“Boy,” James said. “I had no idea this was circus life.”
“They’re trying to convince you to sign a long-term contract,” I said, examining the fruit, so lustrous and beautiful I’d first thought it wax. “Sign on, and then it’s boxcars and pup tents.”
“No, no,” said Pat Anderson, walking through the door. “Just want you comfortable. Got the bed specially delivered. Thirteen feet—that’s long enough?”
“More than,” said James. “Bigger than my bed at home.”
“Well,” said Pat. “This is a luxury hotel. Here, I brought you this.” He thrust a rolled-up magazine at James. “Program. You’re featured. Page twelve. Also some pub shots.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a pile of glossy photographs, then handed one to me and one to James.
There were two shots on one sheet. The first was James standing up in the Stricklands’ house, his head just missing a light fixture, Oscar posed beside him to show scale. James slouched to fit, and steadied himself with a hand on the ceiling. The other was a baby picture someone had faked up, neither James nor his parents. They’d taken a dark photo of a couple in a garden, and an overexposed photo of a baby sitting on a patch of grass, and married them in what was once called a composograph. The baby was ludicrously large, as big as the grown-ups, and the artist had not been fastidious in his work. You could see the white edge of what had surrounded the baby in his native snapshot, a strange halo separating him from the dark-haired couple who looked only at the camera.
“Doesn’t look like anyone I know,” James said.
“No,” said Pat. “I’m not so crazy about that kind of fake, but.” He sat down in a wing-backed armchair by the door, bounced a little, and rubbed at the upholstery; he leaned back and stuck his legs out, taking that elegant chair for all the comfort it was worth. I guessed he wasn’t used to luxury hotels himself. “So, listen. Order anything you want on room service. We got the money, you might as well spend it. The rest of the outfit’s due at the end of the week. You folks gonna sightsee tomorrow?”
“Yeah, we’d planned to,” said James.
“Mind some company? Might as well get a little publicity out of this, dontcha think?” he asked. “I’d love the papers to see you at the top of the Empire State Building. ‘Tallest Man Atop the Tallest Building.’ ”
“If you think they’d be interested.”
“Sure would.”
“The Empire State Building,” James said thoughtfully. “I’d like to see that. There’s a lot I’d like to see.” The dresser was an ordinary height, and James reached down to pick an apple from the strange fruited tree of the gift basket.
“Boy,” said Pat Anderson. “There are some guys I wish coulda met you. Our other big guys. Hugo of Belgium. Jack Earle. You woulda liked Jack Earle, you remind me of him. He wrote poetry. Nice guy, sad.” He let his neck relax, and one of the wings of the chair caught his cheek like a loving hand. “How much you grow last year?” he asked.
“Two inches,” said James.
This seemed to depress Pat. “Is there going to be no end to it?” he asked.
“I hope there is,” said James, gently.
We’d planned to eat room service upstairs, but the hotel convinced us that we should celebrate our first night in New York in the dining room. “On the house,” the manager told me when he called upstairs, and I almost explained that it didn’t make any difference, the circus would pick up the bill if the hotel didn’t. But the dining room sounded like fun, so two bellhops came to carry the big chair down to the restaurant.
“You should ride down in the chair, like a Persian prince,” I said. At this the bellboys looked nervous. You could see them appraising James, wondering how many steamer trunks he was worth.
The maître d’ took us to a table in the back; the chair had already arrived and been installed. The room was beautiful: high ceilings, dim lighting. Pillars flanked the tables, plaited with wreaths of painted vines and leaves.
“Some place,” said James. He fingered the tablecloth. They gave us menus without prices, and though I know it was meant to be a politeness, it discomforted me; I felt as if I’d been loaned a yacht without a compass.
“What are you ordering?” I asked James.
“A steak?” he said. “Veal? I don’t know.”
The sommelier appeared at our table with a bottle of champagne. “Compliments of the house,” he said, and I worried that they would announce this at the arrival of every course to remind us that the soup was free, the salads gratis, the entrees honoraria. “Thank you,” I said.
“None for me,” James said as the sommelier lifted the bottle to the lip of his champagne flute.
“Have a sip,” I said.
“Well, okay. Just a little,” he said to the man.
“I will only dampen your glass,” the man answered.
And though there were other people in the room, other customers, the waiters, the boys in white jackets who refilled our water glasses after our daintiest taste, it felt like we were the only ones there. The room was dark; perhaps people could not see us. Or perhaps they were polite, used to seeing famous people.
James took a sip of his champagne and made a face. “It’s awful,” he said.
“You think so?”
“You don’t, obviously.” He smiled. “Well, you can have my cut.”
“We’ll just leave what’s left over,” I said as a man appeared to pour me another blond glassful. Even the candles on the tabletop burned politely, elegantly, without dripping to the cloth. I drank my champagne. “Why can’t life always be like this?” I asked.
“I think even this would get boring,” said James.
“So. What do you think of New York so far?”
“I don’t know, Peggy.” He twirled his glass by its stem. “I’m not so sure this is such a great idea.”
“You’re in New York,” I said.
“But what for? To stand and be looked at? Shouldn’t I have some other skills?” He made his glass dance to the edge of the table, then back in front of him.
“You do,” I said.
“Yeah? What are they? Name me something else I could do for a living. See? That’s what’s shameful.”
“No shame in it,” I said. “Welcome to the world of grown-ups. You might be good at math, and somebody pays for that, but what you really love to do is sing. Do you think Oscar prizes above all else his ability to book guests into a hotel?”
“No.”
“The sad fact of the world,” I said, “is almost nobody exactly chooses what they get paid to do.” I reached over and grabbed his traveling glass. “Stop that. You’re fidgeting.”
“Sorry,” he said. “What about you? Don’t you get paid for something you love?”
I tried to locate a spot on the table out of his reach for the glass, but of course, such a place did not exist. “I’m one of the lucky few. I was to the library born.”
“How did you know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really, I’m curious.”
“Well,” I said. “It seemed like the sensible thing to do.”
“That’s Peggy,” he said, “always sensible,” and I thrilled the way I always do when someone takes care to say something about me and says my name aloud.
“But,” he said, “there are other sensible things. You could have been a nurse. You could have been an insurance salesman. There must be something about librarians you liked.”
“Sure. A lot of things.”
“For instance?”
“I liked … I liked the idea of taking care of things. I like order, good manners, and—because I’m basically a stingy person—I like being able to counteract that stinginess by giving people free things all day long. I like knowing things other people don’t. You know my favorite part of the library? Our little local history section. Nobody in our town ever goes into it—you never have, have you? It’s small. There’s the voting records, and the census, and one book a ma
n wrote twenty years ago, called Brewsterville, My Home. Boxes of posters for summer fairs, tickets to concerts. And it’s all necessary, it’s all things you can’t find anywhere else, and I’m the one who owns it. The genealogists come in, wanting information, and I give it to them, the desiderata, the ephemera, everything.”
“The what?”
“Ephemera,” I said. “Stuff that doesn’t seem to be useful, that you think will only be around for one use, like a ticket, but ends up being collected.”
“And the other word?”
“Desiderata?” I let the word knock at my front teeth. That word was like toffee to me—I never thought of or missed it, but once tasted it became unspeakably delicious. “That word, it’s the best thing I learned in library school. It means—well, it’s sort of like, what’s desired and required.”
“Desired and required? Which?”
“Both,” I told him. “Some things are both.”
James cheered up a little. I realized he never really went to restaurants, certainly not one this fancy. He took the waiter’s every suggestion, which resulted in a stultifying amount of food delivered to our table. James enjoyed it, I think: fancy restaurants have the formality of great magic, the whiteness of the tablecloth, the silver plate covers lifted suddenly to reveal not quite what you expected.
Not until the end of the meal did a stranger approach us, a man in a checked jacket, with ashy hair and a complexion to match. He’d had a little too much to drink—I could smell whiskey on his breath—but the fact was, I’d had two and a half glasses of champagne myself and was filled with the milk of human kindness.
“Hi,” he said. “I was wondering something.” He looked at James. “My friend and I have a bet. How tall are you?”
“How tall do you think?” James asked.
“Well, I say, seven feet at the most. Louise says you’re at least seven five.”
I laughed. “What do you stand to win if you’re right?”
He looked delighted; clearly he thought he was victorious. “We haven’t negotiated yet.”
“What kind of betting is that?” I asked. “Go back and decide, then we’ll tell you whether you win.”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “ ‘Fess up. Whatever she has to pay, she deserves it.”
I leaned back to locate his friend. Across the room a woman in a green dress and red eyeglasses smiled embarrassedly, then waved.
James smiled at the man, then at me. “Sound fair to you?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
“So?” the man said. “Who’s right?”
“Louise,” James answered.
“Damn,” said the man. He leaned against the nearest ivied pillar. “How tall?”
“Eight six,” said James.
The man looked at me.
“It’s true,” I told him. “Don’t feel bad. Don’t begrudge Louise. Remember: something she deserves.”
He was looking across the dining room then, and he turned his palms to the ceiling, as if to say, what can I do? you’re right again. Then he blew her a kiss. “No,” he said. “I never begrudge her anything.” He looked at us. “Are you two married?”
“No,” I said, surprised. “Just friends.”
“No, not to each other, or not at all?”
“Neither one of us,” I said.
“Son,” he said to James. “Quit dilly-dallying. Women only wait around so long.” He turned to me. “How long you been waiting on him?”
“No comment,” I said.
“Roses,” said the man to James. “Love poems. Write your own, don’t copy ’em out of a book. What do you do?”
“I’m a performer,” said James.
“Ah. And you?”
“Librarian.”
“Okay,” said the man. “Son, all you have to do is figure out what rhymes with Dewey Decimal.”
I burst out laughing.
“I’m serious.”
“How long has Louise been waiting on you?” asked James.
The man looked at his watch. “Since the twelve o’clock train from New Haven,” he said. “And I think she’s getting impatient. Good to meet you both. You make a handsome couple.”
“He was drunk,” James said when the man was gone. But he didn’t look mad.
I poured myself another glass of champagne. “Oh dear,” I said as the bottle slipped out of my hand and splashed into the wine bucket. “Maybe we have that in common.”
“You’re drunk?” James asked. He grinned at me.
I stopped to consider the question. In other company I wouldn’t have owned up. “Tipsy,” I said.
“We’ll have to get the bellhop to carry you up in the chair.”
I leaned on the table with my elbows. “I’m sure it won’t come to that,” I said. “Unless I fall asleep.”
“You’re right,” said James, “I could take this life for a while.” His plate was beaded with juice from his lamb chops.
“Tomorrow will be a big day,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was already ten o’clock. “We should think about sleep.”
“Let’s eat dessert first. Let’s take the hotel for everything they’ve got.”
“Deal,” I said.
After dessert and coffee—after I had, in fact, consumed my cut of the champagne and James’s—we got up to leave. I didn’t feel drunk except when I tried to speak, and then only because I had thoughts that did not arrive at my mouth intact.
“You are drunk,” James said fondly.
I shook my head, then shrugged.
We stepped onto the plush carpet of the lobby. I was glad for the cushioning; it felt less precarious than the parquet of the dining room.
We went to our separate rooms. I immediately washed my face and felt a little more clearheaded. Part of me knew it would be a good idea to change into my nightgown, but I felt suddenly too exhausted. After a minute I heard a knock, and I realized it came from the door that led from my room to James’s. I went to it.
“Here you go, Peggy,” he said. He handed me a folded piece of hotel stationery. “Good night. See you in the morning.” He closed his door, and I closed mine.
The stationery said:
Love Poem for a Librarian
Although her love for me is infinitesimal,
Her eyes are as Dewey as any old decimal.
I lay awake for what seemed like hours but was probably minutes, repeating those two lines in my head. Sometimes I could not quite get the meter right; sometimes the syllables all fell into place exactly. James was on the other side of the door. I strained to hear what he was doing—pushing aside the drapes to look out, turning down the sheets of his bed, maybe untucking his shirt before taking it off. I thought I could hear the brush of fabric against fabric that might have been any of these things. Life should be like this always, I thought again, and in my drunken state I wondered how I could make it possible. There has to be some way, I thought. Then I fell asleep.
“Clear day,” Pat Anderson said at ten-thirty the next morning, when he met us in the hotel lobby. There was a crowd around James, reporters and gawkers, asking questions. One man in an awful plaid jacket shook James’s hand again and again. “Perfect Empire State Building weather!” Pat said. “Who knows—maybe we’ll go out to the Statue of Liberty.”
“We can’t get to the top of that,” I said.
“No, but good pictures there anyhow.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll go flag the taxi. You flag Jim.”
James was reluctant to leave the crowd. The plaid man was still shaking his hand, then pulled out a business card. I saw that he was the drunk man from the dining room.
“Nice people,” James said absentmindedly, pocketing the card. “Wow. What’s today?”
“Tuesday. Empire State Building Day. Remember to tell me when you get tired. No point in wearing yourself out first thing.”
“No,” said James. He climbed into the back of the taxi.
“You already sound tired. Are you up for this? Maybe yo
u need to rest.”
“No,” he said. “I’m in New York. I guess I should be allowed to do a little sightseeing.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I just—”
“Peggy,” he said, “you’re not my mother, and I’m over eighteen, and I can tell when I’m tired.” He looked at me. “I promise.” You would have thought he was the one with the hangover. I didn’t feel sick, exactly, just dried out and slow-witted.
The Empire State Building’s lobby was big enough that had he stood in it alone, James would have looked quite in scale. A pack of reporters trailed us, from the daily papers, from the newsmagazines. A man in a derby, who said he’d once been mayor of New York, shook James’s hand.
“The only thing that rivals you is this building,” he said.
We couldn’t avoid the elevator, of course, but it went so fast—so alarmingly fast!—that James didn’t have to crick his neck for long. Then we stepped out.
James immediately went to the observation deck. The ex-mayor followed him. “Winds are thirty miles,” he said, and as I stepped outside, I could feel it. I hadn’t imagined it windy up here; I thought for sure we’d left all the weather on the street. The ex-mayor took off his hat, put it back on, and clamped his hand down on its crown. Photographers took pictures of the three of us.
“Well, Jim,” he said, “New York isn’t such a big place when you look down on it, is it?”
“It’s a pretty good size,” James said.
Reporters wrote this down.
“You keep growing the way you do,” the ex-mayor said, “and you’ll be able to get up here without using the stairs or elevator.”
Below us, New York went on as usual. It was so sunny even the dirt looked clean and monumental. The East River sparkled like some big scaled animal turning over and over in bed. “Where’s the hotel?” James wondered, and Pat Anderson went over to help him locate the neighborhood.
“Quite a kid you got there,” a reporter said to me. He was one of those men who seemed to have walked to the edge of adolescence, looked over, and then stepped back in horror. Thin and high-voiced and baby-faced, as short as I was. I wasn’t used to looking at a man at eye level. “How much did he weigh at birth?” he asked.