“Oh, Linsey, shut the fuck up,” said Emily.
“Schist,” he said again, delighted, demonstrating a proper pucker.
Without thinking it through, without thinking at all (and using a straight-arm to hold Linsey back from the girl), I said, “You know how you told me you wanted to meet Linsey’s mom?”
And I invited Emily to the Yale game, a lot of stammering and extra phrases in explanation: “. . . Coach Keshevsky gave me tickets and . . .”
“Yes,” she said cutting me off. “Yes, yes, yes.” For access to the dancer, Emily would brave even the most medieval fare, and Linsey’s slobber, too. She bumped against me quickly in lieu of a hug, brushed past the famous boy, and bounded off to French class, or whatever came next.
DAD WENT MISSING four nights, his record, and Mom had had it. Downstairs I heard her on the phone with Missy Stratton, her great divorced friend, what sounded from our end like advice on lawyers. But Dad returned the night before the Yale–Princeton game, all abashed and chastened and bearing the oddest possible gift, a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder, no case, several boxes of blank 3M tape. “You can record anything,” he said cheerfully. Maybe he hadn’t noticed the little Dolus Investments logo stamped into the metal of the frame.
“Must have been heavy to carry all this way,” my mother said, skeptical.
“It has a handle,” said Dad. Their making up was as subtle as their fights were severe.
But Mom didn’t miss much. “Nick, where’s the car?”
“Stolen,” said Dad simply. And then a lot else, a mudslide of words, the upshot being that the Blue ’Bu had been taken from Westport Station, where in his angry discombobulation those several nights before he’d managed to leave the keys in the ignition, all his own fault. “Not to worry,” he said, “The good men of the Westport Police Department are on the case.”
I imitated Freddy, his gravelly tones: “The police aren’t always up to the job.”
Dad tried a smile.
My mother didn’t like my having private jokes with Dad, shut me down with a look. “And now, Nick, the truth: where have you been?”
He looked offended. “Holed up in my office, lonely as an astronaut. But I caught up on a lot of things and singlehandedly untied some of the knots the company was in with that Tetron thing and, tell you what? I’m back on Mr. Perdhomme’s good side.”
“Raise in the offing,” Mom said tartly, but with a delicate glimmer of forgiveness that allowed me to breathe.
Dad, too. He said he understood why we’d given his ticket to the Yale game away. Why, it was his own fault. “Great that your Negress can attend!”
“Nicholas!” my mother said.
“And who’s the other?” he said.
Everyone counting tickets.
“Friend of Kate’s,” I said. No need to bring in the dancer.
“Friend of Kate’s,” Mom repeated with relief.
I was in a raft heading down the Niagara River, deafening roar ahead, no way to steer to the banks. Dad tried hard to seem he didn’t care one way or the other about the game, but he cared, all right. The game was the reason he’d come home. He and Mom were cozy through the long Friday night of cocktails and promises. After we’d eaten, the old man showed us how the recording machine worked, a complicated threading of tape around rollers and heads, chunky steel microphone on a stand. We took turns recording our voices—weird to hear your own—and then we sang a Beatles song, “Yesterday,” which Dad had always loved abjectly, playing it over and over again, none of us too tuneful. Mom kissed his neck, kissed each of his fingers: martinis.
Dad pushed the buttons on the Wollensak. “Got it for a steal,” he said.
4
Kate’s college at Yale was a medieval cloister, except that the girls emerging from the portico wore blue jeans and peace signs. There wasn’t a bra in the bunch, not that I was looking. My absurd entourage and I had picked up Emily at the enormous carriage house her family occupied on the grounds of the manicured and extensive estate her parents managed, the home of the ambassador to France and former Secretary of State Arnold Walton Wadsworth.
Some date: Emily erect in the sumptuous back seat of the High Side Bentley between my chattering Mom and mysterious Sylphide. Linsey and I were up front with the taciturn chauffeur, poor guy with a bandage across the bridge of his nose where my dad had popped him. Visions of Sylphide’s little breasts in Georges’ louche piano hands leapt into my mind as they had all morning. And here she was, dressed like anyone else going to a football game, deflecting my Mom’s conversational gambits, asking Emily about her teachers, about her plans, about her stretches, her shoes. Emily only murmured in reply. Linsey plucked at his nose, wiped his hands on me. The chauffeur hummed, clearly unhappy to have me in his car.
“I’ll go up,” I said, but my door had been remotely locked, no way to escape.
“No, no,” Mom said. “You stay here and entertain the dance committee!”
Dr. Chun—that was the chauffeur’s name—was already opening her door.
Emily helped Mom get the trailing edge of her big, borrowed, thoroughly absurd fur coat out the door behind her. I looked back and shrugged. Sylphide didn’t seem to mind my gang, but only shrugged back, disconcertingly direct eye contact. Just when I would have turned away, she made binoculars with her long hands, put them to her eyes, wriggled a forefinger as if to focus.
Whoa.
Mom had only been gone a minute when she reappeared in the college portico with Kate. Oh, sister! She’d always been tall and blond, but a kind of luster had come over her. She was no longer lanky and pale, no longer too thin, twenty pounds heavier at least than when I’d last seen her back in August, all filled out and muscular, shining with health. She’d been playing tennis for three and four hours daily—her legs were as tanned as in high summer, her face bright with sun. She scanned the yard happily, pleased hostess, looking for the Malibu wagon and Dad, no doubt, but the Blue ’Bu wasn’t there. You saw her scan past the Bentley two or three times—some rich kid’s parents—and then you saw her actually register us. Instantly she turned on Mom, stomped her foot, threw her hands in the air, shouted something indistinct.
“Uh-oh,” Emily said.
“Kape!” said Linsey, growing upset.
The chauffeur muttered something about the time, put his arm out to keep Linsey in his seat. I tried the door handle again: my first electric locks, like I was in a trap.
Kate’s dormmates pooled around her, carefully excluding Mom, who made placating gestures, reached to touch Kate’s shoulder. An Asian girl—Ling-Ling Po?—actually pushed Mom away. “Fucking assholes!” Kate cried, slapping Mom’s hand. Then she repeated it, poor Mom, her own favorite phrase thrown back in her face. Kate suddenly turned and, pushing past her pals, raced heedless through the quad and off across campus.
“Can you open this?” I said to Dr. Chun. “Open this door.”
Ling-Ling Po stood in Mom’s way.
The chauffeur was impassive, holding Linsey back.
“The door,” I said.
“Lizano, let’s let her go,” said Sylphide.
My mother made a movement toward following Kate, thought better of it—she would have had to knock Ling-Ling on her butt—then stood still as a trophy, undone.
DR. CHUN PARKED the Bentley in a space marked RESERVED in a row of other fancy cars at the edge of the parking lot closest to the Yale Bowl, a gorgeous old stone stadium. I was about to point out the parking restriction when I realized that one of cops on duty was directing us to a spot: everything had been taken care of.
Dr. Chun hopped out efficiently, opened my mother’s door, waited. But Mom was frozen.
“Perhaps I should be going back to try to speak with her,” Sylphide said at length, very gently. “Dr. Chun could be taking me back. I’m thinking we miscalculated, you and I.”
My mother threw a sigh, brightened as best she could. “It’s no one’s fault,” she said, meaning that it was
her own fault, the closest she got to apology, ever.
Gradually we climbed out of the car, dazed survivors suddenly deposited in a parking lot. Our space was in the no-man’s land between Yale fans and Princeton fans; there was a lot of good-natured banter and taunting back and forth across this DMZ, pennants waving, air horns tooting, little boys going out for passes across the blacktop, little girls jumping cheers, Frisbees flying, also half a hundred flags, crew cuts, flattops, effortlessly American. It wasn’t a place you were going to see peace signs or smell pot burning. Hamburgers on charcoal, that’s what I smelled, hot dogs, toasting buns, ketchup, mustard, apple pie, humiliation.
I pulled my hair out of my collar and let it blow in the breeze. I preferred no one look at me, take in my size and think, Jock. Emily was the only brown-skinned person in sight. And with Dr. Chun one of the only Orientals, as I would have put it back then. He got to work pulling an elaborate stainless-steel barbecue out of the Bentley’s boot. It unfolded in ingenious layers, produced its own legs, refused to stand straight. I went to Dr. Chun’s aid, and together we got all the latches right. With nothing else to focus on, the women watched us closely. There was a table, damask tablecloths, matching cushions for the chairs.
We were attracting considerable attention. Several of the women in the crowd had recognized Sylphide: you could see her name on their lips. Oblivious, the great dancer breathed in the air, breathed it out again, someone who knew how to contain her emotion. For Linsey, she pointed out a clown on stilts, a Princeton tiger costume, a bikini girl on roller skates selling pennants. “Sylphide!” someone called, but to no reaction. Emily followed the great ballerina’s lead, breathed the air, pointed out her own sights, the Goodyear Blimp coming into view, a television perched on the hood of a car. By the look on her face you’d think it was her name the voices called out. I didn’t dare look at Sylphide, stood between her and Emily, close as I could to both.
A stray football wobbled through the sky directly at us. I reached just in front of the great ballerina’s face at the last second as if casually, grabbed the ball out of the air with one hand. I could have been a tight end, fingers like that! The man who’d thrown it—a Yale freshman, beanie and all, waved comically, cried “Here!” And I fired a pass those thirty yards straight as a string, a bullet that drilled his chest and knocked him down, all to the screaming laughter of his friends. He leapt up triumphantly, ran through the crowd as through defenders, made his own kind of touchdown by running up on the hood of a VW bug.
“Such a beautiful, efficient core,” Sylphide said to my mother. And to Emily: “See how the football is carrying his anger forward.” She held my eye. She had a way of turning her shoulders at you.
“I’m not angry,” I said slowly.
“Well, you didn’t kill the poor guy,” Emily said.
“Should I call Daddy?” My mother suddenly said. “Daddy could call Kate.”
“Sylphide!” that same voice called.
None of us reacted, but only the dancer didn’t hear.
Dr. Chun found coolers full of food, two thermoses of martinis, fancy glasses, which he passed around, an olive each.
“I’m not old enough,” Emily said eagerly.
“Let us not stand on convention,” Sylphide said.
Dr. Chun poured, full glasses for everyone but his employer, who accepted only a few precious drops.
In the close distance a cherry bomb went off, making us all jump, then a whole pack of firecrackers, the explosions followed by screaming and hilarity. Dr. Chun quaked visibly. A fight song rose up somewhere.
“Our team,” Sylphide said, a toast.
“Our team,” said my mother. I refilled her glass with my own: the drink tasted like gasoline to me.
“Trouble,” said Linsey, or something like, a lot of ts and ls.
A SPECIAL USHER gripped our special tickets and guided us through a mossy, dripping tunnel and then back out to the periphery of the playing field. When we hit the sunlight, Linsey wailed like a spanked baby. And it was like being born, the sky above us blue, the concrete stadium rising on all sides, every molecule around us vibrating with sound—thousands of people laughing, shouting, clapping, stomping. Fortified with gin, my mother took the lead, the usher trotting to keep up, and we crunched along the cinder track to a row of elegant, portable field boxes, each with its own gate and its own little stairway, two rows of three plush theater seats each, the whole section raised directly behind the Princeton bench. Mom administered the seating plan as if we were a dinner party, sat the great dancer beside her, top row, sat me in front between Linsey and Emily. That left an empty seat beside Mom, an instant rebuke—she kept patting it, stroking the velvet nap.
Emily said, “When do they let the lions in?”
Sylphide liked that, laughed and hiccuped daintily, playing drunk—she’d had no more martini than I.
Precisely then, through the great mouth of the stadium, the Eli marching band roared in, all brass and piccolos, the bass drums vibrating the very cement, drum major kicking up his legs. Even Emily grinned, leapt to her feet. Shortly, the Yale players poured in—cheers and shouts and boat horns blaring. After them, the Princeton team rushed in, too, but to a sound like wind, which was the whole place hissing. Coach Keshevsky hobbled after them in his signature rumpled suit, pulled up at the fifty-yard line directly in front of us, ignored the catcalls aimed at him from all around. He looked like a granite precipice with a hat.
Sudden silence in the stadium, the band easing into “The Star Spangled Banner.” My heart welled when groups of students all over the stadium booed. Vietnam, of course, and President Nixon’s late decision to increase troop strength to some 500,000 men, regular guys only slightly older than I.
Just before kickoff, Coach Keshevsky looked back, found me in the box, gave a short salute, eyed the people with me briefly, countenance unchanging. At halftime, a water boy brought a note scratched on a slip of old cardboard:
HOCHMEYER. JOIN US LOCKER ROOM AFTER GAME. KESHEVSKY.
And the contest was brilliant, at least in terms of offense, touchdown after touchdown, one of the highest-scoring games in college history, as it happened, Princeton winning 79 to 75, the lead having swung back and forth until the last seconds, when Matt Morrisey, my hero quarterback, threw the winning bomb. Even Emily could understand the drama in that, stood and cheered despite herself.
“It’s a dance,” Sylphide repeated, pleased at the revelation.
“If dancers tried to brain each other,” Emily shouted.
“But dancers do,” Sylphide shouted back.
Linsey and my mother had had their own hilarious time, finishing off a tall thermos of martinis between them and cheering at all the wrong moments. At game’s end they stood tottering like old friends and hooted with the small Princeton contingent, drawing stares from the crowd around us.
Emily draped a hand on my shoulder.
“Mutts,” Linsey said. Helmets, he meant, dedicated old equipment man.
He and I left the females to get back to the Bentley on their own, crossed the middle of the field unchallenged—such were the times—to visit the Princeton locker room. My future team was in high spirits, of course, shouting and snapping towels, various stages of undress, odor of mildew and old socks and victorious sweat, a sudden Princeton cheer, pumping fists, the win like a drug. Linsey hooted, collected helmets and pads. Coach Keshevsky was as impassive as ever, but the win shone bright in his eyes as he took my two hands, leaned to me.
“Tell me that wasn’t Sylphide,” he said.
EMILY GREETED US by the Bentley, where Dr. Chun had everything packed and ready to go. “Your mother is smashed,” she announced, quite drunk herself. She turned her shoulders to us, I noticed, held herself very erect. “She’s ranting about Kate. Sylphide’s talking her down, though. Don’t worry. Oh, David, David, Sylphide is wonderful.”
Linsey blew a gigantic fart, and so we all moved a few steps toward the car. Emily leaned at me,
leaned more, but I didn’t manage to put my arm around her, or whatever it was she wanted. Dr. Chun opened the passenger door for Linsey, who dithered. Emily took my hand, didn’t care who saw, squeezed emphatically. “This is the most perfect day,” she said, and abruptly spun and hugged my neck, let me go brusquely, fell into me. I kissed at her mouth and missed, kissed again as she leaned further, our lips pressed tight together through a long beat. And that was it: our first kiss.
“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.
ON THE MERRITT 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. They 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. The 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 professional 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? That way you can enjoy dance! So much less to suffer!”
They laughed, whispered more intimately. I felt I was losing them both.
Life Among Giants Page 8
