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.
AT 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.
ONE 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. The 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. The 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.
Then 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.
The 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.
SATURDAY—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?
Then 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. They’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. This 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. The 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.
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.”
“Thanks 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. The 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.
INDOORS 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. The 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. Three guest bedrooms upstairs had been Sunday school classrooms, very spare, almost no windows, nothing on the walls. The 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. The enormous master bath had been a classroom, too, towel heaters, deep Jacuzzi, fixtures black, fittings gold. The 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. “ ‘The 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.
“They 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. Those paintings she gave your father were worth any number of dozens of Yale tuitions. The 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. This one right here. I didn’t care about the others. Dad helped me, and I helped him. I wouldn’t call it begging.”
“The painting is hers,” Jack said, poor guy, caught between love and ethics. “I have the paperwork. Though the method of reacquisition may have left something to be desired.”
LATER, JACK 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.
“The 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.
Life Among Giants Page 9
