Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

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?

James asked, “What do people say in their sleep?”

It had been so long. There was only that one boy I’d ever spent the whole night with, and as far as I knew he never said anything. But maybe I hadn’t been paying attention. Maybe, so pleased with everything, I’d slept soundly, paying attention only to myself. If I’d been told, all those years ago, that this would be it, I would have learned it, the way if somebody said of a song I loved, you will never hear this again , I would try to memorize every little false note and trill and would play it in my head until it became my favorite song, until I was the one singing it.

“They talk nonsense,” I said. “And when you repeat it back in the morning, they don’t remember dreaming anything close.”

“Go to sleep.” I felt his arm move beneath me, then relax. “Say something.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I mean later. When you’re sleeping. Try to talk in your sleep. Make something up.”

He died.

He died, of course.

He died, not that night, the one I fell asleep on his arm and slept soundly. I don’t know whether he did, too — it was only nine at night when he made room for me, half a day before his usual bedtime — but when I woke at five the next morning, his arm was still beneath me, and his faint snores weren’t much different from his speaking voice. I got up and went home alone to change for work.

He died a week after this, two weeks before the circus hit Boston. Feeling better, he’d gone into town by himself. He did that every now and then, to admire a store’s high ceilings, get a touch of admiration from the tourists. Ever since New York, he’d liked that: seeing people watch him, people who hadn’t been forewarned.

He went to the little grocery store in town to buy a Coke. There were two tourists there, men from Boston, getting things for a picnic in a more picturesque town than ours. They filled their baskets with packages of cheese, a loaf of Italian bread wrapped in white wax paper, and then they caught sight of what looked impossible: a man whose body had refused to stop, an ambitious body, beyond what they’d imagined architecturally feasible. First they thought it was some kind of costume, two men dressed up in a dark suit, a papier-mâché head on top of the top man. Was it advertising something? Wasn’t it hot in there, hard to balance?

Then the thing said something. “Mary,” it said, “could you open that for me, please?” The clerk pried off the crown cap of the Coke; it plunked off the glass and fell into a basket beneath the counter. The tourists realized in steps. The face was real, the head was real, that whole enormous span of body was a true thing, no fake, no hoax. He smiled at them, then turned to the door. Still precarious-looking, as he bent down his head to leave, started across the parking lot. You could understand why people thought at first he was two men: he moved like that. Like each part of him was a piece of furniture a little heavy for the rest, his Laurel and Hardy legs moving his piano-torso down a flight of stairs. Clearly his body regretted agreeing to this unwise proposition, getting James across the street.

It was halfway across the street that he fell, about two blocks from the library. Nobody came running to get me. He would have told them to, I think he would have, but he had a sudden fever and was not making much sense. The tourists got to him first; they dropped their bread and cheese in the middle of the street, as if they were the ones who’d fallen. Then Mary from the market arrived. She called the ambulance and then Oscar and Caroline. The paramedics couldn’t get him on a stretcher; he was too heavy, he wouldn’t fit. The tourists — they were good people, real estate brokers on vacation — said they’d help to lift him. The doors wouldn’t close. By this time James was back in the world, and Oscar was there.

“I want to go home,” James said. “I’m fine, I just want to sleep.”

“Think you better go to the hospital, Jim,” Oscar said. “You look terrible.”

“I feel fine ,” said James. “I just want to sleep.”

So he sat up on the floor of the ambulance and they closed the doors and drove him home.

I found out an hour later, when two boys came into the library. “You hear about the giant?” one said to another. “Got hit by a car.”

“Naw, he tripped over some kid,” said his friend. “Killed ‘im.”

“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“That giant fell on some kid and killed him. Squashed him flat,” said the second boy.

“Did not ,” said the first.

I immediately called the Stricklands.

“Oh, good, Peggy,” said Caroline.

“What’s happened?”

“Jim had a little accident. Nothing serious. He fell in town, didn’t hurt himself, but I think he must be sick — he’s sweating, he feels terrible. We can’t get him to go to the hospital. Oscar’s over there now. We were just about to call you. Maybe — could you get away from work? Is this a good time?”

“Of course it is, of course I can.” I wondered where Astoria was, I wondered exactly how fast I could get out. “In a couple of minutes.” And then, as I hung up the phone, I did something I’d never done before: I yelled in my library. I didn’t care who heard me.

“Astoria!” I hollered. “Come here! I need your help!”

She came running up on her pointy little movie-star shoes.

“What is it?”

“Take the desk. I need to go. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

I left her there, calling after me. “Peggy? Just wait a minute, Peggy—”

He wasn’t asleep when I got there. I thought he would be; I’d imagined I’d have a few moments to think, to discuss things with Oscar.

“Peggy!” Oscar said. “How nice!”

“I’m not going,” said James. “I don’t have to.”

“I’ll just leave the two of you alone,” said Oscar. “I’ll be over at the house.”

“Had a fall?” I said.

“I had a fall,” said James. “Then I got up, and I came home, and I want to recover here .”