Tiny Little Thing

  “Well, screw him. Go to the police.”

  “I can’t do that. Frank will find out.”

  “So what if he does?”

  “Pepper, Caspian’s his cousin. How am I supposed to tell Frank I slept with his cousin?”

  “You never told Frank?”

  The fan overhead is rotating at low speed. I imagine myself grabbing hold of one of the blades and going around and around, like a carnival ride. I can almost feel the air rushing against my cheeks. “Not exactly. A little. I think he guessed the rest, except about Caspian. But he’s never spoken to me about it. He never seemed to care. He was just . . . He was just glad I came back. Glad I changed my mind and went through with the wedding. A gentleman, you might say.”

  “What does Caspian say?”

  “About the blackmail? I haven’t told him.”

  “Why not? He took the pictures, goddamn it!”

  “I just can’t, that’s all. He might tell Frank, or Frank’s father.”

  “Do you think so? He seems pretty square to me.”

  Round and round, getting me nowhere. “Oh, he might. Trust me. It’s the Hardcastle way. The family comes first, when the chips are down.”

  “I think you’re wrong, there. I think he’s his own man.”

  I swing upward to sit on the edge of the bed, gripping the comforter with my fingers. “I said, trust me.”

  Pepper folds her arms. She’s starting to look a little rounder now, Pepper. If you look closely, you can maybe even see a trace of fullness at her belly, about the size of a man’s spread palm, beneath her cotton shift. A wide scarf holds her hair back from her face, and I’ll be damned if the sculpture of her cheeks hasn’t taken on a layer or two, a coating of new clay. “Just what the hell happened between you two?” she asks.

  “It doesn’t matter now.” I hoist myself up and turn around to face her, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed. “The point is what I’m going to do now.”

  “Did you reply to this little valentine?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  Pepper drums her fingers against the envelope, which dangles from her crossed arms. A plain manila envelope, the kind you see in offices everywhere. The photograph and note are still outside it, pinned to the manila by her scarlet-tipped thumb. Her head tilts to one side as she watches me. Her face is half in shadow, half alight with the golden glow of an afternoon beach streaming through the window. “You have no idea who this guy might be? No idea how he got his hands on the photographs?”

  “Caspian says he packed up the photographs, before he left for Vietnam. An attic or a closet somewhere.”

  “Well, anyone in the family could have gone in the attic, right? Two years is a long time.”

  “But why would anyone in the family be blackmailing me?”

  “That bitch Constance. She’s no friend of yours. You should hear the stuff she says, behind your back.”

  “She loves Frank more than she dislikes me,” I say absently. My head is tilted, my eyes are fixed on Pepper’s thumbnail, which covers my slender black-and-white hip at the edge of the photograph like a scarlet fig leaf. “Could you give me that photograph for a moment?”

  She hands it to me. “What about her husband? Tim?”

  “Tom.”

  “He’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Plymouth Rock. I’ll bet he—”

  “This photo was developed in a shop,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  I look up at her. “There’s a time and date stamp on the border. It was processed in a professional lab.”

  “Well, of course it was.”

  “You don’t understand. Caspian develops all his own film. He has a darkroom in his apartment.”

  Pepper frowns at me. “Let me see that.”

  I hand her back the photograph.

  She holds it up to her nose, squinting a little. Surely my little sister doesn’t need reading glasses, does she? Wouldn’t that be a hoot. Pepper, wearing glasses. She reads out, “Eleven twenty-two a.m., May the fourth, nineteen sixty-six,” and looks up at me. “Is that a clue, Mr. Holmes?”

  Already I’m putting on my sandals. My brain is buzzing, my veins are fizzing with something. Hope? Purpose, maybe. Doing something. I head for the door.

  “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

  “Are you, now? And how do you plan to do that, Miss Scaredy-Cat?”

  I pause at the vase of flowers on my chest of drawers. Hyacinths, delivered yesterday with a handwritten note: To my darling wife. I love you. Frank. They’re a lovely shade of blue, unearthly, each tiny petal poised in dewy perfection. But when I bend my face to smell them, the scent is almost too faint to catch. As if they’ve left their essence behind in the hothouse.

  I straighten from the flowers, take the envelope from her fingers, and tuck it under my arm.

  “I’m going to talk to Caspian.”

  • • •

  For lack of anything more, I address Caspian’s feet. They’re shod in old army boots and stick out from beneath the elegant swoop of the Mercedes-Benz rear fender like a pair of gigantic leather bookends.

  “What’s that?” he calls, in a metallic voice. “You’ve got the sandwiches?”

  “Would you mind coming out of there for a moment? I can’t stand here shouting.”

  Caspian scoots out slowly, foot by foot, clad in worn Levi’s and a stained old shirt. He’s lying on one of those wheeled planks, like mechanics use. He straightens to a sitting position and braces his boots against the floor so he doesn’t roll. “Is something wrong?” he asks, when he sees my face.

  “The photographs,” I say.

  He doesn’t ask which photographs. “What about them? I told you I boxed them up. I checked on them, when I was back in town. They’re still there.”

  “I know. I mean, I’m sure they are. I mean the other photographs. The ones you took of me on the sofa.” My lips are thick and clumsy; the words seem to stick in them.

  Caspian frowns. “Those? That’s just film. I never developed them.”

  “What did you do with the film?”

  “I mailed it to you, of course. Before the wedding.” He rises to his feet. “Didn’t you get it?”

  I almost can’t hear him, through the beat of my own pulse in my ears. “Where did you mail it to? Which address?”

  “To your apartment. I didn’t want to take a chance that Frank would find it and get curious. Why? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  He reaches for my arm. “Tiny—”

  I shrug him off and take a stumbling step backward. “It’s nothing. I was just wondering.”

  “Did someone—”

  I turn to the door, to the wedge of open sunlight, but Caspian bolts in front of me and takes me by the arms. “Hold on. Wait a moment.”

  I stare at the buttons of his shirt. “Please let me go.”

  “You’re in trouble.”

  “No more than usual.”

  “Tiny, I’m here to help you. To serve you. That’s why I’m here, the only reason.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve done enough already?”

  Caspian flinches and drops his hands, as if I’ve turned into molten metal. I gather myself and look up at his face. A black smear lies across one cheekbone, rubbed there by a dirty hand. His forehead is dark with grease.

  “You’re one of them,” I say. “You’re a Hardcastle. You’re part of this whole racket. Frank’s campaign staff, carrying him into the White House with your bare hands. Never mind who gets hurt along the way. The end justifies the means, doesn’t it?”

  “You know that’s not true. I don’t give a damn about Frank’s ambitions.”

  “Then why are you campaigning with him? Why are you all protecting him like this?”

&nbs
p; You wouldn’t believe a man with one leg could stand so still. You’d think he was made of stone, or wax, the way he looks down at me, or maybe through me. Not even a single dark pupil flexes against a green Harrison iris. I could count his eyelashes.

  “Well?” I say, because I am not going to stand down this time, I’m not going to fade away. “Why do you defend Frank? Why do you let them dress you up in your uniform and your medals and . . . and use you like that?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Oh, really? Then what do you call it?”

  He blinks at last and lets out a heavy sigh. He steps out of my way and makes for the car. I turn and watch him as he picks up a wrench and sinks back down to sit on the wheeled platform. “This,” he says fiercely, holding up the wrench. “Me, here.” He gestures around the shed, toward the door. “The ceremony in Washington, the hotel the other night. You think I’m doing it for Frank? Helping Frank? Protecting Frank?” He shakes his head.

  “What, then? Tell me. For God’s sake.”

  He leans backward on the wooden platform and stares at the ceiling. “When you’re done thinking about it, come and find me.”

  A flutter disturbs the air, and the mother starling ducks in through the shed door and rushes to the nest in the roof beams. The baby starlings stir, opening their red throats, wide with anticipation.

  I let my gaze fall to Caspian below them. His knees are raised, the left one a bit larger than the right. His hand with the wrench lies across his wide chest, moving slightly with the rhythm of his breath. His wide chest, which once sheltered me, which then traveled across the world and bled out into the jungle mud, which was hoisted almost lifeless into a helicopter while I wrapped Christmas presents in my tasteful Back Bay living room.

  I step across the dusty floor and sink to my knees next to him.

  “I’m here now, aren’t I?” I say.

  He rolls his head and looks at me, without speaking. Exactly the same eyes, the same cheekbones, the same jaw, the same Caspian. Except for that scar on his forehead, curling around his brow.

  I reach out a brave hand and touch his knee. “Does it hurt?”

  “You mean now?”

  “Now. Whenever.”

  “Sometimes. A lot of the time. But not now.”

  I lean forward and kiss the edge of his broad patella. The denim is hot beneath my lips and smells of oil. “I am so sorry. You don’t know how much. If I— I just keep thinking, over and over, it’s my fault, if I hadn’t—”

  Caspian sits up. “It’s not your fault.”

  “You wouldn’t have taken that second tour—”

  “Then something might have happened in the first tour. You never know what might have been. You just never know.”

  His breath is close to mine. His breath and my breath.

  I lean my cheek against his knee, facing the wide old boards of the shed wall. Above us, the baby starlings exclaim delight at being fed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Your beautiful leg.”

  “It’s just a leg, I told you.”

  “I screwed up, didn’t I? I screwed up so badly. You should have found another girl.”

  “There isn’t another girl, Tiny. Not in the wide world.”

  He doesn’t touch me. Thank God, he doesn’t touch me one bit. I stare at the wall, holding his knee under my cheek, and at last the starlings settle down and I rise to my feet and walk wearily to the door, where I pause, bracing my hand on the post. The sun burns down on my hair. Before me, the bracken is clearer now, pushed aside by dozens of hands over the past few weeks. The grass is beaten down into a path. It’s a wonder Granny Hardcastle hasn’t noticed.

  I turn back. “There’s one thing. Something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  Caspian is lying down again, knees still raised, about to roll back under the car. His head is shadowed by the fender. “What is it?”

  “Something that reporter mentioned to me. He said he was looking into something about Frank. Some incident when Frank was at Harvard. His junior year, I think he said. I told him I didn’t know anything about it.”

  Caspian swears softly.

  “I see. So there is something. Something no one’s told me.”

  “I don’t know much about it myself.”

  “But you do know. The family knows. You’re protecting him.”

  Caspian lies there quietly with his head under the front fender of the Mercedes. He fiddles with the wrench. “I didn’t know if they’d told you or not.”

  “Are you going to tell me now? Or do I have to find out for myself?”

  “Why don’t you ask Frank?”

  “Because Frank isn’t going to tell me the truth. Or is he?”

  Caspian sighs. “All right. I could tell you what I know, which isn’t much. But I think you need to ask your husband instead.”

  “And why is that, Caspian?”

  He rolls back under the car and starts to clank around with his wrench. “Because it’s not my place. I’m not here to push you off the ledge, Tiny. The ledge is your choice, I can’t touch that. I’m just here to catch you if you jump.”

  I stare at the soles of Caspian’s strong boots, at his legs visible to the knee before they disappear into the undercarriage of the Mercedes-Benz. My hand clenches around the manila envelope, crumpling the edges.

  “Do you mind if I borrow your car?” I say. “I can’t find my keys.”

  Caspian, 1964

  Funny thing, falling in love. You can’t quite explain the difference between this—kissing the girl you love, having sex with the girl you love—and all the kissing and the sex that came before. You can’t describe the difference between her flesh and that flesh, her hips and those hips, her gasp and those gasps. You can’t parse the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the experience, the units that make up the whole, any more than you, the untrained viewer, can explain why the Mona Lisa is the Mona fucking Lisa. You just stand back and take it in and say, Wow, so this is art.

  You lie back in your bed, you hold her chest next to your chest, her ribs next to your ribs, her breath and your breath, and you say, So this is love.

  “I want to see Mount Rushmore,” said Tiny. This wasn’t entirely out of the blue. They’d been lying there for a while, talking about this and that, because discussing the sex they’d just had was like discussing the Mona Lisa, too big and too complicated, and maybe a little too new and sacred too. Anyway, what did you say, after an hour like that? What were the words? Are you all right? As if he hadn’t been paying attention the whole time, as if all the action were one-sided: his lust casually dismantling her virginity. I love you? Banal, compared to what he actually felt, the complexity of his entanglement with the person lying in his arms, invading the pores of his skin.

  So they stuck to what could be communicated through words, what actually needed saying.

  Like the trip out to California. Their new track, laying itself out ahead.

  “Mount Rushmore’s in South Dakota,” he said. “If you still want to see the Grand Canyon, it’s going to be hard to do both.”

  “We have two weeks, though.”

  “I guess we’ll see how it goes. But you may have to make a choice.”

  “That’s okay. I like making choices, it turns out.” She ventured a hand across his chest, up one pectoral and down the other, winding up curled around his opposite shoulder, and it was strange, antigravitational, that a touch so light, a skeleton so fragile, should hold him so securely in place in his own bed.

  She stared at her hand, wholly unaware of its magical power, and continued. “I was thinking I might try to teach dancing, once I’m out there. I’ll never be good enough to dance professionally, I mean with a real company, a prestigious company, and anyway that’s a hard life. Lots of backstabbing and bleeding toes. But I could teach kids, like I did with my little dance company in
Boston. Maybe open my own studio.”

  “Sure you could. That’s a great idea. Plenty of little ankle biters out there, these days, that’s for sure.”

  “Good. So that’s me. What about you?”

  The moon had come out, a friendly half-moon, not too bright. He stared at the white ceiling, at the fan rotating ponderously. His own bed. His ordinary bed, except it was rumpled beyond repair, sheets and blankets all twisted up and hanging to the floor, an unholy mess, and for the first time in his life he didn’t care, he wasn’t tempted to jump up and straighten and tuck everything back into the wholesome flat prairie his father taught him. His ordinary bed, except he lay here naked with Tiny in his arms, Tiny, and they’d just had sex together, he and Tiny: he’d entered her body with his body, she’d taken him joyously into herself, and his nerves were still sparkling, his brain was still foggy with pleasure and disbelief. With the scent of her breath. “You know about me. I’m a soldier. Leave ends in sixteen days, then I get on a plane, a fat old noisy deathtrap of a troop transport, first class all the way, and go back to active duty.”

  “And how long are you signed on for?”

  “I’m an officer, Tiny. A career officer. I’m on until I resign, or retire. But the tour lasts a year, officially.”

  “An officer?” She lifted herself up and looked down at him, and the fearless intimacy of her naked and dangling breasts made him sing a little, inside his chest where she couldn’t hear. “I didn’t know that. Are you commissioned? What rank?”

  “Captain.”

  “Ooh, a captain! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He shrugged. “You were already head over heels. Didn’t want you to go off your rocker or anything.”

  She fell back laughing. “Oh, my God. My mother will die, absolutely die.”

  “She’ll probably get me court-martialed, knowing her.”

  “Knowing her?” Tiny stopped laughing and lay still against his ribs. “How do you know my mother, Caspian?”

  “Because she was there at your apartment, when I came looking for you.”

  Tiny shrieked. “She what?”