Tiny Little Thing

  “I can’t eat when I’m anxious.” Her voice was small and determined, a girl working up her nerve. She stood near the darkened windows in a neat powder-blue suit. As outfits went, it hardly seemed like the kind you wore to run away into a new life. The matching powder-blue hat was perched on top of her suitcase, next to the door.

  “Well, eat this.” He slid the omelet onto a plate and poured a glass of milk. “Got to be up early tomorrow. You’ll need it.”

  She sank into the sofa and accepted the plate. He set the milk on the lamp table next to her. “Thank you,” she said, without looking at him.

  “Hey.” He crouched down in front of her and tapped her knee. “You’re okay with this, aren’t you? You’re sure?”

  She pushed her fork into the omelet. “I’m sure. I sent him the letter, didn’t I? No turning back.” The plate wobbled under her attack. She gripped it with one hand, stuck the egg into her mouth with the other, and chewed bravely.

  “Hey,” he said again. “Will you look at me?”

  She lifted her eyes. Her mouth was still full, as if she couldn’t seem to force the omelet down.

  He smiled. “That’s better. You’re not nervous of me, are you? Because that would hurt. Really hurt, Tiny.”

  Tiny swallowed at last and worked up a smile. “No. I just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “Well, I just don’t want you to think I’m throwing myself at you, that’s all. I appreciate your helping me out. Giving me a lift out west. But I don’t— I know you have a life of your own. I’m not asking for anything more.” Her gaze dropped back down to her eggs.

  Now that he was close, he could smell her again, and her fragrance had changed along with her clothes. She’d washed out the scent of his shirt and his apartment. She’d showered again in her own apartment, showered with her own soap and her own creams. She smelled like flowers and baby powder, like a girl’s bathroom.

  He put his hands on his knees, to keep himself from touching her. “Well, do you want anything more?”

  “I—” Her face flushed. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  Cap studied her in the lamplight, studied her ladylike blue suit and her dark hair curling obediently around her ears, her eyelashes shielding her from penetration. Her force field had assembled back around her. But it wasn’t a force field, after all, was it? It was more like a shell, an exquisite painted-on version of herself, made of habit and nature, a girl who hated to disappoint others. He wondered why he ever thought she was stiff. Only the shell was stiff, not the woman inside it.

  She poked at her eggs. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I’d like to photograph you again.”

  “Dancing?” She looked up.

  “No. There’s not enough light, anyway. Just sitting here, like this. We’ll call it Bride readying for her big day.”

  “But I’m not getting married.”

  “I’m not talking about a wedding.”

  She placed her fork at a five o’clock angle on her plate and reached for her milk.

  “Tiny,” he said. “It’s just me. You don’t need to be nervous.”

  She tilted her milk glass and stared inside. “Maybe I just need something stronger.”

  “No. Clear head, clear conscience.”

  She widened her mouth into a smile. Her teeth were—of course—white and perfect, honed by the very best Park Avenue dentists. “All right, Caspian. Take my picture again, since you can’t seem to help yourself.”

  While she finished her omelet and drank her milk at the table, he closed the curtains and turned on all the lamps. He’d put her on the sofa, right next to the arm, so she could lean against it for support. He dragged over a floor lamp and adjusted the shade.

  “You should open up a studio,” said Tiny.

  He took her empty plate and glass and put them in the kitchen sink. “I told you, it’s just a hobby. I already have a job.”

  She arranged herself on the sofa. “Shall I touch up my lipstick?”

  “Not a chance. Just put your feet up on the cushion. Maybe lean your elbow on the arm.” With deliberate methodology, he prepared the camera: changed the lens, chose the film, screwed in the flashbulb.

  “Take off my jacket?”

  God yes.

  “Only if you like,” he said.

  Her blouse was cream-colored and made of silk. It draped expensively against her body, revealing a single strand of small pearls around her throat, the same shade as her skin. “Is this all right?” she asked.

  He lowered himself in front of her. “You’re beautiful. Look at me. You don’t need to smile, just . . . Tell me more about your sisters.”

  She rolled her eyes. “What do you want to know about my sisters?”

  “What they’re like. The trouble you used to get into.”

  “They got into trouble, not me. They’re only eleven months apart, Pepper and Vivian. They— Oh, that flash. Could you turn it off?”

  “Sorry. Let me see if I can bring in a little more light.” He carried over the lamp from the desk in the corner and placed it on the side table. “Keep talking.”

  “Well, they’re birds of a feather. Maybe Pepper’s more a free spirit. She’s the older one. They went to Bryn Mawr together, though Pepper barely graduated last year, and Vivian got high honors. The ceremony was just last weekend, actually. She looked dazzling in her white dress.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “That’s it, really. They’re both independent, but Vivian’s always known what she wanted.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “To be a journalist. She’s starting a job at the Metropolitan magazine in New York, when the summer’s over. She’ll probably be running the place in a year or two.”

  He smiled and moved to another angle. “I think I like your sister.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first.” She puffed a bit of scornful air from her nose: another girl, and you’d have called it a snort. “She and Pepper, they aren’t shy. I’ll bet they’ve had dozens of lovers already.”

  “Dozens?”

  “Well, at least a dozen between them.”

  He set down the camera. Tiny looked across the room at the wall of photographs. Her brow was creased, her large eyes narrowed into almonds. The corners tilted upward just a fraction, unlike her mother’s.

  “What about you, Tiny?” he asked. “Any lovers? Other than your fiancé, I mean.”

  “He’s not my fiancé. And if you can’t guess, I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Fair enough. A lady has her secrets.” He lifted the camera again.

  She turned to face him, and in a million years, forests and glaciers advancing and retreating across the continents, species flourishing and disappearing, he could never have predicted what Tiny Schuyler said next.

  “When Pepper was twenty, she had a photographer take her picture in the nude.”

  His fingers froze on the camera lens. “Did she, now?”

  “She showed me the photographs. She looked beautiful, of course. Pepper’s the most beautiful of all of us. The most daring. I asked her why she did it. Whether she wanted to be a model or an actress or something, or just to scandalize my parents. Do you know what she said?”

  His pulse was off and running again, plucking staccato against his skin. “No idea.”

  “Just because she felt like it. She wanted to know what she really looked like, without any clothes or mirrors. Just her. Her true self.”

  “I see.”

  She raised her knees and hugged them to her chest. She was still staring at the wall of photographs, her head tilted to one side. “I was just thinking . . .”

  He loved her expression, loved the way the lamplight grabbed the thoughtful curve of her eyelashes. “Yes?”

  “How hard it is
to tear down the barricades. No, that’s not it. I mean the way we act. You lay down these tracks, even though you know it’s not the right track, even though you can see what track’s the right one. But you don’t know how to get off yours. You know how you want to behave, what you want to be, the change you need to make—the thing you need to stop doing, or start doing—and yet you stay on your old track. You can’t find the switch that takes you to the other one. You can see the change, the desired state, but you can’t quite touch it. Like my mother, wanting to be good.”

  “So what’s the desired state, Tiny? Your desired state.”

  “Not to be so stiff. Not to be so scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Doing the wrong thing.” She drew a massive breath into her lungs and turned her head toward him. “I think I’m ready now.”

  “For what?” he whispered.

  She lifted her fingers to the buttons of her blouse. “Keep clicking.”

  “Actually, I’m out of film.”

  “Well, go get another roll.”

  He rose obediently and found his camera bag. His ears rang, like they’d been stuffed with wire, the way he sometimes felt in an ambush. He loaded another roll of film and snapped the case shut. When he turned around, Tiny was naked, wholly and delicately naked, bent over her legs, rolling down her stockings. Her clothes lay in a heap on the floor, brassiere and girdle on top.

  “Is this really what you want, Tiny?” he asked.

  She lifted her head and dropped the stocking into the pile. She still wore the pearls. “Yes.”

  “All right. Lean back against the arm of the sofa. Relax your shoulders. Turn your hip a little, back toward the sofa. Just the hip. That’s it.” Her breasts were larger than he imagined, beautifully shaped, puckered at the tips despite the warmth of the apartment. The lamplight inhabited her skin. He hoped he could capture its translucence, the singular liquid glow beneath her surface, but he knew the limits of film. The curve of her rib cage, the hollow of her hip bone, the uptick of her lips into the tiny crescent at the corner: you could force these inanimate details through the layers of lens and aperture and imprint them faithfully on a strip of plastic, to be forever preserved in their exact present form, like fruit in a jar. The breathing woman, the quality of her skin, lived only in his head. His bones. His chest, where his heart beat and beat, pumping out the minutes of a May evening.

  As he fell into a rapturous silence, moving about, changing angles, Tiny’s body stretched out, inch by inch. She extended one sinewy leg like a cat, and then an arm above her head, dangling over the end of the sofa. She tilted her face and looked at him, wise and sideways, as if she—innocent Tiny, immaculate Tiny—knew things he could only guess.

  His thumb, moving to advance the film, kept going and going. End of the roll.

  He lowered the camera. “That’s it. Do you want me to load another?”

  “No, that’s enough, I think.” She watched him quietly.

  He rose to his feet and walked to the bedroom, where he found an old dressing gown and returned to the living room. He kept his eyes on the slice of upholstery next to her cheek while he draped her with his robe, like a Victorian piano whose curving limbs must not be exposed to the rapacious male gaze. She clutched it modestly to her bosom, propping herself on her elbows, and Cap turned his back so she could wrap herself back up in privacy. While the silk whispered behind him, belting her in, he rewound the film and removed it from the camera. “Here you are,” he said, turning slowly, holding it out to her.

  She plucked it from his fingers and rolled it about in her palm. Her hair had loosened up in all the stretching and posing, and it tumbled past her temples as she gazed down at the small and potent cylinder. Its extraordinary contents.

  She handed it back to him. “You take it.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. A memento.”

  “Don’t you want to know how they turned out?”

  She shook her head. “That wasn’t the point, really. Go on, take it. I trust you.”

  He closed his fingers around the roll. “That’s a lot of trust.”

  She shrugged. The dressing gown was green and old-fashioned, silk like they used to make them, and it lay beautifully on her pale skin, picking out the spikes of tiny color in her brown eyes. It was far too big, of course. She’d rolled up the sleeves, and the extra material overflowed the snug cinch of the belt. She knitted her fingers together and stared at his hand. “There was another reason,” she said.

  “Another reason?”

  “My sister. Pepper. Why she had those photographs taken.” A rueful chuckle. “The real reason, probably, knowing her.”

  “Oh?”

  Tiny unclasped her fingers and wrapped one hand around his fist, trapping the film inside.

  “She wanted to sleep with the photographer.”

  “I see. Was she successful?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. But judging from the photographs, I don’t see how he could have resisted her.”

  “Except he’s supposed to be a professional. Not to take advantage of the situation.” Cap uncurled her fingers and walked to the darkroom, where he set the film on the counter and stared, gathering his breath, at the array of photographs still attached to the drying lines: Tiny suspended in a starburst of an arabesque; Tiny’s leg stretched upward to an impossible height, not a toe out of line; a blurred Tiny swirling past the lens; Tiny’s face sculpted by the sunlight from his window. His white shirt collar against her neck.

  He grabbed the edge of the counter with his fingertips and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “It wasn’t taking advantage,” said Tiny, from the doorway. “It was what she wanted.”

  “She was vulnerable.”

  “She put herself in that position, knowing it was vulnerable. Her eyes were open.” Swish, swish, went his robe against the darkroom floor. A warm hand rested flat upon his right shoulder blade. “I left him, Caspian. I broke off the engagement. I’ve started a new life, right here, at this second.”

  “You don’t need me to do that. You don’t need anyone except yourself.”

  “But I want you. So much it hurts.”

  His knuckles gleamed white against the counter. He bit down against his lip, because he was about to say something stupid. Stupidity filled his mouth and ran out his eyes, and it tasted like salt.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” she went on. “You’re right, I guess. I shouldn’t just jump from one man to another. And yes, you’ll be off to the other side of the world in two weeks, and yes, I don’t really know you, and what happens if you don’t come back, and what happens when you do. That’s all true. But you’re not taking advantage of me, Caspian. I just want to make that clear. It’s the other way around. I saw you and I wanted you, I think I even loved you, yes, I do love you. I’m thoroughly in love with you, you can’t imagine how much. Since I first saw you in the coffee shop, and now more, because you turned out even better than I dreamed. And I want to drive to California with you, like we said, and I want to drive across the country as your lover. Not your friend, your lover. I’ve been a good little daughter and a good little sister and a good little student and a good little girlfriend and a very, very good little fiancée, and I just want to leave all that behind and be your lover, no, I want you to be my lover, be my good little lover, and let the rest of it, everyone’s ideas of what I should be, go to hell. I want to jump to the other track before it’s too late. Before I wind up as someone’s good little wife. Someone’s perfect little fucking wife. Smiling for the camera.”

  He released the counter and touched her hands, which had crept around his waist.

  “This is the switching point, Caspian,” she whispered in his shirt. “This is me, switching tracks.”

  “I guess that’s one thing to call it. A new one on me. We could start a new slang. Let’s
go back to my place and switch tracks.”

  “Unless you don’t want to. In which case, I’ll just grab a blanket and sleep on your sofa. But I think you want to.”

  Want to.

  “I’m just trying to do the right thing here. What’s best for you. That’s all I’ve been trying to do, since you first showed up on my doorstep in your red fucking dress.”

  “Oh, I see. And has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Noble Intentions, that I just might be able to decide what’s best for me, all by myself?”

  Cap turned, and luckily the light wasn’t on, and she was dressed in shadow, or the sight of her face might just have obliterated him. Her hands linked behind his waist, strong as chain, and she leaned back as far as she could. Looking up at him. Smiling, probably. Jesus.

  “I mean, really,” she said. “This is the twentieth century.”

  And there it was, a snap in his chest, the audible noise of his best intentions cracking in half and cracking again, a chain reaction of thick cracks causing hairline cracks, causing the whole goddamned works, the whole vast machinery of his human willpower, to crumble downward into his abdominal cavity, where it lay pretty much useless.

  He wrapped his hands around the back of her head. “And you’ve decided this is what’s best for you.”

  She nodded her head against his fingers.

  “This is what’s best for me.”

  He leaned down and kissed Tiny Schuyler, right in the middle of her waiting mouth.

  Tiny, 1966

  The car lies in the driveway like a sleek black shark, a Cadillac coupe. The tailfins are neat and sharp, and the top is down to absorb the noontime sun.

  Pepper whistles. “Ooh, I hope it’s a guilt present from Frank.”

  I think of my sapphires and diamonds, tucked away in the bedroom safe. “I think he’s already given me one.”

  “There’s always room for another. A philandering husband is the gift that keeps on giving.”

  I wipe my greasy fingers on my handkerchief and tuck it into the pocket of my dungarees. Back in the shed, Caspian is still hard at work, absorbed in the inner workings of the Mercedes-Benz engine. Pepper and I have promised to bring him back a sandwich and a cold Coke from the icebox. “I don’t think so,” I say. “He just gave me a new car a few months ago.” When I told him I was pregnant again.