Tiny Little Thing: Secrets, scandal and forbidden love
He leaned against the cushion and watched the hustle-bustle. A lot of regulars this morning, a few new faces. Em and Patty cross and recross the linoleum in patterns of chaotic efficiency, hair wisping, stockings sturdy. Outside, the pavement still gleamed with the rain that had poured down last night, shattering the heat wave in a biblical deluge, flooding through the gutters and into the bay. Maybe that was why Boylan’s booths were so full this morning. That charge of energy when the cool air bursts at last through your open window and interrupts your lethargy. Blows apart your accustomed pattern.
“What’ll it be, Cap? The usual?” Em stood at the edge of the table, holding a coffeepot and a plate of steaming pancakes. They had an uncomplicated relationship, he and Em; no menus required.
“Well, now …”
“If you love me, Cap, make it snappy.”
“Bacon, four eggs over easy, lots of toast.”
“Hungry?” She was already dashing off.
“You could—” Em was gone. “—say that.” Across the crowd, someone dropped a cup loudly into its saucer, making him jolt. He converted the movement into a stretch—nothing to see here, folks, no soldier making an idiot of himself—and plucked the paperback from his camera bag, but before he could settle himself on the page the goddamned bells jangled again, clawing on his nerves like a black cat, and he jerked toward the door.
His chest expanded and deflated.
Well, well. Jane Doe. Of all the girls.
She took off her sunglasses to reveal an expression of utter, utter dismay. (With another girl he might simply have said total dismay.) Her shiny dark hair bobbed about her ears as she looked one way and the other, searching for a booth around which to enact her invisible force field. She wore a berry-red dress, sleeveless, a white cardigan pulled around her shoulders. Her face glowed with recent exercise, making him think instantly of sex (vigorous, sweaty morning sex on white sheets, while the early sunlight poured through the window, and a long hot shower afterward that might just end up in more sex, if luck were a lady, and if the lady could still walk).
Em passed by. Miss Doe tapped her on the elbow and asked her a question; Em replied with a helpless shrug and moved on.
Miss Doe’s elegant eyebrows converged to a cranky point. She had expected better than this. To her left, a sandy-haired boy about four years old started up a tantrum, a real grand mal, no holds barred, a thrashing, howling fit-to-be-tied fit over a glass of spilled milk. In the same instant, the door opened behind her, and a large man barged through, smack between Miss Doe’s white cardiganed shoulder blades. She staggered forward, clutching her pocketbook, while the man maneuvered around her and called for Em in a loud Boston twang.
At which point, Cap raised his hand into the crowded air.
Not a wave. Not a beckoning of the fingers. Just a single hand, lifted up above the sea of heads, the way he might signal noiselessly to another soldier in the jungle. I’m here, buddy. At your back. Never fear.
Miss Doe wasn’t a soldier. She saw his hand and ducked her head swiftly, pretending she hadn’t noticed. But an instant later, her eyes returned to his corner. He lowered the hand and shrugged, pretending he didn’t care.
But his heart was bouncing off his rib cage, and it wasn’t just the crash of the coffee cup and the jingle of bells. Miss Doe was slender and gently curved, almost boyish, not his preferred figure at all, and still he couldn’t remove his mind from the belly of that berry-red dress, the tiny pleats at her tiny waist, the rise of her breasts below the straight edge of her collar. The pink curve of her lips, slightly parted. The suggestive flush of her cheeks. Flushed with what? Did she spend the night with her fiancé? Did she shed her immaculate clothes for him, her immaculate hair and lipstick? Did she let down her force field and allow him inside?
What was she like, inside her force field?
She lifted an uncertain eyebrow. He held up his hands before his chest, palms out, and sent her his best crooked smile, the one that never failed. No threat here. Just helping a girl out, the goodness of his heart.
Miss Doe hoisted her pocketbook up her shoulder, the same gesture as before, and walked poker-faced toward his booth. He liked the way she moved, sinuous and gymnastic in her matching berry-red kitten heels, not the usual mincing gait you saw around town. Girls with no stride at all, no swing, no natural grace.
You could always see the real girl in her walk, couldn’t you? The one thing she couldn’t make over.
She arrived at the booth, smelling of Chanel.
“Caspian,” he said, without standing up.
She slid in across from him, holding her dress beneath her. She settled her pocketbook on the seat, well away from his grasp, and folded her hands on the edge of the table. Her engagement ring glittered just so in the yellow light from the hanging lamp. Mother of God. Three carats at least. Almost as big as his grandmother’s rock.
“Tiny,” she said.
“Tiny?” he said. “Is that a nickname?”
She fixed him a steely one. “Yes, it is.”
She studied the menu carefully, considered each item, and raised her head at last to order her usual coffee and an apricot Danish. Em hid a smile and scooted obediently off, tucking her pencil between her ear and her graying brown hair. She scooted right on past the boy with the tantrum and his harried mother, who cajoled and scolded in alternating beats.
“Please go ahead,” Tiny said, gesturing to Cap’s plate. “Don’t let it go cold on my account.”
“I won’t.” He picked up his fork with one hand and his paperback with the other, and commenced—against every instinct, ground in him since childhood—to shovel and read, having rolled the cover carefully around the back so she couldn’t see the title.
“I appreciate your offering me a seat, Caspian,” she said. Elocution lessons, no doubt at all. The vowels so terribly well-rounded, the consonants crisp enough to shatter on contact. That kind of expensive vocal delivery didn’t just occur by accident.
He loaded his fork with eggs, gestured prong first to the paperback, and said, “Sorry. Do you mind?”
Her pink lips compressed into a straight line. “I beg your pardon.”
He pretended to read amid the fracas. Tiny tapped her finger on the edge of the table and glanced back at the screaming boy.
“She should take him outside,” she said softly. Not the way most women would say something like that, all pursed lips and disapproval. Curious. You’d think the impeccable Miss Doe would regard the mothers of misbehaving children in the same class as criminals.
“What’s that?”
“She should take him outside. The boy. He’ll settle down sooner without an audience, where it’s calm.”
He shrugged and turned his eyes back to the paperback.
Tiny’s coffee and Danish clattered down before her. She added a dainty few grains of sugar, a precious few drops of cream.
“Refill, Cap?” asked Em.
He looked up. Em winked and tilted her head at the berry-red figure across from him, sipping her coffee.
Cap held out his cup and pointed his thumb at Tiny’s Danish. “Yes, ma’am. And I’ll have one of those, too.”
“Well, and who’s the hungry one today? Exercising again?”
“Yes, ma’am. Fit for service.”
Em set down the coffeepot on the edge of the table. She was the kind of waitress who could ignore the breakfast rush when it suited her. He liked that about her. “C’mon, then,” she said. “What did you do this morning?”
Ran eight miles. Lifted dumbbells in the attic. Climbed the stairs, wearing his pack, bottom to top, seventy-five seconds flat. Five times.
He shrugged. “Some running, some weights.”
Em stuck out her hand and tried to measure his left bicep with her hand. “Flex for me, Cap.”
He obliged.
“That’s not bad. They grow ’em big where you come from, huh?”
“Just elbow grease, ma’am. Works every time.”
Em winked again and turned to Tiny, who sat there razor straight, face frozen in a prim pink smile. Em nudged the nearby air with her coffeepot. “You watch yourself with him, ma’am. He’ll charm your socks off if you’re not careful.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me.”
Cap returned his attention to his book. Tiny sipped her coffee, and when Em arrived back with Cap’s apricot Danish she asked for a fork, so she could eat her own, which she did in small bites, each one passed gracefully from her plate to her mouth, as if she were eating lunch in the Oak Room at the Copley Plaza.
Cap pointed his forefinger at a remaining crumb. “You going to finish that?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
“Aha. So you’re hungry, too, only you won’t admit it. Reducing for the wedding?”
“I’m not reducing.”
“When’s the big day?”
“June.” She said it reluctantly, as if she were worried he’d use the information against her.
“Oh, really? Right around the corner, then. My cousin’s getting married in June.”
“How lovely.”
“He’s a lucky man, your fiancé.”
“I like to think so.”
Across the room, the toddler was wailing now, down on the floor with his arms and legs waving. Want more syrup! Want more syrup! And the mother hushing, flushing, red-faced, helpless, trying to peel his boneless body off the linoleum.
Cap tapped the corner of his mouth with his finger. “You’ve got a bit of apricot jam, there.”
The tip of her tongue flashed out, remembered its manners, and disappeared. She picked up her napkin and dabbed instead.
“Nope, the other corner. Here, I’ve got it.” Before she could react, he reached across and swept away the dot from Tiny’s mouth. Her lip was softer than he expected. He licked the sweet jam from his finger and smiled at her shocked expression. “You look as if you’ve never been on a date with a man before.”
“This isn’t a date!” she gasped, and touched her ring with her thumb.
“Hey,” he said gently, losing the wicked smile. “Relax. I’m just playing with you a bit. Tiny.” He tried out her name on his tongue, and it tasted good. “Come on. You’ve seen me every day for a month. Just an ordinary guy, eating his eggs. You can relax, all right? Just relax. Not going to bite, I swear.”
Her brow worried. Her lips parted, and then squeezed back into that tense pink line.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “If I were going to make a move on you, I’d have done it last week, when you were wearing that pink number, the one with the …” He gestured to his neck.
“Lace.” She exhaled audibly, a whoosh of apricot air. And she smiled. And holy God, that smile, like she’d just swallowed the sun. Where had she been hiding that smile?
He smiled back. “You see? One of the good guys.”
“All right, Caspian.” She held out her hand. “Let’s start again.”
He set down his cup and reached for the handshake that would start things all over again, down the road he wanted to take her. But in the instant before his fingers touched hers, the bells jangled furiously, like they meant business this time, and a man in a dark suit walked through the door, drew a gun from his pocket, and stepped to the register at the front.
“Hands in the air! Everyone!”
The little boy stopped crying midwail.
Tiny, 1966
Caspian Harrison holds my outstretched hand. “Thanks. You can call me Caspian. Or just Cap, like the rest of the family.”
He looks the same. Of course he does. Men like him aren’t made for changing. The taut face, the pale green eyes with the serious creases at the corners. The dark hair shorn to a bristle, emphasizing the bones of his face.
Except for the scar. Though my eyes remain locked politely with his, I still see it at the periphery, long and thick, pink against his tan. (Where had he found a tan like that, after all those months in the hospital? Or has the sun of Southeast Asia burned permanently into his subderma?)
The thing about faces, though, is that when your emotions are tangled up in a person, your memory can’t quite draw up a picture of him. You can’t remember exactly what he looks like. It’s a scientific fact; I read it somewhere. Something to do with the neural connections of the brain. So as Caspian stands before me, two years later, the very familiarity of his image shocks me. It’s you! says the startled jump of my pulse, remembering, and yet the absolute warrior rawness of his beauty still shaves my breath, as if I’m observing him for the first time, that very first time I walked into Boylan’s Coffee Shop, all innocent and unsuspecting, clutching my pocketbook, and there he sat in a booth in the corner, exotic and feral, eating his eggs.
I remember the photograph now sitting in an envelope at the bottom of my underwear drawer. Not the wisest place to hide something like that, I realize now. My fingers grip the sides of the glass. For an instant, his face blurs in front of me, as if the resentment and anger have formed a film atop my eyeballs.
And then he comes back into focus.
“Caspian. Of course. Come in. You didn’t need to ring the doorbell.”
“I thought I should. It’s been a while.”
I motion in the direction of the library. “Would you like a drink? Frank’s father is standing by. You’re the first to arrive.”
“Sorry. Army habit.”
“Yes, of course.”
We stand there suspended for an instant, not quite sure what to say. I’m afraid I’ll burst out with some question about the photograph. I’m afraid I won’t, that I’ll just let this awful thing dangle unspoken between us.
Well, maybe I should. Maybe if I ignore it long enough, leave it in its drawer upstairs, untouched, unspoken, it will disappear. It will never have existed to begin with.
A hand falls on my shoulder. Caspian’s eyes shift to the right.
“Cap! You’re early!” says my husband, Frank.
“I’m on time, actually. Which is early, in this crowd.”
“You can take the boy out of the army …” Frank shakes his head and applies a kiss to my cheek. “I see you’ve finally met my lovely wife.”
Caspian’s gaze travels from my cheek to Frank’s hand on my shoulder, and finally to Frank himself. He smiles. Not a happy smile. “The pleasure was mine.”
I raise the glass to my lips for a sip that turns into a gulp. My nose bumps against the olive. I’ll say, I think.
“Wow,” says Frank. “Did I miss something?”
I realize I’ve said it aloud.
“I’ll have that drink now, if you don’t mind,” Caspian says quietly.
His voice is the same, too, formal and easy at the same time, rumbling naturally from his throat. Two years ago, dizzy with the newness of infatuation, I had adored that voice. What wouldn’t you confess, to a voice like that? What wouldn’t you reveal of yourself? No, I can’t blame that old Tiny, that young Tiny, two years younger, two years fresher and so damply naïve.
I turn for the library. “Of course. Right through here.”
I leave Caspian in the library with my father-in-law, drink safely in hand, talking about Vietnam and the politics of war by proxy, and by this time the house is filling up at last. Frank pulls me aside and wraps his hand around my elbow.
“What was that all about?” he asks.
“What was what all about?”
“Between you and Cap. Did he try something?”
We’re standing in a shadowed corner, so it’s hard to see Frank’s expression. His brows are down low over his blue eyes, which doesn’t happen often. I put on my cheerful face. “Why, no. Just the usual hello.”
“Because he can be a bit funny sometimes. He’s been away awhile, and—well, you know.” He delivers the you know in a masculine growl that runs the gamut of possibility.
I edge my body to the right, so that the light from the opposite window finds my husband’s face, and I can determine whether he’s angry or worried. Whether this is my fault or Caspian’s fault. What exactly he means by that you know.
“Are you saying your cousin can’t be trusted?” I ask.
“I’m just saying he can be a little direct. Army guy.”
“Is this something to do with last night? When you went out?”
Frank pauses. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, did something happen last night that made you think he couldn’t be trusted with women? You said, in the bedroom just now, you said that you could always tell about a man, on a night out.”
I don’t know quite what I’m fishing for. From the look on Frank’s face, which has shifted from concern to wariness, he has a better idea than I do.
“Look,” he says. “He’s a bachelor. Red-blooded. You can read all you want between the lines of that. I just want to make sure he was a gentleman.”
I smile. “Darling, I was just making a little joke back there. I guess I need to work on my delivery. If Pepper had said the same thing—I’ll say—you’d have thought she was just flirting.”
His brow flattens out, his smile returns. “All right, all right. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m more than okay. Perfectly capable of fending off ungentlemanly behavior at cocktails.”
“I know you are. My perfectly capable wife.”
I reach up and brush his lapel with my thumb. “Don’t worry about me. I won’t let you down.”
He kisses the thumb and pats my behind. “You never do. Now go spread some of that charm around.”
Over his shoulder, from the additional height of my two-inch heels, I see a familiar face part from the crowd and turn in our direction. The words bachelor and red-blooded float in my head. Read between the lines, Frank said, whatever that meant. And I think I do. I think I do know what that means. After all, Caspian is a bachelor, isn’t he? An attractive red-blooded bachelor, strong and scarred and so on, tall and wounded, the kind that women hang all over at nightclubs and cocktail parties.
Well, who can blame them? Here I am, a wife and hostess, a straight young pillar of society, and my face warms right up when Caspian turns to me. My blood rises obediently under the touch of Caspian’s attention.
I wrap my empty hand—the left hand, crowned by a triumphant engagement ring and wedding band—around the back of Frank’s neck. I pull him down for a lingering kiss.
He lifts his mouth away, bemused. “What was that for?”
“For calling me charming.” I press the tender crease of his lips with the index finger of my right hand, the hand holding the martini.
The vodka hits fast and hard. I step outside for a breath of the fresh stuff, and nearly stumble over Kitty, Constance’s daughter, who sits cross-legged on the terrace, staring at the wall.
I catch her shoulder just in time. “Oh, I’m sorry, darling. Are you okay?”
“Yes.” Her arms are crossed.
I bend down next to her. “Why aren’t you over by the pool, with the other kids?”
She shakes her head.
“Would you like me to get Mommy for you?”
She presses her lips together and shakes her head again.
“Okay, then.” I ease myself down next to her on the stones, careful not to snag my stockings. “We’ll just sit here.”
We stare companionably at the beach, where the seagulls seem to have found an object of dispute, some rotting marine carcass or another. The air fills with acrid squawks. Vicious things, seagulls. I wiggle my toes inside my satin shoes and wonder if I could possibly take them off. (The shoes, not the toes.)
“What’s that smell?” says Kitty.
I cup my hands over my mouth and puff out a breath. “It’s my martini, I think.”
“It’s yucky.”
“Yes. Yes, it is, isn’t it?”
“Then why do you drink them?”
“Oh, it’s just what grown-ups do, I guess. We do a lot of silly things. Maybe we just wish we were still kids, like you.”
She chews on this for a moment. “Mommy drinks martinis.”
“Does she?”
“She drinks them in the nighttime. Then she takes her pills and sometimes she gets mad at Daddy.” She says this in the same matter-of-fact way she might describe a game of marbles with her cousins.
“How do you know this, honey? Shouldn’t you be in bed at nighttime?”
“Sometimes I need a glass of water.”
I draw an invisible circle on the stone next to my foot and think of Mums and Daddy, sometimes getting along and sometimes not, lubricating the Fifth Avenue evenings with vodka and courtesy. “Well, you know. Grown-ups fight sometimes.”
“One time they took off their clothes and Mommy kissed Daddy’s wee-wee.”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out.
“Nancy wouldn’t let me play with her horse.” She starts to cry.
“Oh, honey. Is that why you’re sitting here, all by yourself?”
Sniff. “Yes. She said I couldn’t play with it because I had germs.”
“We all have germs. It’s okay.”
“Do you have germs?”
“Yes. We all do. I think Nancy just didn’t want to share her horse.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“No, it isn’t.” I rise on my knees and take her hand. “Let’s go over to the pool with the other kids, and I’ll tell Nancy she has to share her toys with her cousins.”
“Okay.” She jumps up and tows me along the terrace at a skip. The afternoon sun lights her hair like a nimbus. “It’s a white horse with black dots on its bottom.”
“An Appaloosa.”
She swings our linked hands. “Sometimes Daddy kisses Mommy’s pagina.”
“Her what?”
Kitty chants, “Boys have penises, girls have paginas.”
“Oh. Vagina, honey. With a V.”
“Vagina, vagina!” she shouts, all the way to the pool, while I try to shush her. Probably not hard enough.
When I return to the party, fully refreshed, Pepper has just descended the stairs in splendor, her bosom not quite overflowing from an iced violet dress cut on an extremely expensive bias that ends a good four inches above her knees. She looks even more delicious than usual.
Delicious, that’s the word for Pepper. If I were a man, I’d want to gobble her up and lick my chops afterward. Nature’s just devious that way, giving Pepper all the sex appeal, as if to lock us in our preordained places and watch, breathless, to see if we can break loose.
To the Hardcastles, Pepper is a rare dish, never before seen at the table. This is my younger sister Pepper, I say, by way of introduction, presenting her with garnish.
Why do they call you Pepper? the men usually ask.
She usually winks. Because I’m that bad.
As a rule, the women don’t see the satirical curve of her lip when she says this, and they harden up instantly into those frozen polite expressions you get when a wind-and-surf clan of females like the Hardcastles—no makeup, horsey leather faces—encounters the cultivated variety.
I watch Kitty’s mother, Constance, tighten her mouth at Pepper, and I realize in that instant that I have more in common with my sisters than I realize, and that I’ve really never liked Constance at all. Constance, who threw an aggressive baseball into my unsuspecting stomach that first summer, soon after I knew for certain I was pregnant, and who apologized too profusely afterward. I should have known better, she said, shaking her head, and what could I do but accept her apology and tell her it was nothing? The first miscarriage began soon after, but of course I couldn’t blame Constance for that. It was an accident, after all.
I should have kept my eyes on the ball.
The Hardcastle men, on the other hand. Well, well. They interpret Pepper exactly the way they want to, don’t they? Men always do. Pepper’s happy with this arrangement. She’s never had much use for women. Even when we were kids, her friends were mostly boys. Our sister Vivian’s the only glittering double X wiggling her shapely fins in the sea of Y chromosomes surrounding Pepper, and maybe that’s only because they’re sisters, united in their disdain for me, the uptight and obedient Tiny, no fun at all.