George Mills (44 page)

“Yes,” Charles Oliver tells him when they shake hands, “I saw you dancing with Lulu,” and George feels himself blush.

Meanwhile Stan David has begun to play for them again. From time to time George thinks he recognizes a song he has played on the jukeboxes in the bars, and again he feels himself blush. He’s mildly afraid Louise will notice his embarrassment but knows she could never guess its source. The men would understand of course, Charles and Herb and Ray, and though they are four and five years younger than he, there could have been times before they’d ever met their wives when they too had been at the mercy of glands, their willful and whimsical insides, their rude juices.

“My friends like you,” Louise whispers in his ear when they are on the dance floor again.

He wishes she wouldn’t do this. He wishes to be in control of his body. Breath in his ear does things to him. He knows how reckless he has become, his polite analyses forgotten, his calm science, when even slatterns in bars have brushed his ear with their lips.

“Change partners,” Stan David says ominously. The bandleader’s words are a kind of fatality, a soft force as threatening to mood as an announcement of war or a train conductor’s no-nonsense “All aboard.”

“Damn,” George says, and Louise smiles. Somehow she takes the measure of the music, absorbs its implications and impulses, the secret energies of the song, and takes them into her body, changing not partners but patterns, by some subtle shift of weight signaling George to follow, to come with her, and it’s as if they’re hiding in the melody, dancing counterclockwise, their gait disguised, their bodies subsumed within some more anonymous shape. Their form throws off detail, thickens to silhouette, and George feels invisible.

“You just won’t listen, will you?” Stan David says sadly.

But Mills would be content if the dancing were done with altogether. They have been with each other almost an hour. For almost half that time she’s been in his arms. They have spoken perhaps two dozen sentences to each other, and if she is friendly he knows it is just the good will of her optimism, the unmarked chemicals of innocence pure as fruit juice in her virgin’s blood. She cannot know that a smile is the leading edge of seduction, that the warmth of her body cannot be stored, that contact with a man releases it as energy, that the energy fragments and beads like moisture when it touches the surface of his skin, that the beads penetrate the follicles where the hairs grow on the backs of his hands and along his arms and the nape of his neck, and sink to the nerve endings to travel the synapses to his genitals and suffuse his body with what in other men is the patient will of courtship but which, in him, is degraded, only low lust. It is this lust which thickens his speech, which turns him clumsy during introductions and blunts the strategies of wooing—are his togs too tight? do his arms thrust from his sleeves?—and bewilders his bones and staggers his box step.

“Because you’re too young,” Stan David says while the band plays on. “Because you think you know it all, and you don’t know anything. My God,” he says, “just look at the slave bracelets and school rings and fraternity pins twinkling in here. You’d think it was the midsummer night’s sky, another solar system. Those are the fairy lights of crush and puppy love. You think you know what it leads to. You don’t. You’re in the dark about this stuff. Is it vine-covered cottage in your guts? It’s the projects. Is it moon and June? It’s a high of thirty, a low of twelve. It’s all glum drizzle and the engine won’t turn over in the street and the kid’s spitting up and there’s maybe two eggs in the house and a heel of stale bread. The zip’s gone out of the three ounces of open Coke standing in the fridge and your nose is running and your throat is sore.

“Sometimes I think maybe me and the guys are in the wrong business. We’re ruining lives here, confusing you with bad signals. Excuse me, Mr. L., but I’ve got to say what’s on my mind. It would trouble my conscience as a musician if I didn’t.

“Most bandleaders—Mr. Lodt can correct me if I’m wide of the mark—most bandleaders tell you you’re playing for keeps. Heck, it’s what the songs themselves say. That every love’s true, till the end of time guaranteed. You can keep track of it on the 18-karat gold watch, the 17-jewel movement. But figure it out. Stop to consider. How could it be? This is stuff you should have learned in the home. It ain’t something you should have to hear from a bandleader. You’re young. Get some experience under your belt. Don’t be so serious, play the field, there’s other fish in the sea. Have some fun, please.

“
Change partners!

“
—The theme from
Moulin Rouge,
ladies and gentlemen.”

George is the first to let go. He pushes off from Louise as if it were a maneuver in water. Louise reaches out for him. “It’s part of the show,” she says.

“No,” George says.

“If you cut in on anyone right now you’d be laughed right out of the Delgado. Or get punched if the fellow isn’t in on the joke. It’s part of the show, I tell you. He does that to instigate.
It’s part of the show!
”

“You don’t know, Louise.”

“Sure I know,” she says. “Sure I do.”

“I mean you don’t know what’s up. You don’t know what’s what.”

“He’s got his eye on you. Can’t you see that? He’s smirking at you, just waiting to see if you’re going to cut in on somebody.”

“I’m not going to cut in on anyone. I haven’t got the patience for this stuff, Louise. You’re a nice person but I haven’t got the patience for this stuff.” Suddenly he is trying to tell her why. They are dancing again. She has brought this about by falling forward on him. She is leaning on him with all her weight and he staggers into a kind of tango. He is trying to tell her why.

“
Haven’t you ever been in a nightclub?
” she asks forcefully. “Weren’t you ever in a nightclub and the comedian sees someone who has to go to the washroom and then he singles that person out and him and all the guys in the band and even the people in the audience sing ‘We know where you’re going, We know where you’re going’?
Haven’t you ever been in a nightclub?
”

“No,” George says, “never. I was never in a nightclub.”

“It’s part of the show. It’s all part of the show.”

Everything is part of the show, George thinks.

[Maybe everything was part of the show, I thought.]

[“Maybe we ought to sit down,” Louise says.]

[I was this musical comedy lout, an oaf of vaudeville, the hick from history. But was Louise any better? Virgins were a sort of lout, too, I thought. Oafs of the ovulate, hicks of hemorrhage. I should have told her, “No, sweetheart, I’ve never been to a nightclub, but I’ve been in a bar.” I should have told her, “No, lady, never in a nightclub. In the back seats of cars. I ain’t talking lovers’ lanes, some place the cops stake out with their flashlights and warnings. I’m not talking drive-ins or all the clubby, sanctioned green belts of love, fairways and parks and a view of the falls. I’m not talking cozy, I’m not talking snug. Where voices don’t carry, the moans muffled. Alleys, vacant lots, rooms the bed ain’t made days.” I should have told her, “No, sister, but I been where nothing’s part of the show, where the calls and rasps, the yelps and barks, the bleats and brays and blatter and whines and grunts, the neighs and howls and cackles and hisses ain’t even noise, they’re just vocabulary. How ladies talk when they’re in a hurry and trying to slip two or three of their fingers, and for all I know maybe the whole damn hand itself, in there with my tool!” I should have asked her outright, “Are you cherry, Louise?”]

Mills tries to explain again how he hasn’t the patience or craft, but somehow it seems he is saying how formidable she is. She interrupts him.

“Say, are you married?”

“No. Of course not.”

“I’m not Catholic or anything, but are you divorced?”

“No.”

Her friends join them. Ellen Rose and Herb think they should all go out afterward for pizza and want to know how the rest of them feel about it.

“I’m trying to watch my figure,” Louise says, glancing at Mills.

“Aw, come on, Louise,” Herb says, “George’ll watch it.”

The Olivers want ice cream. Ruth has a yen for a dish of maraschino cherries and whipped cream.

Ray knows the manager of this White Castle who’s on duty tonight. “You met him, Bern. Pete McGee.”

“Oh, yeah,” Bernadette says, narrowing her eyes, remembering. “That guy with the tattoo. He’d be kind of cute if it wasn’t for the tattoo. I don’t know why guys disfigure themselves like that. Oh. Me and my big mouth. I beg your pardon, sir,” she tells George. “You may be tattooed yourself.”

“I’m not tattooed.”

“Is he, Lulu?” Charles Oliver asks, winking.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.” Now Louise is blushing. “No one’s asked George what he feels like. What do you feel like, George? Pizza or hamburgers or ice cream?”

“I don’t care.”

“He’s very polite,” Ruth Oliver says.

George listens as they make the arrangements. It is the committee work of friends and very complicated. He understands that Herb is to phone ahead and arrange the pizza which he and Ellen Rose will pick up. Ray and Bernadette will see Ray’s friend, Pete McGee, about the White Castles, and Ray will try to talk him into taking a break for an hour or so and joining them all at Crown’s Ice Cream Kitchen, but Sue will have to talk Carol into coming along as Pete’s date.

“What’s going to happen to Sue?” George asks, genuinely interested.

“Sue has her car,” Ellen Rose explains.

“Sue’s a good sport,” Louise says.

“Oh God, yes,” Ray and Bernadette agree.

“Would you and Louise go down to Crown’s and reserve a table for eleven?” Ruth Oliver asks George.

“I don’t have a car,” George says.

“Twenty-five minutes,” Herb says. “I ordered one large plain and one large pepperoni with mushroom. And one medium anchovy. I figured that way everyone would be happy. Did I do wrong?”

Ellen Rose tells him he did exactly right.

“I figured everybody’d be happy. This way, people who don’t like spicy can have plain. Is George getting us a table for eleven?”

“George doesn’t have a car,” Ray says gloomily. Two or three of the others look stymied, and it seems to Mills that everything is about to collapse because he has no car.

“How far is this place? Maybe I could walk,” he says.

“The pizza is going to be ready in twenty-five minutes,” Bernadette says, and though George doesn’t understand how this is an objection he knows that it is.

“I don’t think I better,” Carol says quietly. “Go without me.”

“I ordered all that pizza,” Herb says.

“You mean you gave them your real name?” Charles Oliver says.

“Hey, I thought it was all set,” Herb says defensively.

“Oh Carol, he’s the
manager
of the place for gosh sakes,” says Sue.

“Sure,” Carol says, “the
night
manager.”

“It’s when they do most of their business, Carol,” Charles Oliver tells her. “Isn’t that right, Ray?”

“What? Oh. Yeah, absolutely.”

“How can he get off then?” Carol asks. “If it’s when they do most of their business, how come he can get off for an hour?”

“Well he’s the
manager.
I already told you.”

“Gee,” Carol says, “I don’t know. Don’t tattoos itch?”

“Do they, George?” Charles asks.

“I’m not tattooed,” George Mills says.

“It’s just too creepy,” Carol says. “Go without me.”

“If you’re not going
I’m
not going,” Sue says resolutely.

“Herb’s ordered the pizza,” Ellen Rose says. “Two large and a medium in his own name.”

“A Sweetheart Dance,” Stan David announces. “I’m calling a Sweetheart Dance.”

Two thirds of the couples walk off the dance floor.

“It’s the Sweetheart Dance, Herb,” Ellen Rose says.

“We’ve got twenty minutes to get there.”

“We’ll dance two minutes and leave in the middle.”

“I’ll phone for a taxi,” George says.

“What for?” asks Ray.

“To take us to Crown’s to reserve a table for eleven.” He’s pleased to have thought of the idea of the cab and wants to make additional arrangements now that he begins to understand not the mechanics, and perhaps not even all the principles, but the theory itself who had entered this community cold, who for the seven years it took him to get from Cassadaga to St. Louis had entered
all
communities cold, like a beggar at the back door, presenting himself at foundling homes, orphanages, and, during the war years, sometimes actually passing himself off as a refugee, who had been born, it may be, with no ear for complication, with no gift for the baroque, but who has begun to see that youth—he himself is already twenty-seven—will try anything, say anything, in order to salvage its plans, which are never plans of course, never goals and their concomitant procedures, but the blatant articulation of whims, the accommodation of which involves the overriding and placation, if that was the order, of other, contrary whims. It is a kind of power, and he has never before felt its urgency, never before wheeled and dealed in the arbitrary.

“You been to Crown’s?” Ray asks.

“No.”

“It’s booths. It’s booths and stools at the soda fountain. They got a loose booth they let you move if nobody’s in it and you’re a party of ten. Pete McGee won’t come without Carol, and Sue won’t come unless Carol does.”

“But Sue’s a good sport,” George says petulantly.

“Carol said I should go without her. A good sport doesn’t do that.”

“Your folks!” George says. He is still planning, tuning solution. “Your folks, Louise. That would give us ten.”

“I told him I came with my folks,” Louise says.

“He’s not from around here,” Bernadette says.

“Until a girl knows what a fellow’s like, George, she tells him she’s with her folks,” Louise says.

“Louise’s folks,” Ruth Oliver says, and giggles.

“What’s so funny?” her husband asks. “They have a car.”

George Mills doesn’t understand any of this. He doesn’t understand why it’s necessary to get the roving booth at Crown’s, or why Pete McGee should join them, or why Carol thinks tattoos itch, or what makes Sue such a good sport. All he knows is that the pizzas are burning and that Ellen Rose and Herb, who have returned from the Sweetheart Dance, have made no move to leave. “The pizzas,” George says.