“All I need” I said, “is to hear ‘Peggy ruined the upholstery on that chair. Have you cleaned Peggy’s litter box? Peggy kept me awake all night coughing up a hairball.’ ”
“I get the point,” said Oscar.
So we called her Kazoo, because though she was only three months old, she already had a nasal, scratchy voice, a smoker’s meow. We did not get along, much to the delight of everyone else, especially James. He liked to imagine that Kazoo spent her catnaps dreaming of ways to torment me.
“She doesn’t see herself chasing mice,” he said. “She sees herself chasing Peggy.”
Oscar had decided to start an art school by mail. He’d gotten this idea from James, who was taking a correspondence course from a school in Vermont. Now that Alice was three, only a little tall for her age and pretty, her father no longer feared sudden giantism; by the time James was her age he was already enormous.
Oscar asked James for advice. “How much is too much for one lesson? How do you think I should grade?”
“People are going to send you paintings in the mail?” I asked. “Won’t that get expensive?”
“No, just cartoons. I’ll specialize in cartoons—everybody wants to do comic books. So, Jim: start with funny characters, move onto serious? Vice versa?”
He tried to recruit students from the tourists who visited James, but it was like the end of a summer romance. Write to me, remember me, won’t you? They never did. They remembered only the prairie of mattress, the chair as big as a haystack, sent their friends, and came back themselves.
“Charge money,” the tourists said. “Charge money,” said Astoria, and Oscar, and even Leila, the Smallest Woman in the World, who sent a package from her winter home in Florida. Inside was the promised record: Julia Lee and her Boyfriends singing “King-Sized Papa.” I’d almost thought she’d been making it up, but we listened: I got a man that’s more than eight feet tall.…
“You make people pay to look at you in New York,” Leila wrote in her tiny messy handwriting. “No problem to make them pay to look at you at home. Better in fact.”
But James couldn’t make himself do it, and I was inclined to agree. Somehow charging money for posing for photographs was different, a clear transaction. Asking admission to his house was worse. There was a line that you crossed when you decided that you existed for other people. There were a million ways to cross it. You married and changed your name to Mrs. Roger Husband; you went to medical school only because your parents wanted you to. It was a selfishness, to deny yourself like that. I knew. You took care of other people all your days, you gave up your own plans. In these ways you abdicated responsibility: you became an exhibition in someone else’s life. Oh, I knew it, I did, and perhaps I didn’t like people—haven’t I said that enough, that I didn’t like people?—but I liked myself a good deal less, I could not bear to be alone, I needed my library patrons, I needed Oscar and Caroline and cranky little Alice and, of course, I needed James above everybody else. If I’d had the choice, if people were offering, I would have charged admission to myself. Maybe it would have made more people interested.
But James was better than me. In every way he was better, and I didn’t want him to succumb to needing either strangers or their lousy spare change.
“Alice,” James said. “Come here.” Now that Alice walked, she sometimes came toddling down the path to drag Kazoo to the front house for a visit. That made the cat worth something, James thought; any creature who brought Alice around was worth something. He asked Caroline and Oscar to bring some of her toys and books over to the cottage.
“Yah?” she said. She came up to the edge of the bed.
“How are you, Alice?”
“Good. You sick?”
“No. Will you read me a story?”
Alice went to get a book. She couldn’t read yet, of course, but one didn’t dare tell her that. She climbed on the bed from the seat of the step-chair Caroline had brought over for this purpose.
“There were dogs,” she said. James closed his eyes. “And they got in a car and they drove away, and then they crashed and they crashed and they crashed and they crashed.” She stopped for a minute, fingering the page.
“Then what?” James asked.
“And they crashed and they crashed and then they got up and they turned around and they crashed and they crashed and they crashed.”
“A sad story,” said James.
“No-oo-o,” said Alice, looking at the book. Then she let it slide off her lap onto the floor, where it flopped spine up. I went to retrieve and close it.
“Peggy doesn’t like it when you treat books that way,” James said. But Alice didn’t look at me. She crawled up to James’s face and began to pat it, as if it were one of those crashing dogs.
“Good girl,” Alice said, patting James.
“Me or you?” James asked. “I’m not a girl, and I’m not sure how good I am. Maybe you mean Kazoo.” The cat was asleep on the far corner of the bed.
“She’s a girl,” I said. “But she’s definitely not good.”
“Good girl,” said Alice. She had her palm open, dabbing at James’s face. “Good, good girl.”
Now I can look back on those days six months after New York and see he was dying. Although strictly speaking he wasn’t—there was nothing for him to be dying of yet. Height wouldn’t kill him, after all; it was just that his height made him susceptible to other things. But he was weakening, worn out. I sat by his bed some evenings while he napped. The circus invited him to go to Boston for the 1959 spring tour, and he wanted to—now he was interested in all cities and their mysteries. I stuck signs on the cottage door that told the tourists to go away, but they still pressed their faces to the window, still knocked on the glass. If James was asleep, I didn’t even turn my head to look at them. They thought I was stubborn or deaf. That was fine.
When he was awake, he’d call out in his thick husky voice, “Come in.” They would, but he wasn’t so interesting when he was in bed. Impressive still, but even tourists turned uncomfortable in the company of a man under a blanket, a sick man. The room smelled like an old quilt, a mixture of history and mildew and a huge, on-the-blink body. They didn’t know what was wrong with him. They thought he was dying of too much of himself. “Some place,” they’d say, looking around, and then they’d hustle their children out. Only when he sat in the armchair—shabby now, after several years of teenage use, even looking a little small for him—would they stay and talk.
One night I sat there reading. At least, I had a book open on my lap. Kazoo, growing out of kittenhood, jumped on top of the book, and then up to the bed. She dug her claws into my arm to push off.
“Bad cat,” I said to her.
James opened his eyes. “Good cat,” he said absentmindedly. “Are you torturing Peggy? Good cat.”
“Rotten animal, through and through.” I put my hand out, hoping just once she’d walk under it to be scratched—she did it for everyone else—but she rubbed up against James’s shoulder instead.
He made a clicking noise with his tongue, and the cat sniffed his nose, then curled up beneath his chin. “Aunt Caroline says I should be careful, I’ll roll over in my sleep and kill her.”
“Doubtful,” I said.
“I don’t roll over. I’m too heavy. The cat’s safe anyhow. She likes to sleep on my pillow.”
“She knows that’s where you live.”
“What do you mean?”
“In your head,” I told him. “You live in your head. Everybody lives somewhere in their body. Hands, heart, private parts. Some people live anyplace but their head. Remember Patty Flood? She, I believe, lived in Jesus.”
“Where do you live?”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t answer.
“You have a habit,” he told me, “of asking questions of others that make yourself blush.”
“That much is true.”
“Where do you live, Peggy?”
“Me?” I closed my book and
looked at him. “I live in a whole other room from my body, I live down the block.”
“Not really,” he said.
I put down the book and climbed up to sit on the edge of the bed. The cat jumped off. She didn’t even pretend to like me. “My body is a dull place. Who’d choose to live here?”
“I might,” he said. “If I could move. But here I am.” He pulled one arm free from the covers; his pajama top was striped a cool blue. “At least the view was good. And you. I think I know where you live.”
“Where?”
He slapped his right leg, three times. “Here. Me. Vicariously, I mean. Bad choice. You should have picked someone who has more fun.”
“You have fun,” I said. A stupid comment.
But he said, “Yes, sometimes.” He put his hand on mine. I held it a second.
I didn’t know what would happen next.
“You should go back to sleep,” I said.
“I wasn’t asleep. I was just sort of pretending to give you some time off. When I’m awake, you feel obligated to talk to me.” He threw the blankets off the top half of his body. “But I don’t know what people sound like sleeping. You know—I try to get the breathing right, but I don’t know how it goes. Then I thought maybe I’d talk in my sleep to entertain you. My mother did that. I don’t remember what she said, but sometimes I’d hear her voice from the other room. Is that common? Do people talk in their sleep as often as they snore?”
“I think everyone eventually does,” I said. “I guess. I’ve watched you sleep enough, but you haven’t talked yet.”
“Another thing I don’t know. When you stop and think, there’s a lot I’m stupid about.”
“Me, too.”
“You?” he said. “You’ve lived more a life than me. You know a lot of things.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I held on to his thumb. “I think everything worthwhile I know I probably learned from you.”
“There’s a lot of things you know that I don’t. I don’t know what people say in their sleep. I don’t know how to ice skate. I’ve never been in a plane. I don’t know—I don’t know what somebody looks like when they’re about to kiss you.”
“Like this,” I said, and just like that, I leaned in and kissed him. One short kiss on the cheek. He hadn’t shaved lately; he did that in his bed, a towel across his chest and a mirror leaning on his knee, though he never had much of a beard. Then a kiss on the mouth. And then I looked at him, and I was about to kiss him again, for real. For real, whatever that means. But he caught me as I was leaning in, he put his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s too late,” he said.
I nodded. But then I had to ask, “Too late for what?”
“It’s too late, Peggy.”
I put my own hand on his shoulder. I tried to curl my fingers around, but there was too much of it. “You should go to sleep.” I’d wanted—at that moment—to kiss him because I thought he should be kissed, but maybe it was better he didn’t know. No, it wasn’t better. I wanted to give him something that could make him forget he was a young man, dying; I wanted to give him a kiss so good he’d forget it was his first. But I wasn’t the woman for that kind of work. I imagined getting Stella to help me out again, though she was long gone, married, and a student at a college in Maryland; even so I imagined calling her up and explaining my problem.
Then James reached up and smoothed my hair—it was late, I’d taken it down—smoothed it on either side of my face, with just the tips of his fingers. It was the sweetest way he’d ever touched me, so planned and a little clumsy.
“I guess you didn’t want to marry me after all,” he said.
“I did. I wanted to, but you didn’t.”
He closed his eyes, smiling. His hand was still by the side of my face. “But I think I did. I mean, obviously I love you.”
Then I leaned forward and kissed him, and this time he didn’t push me away. Obviously he loved me. His lips were hot and his mouth was dry and I had my hand on his shoulder; he let his teeth part a little. He didn’t know quite how to do it. When I sat up, his eyes were still closed.
“We could still get married,” he said.
“You’re not dressed for it. I think even Leila would frown on pajamas at a wedding.”
“When I’m feeling better. In Boston, maybe. Leila could be there.”
I wanted to kiss him again, but he had his hand on my cheek, bracing me up. His eyes were open a little. I could see how chapped his lips were, though I hadn’t felt it.
“When I’m feeling better,” he repeated.
“You look tired,” I said.
“You must be tired yourself, saying that so much. Lie down.” With some effort, he scooted himself over; first his hip, then the rest of him. “We’re going to Boston soon. You need to get some rest. Lie down with me and take a nap.”
So I did, my back to him. He’d stretched out one arm for me to lie down on.
“So that’s what people look like,” he said.
I was quiet.
“Who was the last man you kissed?”
“You,” I said.
He laughed. “Before that.”
“I only remember the last boy I’ve kissed.”
“Come on, Peggy.”
“It’s been a while. Since college.”
“Did you love him?”
“No,” I said.
“Did he love you?”
“No. That’s why I didn’t love him.”
“Tell me.”
“Just a boy,” I said. “A philosophy major. A nice boy, nice enough.”
“Does he have a name?”
“I don’t remember. George Baker. You aren’t interested.”
“I am,” James said, and I could tell by his voice that he was.
“He was older by a couple of years. Too handsome for the likes of me.”
“And you kissed him.”
“Yes,” I said. “I kissed him.”
I remembered the way this boy had kissed; it didn’t seem like a good story. He didn’t like deep kisses at all, just gentle slow ones, our lips and tongues just touching. Lovely one-note kisses. He’d recently broken up with his longtime sweetheart. I liked those kisses, but I wanted other sorts, too: bruising, end-of-movie kisses, someone saved from a villain or shipwreck in the arms of another who suddenly realizes everything. Impolite kisses. A catalog that I could now describe to James, to let him know there are as many kinds of kisses as there are kinds of conversation. But no matter how I tried to convince that boy otherwise with my mouth, he went back to his gentle kissing. Finally I concluded that I was at fault, I simply didn’t know how to kiss. That, of course, was not the problem. The problem was that his mouth had just come from a five-year stint with somebody else’s, somebody who’d taught him to kiss that way in the first place. The problem was he was giving me some other girl’s kisses.
“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?