Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

“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.