“I’m sorry, sir.”
“And because, as before, Mr. Nussbaum has placed the blame on you. Which he’s done in the past, of course. I told the investigators just that. So you’ll do well to get a note from someone over there at the High Side. Maybe multiple signatures?”
“Sir, there was an incident at the High Side. Right about that time. The police came. They took my name. They took everyone’s name.”
“Then we can check with the police.”
“Do you have to? The police aren’t very good at this stuff.”
“Again, I know you are protecting Emily Bright’s honor, and I appreciate that. Quietly, David. We’ll do this very quietly. You’ve done nothing wrong, so your name should not be dragged through this and won’t be, nor Emily’s. I believe you implicitly, but I’m afraid there are others who may not. Nussbaum’s parents are very powerful attorneys, and naturally they are quite concerned, quite concerned.”
“Just what I need,” I said.
“No, now, never mind. I’ll run interference for you, son. It’s best for everyone involved, including the students and faculty of Staples High, and probably Mark, as well, to get this cleared up as quietly as possible. In progress, son. Meanwhile, please give my best to your mother and your dad, and my best wishes in these difficult times. And let’s get you back to classes as soon as possible.”
Nice guy.
FREDDY GAVE ME a long, appraising look from the front doors at the High Side, said nothing: we were all feeling guilty. He wouldn’t let me pass: the house was shut down. Finally Desmond appeared carrying a tray with a glass of water and a pill bottle. He said, “Mr. Hochmeyer,” very professional tones, didn’t invite me in. He just went about his business, climbed the great stairs.
“How’s Tenke?” I called after him.
“Come again, sir?”
“Sylphide, how is she?”
“She’s resting upstairs.”
“Did they find the guy?”
Confidential, said his posture—he’d never discuss anything about his employer without express instructions. More clipped even than usual: “I’ll tell her you are here.”
“We’ll find him,” Freddy muttered, still standing in my way.
I kept mum about the damage at my own house. Freddy was still the goon, as far as I was concerned, and a failed one at that: when there was actual trouble, he hadn’t protected the great ballerina.
Shortly Desmond was back: “Sylphide will see you.”
Freddy looked surprised, let me pass.
I bustled after Desmond up the scooped stone stairs. Desmond knocked gently at the heavy door to Sylphide’s suite, opened it, let me in, let grief cross his features. “You may go in. No more pills, no matter what she says.” He turned on heel.
“Wait,” I said. “The guy trashed my house. The guy who did this to her. They went through my father’s desk. I mean, obviously there’s some connection.”
Desmond turned back to me, gave me a long look up and down. “And you think your father isn’t it?”
SYLPHIDE WAS DEEP in her bed, shoulder encased in ice packs, silk sheets pulled up to her chin and folded nicely, Desmond’s work. “Lizard,” she said fondly. Her teeth were bright white, tilted very slightly sidewise as if by strong currents, something I hadn’t noticed before. The layered muscles stood out on her good arm, a few freckles. Her eyes were darker than I remembered, her face more relaxed, prettier for that, add acne scars for character, that tall nose for nobility: the woman never looked the same to me twice.
Gently, I said, “Happy Halloween.”
And she said softly, “What do you mean?”
Even more softly: “Skeletons and pumpkins, trick-or-treat, all that?”
“Oh, fie fahn,” she said slowly, letting her eyes droop closed. “A great crowd of children are coming as ghosts last year and terrify poor Dr. Chun.” Her head was propped too high in pillows. I took one away, and she let her neck fall back—gratefully, I thought. She said: “He is exploding my shoulder, everything about it: muscles and tendons and rotator cuff. The nerve is pinched in my neck. The hand is numb. These pills, they do not work. I’m all black and blue and green and yellow under here, swollen.”
A great drum roll from downstairs, background noise, well muffled by the walls of that lair, the heavy door.
I said, “You’ll dance again.”
She murmured something fondly.
I leaned close to hear, asked her to say it again.
“Oh, you,” she breathed. “You’re so very stupid.”
She wriggled slightly, adjusted the ice pack on her shoulder. Her eyes fluttered open. Her good shoulder was bare and parian pale, delicate passage of blue veins. Her lips parted slightly. She seemed to search for my thoughts, then let her eyes close again, took measured breaths, her shoulders rising and falling in the silk of her sheets just slightly. “These useless pills,” she said, vexed. She brought her good hand up and out from under the sheets, inadvertently exposing a pretty, pallid breast. I tucked the sheet back up. She reached to me, patted my cheek, let her hand drop, patted my shoulder, squeezed my bicep, ran her hand down my forearm, found my fingers, twined them in hers.
“Warm,” she said, and strong as ever pulled my hand to her cheek and to her forehead, seeming to ask me to stroke her, so I did, working my fingers into her hair. “Oh,” she said. Her eyes fluttered, her jaw twitched, her breath grew ragged.
I slipped the speckled stone heart into her palm.
She closed her fingers upon it tight. “Oh, Dab,” she murmured. “Oh, Dabney, darling.”
AT HOME, THE rain came suddenly and very hard, cold drops like hail almost, they were so big. I started in cleaning again, wanted that house spotless. I’d hurt Sylphide’s attacker—broken his arm (I’d felt it go), crushed his hand—so he must have been at our house before he went to get Sylphide. A bucket, a sponge, the top edge of every baseboard, nutty behavior. But if I could clean things up, I’d be in control.
Finally the phone rang. I leapt to answer.
“David, hello. It’s your mother.” She sounded almost cheerful. “Honey, there’s really no time to talk right now but I want to let you know that they’ll release Daddy after court on Friday, good news. Your sister and this professor of hers will pick you up nine o’clock that morning and chauffeur you. There’s to be a hearing, okay? A formality, but fatso the public defender thinks the appearance of a loving family will be an asset—and then we’re all going to go get a nice lunch and try to sort through some of the issues here. Your father won’t be able to come home for a while, but.”
My father had gone state’s evidence and was to be sequestered under guard in a secret location, was the gist of the rest. Mom was calling from a pay phone in the courthouse, about to enter a meeting with the federal prosecutor. So that explained the businesslike tone, the brusque good-bye.
Not a word from Kate.
Early dusk under the dense overcast, the hard rain soothing. I made myself dinner from sparse leavings: can of beans over rice, chunks of onion, heavy dusting of chili powder, first class. I scrubbed the counters after, washed the skillet and pan and dish I’d used, rinsed the bean can doubly. I had felt for a moment what to be loved by the dancer would be like, and the tumble of it suffused me. To have been mistaken for Dabney even momentarily was somehow promising, even suggestive, not as discouraging as you’d think.
Cheerful as Mom, that kind of will, I sat down to do homework, no trouble guessing the calculus assignment: chapters ten and eleven in our ponderous book. Mr. Demeter expected me at school Monday, and maybe I could talk to him, clear my name in the matter of Mark Nussbaum, for whom I felt nothing but pity.
After an hour I wandered upstairs and retrieved my private Sylphide gallery, a photo from Life, another from the Times, two from Newsweek, the very moving photos from Rolling Stone (never a ballerina on the cover before or since), finally, the art from Dabney’s Dancer, that naked butt. I sorted through them all, but one
of the photos in the Rolling Stone spread moved me particularly. I brought it out to my small desk, just a shot of Sylphide from the waist up looking back at the camera over her shoulder, that frank, vast gaze, her hair falling out of its bun, leotard strap off her shoulder, dangling. That fragile shoulder! To love her as Georges loved her would be very simple. But I wanted to practice purity and so concentrated only on her face. I wanted to love her chastely and not use her as others did or even to so much as think of her or any dancer that way. All that purity left me feeling beautifully light, warm in my chest. I lay on the bed and studied that face, found myself overwashed with a rarefied desire that was not lust, fell hard asleep.
HEAVY BALLS OF rain still crashing down—that’s all it was, and branches in the wind—but then there it came again. I leapt awake and off my bed, grabbed my baseball bat, slipped along the carpeted hallway and down the stairs, peered between balusters to inspect the remaining patio door, nothing but reflection—I’d left the kitchen lights on. Still the tapping came, more insistent. I slapped at the two-way light switch, the kitchen went half-dark, and suddenly out there past the perfectly polished glass was a person. I gave a little shout of surprise: Emily Bright.
She staggered in as I slid the door open, left a wet trail. Her shoes—just little dance flats—were covered in thick mud; she was mud to the knees, mud in the ends of her thick braid. She swayed there regarding me, let a sheepish smile take hold, leaked sudden tears.
“Whoa,” I said.
She said, “I’ve done something really nuts.”
“I’ll get a towel,” I said. Mom kept beach towels in the laundry room. I retrieved four, handed one to Emily, who put it immediately to her hair. I wiped the floor, laid out a towel for her to stand on, helped her out of her shoes. She put a hand on my shoulder, dripped on me. All I could think of was getting her clothes in the wash. I stood to suggest she get a hot shower, borrow some of Katy’s old clothes—stood up right in her face, and she just suddenly kissed me, pressed her lips to mine, kept it coming, gasps and sobs, not wooden. In there somewhere the phone began to ring, rang twenty, thirty times. A kind of disgust overwhelmed me, the extravagant sighs and her pointed tongue, but then in a rush the feeling passed and suddenly I was in my mother’s kitchen kissing the girl I loved, kissing her just as hungrily as she’d been kissing me, letting the phone ring, first time in my life, just letting it ring, knowing full well that whatever it was it was probably important, probably Mom.
“I jumped out of the car,” Emily said suddenly, tugging at my shirt. “I just opened the back door and jumped out and ran into the woods.” I pulled at her shirt, too, pulled it over her head, just a light shirt, a shirt for an airplane ride to a warmer place. She looked like Emily again, someone I recognized again, her features adding up. She pressed her breasts naked against my chest and pulled at my belt—disquieting expertise—shoved my pants down as far as she could, put her hands on me, this sudden heat. So I put both hands in the back of her unlikely Capri pants—they were ruined anyway—and pushed them down off her butt, just popping the buttons in front, pushed them down, soaked panties and all—she’d been in the rain for hours.
“On the way to Kennedy,” she said.
I got my shirt the rest of the way off and tripped over my pants, sat my naked butt unintentionally on the mud and gravel she’d brought in. I said, “You jumped out of the car?”
“I just opened my door at a light and jumped out.”
We both laughed. Suddenly it all seemed pretty funny.
She didn’t wait for me to get my difficult shoes off but fell on me naked and crawled to my mouth and kissed me more, our foreheads banging—we were no less clumsy than ever—our brows knocking, our tongues counting teeth, her hair falling out of its braid thick and black and soaked, the smell of vanilla and rain, her hips pushing at me, her cold toes pushing my pants down as far as they’d go with the stupid shoes in the way and then her legs straddling me and her hand on my hard-on, way too skillfully putting it to herself, her soaked self, all but drinking it in, and she fucked me, that’s the only way to put it, with every bit of an athlete’s attention and focus, muscle, too. Huskily, rapidly the words tumbled from her, like she couldn’t stop talking, all the things she’d planned to say: “I jumped out of the car at the tollbooth in probably Greenwich and just took off.”
“Whoa,” I said, trying to get my hips flat on the linoleum floor—the girl was cracking my pelvis.
“And I lied to you,” she said, pushing herself on me, around me, her eyes full of lights, pushing her pubis on me uncomfortably till finally I got my hips square enough to push back, push up, arching myself up with every muscle, pushing up and into her maybe all of three times till I felt everything building and humming and massing at the gates.
“I lied to you,” she said again emphatically. “I lied, I lied a lot.”
I tried to pull out—yes, you lied, so what—tried to disengage, knew everything about babies being made, but Emily wouldn’t have any of it, clutched me with her legs, kissed me with her hot mouth, kissed me and clenched me and I let go, like nothing I’d ever felt or anticipated, let go in silent waves and lingering spasms, nothing like alone, nothing like with Jinnie and her dry little hand, more so even than with Sylphide, those triumphant leaps she’d made around her studio.
“I felt that,” Emily said.
My first time, not hers.
WEARING MY FLANNEL shirt and nothing else after a shower, Emily made a noodle soup from the dregs in our kitchen: one frozen chicken leg, odd vegetable butts from the drawers in the fridge, a shake or two from all those jars and jars of untouched herbs and spices in the pantry, finally a decade-old can of coconut milk. Just add spaghetti, which we had in abundance. And the Noodle-Loving Boys had nothing on me.
Afterwards she went through her purse, found a little bag of pot, tucked some fat pinches into a tiny pipe from a hidden pocket, lit the bowl with a miniature Zippo she stored in there as well. It’s not like I didn’t know: her crowd at school had always had the whiff of dope about them. I refused a puff, refused another.
“You need something,” she said. She went to the liquor cabinet, Mom’s A&P brand Vodka. In the kitchen she made tea and honey, added the last teaspoons of coconut milk, a couple of spices, let it all steep a while, total focus on the task, her legs long and brown and recently parted, her hair still damp, back in its loose braid. At length she poured her concoction over ice, two big tumblers, and added an equal amount of vodka. She might have been in her own house, the way she led me into the living room, set our drinks up on coasters, put on a record, Brazilian jazz of my father’s, his best moods, one hand on his belly, the other out to the side, make-believe samba, Mom drifting in to make it real, all love and smiles. My girl drifted away into the music, sipped at her drink. She leaned into me, kissed my chest.
“Mark saved my letters,” she started.
“Letters, so what,” I said, but I already knew what was coming. I’d been thinking about saying something about the little creep getting pounded, not now.
“He gave them to Mr. Demeter. Did you hear? You heard. Mark got beat up. By like grown-ups, weird. I’m worse than grounded. The letters were pretty, I guess, dirty.”
“You mean, like . . .”
“Like really dirty. Like everything we did. I pretended like I’m so innocent, but really I’m not. Okay? Okay, I said it. I just wanted you to like me. Because I like you.”
I sipped my drink, found it delicious, sweet, direct contrast to the conversation, heavy bite of alcohol, whoa. I said, “You didn’t have to worry about that. That’s in the past.”
“He would strangle me and pull my hair. He’s very crazy. I liked it, okay?”
“All right,” I said. “That’s fine. This is getting to be quite an apology.”
“It’s not an apology. It’s an explanation. Demeter called my father. It’s like a hundred letters. We did stuff all summer, Mark and me. I wrote him a letter every single day
because they turned him on. And now we all have to have a conference. Mark and me and his parents and mine and Demeter and Mrs. Haggerty and maybe more, maybe the police. There’s some drug stuff in there. And a time we broke into the field house at the polo club.”
“Emily. And you’re not making this up?”
“I wish. He thought you set him up. These guys? They said, ‘A message from a friend.’ And they basically kidnapped him right from school.”
“Message from a friend?”
“Probably some drug thing, that’s what I think. Mother and Daddy are freaking. I mean, all that, and then your father. Mother showed me The New York Times yesterday. Holy shit. It’s like a crime wave around here. I’m never to see you again.”
We drank our drinks. The Brazilians played on. We listened to two whole songs, quite separate on the couch. I’d told my dad about Mark. I was pretty sure I’d told him. How Mark had popped me in the jaw. Message from a friend!
Dad?
Emily said, “Okay, and it gets worse. After the thing with your father in the paper, and after this morning, my mother announces that I better pack a second suitcase, because she and I are going to stay in Seoul. We are moving to Seoul! She went nuts, David. She blames it all on the United States. Also on my dad and his ‘Black-Negro’ ways. She’s full of racist stuff, I’m telling you. And he’s not standing up for me. She runs him like a factory. David, they were going to make me stay. I might have never come home.”
Emily rose to get her little pipe, had a puff or two more. I felt my disgust return. She was no victim. She was bad as Mark, maybe worse.
“The other thing is that I love you,” she said.
“You do?”
“I really do.”
I pulled her up to my face, kissed her mouth. I could taste the pot. She kissed me back, kind of the old way, and then she really kissed me. We held on tight. I wanted to say I loved her, too, couldn’t get it out.
Life Among Giants Page 23
