Life Among Giants (19 page)

I felt the need of support, waited in line at the pay phone in the nurse's station, one of those old wooden booths, dialed Benedikta.

“You missed your session,” she said when I repeated my name. “And you didn't call to cancel.”

“I suddenly had a couple of days.”

“You can't save her.”

“I can't abandon her, either,” I said.

“Said the one who was actually, in fact, abandoned.”

“You almost sound hurt.”

“Oh, Lizard, I am I think.”

“Can we reschedule for Friday?”

“I will give you the morning. You'll be tight after flying.”

“
Th
ank you, B.”

“You had a chance you know,” she said. “You had a chance to break away from them. To make yourself new.”

“I think that's just what's happening.”

“You can't make yourself new in quicksand, David.”

Th
e man at the window knocked.

Repressed tears got into my voice. I said, “I've lied to her half my life.”

“Friday, then,” Benedikta said a little coldly.

“Friday,” I said.
Th
en, clinically as I could: “I'll have missed you.”

“Okay,” she said more warmly. “I'll have missed you too. Careful, then.”

I kept it cool. “Yes, careful.”

“I love you, David.” She'd never said that before, nor anything close.

“You're manipulating me,” I said.

She thought about that, said, “It's my job.”

I MET
J
ACK
in Mystic, Connecticut, for dinner. We toured one of the old whaling vessels, remarkable, admired the deck prisms that had brought light to the sailors working below, not much to say, but tangible warmth between us.

“Where does your devotion come from?” I asked him over lobster rolls, long conversation about Kate's latest treatment, the new drug regimen, the guarded prognosis, all the damage her body had been through, her weariness after years of illness. After all she'd put him through, I meant, how did he hang in?

“I love her, Lizard. It's simple as that.”

“
Th
at's not very simple,” I said.

Next afternoon I found her playing Ping-Pong with a fellow patient, a thick-waisted Japanese-looking man with castlike bandages still on his forearms.
Th
e two of them gave no quarter, slammed that ball back and forth. It took maybe a half hour for Kate to get to twenty-one. Muted victory dance in slippers. She still liked to win.

“Hi David,” she said grinning.

“Hi yourself.”

Th
e grin faded, triumph fleeting. “I have some energy again. Really a lot of energy. Appropriate energy.”

“I see—you two used the whole room for that game. It's brilliant.”

“He lets me win.”

“No way,” said her opponent. “I was trying my best.” He had a crush on her, you could see, also that he really had let her win.

Her face was bloated, the rest of her diminished, an older and more fragile person than I'd expected, terribly skinny, no sunshine in her, meds and oversleep.
Th
e raised lip expressed more fear than contempt, and maybe that had always been true. Hard to keep her gaze, which was disconcertingly steady. I guess I didn't like the flatness of her eyes, which had gone gray, the ocean of her meeting the sky of her in an indistinct horizon on a cloudy, windless day.

I said, “Everything good?”

She looked to her Ping-Pong partner.

“You're very strong,” he said encouragingly. He wasn't going to leave us to ourselves.

She said, “I'm using myself up. You know? Just burning up the fuel.
Th
is stuff they've put me on makes mud puddles in my head.”

“Better than landslides,” the Ping-Pong guy said likeably.

Kate ignored him. “I'd want to learn to play the guitar. I would love that. Certain songs are in my head when I see you, David. ‘Fire and Rain,' for example. I imagine I could play that. I want to have a business. It would be nice to sell something.”

“Jack sure loves you,” I said.

“Everyone loves Katy,” her partner said.

“Like furniture. I would love to be able to make and sell furniture. Jack and I visited a shop when I had a weekend pass where they make these perfect, stable chairs. Shaker something-or-other. Design something-or-other.
Th
ey have a school attached to it, or an apprenticeship program of some kind. I'd build boxes and then things to put in boxes.”

“You were always good with tools.”

“Kate has been through so much,” the Ping-Pong guy said.

“I imagine you have, too,” I said.

“All self-inflicted,” he said.

“You love me,” Kate said, not quite a statement, not quite a question.

“Of course I love you,” I said. “I love you, Katydid.”

“What happened?” Kate said. “I mean, what the fuck?”

“I guess we know the answer to that,” I said.

“I guess we don't,” she said.

“
Th
ere are things I need to tell you,” I said.

“You'd better tell yourself first,” she said.

“
Th
at's a lot of pressure to put on Kate,” her friend said. “Maybe a better way to say it would be, Now I'm going to listen to you.”

Kate had looked away, wouldn't look back, nothing more to say.

“You're a nice man,” I said to the friend.

“
Th
at's a lot of pressure to put on me,” he said.

Soon an attendant came in, indicated it was time for me to go, took my arm like I was a ward, escorted me all the way back to my car and practically put me in it.

“
Th
ere's so much I haven't told her,” I said sorrowfully.

“
Th
is shit's no picnic,” the attendant said. He wanted me gone, didn't want to have to listen to the visitors' stories, too.

E
TIENNE CAME ON
board at Floridiana immediately, stepped into our soul kitchen two weeks after his interview and served his first meal that very night, our regular menu with our regular provisions, and yet everything looked better, tasted better, sold better. Same number of guests as the night previous, double the gross.

After that, small changes every day, new workstations installed, fresh suppliers, individual meetings with staff, a new attitude overcoming everyone, a new culture of song—Etienne always singing—joy in the work.
Th
e regular customers didn't know what hit them, it came so gradually, but slowly the place was made over in Etienne's image. Best of all, he didn't mind my cooking beside him, seemed to take pleasure in handing me insurmountable tasks.
Th
e two of us were first in, last out every day, both of us married to the work and therefore to each other, in a way, long discussions over morning prep quickly becoming personal. He never offered advice, just wanted to hear my story, or so it seemed, so much so that I didn't notice he never talked much about himself and his own struggles, if any.

He was fascinated by Kate, considered her driving into Long Island Sound a sensible response to all that beset her. In his view, she'd swum naked as a newborn to Yale in order to return to the moment of our parents' deaths. She was attuned to them, that's all, aware of their needs in the other world, which left her weird for ours. “
Th
ose deaths must be avenged to put her right.”

“What kind of gentle gay psychology is that?”

“
Th
at's voodoo gentle gay psychology, boss, with skulls.”

After a few months, the restaurant roaring along once again, I set Etienne and Kate up talking on the phone once a week, thinking he'd like her, also that he'd be as good for her as he'd come to be for me, and maybe she for him. She had become a vegetarian at McLean—you got better food that way—and this opportunistic strategy had turned into a passion. Her campaign was to get Floridiana to stop serving meat—any kind of meat—because after all there were a million other things to serve, things that didn't have eyes and didn't feel fear, whose deaths wouldn't load bad karma upon us.

“But meat
feels
good,” Etienne liked to respond. Even ribbing her, he was the one person who could make her laugh. And before long, contradictions upon contradictions, he was putting vegetarian items on the Floridiana menu, as passionate as she, just subtler. He never used the word
vegetarian
for example, mixed and matched fantastical Caribbean fruits and flowers with familiar grains and vegetables, a multiplicity of beans, varietal rices in traditional African spices and herbs. Dish by dish, week by week, he began bumping meat plates off the regular Floridiana menu.

“Poor people never got much meat,” he explained in a short segment on
60 Minutes
highlighting the Afro-American chefs of America (as if they weren't just chefs), for which, he said, he played Black. “
Th
at's what soul food all
about,
bein' poor. Rice and peas, greens and knuckles. Corn meal and potato flour, pig's ears and tripe, any leafy thing at hand, anything the rich folk won't touch, Mister Wallace.”

Y
ET REVENUES, WHICH
had spiked after Etienne took over, began to falter. Covers were up (numbers of guests eating, I mean), a good thing, but expenses were up as well.
Th
e new dishes were maybe too brilliant, the new restaurant maybe too good, the new customers maybe too, I don't know, plain
odd
—despite brilliant reviews, better service, sexier atmosphere, the old regulars started going elsewhere, plenty of choices around Miami when it came to meat. Which was Etienne's point, of course. You forged a clientele, not just a cuisine, a clientele that couldn't find your product anywhere else on the planet.

I had another always-a-bridesmaid season with the Dolphins, less play than any year previous, less money, too, and was very happy to get back to the restaurant after
Th
e Team was shockingly bumped from the playoffs.

And so I was there the night a huge reservation, some kind of wedding party, walked out when they saw the chef's sheet for the night—I mean thirty-five people who'd come for meat. Of course the bride was some cousin of Lionel's mother's niece, and word got back to him, and from him to Carter, and, Lionel at his side, Carter was upon us the very next night, wrath of God.

“I wanna see barbecue back on the menu
to-fucking-night
,” he shouted around the kitchen during prep, fresh off a plane from Dubai. Etienne rolled his head on his neck,
Yes sir
,
sure sir,
very dead serious, not a single look in my direction.

Lionel tried to soften things, sweet guy, always more articulate: “And, yo, E.T., if we could eliminate the roots-and-fruits.”

“I'll tell you what we're going to eliminate,” Carter said, big finger in Etienne's chest.

Th
en my partners took me outside and Carter threatened me, too: if I didn't manage the place the way they'd envisioned, whether profits shrank or rose they'd push me right back out on the street and no amount of lawsuit would get me my investment money back, not one dime.

I looked to Lionel. “I'm with Carter,” he said simply.

K
ATE WAS RELEASED
from McLean in early March that year, required to go back up to Boston weekly for group meetings. I flew to Connecticut to stand at her wedding to Jack, a nice civil ceremony, purely functional, Jack doing the right thing, Kate quite subdued, I thought, a new generation of meds flooding through her. My gift to them was a honeymoon at such time as they were ready to take it. I could barely stand to be in their house—nothing to do with them. It was that painting, that gorgeous painting high on the wall over their bed.

I made a second visit a month later, and as the honeymoon didn't look imminent, I bought her a guitar, maybe a little fancier than required, a beautiful Martin D-26 with pretty abalone-shell inlays up and down the neck. She didn't make fun of me over the expense as she might have in the old days but actually went through ads in the local paper and immediately signed up for lessons, trying harder than I'd seen her try in a long time, all irony having abandoned her.

Jack promised they'd visit, no conviction in his voice.

Kate, meanwhile, kept up her phone calls with E.T., talked with him some days for hours, his infinite capacity for empathy, speaker phone murmuring while he prepped in the mornings, neither of them minding if I listened in, Kate strumming chords for him as she learned the guitar, inseparable strangers, those two.