Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach Read Free Book Online

Inside was nothing I wanted, just a large check and an invoice in my own name, neatly typed, an accurate computation of the hours I’d put in mowing and a contractor’s hourly rate, princely. I opened the parcel next and found a large photograph in a walnut frame: President Kennedy and Dabney himself, the two of them grinning as after a joke, touching one another’s shoulders. Th e president had signed it over to the rocker in black ink with “Great Vigor,” the famous Kennedy catchphrase that comedians had made into a joke.
    I trotted up to my room with the treasure, hid it in my closet, knowing my mom would never let me keep such a gift: she’d see it as the addled gesture of a woman in mourning. I preferred to see it as a promise of friendship.
    I looked at President Kennedy and Dabney a lot over the next few weeks—two dead men—trying to discern in the image or frame or scrawl of presidential handwriting a message beyond thanks from Sylphide, but nothing was forthcoming. No invitation seemed implied, and without one I couldn’t get myself to go back over to the High Side.
    Meanwhile, the parties across the pond resumed, the deliveries of dresses in huge boxes and liquor and sculptures in ice, the constant inrushing of guests, the perpetual music—from the most delicate chamber quartet on the lawn to live, roaring rock ’n’ roll barely muffled inside the great walls, Dabney’s world of friends and hangers-on, all of them paying tribute to the great man at Sylphide’s expense, or at least that’s how Look magazine and I saw it, gentle Sylphide a victim of her husband’s wild life.
    A LTOGETHER, I FELT like a new kid in school. I suffered no great regret when I saw the football team at practice or heard the roar of the sixth-period pep rallies on Fridays. Th e only thing that made me really feel the pain was sight of Jimpie, or worse, Jimp with Jinnie, the supercilious way they ignored me, her hand in the back pocket of his jeans.
    In light of my stand against haircuts, I’d become a hero of the dress code. Th e artsy, intellectual crowd had taken an interest in me at lunchtime, and among them was Emily Bright, whom I’d known since grade school. Emily was also a tall person, very shy, known to be difficult, a hurt look behind granny glasses, long dresses, long legs hidden. She was angular, awkward, not everyone’s idea of a beauty, certainly not mine (no one but Jinnie would do for me). But she’d been voted Anti–Homecoming Queen in our junior year. Th e hippie types loved her, had invented a comical “anti” tradition around her.
    Emily was in my math class—Honors Calculus—and sat just in front of me, an accident of Mr. Ramsey’s seating chart. Her hair was unbelievably rich and black, fragrant, thick and long like a thoroughbred’s tail, always in a braid. She seemed short in a chair, her height all in her legs. One warm day she wore a kind of jumper that left her upper arms bare, her dark, smooth skin laid over boyish muscles. When she raised her hand to answer Mr. Ramsey’s questions, her wing muscles rose, too, the skin of her shoulder folding. I spied the tuft of tidy, private hair under her arm and caught her scent, something in the category of vanilla, with an agreeable tinge of root, like a forest plant I’d tasted once in Boy Scouts.
    I tapped her shoulder sometimes to ask a manufactured question about the math, just to see her face. Her eyes were black and burned always. She’d turn unhappily, look me over, smoldering. Did I want to get her in trouble? But Mr. Ramsey was oblivious, always writing on the chalkboard with the back of his ancient pinstriped suit to the class, tap-tap-tap. She didn’t smile, didn’t like my little jokes, not even the famous Mr. Ramsey face drawn on my fist, moving mouth and all, little black eyeglasses.
    Walking through my life after noticing her, I could