Authors: Alice Simpson
Ballroom: A Novel (30 page)
A
s a child, I danced on my father’s feet to the songs of Carlos Gardel and Piazolla, and I think it was then that dance crept into my bones and my being. Looking back, I believe that my family was about lost dreams. Vaudeville had died, along with my father’s legendary dance career, and my mother’s dreams of living a life of privilege were shattered. Dance, tango, yearning, and loss seemed entwined.
Later in life, I came to dance once again in search of my dreams, only to be fooled by the deceptive promise of the gilded ballroom with its Corinthian columns. When the music plays and you are held in a partner’s embrace, and if his lead is strong and you know how to follow, you believe, for that dance, that anything is possible.
In that contained universe of a New York ballroom on Union Square, and in the mournful sounds of tango songs, I searched to find Harry’s, Maria’s, Joseph’s, Sarah’s, and Gabriel’s thoughts and secret dreams; what they longed for. Each believed that someone special was waiting, a partner, one perfect dance, love, or someone to go home with for the night. I wish each of my readers might read
Ballroom
as I wrote it—to the sounds of tango.
ALICE SIMPSON
is an accomplished visual artist who has a profound passion for dance.
Ballroom
is her first novel. She lives in South Pasadena, California.
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Cover photograph © Phillip Bannister
Author photograph © Jimmy Chou
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BALLROOM.
Copyright © 2014 by Alice Simpson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simpson, Alice
Ballroom : a novel / Alice Simpson. —First edition.
pages cm
EPub Edition September 2014 ISBN 9780062323064
ISBN 978-0-06-232303-3 (hardback) —ISBN 978-0-06-232304-0 (paperback)
1. Ballroom dancers—Fiction. 2. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.I56326B35 2014
813’.6—dc23
2014009045
14 15 16 17 18
OV
/
RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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