Life Among Giants

by Bill Roorbach

  GET YER HUNKY BUTT OVER HERE

  I was being summoned. Always one for the arts, Mr. Demeter formally excused Linsey and me, and Dr. Chun drove us to the High Side. Desmond at the door gazed up into my eyes.

  I took advantage: “So. You knew all about Dabney and Kate.”

  “Sir, I know only that you are expected in the ballroom immediately.”

  “What about my dad’s shoes?”

  His gaze fell to my belly. “The shoes didn’t match, sir. Very close, sir. As it turned out, sir. But not a match. And I know nothing about any stolen paintings. So don’t ask me about that, sir.”

  “Sir yourself,” I said. “Who said anything about paintings?”

  He said, “I, sir. It was I who said it. May I just . . . Sir, may I punch you in the stomach?”

  I lifted my T-shirt for him, and he took a shot, bam.

  “Ouch,” I said, to please him.

  “Like cement,” he said.

  I raised the shirt a little higher. “Kate and Dabney,” I said.

  “The poolhouse,” he said. “That was their domain. The old carriage house.”

  “And my father,” I said. “Did my father know?”

  He gazed at my belly. “I’ve made you pink,” he said.

  “Did Nicholas know?”

  “No sir, no. A great effort, in fact, was mounted that he should not.”

  “Does he know now?”

  “You will have to ask him.”

  I dropped my shirt. A harried man wearing a black beret burst into the foyer as if from another dimension—there were a lot of doors leading in and out of there, several under the stairway.

  “Perhaps sometime you and I could box,” Desmond said. “You might be surprised at my prowess.”

  “Ha,” I said.

  Desmond hurried: “Your father was banned. By Sylphide. He isn’t welcome here and has not been since Mr. Stryker-Stewart’s death.”

  The beret man was Conrad Pant. His handshake was a slice of pressed turkey, limp and cold. Desmond introduced me as Sylphide’s new executive assistant. I mouthed the title back to him. He didn’t seem to be kidding. Pant looked up at me with huge disdain, bid me follow, led me at warp speed to the Chlorine Baron’s old ballroom, which I’d seen only in my imagination—Kate’s stories—a startling, ornate cavern the size of a school gym but with mirrors and barres installed on two long walls, chandeliers hanging from gilded plaster escutcheons, high-arched doorways, no windows, stage lights on a retractable rigging of pipes and cables, a convertible theater. My guide looked me over once more, sneered and stormed off, leaving me in the midst of a careless understory of music stands, instrument cases, duffel bags—people, too, all haphazard, apparently on some kind of break: dancers stretching, musicians chatting and running licks, a dark-skinned techie in dreads measuring the floor and laying out precise lines in black gaffer’s tape.

  I kept wondering: How did Dad’s actual shoes not match his actual footprints in the actual High Side parlor? Had he been there with Kate or not?

  Shortly, Georges slipped in without a look in anyone’s direction, sat at the biggest piano, slumped and stared lugubriously, his satyr’s earring glinting in the light tests. One of the female dancers—a plump woman with a strange, long face—showed the others a step on flat feet, and then they all tried it, laughing. Vlad Markusak came in from the patio—the Cavalier himself, dressed in tights that showed his bozzer quite plainly, no shirt, no shoes.

  A suite of teenage girls flounced into the hall from the double doors at the back, all in tights and bare feet after the day’s classes. They saw Vlad and flew to gather around him. He bussed their cheeks, both sides, each girl, lifting them up at the waists to his height, enormous strength, perfect control. I thought of the driveway full of cars. Hard to imagine any of these people getting on a train or driving—more likely they had drifted in on currents of air like spiders casting silk.

  Suddenly Conrad was back, vast shift in attitude. Clearly he’d been yelled at. “It’s Lizard, then,” he said, all transparent. “Let me apologize for my earlier greeting. You just seemed so young. Like a newborn calf, no offense. A wet, enormous, staring, stupid, mucous-covered newborn calf, for which image I apologize. Here’s what’s going on: Sylphide is forming a new company, ongoing auditions, old friends, lots of the folks you see here, plenty of new young dancers. Youth the watchword, eh? She’s determined to mount Dabney’s benefit, the one he always waxed on about, dance performances in the form of rock concerts, untold millions for Children of War. All right? Of course she’s going to ruin her reputation and mine in the process, but there you go.”

  “A mucous-covered wet calf,” I said, impressed.

  “You and I, we’re going to get along fine,” Conrad said.

  Children of War was Dabney’s foundation, everyone knew, a big part of why he’d been knighted, funded by the robust proceeds of his most remarkable album, Children of War, every song a hit, all those kids’ voices. He himself had traveled to places like Borneo and Laos and Colombia—and of course Vietnam—always at great personal risk, supposedly, went wherever the wars were, free concerts, meetings with world leaders, visits to schools and hospitals, the fierce media focus he brought to bear like sunshine.

  Pant said, “The lady’s got commitments from all of Dabney’s old friends, and we’re gathering new commitments every day, concerts around the world. Listen to this: Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Grace Slick, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Page, all the Beatles but McCartney, Mick Jagger. They all want to be involved, which means everyone else wants to be, a whole new audience for Sylphide and her dancers, of course.” Apparently her plan for the New York engagement (“I have stopped arguing,” Conrad said) was to go up against every Christmas event—Nutcracker and Rockettes and Messiah, all that stuff rock fans didn’t care about, all the stuff ballet fans did, and sell out a week or ten days of shows, every night different.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “And as Sylphide’s executive assistant, you are going to help make it happen.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Good. Don’t say anything. What we need now is a theater. Two thousand seats give or take.” He handed me a neatly typed sheet of addresses, phone numbers. “You’re going to call these people, explain what we’re doing, drop all the names I’ve been dropping, and make appointments. Be snooty, lord it up. You’re somebody, now. You’re Dabney Stryker-Stewart and Sylphide put together, with all their clout behind you. Tenke said she’d be down in a minute to show you to a phone.”

  I fingered the smooth stone in my pocket, lurked and watched the action, considered my father’s shoes.

  WHEN SYLPHIDE FINALLY appeared, she flew right at me, grabbed me by the hand, full speed to the kitchen, where several cooks were at work in front of the famous Victor range. I thought I’d be getting a snack, but no: she pulled me into the pantry, of all places, vortexed me up a spiral staircase into a storage loft, lots of empty boxes. She slid a secret panel aside as if it were nothing strange, pulled me into a dark passageway and to another panel, which she slid aside with a flood of light: a sudden, sumptuous dressing room, no windows, no obvious doors, just rows of hangers heavy with costumes, ceiling so low I couldn’t stand straight.

  “My office,” she said. And indeed under piles of clothes and torn envelopes and note cards and books and polished rocks and seashells there was a huge old oaken eminence, like a dance floor with drawers. She pushed some papers aside so I could sit, tossed a bralike thing to a waiting chair, gave me a shove.

  I felt a strong sensation of falling toward her, when in fact I was falling away, sat on the desk. “How was London?” I said to save myself.

  She put long fingers to my lips, stood between my legs, hands on my thighs, continued to hold my eye. “London was lovely,” she said, leaning close, then closer, levitating somehow (going up on her toes no doubt), kissed my forehead, kissed my mouth. Before I could respond, something came visibly over her, some air of
gravity. She backed away, became a businessperson, calm and articulate: “Now, let us get to work. Conrad has filled you in, ja? You have got the list? I am finding the phone.”

  She drifted to a buried dresser, stripped out of her sweatpants and leotard. Naked, she found a sheer kind of frock in a drawer, held it up to herself, slowly put it on. Trick of the light, you could still see her body. She seemed muscular to me, not perfectly attractive. The phone was on the floor. She dug it out, bending from the waist. I watched every movement from the very edge of my vision, every inch of her legs.

  “I should not kiss you so,” she said abstracted.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Good boys cannot live in my world.”

  “Good boys could try.”

  “Just something to keep in mind: Good boys cannot.”

  “So Georges is not a good boy?”

  That got her attention. She stood and faced me, said, “He is teaching me some little yummy somethings. But he is a troll, not a good boy at all. He should be living under a wooden bridge in a swamp somewhere nasty, with fog and mold and Spanish moss.”

  “He’s incredible, really. At piano, I mean.”

  “Oh, he is incredible, ja. Dabney was being very, very fond of him.” She poked her chin at me, a pointed thing. A lick of pink fire had risen up from the collar of her frock into her neck—I wanted to put my hand there, or anywhere. She found a slight pair of underpants in her drawer, pulled them on under the shift with no particular modesty, someone used to dressing in front of others.

  She caught me looking. “Oh, Lizard,” she said. “I have not had a normal life. I am emotionally stump-ted.”

  “Stunted?”

  “Ja-ja, that’s so.”

  I gathered my thoughts, a vision of her through binoculars, said, “I don’t think I know what that means, emotionally stunted. Or anyway, it doesn’t sound true. I mean, you seem pretty grown-up to me.”

  “Did you want to know something? Georges is my first lover. And you, you are the first man I ever kissed.”

  “Just that thing in your car? That’s what you’re talking about?”

  “And just now, ungrateful you. The first, ja. I can’t stop thinking of it.”

  “That one little kiss?”

  “Two of them, now,” she said. “Don’t be making fun of me.” She cleared her high dresser off, perched upon it with a simple hop, her head almost touching the ceiling. Her hair came past her shoulders, seemed a little dirty. I’d never seen it out. She could easily be a classmate, maybe someone who didn’t know about shampoo. She said, “You don’t believe me.”

  “Well, no. What about Dabney? What about Georges?”

  “I never developed. I am dancing all the time. All the time. Dancing is the only reality, the only thing I do. Others kiss me, ja. They kiss me all the time. That is not what I am saying. I am saying that I kissed you.” The blush on her neck and clavicle had fallen back into her neckline. She raised a leg, impossibly placed her foot flat on the dresser beside her, matter of factly hugging her knee to her cheek—that’s how long her legs were, proportionally speaking. I loved the way her thigh fit into her hip, the way the crease worked, the sight of her underpants. She caught me looking again, just kept going: “Dabney, he was a miner’s kid, and then he was a miner himself. Love was about battling and getting an upper hand. A man worked very hard all day and then he drank and when he wanted some cunt he pulled off your pants. Sorry, is that not a nice word? Okay, cunt. I won’t say it. You worship your woman, you build a shrine, ja? You are using all your strength carrying the beloved up there and after a time you are being exhausted and so you leave her up there, you never come back to claim her. That was Dabney and Sylphide. Do you know how we met?”

  Everyone knew how they met: rhetorical question.

  “He saw a photo in the Times of London. I am not even nineteen. He pulled on a few ropes and sat in the front row at my Royal Ballet debut. I did not know him. I did not know to be star-struck. After the performance, there he is in my dressing room. Everyone rushing in to touch him like I’m not there.”

  “And you just ignored him!”

  “I have heard that rumor, too. But not true. If everyone wanted him, I would have him. And this part you have not heard, because it has not been told: we are having dinner at his hotel, and then up to his room, no resistance from me. But in his bed I am surprised by what he seems to intend. I have been sheltered, Lizard. I am perfectly pleased to be touched, kissed, naked in his hands, fucked if he wants, all of it, it’s not like I do not know what it all is, but I cannot begin to comply. I mean physically. There is a medical word for it, but I forget it. I closed up tight! He is knocking away, and pushing and prodding, but you know, he cannot even get started. I am crying. I cry and cry not to make him happy. I am not understanding. It is funny, ja? You smile? I thought he would hate me, but he did not care. He is liking my innocence. He finds some way around it, gets his satisfaction. We married the next week. I was grateful to him. But grateful is not love, I have come to learn.”

  I picked up the huge phone, put it on my lap, picked Conrad’s list of theaters out of my shirt pocket, gazed at the names and numbers almost longingly.

  Sylphide said, “Kate doesn’t brag of him?”

  Suddenly we had landed on my sister. Was that why I was there? I felt protective: “Far from it. Total secrecy. I just found out like, last week.”

  “I was finding out the night he died. Those little tennis skirts of hers, oik! You know his song ‘Love Fifteen.’ That is how old, she! And then two years more it went on! He is writing this for her! And she’s the one being furious with me!” Sylphide turned her head just so, cocked her shoulders so, crossed her ankles, put herself forward in some ineffable way, the sexual body no longer on display, a dancer in its place.

  “That was the only time he try with me. That one night in that beautiful hotel. He had all the girls in the world. I was the one he couldn’t. And before Dabney there was only Vasily Bustonovich Bustonov, my impresario. I was twelve, ja? I knew nothing. I loved him very much, so far as I knew. He is taking me from my home with the blessing of my parents . . . .”

  “They were farmers in Boda. An island.”

  “They were not farmers. That error, over and over again endlessly. But it was an island, and quite severe, two hours of daylight in winter. My father was being a grain broker.” She told the proper story, not like what I’d heard: her mother had grown up in a house of drunkards, had known the dancer’s father from childhood, was not a mail-order bride. The mother had, in fact, been a dancer in her youth, had run off and lived in Russia, well into her thirties. Bustonov had been the mother’s mentor, and was her correspondent in Sylphide’s youth, likely a lover, but certainly not Sylphide’s actual father, per rumor.

  “And Bustonov brought you to the Kirov School for training. In Moscow, which was still in a shambles from the war. You met Vlad Markusak there. He defected years later in Boston in order to dance with you again.”

  “I see you have been making a study of me. But low marks: it is all being much more complicated than you want to believe!”

  “And you got in trouble in Moscow, trying to protect your friends. Or Bustonov tried to keep you from your friends and you rebelled. But whatever, he took you to Bournonville’s company in Denmark. He had a diplomatic passport. You took the name Sylphide.”

  “Well, and you are ready for the exam, I see. Yes, to Denmark. But Bournonville? He died in 1864 or something like this. He only started the company I was in: Danish Royal Ballet. Very proper, classical ballet. Vasily very proud of me, very protective. I was given to understand that he was my lover.”

  “Given to understand?”

  “He is saying we are lovers, and so I believe him, ja? But in fact we did not make love. Our only intimacy was conversation, very good talk. I was calling him Uncle in public, lived with him in Copenhagen. We are not sleeping in the same room, not even that. His sexual needs are nothing
to me, only a few kisses on my forehead when I am lying down to bed. He draw my baths, he help me dress; I have no sense of shame in my body, none at all. He likes me to do my barre exercises in his bedroom while he does something or other under the quilts. I never inquire about it, never understand it in any explicit way till Dabney explains. I just mistook it all for love. And what else did I need?”

  Dance.

  Dance provided all the physical expression she needed, every bit of it across the entire range from plain exercise to the sexual, as she understood it then. And I wasn’t to misunderstand her: Bustonov was quite fascinating. She would have said she loved him. “He kiss me on the mouth only once, a lot of warm spittle, how I was seeing it, a disgusting event.” She was my age by then, having already had five years with the man, who had turned sixty, and just the one kiss. Which was itself part of a very nasty scene. He’d grown jealous of Tenke’s dance partners. He had demanded that she quit. He wept and begged and raged and made promises. “I left him forever the next morning. A boat to Newcastle, a train to London, all the money he was having in his purse.

  “Then Dabney. Then Georges. And that is all. So thank you for my first kiss. I love you for my first kiss.”

  I looked this way, she looked that, and the dressing room was just a hot stillness, one minute, two minutes, three. I couldn’t think of a thing to say, wasn’t at all sure what she was implying, didn’t believe she was only confiding. Also, had she just said she loved me? She made no motion to get off her dresser. I stayed put on her desk, the heavy phone in my lap. Was I supposed to make a move?

  “Make your telephone calls,” she said after a long wait. She slipped off her perch and onto her famous feet, the frock rising up in the process to show her naked thighs, her tiny underpants complete, her bellybutton then, which I was almost surprised to see she owned. She straightened the garment, wrapped herself in a silken robe, crossed in front of me unhappily, jasmine zephyr, pushed at the bottom of yet another innocuous wall panel, which opened to reveal her boudoir—the very room I’d seen her and Georges in, the very bed, the very windows back behind it, a tree fort somewhere out there.