Come and Join the Dance (7 page)

CHAPTER TEN

H
E HAD SO
many plans. He was going to show her things she had never seen before, reveal the city to her. “Have you ever seen shipyards at night? Have you ever seen white steam coming out of smokestacks with the sky pitch dark? It's terrific! Tomorrow night we'll go to the Brooklyn Navy Yard!” he shouted. “I'll borrow Peter's car.” Water was rushing into the sink in Peter's kitchen, and Anthony was clattering cups and saucers around in it, delighting in the noise he made. He didn't seem to notice her silence. “We'll go back and forth on the Staten Island Ferry and eat hot dogs. Would you like that?”

“I've been on the Staten Island Ferry,” she said.

“Not with me!”

She wanted to be alone—alone with her body and her emptiness and the unchanged face she had seen in the bathroom mirror. He had insisted on making coffee and she didn't want coffee. There was something terrible about having coffee with him now, about watching him move around the kitchen as if their bodies had never even touched, and yet she still smelled like him. If something happened, why didn't it really happen? Instead she was being promised smokestacks and ferry rides as if she were a child. Where was the moment when everything became luminous and the earth shook? She would remember being bored and not knowing what time it was.

“It's late,” she said, not wanting to speak at all, but in a little while she was going to say she had to leave and she didn't want her voice to fail her. She was going to sound pleasant and ordinary. Why wasn't it possible just to leave in silence?

“It's only nine. We've got hours, baby.” His arms swooped down in front of her, put cups on the table, saucers, spoons. His sleeve kept grazing her cheek. She stood up.

“I'm in your way,” she said.

He stared at her uncertainly for a moment, then smiled. “You're not in my way.”

She wished she hadn't gotten up—it was too soon—how silly to have to sit down again. “Well … all right,” she said, subsiding awkwardly into the chair.

He was still looking at her. “You're pretty,” he said with an unnerving eagerness. “I like you best without lipstick.”

“I don't.”

“That's because you're hung-up on being elegant. You like to put on that black dress and have some guy take you downtown and buy you cocktails. Right?”

“Sometimes,” she shrugged, for some reason feeling a little ashamed, almost wanting to tell him that the black dress frightened her, that she had never quite lived up to it. But he was laughing now.

“Oh yes, sometimes!” he joyfully mimicked her. “Listen—we'll do that. That would be terrific. But you'll have to pay—I haven't any bread at all. I'll pay for all the ferry rides.”

She found herself laughing too. “I don't love you, you know,” she said in desperation, “I don't love anybody.”

“Jesus!” he cried. “Who said anything about love?”

“No one.”

“I don't love you. You don't love me. Right?”

“Right!” Susan said emphatically, but it had somehow become impossible to be honest with him even if she told him the truth.

“But—we like each other?” He sat down opposite her and put his feet on the rung of her chair. “You're strange,” he said, as if he were pleased, as if someone had given him a strange little animal to hold in his hands.

“Strange?” She felt a frightened giddiness.

“You like to make everything a little complicated. There's nothing complicated about the Staten Island Ferry.”

“Well … ” she said, “I'm going away in five days, that's all,” believing that less than ever.

“So we'll have five days.” He began to wind a lock of her hair around his fingers. “Let's not be sad now.”

“But I have things to do.”

“What things?” he asked indignantly.

“Oh, shopping, seeing people. All kinds of class meetings.”

“That's shit,” he said. “You don't have to do all that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You'll go to the Staten Island Ferry,” he said a little belligerently. She didn't answer. He unwound her hair and let it go.

“If I were going to be around for more than a week you'd get pretty sick of me,” she said, trying to laugh. “You like to know lots of girls. You like to sit in that bar and talk to everybody and get drunk and say ‘
C'est la vie
.'”

“That's only because I'm not with you.”

“No, you like it. Really. That's the way you see yourself.”

“I see myself with you this week,” he said sadly. “I see us talking and wandering. I see us making love. Then, okay—so you go. It's not so complicated.”

“I don't know,” she said.

“Listen, when I first came to this city, I used to walk everywhere—miles! Just walk and look. I wanted to live in Chinatown.”

“It's late,” she said again.

She couldn't quite look at his eyes, but she saw him moisten his lips with his tongue. “I want to be in my room,” she said. How odd that sounded, but why should it be odd to wish to be in one's room? “I want to be alone.” Too loud, she thought immediately. It came out wrong, false, but she was somehow committed to it.

He had gotten up, was standing at the stove watching the water boil.

“I'm sorry … I'm tired, I guess.”

“Sure,” he said, grimly cheerful, “alone, alone. Greta Garbo has to be alone. Pour some instant in the cups, will you?”

“I don't think I want any.” But he took the pot off the stove and brought it to the table and stood silently waiting for her to open the jar and measure out two tablespoons of coffee. “It's too warm for coffee.” Susan felt as if she were going to suffocate. “I'm sorry … ”

“Don't be sorry.”

“Okay.”

“Look—” he began. She looked at the pot which he still held and began to giggle guiltily. He banged the pot down on the table. “Listen to me!” He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Next time it'll be better. Next time I'll make you come!”

“Your hands are wet!” she cried shrilly.

After a moment, he removed them from her shoulders and with a white, desperate smile began to dry them on his shirt.

“I really do want to leave,” she said, trembling. She made herself stand up.

Anthony strode over to the refrigerator. “We'll have iced coffee,” he said, jerking violently at the ice tray. “It's not too warm for that.”

“Anthony, listen … I … ” He began to pound the ice with his fists. “Oh stop! Please … ” She plucked at his sleeve and was shaken off like a kitten. “Anthony, it's not your fault!”

“Thanks!”

“It had nothing to do with you. It was an experiment.” She had an astonished moment of triumph—she had never been more honest with anyone. “It was an experiment,” she repeated, “that's all.” Everything in the kitchen was rattling. He seemed to be trying to pull the refrigerator down. Suddenly the ice tray came loose in Anthony's hands. He turned slowly and confronted Susan holding it. There was blood running down his fingers—his eyes accused her.

It was horribly quiet in the kitchen. She tried to think of something to say, but one sentence after another shattered inside her. “I don't want any coffee,” she said.

“Why don't you go, then!” he yelled. “What are you hanging around for?”

“I … I just wanted … ” But she couldn't remember ever wanting anything.

“Why don't you
go
!” He flung up his arm and blindly hurled the ice tray away from him, across the room.

There was the sound of glass breaking, falling, splintering all over the floor—then silence until someone shouted down the black tube of the courtyard, “Hey! What's going on down there!” and she saw the smashed pane in the kitchen window, the jagged wound in the glass that had not been there a moment ago. Was the window really broken? But if you thought about things like that, you would begin to fall—slowly, as if you had been dropped out of an airplane in a nightmare. It was strange, too, that the night was a slightly different color where there wasn't any glass, and strange the way Anthony kept looking down at his bleeding hands and then at the window as if it were the window that had hurt him.

“Wow!” he whispered, strangling the word. Was he afraid she would find him ridiculous for talking to himself? Should she offer to help him sweep up the glass, say, “Don't worry about it”—what was expected of her? She remembered the softness of his hair suddenly, the way he had clutched her when they had been in bed, and felt a peculiar hollow ache in her armpits. There was so much loneliness about the way he stood, all alone in the middle of the kitchen, not even angry but as vacant as she was, watching the ice cubes melt on the floor.

She wanted to put her arms around Anthony, let him close his eyes, but he might not understand. He might push her away or begin to kiss her—that would be frightening, humiliating. She folded her arms and pressed them against her body as if she were cold. She would think about it. There was still a little time—Anthony hadn't moved.

The doorbell rang, unreal in the silence, rang again. Without even a final look at her, Anthony rushed out of the room. But how could he go when she had almost decided to touch him? Now he was opening a door, shouting to someone. “I'll pay for everything!” Then the door slammed and she thought she heard him running down the hall to the elevator. There was someone moving around in the living room, but it wasn't Anthony—he was gone. Her arms still folded, Susan confronted only the kitchen's emptiness, the little square of linoleum where Anthony had stood.

“Susan?” She looked up and saw Peter standing in the doorway. “Hello,” he said uncertainly.

“The window's broken,” she said after a long while.

He walked into the kitchen and looked at the window without saying anything, peered down at the glass on the floor. Then his eyes were on her again. “Are you all right?” he asked, half as if he cared, half as if he were just curious.

“Yes,” she whispered, “but the window … ” He was standing exactly where Anthony had stood. A painful lump was forming in her throat.

“Sit down,” Peter said. “Come on.”

“Oh, I'm really all right.”

“Sit.” Peter dragged a chair across the kitchen floor and gently pushed her down on it. He took off his jacket, tossed it into her lap, and knelt down to pick up the glass.

“I'll help you.”

“Just sit there.” Methodically, one by one, he was picking up the splinters and dropping them into the garbage can. He placed the ice tray carefully on the kitchen table.

“Anthony threw it—but it was my fault.”

Kneeling among the pieces of glass, Peter had an odd, secret smile. “Well, it let some air in.” He stood up and walked to the window and thrust his arm through the hole in the pane. “It's a very respectable broken window.” The way he said that reminded her of the careless way he crossed streets, the way he drove his car.

“You don't care.” Her arms had slipped into her lap. She stared down at them wearily, a little surprised.

“Not particularly,” she heard him say. “It's almost summer.”

For a moment she felt a funny abstract hatred for him. “Why don't you break your own windows?”

“Why don't you cry?” Peter asked quietly. His face had collapsed into sadness now that he had stopped smiling.

“I don't know.” The lump in her throat was swelling larger and larger.

“Just cry—you're going to anyway.”

“I don't want to.” A bitter fluid had begun to run down her cheeks. If she cried, she would cry forever. “I don't want to,” she wept, “I don't want to.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

S
HE DIDN'T WANT
to think. The mornings were the worst times. For three mornings she woke up much earlier than she wanted to; the first morning it wasn't even six. She would lie stunned on her bed, afraid to move, and it would only be for the moment of waking that she would not remember anything. The early light in her room would be white and sunless, and the room itself would not be quite familiar to her; it would look as though its space had been subtly altered during the night, as though the objects in it had lost their color, grown larger.

She would not be able to go to sleep again, so she would tell herself that in only two hours it would be time for breakfast and that she could, if she wanted to, get up now and turn on her lamp and even take a shower and put on the dress she was going to wear that day—except that there would still be the problem of what to do before breakfast.

But already she would have begun to remember. Already the scene in Peter's kitchen would be playing itself over and over again, she weeping while Peter watched, the evidence of details accumulating—the color of Peter's shirt, the four beer bottles on the window sill, the coldness of her fingertips when she had pressed them against her eyes. After a while Susan could see it all with such heightened clarity that she would no longer know how much she remembered, how much she imagined.

I ought to get up, she would think—there was no comfort in the damp, twisted sheets of her bed—but her body would be as strengthless and limp as if it had spent the night wrestling a fever. She would not be able to recall what she had dreamed. Better not to know. Better to stop thinking before one knew too much. There was something about Peter that forced too much knowledge upon her. He was as dangerous, as compassionless as a mirror. She would not see him again before she went away. At first she told herself that it was for Kay's sake, but she knew very well that that was not the reason.

When she was leaving that night, he had followed her down the hall to the door. For a moment they had stood facing each other, and she had known that he was holding her there, forcing a dizzying closeness upon her as powerfully as if he had thrust his body against hers. “I'll see you,” he had said to her, not in the casual way that people often said that, but somehow stating a fact. And she had felt—even remembering it she felt—as much joy as terror. She wished it had not been said at all.

The afternoons were easier for her. It was easy to find ways of not being alone. She gave herself up to the college. If Peter called, she would tell him how busy she was now before graduation. The first day she was measured for her gown, and then there was the Class Sing and a speech by the Dean; the second day there was the Class Luncheon. The third day there would be the graduation rehearsal; the fourth, the graduation itself; the fifth, her departure.

Peter didn't call, of course. She knew that he wouldn't; he would wait for her to find him. But she had no time to walk up and down Broadway looking for faces.

Sometimes it amused her that with hardly any effort she could be such a convincing senior. Maybe all that was needed was sheer physical presence and a bland face. Strangers never looked at you hard enough to see that you were sleepwalking. When she went to the Class Sing, only someone listening to her with particular interest would have noticed how few of the songs she knew, that she sang only disjointed fragments of the lyrics, like “youth's happy shore will evermore … ” and something about lifting one's glass on high “
sans souci
.” It had only been a week ago that she had sat in Kay's room and said, “I'm not going to bother to go to anything. I wouldn't even go to graduation if it wasn't for my parents.”

She was glad that Kay hadn't called either. Kay would have made her feel guilty, ashamed, as if she were betraying her as much by going to the Class Sing, the Class Luncheon, as by liking Peter too well.

She found a window on the top floor of the dorms from which she could see all of Broadway. First, the two blocks nearest the college where nothing ever happened, then 113th, 112th in miniature, a reduced Schulte's and Riverside Café and the anonymous figures that skittered in and out of them and could have been anybody. If you had a photograph, she thought, the photograph would contain everything really—not only the people you glimpsed in the streets, but people you couldn't see, people containing invisible thoughts behind walls and other windows. You could have the photograph and look at it forever and know that it contained everything, and it wouldn't be enough. But at least a photograph asked nothing of you, would never watch you cry.

On the day before graduation rehearsal, Susan had just come from the Luncheon, was just crossing the campus on the way to her room, when Mrs. Prosser, the postmistress, suddenly materialized on the same brick path.

Susan felt perfectly calm in a stunned sort of way. It even occurred to her that ironically enough this was the first time she had ever known that Mrs. Prosser was definitely not on duty.

“Miss Levitt,” Mrs. Prosser said, “you still haven't picked up your mail.”

She had nothing to say, no excuse. “I know,” she said. “I'll pick it up.”

“I've never heard of such a thing—a girl not wanting her mail.”

“I know, Mrs. Prosser,” she said politely.

“Well, you come with me now and get it.”

“No … I'll get it later.” Maybe I will get it later, he thought.

But then, without warning, Mrs. Prosser gave her a sudden shrewd, terrible look, as if she knew the most intimate things about her, as if Susan stood before her wearing only her secret dirty underwear. “You're a very peculiar girl, aren't you?” she said in a soft, shocked voice. She turned from Susan without further comment and took up her slow, elderly journey across the campus.

“You're a very peculiar girl.” She was standing on the path exactly where Mrs. Prosser had left her and the words were spinning around and around, shaping themselves into a judgment. She was peculiar. Her terror of Mrs. Prosser was peculiar, her fear of getting her mail. She wouldn't be able to get it now until she had graduated, until she was immune and could stride laughing to the mail desk—“You see, Mrs. Prosser, I've come to get my mail”—as if it were a joke they shared. The letters would be dead by then, and meaningless. She could throw them away unread if she wanted to. But would she ever be immune? Her fear was peculiar. She was peculiar.

She made herself walk the rest of the way to the dorms, made herself climb the stairs, walk down the hall to her room. In her room, she would be temporarily safe.

There was a note on her door. From Mrs. Prosser, she thought, barely surprised. But it was from Kay:

Susan, where are you?