Dancing After Hours (11 page)

“I go to meetings. I’m in my sixth year without a drink. My second without smoking.” His hand came midway across the table. “But I’d love a hit off yours.”

She gave him the cigarette, her fingers sliding under his. She left her hand there, waited for his fingers again, and got them, his knuckles beneath hers, and she paused for a moment before squeezing the cigarette and withdrawing her hand. She said: “Doesn’t cheating make you miss it more?”

“Oh, I’m always missing something.”

“Drinking?”

“Only being able to. Or thinking I was.”

“Nothing horrible has ever happened to me.”

“I hope nothing does.”

“I suppose if I live long enough something will.”

“If you don’t live long enough,
that
would be horrible. Are you seeing anyone?”

“No. Are you?”

“No. I’m waiting. I limp. I get frightened suddenly, when there’s no reason to be. I get sad too, when nothing has happened. I know its name now, and—”

“What is its name?”

“It. It’s just it, and I go about my day or even my week sometimes, then it’s gone. The way a fever is
there, and then it isn’t. I want a home with love in it, with a woman and children.”

“My God,” she said, and smiled, nearly laughing, her hands moving up from the table. “I don’t think I’ve
ever
heard those words from the mouth of a man.”

“I love the way you talk with your hands.”

They stayed in the booth until midafternoon; he invited her to a movie that night; they stepped out of the restaurant into the bright heat, and he walked with her to the door of her apartment building, and stood holding her hand. She raised her bare heels and kissed his cheek, the hair of his beard soft on her chin, then went inside. She showered for a long time and washed her hair and, sitting at her mirror, blew it dry She put on a robe and slept for an hour and woke happily. She ate a sandwich and soup, and dressed and put on makeup. He lived near the church, and he walked to her building and they walked to the movie; the sun was very low, and the air was cooling. After the movie he took her hand and held it for the four blocks to her apartment, where, standing on the sidewalk, he put his arms around her, the cane touching her right calf, and they kissed. She heard passing cars, and people talking as they walked by; then for a long time she heard only their lips and tongues, their breath, their moving arms and hands. Then she stepped away and said: “Not yet.”

“That’s good.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I keep meaning it.”

He waited until she was inside both doors, and she turned and waved and he held up his hand till she was on the elevator, and she waved again as the door closed.
In her apartment she went to her closet and picked up the white shoe with the broken heel. She did not believe in fate, but she believed in gifts that came; they moved with angels and spirits in the air, were perhaps delivered by them. Her red fingernails were lovely on the white leather; her hands warmed the heel.

In the morning she woke before the clock radio started, and made the bed; tonight she would see him. In her joy was fear, too, but it was a good fear of the change coming into her life. It had already come, she knew that; but she would yield slowly to it. She felt her months alone leaving her; she was shedding a condition; it was becoming her past. Outside in the sun, walking to work, she felt she could see the souls of people in their eyes. The office was bright; she could feel air touching her skin, and the warmth of electric lights. With everyone she felt tender and humorous and patient, and happily mad. She worked hard, with good concentration, and felt this, too, molting: this trying to plunder from an empty cave a treasure for her soul. She went to lunch with two women, and ordered a steak and a beer. Her friends were amused; she said she was very hungry, and kept her silence.

What she had now was too precious and flammable to share with anyone. She knew that some night with Ted it would burst and blaze, and it would rise in her again and again, would course in her blood, burn in her face, shine in her eyes. And this time love was taking her into pain, yes, quarrels and loneliness and boiling rage; but this time there was no time, and love was taking her as far as she would go, as long as she would live, taking her strongly and bravely with this Ted Briggs, holding his pretty cane; this man who was
frightened by what had happened to him, but not by the madness she knew he was feeling now. She was hungry, and she talked with her friends and waited for her steak, and for all that was coming to her: from her body, from the earth, from radiant angels poised in the air she breathed.

S
HE WAS IN HER THIRTIES, A POET, AND SHE
was afraid to fly. Her brother was dying in another city She did not have a husband or children, but she had a job that held her in the city where she lived. Until her brother went home to die, her job was work she gave her time to. But now it was taking time from her. She could feel it.

She read poems that students wrote; she read poems in books and in the evenings she lived with them, thought of what she would say about them next day in the classroom. She knew that she could not plan everything she would say; she could only plan how she would begin. It was a matter of letting go in front of the students, and waiting for the light to come. The light would come with images and words she must not hold
before class. Her holding them could take away the life they drew from revelation, turn them into dead objects she possessed and carried with her to show the students. She knew that teaching a poem was like writing a poem: she could only begin, and reach, and wait. If she tried to impose a design to save herself from failure, there would be no revelation on the page, or with her students. Before each class she was afraid, but it was muted, and she knew it kept her from being dull and removed. She loved all of this until her brother was dying, and drawing her to him. Then she felt separated from her work, and had to will herself into her voice, into her very flesh.

Grief held her. Always: while she was talking with students, eating with friends, its arms encircled her. Alone, she gave in to it, allowed it to hold her while she fed and cleaned her body, and breathed. It held her when she sat at her desk to do the work that was only for herself; it pressed her biceps to her ribs, her back and breast to her heart, and she could not make a poem grow. She sat with paper and pen and wrote words, but she felt as she did when she drank coffee and ate toast, that she was only doing this because she was alive, and awake. On weekends she flew to her brother.

As she drove to the airport on Fridays and rode to it with her father on Sundays, fear scattered her grief: it lay beside her, hovered behind her. Shards of it stayed in her body; she could touch the places they pierced in her brain and heart. But fear was in her blood, her muscles, her breath. She heard herself speak to airline clerks. She did not make up anything; she did not look at the eyes or the posture of other passengers to find
the one whose number was up and visible, or the one who wanted to die by explosion in a crowded plane. She did not imagine the plane’s sudden fall, her back to the stars, her face to the earth, the seat belt squeezing her double as she waited for words to utter before the earth she loved tore her apart. She only breathed, and moved onto the plane, always to an aisle seat.

The width and height of the aisle held breath and light, and she gazed at it. On her other side were shadow and two people filling two seats, a bulkhead with a dark glass window, an overhead whose curve sealed her. For two hours she flew to the city where her brother was dying. She drank wine and looked at the aisle.

Her brother was dying from love. At first she had watched her parents’ eyes for shame, but she saw only the lights of grief. Mortality had raised him from his secrets; there was nothing to hide, and he lay whole between clean sheets. It was she who left parts of her behind when she entered the house. Her brother was two years older than she, and he was thin and weak in his bed. She did not see fear in his eyes anymore. For a long time it had been there, a wet brightness she wanted to consume with her body. He looked at her as though death were a face between them, staring back at him. Sitting on the bed, she bent through death and held her thin brother. Her breasts felt strong and vital, and she wanted to absorb his fear and give him life. She held him as if this were possible. She did not know when fear left him, but it had. Now wit and mischief were in his eyes again, and a new and brighter depth. She did not know what it was. She only knew it was good to see. Sometimes she believed it was simply that:
goodness itself, as though death were stripping him of all that was dark and base, mean and vain, not only in him but in the world, too, in its parts that touched his life.

So she felt she could tell him now: she was afraid to fly. She was holding his hand. He smiled at her. He said: “Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.” They could have been sitting at her kitchen table, drinking wine. He could have been saying:
Read Tolstoy; lie in the sun; make love only with one you love
. He had told her that, drinking wine at her table, years ago. She looked at his face on the pillow, wanting to see him as he had seen himself, holding his fear in his arms. She saw her brother dying.

On the plane going home, she folded her arms beneath her breasts. Then she closed her eyes and hugged. She saw herself buckled into the seat, under the tight arc of the plane’s body. She saw the plane in the immense sky, then her brother in bed, poised as she was between the gravity of earth and infinity. She had tried with a poem to know his fear, months ago, when she could still write. But the poem changed, became one about love, and the only fear in it was hers, of loving again, of her heart swelling to be pierced and emptied.

Lightly embracing herself, she saw that, too: the words of the poem coming from her pen, the notebook and her forearms and hands resting on the oak desk her grandmother had used, writing letters. She saw her grandmother, long dead now, writing with a fountain pen. She saw herself sitting in the classroom, at the desk where some afternoons chalk dust lay, and she brushed it off with notepaper so it would not mark the sleeves
of her sweater. A trace of someone who had taught before her, who nervously handled chalk. Traces of herself were scattered in the world. She saw the book she had published, held open by hands she would never know. She saw herself holding her last lover, under blankets on a cold night, waking with him to start a day.

She liked starting: a poem, a class, a meal for friends who crowded her kitchen while she cooked. But not starting a day, now that she was alone. She woke from night and dreams to the beginning of nothing. For minutes she lay in bed, gathering her scattered self. Then she rose to work, to be with friends. She liked the touch of leather boots on her calves, soft wool on her arms, snow on her face.

She wondered what her brother saw, now that fear had left his eyes. Her grandmother’s eyes were like his, when she was old but not visibly dying: She seemed to watch from a mirthful distance. Perhaps connected to wherever she was going, she still took pleasure in the sport of mortality. Maybe it was a gift, for those who had lived long, and those who were slowly dying. She wanted it while her body was strong, while she was vibrant and pretty. Hugging herself, her eyes closed, she wanted it now as she breathed in this shuddering plane, speeding through darkness under the stars. She was afraid until the plane stopped on the runway.

T
HE RETIRED MARINE COLONEL HAD TWO
broken legs, both in casts from the soles of his feet to the tops of his thighs. His name was Robert Townsend; he was a tall and broad-shouldered man with black hair and a graying mustache. In the hospital in Boston he had five operations; neither leg was healed enough to bear his weight; he had rods in both femurs and his right tibia, and now at home he was downstairs in the living room on a hospital bed whose ends he could raise and lower, to evade pain. The bed was narrow, and his golden-haired wife, Lydia, slept upstairs.

He refused to eat in bed, for this made him feel he was still in the hospital; so at mealtimes Lydia helped him onto the wheelchair. He raised the bed till he was upright, she handed him a short board with beveled
ends, and he pushed one end under his rump and rested the other on the chair. Then she held his legs while he worked himself across the board. He wore cotton gym shorts and T-shirts. Before the horse fell on him, he and Lydia had eaten breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table. He could not go there now. He could wheel through the door from the dining room to the kitchen; then his long legs, held by leg rests straight out in front of him, were blocked by a counter, and at his left the refrigerator stopped him. On his first morning at home he tried to turn between the counter and refrigerator by lowering the leg rests; when he pressed the switch to release them, they dropped quickly, and he gasped at the blades of pain in his falling legs. Lydia bent down and grabbed his ankles and lifted them while he moaned and began to sweat.

His feet in their casts would not fit under the long rectangular mahogany table in the dining room, so he sat parallel to his end of it, removed the right armrest of the wheelchair, and ate, as he said, sidesaddle. He looked to his right at his food and Lydia. She had brown eyes and had lately, in the evening, worn her hair in a French braid; she liked candles at dinner, and after her bath in late afternoon she wore a dress or skirt. Her face was tan and pink, her brow and cheek creased, and lines moved outward from her eyes and lips when she smiled. Every morning after breakfast she walked two miles east to a red country store. She did this in all weather except blizzards and lightning storms. At the store she bought the
New York Times
and a package of British cigarettes, and sat at the counter to drink coffee and read. Then she walked home for lunch, and came in the front door each day as precisely
as a clock striking noon. She had not done this since the sunlit morning of January thaw when Robert’s brown mare broke his legs.