Life Among Giants Read Online Free PDF Page B

back. “Oh, Firfisle,” she said, rising up on her tiptoes, balance enough for both of us. “Firfisle-mine.”
    We breathed there in front of the ten-burner stainless-steel stovetop five minutes or so, a monumentally long embrace, the multiple fragrances of her rising to my nostrils—a little sweat, a little liniment, that smell of bed—just about the most awkward five minutes of my life. I wondered when it would be okay to let go.
    â€œI am hating it, to be alone,” she said finally.
    â€œMe too,” I said. And then I flushed with the truth of it: my former teammates, and Jinnie, and most of all, my sister, Kate, all lost.
    T H E NEXT WEEK, entirely out of the ether, a message arrived from the head football coach at Princeton, “Rumbling Rick” Keshevsky himself, a crisp piece of bond paper folded into a shorter note from no less a personage than the president of the university. Th e letters took some deciphering, but after several readings it became clear that based on my junior-year game stats and my perfect grades they were offering me early acceptance and a full academic scholarship, plus room and board.
    It wasn’t that I’d forgotten meeting the Princeton scouts, wasn’t that I’d forgotten my Princeton dream; it was that I’d assumed I’d blown it, quitting the Staples High Wreckers. Had wanted to blow it, no doubt. But the letter made it clear they knew all about Coach Powers and my hair, my getting axed: didn’t matter—they’d had their eye on me for years. I was pleased but not jumping up and down, nothing like that, mostly I was just surprised. I really had very little sense of the honor of the thing, had always taken my physical prowess for granted, just something I’d been born with, nothing to be particularly proud of, not something to peddle in exchange for status. Long hair or no, I was one of the best high-school quarterbacks in the country, something to this day it’s hard to keep in mind. Jock or not, I was an academic star, as well, on course to be valedictorian, a kid who read philosophy on his own, a kid who translated Latin poetry (looking for the sexy bits, but still). Of course Princeton wanted me.
    My high-school-dropout father, always the salesman, put on his best pair of penny loafers and his most collegiate sweater and drove me down to South Jersey—he wouldn’t let me go on my own, wouldn’t let me not go. He steered the big highways with one hand on my knee, a squeeze every twenty miles or so, not a word between us. Th e two of us were shown around campus by a simpering series of assistant football coaches. I was being courted, stroked, seduced, nothing subtle about it. I wasn’t impressed—not with myself, not with the school, not with any of their blandishments.
    But my dad glowed, handed his business card to each new professor and coach and admissions dean, shook hands vigorously, talked too loudly, led with his bulky, oft-broken nose, cranked up his sparkling but damaged charm, left me in the background, where, as it happened, I was content to be.
    Rumbling Rick, though, was too imposing for that treatment. His office was a cave in the bowels of the football stadium, steel door like a prison gate; he answered Dad’s knocking only at length, filled the archway—chiseled face, chin like a truck grille. He ignored my father, took my hand in his two Princeton tiger paws, pulled me in, squeezed my biceps, unembarassedly pulled a leather-covered stepstool between us and stood on it so he could look directly into my eyes.
    â€œSon,” he said, “a little haircut shouldn’t come between great men. You can play in braids and ribbons as far as I’m concerned. First-string quarterback by sophomore year! Can you give me a yes today?”
    From out in the alcove my Dad said, “Yes. Yes, he can.”
    Keshevsky ignored him, could see the ambivalence in my face. Gently,