Life Among Giants (4 page)

I said, “I just wanted to help.”

Apologetically she said, “I can't pay.”

“It's okay,” I said. “Neighbors help neighbors. You know.”

She seemed to consider that, brightened. “I am wondering if you can help me with one thing more.”

I tried to take the wide stone steps gracefully, even if three at a time, followed her into the enormous foyer, past the grand stone staircase and through a hidden door, down a hallway into the spacious, restaurant-grade kitchen. We floated right to the stove, where a teapot waited cold.

She handed me a box of matches, gazed up at me. She said, “I can't make the fire to light.”

Th
ose startling celadon eyes, always mentioned by the press! (I'd paid attention to every word ever written.) Eyes the color of oxidized copper, or what my mom called sea-foam green, full of light and a penetrating intelligence. Pale, spare eyebrows, open and generous face, her nose tall and thin, cut like glass. Her lips thin, too, and parted in supplication, and I saw as I broke her stare that a front tooth was chipped. She was short, I kept realizing, really quite short. She had breasts under that robe and all the rest of a female body. And she had
bad
skin,
acne-scarred and shining. Which was what I'd tell Mom when I got home.
Th
e dancer's unassailable beauty in photographs, her imposing beauty onstage, that towering presence, they were illusory! She was really only a girl, not very much older than Katy and her friends, or me. She smelled of bed sheets more than anything, like someone who'd been ailing, smelled of what must be jasmine—always her scent, according to Kate, who found it nauseating.

Not I.

I lit a match, turned the knob, waited. Nothing. “
Th
e gas is off,” I said.

“Off?” said the world's greatest dancer.

I looked into green light of her eyes a second too long, like rocketing past the earth's atmosphere and into the realm of stars. Helpfully I said, “You have to have gas to make the burners work. It comes in through a pipe. Did you pay your bill?”

She studied me, trying to understand. My heart fled to her helplessness.
Th
e dancer had no equipment for living in this world. When tears came to her eyes, tears came to my own.

“Oh, for me,” she said cryptically, and then something urgent in Norwegian, a song of a sentence, a woman troubled about much more than her gas bill. Abruptly she reached up to hug me, or rather, reached up to
be
hugged the way a child might. I leaned and put my arms about her as best I could, more than surprised, intensely aware of my naked, sweaty, grass-stained chest against her cheek as she pressed back. “Oh, Firfisle,” she said, rising up on her tiptoes, balance enough for both of us. “Firfisle-mine.”

We breathed there in front of the ten-burner stainless-steel stovetop five minutes or so, a monumentally long embrace, the multiple fragrances of her rising to my nostrils—a little sweat, a little liniment, that smell of bed—just about the most awkward five minutes of my life. I wondered when it would be okay to let go.

“I am hating it, to be alone,” she said finally.

“Me too,” I said. And then I flushed with the truth of it: my former teammates, and Jinnie, and most of all, my sister, Kate, all lost.

T
H
E NEXT WEEK,
entirely out of the ether, a message arrived from the head football coach at Princeton, “Rumbling Rick” Keshevsky himself, a crisp piece of bond paper folded into a shorter note from no less a personage than the president of the university.
Th
e letters took some deciphering, but after several readings it became clear that based on my junior-year game stats and my perfect grades they were offering me early acceptance and a full academic scholarship, plus room and board.

It wasn't that I'd forgotten meeting the Princeton scouts, wasn't that I'd forgotten my Princeton dream; it was that I'd assumed I'd blown it, quitting the Staples High Wreckers. Had wanted to blow it, no doubt. But the letter made it clear they knew all about Coach Powers and my hair, my getting axed: didn't matter—they'd had their eye on me for years. I was pleased but not jumping up and down, nothing like that, mostly I was just surprised. I really had very little sense of the honor of the thing, had always taken my physical prowess for granted, just something I'd been born with, nothing to be particularly proud of, not something to peddle in exchange for status. Long hair or no, I was one of the best high-school quarterbacks in the country, something to this day it's hard to keep in mind. Jock or not, I was an academic star, as well, on course to be valedictorian, a kid who read philosophy on his own, a kid who translated Latin poetry (looking for the sexy bits, but still). Of
course
Princeton wanted me.

My high-school-dropout father, always the salesman, put on his best pair of penny loafers and his most collegiate sweater and drove me down to South Jersey—he wouldn't let me go on my own, wouldn't let me not go. He steered the big highways with one hand on my knee, a squeeze every twenty miles or so, not a word between us.
Th
e two of us were shown around campus by a simpering series of assistant football coaches. I was being courted, stroked, seduced, nothing subtle about it. I wasn't impressed—not with myself, not with the school, not with any of their blandishments.

But my dad glowed, handed his business card to each new professor and coach and admissions dean, shook hands vigorously, talked too loudly, led with his bulky, oft-broken nose, cranked up his sparkling but damaged charm, left me in the background, where, as it happened, I was content to be.

Rumbling Rick, though, was too imposing for that treatment. His office was a cave in the bowels of the football stadium, steel door like a prison gate; he answered Dad's knocking only at length, filled the archway—chiseled face, chin like a truck grille. He ignored my father, took my hand in his two Princeton tiger paws, pulled me in, squeezed my biceps, unembarassedly pulled a leather-covered stepstool between us and stood on it so he could look directly into my eyes.

“Son,” he said, “a little haircut shouldn't come between great men. You can play in braids and ribbons as far as I'm concerned. First-string quarterback by sophomore year! Can you give me a yes today?”

From out in the alcove my Dad said, “Yes. Yes, he can.”

Keshevsky ignored him, could see the ambivalence in my face. Gently, he said, “Yes, no, Hochmeyer, take your time, make your own decision. But come out and practice with us today.
Th
ose boys want to see you in action.”

Th
e 1970 season at Princeton would start in two weeks. I was intensely aware that I was still only going to be a high-school kid. Quitting the Wreckers had made me different; nothing that had been important before had remained important after. And meeting Sylphide had turned me one notch again in the direction of this undefined thing I seemed to be straining toward, nothing to do with hair, more to do with the ambiguities I'd begun to notice in the world, a new feeling that nothing was black or white, nothing either/or, that no one could truly lose or win. I thought of the dancer's not exactly delicate hands on me there in front of her kitchen stove. I was no gridiron brute, took no pleasure in my own powers, didn't need to stomp anyone, didn't want to play out my father's dreams, or Coach Keshevsky's, these stale old guys with their failing testosterone.

But there was no way around it. I dressed for practice and worked out with the college fellows, shadowing the quarterback, Matt Morrissey, my once hero, a senior everyone knew was going to play for the Green Bay Packers. In a scrimmage Coach Keshevsky let me take the helm of the freshman team.
Th
e varsity drubbed us, of course, and the real first-year quarterback, left on the sidelines, was visibly pissed. I ran plays perfunctorily, completed a dozen solid passes, slowly got inspired, ran for the only freshman touchdown—an arrogant quarterback sneak against the coach's call, purposefully knocking over my own man, the enormous freshman center (guy from Hawaii, later to do well in the bigs), using his bulk as a ramp to launch myself over the opposing line, then dancing through the secondary, breaking one tackle, two, head fakes, spins, straight-arm right, straight-arm left, lots of simple ducking, and then, all alone out there, a colossus racing seventy-nine yards with the whole varsity defense chasing me, the best tackling team in the Ivy League.

So what?

Rumbling Rick was stern with me after, of course—I'd gone against orders—but I just gazed at him, nothing to say, this little tyrant without his stool. I was through apologizing to coaches. As a parting gift—a little more incentive towards my decision—Keshevsky gave me an envelope with six box-seat tickets to the upcoming game at Yale—the opponent's homecoming. “Closer to Westport for you,” he said in a way that was warm and cold all at once.

“Hey,” said my dad.

I was indifferent until I had the obvious thought: I could invite Katy to her own homecoming game. Of course the coach would have known where she went to school, would have known everything there was to know about me, including my plans to major in Philosophy and Culture, a new field being pioneered at Princeton, as it happened. But none of that would have occurred to me then, the extent of a coach's manipulation.

He said, “Okay, mister. No more bullcrap. Time to grunt or get off the pot. Can I tell the boys yes? Can I give Professor Lunkins the good news?”

Lunkins was the chairman of the philosophy department. From him I'd had three stirring letters in a week. “I need some time to think,” I said.

“Nothing to think about,” said my father.

“He'll
think,
” said Rumbling Rick approvingly.

Dad drew himself up, handed over a business card, barked in imitation of the coach: “Mr. Keshevsky—Rumbling Rick, if I may—telephone me at your leisure. Have
I
got investments for
you
!”

C
RUISING UP THE
Jersey Turnpike on the way home Dad and I laughed about the coach's face at that moment—his dismay, disgust, disdain for my father all barely hidden—but I must have let on that I'd been embarrassed.

Pop said, “I know, I know. You think it's extortion. You think I'm using you. But, buddy, you've got to be fighting all the time. All the time, fighting. Because why, David?”

I mocked him mildly: “Because ‘Opportunity Could Be Right in Front of You.' ” Sign in his boss's office apparently, oft quoted.

“Exactly right. And I've got to be sharp these days, believe you me. Mr. Perdhomme is up my ass every second with a hot glowing poker, David. You should see the scars. I've got to be on my toes! No, not good enough. I have to be on my goddamned
toenails
!”

“Especially in these times,” I said unhappily, since that was going to be the next line.

And those were bad times indeed. Kate's tuition at Yale was an issue, I'd come to understand. We hadn't had beef for dinner in weeks. Only a couple of months before, Dad had lost a briefcase with negotiable bonds inside, also his entire collection of illegal gold coins, also his raw diamonds, his vaunted Yangtze River pearls, all his paranoid investments, stuff he could physically touch, keep in sight, keep protected from man and market: gone.

Th
at briefcase!

He'd been bringing it to the office vault for safekeeping, he said, one of his occasional paroxysms of insecurity, and managed to
leave it on the train,
just another in a long series of self-imposed disasters. All the humor drained from his face as he remembered it now: “My fucking pearls! How could I be so stupid?”

I didn't want him crying. I said what I'd said a dozen times before: “It could have happened to anyone.”

But he did cry, first just a little, his lip quivering, and then he was sobbing. He pulled over on a patch of grass, all there was for a shoulder on the Merritt Parkway, folded himself into the steering wheel, really broken.

“Dad?” I said.

“Never be a loser like me, David. Please, please, please. Don't say no to Princeton, David.”

“Oh, Pop.” I patted his back. “You're no loser.” And because I knew I had to be plain, I added, “And as for Princeton, we'll see.”

I was too big for the car (too big for a lot of things, come to think of it), sat there cramped and uncomfortable patting at his back, no further gesture I could make, just waiting him out. It had never been close to this bad, and, painful truth, for the first time he did seem like a loser to me. Finally he spoke, blubbering: “Mr. Perdhomme's got my ass in the fire, son. He's a bad oyster. If I come up a suicide, don't believe it!”

“Oh, come on, Dad. Mr. Perdhomme? Suicide?” Like my mom, I wasn't one for his histrionics.

He knew it, too, tried to be funny: “Unless it's by martini.
Th
en you'll know it was real.
Th
at's my weapon of choice, David. If I'm dead of olives, you know I was depressed.”
Th
en coldly serious, another big sob: “Anything else, go after that little prick Perdhomme. You hear me? Make that little prick pay!”