Life Among Giants

by Bill Roorbach

  Across the way, Kate was peaceably ambling, flipping up shells with her toes, inspecting finds. She might have been eighteen at that distance. Or even ten: there wasn’t a hair on her body, another of her symptoms—obsessive shaving. I studied the current in the inlet, no longer worried I’d have to dive in after her. A striped bass cruised by in the clear water, and me without a rod and reel. Bait mackerel battled the current in large schools, menhaden flashing. A succession of crabs walked by on the rocks, just under water. There was a great, satisfying stench of salt and sea. The tide came full, the current went slack, everything paused, pent, five minutes, ten, started back again the other way, slowly gathering momentum, heartening. I felt a portal had opened, that a wind blew through my brain. I’d been mourning the loss of everything: Floridiana, the Dolphins, years of my life. Barb and Nick, yes, the unsayable names, coming clearly to the foreground.

  How strange to find a serene moment in the company of Crazy May.

  And of course, senser of fine thoughts, here she came, perfect stroke, everything timed so she emerged like the crabs at my feet, her skin taut with the cold of the water. She lay on the warm rock on her back, hands behind her head, eyes emphatically closed. Any naked body is interesting. Probably twenty years since I’d seen hers, some nude beach somewhere. She wore that key on a chain between her cold-gathered breasts, the one Dad had supposedly given her, a key for a briefcase that had a combination lock. I almost smiled. Certainly that would not be unlike him. Never a word about my having sent the key back to her, mysterious Kate.

  Her figure hadn’t changed at all. Her shoulders were broad and muscled. Her belly was narrow and flat, her shape narrow, too, narrow through the hips, slightly masculine, her thighs more powerful than you’d notice in a skirt. In every sinew the memory of tennis. I looked away, kept my eyes on the horizon, a shimmering, numinous day.

  Her feet began to kick, heels jamming into the rock. She drummed her fingers under her head, making it bop; she wriggled her hips; she drew up her knees, up and down, up and down, a kind of kinetic storm. Suddenly she said, “We have to comb our memories, David. It’s just as simple as that. Any little thing could be the answer. We have to get these fuckers. And when we do, you’ll see.”

  “I’ll see what?”

  “You’ll just see.” She drummed and bopped and kicked, repeated the whole imperative word for word, then: “Comb, comb, comb our memories.”

  Enough. I put a hand on her shoulder, just a little pressure, like keeping a boat from floating away from its mooring as the tide rushed seaward. Very slowly she settled down, very slowly all those hard-won muscles came to rest, very slowly her flesh molded to the warm rock, and finally she lay still in the sun.

  “We’re all we have,” she said.

  “There’s so much you haven’t told me,” I said, hungry to communicate, trying to reverse the polarity of my confession at McLean.

  She thought about that a while, took a breath like sighing, said, “But there’s nothing you can do about my secrets, fucker. It’s yours you have to worry about.”

  Soon she slept.

  After an hour, the sun losing its force, my belly rumbling, sack of mussels and oysters and seaweed waiting, I shook her a little, then shook her harder. She sat up fast, an almost panicked look around. “Dad?” she said.

  I wasn’t taking that on.

  We watched the ocean. We watched the sky. As if languorously, she slipped back into her three garments. We breathed the air. She touched my arm.

  “Don’t open a restaurant,” she said.

  PART THREE

  Children of War

  12

  Nicholas Bernhardt Hochmeyer. “The only,” he used to say, instead of “Junior.” He’d abandoned that suffix in high school after his own father’s suicide by drowning, history that seemed to hang in the shadows around him. I’m considerably older now than he ever got to be, and want to believe that his anger has worn out, that it can’t live on without him.

  I look for the good in the man. He never bullied me, for example. He could spend all day playing catch, nailed a plywood target to the back of the garage for me to hit with a football when I wasn’t more than six, did a play-by-play as I threw, gave me prizes for ten bull’s-eyes in a row, later a hundred. He put on his Chippewa work boots and flannel shirt and built me a fort with free materials from the dump and from a collapsed barn up the road (no permission, not him)—big glass panels, corrugated steel roofing, old studs and siding, fancy doors—and then he sat in there with me playing cards at a tiny table till fall came and it just got too cold. He taught me to play poker so I wouldn’t get taken advantage of like he did when he was in the service. World War II and he was a grunt walking drunk through France after the liberation, never near a single bullet, got there after the real work was done, kisses for candy bars. He advised me not to register for the draft, to just sidestep the whole Vietnam thing, and that’s what I did, with no thought that it might be terrible advice but in the end no repercussions. He was right when he was wrong, and wrong when he was right; he couldn’t win and he couldn’t lose. He smelled good night and day. He didn’t drive well, very poorly, in fact, but he knew it and never broke a rule of the road. Handsome forever, with that strong chin and forged face, the charming light in his eye, at least when he wasn’t miserable.

  My mother kept her distance, surrounded herself with a sense of mystery, anyway she wasn’t a big one for hugs or self-revelation, not with her kids, not with anybody. Barbara Makepeace Barton, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Dad had gone to attend a friend’s wedding. She had a reckless side, loved a martini, loved two martinis, liked a naked swim. She would have found Nick pleasingly cocky, insecurity recognizing its own—beauty, too. Anyway, they were married not long after they met and Katy was born not long after they were married and Mom was glad she’d moved east—exurban Connecticut never stopped seeming upscale to her. She had cultural pretensions, too, took Katy and me to pops concerts, all the museums in New York, to Sturbridge Village, flower shows, Shakespeare festivals, lectures at the library, but never really followed up in any way: these things were good for you, like oats. You ate them and you were done.

  Dad hated all that stuff (including oats), hated being anywhere the public gathered. But he shared Mom’s vision of the good life. He brought her champagne, extravagant bouquets, headshots of tennis stars with autographs possibly real. He bought steaks the size of tires, used four bags of charcoal to grill them. Hula hoops, color TV, convertible VW Bug, we were the first to have them all, though the VW didn’t last, disappeared in some kind of squabble with the bank. He taught us to swim in Long Island Sound at a secluded beach with imported white sand and elegant rafts, part of an estate he claimed was a friend’s, ours alone till a certain year (I’d been maybe ten), when a gardener and the Westport Police escorted us back to our car, which he’d parked brazenly in the stone mansion’s massive portico.

  Like my Mom’s father, I was close to a foot taller than Dad, taller from the age of twelve, a state of affairs he didn’t comment on, though you knew he hated looking up at a seventh grader as much as he hated looking up at his father-in-law, always finding ways to make himself taller: big boots, high hair, a barstool at the head of the kitchen table, a perch on the curb in a crowd or on the next step up no matter where.

  Mom was more comfortable socially, loved parties, increasingly went alone, a source of friction between her and Dad. She was crafty, careful, held love and even the smallest secrets close to her chest, big ones, too (none of us ever did learn where she bought those black-dark chocolate chips, or why she refused to speak to her sister Ellen, or who the man was who telephoned one Sunday night). Dad was more open than Mom, even inappropriate (we knew about every gal he found desirable and why, knew he couldn’t stand his brothers, ditto). He was much warmer than Mom, too, despite some tricky corners. Mom never tired of reminding us of his childhood nickname: Sneaky.

  Her nickname if she’d had one would hav
e been Ambitious. Yale, Princeton, that was Mom’s vision, and she told Kate and me from kindergarten where we’d be going to college. She loved sports, had excelled herself, and that was going to be our way in, just as it had been her way into the Westport Country Club, a place we never could have afforded nor would have been accepted otherwise. She was the ringer in the tennis tournaments, trophy after trophy in the club lounge, and the ladies were very fond of her.

  My parents’ mothers had both died young, and I never met either grandmother. Even photos or stories were rare: we Hochmeyers avoided painful subjects. Her dad—a guy I saw once or twice a year—was like her: competent, loyal, murder on the tennis court, maybe a little disappointed in life. His expectations must have been hard for Mom to live up to. And my father did not meet expectations. Dad’s own father was mean and unsuccessful and a suicide as I have said, drowned himself with the aid of a cinder block and chain when my father was fourteen, something Dad mentioned to me just once in a black mood and that otherwise we just simply never talked about, something he’d had to overcome, and silently. You have to wonder how that death shaped him, and how in turn it shaped us all, genetics aside.

  SO MUCH KATE hadn’t told me: suicide attempts, for example, four. First at Yale, nothing I ever heard about. The damage, whatever it had been, was why she’d quit tennis for a few years. Then, after her return to the game, there was that time she was pulled off a plane at Heathrow in handcuffs for trying to open the cabin door and leap. The phrase critical depressurization is in the official report, which I’ve only recently seen. Next was the drive into Long Island Sound and subsequent swim, which I’d only found out about via that anonymous news clipping, and never took up with her, and not with Jack. And then she’d dived off their sailboat, Deep Song, Jack running full with the wind. It had taken him almost twenty minutes to get back around and fish her out of the frigid water, her metabolism as crazy as she was, full breaststroke the whole time, not so much as a case of exposure. Their “honeymoon” was actually a kind of homemade rehab, thus Jack’s bizarre reaction when I tried to pay for the trip. Much later, recently in fact, here in a new century, I asked him why they hadn’t told me. “For your own protection,” Jack said, though of course they’d been protecting themselves.

  Or was that me, keeping my distance, protecting myself?

  Because there was so much I hadn’t told Kate: that Mom and I had gone to the dancer’s for tea, for example. That Sylphide had kissed me in her Bentley. That I’d seen the world’s greatest ballerina not only naked, but having sex. Through Dabney’s binoculars. That Sylphide had subsequently been my boss, kissed me as I sat on her desk in a secret dressing room off her boudoir. That I dearly thought we were developing a relationship. That in fact we were, no less perverse than Kate’s with Dabney.

  I combed my memory, all right, saw myself emerging from Sylphide’s secret dressing room after my first assignment, the High Side empty, everyone off on some adventure that didn’t include me.

  Home that night, my parents safely asleep in their bedroom, I found Sylphide’s soft bra-thing in my pocket, held it to my lips, lay on my bed sniffing jasmine and parsing every word she’d said to me. Had I really been her first kiss? Could it be true that Dabney hadn’t ever really slept with her? Georges was definitely a troll, but that gave me no comfort: he was Sylphide’s troll. Maybe I was going to be her giant, complete the fairy story. The bra-thing was so, so soft. The jasmine arousing. Memory of kisses, first this one, then that. Memory of her hardened body as she pulled off her sweats, her tights, my slight repulsion at all the muscles, the call of the little underpants. The thought came to me that with Kate at college and Emily off in Korea I was free to go back for more, calculated I could skip a little school in the coming days and weeks, maybe a lot of school. The dancer needed me. She needed me in the way Dabney had needed my sister, a need my sister had hidden from me. In fact, my sister had hidden herself from me altogether.

  Our secrets gave us power.

  And then they took our power away.

  From whom had we learned that?

  THE HIGH SIDE was quiet when I got there the next morning, quiet except for Desmond, who acted as if he didn’t understand when I asked where everyone had been the night before. He’d gotten instructions to set me up in a little office back behind the parlor, another big phone, gorgeous polished desk, an amended list of theaters neatly typed, longhand note from Conrad. I was to make APPOINTMENTS, not leave MESSAGES: “Don’t take no. You are DABNEY. You are SYLPHIDE.”

  Desmond handed me another note, one of Sylphide’s signature envelopes, neatly addressed to Emily Bright. He said, “If you could deliver this at school. Madame has had an impressive report on your girlfriend from Brandi DeAngelis at the conservatory.”

  Whoa.

  Desmond stood too long behind my chair in case I might need something, came back too many times with tea and cakes and a pillow for my back. I closed the door finally, shut him out, put the envelope in my jacket pocket—Emily would have to acknowledge me now whether she liked it or not—put myself to work, dialed the phone. Soon I was talking to theater owners, office hours in the executive suites, all these important people excited by the prospect of Children of War. A subtle feeling of power washed over me. I was Sylphide’s executive assistant, and Kate didn’t know. I was Dabney, just as Conrad had said. I stopped making calls, didn’t have to: the phone rang every time I hung it up. My list of appointments grew longer. I stopped periodically to recopy it, sixteen theaters at our disposal, all previous engagements to be cancelled: the dancer’s name was gold.

  About noon there was a knock at the office door. Not Desmond, but the woman herself. I felt suddenly shy. But she didn’t want to talk, not a word about any speckled stone, nothing about her missing garment. She perched on the arm of my plush chair, which was of course hers, looked at my list.

  “You are being my eyes and ears,” she said finally.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I mean when you and Conrad are visiting theaters. I am not trusting his taste.”

  She left abruptly. I took more calls. Desmond brought lunch, rubbed my shoulders a little, snippy to be spurned. “Don’t bug me,” I told him, playing Mr. Powerful. The phone rang, rang some more.

  Sylphide was back, sweaty from the morning class, morning for her, anyway, bare feet and sweatpants. “I’m afraid I’m telling you too much yesterday afternoon,” she said, sitting on the desk so I couldn’t avoid her eye.

  “No, no,” I said.

  “Life is dancing, all the time. Dancing only. That is all I was trying to express to you. Dancing is the highest physical expression. And in that way of talking, Vlad Markusak is my only lover. Sex was never anything like so wonderful as that. Though maybe it gets better?”

  “You’re going to say too much again.”

  She never found me funny. We both looked out the window—chickadees, tufted titmice—there must have been a feeder just out of view. She put a hand atop my head. That famous photo, she and Vlad caught at a restaurant by a photographer for Paris Match, a very deep-looking kiss.

  I mentioned it.

  “Public relations,” she said. “Vlad is queer one hundred fifteen percent.”

  The phone rang. I answered businesslike, handled the inquiry. Absently, inches from my face, Sylphide clipped one of her nipples between two fingers, scissored it through the scant cloth of her workout top, a kind of cotton leotard, which was under a little bit of a sweater. When my call was done I forced my gaze to the dancer’s pocked face. Her profile was so sculpted, so intelligent, like a shell alone on a vast beach. Chin too pointed, cheeks too high, brow too flat, altogether however a woman of surpassing beauty, as the critics liked to say. Finally her distracted eyes found mine again, that rare green so close I could see the dark-brown line drawn around the rim of each large iris.

  “What did you mean by the binoculars?” I asked boldly.

  “They are very fine, ja? Dabney always said so.”
She smiled slowly, seemed suddenly to notice what her fingers had been doing, quit with the nipple, pulled the little sweater thing tighter around her shoulders. She looked at me such a long time, like maybe a real answer was forming, something direct about the magic she’d used to get me into that tree fort.

  I must have looked away, looked at the phone.

  “You want to make calls,” she said.

  “Conrad wants me to. Or asked me to. Told me to.”

  “And do you work for Conrad?”

  “No, I work for you. A theater for you.”

  “I am working on a dance,” she said. “But Vlad is in Houston. Always in demand, our Mr. Markusak. I’m needing a stand-in. Someone tall.” She slid off the arm of my chair, floated to the open door, disappeared. I understood that I was to follow, trailed her through the parlor with its missing Bonnard and Picassos and into the foyer and up the grand stone stairs to her suite, glimpse of the famous bed, then leftwards through another little parlor and then a tiny kitchen, through a tiny maidservant’s room with single bed tightly made, finally through a long room with a lap pool, a luxury I’d never heard of, a single long lane in crystal blue, then out the far door into a large dance studio with its own piano and mirrors and barres and perfect shiny wood floor, pretty view out across the side yard I’d just been looking at, the endless High Side grounds.