Dancing After Hours (22 page)

She had hurt herself, too, and she could not say this to Jeff: she wanted to have lunch with him. She liked him, and lunch was in daylight and not dangerous; you
met at the restaurant and talked and ate, then went home, or shopping for groceries or beach sandals. She wanted to have drinks and dinner with him, too, but dinner was timeless; there could be coffee and brandy, and it was night and you parted to sleep; a Friday dinner could end Saturday morning, in a shower that soothed your skin but not your heart, which had opened you to pain. Now there was AIDS, and she did not want to risk death for something that was already a risk, something her soul was too tired to grapple with again. She did not keep condoms in her apartment because two winters ago, after one night with a thin, pink-faced, sweet-eyed man who never called her again, she decided that next time she made love she would know about it long before it happened, and she did not need to be prepared for sudden passion. She put her box of condoms in a grocery bag and then in a garbage bag, and on a cold night after work she put the bag on the sidewalk in front of her apartment. In a drawer, underneath her stacked underwear, she had a vibrator. On days when most of her underwear was in the laundry basket, the vibrator moved when she opened and closed the drawer, and the sound of fluted plastic rolling on wood made her feel caught by someone who watched, someone who was above this. She loved what the vibrator did, and was able to forget it was there until she wanted it, but once in a while she felt shame, thinking of dying, and her sister or brother or parents finding the vibrator. Sometimes after using it, she wept.

It was ten-fifteen by the bar clock that Jeff kept twenty minutes fast. Tonight he wore a dark brown
shirt with short sleeves, and white slacks; his arms and face and the top of his head were brown, with a red hue from the sun, and he looked clean and confident. It was a weekday, and in the afternoon he had fished from a party boat. He had told Emily in winter that his rent for a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and bathroom was six hundred dollars a month; his car was old; and until his wife paid him half the value of the house she had told him to leave, he could not buy a boat. He paid fifteen dollars to go on the party boat and fish for half a day, and when he did this, he was visibly happier. Now Emily looked at him, saw his glass with only ice in it, and brought him a club soda with a few drops of bitters; the drink was the color of Kay’s lipstick. He said: “I’m going to put wider doors on the bathroom.” Their faces were close over the bar, so the woman sitting to the right of Jeff could not hear unless she eavesdropped. “That guy can’t get in.”

“I think he has a catheter. His friend took something to the bathroom.”

“I know. But the next one in a chair may want to use a toilet. He likes Kay. He can feel everything, but only in his brain and heart.”

She had seen Drew talking to Kay and smiling at her, and now she realized that she had seen him as a man living outside of passion. She looked at Jeff’s eyes, feeling that her soul had atrophied; that it had happened without her notice. Jeff said: “What?”

“I should have known.”

“No. I had a friend like him. He always looked happy and I knew he was never happy. A mine got him, in Vietnam.”

“Were you there?”

“Not with him. I knew him before and after.”

“But you were there.”

“Yes.”

She saw herself facedown in a foxhole while the earth exploded as close to her as the walls of the bar. She said: “I couldn’t do that.”

“Neither could I.”

“Now, you mean.”

“Now, or then.”

“But you did.”

“I was lucky. We used to take my friend fishing. His chair weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. We carried him up the steps and lifted him over the side. We’d bait for him, and he’d fold his arms around the rod. When he got a bite, we’d reel it in. Mike looked happy on a boat. But he got very tired.”

“Where is he now?”

“He died.”

“Is he the reason we have a ramp?”

“Yes. But he died before I worked here. One winter pneumonia killed him. I just never got to the bathroom doors.”

“You got a lot of sun today.”

“Bluefish, too.”

“Really?”

“You like them?”

“On the grill. With mayonnaise and lemon.”

“In foil. I have a grill on my deck. It’s not really a deck. It’s a landing outside the kitchen, on the second floor. The size of a closet.”

“There’s Kay. I hope you had sunscreen.”

He smiled and shook his head, and she went to Kay,
thinking they were like that: they drank too much; they got themselves injured; they let the sun burn their skin; they went to war. The cautious ones bored her. Kay put down her tray of glasses and slid two filled ashtrays to Emily, who emptied them in the garbage can. Kay wiped them with a paper napkin and said: “Alvin and Drew want steak and fries. No salads. Margaritas now, and Tecates with the meal.”

“Alvin.”

“Personal care attendant. His job.”

“They look like friends.”

“They are.”

Emily looked at Jeff, but he had heard and was standing; he stepped inside the bar and went through the swinging door to the kitchen. Emily rubbed lime on the rims of glasses and pushed them into the container of thick salt, scooped ice into the blender and poured tequila, and imagined Alvin cutting Drew’s steak, sticking the fork into a piece, maybe feeding it to him; and that is when she knew that Alvin wiped Drew’s shit. Probably as Drew lay on his bed, Alvin lifted him and slid a bedpan under him; then he would have to roll him on one side to wipe him clean, and take the bedpan to the toilet. Her body did not shudder, but she felt as if it shuddered; she knew her face was composed, but it seemed to grimace. She heard Roland Kirk playing tenor saxophone on her cassette, and words at the bar, and voices from the tables; she breathed the smells of tequila and cigarette smoke, gave Kay the drinks, then looked at Alvin. Kay went to the table and bent forward to place the drinks. Drew spoke to her. Alvin bathed him somehow, too, kept his
flesh clean for his morale and health. She looked at Alvin for too long; he turned and looked at her. She looked away, at the front door.

It was not the shit. Shit was nothing. It was the spiritual pain that twisted her soul: Drew’s helplessness, and Alvin reaching into it with his hands. She had stopped teaching because of pain: she had gone with passion to high school students, year after year, and always there was one student, or even five, who wanted to feel a poem or story or novel, and see more clearly because of it. But Emily’s passion dissolved in the other students. They were young and robust, and although she knew their apathy was above all a sign of their being confined by classrooms and adolescence, it still felt like apathy. It made Emily feel isolated and futile, and she thought that if she were a gym teacher or a teacher of dance, she could connect with her students. The women and men who coached athletic teams or taught physical education or dance seemed always to be in harmony with themselves and their students. In her last three years she realized she was becoming scornful and bitter, and she worked to control the tone of her voice, and what she said to students, and what she wrote on their papers. She taught without confidence or hope, and felt like a woman standing at a roadside, reading poems aloud into the wind as cars filled with teenagers went speeding by. She was tending bar in summer and finally she asked Jeff if she could work all year. She liked the work, she stopped taking sleeping pills because when she slept no longer mattered, and, with her tips, she earned more money. She did not want to teach
again, or work with teenagers, or have to talk to anyone about the books she read. But she knew that pain had defeated her, while other teachers had endured it, or had not felt it as sharply.

Because of pain, she had turned away from Jeff, a man whom she looked forward to seeing at work. She was not afraid of pain; she was tired of it; and sometimes she thought being tired of it was worse than fear, that losing fear meant she had lost hope as well. If this were true, she would not be able to love with her whole heart, for she would not have a whole heart; and only a man who had also lost hope, and who would settle for the crumbs of the feast, would return her love with the crumbs of his soul. For a long time she had not trusted what she felt for a man, and for an even longer time, beginning in high school, she had deeply mistrusted what men felt for her, or believed they felt, or told her they felt. She chronically believed that, for a man, love was a complicated pursuit of an orgasm, and its evanescence was directly proportionate to the number of orgasms a particular man achieved, before his brain cleared and his heart cooled. She suspected this was also true of herself, though far less often than it was for a man.

When a man’s love for Emily ended, she began to believe that he had never loved her; that she was a homely fool, a hole where the man had emptied himself. She would believe this until time healed the pain. Then she would know that in some way the man had loved her. She never believed her face was what first attracted these men; probably her body had, or something she said; but finally they did like her face; they looked at it, touched it with their hands, kissed it. She
only knew now, as a forty-year-old woman who had never lived with a man, that she did not know the truth: if sexual organs were entities that drew people along with them, forcing them to collide and struggle, she wanted to be able to celebrate them; if the heart with intrepid fervor could love again and again, using the sexual organs in its dance, she wanted to be able to exalt its resilience. But nothing was clear, and she felt that if she had been born pretty, something would be clear, whether or not it were true.

She wanted equilibrium: she wanted to carry what she had to carry, and to walk with order and strength. She had never been helpless, and she thought of Drew: his throbless penis with a catheter in it, his shit. If he could not feel a woman, did he even know if he was shitting? She believed she could not bear such helplessness, and would prefer death. She thought: I
can walk. Feed myself. Shower. Shit in a toilet. Make love
. She was neither grateful nor relieved; she was afraid. She had never imagined herself being crippled, and now, standing behind the bar, she felt her spine as part of her that could be broken, the spinal cord severed; saw herself in a wheelchair with a motor, her body attenuating, her face seeming larger; saw a hired woman doing everything for her and to her.

Kay’s lighter and cigarettes were on the bar; Emily lit one, drew on it twice, and placed it on the ashtray. Kay was coming out of the dark of the tables, into the dim light at the bar. She picked up the cigarette and said: “Oh, look. It came lit.”

She ordered, and Emily worked with ice and limes and vodka and gin and grapefruit juice and salt, with club soda and quinine water, and scotch and bottles of beer and clean glasses, listening to Roland Kirk and remembering him twenty years ago in the small club on the highway, where she sat with two girlfriends. The place was dark, the tables so close to each other that the waitresses sidled, and everyone sat facing the bandstand and the blind black man wearing sunglasses. He had a rhythm section and a percussionist, and sometimes he played two saxophones at once. He grinned; he talked to the crowd, his head moving as if he were looking at them. He said: “It’s nice, coming to work blind. Not seeing who’s fat or skinny. Ugly. Or pretty. Know what I mean?”

Emily knew then, sitting between her friends, and knew now, working in this bar that was nearly as dark as the one where he had played; he was dead, but here he was, his music coming from the two speakers high on the walls, coming softly. Maybe she was the only person in the bar who heard him at this moment, as she poured gin; of course everyone could hear him, as people heard rain outside their walls. In the bar she never heard rain or cars, or saw snow or dark skies or sunlight. Maybe Jeff was listening to Kirk while he cooked. And only to be kind, to immerse herself in a few seconds of pure tenderness, she took two pilsner glasses from the shelf and opened the ice chest and pushed the glasses deep into the ice, for Alvin and Drew.

Kirk had walked the earth with people who only saw. So did Emily. But she saw who was fat or ugly, and if
they were men, she saw them as if through an upstairs window. Twenty years ago, Kirk’s percussionist stood beside him, playing a tambourine, and Kirk was improvising, playing fast, and Emily was drumming with her hands on the table. Kirk reached to the percussionist and touched his arm and stepped toward the edge of the bandstand. The percussionist stepped off it and held up his hand; Kirk took it and stepped down and followed the percussionist, followed the sound of the tambourine, playing the saxophone, his body swaying. People stood and pushed their tables and chairs aside, and, clapping and exclaiming, followed Kirk. Everyone was standing, and often Kirk reached out and held someone’s waist, and hugged. In the dark they came toward Emily, who was standing with her friends. The percussionist’s hand was fast on his tambourine; he was smiling; he was close; then he passed her, and Kirk was there. His left arm encircled her, his hand pressing her waist; she smelled his sweat as he embraced her so hard that she lost balance and stood on her toes; she could feel the sound of the saxophone in her body. He released her. People were shouting and clapping, and she stepped into the line, held the waist of a man in front of her; her two friends were behind her, one holding her waist. She was making sounds but not words, singing with Kirk’s saxophone. They weaved around tables and chairs, then back to the bandstand, to the drummer and the bass and piano players, and the percussionist stepped up on it and turned to Kirk, and Kirk took his hand and stepped up and faced the clapping, shouting crowd. Then Kirk, bending back, blew one long high note, then lowered his head and played softly, slowly, some old and sweet melody. Emily’s hands,
raised and parted to clap, lowered to her sides. She walked backward to her table, watching Kirk. She and her friends quietly pulled their table and chairs into place and sat. Emily quietly sat, and waitresses moved in the dark, bent close to the mouths of people softly ordering drinks. The music was soothing, was loving, and Emily watched Kirk and felt that everything good was possible.