Elizabeth McCracken - The Giant's House - A Romance

“This is hard,” Cal said. “I didn’t know how hard this would be. Look, you think I’m a terrible guy—”

“No—”

“Yes, you do, or you started out thinking it and that’s hard to shake. And you know, I get flip ’cause it’s easy.” He sighed. “No one will ever say that Calvin Sweatt didn’t take the easy way out, every single time. But—” He held on to the shot of James.

“But?” I said.

“But the easy way out isn’t always so easy. I’m getting old, starting to realize that. Why did I leave, you asked me. I left because it was the easy way out. Mrs. Sweatt was an unhappy person, you knew her, and I am pretty much a happy person, and this caused some spectacular fights.”

“Did you love your wife?” I asked.

“I loved her,” said Cal, “because I got used to her. I didn’t fall in love with her.”

“No?”

“It pains me to say this,” he told me, “but I’m not susceptible to love. Probably I’m immune.” He sighed. “That sounds so pessimistic.”

“Why are you immune?” I asked.

He took me by the hand and stroked my knuckles. It was a slow touch; I felt it in my stomach. “Well, people become immune to love like they become immune to any disease. Either they had it bad early in life, like chicken pox, and that’s that; or they keep getting exposed to it in little doses and build up an immunity; or somehow they just don’t catch it, something in ’em is born resistant. I’m the last type. I’m immune to love and poison ivy.”

“Oh, dear,” I said. “You’re invulnerable.” He opened my hand and stroked the palm. This was not a good idea, to sit here and take his touch. I decided to concentrate on what he was saying.

“Not at all,” he said. “Not invulnerable at all.”

“What’s your Achilles’ heel?”

“Everything,” he said mournfully. “I am highly susceptible to almost everything.”

“To what precisely?” I asked.

“You’ll only use it against me,” he said. “Let’s see. Strep throat, sex, flea bites, companionship, pillow talk, whiskey, flattery, presents. Most of me thinks that’s pretty smart. I’m not convinced that love can offer me anything that the dynamite combination of sex, companionship, pillow talk, flattery, and of course whiskey doesn’t already supply.”

“There are some things,” I said. “So I hear.”

“Like what? Nausea, nerves, and stupidity? If I ever get a craving, I’ll just increase the whiskey dosage.”

I turned my hand over in his hand. He started to trace my thumb — the creases at the joints, the lump of bone where it met my hand. My thumb had never before seemed like such a complicated mechanism.

“Could you get used to me?” I asked.

“Peggy Cort,” he said, in a small, sad voice.

“Calvin Sweatt.” I closed my eyes. “May I ask you a favor?”

“Shoot,” he said.

“May I kiss you?”

I opened my eyes. His were closed. He didn’t say anything. I leaned forward and kissed his jaw, then his neck, then the edge of his mouth. Then his mouth itself. We still held hands, and I thought about slipping my hands from his to put to his face, and I cursed myself for thinking this much. Was he kissing me back? Yes, now he was. Now he was kissing me back. My eyes were still open. His still closed.

I leaned back. There was lipstick on his lips. What was it I liked about him? I examined everything. Not his coloring, sandy hair, and almost-blue eyes — James had gotten his pink-and-gold from his mother. Not his arched nose or straight eyebrows, not his heavy-lobed ears or curiously unlined skin. This is what I liked: one thin scar on his chin (a shaving accident, perhaps), and my lipstick on his mouth.

“You look like you were hit by a bus,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Yes, you were hit by a bus?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Peggy Cort, I could get used to you.”

And I decided to take this to mean he could love me.

Some men — well, one man I knew, anyhow — get braver in bed, the way they get braver fixing a car, or showing you how to shoot billiards: sex is man’s work, even a woman’s body is man’s work, and you won’t ever be as good at it as he is but he’ll pass along some tips anyhow. Cal Sweatt, however, got shyer, looked more like his son, more like my James, every moment. He snuck his hand between my legs, over my skirt, to rub me there, but I wasn’t wearing the clothing for it; mine was a stiff, unyielding straight brown skirt; something gossamer and flowered and loose would have been better for that almost-furtive maneuver. Still, I whispered in his ear, “That’s nice.”

“It is?” he said, his voice full of surprise.

I pulled him closer to me, and he moved his hand around my back; I felt his fingers find the waistband of my skirt, pull my shirt from it, snake down past the bridge of elastic between the back belt loops.

I was not in my body, I was somewhere just behind it, as if I were pushing an empty shopping cart through a bright supermarket, taking anything I wanted from the shelves and throwing them into the basket, knowing someone else would pay the bill, knowing the things would never fill the cart.

He said into my ear, “Should we be doing this?” and since he put it that way, a question, I said Yes.

You might think, living alone so long, so seldom touched, I wouldn’t know what to do. But I did. Alone in my bed, I’d sometimes tested on myself. I ran a tentative hand along my collarbone; then a confident hand; then somewhere between. There wasn’t an inch of skin I hadn’t skimmed my fingers along, wondering would someone else like this? I thumbed my ears, traced the outer trough with just a fingernail; I strummed my belly; outlined my own nose, mouth, as if they were places on a map I longed to visit, a homeland I had not seen since childhood.

Some lonely untouched people might get used to it, decide they could do without. Not me. I learned to touch myself tenderly to give myself what I could not ask others for. I stroked my own cheek; late at night, I brushed the hair off my own tired, worried forehead.

I knew in what order to caress a face, a back. I knew what would be expected, and what surprising. I remembered: there is bone, and there is skin, and muscle, and other things. You must always remember this, encountering a body, the same way you must remember when you walk around Cape Cod that there are trees, and also dunes so vast that while walking in them you cannot see the ocean or road; there are roads, and the ocean, and the bay, scrubby forests full of things that scratch, and bogs. It may seem impossible to dress in readiness for all these things, but you can, as long as you are mindful.

When I woke up the next morning, Cal was still asleep, turned toward me. If he thought that was just a high forehead, he was even more of an optimist than he claimed.

Late last night he’d asked, “But what do you really think of me?” and I’d answered, “I think I’ve never met a nicer man with fewer morals.”

Then he was awake. His eyes were a little crusty. He put his hand to my cheek, and for that moment things were lovely, and then he said, “Heya, kid. What time is it? I gotta get to Albany tonight.”

And I walked to the bathroom, shut and locked the door, turned on the shower, realized what I’d done — in this order, this order precisely — pulled off the sheet I was wrapped in, folded it carefully, and got in the shower and began to cry in a way I am quite sure I have never cried before.

I pounded the walls of the bathtub, sat down in the tub, hit my knees. I couldn’t get enough air; I tried to eat it, bite down into it. My mouth filled up with water. Finally I curled up in a ball beneath the shower, as if the water had driven me there, as if I had no choice but to stay.