“I’m in big trouble,” she said. “I’m in really big trouble.”
“So am I,” I said.
She kissed my chest, kissed my belly, took me straining in her mouth. Whoa. She knew when to stop, too, called the moment perfectly. “Go in me now,” she said, arranging herself so I could, my second time. She made noises like I hadn’t heard before. I kept thinking of Mark. Should I strangle her and bite her and pull her hair? I was quick, I was gentle, managed to last a few strokes longer than the first try. We lay a while in my contentment, the samba record repeating for the third time.
“I’m not really done,” she said after a while.
“Okay?”
“I mean, you know. Like I did for you.” She wriggled, positioned herself, pushed at my shoulders, made it plain what she was saying. It wasn’t like I hadn’t heard of such a thing, even knew the Latin. I slid down, couch cushions falling all over the floor, my first view that intimate of anyone, the most beautiful vista I’d ever encountered. I gave a few tentative kisses, fell enthusiastically to my task, the root and salt fragrance of her. She pulled away some, said, “Just easy, is how that works.” I slowed things down, relaxed into it, something going right, going very right, a kind of violence building—she pushed herself on me, the rhythm breaking, something going right for sure, really going right, gathered herself and gathered herself and gathered herself and then abruptly let go, let go in several waves, squeezed me and my fingers and face away from her suddenly with her legs and a giggle unlike her.
“I DON’T NEED sleep,” Emily said. I’d finally got her to climb the stairs with me.
“I’m more of a sleep person,” I said.
I pushed the door open to my room and we staggered in together.
“Oh,” she said.
All my photos of Sylphide, spread out on my covers!
Emily looked me square in the eye, awaited an explanation.
“I just like her,” I said.
“You like her a lot.”
“I like her a lot,” I said, “yes. Plus, I’m working over there.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “So long as you like me.”
“It’s very different,” I said. “How I feel about you.”
“Very different,” she said. “Like, unattainable versus a blow job in the living room with a nice cold drink in your hand after you’ve already been laid on the kitchen floor?”
“Maybe something along those lines, yes.” I gathered the gallery in a loose stack, put it on a high shelf in my closet, really wished the girl hadn’t seen them.
She said, “I got her note, by the way. In my locker, thanks. She wants me to come dance for her, do an audition. Sylphide, David. So like, I’m going to go live in Korea? Are you kidding me?”
“So that’s why you’re here?”
“Oh, David. Yes.” Kisses, her hands on me.
DAWN, AND WE still hadn’t slept more than an hour, tangled up naked in my sheets under airplanes. Emily was pumping me for information: “But, I mean, what’s she really like?”
“She’s nice. She’s hurt her shoulder, you know. There was, well, she had an accident.”
“An accident?”
I skipped ahead: “Her real name is Tenke Tangstad. She named herself Sylphide when she was maybe your age.”
“No, much younger.”
“Well, right, you’d know all this. It’s the name of some second-rate ballet.”
“Second-rate? La Sylphide?”
“That’s what Kate said, second rate.”
“Well, we all know about Kate. I mean all about Kate and Sylphide.”
“I guess.” What we didn’t all know about was Lizard and Sylphide. Increasingly guilty, I felt I was balancing my way along the top edge of an endless two-way mirror, Emily on the dark side, the great ballerina seeing all. But Emily and I hadn’t really been together till now, and Sylphide and I would never be, and as for honesty, some things were just best left unsaid. Overnight I’d caught up to Kate, sexually speaking. And learned a little Korean: my jaji was raw, Emily’s boji, too. My airplanes turned on their threads.
A matter of subtlest movements and then raw or not Emily and I were making love again, less urgently, more companionably, like a conversation. In fact, she was talking, a series of languid, distant, disconnected sentences like sighs: “I saw it just like two years ago . . . . With Carla Fracci as the sylph and Erik Bruhn as James, amazing . . . . We’ve been studying it at conservatory, too . . . . It began the era of the romantic modern ballet . . . . Natural and ethereal settings, flowing dresses, satin toe shoes, ballerinas en pointe, partner lifts . . .” She climbed upon me, and the talk stopped, all right, deep kisses, whoa, till we’d climbed the mountain via the dozen ravines and seen the brilliant glaciers on the other side, a nice long climb up, a quick trot down among the wildflowers.
Flopping off me, she said, “But the big thing was it had a story—like, a really involved plot, which they didn’t used to have.”
“La Sylphide, we’re talking about.”
“Yes. La Sylphide, David, what did you think?”
And as the sky pinkened in the east she laid it out for me: Olden Scotland. A young man about to be married. He falls asleep and dreams of a comely sylph, a gorgeous forest setting. She falls for him, crosses over to this world from the dream world, a very dangerous proposition, apparently. Something about a magic blanket, a lot of other sylphs, a suitor for his fiancé, a jealous witch, Emily laying it out in detail. Late in the ballet, our hero ends up in the dream world, the world of the sylph, not good.
CARS IN THE High Side driveway again, if not so many as on the day of the attack.
Desmond unlocked the door when we got there. “Mr. Hochmeyer,” he said.
“This is my friend Emily,” I said.
“Miss Bright,” Desmond said, already apprised.
Music in the ballroom, just a piano: Georges. I didn’t want to share Emily with Sylphide, and I didn’t want to share Sylphide with Emily. But it seemed either wittingly or not they’d used me to get to one another. I brooded, some mood—direct counter to Emily’s bright nerves. Scenes of our many encounters in the night played in my head, didn’t cheer me, not exactly. I wanted to be home again, home in my bed again, making love again, possessing Emily solely, didn’t want to see Sylphide, didn’t trust my emotions. Emily had been compassionate about the great ballerina and her injury, but there was the glint of ambition in her eye as well: Sylphide was out of the way.
And Kate didn’t know a thing about any of it, and no way to ever tell her, another dark spot in my vision. In the ballroom the action had been pared down; still, it was even clearer that the show would go on. Vlad was instructing three male dancers. Sylphide herself, shoulder still wrapped with ice, arm in a blue sling, was talking in the far corner of the ballroom to a guy with a guitar. I tugged Emily over.
“Just in time,” the great dancer said, gave us both kisses on our cheeks, no surprise at all that Emily was along, like the date had long been planned. She didn’t introduce us to the guitar guy, a face I recognized but couldn’t place. You could see the painkillers in her posture and sleepy eyelids, pain, too, a lot of pain, too much to ignore. Jimmy Page, that’s who it was. From Led Zeppelin. He touched Sylphide’s good shoulder as they said their good-byes. He walked off pulling a pack of cigs from his shirt pocket, nodded at the two new guards at the huge hangar doors, one of whom accompanied him to his limo, an extended Morris Mini-Minor painted in zebra stripes.
“Emily Bright,” the great dancer said.
“Hi,” said Emily.
“We are going to start class in ten minutes or fifteen. I am keeping you for the day, if okay? Ja? We want to see you dance. Lizard, sweet boy, you are going into town to inspect theaters. Be very tough with Conrad. We are wanting the perfect venue, not the first you see, but the perfect. Use your judgment, not his. Tell me what you find.”
Emily stepped further from me, further.
CONRAD DR
OPPED NAMES like atom bombs, demanded contract concessions that made me sweat, insulted the food and drink we were invariably offered, but no one seemed to mind—they were very, very hungry for Sylphide and Children of War. I kept my mouth shut, tagged along. Conrad had warned me not to smile, not to blink, just to look around as if I smelled something rotten no matter how nice the place. The only theater I liked was the Shoebox. I sniffed and sneered, but no one was paying much attention to me. Conrad seemed to prefer a more traditional stage, hated the Shoebox, what seemed like technicalities to me: stage doors in an alley, center aisle in the orchestra, Greenwich Village location. In the Bentley between venues I tried to get him to talk about the attack on Sylphide, but it didn’t seem to interest him.
I was too young to recognize discretion.
“My parents,” I said, needing to talk, but he waved me off with a hand. He had notes to take, didn’t need anyone’s problems but his own. I tried to picture Dad in a jail cell. He’d be miserable, cocky, too; he’d try to sell the guards investments. He’d be fine, the more I thought about it. He’d be in his element.
Mom, on the other hand, would be nothing but pissed. Her idea of hell was a motel of any kind. Her idea of hell would be paying for a cheap dinner from a bag of quarters. She wouldn’t sleep, she’d find a bar, she’d drink martinis, she’d start smoking again, there’d be a man telephoning some Sunday night soon.
It was ten before Conrad and I got back to the High Side, an expensive but lousy Times Square dinner in our bellies. I was exhausted, though my thoughts had clarified considerably: I couldn’t wait to see Emily, Emily was my girl, Emily forever.
Sylphide met Conrad and me in the parlor, let Conrad describe the theaters he liked, a couple of functional large houses in midtown. When he was through with an animated spiel, practicality after practicality, Sylphide turned to me: “What do you think, Lizano?” Her face was pale from a day of pain, her ice pack melted and sagging off her shoulder. She belonged in bed. It was like football, I realized: you weren’t supposed to give in to injury.
“Well,” I said.
“Don’t say Shoebox,” Conrad said.
“Shoebox,” I said. “In the Village.”
No reaction from Sylphide, nothing. She just moved onto her next subject, a checklist before bed: “Emily is having a great day. She is so very natural, so very human, a lot of tense angles, and that braid flying around.” She settled her arm in its sling, shuddered privately. “Marvelous physique, of course, and comic timing, ja? But needing to build her technique. Conrad, we will set her up with Neville. She don’t know how to isolate that tall-girl torso. Doesn’t know. An hour before class each day?”
“So she’ll get an audition?” I said.
“She’s been hired,” Conrad said.
“Children of War,” said Sylphide, just business: time for her to go to bed.
It was time for me to repossess my girl, too. I said, “I’d better get Emily home. Across the way, I mean. And back for class tomorrow? Around ten?”
Desmond approached, took Sylphide’s good arm, turned her toward the stairs.
She said, “No, Firfisle, no. I’m sorry. But Emily will stay here. Already she sleeps. We work her so very hard today. Not so hard as you work her last night! She need rest. Also some privacy. If she is going to be dancing with us, I mean. She is needing a home, her own. Away from those parents, and away from you, who has his own troubles.”
ON OUR LAWN I turned to look back, saw Conrad’s little car pull out of the driveway over there, saw Sylphide’s light blink out. I watched the darkness that was left, watched a long while in the chilly night. In the morning was Dad’s court date, hateful, more time away from my dancers. I’d been thinking of Emily’s skin all day, tasting her, living in her kisses, looking forward to more. I’d been thinking of Sylphide’s ability to become a vine, to turn me to stone, then water, then wind. I felt something had been taken from me, that both women had used me. I skulked, hoping maybe Emily would make another break. But no.
Late, lonely, I plunged my hands into my pants pockets, found my house key—I was keeping the doors locked, all right—and found the speckled heart, Sylphide’s heart, as I slowly realized, smooth as secret skin.
How did she do these things?
15
The BLT I ordered at Restaurant Les Jardins is clearer in memory than anything else from that fateful morning. Oh, and the Bloody Mary. The combination seemed to disagree with me, or anyway, the taste of bacon and vodka was with me all the rest of the day. I have cared very little for bacon since, less for tomato juice. But there was a delicate serving of coleslaw, too, colored with beet slivers, and I ate the cabbage strand by strand as Kate fulminated, a perfect, impressive uniformity of knife cuts, unexpected herbs, and raisins. Who put raisins in coleslaw? Delicious.
Kate was rough on Mom, nothing new, and Mom was rough on Dad, ditto, but something had changed: there was no irony in any of it. Dad was cavalier, and that was new for him. Jack was perfection, calibrated his role so delicately that I almost forgot he was there. Outside a tall window I spotted trellised tomatoes and pole beans reaching for the sky from the very top of stick teepees, an abundance of beans in a green rainbow of colors, the very beans in our drinks. On the hill a cabbage patch, many heads cut, many to go, like so many medicine balls just waiting for the fitness coach to give a command. I decided Les Jardins was the most wonderful place I’d ever been. The lobster bisque? First time I was ever moved to use the word divine. The BLT, a simple thing, was made like a sculpture, the bread sliced from a yellowy, rich homemade loaf and toasted just crisp. They didn’t trust themselves with the mayonnaise but put it in porcelain ramekins, tiniest little spreading knife, nothing precious about it, pure function and solicitude.
Jack had a way of reeling Kate in—I imagine Mom noted it as I did, something surely we would have talked about later, if there’d been a later. The guy knew when to get my sister out of there. Her hug for me was very brief, none for Mom. For Dad, a long embrace and an earful of secrets, enough to make him giggle: what were they up to? He put something in her hand, I thought. I’ve always thought.
I loved having Mom and Dad alone, then. I didn’t much notice the guard, who was inspecting his fingernails closely, standing off by the waitress station, his weapon unused all these years, holster falling a little too far behind his back and under his jacket to be accessible, snap rusted so that one hand would not be enough to open it. Not that I considered that. Dad offered a soliloquy on the subject of the Staples High Wreckers football season, unclear what he was getting at, though he did seem to think they’d be doing a lot better if I were there. I think it was I that ordered the cake, or maybe Dad—Mom wouldn’t ever.
“Hochmeyer belongs at the helm down there,” Dad repeated.
Mom clacked her tongue, a noise to put a stop to all nonsense.
Add chocolate to the flavors of the day, the tastes and smells that bring it back. We all split that enormous, moist, all-but-glimmering piece of cake, supposedly reluctant Mom edging out the competition and eating most, three busy forks.
Outside, the beauty of the day. The solicitous guard opened the restaurant door for Mom, then held it for Dad, too, who was drunk, I realize now, who was staggering. That piercing, clear October light slantwise, and a car coming down the stately gravel drive, nothing more sinister than that.
MEMORY RETURNS IN Mom’s kitchen with the image of her stout old Waring blender, glass pitcher on a throne. Also a knock at the door: Mrs. Paumgartner, Mom’s great tennis friend and our closest neighbor. She was helpful in that I comforted her while she wailed and wept, and this gave me something to do. Dad was upstairs, I felt deeply, maybe polishing his wingtips. He was always polishing his wingtips because they were old and the leather was cracking and shoes made the man. He disliked Jean-Anne pretty violently. You’d never get him downstairs in a million years when she was over.
Mom was at tennis, was how I felt.
Something I
had to do for Dad, something I had to do immediately. I left Mrs. Paum on the living room couch clutching a kitchen towel and pounded up the stairs, sat on Mom’s and Dad’s bed, dialed Coach Powers. He wouldn’t know about my folks; nobody would know, not yet. I offered it as an announcement, not a request: “Coach Powers, I’m going to come back and finish the season with you.”
“Hochmeyer,” he said, noncommittal.
“You guys are four and three on the season, right?” Dad had just told me that at lunch, and the next bit, too, nearly verbatim: “Not so bad. But if you can beat Stamford Catholic, Bridgeport, and New Canaan, last three games, you’re on to the state finals.”
“I don’t know, Hoch. Quitter like you.” I heard the wavering, a certain greed, his need to win trumping his need to dominate me.
“State finals,” I said, very firm. I wanted that championship for Dad. Dad could not face eternity as a loser.
Powers pretended to think, gave a couple of strangulated coughs, trying to compose a paragraph no doubt, a face-saving paragraph of terms and conditions.
“So I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said and hung up, bang.
Mrs. Paum’s thready voice calling up the stairs: “David?”
“I’m here.”
“Oh, David, I’m so frightened!”
GRANDPA ARRIVED EFFICIENTLY at seven-thirty, limo from LaGuardia Airport, quick flight from Detroit. Mrs. Paum had seen to it that I got into the shower, and had dispatched my clothing to the washing machine, later for the garbage: we’d only slowly realized I was covered in blood, yet another of the unbelievable things of the afternoon Kate had missed. And was still missing.
Mrs. Paum looked like a midget shaking my grandfather’s hand, one of those moments when I realized how big I must look to everyone else. Grandpa had an angry air about him, but regardless managed a smile, a muscular handshake. We didn’t say anything about the disaster, just sat down at the cramped kitchen table to eat.
Life Among Giants Page 24
