Dancing in the Dark (7 page)

But whether I understood or not was not the point. The point was, he trusted me with his dreams. “You’ll be somebody,” I told him.

If he had gotten old, would he have been satisfied? Would he have been able to sit back and say, “Yes, I missed nothing. People noticed. What I did mattered. I mattered”?

“Talk to me, Edna,” he said sometimes.

“What about?”

“You. I’ve told you what I want, now it’s your turn. Tell me what you want.”

I wanted him; but that was too bold a thing to say.

“I’m not sure. I’m not like you, I’m not sure what I want.”

“But you must have some ideas, some plans. For what you’ll do when you graduate.”

“Well, there’s only so much you can do with a degree in English. I’ll probably end up teaching.” Dreary prospect; one reason I didn’t care to look beyond the slim figure unwound
in my living room, whose presence astonished me and seemed a miracle, which I couldn’t tell him because it would say far too much about the fear.

“And get married some day?” His eyes were glinting, laughing: testing my intent to trap him?

“Maybe. If it happens.”

“But you’re not really aiming at anything in particular? There’s nothing you have in mind that you really want to do?”

He made me feel very small and useless. Amazed, he was, that someone young and starting out would not have a dream. I could have said, perhaps, “I’ve thought of telling stories, or seeing Timbuktu.” But those were only fantasies.

“Okay then,” he was saying, “if there’s nothing special you want to do, what do you want to be?”

There was a difference? I frowned and shook my head. I might have said, “I want to be safe,” or “I want to be happy,” but that would have disappointed him, and sounded stupid even unspoken and I didn’t want to answer stupidly, so kept silent.

I do see now, though, what he might have meant. I spent all those years with him assuming that I was what I was doing and that I was doing what I was. But now I’ve done something that must be different from what I am, I cannot be a person who would do that. So maybe that’s sort of what he meant. Although nothing so drastic, I’m sure.

“You want kids?”

“Well yes, I suppose so.” It was not a matter of longing for children, no maternal yearnings and growlings deep in my body somewhere; only an assumption. Children appeared in people’s lives, the order of things, and I supposed that in the order of things they would appear in mine. What was inconceivable, although becoming less so with Harry in my living
room when he could have been other places, was the gap between who I was and getting there.

“I can see you as a mother. You’d be a good one.”

Possibly that was true.

Other nights, other questions. “Tell me about your family,” he demanded, and I did what I could.

“It doesn’t sound to me as if you like them much.”

“But of course I love them.” Startled. “They’re my family.”

“Maybe. But it doesn’t sound as though you like them.”

He tried to make me see these differences: between being and doing, liking and loving. He was much wiser than I.

He always seemed to see things more clearly. He wasn’t afraid. Except once, he was afraid.

His eyes were open and he was looking at me. “You don’t like talking about yourself, do you? You’re shy.”

It was the kindness, the rare gentleness on his face, the care, that did it.

“I don’t know how.”

That just came blurting out, and the words hung there all by themselves. It shook me, hearing the echoes of them. There was some great rock lodged in my chest that had been there as long as I could remember, so that I had taken its weight for granted, and all of a sudden it was breaking into splinters and pieces were flying loose and the weight was gone and I was trembling, my face was all screwing up on itself and tears were pouring down it, out of my control.

“Hey!” He must have been astounded. “What’s the matter? Edna? What is it?” His arms were around me, a hand was pressing my face into his shoulder and he was rocking me back and forth, back and forth, crooning, “Hey, hey, it’s all right,” a lullaby, letting me weep.

Oh, sometimes I had cried—as a child for hurt knees, in my teens for loneliness—but never before like this, not with my whole body wrenching like some kind of fit, tears flushing all my veins and arteries. It hurt, and I wanted to stop; but also didn’t want to, the rocking and crooning were pleasant and comforting and kept me safe while I cried. It went on and on while I thought, “Oh God, it’s so awful,” by which I meant everything, I think, up till then, and also, “This is so nice.” It made it hard to stop, but finally the tears hit bone and finished, and I felt limp and weary and was hiccuping as well. I thought, “I must really trust him to be able to do this.” And then thought, “So I must really love him.” I’d only permitted that word in fantasy before, made-up conversations, drifting off to sleep alone.

I straightened, wiped my face. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I must look awful.” I didn’t want him to see me ugly, now that I was alert to love right here in the flesh. One of the things I understood was looking one’s best in order to get love in return.

“You look fine.” He was stroking my hair, and down along my shoulder and my arm. His voice was so gentle. If mine was shaken, his was kind.

I think now that if he had never seen me weep, we never might have married. I think it made that difference.

Later, I could say to him, without a tremor or a hint of tears, “You know, I’ve never heard anybody in my family say, ‘I love you.’ Nobody has ever said it.” I now found that strange, although it hadn’t occurred to me quite that way before. Now I could see because I was away and because Harry was teaching me to see and because I could trust and therefore love him.

“Well then, why don’t you say it? Maybe it only takes one person and you’d shake things up so everybody could.”

But it would be like walking naked in front of them. Everything might disintegrate with the shock.

His people, when I eventually met them, were quite different. His mother was small and grey-haired and charming and his father was big and tall and grey-haired and courtly. They touched each other often and smiled at Harry. Just small touches, a pat on the hand or the back. They seemed fond of each other, and they were proud of Harry. He was their only child. “That makes a difference,” he said. “They only had me to love.”

Yes, well that hurt a bit, although he wouldn’t have meant it to.

They were well-dressed and prosperous. His mother wore a grey silk dress that made her hair glint at the lunch at which Harry introduced us all, and his father wore a charcoal three-piece suit. Harry, too. “It’s the family uniform,” he joked.

I wore a new dress that Harry had helped me choose. I had only ordinary school clothes, skirts and sweaters. This dress was cotton, ivory with thin pink stripes. Plain, with matched buttons down the front and a matching belt around the waist. Simple, and a bit expensive. Another thing I was learning: that simplicity can cost more than the elaborate, and is in better taste.

I also bought white pumps and a small white handbag for the occasion.

They were pleasant and polite and kind and proper. Prosperous, although not rich, and their prosperity and satisfaction showed in small ways that made them different from my family—the way they handled their forks, the way they ate—the meal a ceremony of some pleasure, not an uncomfortable tongue-tying necessity. I managed to say some things about myself and to ask polite questions in return. Harry
carried things along. It seemed he could take care of any awkward moments. Afterward he said they liked me. “They said you seem a nice girl,” and he grinned as if we knew much better. It was a new pleasure to be secretly daring, cleverly deceptive; because by then we were going to bed together, an astonishing leap for someone like me so many years ago.

I wonder what they would have thought of me if they had known. I wonder how I felt myself.

Our two families at the wedding, such a contrast. Except for Stella, of course, who danced and danced and seemed more likely to be Harry’s sister than mine.

H
e had a wonderful body.

“Edna, come on,” he said. “I love you.” I could never, despite my joy and greed for him, have been the first to say those words. But now he demanded, “You love me, don’t you?” It was hard: as if the words were taboo, and I could be struck down for saying them.

True enough, one can be. They leave quite a gap.

I thought myself a moral person, and this was more than twenty years ago, when these things mattered. But Harry’s and mine was a separate world, a small and enclosed universe, and nothing outside seemed to apply here.

He undressed me slowly, gently, and with admiration in each step. He kissed each breast and then, startlingly, my thighs. He was—almost pure about it; as if he were removing wrappings from a lovely statue. As if the object were to worship, not to hold.

But he did hold. I lay beneath blankets while he undressed. He was much quicker with himself than with me: swift, efficient undoing of buttons, a shrug to discard the shirt, a zipper rasp, hands thrust beneath elastic, bending, stepping free,
sitting on the end of the bed, leaning over for the socks and then standing and this was it, a naked man.

I thought of mirrors and pillows and what had been unimaginable then and would now be real.

He slid beneath the blankets with me, turned on his side. For a while he just touched fingers and lips lightly here and there. I felt, now and then, tremors rippling through his body, but he was patient.

This was pleasant. It really did feel fine, as I’d imagined, to feel the length of a body, warm all the way down, alongside mine.

I was nervous when he pulled the covers back and raised himself up on one elbow to stare at me; but I was proud, too, that my body did not have obvious flaws. His did not either, although I could see his bones. It was fine and hard and slim.

He never let his body go. Neither of us let ourselves get flabby.

The act itself wasn’t long enough for me to absorb all the things it meant. That here he was, this man, this real warm flesh, this piece of magic. I was too amazed to be very aware of the thing itself.

But we did it again and again. There was plenty of time. There were hours in that little bed. It remained a miracle, to have this body everywhere around me.

Afterward, when he collapsed, his face in my neck and the length of him a warm weight along the length of me, that was the time I liked best: when I could stroke his shoulders and his hair, tenderness and gentleness in my own hands, repaying his before. That was my time, afterward.

We slept curled together. Nothing could reach me, with his body wrapped behind mine, a long arm flung over my ribs, across my breasts.

It wasn’t the way one reads about, all that ecstasy in novels. I guess that was somehow what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that way at all. I thought it was probably better, in a way, to feel the warmth and tenderness, if not the passion.

He
felt the passion, I’m sure that was unmistakable. And it made me a bit uneasy. It seemed wrong for him to need me so much, to show so much desire, when the truth, apart from bodies, was the opposite.

I prefer to give than to receive; to need than to be needed; to want than to be wanted. The pressure of being given to, wanted, needed, is hard for me.

When I was a girl kissing pillows and mirrors, I thought, “Well, this is practice. It will be different with the real thing.”

Of course it was different. Pillows and mirrors do not kiss breasts or hold you in the night.

But I’d thought the difference would be something else: that in the act there would be a loss of self, a splitting of bonds. I thought when it happened I would soar beyond myself to some place unaware and free. That I might disappear completely. I’d imagined some transcendence that would be unimaginable and indescribable.

I was amazed by the kind of magic there was in that small bed with Harry; but also amazed that the other magic, apparently, was an illusion.

Because all the time, each time, before and while he was inside and afterward, there I was, my body and all my thoughts, alert to each sensation and every move, all the pantings and perspiration. Not for a moment was I lost.

Are there people who get lost? Or do the books lie, as they seem to have about so many other things?

But I was safe.

I was safe even in ways I hadn’t considered. I must have assumed that if outside rules did not apply in our two-person world, outside accidents would also not occur.

Harry was not so foolish. He must have been looking at it all quite differently from me, and it’s just as well, although ironic that it turned out to be unnecessary.

There were strange shufflings and cracklings, clumsy shiftings, but I didn’t catch on right away what he was doing. Afterward, there was a small damp milky balloon twisted shut with a knot, lying beside the bed.

It was repulsive, a white slug of a thing, and Harry caught my surprised grimace. “It’s a safe, honey,” he said, and leaning over me, picked it up. “So you don’t get pregnant. See all those little maybe-babies? Zillions of the little devils.”

Later he told me he didn’t like using them. “You don’t feel as much as you do without them.” So what did he feel? So much pumping and desire with them, how much without?

Such a puzzle to understand someone else’s body. Oh, I could
watch
his, he encouraged me to look at him and even touch him, and I got used to the sight of him rising and flushing and the feeling of him jerking and throbbing to the touch of my fingertips; and later I could see him shrinking, fading, and withdrawing. But how it happened, that was some excitement I could not grasp.

He tried to watch me in the same way, but I wouldn’t let him. Those parts, I think, are not beautiful. Those parts of him weren’t beautiful either, but he was so proud. He looked at himself sometimes with wonder, as if he also didn’t understand it. It must be odd to be a man, so exposed. In women, everything is tucked away and hidden.