The Giant's House (15 page)

The song was just ending as I walked in; the couple parted, and the girl clapped her hands three times, as though she believed she would hurt the singer's feelings if she did not acknowledge him.

The boy looked at his watch, then at the girl.

“I know,” she said.

She had dark wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her tight sweater rode up in creases above her bustline. Her lipstick was a bit smudged; I located some of it on the boy's cheek.

“We have to go,” he said to James.

“Us, too,” said one of the boys on the bed.

“Okay,” said James. “Tomorrow?”

The dancing boy pulled his record off the player. “It's Friday,” he said. “There's a dance in Brewster. You should come, Jimmy.”

“Oh,” said James. He kicked at his cane, which he'd set down at the foot of the chair. “I'm not much for dancing.”

“I'll dance with you,” said the girl. She obviously thought that this promise—not even the dance itself, but the promise of a dance—would solve anything, and she was the type of girl who might convince a boy it could.
I will save you from being a wallflower
, she'd say,
I will cure your life
, and a boy, looking at her face, the line of delicate beauty marks on her neck, would think he was the only boy who'd ever been promised such a thing.

“Maybe the next dance,” said James. “When my leg is better.”

“Swear you'll dance with me sometime,” said the girl.

“I swear.”

She looked at me and smiled. I was happy to see there was
something a little wrong with her teeth, a faint chalky discoloration.

“Good night,” she said, and then she walked out, followed by first her dance partner, then the whole line of boys who had watched them.

“You have a lot of friends,” I said to James.

“I don't really know some of them. I know Ben—” He patted the arm of the chair to indicate the heavy boy who'd been sitting there. “And I know Stella.”

“She's pretty,” I said, which was what I said as soon as I could about any pretty girl. I wanted people to know I saw it, too.

He nodded, then kicked the cane up with his foot and caught it. He twirled it in one hand; his card exercises were paying off. “I can't dance,” he said.

“Neither can I.”

“You
could
,” he said. He spun the cane faster, and I could tell he wished he'd thought to try this trick while Stella was in the room. Then he missed, and the cane fell to the floor. “Maybe in a while I can. When the braces come off.”

“The braces are coming off?” I asked.

“They might,” he said, the way you say things that you have made yourself believe, other evidence to the contrary. “I mean, I won't ever be a
dancer
.” He moved his feet across the floor nervously, knocking into the cane. “But that. What they were doing. I could dance like that, maybe. Slowly. If I had someone to lean on.”

“Maybe so,” I said. No girl in the world was tall enough for James to lean on. That girl was just a usual height; taller than me, but not tall. I handed James the book I had under my arm. “
William the Conqueror
,” I said. “It's a new one.”

She knew he couldn't dance. He could barely walk.

Still, she was one person who could offer him things I could not. Let's face it: a girl his own age.

When I was in eighth grade, there was a girl all the boys called Hickey Vickie. Whether she'd realized at a young age that the neat
rhyme made the practice inevitable, or whether it was a coincidence, she was a master at this teenage art, and boys proudly wore her work. Some advanced girls delivered orderly hickeys, circumspect enough to be mistaken for some other adolescent skin problem. Vickie was the Rocky Graziano of kisses; necks left her mouth nothing short of mauled.

I was what is known as a late bloomer—though I am not sure I've bloomed yet—and years away from the crude puberty that would visit me late my senior year of high school. I didn't understand. I knew what a hickey was, technically, but I'd seen movies and believed that passionate kisses were strictly a mouth-to-mouth transaction. Occasionally a leading man would tenderly apply his lips to a forehead or cheek, but his lady would only close her eyes, clearly unbitten.

No amount of prepubescent contemplation could explain it. I did my best. I tried to imagine a situation in which I would be willing to receive (delivering was out of the question) a kiss on the neck at all, never mind a forceful, capillary-busting buss. And though I was able—had long been able, as a matter of fact—to imagine myself with some handsome man who curled his fingers beneath my chin, tilting my lips toward him, these pictures might well have been movies themselves, so devoid were they of any physical nuance. I knew what a kiss looked like, but I had no idea of what one felt like and, being an unimaginative child (as I am now an unimaginative woman), was unable or unwilling to speculate.

Which did not stop me from picturing those kisses. I needed them. I hoarded them. Still, I would not have confessed them, even to girlfriends who, assaulted already by puberty, confessed to much more. In eighth grade it seemed that puberty was a campaign whose soldiers could not find me—I was down the hall and around the corner, or already in a nook in the library, while puberty, like polio, struck the kids who hung around in crowds by the swimming pool or punch bowl. By the time puberty located me, I was sixteen and so frightened of boys I'd given up my dreams of kisses. I'm not sure what I was afraid of. It wasn't exactly sex, which
I'd read up on, eager to understand my still-dreaming and sometimes treacherous friends. Maybe it was too much contemplation, maybe I was finally certain that, left alone with me, a boy would surely try to sink his teeth into my neck.

Now, with James, I was in eighth grade again, curious, not yet frightened. I longed for something physical, but what that would be I could not feature; could not even speculate.

There is his hand on the tabletop.

There are his shoes, still warm from his feet, worn down on either side from where the brace buckles around
.

There is his chair, and look, he's still in it
.

There, behind me, retreating, is his window, and his light is on, he's still awake, just as he was thirty seconds ago when I closed the door
.

It's sex you're thinking of, Peggy, people will say, you are being naive on purpose or by nature, but anyone else can see it plainly.

Well, perhaps. But those seeing people, those who have in their lives fallen in love without impediment, cannot understand. Nowadays sex is the guest you should always expect, because it's supposed to knock down your door without an invitation: you might as well be prepared. If you haven't set a place at the table, you are called naive or repressed.

But sometimes, honestly, the mind makes calibrations, but not for sex, because sex is not coming to you, sex is down the street wrecking your neighbor's house, sex has—for any number of reasons—washed its hands of you, even if you are not done with it, even if the breakup is not mutual. In which case, if you are lucky and you work very hard, you learn not only to be satisfied by other things, you start to long for them. And you don't feel starved; you find your hungers are simply different, as if you've dropped your Western upbringing for a childhood in a country where ice cream was unheard of, available only in books.

And so I stared at the hand on the tabletop, wanting it to come toward me even if I wasn't sure for what. I wanted to stick my own feet in his recently occupied shoes to sop up that warmth. I wanted to turn back at night, open the door and say,
I think I'll stay
awhile
—not the way they do in movies, no meaning or implied unspeakable verb, just to stay, just to be there, just to stay.

James's ambition—besides dancing—was to attend one of the twice-yearly shoe conventions in New York. Perhaps he thought of New York as a city of size, avenues and skyscrapers and noise. Would the tallest boy in the world be such a sight on those streets? Wouldn't he be able to walk them, plenty to look up at, thinking, this place is so
big
? All his life he'd taken pleasure in the smallest tricks: sleight of hand, a camera, what made one bird different from another. He looked for a patch of red beneath a wing, or made a visitor wonder where a card had gone to, or shrank the world into a snapshot.

Finally, though, these things were small, in theory and in fact, and they were no longer enough. He could not shrink himself by loving smallness, though he tried; perhaps he could manage it by courting things even larger than himself. His books on magic taught him that you can convince people of anything if you just direct their attention where you want it, distract them from the matter at hand. Plenty of distraction in Manhattan.

He wrote away for train schedules.

“We could drive,” I said. I still hadn't convinced James to get in the Nash with me. After all those years of avoiding them, cars made him nervous. They seemed an easy way to break a bone.

“I like trains,” he said.

He bought a map of Manhattan and stuck it to the wall by his bed. I brought him books about the city's history, the stories of O. Henry,
Knickerbocker Tales
.

“I had a dream about New York City,” he said sometimes.

“What about it?”

“I was there,” he said. “That's all.” I waited for him to say, You were there, too. But he didn't.

As the summer progressed, something changed. He still spoke of New York, but it was something he'd see in years, not months. He scorned his physical therapy.

“No point,” he said. “I can't feel it working.”

“Well, you wouldn't,” I said. If he didn't feel his legs, how would he feel improvement? “The doctors know best.”

“The doctors don't live with it.”

The only place he ever went was the front house, and then only to eat, to take advantage of their more extensive plumbing. In the fall he'd be a junior at the high school, but he decided not to go back.

“You could just go some of the time,” said Caroline. “They won't care. Show up when you feel like it.”

“No,” he said. “If I can't do it right I don't want to do it at all.”

“Right?” she said. “What's right? They'll be glad to see you whenever you show up. You always do well. Isn't that right enough?”

“I don't want to.”

“Jim—”

“I don't want to fall,” he said. “Those floors are slick. I can do the work at home.”

When he wanted to quiet us, he talked about his health, and we thought, at least he's being sensible. This was something we—Caroline and I—had in common: a passion for the practicals. Yes, that's right, he could fall, he could break a leg or worse. Sometimes we worked hard to believe it, because otherwise we'd fret too much. Best to stay home.

Best to hold court in his own house, imagine himself a bachelor with a dance floor and a juke. If he fell at school, he'd be helpless in front of everyone he knew; at home he sat in his chair, did the schoolwork a tutor brought over, and waited for three o'clock, when his friends came by and Caroline brought refreshments and maybe—not that he cared or anything—maybe Stella would show up, too. Because she did show up sometimes, and danced, or flirted, or combed her hair. Her boyfriend, whose name was Sean, didn't seem to mind that she flirted with every single boy there, and I wanted to take him aside, say, Doesn't this bother you? Don't you worry?

All those boys—fat and thin and tall and cross-eyed—had
lipstick on their cheeks, little Stella kisses. Maybe she kissed them hello, or maybe she let her lips brush against them when they were dancing, because she danced with all of them. But only the one boy ever got to hold her when the music was over, when she'd clapped for the song and settled herself on the sofa we'd recently moved in. He was the handsomest boy, no doubt.

Some days I wondered why James tolerated me, a comparatively old woman of thirty-one, when he had those teenagers. Other days I knew why: he felt, if not older than the kids, at least significantly different. Maybe those days—the days he seemed sadder, the days he'd talk so long I wouldn't leave for hours—were the times he remembered that he was going to die sooner than they were.

I have forgiven myself for the fact that I liked his sad days best. That was when he was happiest to see me. He liked the fact I was around so often that he did not have to lie about a bad mood. He'd become accustomed to me. I don't know exactly when that happened—at the hospital? Afterward? Those days I could think that Stella and her visits and her pretty hair and tight sweaters could not make him happy. Those days he needed me most.

In newspaper articles that came toward the end of his life, when James had attained some measure of fame, they'd note: “He eats no more than the average growing boy.” People always wanted to know his appetite, his shoe size, how many yards of material it took to make one of his shirts.
How much does it cost to run such a concern?
they wondered, as though they'd plan to be as tall themselves if only it weren't such an expense.

To build the World's Largest anything requires money, usually in advance. James's entrepreneurial body constructed itself without backing, and then threatened to bankrupt him in any number of ways. Including, of course, the coarsest, most literal way. The town had been generous with donations to build and outfit the cottage, but we could not set the collection cans out every time he outgrew a pair of pants, every time a shoe or shirt size lapsed into obsolescence. For a while Caroline tried to make his clothing, just as she made some of her own. Her talent was with delicate fabric: she hid the messy seams of her dresses and the odd bell-shapes of her skirts with too much cloth and loud unruly prints. The materials for a boy's clothing—denim, tweed, oxford cloth—confounded her fingers.