Ballroom: A Novel (25 page)

S
arah awakes in the dark of her bedroom, feels the sweaty damp of her pillow, nightgown, and body. Her throbbing wrists, which seemed so vivid a part of her dream, are a reminder of Gabriel’s violence. Throwing off her covers, she lies motionless under the ceiling fan, feeling the tingle of cool air against her sweaty skin. Did last night happen? What is left of her dreams? Her body aches.

Without turning on lights, she steps into the shower, startled and soothed by the water’s icy force. Listening to the rush of sound, she turns her face up into the cold spray, so the steady rivulets will interrupt her disturbing thoughts with their motion. Nothing has been what she wanted after all. Under the water for a very long time, she watches the light of dawn appear through the window. At some point she sits down in the tub, aware of the awakening of all her senses; the cold, the hardness of the tub, the throbbing pain, and a realization of the reality of the night before. She is shocked at the cobalt bruises on both wrists. They are that much more startling against the redness of her skin from the icy water, and the memory of Gabriel’s violence.

Is Gabriel one of the secrets of the Ballroom that no one speaks of? Everything he promised was a lie. He doesn’t want a partner.

For several weeks, the color of her bruises changes like a sunset; the four strokes on her cheek remain the longest, fingerprints of his impotent seduction.

Recollect the desire of imparting pleasure, especially to the fair sex. It is one of the essential qualifications of a gentleman.

                
—Elias Howe,
The Pocket Ballroom Prompter
, 1858

A
ngel takes Maria by the 7 train out to the Queens Museum, at the site of Flushing’s 1939 World’s Fair, to show her the scale model of New York City. As they stand on the glass bridge overlooking the panorama of the city, it lies beneath them in perfect and dizzying miniature.

“It’s a one-inch-to-one-hundred-feet scale. Every building built before nineteen ninety-two is here,” Angel explains.

“Where’s my house?” she asks.

Within the teeming metropolis of wooden skyscrapers and papier-mâché landmarks they search for Twelfth Street and her four-story tenement. They trace streets, Con Edison to the north, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village to the east, Tompkins Square Park to the south. The Lower East Side is indiscernible.

The light in the room dims and day turns to night as an airplane, like a dragonfly, takes off and lands on invisible wire. The lights in the buildings sparkle like fireflies against an ultramarine sky.

“I’ve been looking at spaces in Chelsea and uptown. I want you to see them. I’m going to open the dance center in December.” He likes surprising her in the twilight. “Mike’s putting up some money to help. I’m going to speak to my pop, too. I have this idea. Just listen and don’t say anything. Okay? It’s May, and you’ll be graduating next month. I want you to think about you and me being business partners. Look at the business plan; tell me what you think. Then make up your mind.”

Since that one night on the roof, he has realized that he needs Maria to tell him what is going on with Harry. The truth. Not something he imagines in the middle of the night. Though he can’t bear to go back, and won’t, there have been nights of imagining Maria and Korn together. Trying to understand. It is time to move forward, and he is proud of himself for confronting Maria with what he’s seen, forcing her to face it with him. If they are ever to have a life together, there can be no secrets. He has something real to offer her.

“Make a new start with me, Maria. Be my partner. Move out of your dad’s place. Get away from the neighborhood. You know what I mean?”

He means Harry. He wants her to get away from Harry, as far away as possible.

Treat them with such kindness and cordiality in the close that the recollection of their visit will ever be a bright spot in their memory.

                
—Thomas E. Hill,
Evils of the Ball
, 1883

S
he’s planned it all out. Made notes like a script for the past month. What she will say, her tone and her manner casual. No matter what he says she’ll remain calm. Clear. Final.

When he greets her at the door, there is an expression of bewilderment on his face.

“You can’t dance in jeans. Not with me.”

She has intentionally worn them. To make it clear she isn’t there to dance. Not tonight. Not ever. “I can’t stay long. I have something to talk to you about.” She walks carefully along the path of sixteen grocery bags into his kitchen and sits at the table, her back to the mirror. She doesn’t want to look at herself telling Harry it is over. “I’m not coming anymore,” she begins.

Harry doesn’t respond, just fidgets with the dial on his radio. There is static as La Mega slides in and out of clarity.

“Do you hear what I’m saying?”

Ignoring her, he walks to the sink, pours a glass of water. How familiar his gestures are; the way he stands; the tilt of his head; how he holds the back of the chair; the way his fingers look in that motion; the way he reaches for a glass, turned upside down on a kitchen towel at the sink, holding it up to see if it is clean enough, even though he is the only one ever to drink from it. You get to know a lot about a person in thirteen years, she realizes. Especially in one room.

She knows his dream because she is part of it. She’s hardly slept all night, dreading this moment. Understanding the sadness he will feel and knowing what she means to him makes it that much more painful. He wipes the glass, puts it back in place on the sink, and changes the lean of the mirror.

“You need to find a new student. I’m grown up now. You’ve taught me everything I need to be a dancer, and I just can’t come up here anymore. I need to get on with my life, and I’ll be moving out of the apartment at the end of the week. Getting my own place uptown.”

It isn’t like Harry not to say anything.

“I mean it, Harry.”

“I’m going to speak to your father,” he says.

“About what?”

“About me and you going to Buenos Aires.”

“That’s not real, Harry. You mustn’t do that. You know that?”

“I’ve waited all these years for you to be twenty-one. Now you are. It’s time. I’ve saved the money, and we can do it. We’ll be together. We’ve always talked about it. We’ll tell your father about us. You promised.”

“No, you can’t do that. It’s our secret. Remember? You always said that? It was make-believe, Harry. My promising, that was a game. Like you asking me to go mambo with you when I was five. I could never do that. Could I? It was just a game. I’m grown up now, graduated, and I have real plans. I can’t go to Buenos Aires. I can’t. I have grad school, plans.” When she thought about all of this, she was certain she would cry, but face-to-face with him, she realizes that she needs to be strong. She fights back her tears.

He sits down at the kitchen table, holding his temples with both hands as though his head hurts.

“What kinda plans?”

“What kinda plans?” he asks again, when she doesn’t respond.

As she recognizes his dismay, her resolve to shield him from the truth disappears.

“Angel and I, we’re going to be business partners. Open a dance center. You know, tango, ballroom, maybe a library, films and lectures. After I graduate. I didn’t want to have to tell you all of this. I would never want to hurt you, Harry.”

“What about me and you?” He sighs with grief.

“I’m too young for you, Harry.” She reaches across the kitchen table and takes his hands away from his head, holding them in hers. “Look at me. Look at yourself, really look.” She points to the mirror, but he won’t look up. His reflection looks fragile. “You need someone closer to your own age. Like one of those women you teach at the Ballroom. You’re sixty-five, and I’m almost twenty-one. It’s just not right, Harry. I want you to want me to have a good life. Say it’s okay, please. Wish me a good life. Let me go.”

Refusing to look at her, he stands up and pushes the mirror back into the space next to the refrigerator.

She didn’t mean to ask for anything, or to plead. She intended to state only that she couldn’t come on Fridays anymore. When he turns toward her, she’s afraid he will start saying the same old words again; his lullaby of promises and dreams, the turquoise dress, the shoes, the plans.

Instead he sits down at the table, his head in his hands again, and looks at the linoleum tiles. The heel of his shoe mindlessly kicks at the missing chip where he starts each dance. His head turns from side to side, as though saying,
No
.

She touches his shoulder, then bends down and kisses the top of his head. She longs to put her arms around his neck, beg him not to be sad.

“You’re in love with that Angel Morez, aren’t you?”

“This is about you and me . . . and it’s over.” Standing up, rearranging the chairs the way Harry likes, she walks toward the door. “I’ve got to go now.”

Year after year, everything has been the same—the words, the mirror, La Mega, the steps, his touch. Week after week, even after she and Angel won the Latin ballroom championship, she has climbed the three flights of stairs to Harry’s apartment every Friday night.

“I’m going now.”

“You just got here. We didn’t dance.”

Though she is certain of what she is doing, as she closes the door behind her for the last time, she hesitates.

“
Te amo
.”

Guests should enter with spirit and cheerfulness into the various plans that are made for their enjoyment.

                
—Thomas E. Hill,
Evils of the Ball
, 1883

G
o on, Angel, open it.” Maria seems embarrassed as she hands him a small white box.

“Why are you giving me a present?” When she won’t meet his gaze, he is reminded of those first nights at Our Lady of Sorrows.

“Because I’ve never given you anything,” she responds. “Because you’ve been so good to me. Stood by me. Go on, open it.” She is so still while he holds the white box, it seems she can’t be breathing.

“I should be giving
you
a present. You’re graduating next week.” He shakes the box near his ear, listening to the sound of metal against cardboard and the rustling of tissue. “What is it?” Looking up, he notices a vein, small and blue, pulsing on her neck.

She gives him a jab in the ribs as he unties the satin ribbon, smooths it, then slowly rolls it around his fingers. She grabs it from him and is about to toss it out the window.

“Hey! No throwing stuff out the window.”

“You’re driving me crazy, Angel. Since when are you so compulsive? If you don’t open it, I will!”

“Smells like a new car.” He sniffs around the edges of the box, and she tries to take it away from him. Finally, taking off the cover, he takes hold of a heavy silver buckle in one hand and watches as a black alligator belt uncurls in a downward spiral. “
Amore mío
.”

“Do you really like it?” Her face breaks into the most radiant smile of relief.

“
Si
.”

“I want you to know it’s over with Harry.” She pauses. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I thought so much about it. I don’t know if anyone—if you—can understand my relationship with him. I don’t know how it began, but it was something I kept secret for too long. Partly from shame, and partly from a fear of being found out.

“School always comes easy to me,” she continues. “The most important thing is, I do it to show Papi that I can make something of myself. He wants me to be a success, and I want to succeed. For him and for me. That’s my head. But in my heart I want to dance. You know that. You understand that better than anyone. It’s what we share.

“Since I was five, I used to go upstairs. I’d just sit outside Harry’s door and listen to his music. I wanted to learn to dance, more than anything in the world.

“He made me assure him that I would come.” She looks down, wrapping the ribbon around her fingers. “Every Friday night, at the same time. He was obsessed with details and made promises to me, too. I was caught up in it, somehow; all the things a little girl wants, to be beautiful and to dance in a ballroom in a ball gown. I wanted those things and . . . I . . . I had to be there. Those Friday nights with Harry went on for so long, they seemed a part of my life. Then he got this crazy idea to take me to Buenos Aires to dance. I just went along with it. I think he really believed it would happen.”

“He’s an old man,” Angel says.

“I know.” Her hands are very still now as she speaks. “I can’t lie, there was something hypnotic, something magical, almost exquisite about dancing with him. You know what it’s like, dancing with someone special. It doesn’t matter what they look like or how old they are. I’d forget who I was. I’d forget that he was an old man.

“You won’t tell Papi? Promise me, Angel. Please, tell me that you won’t tell my father. He would kill me. Promise me, please. I don’t think he’d ever forgive me. I’m all he’s ever had. Since my mom died, it’s just the two of us.”

It surprises Angel to hear Maria mention her mother. She almost never speaks of her, which is a relief, because he has always known that her mother isn’t dead. Everyone knows about her mother but Maria. Years before, his parents told him that Vivianna Rodriguez had run off with a man she’d been seeing behind Manuel’s back. Manuel wouldn’t allow anyone to speak of her again, and Angel has been sworn to keep the secret from Maria. He’s wanted to tell her, because he doesn’t believe in lies. But it’s her father’s truth to tell, not his.

“I won’t tell him.”

“How did you find out?”

“I had to know. When you didn’t go out, and I saw that Korn lived in the building, I went up on the roof across the street.”

“Harry taught me to dance. I couldn’t stop going up there. I didn’t know how to stop.”

“You always knew how to dance. You said that he loves you, Maria. Do you love him?”