice had gone past husky, something lower yet.

I muttered, “Places.”

Emily put her lips to mine, and I wasn't wooden but kissed her, once, twice, put my hand on her neck, kissed her again, put my tongue to her teeth, took her lip between my own teeth, arousing myself fiercely, guilty image of Georges and those bushels of peaches falling to his tongue, also my kissing lesson, whoa.

Emily panted. I had not heard her pant before. “I'm not jealous,” she said, sounding as if she were. She sighed and rocked back to me, kissed me too hard, letting her lips part. She pulled her hands from mine, put her arms around me. I did the same, my arms around her, and we held this single hard kiss—wooden, I had to admit, but good wood—held it till she pulled away, dove her face into my shoulder. She whispered something, tried again too quietly, then again so I could hear:

“I'm sexually excited when we kiss.”

And though it seemed too clinical to describe my own state, I said I was sexually excited, too, using those words.

She struggled out of her big down comforter of a coat, snuggled into mine, her face over my shoulder. She said, “Is it very uncomfortable for boys?”

I said, “No, no.”

She said, “I used to think being sexually excited meant I was in love.”

Which was as close as we got to saying anything more on the subject. She kissed me again, opened her mouth too wide, surprisingly awkward, touched her tongue to mine experimentally. Abruptly then she lay down on my coat on the rock, pulled me alongside her, tugged her big parka over us. I had a hard-on like a steeple, as my lost friend Jimpie Johnson had been fond of saying.

“Touch me places,” she breathed.

I put a hand on her breast, pressing the coarse weave of her sweater against her, found the bump of her nipple, nice.

“It's my birthday,” she murmured.

“And you don't say a word?”

“I'm a Scorpio,” she said hotly, meaning I knew not what. She put a hand on my chest, pressed as if to push me away, but she was not pushing me away. At length she sighed, threw a leg over mine, pressed into me. I couldn't stop the images of Sylphide and Georges, of Katy and Jack. I reached down in the course of that everlasting kiss, not wooden, pulled Emily's skirt up inch by inch, then in a handful, put my palm over the front of her underpants—hot cloth, grassy feel of pubic hair beneath—pressed gently at a sinking spot as the cloth grew damp.

“
Th
at's good,” Emily said, her hips beginning to dance without her, really writhing. She said, “Go harder.”

Her own hand found my belt, pulled at it ineffectually as she began to gasp. And then, suddenly, it was as if she had fallen asleep.
Th
e pressure from her lips slackened, her hand fell from my buckle, her leg slipped off of mine in a way that forced my hand away from the layer of thin, soaked cloth.

Recess was over.

A
FTER DINNER THE
night he was supposed to call Emily's house, I heard my father talking in the living room. I crept halfway down the stairs as I'd done with Katy so many times. But Pop wasn't talking to Sergeant Bright.

He was talking to his boss, begging. “Why would you send those guys to interview
me
?” He listened long, said, “I don't like you threatening me. . . . Well, you're scaring me. . . . Yes, I'm on my home phone. . . . No, no, Mr. Perdhomme, I gotta say no. . . . No, no, wait a minute, past tense. I
owed
. . . I know exactly how much, and those paintings . . . I get it. I get you have to disavow me. . . . But don't tell me you don't remember those paintings. And the other stuff? . . . Okay, that was a gift, fine, I'll accept that, a very valuable gift, give me credit, but not the paintings, those were payout. You and I both know. I'm still saying it, though—why did they interview
me
?
Th
ose fuckers were in my office, Mr. Perdhomme. You sent them to my
office.
Yes, my home phone. . . . I don't want to take the fall here. . . . Well, that's what it sounds like you're saying. . . . I know how deep I'm in. . . . I know that. . . . Yes, worse things than taking a fall, I know. . . . Okay, now you're scaring me again. . . . Crazy, yes I know he is. . . . I told you I'll fucking try.”

My ineffectual dad, negotiating who knows what. Apparently he hadn't been paid in quite a while. In the end he was plain groveling. He stopped talking in mid-sentence, only slowly hung up, sat staring. I'd never seen him so bleak, an image that has stayed with me: finally the quintessential Dad. I shambled on down the stairs as if I were just coming down, stepped up behind him, hugged his shoulders. He threw my arms off, suddenly irritable, the microphone from the Wollensak in his hand with the receiver, a tape running on the big machine.

“Who're you recording?” I said gently.

He had to think, rubbed his eyes to buy time, offered a feeble lie: “Oh, the Chevy dealer, what's his name. We can't drive a goddamn
Volvo
everyplace.” My mother, at least, still believed the Volvo was a loan from Katy's suitemate.

“So why are you recording the Chevy dealer?”

He turned to look at me square, went on the offensive: “Mommy says the school called. Mr. Demeter, whoever.
Th
e principal. You were in a fight?”

“A fight?”

“Some kid reported you.”

“What? It wasn't Mark Nussbaum, was it?”

“Here's her note—you look.”

It was Mark Nussbaum, all right.

“He hit
me,
Dad. Grazed me, I mean. A sucker punch. And he forced himself on Emily, that's the real issue. And he's jealous and devious. Me, I turned the other cheek.”

“Okay, Mr. Christ. Listen, I'm all for smashing the kid. Teach him a lesson. You're both supposed to see Demeter tomorrow. It's right there on the note. Emily, too, it looks like. Your mother and I are proud of you for protecting the Negro race.”

“Very funny, Dad. And I know you were you talking to Mr. Perdhomme.”

“Bah. I don't give Perdhomme the time of day, son. Why so fixated on Mr. Perdhomme?”

“It's just that you were going to call Emily's dad.”

“Oh, son, meant to tell you. I tried over there.
Th
ey hung up on me twice.
Th
e Oriental lady, her mom. ‘Emiree can'tah!' I guess she thought I was you. Aw. I know how you feel. But you'll be back in the saddle after this Nussbaum thing blows over.”

Leaving me, he went to his desk in the living room, started cleaning it energetically, noisily crumpling papers and tossing them into the fireplace, groaning, muttering. In the kitchen I made popcorn, brought him a bowl to no reaction, carried the rest upstairs to my desk. Nussbaum? I would make short work of him in front of Mr. Demeter. And Emily would back me up. And her father would warm to me. I was a warrior in all things, would win this battle, too.