Life Among Giants (17 page)

Didn't matter—I'd grown excited, too.

Jack gathered her in, surprisingly sheepish girl, plunked her in a cab, whisked her to their hotel—she'd have to start her meds protocol all over again, which could only be done gradually after these hiatuses. Coach was footing the bill for their visit complete, his own pocket and insistence: my emotional health, ha.

At dinner that night, no preamble, Kate announced that she'd decided to become a scientist. Rapid speech, she outlined her plans to go for her doctorate in genetics. “Dad always wanted it,” she said.

Not in my memory. I looked around the restaurant to avoid catching Jack's eye. I allowed myself a Bloody Mary, didn't drink it, didn't even look at it when it came, big salad of vegetables sticking out of the outsized glass, sickening to see: Dad's last drink.

Jack patted her hand. “Let's ask David about the big game,” he said.

“Pittsburgh Steelers,” I said.

“CpG islands,” Kate said seriously. “Codons, plasmid vectors, eukaryotic DNA—I've been learning it all—phage lambda cohesive end sites, phosphodiester bonds, zoo blots.”

Jack looked mournful over dessert, put a hand through his thick hair, which had gotten shot with gray. “It's not your fault,” he said, Kate in the ladies' room an awfully long time, perhaps decoding a gene spool in there. “Really, it started a couple of weeks ago. Genetics this and genetics that. And the horror is, she's fully capable! In another life, she'd be a scientist. You should see the books we suddenly own. I can't keep up with her.”

“It's always been this way,” I said. “
Th
e illness takes over, but it can't stop her from being smart.”

“Lately, David, I find it very difficult to separate the illness and the personality. Maybe they're the same. In any case. I need help. She wears me down. She wears
herself
down.
Th
ere are parts missing. Not everything comes back after these bouts.
Th
is thing about your parents? Detective Turkle all of a sudden? It's not benign. It's not a hobby. She took him to Mexico, I've just learned. When I was at the conference in Milwaukee.
Th
ey spent the week in Mexico. She and Turkle. He had no idea she was attached.”

“Oh, no.”

“David, he's bought her an engagement ring.”

O
N GAME DAY
Jack and Kate sat in the end zone with my teammates' friends and families, the “Dolphinators,” great bright faces full of pride. Kate wore a fresh pink sundress, and while Jack smoked a tremulous briar she told everyone around her that she was a genetic chemist, that she was on the verge of finding the answer, or so I was told later by more than one impressed teammate.

I prepped for the game in my usual way, all but superstitious: Sunday paper, huge carbo breakfast with the other quarterbacks over the playbook, stretches alone or with a trainer, a long walk during free time down to the harbor, the cries of gulls, the stench of low-tide mud, then over to the stadium, full game-day stretches, playbook review with the offensive coordinator, playbook review with the defensive coordinator, more playbook review on my own, two coffees, whirlpool, pads, quick snack of peanut butter and jelly, team meeting, more peanut butter and jelly. I kneeled for the team prayer—something I usually skipped—and forgot Kate, felt only the genius of the coaches, how all of our energy had been beautifully orchestrated through the practice week, culminating as we sprinted out onto the field in juggernaut formation, the long weekly climb to the top of the mountain together, great vistas before us.
Th
is was a late-season game, a chance to clinch both the division and conference titles at home, playoffs in sight.

Garo kicked three field goals, all in the east end zone, as it happened, and so I got to perform for my sister, no different than I'd felt in peewee league, no different than in high school, receive the hike, set it up, boom. After the plays I'd find her up there in the cheering throng, always chatting, chatting with whomever was beside her, behind her, on the bench in front. It was a very close game all the way through to the last minutes, when we found ourselves three points behind, fourth down on the one-yard line, routine field goal to tie, only a couple minutes left to play.

Coach Shula called a B-ninety, and after that it was all poker faces, the B-ninety being a fake field goal we'd practiced endlessly but seldom attempted in a game. Four times, in fact. On three occasions I'd made the yard we needed, on the fourth (my very first season), I'd burst through for a touchdown.
Th
at touchdown ran through my head vividly. And in my head I saw myself making another, and saw Katy leaping to her feet, we win! Very simple: you take the hike as always, Garo fakes a kick as you pull the ball away, then you stand and run left behind the entire team blocking, only thirty-six inches progress required, an arm's-length, a touchdown in all our heads, careful body language: this is only a kick, see you in overtime. With his call Coach Shula had put all of his faith in me, all the team's faith, all the fans' faith, just as he said he would. Get that touchdown and we go to the playoffs. Fail, and the long road continues for everyone.

And so in a light Florida mist, very muggy afternoon, Garo took his preparatory three steps left, his one step right, kicked the dirt just as he always did, raised his arm just as always, dropped it fast.
Th
e snap was perfect, a spiral right into my hands. And as Garo rushed past me to block all comers I straightened the ball, poked it tip down into the grass and held it for the kick that wasn't going to come. By the time I realized my lapse—football a mental game, all right—I was already under a great pile of defenders, and the game was lost.

C
HICK
J
OHNSSON LET
me know that the Miami Dolphins would pay for any kind of therapist I wanted, at any price, gave me a list of people specializing in sports, offered to make the call for me. And over the subsequent months I saw hypnotists, art therapists, two psychiatrists, a Chinese herbs guy, an osteopath renowned for mystical cures, finally a smart psychotherapist, the first guy I ever heard mention the phrase
post-traumatic shock.
He just let me talk, and let me cry, and I believe it was he who recommended bodywork, as he called it, believing (as the osteopath had) that the body stored disaster. So to the acupuncturist, the masseuse, the chiropractor, the witch with the wax candles and incense. Maybe they were only doses of love.

One willowy bodywork expert pulled at my arms—so good—pulled at my head, passed her long hands an inch over my flesh smoothing my energy fields (or something along those lines—I never quite got the explanation). She pulled at my legs, she pulled at my toes, my ten fingers, my ears, wonderful, rousing, always the gentle scent of almond oil. Her hair was very long and dyed deep black to contrast her very pale skin, pale blue eyes, and in them a pained wisdom, a wayward whiff of judgment, too. She put her hands on you the moment you entered her inner sanctum, touched you even as you pulled off your shirt, even undid your belt and drew it through its loops as you lay back on her table, like preparing for sex. So it seemed natural one humid July afternoon when she crossed the line I'd been unconsciously pushing at and started kissing my belly (which at the time was like armor, but with nerve endings). She was unapologetic, very straightforward and natural, kissing my belly and then my chest and my neck and my face, some new treatment, you'd think from her demeanor, which was serious and really quite professional, hard to explain. She bid me rise and kissed the rest of me thoroughly, too, down to my toes and then back up, turning me this way and that to be sure that every stretch of my skin had felt her lips. Under her kimono she was only herself, and had always said giving was as therapeutic as getting, so I kissed her as she had kissed me. We made love on a pile of her plush towels and meditation cushions without rearranging them, using the office as it was, she reminded me, not as we wished it would be, the next patient eyeing me carefully as I floated out through the waiting room.

B
ENEDIKTA
P
EKKILAK
C
RABTREE
.
Her business card said B. Crabtree. Finnish by heritage, and though she was taller and thinner and less robust and more conventionally pretty, something about her reminded me of Sylphide, a certain emotional remove, an even more northern chill. Benedikta was distant in another important way in that she was married (to Crabtree), and
happily,
if an unfaithful kind of happiness is not too hard to understand, and in the end I guess I didn't mind that she had an “existing condition,” as she referred to her husband. Her long-view unavailability made her possible for me, she liked to say. I saw her for months and then years, near daily appointments in the off-season, as many as possible in fall, one of her prime two-hour slots in the late afternoon. She was free for occasional chats over breakfast but for sex only at my appointment times. And it was never only sex, but all the other elements of bodywork, the stuff that formed her regular practice, never quite tender.

Benedikta was my library, a new book in my hands every week, poetry and novels, politics and science, cultural criticism and a certain kind of hopeful memoir, also a lot of biographies of great men, since she worried I had no role model past the age my father had died, which was forty-four and coming at me swiftly, not that I realized it then. She wanted me to re-create my philosophy courses at Princeton for her, and I did what I could, boxes of books, assignments, oral exams, Heidegger, Alcibiades, Kant (“Out of the crooked timber of man no straight thing has ever been made”).

Because another part of her healing protocol was talk.

Th
e third part was touch, which we had down, spending whole hours gauging the sensations of one instep upon another, one hand placed on a buttock, etc. From this sort of thing she reached her climaxes, which were thoroughgoing, very long, a kind of ratcheting and clenching of her limbs, ratcheting and clenching under my touch, my tongue; and then release, often sobs.

Th
e fourth, overarching part of her protocol was the not-touch, amazing, a definite sense of strange powers as she stroked and patted the air over my face, or kidney, say, or calf.

I all but fell in love with her, getting to be a pattern, the closest I'd gotten since high school to that kind of plunge. And she all but fell in love with me, a pattern, yes.
Th
e shallowness of her gaze was no character flaw but was the inexplicable Crabtree, standing in my way. As for me, I was not receptive to her deepest love, so she told me. Something blocked me, something that had to do with my parents and their deaths, she thought, and not with Sylphide, as I always tried to claim, and not with Emily, my backup position, though Benedikta was correct when she observed (her hand just over the nape of my neck) that somehow I'd managed to tangle my memories of those four people in a hopeless knot. Kate was the answer, she thought.
Th
ough not in a way she could articulate, just something she could feel when her hands hovered in the air over my heart, hot flawed prescience: “You have a twin.”

We often ended our sessions angrily, frostily. We were at least that close. Once, writing out the usual check (one hundred ten dollars was a lot, late seventies!), I called her a prostitute. She drew herself up, all her tiny-breasted naked pride, all her black-hair-swinging-lank pride, and with her face untouched by any emotion but her customary honesty, said, “You only say that because you pay me.”

After that for a month or two I campaigned for her divorce from Crabtree, for us to marry. “Your aura isn't evolved enough for a soul merger,” she said, her one kind of joke. But seriously, even with the benefit of her teachings and other ministrations, she didn't think I'd make it to her level in this life. Her husband was much more thoroughly enlightened, she let it be known, bitter tones as we made love on her worktable. “It's just that he doesn't turn me on.”

“
Th
at doesn't seem so enlightened,” I breathed.

We were this close, both of us, holding on to the edge of orgasm, something she'd taught me, could easily go on for hours.

Lying across me another afternoon, she let her black hair cover and uncover my face and very, very slowly said, “You say Kate collected oddballs. You make her out to be mysterious. But you seem to collect oddballs, too, or make all your people into oddballs. Anyway you go on and on about all your people and their extraordinary lives and extraordinary qualities, everyone so beautiful. Probably you even make me seem strange and beautiful when you talk about me, yes?
Th
e more beautiful, the more wonderful, the more elegant, the more I think you're covering up your own sort of ordinary and mundane grief. Which it's time to abandon.”

Later, I got dressed and wrote her a check.

I
DIDN'T GET
up to Connecticut at all in the weeks and months after Kate's visit. Jack kept the breezy letters coming for a while, the weekly phone calls, but the next fall they slowed, then stopped. It occurred to me to call him, to check in, but I did not, even knowing what must be happening. We played in New York—I didn't call. We played in Boston—I did not. Even Philadelphia. How far is that? An easy train ride.