Dancing After Hours (23 page)

It would be something like that
, she thought now,
something ineffable that comes from outside and fills us; something that changes the way we see what we see; something that allows us to see what we don’t
.

She served four people at the bar, and Jeff came through the swinging door with two plates and forks and knives, and went through the gate and around the bar to Alvin and Drew. He stood talking to them; Alvin took the plate Jeff had put in front of Drew, and began cutting the steak. Jeff walked back to the bar, and Emily opened two bottles of Tecate and pulled the glasses out of the ice chest. Jeff said: “Nice, Emily.”

Something lovely spread in her heart, blood warmed her cheeks, and tears were in her eyes; then they flowed down her face, stopped near her nose, and with the fingers of one hand she wiped them, and blinked and wiped her eyes, and they were clear. She glanced around the bar; no one had seen. Jeff said: “Are you all right?”

“I just had a beautiful memory of Roland Kirk.”

“Lucky man.” He held the bottle necks with one hand, and she put the glasses in his other hand; he held only their bottoms, to save the frost.

“I didn’t know him. I saw him play once. That’s him now.”

“That’s him? I was listening in the kitchen. The oil bubbled in time.”

“My blood did, that night.”

“So you cry at what’s beautiful?”

“Sometimes. How about you?”

“It stays inside. I end up crying at silly movies.”

He took the beer to Alvin and Drew, and stood talking; then he sat with them. A woman behind Emily at the bar called her name, and the front door opened and Rita in a peach shirt and jeans came in, and looked at Drew and Alvin and Jeff. Then she looked at Emily and smiled and came toward the bar. Emily smiled, then turned to the woman who had called; she sat with two other women. Emily said: “All around?”

“All around,” the woman said.

Emily made daiquiris in the blender and brought them with both hands gripping the three stems, then went to Rita, who was standing between two men sitting at the bar. Rita said: “Home sucked.” She gave Emily a five-dollar bill. “Dry vermouth on the rocks, with a twist.”

Emily looked at Jeff and Alvin and Drew; they were watching and smiling. She poured Rita’s drink and gave it to her and put her change on the bar, and said: “It’s a glorious race.”

“People?” Rita said, and pushed a dollar toward Emily. “Tell me about it.”

“So much suffering, and we keep getting out of bed in the morning.”

She saw the man beside Rita smiling. Emily said to him: “Don’t we.”

“For some reason.”

“We get hungry,” Rita said. “We have to pee.”

She picked up the vermouth and went to Jeff and Alvin and Drew; Jeff stood and got a chair from another table. Alvin stuck Drew’s fork into a piece of meat and placed the fork between Drew’s fingers, and Drew raised it to his mouth. He could grip the French fries with his fingers, lift them from the plate. Kay went to their table and, holding her tray of glasses against her hip, leaned close to Rita and spoke, and Rita laughed. Kay walked smiling to the bar.

When Alvin and Drew finished eating, Drew held a cigarette and Rita gave him a light. Emily had seen him using his lighter while Rita was at home. He could not quite put out his cigarettes; he jabbed them at the ashtray and dropped them and they smoldered. Sometimes Alvin put them out, and sometimes he did not, and Emily thought about fire, where Drew lived, then wondered if he were ever alone. Jeff stood with their empty plates and went to the kitchen, and she thought of Drew, after this happened to him, learning each movement he could perform alone, and each one he could not; learning what someone else had to help him do, and what someone else had to do for him. He would have learned what different people did not like to do. Alvin did not smoke, or he had not tonight. Maybe he disliked touching cigarettes and disliked smelling them burning to the filter in an ashtray, so sometimes he put them out and sometimes smelled them. But he could empty bags of piss, and wipe shit. Probably he inserted the catheter.

Two summers ago a young woman came to work as a bartender, to learn the job while doing it. Jeff worked
with her, and on her first three days the noon crowd wanted fried clams, and she told Jeff she could not stand clams but she would do it. She picked them up raw and put them in batter and fried them, and they nauseated her. She did not vomit, but she looked all through lunch as if she would. On the fourth day, Jeff cooked, but when she smelled the frying clams while she was making drinks, she could see them raw and feel them in her hands and smell them, and she was sick as she worked and talked with customers. She had learned the essential drinks in four days and most of the rare ones, and Jeff called a friend who managed a bar whose only food was peanuts, to make the customers thirsty, and got her a job.

So, was anyone boundless? Most of the time, you could avoid what disgusted you. But if you always needed someone to help you simply live, and that person was disgusted by your cigarettes, or your body, or what came out of it, you would sense that disgust, be infected by it, and become disgusted by yourself. Emily did not mind the smell of her own shit, the sight of it on toilet paper and in the water. There was only a stench if someone else smelled it, only disgust if someone else saw it. Drew’s body had knocked down the walls and door of his bathroom; living without this privacy, he also had to rely on someone who did not need him to be private. It was an intimacy babies had, and people like Drew, and the ill and dying. And who could go calmly and tenderly and stoutly into his life? For years she had heard married women speak with repugnance of their husbands: their breath, their farts, their fat stomachs and asses, their lust, their golf, their humor, their passions, their loves. Maybe Jeff’s wife was one of
these; maybe she had been with him too long; maybe he took home too many fish.

Kirk had said: “Know what I mean?” To love without the limits of seeing; so to love without the limits of the flesh. As Kirk danced through the crowd, he had hugged women and men, not knowing till his hand and arm touched their flesh. When he hugged Emily, she had not felt like a woman in the embrace of a man; she melded; she was music.

Alvin stood and came to the bar and leaned toward her and said: “Are we close to a motel?”

“Sure. Where did you come from?”

“Boston.”

“Short trip.”

“First leg of one. He likes to get out and look around.” He smiled. “We stopped for a beer.”

“I’m glad you did. You can use the bar phone.”

She picked up the telephone and the book beside the cash register and put them on the bar. She opened the Yellow Pages. Alvin said: “We need the newest one.”

“Are the old ones bad?”

“Eye of a needle.”

“Are you with him all the time?”

“Five days a week. Another guy takes five nights. Another the weekend, day and night. I travel with him.”

“Have you always done this work?”

“No. I fell into it.”

“How?”

“I wanted to do grand things. I read his ad, and called him.”

“What grand things?”

“For the world. It was an abstraction.”

———

Now the bar was closed and they had drawn two tables together; Emily was drinking vodka and tonic, Louis Armstrong was playing, and she listened to his trumpet, and to Drew; he was looking at her, his face passionate, joyful.

“You could do it,” he said. “It’s up in Maine. They teach you for—what?” He looked at Alvin. “An hour?”

“At most.”

Kay said to Alvin: “Did you do it?”

“No. I don’t believe in jumping out of airplanes. I don’t feel good about staying inside of one, either.”

“Neither do I,” Emily said.

“You could do it,” Drew said, watching Emily. He was drinking beer, but slowly, and he did not seem drunk. Alvin had been drinking club soda since they ate dinner. “You could come with me. They talk to you; then they take you up.” Emily saw Drew being carried by Alvin and other men into a small airplane, lowered into a seat, and strapped to it. “They told me there was a ground wind. They said if I was a normal, the wind wouldn’t be a problem. But—”

Jeff said: “They said ‘a normal’?”

“No. What the guy said was: ’With your condition you’ve got a ninety percent chance of getting hurt.” Drew smiled. “I told him I’ve lived with nine-to-one odds for a long time. So we went up in their little plane.” Emily could not imagine being paralyzed, but she felt enclosed in a small plane; from inside the plane she saw it take off. “The guy was strong, very confident. Up in the air he lifted me out of the seat and strapped
me to him. My back to his chest. We went to the door of the plane, and I looked at the blue sky.”

“Weren’t you terrified?” Emily lit one of Drew’s cigarettes and placed it between his fingers. When she had cleaned the bar and joined them at the table, she had told him and Alvin her name. Drew Purdy. Alvin Parker. She shook their hands, Alvin rising from his chair; when Drew moved his hand upward, she had inserted hers between his fingers and his palm. His hand was soft.

“It felt like fear,” Drew said. “But it was adrenaline. I didn’t have any bad pictures in my head: like the chute not opening. Leaving a mess on the ground for Alvin to pray over. Then he jumped; we jumped. And I had this rush, like nothing I had ever felt. Better than anything I ever felt. And I used to do a lot, before I got hurt. But this was another world, another body. We were free-falling. Dropping down from the sky like a hawk, and everything was beautiful, green and blue. Then he opened the chute. And you know what? It was absolutely quiet up there. I was looking down at the people on the ground. They were small, and I could hear their voices. I thought I heard Alvin. Probably I imagined that. I couldn’t hear words, but I could hear men and women and children. All those voices up in the sky.”

Emily could see it, hear it, and her arms and breast wanted to hug him because he had done this; her hand touched his, rested on his fingers; then she took his cigarette and drew on it and put it between his fingers and blew smoke over his head.

Kay said: “I think I’d like the parachute. But I couldn’t jump out of the plane.”

Drew smiled. “Neither could I.”

“I don’t like underwater,” Rita said. “And I don’t like in the air.”

“Tell them what happened,” Alvin said.

“He didn’t think I should do it.”

“I thought you should do it on a different day, after what he told you. I thought you could wait.”

“You knew I couldn’t wait.”

“Yes.” Alvin looked at Emily. “It’s true. He couldn’t.”

“I broke both my legs.”

“
No
,” Emily said.

Jeff said: “Did you feel them?”

Rita was shaking her head; Kay was watching Drew.

“No,” Drew said. “They made a video of it. You can hear my legs break. The wind dragged us, and I couldn’t do anything with my legs.”

“He was laughing the whole time,” Alvin said. “While the chute was pulling them on the ground. He’s on top of the guy, and he’s laughing and shouting: ‘This is great, this is great.’ And on the video you can hear his bones snapping.”

“When did you know?” Jeff said.

“On the third day. When my feet were swollen, and Alvin couldn’t get my shoes on.”

“You never felt pain?” Rita said.

“Not like you do. It was like a pinball machine, this little ball moving around. So in the hospital they sent me a shrink. To see if I had a death wish. If a normal sky dives and breaks some bones, they don’t ask him if he wanted to die. They ask quads. I told him if I wanted to die, I wouldn’t have paid a guy with a parachute. I told him it was better than sex. I told him he should try it.”

“What did he say?” Jeff said.

“He said he didn’t think I had a death wish.”

Rita said: “How did you get hurt?”

“Diving into a wave.”

“Oh my God,” Emily said. “I love diving into waves.”

“Don’t stop.” He smiled. “You could slip in the shower. I know a guy like me, who fell off his bed. He wasn’t drunk; he was asleep. He doesn’t know how he fell. He woke up on the floor, a quad.”

She was sipping her third drink and smoking one of Rita’s cigarettes, and looking over Jeff’s head at the wall and ceiling, listening to Paul Desmond playing saxophone with Brubeck. Rita’s face was turned to Kay, and Emily could only hear their voices; Jeff and Alvin and Drew were planning to fish. She looked at them and said: “Paul Desmond—the guy playing sax—once lost a woman he loved to an older and wealthy man. One night he was sitting in a restaurant, and they came in, the young woman and the man. Desmond watched them going to their table and said: ‘So this is how the world ends, not with a whim but a banker.’ ”

Rita and Kay were looking at her.

“I like that,” Drew said.

“He was playing with a T. S. Eliot line. The poet. Who said ‘April is the cruelest month.’ That’s why they called him T. S.”

They were smiling at her. Jeff’s eyes were bright.

“I used to talk this way Five days a week.”

“What were you?” Drew said.

“A teacher.”

She was looking at Drew and seeing him younger, with strong arms and legs, in a bathing suit, running barefoot across hot sand to the water, his feet for the last time holding his weight on the earth, his legs moving as if they always would, his arms swinging at his sides; then he was in the surf, running still, but very slowly in the water; the cold water thrilled him, cleared his mind; he moved toward the high waves; he was grinning. Waves broke in front of him and rushed against his waist, his thighs, his penis. A rising wave crested and he dived into it as it broke, and it slapped his legs and back and turned him, turned him just so, and pushed him against the bottom.

Alvin asked Rita to dance, and Kay asked Jeff. They pushed tables and chairs and made a space on the floor, and held each other, moving to Desmond’s slow song. Emily said: “When this happened to you, who pulled you out of the water?”

“Two buddies. They rode in on the wave that got me. They looked around and saw me. I was like a big rag doll in the water. I’d go under, I’d come up. Mostly under.”