Ballroom: A Novel (19 page)

“Get going, you imbecile.” Hy shoved him forward. “Get home and take your mother to her goddamn dance lesson.
Now!
” He grabbed Gabriel’s arm like a vise. “March!” he shouted. “I’m paying forty-five dollars an hour while you’re here with these nincompoops eating pizza.”

Maury and Joel sat in terrified awe. Gabriel slipped on the soda and stumbled through the restaurant. From behind him, Gabriel could hear Maury and Joel breaking up with laughter.

“What a pussy,” said Joel.

“Dancing lessons with his mother?” added Maury.

Gabriel was filled with unbearable humiliation. His other schoolmates stopped talking to watch as he was shoved into his father’s beloved Cadillac, double-parked in front.

“Stop sniveling.” His father smacked him hard across the head.

“Yes, sir.” Gabriel concentrated on the large, oily pores on his father’s nose. There was snot on his father’s mustache.

“Get in the back seat, so I don’t have to look at your ugly face.”

Gabriel crawled into the back seat like a small child. He barely avoided his father’s elbow aimed at his ribs.

They missed the 3:30 mambo class, but as his mother drove toward Fred Astaire’s for what was left of their 4:30 tango lesson, she held him close, smoothing his hair.

“I had to tell him where you were, baby. I guess I shouldn’t have. Maybe he would have calmed down—but he knows how much these lessons mean to me. I wait all week for them, and we have such a good time. Don’t we, baby?” Her hand felt icy as she held his chin with mauve polished fingers.

T
hat night, Gabriel broke his mother’s favorite Carlos Gardel tango singles, “Por una Cabeza” from the film
Tango Bar
, and “Mi Noche Triste”—songs about losers, tormented by failure, who never grew up. Unlucky in love, repeatedly abandoned, they always went home to their mothers. The saintly mother—like his own, always wanting him by her side. Could she possibly see herself as a saint? Yes, Saint Lila of the Fallen Arches.

She would sing along in Spanish whenever they danced to Gardel’s songs. She believed he was Latin America’s greatest singer of the twentieth century, the supreme legend of tango.

“Who the hell did you stay with in Buenos Aires?” his father occasionally demanded. When Gardel died in 1936, Lila had flown to Buenos Aires for his funeral and, much to Hy’s chagrin, stayed for a month.

As Gabriel cracked each record over his knee, snapping it into sharp, pointed pieces, the mirror above the couch reflected his flushed, smiling face, but he recognized a kind of bold terror in his eyes. Because he was a coward, he would do this, then allow his father to beat him with his belt mercilessly, even though at seventeen he was as tall as and stronger than his father at fifty.

He had danced with his mother for years. As a senior in high school he would meet her at QuickStep on Queens Boulevard. She had seen to it that during competition season they had standing reservations four afternoons a week. She’d wait for him in the lounge area, because there was no way he would let her pick him up at Forest Hills High, even in the Caddy.

“Hi, Lila.” At QuickStep, kissing her European style on both cheeks, he addressed her by name so that people would think he was her private instructor.

“Meet you upstairs. Practice room two.” It was the largest of all the practice rooms on the second floor, mirrored on three walls.

F
or Christ’s sake, it’s a waltz. It’s not that complicated,” he growled. They had been practicing their approach without music for almost two and a half hours. “Stand on your own feet, Lila.”

They began several feet apart, arms open, frame, solid. Then, at his indication, she would move gracefully into his embrace, and together they would move into a long step.

“I am,” she whined.

“You’re leaning on me. You’re not supposed to lean on me.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. Start again.”

She took three steps back to her original position, pulling her head and shoulders up.

“I’m trying, baby.”

“You’re supposed to know the steps. We’ve practiced for over a month. You still can’t dance without leaning on me.” His mouth hardened in a tight grimace. “Your hand feels like a fuckin’ brick.” Shaking her clammy hand free from his own and walking over to a mirror, he took out his comb and ran it through his thick, dark hair, checking himself out, Elvis-style. “That’s just the sort of thing that’ll lose us points in the judging.”

Bent over with her palms flat against the floor, Lila slowly curled herself back up, stretched her arms toward the ceiling. Turning to face the mirror, she brushed imaginary lint off her red linen capri pants, straightened out her crisply ironed candy-pink shirt, and pulled up the open collar. With one adjustment of her red hairband, centering the bow that held back her streaked blond hair, she began dancing alone, arms held at shoulder level, head cocked to the right. Wearing a disdainful expression, she was dancing with the perfect invisible partner.

Gabriel took three long, low steps toward himself in the opposite mirror, knees bent, head slightly tilted to the left. He sucked in his cheeks, caught himself, and relaxed his expression.

“Are you ready? One more time, this time with music,” he called to his mother as he shoved the tape into the tape deck.
And one, two, three
. . . They crossed the room, created a balanced frame in each other’s arms, and once again Gabriel led her forward. “Goddamn it, you’re doing it again!” He pushed her away.

“What?” she pleaded. “What am I doing?”

“Leaning. You’re always leaning. For Christ’s sake, Lila, stand on your own two feet and dance.” Her hand was sweaty, and he wiped his hand on his pant legs as he sat down on one of the chairs lining the room. “If you want to compete, and if you want me to dance with you, you’ve got to learn the steps.” He was fed up. “Your dancing is shit.”

She sat next to him and began to cry. “Baby, don’t be angry with me. I’ll practice more,” she entreated, running her fingers through his hair. “I want to win a gold. Just once.”

“You’re not good enough.”

The truth was that she was an excellent dancer; he just couldn’t stand dancing with her in public. He had learned how to make it worth his while, though, persuading her to buy him things—clothes, music, a newly decorated room the year before. He also liked arriving at Roseland with the hired car and driver. That was really cool. Now what he wanted was a car, and he knew that his mother would give him anything to dance with her.

“Why don’t you pay for a partner? Ask Andres to dance with you. He’s your teacher.”

“Pay him sixty dollars an hour? I have you,” she said emphatically. “Besides, he’s too short.”

“I don’t want to compete with you anymore. I hate these stupid competitions. You in those idiotic costumes.” What he really hated was that she was old.

“My dresses cost a fortune. The gown for the waltz competition was a Nina. It cost me eight thousand dollars, all that beadwork, and real marabou feathers!”

“Everyone will know you’re my mother.”

“You’re tall and handsome, and when you wear your new tuxedo, no one will guess.” She massaged his shoulders. “Please, baby, I promise I won’t invite anyone who knows us.” Her hands felt good. “And you could grow a mustache.”

He turned slightly so that she could work both shoulders. Enjoying her touch too much, he pulled himself away. “A mustache?”

“Think about it, Gabe.”

“Look, let’s finish this. I’ve got homework to do. I have to study for finals.”

On the trip home his mother let him drive. He loved the feeling of her Cadillac, the smell of the white leather. He wasn’t sure which he preferred, his father’s black car or his mother’s white.

“Mom, you know what I want for graduation?” Pushing the waltz tape into the deck, he looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

“Oh, I love to waltz.”

“A car.” He gave her his best smile.

“I’ll speak to your father. Win me a gold in New Jersey.” She tapped three-quarter time on his knee with her fingers. “And grow a mustache.”

“A black Mustang convertible.”

I
n the 1980s, after Gabriel’s father retired, his parents moved to Lauderhill in Florida and bought an apartment overlooking Inverrary Country Club. Princely palm trees separated their blindingly white condo from the golf course, with carts skirting across endlessly polite greens. Lila made sure the picture window in the living room and those in the three bedrooms, with their southern exposure, were kept immaculately clean inside and out. The verdant landscape expanded her overwrought, flowery interior. Gabriel hated his monthly visits to his parents, and kept them to a day or two.

In her fifties, his mother looked as if she belonged in a
Come to Inverrary
retirement brochure. Her platinum blond hair was sprayed and pouffed weekly at Etienne’s, and she was always a vision of pale pastel Chanel, complete with cream hosiery, beige patent pumps, and bags. She wore her pearls wherever she went, because when she had her colors done she was told she should wear something white near her face. Elizabeth Arden had so perfectly crafted her makeup that she looked like Doris Day, seen through a Vaseline-covered lens. Of course, whenever she went out she wore dark glasses and a hat to protect her pale, cosmetically corrected face. She wasn’t one to be seen in sweats and running shoes at the A&P. Gabriel, always her confidant, continued to listen to her judgments of not only friends and relatives but also strangers she noticed in passing. As much as he despised it, he had picked up her habit of noticing details of dress, manner, and custom, and he had become just as critical.

Now that she lived permanently in Florida, Lila was forced to dance with her husband. They spent several evenings a week ballroom dancing. In retirement, his father had grown fat and paunchy. Gabriel would never allow himself to get so sloppy. Whenever there was some sort of dance tournament, the calls would begin. Lila would call him day or night, even while he was in diamond negotiations in Botswana or Belgium, beseeching him to fly down to Florida and partner her, promising him this and that, as though he were still in high school. He often felt as though his entire life was about disentangling from his mother’s grasp.

His father had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of diamonds. Gabriel, now himself an expert in fine jewels and respected for his ability to spot, buy, and cut a perfect diamond, had always hoped to win his father’s admiration. Although Gabriel had taken over the lucrative business from his father, Hy continued to criticize him at every turn, arguing with all his ideas and opinions.

“What does a putz like you know about diamonds? When you’ve been in the business as long as I was, then tell me something. You know bubkes, as far as I’m concerned.” Hy’s remarks were often made in front of his buddies, once the royalty of the Forty-Seventh Street diamond district. Now retired, they all sat around smoking smuggled Havana cigars and playing poker. The game was really an excuse to escape their wives and eat forbidden foods. As his father berated Gabriel over barbecued ribs and bricks of fried onions, his father’s oldest friend, Jake, would roll his eyes as if to say,
Pay no attention
. Frustrated that he could never stand up to Hy, Gabriel felt like a child with his father and a husband to his mother. He wanted to be as far from both of them as possible.

G
abriel was vacationing for two months in Mykonos during the summer of 1992 when he first saw Myra. She reminded him of an Amazon goddess. He’d watched her for several days from his hotel window as she ran like a gazelle on the beach in the early mornings. He sat near her on the sand, in awe of her symmetry. Her body was in every respect proportioned, and she reminded him of what he had learned as the four Cs of a flawless diamond: clarity, carat, color, and cut.

One July morning, as he ran along the water’s edge, following at some distance, Myra suddenly turned around and confronted him. “You’ve been following me?” she said, stepping back critically, looking him up and down. “I’ve had my eye on you. I could use you.”

“I’d love to be used.” He was surprised at how forthright she seemed.

With her back to the turquoise Aegean, hands on her narrow hips, head defiantly thrown back, she bared perfect white teeth within a luscious, ample mouth and released a distinctive throaty laugh. Her dark hair was wild and unkempt. Everything about her then had been a promise of the sort of woman he had been searching for. Audacious, uninhibited, and independent.

She was thirty-five, three years older than Gabriel, and highly educated, having studied fine arts in Paris with an emphasis on painting male nudes. She’d been living on Mykonos for two years, where she’d found the peace and light she needed, as well as readily available male models.

“You are just the man I’ve been searching for. But I warn you,” she said as they sat at a seaside taverna, “I’ll expect a great deal of you.”

He was flattered and eager to accept her challenge. Used to pliant, eager women, he’d never met anyone like Myra.

Surprisingly, what she expected of him was to pose for long hours. All through that month at her villa, she sketched and painted him. He preferred posing atop the dazzlingly whitewashed building’s flat roof, where he could laze in the bright midday sun upon brilliant Indian silks, the air fragrant with the oregano, cinnamon, and bay leaf of the marketplace below. He basked in the pleasure of playing the male odalisque, while developing his tan.

O
ne late afternoon, as Myra worked on a series of line studies of him, Gabriel lay on a somber Russian paisley throw in the heat of her whitewashed studio.

Stiffness ran from his shoulder to wrist. The day was particularly hot. He could hear the sandpaper rasp of charcoal as it skidded across newsprint, the grating sound of her pencils being sharpened. The occasional rustle of paper tearing, crumpled, and tossed on the floor. His throat was parched, the smells of pencil shavings, turpentine, oil paints and her stale cigarettes were distracting, and he needed something to drink.