“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. They 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. There had been two brothers on her mother’s side, both lost in the Korean civil war, the Noodle-Loving Boys, as they were called. There 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.
The 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. There 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: “They’d been in the shower together?”
“They 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.” Then 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.
“That’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. The 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.
AFTER 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? Those 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. The 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. They hung up on me twice. The 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.
I stared at my French homework for an hour, gave up. I was onto a secret: Dad was in desperate need of money. I had an idea, a way to make some, and quickly. Flush with my inspiration, I wrote a neat note to our neighbor:
Tenke, hello. Not like Katy’s job, but I would like to ask if there is any work for me over there? I can help mow and I fix things very well and paint or shovel snow, things like that, really anything at all. I don’t have a car, so working so close to home would work out well for me. After school and on weekends. Not expensive.
Nothing more than a job application when you thought about it. Sealing it in an envelope made it safer. I tucked it in my shirt, slipped downstairs and out the back door (Dad preoccupied at the fireplace, putting a match to his trash pile), silently jogged over to the High Side, slipped my missive under the great doors. Sylphide’s kisses, Emily’s, my head swirling with confusion: these women. A few minutes later I was home in my own backyard, lurking—I could see that Dad had moved into the kitchen, and I didn’t want to have to explain myself. But then, oddest thing, he slid the patio door open, hurried out into the night carrying a big manila envelope. He didn’t look around, certainly didn’t see me, hurried down to our rowboat, crossed the pond with efficient strokes, trundled up the long hill to the High Side.
We were both back in our rooms when Mom got home from her tennis match. I could hear Dad murmuring, heard the tone of her answers: they were talking about money. The situation was extreme. But Mom had lost the usual advantage because of her mistake with Kate: she could hardly call him out for his money troubles after what she’d done. They were going to have to cooperate.
Late, I heard them making love, closed my door tight.
THE NEXT MORNING, Emily wasn’t in school. I went to the principal’s office at the appointed time, no sign of Nussbaum, either. I told Mr. Demeter exactly what had happened between Mark and me. He nodded fondly, no love lost on my brash classmate, nothing but trust for me. He said, “Of course, David. And since it’s his complaint, and with your permission, we can let it drop. He’s got enough trouble at home, believe me.”
“I agree, sir. And I can take care of myself, sir. But the person with the real complaint is Emily Bright.” I rushed into his confidence: “He forced himself on her.”
“Sexually, you mean.”
“I guess, yes.”
“Well, that’s a horse of a different color, David. That’s serious stuff. I’ll have to have a word with our man.”
Whoa. “I’m not so sure about that, sir.”
“Worried about Emily’s honor, are we? Trust me, I’ll treat the matter delicately.”
The next day, I waited till I was late for homeroom, then till I had missed homeroom (and had to go to Mr. Demeter’s office for a blue slip, he kindly as ever), but Emily didn’t turn up. It wasn’t like I could phone her, not in those days, when phone calls were practically dates. Then, oddly, she was in math class, something different about her. Clothes, for one thing—she looked like a church girl, all in yellow with bows in her hair. Aloof, for another: she didn’t so much as raise her hooded eyes to greet me. I hooked my feet in the rungs of her chair, lifted her off the ground, but she didn’t even turn, made herself heavy. At the bell she hurried out of the room, pointedly avoiding me.
She didn’t turn up at the Rocks (I’d made big plans for the Rocks, had a blanket in my gym bag), and then she wasn’t in the senior parking lot after school. Wednesday she was even more elusive. I spotted her near her locker after lunch, but she skipped math altogether. It was Thursday before I finally cornered her against the retaining wall, having spied her at the bus line. She couldn’t hold my eye, and I noticed again that she was wearing someone else’s clothes, a cable-knit sweater, white Dacron pants you could only call slacks, hideous. Plus her hair was out, carefully brushed, long down to her elbows, glossy black. She’d even been forbidden her signature braid! In place of her sandals, sensible pumps and Pedi-Sox. And, the ultimate indignity, there she was waiting for the bus: her BMW had been taken away.
“I’m grounded,” she said flatly, and would say no more.
WHEN I GOT home there was a note taped to the front door, definitely not Desmond’s writing, no scent of jasmine, embossed HIGH SIDE, a maid’s handwriting perhaps, anyway, feminine: “Sylphide would like you to know she’s in Europe these coming weeks. Meantime, your note about work has been placed on the desk of her manager, Conrad Pant, and a copy forwarded.”
That was one efficient household.
6
What had happened to our nice, normal family? Kate a
t college, swell, but living with her professor and a near-priceless Bonnard liberated from the home of the greatest dancer on earth. Mom, well, she’d been in the dark about all that, still moped about her treatment over a silly football game, spent her time with ladies who had better things to do: tennis and martinis. Dad was still taking the bus with me, still liked to give me a hard time, though he was the one sneaking off to the High Side with his big manila envelopes, no one home over there but the watchman and a skeleton staff: Sylphide and her retinue and her retinue’s retinue were overseas.
I’ve long since lost the photo I’d clipped from the Times, but the image remains fixed in my memory: the ballerina poised and pleasant, Linsey wide-eyed just behind her, Georges Whiteside slouching in the background, Queen Elizabeth II beaming—a posthumous knighthood for Dabney Stryker-Stewart. I started to call my sister Lady Kate, though not to her face, and not around my folks, not aloud at all.
RANDOMLY ON A Monday night after Dabney’s elevation, the lights came back on at the High Side. I mean all of the lights. By the next afternoon, exotic cars were parked helter-skelter like boats off their moorings, in the driveways, on the lawn, wherever they’d been left. Huge trucks pulled in and out of the service road unloading mysterious crates and pallets back by the garages. The Bentley came and went, came and went, ferrying arrivals from the train station. I heard guitars tuning up, a loud P.A. system being tested. My mother perked her ears as I did.
“We’ll be invited for the party,” she said.
I was hard on her: “Yes, you and me and Kate.”
“Certainly we won’t tell Kate!”
And of course there were things Kate and I wouldn’t tell Mom.
And things Kate wasn’t telling anyone.
Mr. Demeter, our noble principal, came to the door of my history class that Wednesday, interrupting Miss Butterman so that Dr. Chun could present me with a letter—that gorgeous note paper, the intoxicating scent of jasmine, Desmond the butler’s handwriting, his sense of humor, too, no attempt to sound like the ballerina, small words:
Life Among Giants Page 10
