Tiny Little Thing (20 page)

“
Help
you?”

“Now, you know you can’t resist.”

It’s Caspian’s turn to fold his arms. He runs his gaze up and down the car again, sweeping fender to sloping trunk, and back up again to that luxurious cockpit. The lust in his eyes turns the air green. I feel a flutter in my belly, a shameful warmth between my legs.

“I guess I might as well hang around and make sure the job’s done right.”

Pepper leaps from her pose, flings herself against his chest, and loops her long arms around his lucky neck. “Caspian! You darling!” She kisses his cheek, an inch from his mouth.

The flutter in my stomach takes a sickly turn.

Caspian unwinds Pepper’s arms. “You’re going to have to follow my orders to the letter, understand? I’m in charge, here.”

“Yes, sir.” She salutes.

“No whining. No complaining about chipped fingernails.”

“Chauvinist pig,” says Pepper. “I never whine.”

He goes on staring at her like a stern father, like the marine sergeant in charge of boot camp. “Keep your mouth shut except to say
Yes, sir
. Keep your ears open and you might just learn something about the best damned car in the world.”

“Oh, my God.” She closes her eyes and shivers. “Keep going.”

I look at the two of them, five yards away from me on the other side of the swooping black Mercedes, face to beautiful face. She’s working her wiles, he’s pretending not to notice that the most alluring woman in the world is flirting right before him. But of course he notices. How could you—if you were a stalwart red-blooded bachelor officer in the United States Army—how could you not notice a woman like Pepper?

I pick up the wrench from the edge of the fender and carry it to the toolbox.

“That’s settled, then,” I say, brushing the invisible dirt from my hands. My eyes are a little blurry. “Now why don’t the two of you get started while I head back to the house. I think I’ve got a headache coming on.”

“Tiny . . .”

“Good night, sis!” Pepper waves her hand, without looking at me, and takes the flashlight right from Caspian’s fingers. “See you in the morning.”

•   •   •

A
knock on the bedroom door interrupts the promise of an hour’s quiet contemplation. I tuck the manila envelope back beneath my silk slips and close the drawer. At my feet, Percy releases a shaggy sigh.

“Come in.”

Granny Hardcastle opens the door and doesn’t mince words. “Well. That sister of yours.”

“That sister of mine.” I shrug.

“I hope you had a word with her.”

I straighten my back and turn around, bracing my arms against the chest of drawers. “Actually, Granny. Now that you raise the subject. I think you were abominably rude to her.”

Granny, in the act of settling herself in the chintz armchair in the corner, flinches backward like I’ve struck her with a stick. She collapses the last few inches into the cushion. “I beg your pardon.”

“Pepper’s outspoken, I’ll grant you that, but you practically accused her of sleeping with her employer. In an outrageously vulgar manner, I might add.” My palms are sweaty against the chest of drawers, but I hold them fast. Hold the wood for dear life.

Granny’s steely backbone could hold up the Chrysler building. “Really, Tiny. I believe Miss Schuyler herself began the descent into vulgarity. I was only speaking to her in the language she understands best.”

“Granny.” I smile. “That sounds a great deal like
She started it.
”

Granny’s flamingo lips press together so tightly, they disappear into her mouth. “My son and I were just discussing how out of sorts you’ve been lately. Not yourself. How you need a bit of rest to pull yourself back together before September.”

“I need a lot of things, Mrs. Hardcastle, but rest isn’t one of them.”

“I understand Frank hasn’t quite behaved as he should—”

“That’s between me and Frank, Mrs. Hardcastle.”

“—but every marriage goes through its troubles, Tiny. Its stages, if you like.” Her lips soften into a smile. “I know my son may have been a little harsh with you. Like most men, he has certain notions of how wives should behave. But I understand how it is, believe me. My husband always had a weakness for a pretty girl; it’s only natural, really. But there’s no reason the goose can’t have a little sauce, too, now and again, to keep up her spirits.”

Oh, Christ. I was expecting any number of angles to Granny’s lecture, but this wasn’t one of them. My fingers curl around the edge of the top drawer. “I don’t need any sauce, Mrs. Hardcastle. I just need Frank to . . . to . . .” Well, what
did
I need Frank to do? “To stop messing around with his campaign staff, right before my face, for starters.”

Granny leans back in the chair and places her wise arms on the armrests. “Now, Tiny. We’re women of the world, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know. Are we?”

“Let’s not pretend you didn’t know the bargain you were making, when you married Frank. Every woman makes a bargain when she marries. This is part of your bargain.”

“No, it isn’t. He promised me. He promised me it wouldn’t be part of the bargain.”

She waves her fingers, without lifting her arm. “Men make loads of promises, Tiny, in order to keep us happy.”

I form my right hand into a fist and bring it down on the wood behind me. “No. That was the deal. You know my family. You know I grew up in the middle of a fashionable marriage, right smack in the middle, my mother taking lovers and my father turning the other way, and sometimes picking up a girlfriend of his own, and—”

“But it worked for them, didn’t it? Don’t your parents love each other?”

The question brings me up short. Because, tucked in there amongst all the bad memories—running into Daddy and some impossibly young secretary enjoying dinner at the Stork Club, walking in on Mums during a little afternoon splendor with the Russian emigré prince who was supposed to be appraising the art in the drawing room—yes, tucked in among the bad ones lived a few good ones, a few moments of crystalline contentment. The time we went on vacation in Europe, and I caught Mums dancing with Daddy in the middle of an evening downpour in the Tuileries, and the expression of joy on her face, and the expression of tenderness on his, turned my breath into smoke. And wonder. Because how could you forgive him for the secretaries? How could you forgive her for the Russian princes? How could you say to each other:
Oh darling, it’s really all right that you had sex with someone else, that you made love with lots of other people? It’s all right that you put your mouth on someone else’s mouth and kissed it, that you undressed and joined your nakedness with someone else’s nakedness, that you shared an orgasm in all its marvelous messy glory with someone else?
How could you love someone and then engage in the most intimate of acts with another person?

Or did I know the answer to that question already?

“So maybe it works for them, somehow. But they aren’t happy, not like ordinary people, not
contented . . .
”

“Is that all you want, Tiny? Contentment?” She puts one hand on each armrest and rises to her feet, and in her stance and her expression I see a much younger woman, the ambitious one who took her money and beauty and bought a blue-blooded Bostonian with it, and so created a potent alchemy of ancient social prestige and bottomless lust for power, the modern Hardcastle family. “Do you really want to be an
ordinary
person?”

I tilt my chin to meet hers. “There’s nothing wrong with ordinary.”

“You wouldn’t have said that two years ago.”

“Maybe I’ve learned a thing or two.”

“Oh, Tiny.” She places her hand on my shoulder, and good Lord, you wouldn’t think a grandmother born in the previous century could still maintain a grip like that. “For God’s sake. Listen to you. You’re not seeing the big picture. This is larger than all that. This is
history.
”

“Oh, Granny, really—”

“What happens to Frank if you leave him, hmmm? What happens to all of us? The family. The people of Massachusetts. The country, the world.”

I open my mouth, but I don’t know how to answer her. Her hand turns gentle on my shoulder, kneading me through the cotton sleeve like a mother would, if I’d had that kind of mother.

“You see? You’ve already made your choice, my dear,” says Granny. “You can’t go back.”

The phone rings.

“I expect that’s Frank,” I whisper.

She glances at the telephone, releases my shoulder, and walks to the door. “Then I think you’d better answer it, hadn’t you?”

I let it ring a few more times—
drrring drrring drrring
—into the solemn air. I think of those cartoons, where the phone actually jumps into the air, shocked by the electricity on the line.

“Hello?”

“Tiny, it’s me.”

“Hello, Frank.”

His voice is low and subdued. “I spoke to Dad. Well, he came over and spoke to me.”

I hook my fingers under the cradle and carry the telephone to the indigo horizon outside the window. Behind me, to the west, an unseen sun drops below the sky. To the left, the houses have put on their porch lights. Except Caspian’s house, which is still dark and uninhabited. “And what did your father say to you, Frank?”

A deep sigh electrifies the line. “Tiny, you’re wrong about Jo.”

“
Please
, Frank.”

“No, really. I admit, she’s a pretty girl, we flirt a little, but that’s all.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“I’m not a liar.”

“No, of course not. I’m not sure you would consider this a lie, a real one. You probably think it’s a white lie, a harmless little fiction to keep your marriage going, to keep your wife happy, to keep anyone from getting hurt.”

“Jesus. Is that what you think of me?”

I press my nose against the window. A film of fog creeps up the glass, obscuring my vision. “I don’t know, Frank. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think of you anymore. I don’t know if I ever did.”

Silence fills the receiver. I imagine Frank sitting at his desk in the office, staring at the blotter, wondering what to say. Which lie, possibly, to tell.

I continue. “The thing is, it doesn’t really matter if you slept with her or not. If you’re telling the truth or not. The point is that it
could
be true. That it’s been true before. That it
will
be true someday, maybe not now, but in a year or two, when we’ve had a fight or you’re under strain or you’re away on a trip or something. Some excuse to let things slip. And then some pretty girl gets the better of you. It
will
happen. It will happen repeatedly. I know it will.”

“That’s not fair, Tiny.”

“No, it’s not fair. It’s really not. Because the other thing is, the
harder
thing is that you’re a good man. You’re a smart man and a good man. You’ll make the world a better place. You’ll do great things, one day.”

“I can’t do them without you, Tiny.”

Another long pause. I count the pale shadows of the rollers washing ashore, one after the other, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to our little patch of Hardcastle beach.

Frank ventures: “Do you want me to come out there?”

“No. You need to keep the campaign going.”

“This is more important. I need you, I’ve always needed you, I need you to keep me straight—”

“Well, I’m not ready to see you yet.”

“Tiny—”

“I have to go, Frank. I have to think. Good night.”

I hang up before he can reply. I set the telephone back down on the nightstand and take my shoes off, one by one, and then I slip through the door and down the stairs in my bare feet.

Outside, the sand is still warm. I dig my toes in to the knuckles. A moon has appeared out of nowhere, a hazy half-moon, just bright enough to pick out the curls of foam on the beating ocean ahead. Down the line of Hardcastle houses, someone is having a party, playing some music. The Beatles. The bass chords rattle the air, overlaid by the high pitch of teenage giggles.

I form my arms into a circle before me and arrange my feet into first position.

It’s not easy, dancing on the soft piles of sand near the dunes. I have to force out the party music and listen to the notes in my head. My legs aren’t what they were. I stay on the pads of my feet, I concentrate on posture and extension rather than the movement itself. The movement always comes last, the icing on the cake, the skin over the frame.

But the muscles do warm, eventually. The memory returns, and while I can’t raise my legs as high as I once could, and I can’t quite launch myself aloft with the same power, I can still leap. I can still spin, perfectly balanced, rhythmic and fearless, and when I finish, panting, staring out at the ocean while the waves tumble over each other, I find I am myself again, Tiny Schuyler, perched on the brink.

I turn back to the Big House, and as I do, I catch sight of a light through a second-story window of the Harrison cottage, overlooking the beach: the corner bedroom that belongs to Caspian.

“Tiny. Fancy running into you here.”

I jump probably as high as the chimney stack.

“Tom. My goodness. You startled me.”

“Just out for a walk.” He’s carrying a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

I sniff. Actually, it’s not a cigarette.

He holds the joint up. “Drag?”

“No, thanks.”

“No, of course not.” His teeth are white in the moonlight. He nods at the Harrison house, at the light in the corner bedroom. “Looks like someone’s still up, anyway. Dreaming about stabbing little Oriental babies with his bayonet.”

“I thought grass was supposed to make you mellow, Tom.” I cross my arms.

“Yeah, well. He just pisses me off, that’s all. The way everyone worships him. It’s like they’re blind, they don’t see.” He swishes his ice, drinks, swishes some more. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I mean, you see through it, don’t you? You’re not a robot.”

“Oh, I’m a robot, all right.” I make jerky movements with my arms. “A true believer.”

Tom takes a step closer.

“Where’s Constance?”

“Watching the kids. You’ve heard the news, right?”