Tiny Little Thing (13 page)

He answers me far more gently than I deserve. “Why the hell do you think I stayed on in the first place?”

“I don’t know. To save the world.”

“Jesus. All right. Yes. To save the fucking world. Because anything was better than coming back to you and Frank.”

“Then why are you here now? Go to your sister in San Diego. I’m sure she could use a man around the house.”

“Because I’m needed here.”

“Oh, yes. I forgot. Frank’s campaign.”

Caspian’s hand finds my shoulder. I’ve forgotten how large his hand is, how thoroughly it covers my skin. “Tell me the truth. Why you’re unhappy.”

Two years ago, I would have confessed to that voice. How couldn’t you confess to a voice like that? To a hand like that, steady and reliable on your shoulder?

I made a mistake, Caspian. I’ve failed. My life isn’t quite so perfect as it seems. The bargain I made, it hasn’t quite turned out the way I dreamed.

Or better yet:
You know those pictures you took? I need to know how they might have gotten in the hands of a filthy blackmailing scoundrel.

But now? Confess all
that
? Now there’s a good one. To Caspian, of all people. Caspian with his direct line to the senior Hardcastles, Caspian who had been sent tonight to clean up the drunken mess of me by none other than Mr. Franklin Hardcastle, Senior.
Uncle’s orders,
he said.

Sure, maybe he wouldn’t rat on me. The odds, I figured, were maybe fifty-fifty. But even sloppy with champagne, I wasn’t the kind of girl to take those odds.

I certainly wasn’t the kind of girl to tell her problems to any old stranger.

“I’m not unhappy. I am . . .” I curl my fingers around the pocketbook and draw it into my belly. “I am
perfect.
I’m perfect.
”

Caspian’s hand remains on my shoulder. I can feel his fingertips in the hollow. I can count each one.

“All right,” he says. “I’ll take you upstairs.”

I turn, dislodging the hand. “I can find my own way.”

“I promised your father-in-law I’d make sure you got to your room safely.”

“That’s noble of you.”

I try to walk past him, but he starts first, drawing my hand into the crook of his elbow, and owing to some failure of backbone, some surfeit of champagne, I let it stay.

Caspian takes me up in the metal service elevator, tucked out of sight. I can’t blame him. I suspect my lipstick is askew, my hair disturbed. I wonder if my face has taken on that florid quality I regard with such pity in other women. Beside me, Caspian is utterly still. I look down at our feet, lined up in a row, in and out of focus.

“I’m sorry about your leg,” I say.

Caspian reaches forward and presses the emergency stop. We stagger to a halt. I throw my hand out to the wall to steady myself, while an alarm bell gives off two demented rings.

“It’s just a leg,” he says.

An ominous quiet fills the car. An absence of hydraulics. I have never noticed how noisy elevators are until now. Caspian’s body dwarfs mine, filling up all that silent space, and the impression—Caspian’s reliable size, his quiet fortitude—is so familiar, I stare at our aligned feet and think,
It doesn’t matter
. Doesn’t matter why we fell apart two years ago. He’s here now. He came back.

I say softly, “That’s what I told myself, when I heard the news. I thought it was a fair trade. I told God he could keep the leg, as long as you came home alive.”

“You could have saved yourself the trouble. At the time, I didn’t care one way or another.”

His shoes are black and polished, rounded at the tips, almost liquid in their military perfection. Identical in every detail. You would never guess, if you didn’t already know, that one of them contains a mechanical contraption, a bang up-to-date marvel of bionics or whatever they called it, instead of a living human foot.

If I were his wife instead of Frank’s, I’d weep for that foot. Weep that I’d never have a chance to see it wiggle next to mine, to feel it curl around my leg at night, to rub it when it’s weary, to tickle its sole, to kiss every toe. I’d mourn forever for Caspian’s lost foot. Where were its remains, anyway? Did they cremate amputated limbs? Throw them out with the trash? Where were the rotting molecules that had once been Caspian’s beloved left foot? So lurched my champagne-drenched thoughts, in the grim-bright metallic interior of the hotel service elevator.

“How are they treating you, Tiny?” says Caspian. “The family, I mean.”

“Just fine.”

“Because I’ve been wondering. I’ve been hoping they’re making you happy. That they appreciate you, the real you.”

“I’m happy.”

“If you need me, you know, I’m right here.”

“Yes. Yes, indeed. You’re right there.”

He persists, in a gruff voice: “I’m not going to get in the middle of your marriage. I’d never do that. I’m just . . . well, if you ever need help, that’s all. Help of any kind.”

“What makes you think I need any help?”

“I just have a hunch. I guess I knew you pretty well, for a few days.”

“For a few days, yes. You did.”

The intercom explodes. “Everything okay in there?”

“Yes!” Caspian barks. “My mistake. Just turn us on again.”

There is a static curse and a grinding noise, and the elevator lurches into motion. I stumble out of alignment with Caspian’s feet, and he puts out a hand to steady me.

“You probably think you can’t trust me,” says Caspian, watching the numbers light up above the door, “but you can, Tiny. You can trust me. I’m on your side.”

I tighten my hands around the pocketbook. “Since when is that?”

“Since always.”

The car bangs to a stop. The doors kick open. Caspian’s hand touches the small of my back, urging me forward, and I step onto the worn crimson carpet of the service hallway. My feet totter and ache in their pretty raspberry satin shoes.

I tuck the pocketbook bravely under my elbow and turn to Caspian. He regards me with the same expression he once wore inside the sacred rectangle of his Marlborough Street living room, as if he would like to surround me with his long limbs and burrow through the pores of my skin and invade me.

I’m not sure whether the fluttering in my belly is champagne or melancholy, flirtation or guilt. Anticipation or dread.

“Well, then. Can I trust you to walk me to my door, Major Harrison?”

T
his time, Caspian climbed the three flights of stairs at a run, while his camera bag banged against his hips and his heart banged against his ribs. He could hardly resist the urge to shout
Honey, I’m home!
as he threw open the door, knowing that Tiny existed beyond it, waiting for him to return.

He’d pushed the whole dilemma out of his mind all day. He’d focused on his camera, on picking out subjects, setting scenes, considering light and angle and perspective. It was too much to think about, really: the ethics of making his move on another fellow’s girl, even a girl who’d taken shelter under his roof and asked for his help. Once she’d written that letter, was she free? Was
he
free, considering he was leaving for the other side of the world in two weeks? The honorable thing was to wait until he was back from his tour, alive and whole, the both of them having had time to consider things rationally, to write a few letters, to get to know each other better. In her case, to get over this fiancé of hers, to maybe date a guy or two on the rebound, to settle herself in her newfound life. Then they’d see how things went. Try each other out. Inch by careful inch into intimacy.

But he didn’t feel rational—let alone honorable—by the time he threw open the door to his apartment and cast about for Tiny’s sun-draped shape to rise from the sofa. He only knew that he had two weeks, fourteen days left, before he put eight thousand miles between the two of them, and he had to touch her, he had to kiss her, he had to leave some physical imprint on her, and she on him, or he couldn’t possibly endure the lonely year ahead.

When he stepped through the doorway, though, Tiny didn’t rise from the sofa, sun-draped or otherwise.

The room was empty.

He dropped his camera bag carefully to the floor and called out her name.

No answer.

He looked around the corner of the kitchenette, not really expecting to see her. He walked down the hall and glanced inside the darkroom, which lay untouched and acrid.

The door to the bedroom was closed. A sliver of light showed beneath. Cap felt the blood rushing in his veins, the wind in his lungs. He placed his knuckles against the old wood and knocked softly. “Tiny?”

He didn’t hear a reply, but the door was thick, a hundred years old, solid chestnut like they didn’t make anymore. Once, his father said, you could crawl from Boston to Washington across the limbs of giant American chestnut trees, but the Japanese blight took care of that romantic notion a generation or two ago. He turned the knob and pushed it open, inch by careful inch.

“Tiny?” he said again.

She sat in the middle of the bed, neatly made, with her knees tucked up under her chin and her dancer’s arms wrapped around it all. A few papers lay in front of her, and a ballpoint pen with its cap on.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“Not really.”

He pushed the door open the rest of the way and walked into the room, light with relief that she was talking, at least. That she was there, sitting on his bed. He lowered himself into the wooden chair.

“Did you write the letter?”

She picked up the pen and hurled it against the wall. The cap broke away on impact. “I can’t do it. I can’t. I couldn’t even find the words.”

He didn’t know what to say. Something was crushing his shoulders, a metal safe with a ton of precious bullion inside. “All right.”

“All right? Is that all?” She stuck her hands in her hair, which was fully disheveled, a shining brown mess. “I tried, and do you know how it sounded? Vain. And weak. And self-centered. I’ve got no earthly reason to break off this engagement, have I? It’s everything I ever wanted, isn’t it? An important life, the wife of someone extraordinary. And I knew what the trade-offs were. I knew what to expect. I was
bred
to expect them.”

“What trade-offs, Tiny? What are you trading off?”

She moved her head from side to side. “After all this time, pretending to be happy, pretending to be the perfect wife to be. All my life. My mother. The look on her face. I can’t stand it, I can’t! She’s pinned everything on me, her perfect little virgin daughter, her last hope for redemption, so she can believe . . . she can think that she did
something
right at least . . .”

He lurched forward and grabbed her hand. “Take it easy. Whoa.”

“I’m just being selfish and ungrateful. Lots of girls—I’ve been so lucky—and I don’t—I can’t
prove
—” She stopped.

“Prove what, Tiny?”

“Nothing. Nothing I can write down, anyway. Nothing that doesn’t sound like paranoia.” She bit back a hysterical sound. “Tell me about yourself, Cap. Tell me about your family. I want to know what that sounds like, a normal family.”

He tightened his fingers about hers, as if that could stop her slipping away. “I don’t know about normal. My mother died when I was eight. My father never remarried. We went from base to base, me and my sister and him. All around the world, no real home. Not very normal at all.”

She looked up. Her eyes were dry and white; she hadn’t been crying. For some reason, that seemed worse to him. As if her grief lay in some territory beyond tears, some unreachable region of despair. “Why didn’t your father remarry?” she asked.

“I don’t know. You don’t meet a lot of suitable women on a foreign army base, I guess.”

“I suppose he loved her. Your mother.”

“Yes. He didn’t talk about her much. But he kept her picture by the bed. On his desk. He took leave when she was sick, an extended leave. I don’t remember it very well. I was pretty young. But . . . yes, I guess I knew how much he loved her. I don’t think he ever stopped.”

“He never had any other women.”

“Not when she was alive. I’m sure of that.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I just am. That’s who he was, my dad. He mated for life. And my mother—well, she was exceptional.”

“And afterward? After she died? Were there other women?”

“If there were, he kept it away from us.”

She was looking not at Cap, but at their hands, roped together. “Of course,” she said. “Some men are like that, I guess.”

His knees hurt, pressed against the floor by the side of the bed. “What exactly are we talking about, Tiny?”

She shook her head.

“Look, I’m not here to break up anyone’s engagement. Not here to undermine a man I don’t even know. But I think— Hey, look at me a minute, all right?”

She looked up miserably.

“I want you to be happy, that’s all. With him, if that’s what you want. Or without him, if that’s what you want.”
Him
: Cap felt it should be capitalized, this unknown Him who bestrode the two of them, Cap and Tiny, like a colossus. Like a giant metal safe full of bullion. “You’re a beautiful girl, a—” He reached for words, words that sounded right, not too smarmy, not too melodramatic, not too alarmingly worshipful at a moment like this. “A girl in a million. So it’s not for you to prove to him why you shouldn’t get married. If he doesn’t deserve you, if he makes you unhappy, like
this
—”

“Oh, God, Caspian!” She tossed herself back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, her arms and legs spread out like a starfish. She’d found a pair of his pajama pants, thank Christ, which she’d somehow managed to fit to her frame by tightening the drawstring and rolling up the waistband several times. “Stop making this so easy for me. Stop showing me what I’m missing. What’s been missing from my life all these
stupid fucking years
!” She shouted the last words, making the windows ring.

He rose to his feet. “What the hell does that mean?”

She rolled her head on his pillow and smiled at him. “It means I’m ready for you to take my picture.”

•   •   •

S
he took off the pajama pants—
I can’t dance in these things
—while he opened the window shades all the way, letting the five o’clock May sunshine flood unchecked through the watery old glass.

“You’re sure?” he said. “There’s no pressure.”

She held up a disk from the pile and examined the label. “I want to.”

“All right, then.” He took out his camera, changed lenses, checked the film. No flash, this time. The sunlight was pure and plentiful. His fingers tingled: that rising anticipation of a perfect photograph hovering nearby, waiting to be snatched from the air and made real.

He heard the scratch of the needle, the first few notes as they emerged from the speaker, reedy and contained. He took off the lens cap and smiled. “The
Pastoral?
”

“You like it?”

“A favorite.”

She lifted one leg to the back of the sofa and stretched her body to a breathless length. Her fingers wrapped around her toes. “I didn’t know you liked musty old composers. I would have pegged you for rock and roll. No. Wait.
Jazz.
” She said it like a sex word.

“I’m full of surprises. Though I like jazz, too.”

“Hardy. Beethoven. What next?”

He lifted the camera to his eyes and observed the flex of her arms through the lens. “Ibsen.”

“Oh, a radical! Or are you trying to tell me something?”

He snapped the shutter. “What do you think?”

“For the record, I think Nora’s an irritation. Just because you’re a housewife doesn’t mean you lack any sense at all. Anyway, she was stupid to marry a man like that, wasn’t she?” She switched legs, and this time she faced him as she stretched, and her smile was relaxed.

“It was a hundred years ago, right? Things were different. Anyway, there wouldn’t be a play if she hadn’t made that mistake. And she does realize the mistake, in the end.”

“At least you call it a mistake. Some men wouldn’t. Some people wouldn’t.”

He snapped another shot. “Like who?”

She smiled enigmatically and turned about into an arabesque, bracing her hands on the back of the sofa. “Let’s start,” she said.

“Already have.” He snapped again.

The music was building now, the oboes revolving intricately upward to the crest, the violins answering back. Tiny rose up on her toes and lifted her arms into a graceful arc. Her hair was wrapped back with Cap’s monogrammed linen handkerchief, one of a set given to him by his grandmother several Christmases ago, and her exposed cheekbones attracted luminous stripes of sunlight as she held herself in position, smiling, waiting for the joyous wave to break.

Cap dropped to one knee, a few yards away, and adjusted the aperture. A little more light. That was it. Dazzling.

Just as he took the picture, she looked down at him and winked.

The violins burst free, and so did Tiny.

It was like a feast, like a hotel banquet, dish after dish placed before you, each one better than the last, until you almost lost track of what you were eating. Thank God for the camera, because he could never have found the necessary thousand words to describe Tiny’s grace as she danced the length and breadth of his living room, the flash of her legs in the sunlight, the liquid strength of her movement. More than that. The way each attitude presented itself to his lens in flawless balance, a ready-made composition. The art of the photograph, the science, the framing: Tiny accomplished all these by herself, and he, Cap, only had to open the shutter at the right instant, to manage the flow of light around her body.

Until he lay on his stomach, pointing the camera at an acute angle, trying to reveal the length of her neck, the line of her jaw, before the movement pounced to its end. Too late, he realized she was drawing near him, and too late, she realized it, too. She corrected her trajectory, dragged her toe an instant too long on the wooden floor, and staggered.

For an instant, it looked as if she’d recover. Her long legs assembled beneath her, sounding out her center of gravity, while the oboes and the violins exchanged a last conversation, a final farewell. But just as she pitched upward again, safe and sound, her face turned horrified, and she crumpled back down to land with a thud on the century-old chestnut boards.

“Tiny! Jesus!” He sent the camera skidding and leaped to her motionless body.

She lay sprawled on the floor with her eyes ominously closed, one leg bent beneath the other. Here below the furniture, the windows were too high and the sun too low, and his light-blinded eyes couldn’t quite focus on her. He grabbed her hand. “Are you all right? Tiny, come on!”

Was it the shadow, or had her lips turned gray? He slapped her cheeks gently, once each side.

“Tiny! For God’s sake! Wake up!”

Her eyelashes wavered. A pathetic little groan emerged from her throat.

“Tiny! Talk to me, love. Wake up.”

The eyelids swept up, revealing the rich brown of her irises. Her forehead creased, bewildered.

“Thank God! Tiny, it’s me, it’s Cap. Can you hear me? You’ve had a fall.”

Her lips moved. “I don’t— I—”

“It’s me. I’ve got you. Just don’t move. Does anything hurt?”

“I—don’t understand—”

“That’s okay. You’re going to be a bit confused. Just lie still, okay? You were dancing, you fell—”

“No.” She pulled her hand away. “I don’t understand. Where am I? And who are
you
?”

As if his heart stopped beating.

He set his palms on the floor, next to her shoulder, and tried to keep his voice steady. “It’s Caspian. Caspian, from the coffee shop. We’re in my apartment. You’re staying here, remember? To think things over.”

Her brow was still puzzled. She tried to lift herself on her elbows, winced, and eased back down.

“Lie still, sweetheart. It’ll come back to you. Just rest for a second.” He wasn’t even sure what he was saying. Like he’d speak to a hurt dog or a startled horse or an injured soldier. The words didn’t matter. Just the stream of them kept her calm, kept him calm, kept the whole world propped up around them long enough for him to gather his wits. To start his heart beating again.

With a single weak finger, she motioned him closer.

“What is it? Do you need something?” He bent his head toward hers and inhaled his own scent, his soap and his laundry and his bed. The peculiar scent of his apartment, absorbed into Tiny’s hair.