Tiny Little Thing (24 page)

He doesn’t touch me. Thank God, he doesn’t touch me one bit. I stare at the wall, holding his knee under my cheek, and at last the starlings settle down and I rise to my feet and walk wearily to the door, where I pause, bracing my hand on the post. The sun burns down on my hair. Before me, the bracken is clearer now, pushed aside by dozens of hands over the past few weeks. The grass is beaten down into a path. It’s a wonder Granny Hardcastle hasn’t noticed.

I turn back. “There’s one thing. Something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

Caspian is lying down again, knees still raised, about to roll back under the car. His head is shadowed by the fender. “What is it?”

“Something that reporter mentioned to me. He said he was looking into something about Frank. Some incident when Frank was at Harvard. His junior year, I think he said. I told him I didn’t know anything about it.”

Caspian swears softly.

“I see. So there is something. Something no one’s told me.”

“I don’t know much about it myself.”

“But you do know. The family knows. You’re protecting him.”

Caspian lies there quietly with his head under the front fender of the Mercedes. He fiddles with the wrench. “I didn’t know if they’d told you or not.”

“Are you going to tell me now? Or do I have to find out for myself?”

“Why don’t you ask Frank?”

“Because Frank isn’t going to tell me the truth. Or is he?”

Caspian sighs. “All right. I
could
tell you what I know, which isn’t much. But I think you need to ask your husband instead.”

“And why is that, Caspian?”

He rolls back under the car and starts to clank around with his wrench. “Because it’s not my place. I’m not here to push you off the ledge, Tiny. The ledge is your choice, I can’t touch that. I’m just here to catch you if you jump.”

I stare at the soles of Caspian’s strong boots, at his legs visible to the knee before they disappear into the undercarriage of the Mercedes-Benz. My hand clenches around the manila envelope, crumpling the edges.

“Do you mind if I borrow your car?” I say. “I can’t find my keys.”

F
unny thing, falling in love. You can’t quite explain the difference between this—kissing the girl you love, having sex with the girl you love—and all the kissing and the sex that came before. You can’t describe the difference between her flesh and that flesh, her hips and those hips, her gasp and those gasps. You can’t parse the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the experience, the units that make up the whole, any more than you, the untrained viewer, can explain why the
Mona Lisa
is the
Mona
fucking
Lisa
. You just stand back and take it in and say,
Wow, so this is art
.

You lie back in your bed, you hold her chest next to your chest, her ribs next to your ribs, her breath and your breath, and you say,
So this is love.

“I want to see Mount Rushmore,” said Tiny. This wasn’t entirely out of the blue. They’d been lying there for a while, talking about this and that, because discussing the sex they’d just had was like discussing the
Mona Lisa
, too big and too complicated, and maybe a little too new and sacred too. Anyway, what did you say, after an hour like that? What were the words?
Are you all right?
As if he hadn’t been paying attention the whole time, as if all the action were one-sided: his lust casually dismantling her virginity.
I love you?
Banal, compared to what he actually felt, the complexity of his entanglement with the person lying in his arms, invading the pores of his skin.

So they stuck to what could be communicated through words, what actually needed saying.

Like the trip out to California. Their new track, laying itself out ahead.

“Mount Rushmore’s in South Dakota,” he said. “If you still want to see the Grand Canyon, it’s going to be hard to do both.”

“We have two weeks, though.”

“I guess we’ll see how it goes. But you may have to make a choice.”

“That’s okay. I like making choices, it turns out.” She ventured a hand across his chest, up one pectoral and down the other, winding up curled around his opposite shoulder, and it was strange, antigravitational, that a touch so light, a skeleton so fragile, should hold him so securely in place in his own bed.

She stared at her hand, wholly unaware of its magical power, and continued. “I was thinking I might try to teach dancing, once I’m out there. I’ll never be good enough to dance professionally, I mean with a real company, a prestigious company, and anyway that’s a hard life. Lots of backstabbing and bleeding toes. But I could teach kids, like I did with my little dance company in Boston. Maybe open my own studio.”

“Sure you could. That’s a great idea. Plenty of little ankle biters out there, these days, that’s for sure.”

“Good. So that’s me. What about you?”

The moon had come out, a friendly half-moon, not too bright. He stared at the white ceiling, at the fan rotating ponderously. His own bed. His ordinary bed, except it was rumpled beyond repair, sheets and blankets all twisted up and hanging to the floor, an unholy mess, and for the first time in his life he didn’t care, he wasn’t tempted to jump up and straighten and tuck everything back into the wholesome flat prairie his father taught him. His ordinary bed, except he lay here naked with Tiny in his arms,
Tiny
, and they’d just had sex together, he and Tiny: he’d entered her body with his body, she’d taken him joyously into herself, and his nerves were still sparkling, his brain was still foggy with pleasure and disbelief. With the scent of her breath. “You know about me. I’m a soldier. Leave ends in sixteen days, then I get on a plane, a fat old noisy deathtrap of a troop transport, first class all the way, and go back to active duty.”

“And how long are you signed on for?”

“I’m an officer, Tiny. A career officer. I’m on until I resign, or retire. But the tour lasts a year, officially.”

“An officer?” She lifted herself up and looked down at him, and the fearless intimacy of her naked and dangling breasts made him sing a little, inside his chest where she couldn’t hear. “I didn’t know that. Are you commissioned? What rank?”

“Captain.”

“Ooh, a captain! Why didn’t you tell me?”

He shrugged. “You were already head over heels. Didn’t want you to go off your rocker or anything.”

She fell back laughing. “Oh, my God. My mother will die, absolutely die.”

“She’ll probably get me court-martialed, knowing her.”

“
Knowing
her?” Tiny stopped laughing and lay still against his ribs. “How do you know my mother, Caspian?”

“Because she was there at your apartment, when I came looking for you.”

Tiny shrieked. “She
what
?”

•   •   •

I
can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” Tiny said. “You took my picture like that, you
slept
with me, and you didn’t happen to mention that you’d met my mother an hour before.”

“I didn’t see how that was relevant to sleeping with you.”

“
Men.
”

He added, “Anyway, that wasn’t sleeping.”

They were driving Caspian’s old Ford down Route 3 to the Cape. His idea.
Does she know your name?
Tiny had demanded, and
Yes, of course,
he’d answered; and
So she knows where to find you,
said Tiny, and
Well, I gave her my card,
he’d said, in the most natural way in the world; and
Why the hell did you do that,
screamed Tiny, and
Don’t worry, she doesn’t know you’re with me,
he’d told her soothingly; and
Trust me, she’ll know it in a few hours, when he gets the note I put through his mail slot and dials up Mother, and Mother comes marching over to batter down the door,
she’d said.

He’d leaned back on the pillow, put his hands behind his head, and considered the matter: weighed the satisfaction of letting Mrs. Schuyler batter down his door to discover the precious Tiny lying luxuriously deflowered in his arms, versus the wisdom of postponing such a confrontation until Tiny was ready to face it, and the downstairs neighbors weren’t around to call the police.

“I have this place on the Cape,” he’d said at last. “My mother’s place, an old family house. She left it to me and my sister, when she died. About an hour away, at this time of night.”

This time of night: the car crashing through the moonlight, the grass shimmering silver by the road. He’d put the top down, because that’s what you did when you drove to the Cape in the middle of a silvery May night with the woman you loved.

“Don’t get funny,” she said. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and a ladylike silk scarf tethered her hair. She sat primly in the passenger seat, her legs tangled at the ankles under her powder-blue skirt.

“Come here.” He held out his right arm.

She considered the arm, considered the chest to which it was connected. She brushed her fingertips down her skirt and edged grudgingly in his direction.

He dragged her into the middle seat and kissed the top of her head. “That’s better.”

She fell asleep at once, nestled sweet-smelling in his shoulder, and as the car rolled along, and the salt wind and the moonlight stirred the hair at the top of his head, he thought that he would probably never be happier than this moment, that you couldn’t achieve any greater contentment than this, any more sublime confluence of sensation. Before life fell apart again.

•   •   •

I
n the end, they swung into the sandy driveway of his mother’s beach house an hour and a quarter later, because Cap drove a little more slowly than usual, prolonging the ride. He cut the engine and stared at the old shingles, at the white trim catching the moon. How long had it been? Maybe a decade. So hard to schedule his few family visits to coincide with the height of summer.

He nudged Tiny. “Wake up, sweetheart.” He’d never used that word before, but it fit, at this moment.

“Hmm?”

“We’re here.”

Tiny lifted her head. “The Cape?”

“Mmm.” He climbed out of the car and held out his hand. She stumbled out after him, untying her silk scarf, straightening her skirt. “Let’s get you to bed.”

“What time is it?”

“One o’clock or so.”

“It feels later.”

He found the key in the birdhouse and opened the door. The familiar smell surrounded him: wood and weather, mildew and salt and lemon polish, towels drying in the sun. Childhood. The place was tidy, exactly as he remembered: the family sent someone over every so often for dusting and repairs, kept the gardener on his rounds. There was his mother’s chair, next to the knobbled fieldstone fireplace, covered in a ghostly white sheet. The electricity was probably still off. He used a flashlight from the car to find the hurricane lamp in the pantry and light it with a long match.

Tiny still stood in the hallway, blinking sleepily. She took off her shoes and dropped them by the door.

“Bathroom?” he said.

She nodded.

“Go upstairs and turn right. The door at the end of the hall. Water should be on by now, because of the gardener, but the boiler’s not lit, obviously, so it’s going to be cold. I’ll just get the suitcases from the car.”

He heard the water trickling through the pipes when he came back in. He carried the suitcases upstairs to his room and set the hurricane lamp on the bedside table. The curtains were closed. He pulled them wide to the moonlight and yanked up the bottom sash of the window. The cool air rushed in, the rhythmic wash of the ocean. He watched the faint undulating phosphorescence of the surf until the water stopped and the bathroom door creaked in the hall behind him. He turned and lifted away a few sheets from the furniture. A pale fog of dust rose and settled.

“Is this your room?” Tiny asked from the doorway.

“Yes. Slept here as a kid. I can push the beds together, if you like.”

“That’s not necessary. Which one is yours?”

That’s not necessary.
A little ungentlemanly fall of disappointment in his chest.

He pointed to the single bed closest to the window. “Right there. I’ll just use the bathroom while you get changed.”

The water in the tap ran ice-cold. He splashed his face and brushed his teeth. His reflection was paler than he expected, or maybe it was the moonlight. He scrubbed his skin with a towel and headed back to the bedroom, where Tiny had blown out the hurricane lamp and burrowed into his bed.

He arrived on the old hooked rug in the center of the room, hesitating. The bed wasn’t built for two.

“Well, come on,” said Tiny. “I’m not getting any warmer in here.”

Under the sheets, she was naked and fresh, delicate in his arms, miraculous. He kissed her collarbone, her beautiful neck. “You’re not too sore or anything, are you?”

“We can find out.”

He’d never really liked the term she used,
making love
, but he liked it now. Like
sweetheart
, it fit somehow, it carried the scent of truth. The sweetening of his heart when he touched her skin. The enlarging of this store of love inside his chest, when she touched his skin, when he balanced himself on his palms and locked them carefully together. No, she wasn’t too sore. She’d never felt better, she said, and he thought of the photographs he’d taken—the ballet ones, interestingly, not the naked ones—and he raised her elastic right leg to his shoulder.

“Oh!” she said, surprised and pleased.

Like the drive along the highway, he made it last as long as he could; but like the drive, it had to end sometime, didn’t it, drenched in moonlight and the salt scent of the pulsing ocean outside the window. “How dangerous is it, really? Tell me the truth,” panted Tiny, damp and hot below him in the mattress, her chin hooked over his shoulder, her arms still clenched around his back. (
It
meant Vietnam, he surmised.)

“Am I going to make it back, you mean?”

“Don’t say it like that.”

He concentrated on lifting himself off her—conscious of her dainty frame, which must surely be crushed under his bulk, though she didn’t complain—without falling over the side of the bed. She turned on her side, making room. Her back to the window.

“The odds are good, if you keep your head down,” he said.

“Will you promise to keep your head down?”

“If you ask me nicely.”

“What does that mean?”

He pulled her in a little more snugly. “It means I can’t make any promises, can I?”

He’d said that line before, more than once, but he meant something different this time. Something more to do with her freedom than his. He knew for a fact there wouldn’t be any other women, no matter how brutal and barren things got out there in the jungle, the way he knew he could do without hot water and cold beer when he put them out of his mind. But Tiny? He couldn’t ask her to wait. He couldn’t ask her to take on the chaste and peripatetic life of an army wife, just like that, on the basis of a few weeks’ unstudied passion.

Look what it did to his mother.

“Okay,” she said. “But you’ll know where to find me when you get back.”

He rested his cheek against Tiny’s soft hair and thought about getting back, next year. He thought about the possibility of reunion. He thought the unthinkable, about maybe changing his line of work. Selling his photographs or something. Money wasn’t the problem. He had money, at least. Enough to support a wife and kids in a little house in San Diego, near the ocean. Spend summers at the Cape, right here in his mother’s old place, just like when he was a kid. Happiest time of his life, until it ended.

“Don’t worry, I’ll find you,” he said at last, but she was already asleep.

•   •   •

I
t wasn’t the few bars of charcoal dawn that woke him, changing color outside the window, but the absence of Tiny from his side.

He called her name. No answer.

He listened for the sound of water trickling in the pipes, for the vibration of her footsteps on the old floorboards. The hollow next to him was cool, but at least the hollow was there. She couldn’t have been gone long.

Cap was a man of action, but at that moment, he didn’t want to act. His body lay slack and heavy in his old single bed, unwilling to stir. An unsettling premonition struck him: if he rose from this bed, if he threw off the sheet and blankets that had sheltered the two of them during the night, he’d break the spell. He’d return them both to the ordinary world, to their ordinary lives, and the past three days would have been nothing but a dream. A parallel universe. An unstable element, created by a team of curious scientists, existing for a second or two in a laboratory before breaking apart.