The Giant
Dear Ray,
Colin helped us build a slide for the kids this morning. Entertaining them cuts into our songwriting, I guess, but maybe I’m becoming like Willa—I need less sleep. This place gives me energy. We find time for everything important...
We built a waterslide running down half the field, taking advantage of the slope from near the house down to the center of the bowl. It was my idea—I’d always wanted a Slip ’N Slide after seeing the commercials, but hadn’t grown up in a Slip ’N Slide household.
“It was more of a Sip-n-Sigh household,” I told Colin and Willa after lunch, as we staked the huge roll of Angela’s gardening plastic in place. Willa laughed appreciatively along with Colin, but mouthed Sip and Sigh to herself when he’d turned his back. I knew she was thinking that “Sip and Sigh” could be a song.
“Poor Jackie,” Colin said. “At least you’re making up for your deprivation now.”
We slicked the plastic with detergent and water and took turns shooting down, and within five minutes every kid there was begging for a turn. The angles of the bowl did the work for you. You started out slow, and then you picked up speed, then you were flying, and then, just before it got too scary, the field leveled out.
Even the hordes used it. Even Graham.
“Every castle should have a slide,” he said, launching his huge body onto it, singing one of his obscure English ballads all the way down, something about the castle keep, dark and deep.
I could just imagine how Patricia would’ve wailed if I’d tried something like this in our patch of groomed side garden in the city. Robert, we’ll have to resod!
As we watched Colin climb back up the hill after his third ride, dripping and laughing, shaking his long hair, Willa murmured, “He never stays this long.”
“Never?”
“Never. I’m telling you, it’s because you’re here.”
True, he sat by me at meals and campfire, talked to me, sought me out. But we hadn’t kissed.
Willa thought this was irrelevant; she had decided it was preordained that Colin and I would come together. I dismissed this, but yesterday morning, when she and I were in Slipstream talking about Colin and Liam—with whom she’d had three private surfing dates—we’d looked out the window at his cabin. A branch had dipped over the burnt wood sign that said Plover, covering the P, and we’d burst out laughing.
Now Willa said casually to him as he walked up to us, wet from his slide, “Hey, Col. Me and Jackie and Liam are camping on the beach tonight. Want to come? The stars have been amazing lately.”
“Sure!”
When he left to buy food for our camping expedition, I turned to her. “Why, Willa Kingston, you crafty girl.”
“I think you’re rubbing off on me.” She laughed and flew onto the slide, graceful as an arrow.
I watched her. I didn’t want her to change too much. I liked her dreamy, gentle ways, her honesty. But she’d said it as if this talent of mine—for nudging and plotting—was so obviously a good thing. I couldn’t help but savor the compliment.
Before nightfall, the four of us had built a fire at the beach and set up our skylit beds.
Willa and I had spent the night on the beach, just the two of us, five times now. First to check it off my list and then just for fun. I understood why she loved it—the steady surf washing away every worry, big and small. The contrast between cold face and cozy body, wrapped tight in a sleeping bag. My dreams on campout nights were vivid and expansive and restful, not the fitful, crowded dreams I often had indoors. “High-Ceilinged Dreams”—I’d played around with a song about them.
But I’d only experienced these new pleasures with Willa next to me on the sand. I had no interest in sleeping outside completely alone, like she sometimes did.
After the four of us set up our little camp, Willa and Liam went for a night swim and Colin and I sat by the fire, passing the last of his strawberries and one of Angela’s joints back and forth, listening to Wolfman Jack’s friendly rasp on Colin’s radio.
“She should enter this crop...” he said, holding the weed so deep in his lungs that his stomach became concave under his jutting rib cage. He exhaled: “...in the county fair. Bless you, Angela. An invention born of necessity for Mrs. Graham Kingston, I guess. Here.”
“Why do you say stuff like that?”
“What?”
“Hint that Graham’s so hard to live with.”
“What? Oh. Just that Graham isn’t always such a jolly gold giant. Pass that back, will you?”
I handed him the joint. “You mean he can be moody? All artists get moody once in a while. If they spent every second worrying about etiquette, what’d be left for creating?”
“Sorry, but that...” He took a long drag, held it, blew a slow plume up at the sky. “...is grade-A horseshit. I hate that indulge the stormy artiste garbage. You wouldn’t be so quick to defend him if you hadn’t seen something interesting. Spill.”
“But I haven’t seen anything. Honestly. The only time I’ve seen him moody is when you tease him.”
“But he’s got you babysitting for him.”
“I don’t mind it,” I said, too quickly. “It’s fun.”
“Hey, I’m sorry.” He nudged me. “Jackie?”
I shook my head, staring at the fire and refusing to look at him, but he tapped my knee with one gentle finger, speaking more quietly.
“He’s a brilliant man. I wish I had a hundredth of his talent. Maybe I’m a little jealous. And he’s helping people, offering up his studio, opening his home as a...waystation. It’s a kindness, really generous of him, I don’t deny that.”
“How generous of you to admit it.”
“Is this a fight?” He touched my hand. “Hey, look at me. I’m not trying to be a know-it-all. I like you. I just don’t want you to be...disillusioned. If you find out he isn’t perfect. He gets something out of playing the host, too.”
Willa and Liam came in from the water then, dripping, laughing, shaking their hair on us, unzipping their wet suits. They exchanged a long kiss before sitting together across the fire.
“Just be careful with the hero worship,” Colin murmured. “That’s all.”
I watched Willa through the wavery air above the fire; she was preoccupied with Liam, winding one of his wet curls around her finger. “I know Graham’s not perfect,” I whispered.
I thought we’d dropped it. We finished another joint and roasted marshmallows, and I taught the other three dances to the kind of pop radio music I loved and they pretended to hate, Willa and me sneaking a glance during The Hustle, which was on her list. Her Hustle was as good as it was going to get, but she kept putting off our disco outing, insisting she could improve. But prescribed group dancing didn’t suit Willa. Her body wanted to float free, to do its own thing; it rebelled at the mechanized twirls and claps of The Hustle and The Hot Chocolate and The Bump.
Liam, usually so reserved, had the brilliant idea to make our own disco lights by bouncing a flashlight on a shard of abalone shell, through a pine cone. It wasn’t Teena’s DreamTraxx, and the sand made it hard to slide and hip-bump, to drop into a “dishrag” in Colin’s arms. But this felt better. Teena’s hadn’t been about connecting with other people, not really. Not for me. It only looked that way.
We collapsed onto the sand after “MacArthur Park,” and when we’d stopped laughing, Colin said, staring up at the hills, “Who’s up for a little hike?”
“Where?” I asked. The sky had gone hazy, but maybe that was only thanks to Angela’s blue-ribbon crop.
“The falls. I’ve never gone after sunset.”
I glanced at Willa; we all knew this was the hour Graham would be up there. Right after campfire, which we’d skipped tonight.
“Let’s go on the swing instead,” I said, shooting Colin a fierce look.
“C’mon, I want to see genius in action,” he said. “Willa, you’ve watched him up there before, haven’t you?”
I was sure she’d object. But instead she didn’t answer, just stood. And, without a word, led the way up to Graham’s private ritual spot.
It was a steep hike, and the four of us hiked silently: Willa, Liam, Colin. Me.
I’d never been higher on this hill than the fork where the path up from the beach split—the left trail heading to the Kingstons’ gate, the right looping up past the ponds to the falls.
The climb was steep and I was winded, but I kept the others in sight as we got closer to Graham’s special place, winding around the wooded hills in the fast-fading light. I heard the falls before I saw them. First a whisper, then a trickle, then a rush.
And then I glimpsed him through thick branches in twilight. Graham. Sitting shirtless, with his back against the falls. His hair was wet and he was soaked, but his notebook sat on a dry rock nearby. Closed. His eyes were closed, too, chin tilted up, and his ring fingers were pressed to his thumbs, his hands raised shoulder-level in front of him. Like he was a vessel waiting for inspiration to pour down from above.
This was genius in action? It was too absurd. The water had parted his hair down the middle and pasted it on either side of his head so he looked more like a grade-school kid about to take a bad school picture. I’d expected to find him scribbling in his notebook. Ripping out pages, fighting through ideas, fighting to master his doubts and write something brilliant. But he looked so...passive. I had to clap my hand over my mouth and nose to keep from snorting out loud. I hated to give Colin the satisfaction, even foggy from pot and worn out from hiking.
But then Graham rose and left the falls pool, walked to the ocean-facing cliff. He stood between two thin young tree trunks near the edge, held them, and leaned forward.
I was about to burst through the greenery and pull him back, but Willa stopped me. She shook her head, pressed her finger to her lips. So this was normal. This was part of the ritual. Now I had the answer to Colin’s question. She’d come here many times to spy on her father.
Graham, tilting thirty degrees over the ocean, had stilled himself; his wet hair, whipping wildly, was the only part of his body that moved. I felt as I had once at an elementary school field trip to the de Young Museum, when the docent had ushered my class into the sculpture hall, and I’d stared, mesmerized, at a marble of an Etruscan man charging into battle. His mournful eyes made it clear that he would fail, would die, but his body soared forward anyway.
If Colin had brought me here to show Graham up as a fraud, someone not worth worshipping, he’d failed.
I looked at Colin and found, to my relief, that his expression was serious, that the moment had moved him, too, in spite of his fondness for needling Graham. If he’d still been laughing, I would have resisted my attraction to him. Colin faced me for a minute, contrite. Then we both turned our attention back to my uncle.
A twig cracked under someone’s foot, Graham turned his head sharply, and we scattered.
It was disorienting at this elevation. You couldn’t distinguish the roar of the waves from that of the falls, and I got separated from the other three. I looked up—Willa had tried to teach me stars—but I’d been a distracted pupil and the sky told me nothing. Blurs, blinking lights, blobs that could be airplanes or nebulae or Skylab leftovers—it all looked the same.
I glanced down and noticed a bright mound gleaming in the dark, at my feet. Twenty feet away, another. Graham’s shell cairns. Everyone knew about them—piles of white shells that marked his path. Once, years ago, Graham had stumbled, high, off into the thick woods, and it had taken hours for him to find his way home. He added the cairns so it would never happen again, completing the project the summer before he got the idea for the Sandcastle’s shell spire.
The trail was cut into the hillside in a long, gradual spiral, and it was astonishing how helpful the little shell piles were, guiding me in the falling dark, like neon. Like magic.
The hill had helped me, Graham had helped me; by the last hundred feet, when I could hear the waves and my friends’ voices, I was ecstatic.
I made it to the beach only a few minutes behind them.
“We were just coming back for you!” Colin said. He sounded sober, and genuinely worried. A little repentant, too, after his failed mission to dethrone Graham. He hugged me and kept his arm around my waist.
“I followed the cairns.” I was still amazed that I’d made it.
We talked late into the night, passing a jug of Almaden, cheese, two entire loaves of bread. Willa told us what it was like here in fall and winter, when there were fewer guests, when it rained, and sometimes snowed.
“It’s perfect,” she said. “The deepest quiet.”
Liam opened up about his favorite surf spots and secret camping spaces and the food in Costa Rica. Colin described everywhere he’d worked over the past year—five states, a dozen jobs.
And I, who usually told the stories, this time mostly listened.
Tired, relieved that Graham hadn’t seen us and that the hill had guided me back safely, I reclined against Colin’s chest, letting the others’ voices wash over me. When the wine jug came my way I didn’t sip, but pressed its cold neck to my hot one and passed it on. I wanted to hold on to my exhilaration, to the sense of clarity I felt tonight.
I kept picturing how regal and brave Graham had looked, leaning forward between those two trees, trusting that they’d bear his weight. I knew why he stood on the edge of his cliff. It wasn’t just a cheap high, or ego. He did it to remind himself that there were scarier things than trying to make music.
Li and Willa went quiet, except for the occasional rustles and muffled sighs from their shared tarp.
Colin bent over me, dipping his head low to kiss me upside down, his hands on my knees, trailing up my thighs. A few months ago I’d have taken his hands in mine before it started to feel too good, led him behind the grassy dunes. Looking for reversal, control. But I was braver now. Here, I found I didn’t want to do that. It felt all right with him, to lie back, to be the one tended to.
To let fate take its course.