Dancing After Hours (9 page)

She knew her bitterness was real, earned over the years of indulging herself, and she must not do that anymore, nor allow anyone to do it with her. She held Andrew at bay for four weeks. But he was so sweet, so good to her, and last night she took again the old risk of having him too quickly, so losing him too soon: when he followed her into the apartment for a nightcap, she turned on him with a long kiss and embrace that lasted while she backed down the hall and into her bedroom and unbuckled his belt and unzipped and pulled his pants free of his hips. Now she would not be able to keep him out of her bed again, and she would not want to, and she wished that in the month since they went side by side from the fruit and vegetables through the rest of the store, he had said he wanted children or had at least noticed cute ones in the city or at the beach. She wanted him awake, so she got up and brushed her
teeth and made coffee, and when she came back to bed, carrying the cups, he was in the bathroom. She placed the cups on the one bedside table; it was brown wood, and on it were a clock radio and a shaded lamp. Once in the night, while making love, she had switched on the light and watched Andrew’s face. She sat in bed now and pulled the sheet over her lap. She heard his light steps in the hall and watched the doorway to see him walk in naked. She looked at all of him she could see and he smiled. When he sat on the bed, she gave him his coffee and said: “Do you like it in the morning the way you like it after dinner?”

“Just the same,” he said, and kissed her. She tasted toothpaste, and she liked thinking of him using her toothbrush. He sipped the coffee with the cream and one teaspoon of sugar, then put the cup on the table with hers and kissed her and touched her. She was happy to be making love again on a Sunday morning, but something distracted her, and she could not come; when he did, she moaned and moved faster and he believed her. The coffee was still hot enough; they sat up to drink it, and he said: “Do you eat breakfast?”

“Sometimes. Would you like eggs or something? Pancakes?”

“Let me take you out for brunch.”

She thought of them coming back from brunch to make love again, to fall asleep in midafternoon, and she saw him going home to his shower and razor and clothes, and the sun setting while she put a frozen dinner in the microwave so she could eat before dark; she saw the last shadows in the courtyard below the kitchen and on the street in front of her apartment; saw herself
driving in dusk to the video store. She wanted a cigarette but she had quit and you could never get one from a man anymore. He was watching her.

“So,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

“Did you ever smoke?”

“No. Did you?”

“I quit at New Year’s.” She looked away from him, at the sunlit wall, and drank from her cup. “I had a friend once. A girlfriend, from college. Mona Baker. She kept her maiden name when she got married. She was married for six years, and I swear to God she loved him the whole time; I’d have known it if she didn’t.” She looked at Andrew. “When she was three months pregnant with their first child, he killed her.”

“Jesus. In a fight?”

“No. He never got drunk. He never hit her. You’d see them together, and you’d think,
That’s how a couple should be
. He watched her when she talked. He actually listened to her. No: he planned it. And near the end, while he was planning it, nobody could see anything different between them. Not even Mona. This was three years ago.” She closed her eyes and in their darkness those three years fell away and she clearly saw Mona’s face and blond hair on the day they’d had lunch together. She opened her eyes; Andrew was sipping his coffee, watching her over the cup. “You should have seen him, the proud father-to-be.”

“I don’t understand somebody like that. Usually it’s passion.”

“What is?”

“Homicide. Except with the Mafia. Your friend’s husband was sick.”

“He was her husband. They made love. They wanted a child. Or she thought he did.”

“Was there another woman?”

“No. He wanted the money.”

“What money?”

“The insurance.”

“How much?”

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand.”

“For what?”

“Who knows? His dreams. She thought she had hers. First they bought a house. Good-bye to apartments.” She glanced around the bedroom and saw in her mind the small bathroom, and the kitchen with no space for a table, and the living-and-dining room that faced brick apartments across the street. Sunlight was on the wicker chair now; over its back, her dress from last night lay on Andrew’s shirt and pants. “It was a good house in a good neighborhood, an easy drive to Boston. That was one reason they chose it, and the other was the schools.” She looked at Andrew. “Can you imagine that? For the schools.”

“Did they get him for first-degree?”

“Yes. He’s in prison till he dies.”

“When he’s old, they’ll let him out.”

“Then maybe somebody in her family will kill him.”

“You said her name was Baker.” He looked amused, close to smiling.

“What’s that mean?”

“Never mind.”

“No. What?”

“A joke. Forget it.”

“What joke. Tell me.”

“I was going to say Baker isn’t Italian.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should go live in Sicily. Maybe that’s where the men are.” He touched her arm, but she twisted away. With one long swallow she drank the last of her coffee and put the cup on the table. “Probably they have one Goddamn cigarette for you with your morning coffee.”

She looked over the table at the shadowed wall and brown louvered closet door.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, Tess. I’ll go get some.”

He stroked her back with his palm, and soon she felt only that, his hand on her spine and muscles; then she turned to him and said: “I’m sorry. I loved her so much.”

“Is that store on the corner open?”

He reached past her and placed his cup beside hers.

“No. I mean yes, it is, but I don’t want to smoke. But thank you.” Still his face looked troubled, his body poised. With her left hand she touched his cheek. “Really. Okay?” She watched his face settle. Then she moved her hand to her brow, touched it with her fingertips. “He shot her in the face. Here.” She lowered her hand and held the sheet covering her legs. “He used one of those snub-nosed thirty-eights. For a long time I tried not to see movies with guns in them, but that’s not easy. I was dating. I didn’t want to seem weird. And I’d see those guns on the screen, and I’d see Mona turning to look at him, maybe to smile, maybe to say something, and seeing it pointed at her face. She was in the bedroom. She was in her nightgown, brushing her hair at the mirror. He came in with the gun behind his back. When he confessed, he said he wanted to do it while she was asleep, but there would be blood
on the bed. He wanted it to look like they heard a guy in their room and woke up. Like he went for the guy and Mona was going to the phone and the guy pulled out a gun and shot her.”

“They didn’t have a phone beside the bed?”

“No. They didn’t like a phone in the bedroom; they turned off the ringer at night; the upstairs phone was in the hall; they—
Jesus
.”

“What?”

“I hate saying ‘they.’ ” She looked at Andrew’s face, his eyes calm, lips relaxed, a man listening to a story, her lover right now, maybe her boyfriend, and her thirty-six years of life seemed very long, with too many stories ever to tell to anyone. “He shot her, then knocked a chair over and dumped her jewelry box on the floor. Then he held the gun in his left hand and shot his right shoulder, and put the gun in the toilet tank and called the police. But they saw through his story at the hospital and found the gun.”

“There must have been another woman.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars isn’t enough. Not to kill for.”

“And love is?”

“Nothing is. I’m only thinking a combination of the two might work on somebody. If he’s sick to begin with.”

“Well there wasn’t. He wanted to buy a fucking nightclub.”

His eyebrows arched as he smiled.

“I’ve never heard you say that.”

“You did last night.”

He lowered his eyes while a brief and faint blush colored
the skin beneath them. Then it was gone, and he looked at her again.

“He didn’t want to be married anymore. He wanted money, then sure, other women. But he didn’t have one yet. I keep seeing her face. Turning from the mirror. She probably saw him in the mirror. And she turned and he pointed the gun and then that would be what she saw. The hole of the barrel. And his face above it. I just keep seeing her.” She heard tears in her voice, but she kept them from her eyes. “And I see her one other time. One day when we had lunch.” She closed her eyes and saw the small table with the white cloth, and the glasses of Burgundy and bowls of green pea soup, and Mona in a blue sweater. “She had seventeen days and sixteen nights to live. We were eating soup, and she was telling me he had taken out more life insurance. On each of them. She was telling me this, like you tell anything that’s casual, that just comes to your mind, and she was bringing the spoon to her mouth, just like this—” She moved her right hand, shaped to hold a spoon, up level with her breasts and stopped it there. “Then she said: ‘I don’t know why he’s taking out so much insurance on me.’ And she held the spoon there for a moment, looking at me. Then she waved her left hand past her eyes, just once. Like she was fanning smoke away from them. Then she brought her spoon to her mouth, and I don’t remember saying anything or even thinking anything; maybe I said because of the baby, maybe I thought it, I don’t know. Who does? Who knows anything? We started talking about something else, and there it was, there was the truth, there and gone. Is that what she was pushing away? If she had just held the spoon or put it back in the bowl,
if she had just frozen in her chair and really looked very closely right in front of her eyes. Do you think she could have seen it?” He was shaking his head, and she saw the wariness in his eyes, but she could not stop. “Is that what happens? We lie and lie to ourselves till we can’t even know our husband doesn’t love us anymore, can’t even know he hates us, he wants us dead dead dead in the ground, he wants to kill us, never mind we made a baby with him, never mind we’re carrying the baby, never mind how much we fucked him and sucked him and looked pretty for him, you probably didn’t hear me say love last night either, I certainly didn’t hear you say it, I know, I know, it’s my fault for—”

She could not look at his eyes anymore, so she closed hers. He was not touching her, but his smells and weight and movements on the mattress surrounded her; yet at the same time she felt enclosed by something as blank as air but solid. She lowered her chin to her breastbone, and she slowed her breathing, and saw and heard what she wanted this morning with Andrew: he walked in naked from the bathroom and said:
Good morning
, and she said:
Good morning, did you sleep well?
and he said:
Yes
, and got into bed, and she handed him the cup of coffee and he sipped it and said:
Perfect
, and said:
How are you?
and she said:
Fine, and you?
He said:
Good. It’s a beautiful day
, and she said:
When the wind is blowing from the east, you can smell the ocean
, and he said:
There’s no wind today
, and she said:
No, and it feels humid; it’ll be hot
, and he said:
Maybe we’ll get some rain
.

She opened her eyes. In his she could see flight like birds, flying inward through that lovely blue, down to his heart. Birds that made no sound at all, and she heard his breath and her own, and when he looked
away from her, looked straight ahead and bent his knees, she heard the sheets on his legs, and when he placed his folded arms on his knees, she heard the mattress move. She looked at the left side of his face until she heard the air outside her window.

I
N COLLEGE, LUANN WAS MIRTHFUL AND
romantic, an attractive girl with black hair and dark skin and eyes. She majored in American Studies, and her discipline kept her on the dean’s list. Her last name was Arceneaux; her mother’s maiden name was Voorhies, and both families had come to Maine from Canada. Her parents and sister and brother and LuAnn often gestured with their hands as they talked. Old relatives in Canada spoke French.

LuAnn’s college years seemed a fulfillment of her adolescence; she lived with impunity in a dormitory in Boston, with both girls and boys, with drinking and marijuana and cocaine; at the same time, she remained under the aegis of her parents. They were in a small town three hours north by bus; she went there on a few
weekends, and during school vacations, and in summer. She was the middle child, between a married sister and a brother in high school. Her parents were proud of her work, they enjoyed her company, and they knew or pretended they knew as little about her life with friends as they had when she lived at home and walked a mile to school. In summer during college she was a lifeguard at a lake with a public beach. She saved some money and her parents paid her tuition and gave her a small allowance when she lived in the dormitory. They were neither strict nor lenient; they trusted her and, at home, she was like a young woman of their own generation: she drank and smoked with them, and on Sundays went to Mass with them and her brother. She went to Sunday Mass in Boston, too, and sometimes at noon on weekdays in the university chapel, and sitting in the pew she felt she was at home: that here, among strangers, she was all of herself, and only herself, forgiven and loved.

This was a time in America when courting had given way to passion, and passion burned without vision; this led to much postcoital intimacy, people revealing themselves to each other after they were lovers, and often they were frightened or appalled by what they heard as they were lying naked on a bed. Passion became smoke and left burned grass and earth on the sheets. The couple put on their clothes, fought for a few months, or tried with sincere and confessional negotiation to bring back love’s blinding heat, then parted from each other and waited for someone else. While LuAnn was in college, she did not understand all of this, though she was beginning to, and she did not expect her parents to understand any of it. She secretly took birth control pills
and, when she was at home, returned from dates early enough to keep at bay her parents’ fears. At Mass she received Communion, her conscience set free by the mores of her contemporaries and the efficacy of the pill. When her parents spoke of drugs and promiscuity among young people, she turned to them an innocent face. This period of enjoying adult pleasures and at times suffering their results, while still living with her parents as a grown child, would end with the commencement she yearned for, strove for, and dreaded.