The Giant's House (30 page)

“I kissed him,” I said again. “It was a long time ago. I didn't love him, but I kissed him.”

I could feel James shifting behind me. “I'm trying to see your face,” he said. “I think maybe you did love him.”

What could I do for him?

All he wanted was something of a fair return. For years he'd lived, and I'd had something of a life because of that; I'd had a job and a purpose. Maybe all he wanted was a small piece of me. Oh, I should have greedily taken his proposal the night it was offered. We
should have called Leila to the Hotel Astor, told her to bring a minister and a bouquet. In the time it would have taken her to taxi over we could have dressed. I could have combed my hair. He was so warm in that bed we wouldn't have had to light the furnace all our married life.

I turned my head and looked at James. “You're right. I loved him. He had green eyes. He played the trumpet.”

“Good,” said James. He let himself fall back to the pillows. I thought I felt him kiss the back of my head. “I'm glad. Where is he now?”

“I don't know. Last I heard, somewhere in the South.” I closed my eyes.

“A southern boy?”

“Yes, damn him.”

And then I felt James's hand on my hip. I had forgotten that I owned a hip that could be touched instead of merely clothed. That sounds odd, I know, but when I said I didn't live in my own body, I wasn't lying. James's magnetic hand pulled my steely self out of that formerly abandoned hip, and then rolled it down the slope of my hip to my waist, to my rib cage. And to the back of my neck, where I could feel his humid breath. He had a touch of pneumonia, though I didn't know it then.

“He probably loved you back,” said James. “He was just too shy to say it.”

I tried to concentrate on that lost southern boy—to concentrate, as I always had, on what was being said instead of what was actually happening. “This boy wasn't too shy to say anything,” I said.

James's other hand—the one attached to the arm under me—reached up. Tentatively, it touched both my breasts. Well then. Something was happening, even I was not too dumb to notice. He kept that hand there and with the other drew my skirt up and touched my hip again.

I tried to turn over.

“Hold still, Peggy.”

I didn't want to. I bumped my head into his chin.

“Ow!” I felt him laugh into my shoulder. “I'm not very good at this—”

“Who is?” I asked. He was holding me still with the weight of the arm reaching around me, intrigued by my stockings, the waistband of my underwear—the dullest underwear in the world, I was a woman who patched everything for longer use. “I just want—”

“Peggy,” he said. “Peggy, be quiet. There isn't anything more you can do for me.”

“I'm going to fall asleep here,” I said later. By then, I'd rolled over to look at him. We were still dressed—me partly, him completely. Without his glasses he had an untroubled, hopeful look. Only twenty, and he already had the hint of wrinkles, a line on one side of his mouth. But that didn't bother me; in fact, I liked it. It was evidence that he was growing older, that he wouldn't die in childhood.

“You should,” said James.

But I couldn't fall asleep like that; years of falling asleep, of living alone, made me claustrophobic at the worst times. I turned my back to him again and settled; I thought there was plenty of time to get used to things. I would regret turning later, but what wouldn't I regret?

James asked, “What do people say in their sleep?”

It had been so long. There was only that one boy I'd ever spent the whole night with, and as far as I knew he never said anything. But maybe I hadn't been paying attention. Maybe, so pleased with everything, I'd slept soundly, paying attention only to myself. If I'd been told, all those years ago, that this would be it, I would have learned it, the way if somebody said of a song I loved,
you will never hear this again
, I would try to memorize every little false note and trill and would play it in my head until it became my favorite song, until I was the one singing it.

“They talk nonsense,” I said. “And when you repeat it back in the morning, they don't remember dreaming anything close.”

“Go to sleep.” I felt his arm move beneath me, then relax. “Say something.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I mean later. When you're sleeping. Try to talk in your sleep. Make something up.”

He died.

He died, of course.

He died, not that night, the one I fell asleep on his arm and slept soundly. I don't know whether he did, too—it was only nine at night when he made room for me, half a day before his usual bedtime—but when I woke at five the next morning, his arm was still beneath me, and his faint snores weren't much different from his speaking voice. I got up and went home alone to change for work.

He died a week after this, two weeks before the circus hit Boston. Feeling better, he'd gone into town by himself. He did that every now and then, to admire a store's high ceilings, get a touch of admiration from the tourists. Ever since New York, he'd liked that: seeing people watch him, people who hadn't been forewarned.

He went to the little grocery store in town to buy a Coke. There were two tourists there, men from Boston, getting things for a picnic in a more picturesque town than ours. They filled their baskets with packages of cheese, a loaf of Italian bread wrapped in white wax paper, and then they caught sight of what looked impossible: a man whose body had refused to stop, an ambitious body, beyond what they'd imagined architecturally feasible. First they thought it was some kind of costume, two men dressed up in a dark suit, a
papier-mâché head on top of the top man. Was it advertising something? Wasn't it hot in there, hard to balance?

Then the thing said something. “Mary,” it said, “could you open that for me, please?” The clerk pried off the crown cap of the Coke; it plunked off the glass and fell into a basket beneath the counter. The tourists realized in steps. The face was real, the head was real, that whole enormous span of body was a true thing, no fake, no hoax. He smiled at them, then turned to the door. Still precarious-looking, as he bent down his head to leave, started across the parking lot. You could understand why people thought at first he was two men: he moved like that. Like each part of him was a piece of furniture a little heavy for the rest, his Laurel and Hardy legs moving his piano-torso down a flight of stairs. Clearly his body regretted agreeing to this unwise proposition, getting James across the street.

It was halfway across the street that he fell, about two blocks from the library. Nobody came running to get me. He would have told them to, I think he would have, but he had a sudden fever and was not making much sense. The tourists got to him first; they dropped their bread and cheese in the middle of the street, as if they were the ones who'd fallen. Then Mary from the market arrived. She called the ambulance and then Oscar and Caroline. The paramedics couldn't get him on a stretcher; he was too heavy, he wouldn't fit. The tourists—they were good people, real estate brokers on vacation—said they'd help to lift him. The doors wouldn't close. By this time James was back in the world, and Oscar was there.

“I want to go home,” James said. “I'm fine, I just want to sleep.”

“Think you better go to the hospital, Jim,” Oscar said. “You look terrible.”

“I feel
fine
,” said James. “I just want to sleep.”

So he sat up on the floor of the ambulance and they closed the doors and drove him home.

I found out an hour later, when two boys came into the library. “You hear about the giant?” one said to another. “Got hit by a car.”

“Naw, he tripped over some kid,” said his friend. “Killed ‘im.”

“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“That giant fell on some kid and killed him. Squashed him flat,” said the second boy.

“Did
not
,” said the first.

I immediately called the Stricklands.

“Oh, good, Peggy,” said Caroline.

“What's happened?”

“Jim had a little accident. Nothing serious. He fell in town, didn't hurt himself, but I think he must be sick—he's sweating, he feels terrible. We can't get him to go to the hospital. Oscar's over there now. We were just about to call you. Maybe—could you get away from work? Is this a good time?”

“Of course it is, of course I can.” I wondered where Astoria was, I wondered exactly how fast I could get out. “In a couple of minutes.” And then, as I hung up the phone, I did something I'd never done before: I yelled in my library. I didn't care who heard me.

“Astoria!” I hollered. “Come here! I need your help!”

She came running up on her pointy little movie-star shoes.

“What is it?”

“Take the desk. I need to go. I don't know when I'll be back.”

I left her there, calling after me. “Peggy? Just wait a minute, Peggy—”

He wasn't asleep when I got there. I thought he would be; I'd imagined I'd have a few moments to think, to discuss things with Oscar.

“Peggy!” Oscar said. “How nice!”

“I'm not going,” said James. “I don't have to.”

“I'll just leave the two of you alone,” said Oscar. “I'll be over at the house.”

“Had a fall?” I said.

“I had a fall,” said James. “Then I got up, and I came home, and I want to recover
here
.”

I put my hand on his head. “You have a fever,” I said.

“Well Jesus, Peggy, maybe I have the flu like a normal person. Maybe I feel a little lousy, and I fell because of that—my balance isn't great in the
first
place—and now, like a normal person, I want to sleep in my bed and drink orange juice and feel better in a few days. If there's anything that'll make me feel worse, it's being in a hospital.”

I nodded. Maybe he was right—how could I tell?

“Okay,” I said. “Do you mind if I stay?”

He sighed. “I don't plan on being real entertaining.”

“I've watched you sleep before,” I said, “and you're right, you're not exactly enthralling.”

“Okay.” He gave me a grudging smile. “I'm going to sleep now.”

“I've been warned.”

He took off his glasses and set them on the windowsill beside his bed. When he was asleep, I called Astoria and asked if she could handle the library by herself. I was sorry, I said, I knew I had taken a lot of time off lately—

“Peggy,” she said softly. “You've barely taken off any. How much vacation time do you think you've got stored up?”

“No idea.”

“Call town hall,” she said. “I bet it's a record.”

And then I sat there and watched him. Maybe this was the night he'd talk in his sleep. I even thought I'd claim he did; I thought he'd like that. Caroline came over at dinnertime with some soup and crackers for both of us.

“How's the patient doing?” she asked.

“Okay, I think. Maybe tomorrow morning we can take him to the hospital, when he's not so scared. I think the fall shook him up.”

“Naturally,” she said.

“Naturally.”

An hour later James said something. I thought he
was
talking in his sleep, and I leaned closer to hear what he said. It was my name. Then he opened his eyes.

“Peggy,” he said. He put out his hand. I moved closer, put my hand in his. “Don't,” he began, and I took my hand away, but that
wasn't what he meant, he closed his hand around mine, made it disappear, and held on.

What he said was, “Don't let them boil me.”

“What are you talking about?”

His eyes were glossy, strange paperweights in his face. “Like Charles Byrne.”

“Who?”

“You gave me a book,” he said. “A long time ago. Charles Byrne. He was a giant and he always thought this doctor, I forgot his name, was going to steal his body and boil it for the skeleton.”

“What a thing to be thinking of,” I said.

“And then he died and he'd paid his friends to take care of him but the doctor got his friends drunk and stole Byrne's body anyhow and now it's in some museum hospital. You think they'll try that? With me?”

I felt his forehead. It was slick and warm. “How do you feel?”

“Don't let them. They want my bones.”

“Nobody wants your bones. They just want you to get well.”

“Peggy,” he said, “don't let them boil me!”

“I won't,” I said. “I promise.”

Then he started to shiver. Not the way I'd ever seen anyone shiver in my life, a brief electrical jolt that can be explained by anything, medicine or superstition: a goose stepping on your grave, your body working up heat. This was ongoing shuddering.

“I'm cold,” he said, and God help me, that explained everything. He was cold. He needed to be warmer. Later I would know it was the sign of a fever spiking; maybe I knew that before, too. But at that moment, standing next to his bed, all I knew was that he was shivering like someone who was cold, and that he said he was cold. This was something I could solve, despite the fact that all my suspicions were confirmed: me, my careless supplying of books, was the source of all his habitual nightmares.

I pulled the covers up, right to his ears. I unfolded an afghan and draped it over him. He still shivered. “I'm so cold,” he said, and I went to the closet and got his overcoat out and threw that over the blankets. I arranged the tweed arms like a muffler around his neck.

“How's that?”

He nodded. Soon he fell back asleep. He didn't shiver in his sleep. Tomorrow morning I'd call the doctor over. Maybe he could talk some sense into James. I wondered why I hadn't thought of that before.