The Art of Living (7 page)

Her husband, Pete Duggers, taught tap-dance in the mirror-walled studio below. He was nearly as small as she was, but thicker, almost stout, in fact, and he looked and moved like some Disney cartoon of a tap-dance teacher. He had a red face and wonderfully merry blue eyes, wore vests and old-fashioned arm-elastics. If he ever touched the floor when he walked (and he did), Joan had been prepared to believe that he did so by whim. Jacqui's movements at the barre had a look not of lightness, cancellation of gravity, but of eloquent, powerful control, as if her muscles were steel and could no more speed up or slow down against her will than the hands of a clock could escape the inclinations of its mainspring. Rising on her toes in the middle of the room—a brief jerk and click as the heel and ankle locked, a brief trembling like a spasm, then the firmness of an iron wedge—she gave the impression that touching her calf or thigh would be like touching a wall. Pete's dancing feet moved, on the other hand, as if swinging by themselves, as if his body were suspended like a puppet's from invisible wires. His taps were light and quick, as if he never put his weight down with either foot, and they rattled out around him as gaily and casually—and as unbelievably fast—as the fingers of his Negro piano player, a tall, flat-haired boy who sat sprawling in his chair with his head laid far over so that he seemed to be always, except for his forearms and fingers, fast asleep. The speed and lightness with which Pete Duggers danced were amazing to behold, but what was truly miraculous, so that it made you catch your breath, was the way he could stop, completely relaxed, leaning his elbow on empty air and grinning as if he'd been standing there for hours, all that movement and sound you'd been hearing pure phantom and illusion. That was unfailingly the climax when he danced: a slow build, with elegant shuffles and turns, then more speed, and more, and more and still more until it seemed that the room spun drunkenly, crazily, all leading—direct as the path of an arrow—to nothing, or everything, a sudden stillness like an escape from reality, a sudden floating, whether terrible or wonderful she could never tell: an abrupt hush as when a large crowd looks up, all at the same moment, and sees an eagle in the sky, almost motionless, or then again, perhaps, the frightening silence one read about in novels when a buzz-bomb shut off over London. He stood perfectly still, the piano was still, his young students gaped, and then abruptly reality came back as the piano tinkled lightly and he listlessly danced and, as he did so, leaned toward his students and winked. “You see? Stillness! That's the magic!”

Olive Street was already going down at that time, so the storefront was shoddy, solo dancer and dance-class pictures on the windows, big, vulgar stars, the glass around the pictures crudely painted dark blue, as if the Duggers School of the Dance were some miserable third-rate establishment not worth breaking into or stealing from, though the door was not locked. But that was a trick—the dancing Duggers had trunkfuls of tricks: artists to the marrow of their chipped and splintered bones. The scuffed, unpainted door in front opened into a scuffed, unpainted entryway with a door to the left and a knotty, crooked stairway leading upward. On the door to the left, a sign said “
TAP DANCE STUDIO
,” and above the worn railing at the side of the stairs, a sign, cocked parallel to the railing, said “
SCHOOL OF THE BALLET
.” When you opened the door to the tap-dance studio for the first time, you did a mighty double-take: there were glittering mirrors with round-arched tops and etched designs of the sort Joan would occasionally discover years later in the oldest London pubs, and above the mirrors there were walls of red and gold and a magnificent stamped-tin ceiling. In fact she'd never completely gotten over her surprise at the elegance inside, though she'd worked there four years, into her college days. It was a large building, at one time a theater. The tap-dance studio—and the ballet studio directly above it—took up the first thirty feet; then there was a railing, also red and gold, from which one looked out at the long, wide ballroom floor, at the front an enormous stage boxed off by ratty, stiff wine-colored velvet curtains, along the side walls candelabra between high, painted panels—dancing graces, Zeus in majesty, nymphs and satyrs, peacocks and fat reclining nudes done in highly unsuccessful imitation of the late style of Rubens.

She'd walked there once with Martin—in those days “Buddy”—when he'd motorcycled in from his college in Indiana and had offered to drive her to work in her father's De Soto. He'd driven fast, as usual, his eyes rolling up to the rear-view mirror, on the look-out for police cars, and had gotten her to work much too early.

“Care to have an interesting experience?” she'd said.

Their footsteps echoed. The ballroom was half dark. They could just make out the carved figures on the ceiling, two storeys up, circling around the empty spaces from which once had hung huge chandeliers.

“It's like a church,” he said. He had a crewcut. Leather jacket. He hung his cigarette off his lip like Marlon Brando. Already he'd written two novels—unpublishable; terrible, in fact, though of course she hadn't said so. She was convinced, in spite of them, that he'd someday be famous, someday when he'd given up James Joyce.

She'd squeezed his hand and they'd stopped and, after a moment, kissed, then walked on, up to the front of the ballroom and up onto the stage, where the Duggers students gave their dance recitals. They looked up at the shuttered lights, ropes, catwalks—it was darker here, spooky, as if the stage machinery belonged not only to a different time but to a different planet. Again they paused to kiss, and he put his arms around her and after a minute she moved his hand to the front of her sweater, then under the sweater to her breast. With his usual difficulty, for all his practice, he unsnapped her bra. She felt her nipples rising, and he pressed closer to her. With a grandiose sweep of his free arm in the direction of the dim, ghost-filled hall, he whispered, “Lady, how would you like to be fucked, right here in front of all these people?”

“Hmm,” she said. After a moment, still with his hand on her breast, her hand keeping it there, she led him toward the further wing and the small door opening on a room she'd discovered weeks earlier, half filled with crates, electric wire, old tools, cobwebs, the rotting frames of old sets. Here and there stood old pieces of furniture—chairs, tables, couches—protected from the dust by tarpaulins. “Maybe we need a rehearsal,” she said. They passed under a high window through which a single crack of light came and she glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes. She stood looking around, both his hands on her breasts, until he finally noticed the couch and went over and pulled away the tarpaulin. As he came into her, huge and overeager, as always—but so was she, so was she—she said, “Isn't this an interesting experience?”

She glanced at Martin—Buddy middle-aged. He stared past the steering wheel, professional, absentminded. They'd slipped from his thoughts already, those years, the Duggers. His hands on the wheel were soft, almost fat, though still strong. She looked at his face. “What are you thinking?” she said.

Martin flicked his eyes open, half apologetic. “Nothing,” he said. “Something Athene tells Odysseus. Nothing.” He looked suddenly embarrassed.

She glanced out the window again, then reached for her purse, opening it, fumbling for a pill.

“Hurting again?”

Her mouth tightened in annoyance at that “again.” “Just tired,” she said.

“We should have taken a plane,” he said, and ducked to look up past the buildings.

The sky was gray, luminous and still, like Lake Erie from one of those hushed, abandoned beaches. She thought of Jacqui Duggers.

“There's still a little coffee in the thermos,” Martin said.

“Coffee?”

“To help swallow the pill.”

“Oh. No, it's done.” His helplessness cheered her. “Odysseus,” she thought. Homer had been the subject of his lecture at Urbana. She smiled a little sadly. So he was wishing, as usual, that he might talk about himself. Not that he would do it; he had far too much taste. And she, for her part … She shook her head and smiled again.

The whole left side of the building, as you entered from the street, was the Duggers' apartment. It was the most beautiful apartment she'd ever seen, though not as original or even as spectacularly tasteful as she'd imagined at the time. She would see many like it in San Francisco, and far more elegant examples of white-on-white in London and Paris. Everything was white, the walls, the furniture, the chains holding up the chandeliers, the wooden shutters on the windows. Against all that white, the things they'd collected stood out in bold relief: paintings, presumably by friends, all very curious and impressive, at least to Joan—smudges, bright splashes of color, one canvas all white with little scratches of gray and bright blue; sculptures—a beautiful abstraction in dark wood, a ballet dancer made out of pieces of old wire, museum reproductions, a mobile of wood and stainless steel; books and records, shelves upon shelves of them. Their record-player was the largest she'd ever seen and had a speaker that stood separate from the rest. Once when Jacqui invited her in, to write Joan her check for her week's work, Jacqui, leading the way to the kitchen, stopped suddenly, turned a ballerina's step, and said, “Joanie, I must show you my shoes, no?” “I'd like to see them,” Joan said. Jacqui swept over to the side of the room, her small hand gracefully flying ahead of her, and pushed open a white sliding door. Joan stared. On tilted shelves that filled half the room's wall, Jacqui had three hundred pairs of tiny shoes. She had all colors—gold and silver, yellow, red, green, some with long ties as bright as new ribbons, some with little bows, some black and plain as the inside of a pocket. “Where'd you
get
all these?” Joan said. Jacqui laughed. “Mostly Paris,” she said. She gave Joan a quick, appraising look, then laughed again. “Dahling, Paris you are going to love. There is a store, a department store, Au Printemps. When you go there, blow a kiss for Jacqui!” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Ah, ze French!”

Years later, the first time Joan shopped at Au Printemps, she would remember that, and would do as she'd been told. And she would remember Jacqui too a few years later when, at Lambert Field in St. Louis, deplaning with her family from a European trip, she was approached by a news crew of very cool, very smart blacks from KSDF-TV, carrying camera and wind-baffled shotgun mike, who asked if she had any suggestions for improvement of the airport's services. “Way-el,” she said thoughtfully, smiling prettily, batting her lashes and speaking in her sweetest Possum Hollow drawl. (Martin and the children had fled into the crowd.) She tapped her mouth with a bejewelled finger and gazed away down the baggage area, then said pertly, as if it were something she'd been thinking for a long, long time and rather hated to bring up, “Ah thank it would be nice if awl these people spoke French.” Her performance was included in that night's local news. Her parents missed it, as was just as well. Relatives telephoned to report with pleasure that Joanie had been on television. No one mentioned that anything she'd said was peculiar.

“I wonder if I'll ever get to Paris,” she'd said that afternoon in Jacqui's apartment.

Jacqui had laughed like a young girl, though she was then over forty. “Keep playing the piano and don't theenk twice,” Jacqui said. “If you don't go to Paris, then Paris will have to come to you.”

Where would they have gone, Joan wondered now, when the neighborhood had grown too dangerous to live in? Were they still alive? It came to her suddenly, for no apparent reason, that Pete Duggers had looked like the hero of her favorite childhood book, Mr. Mixiedough, in the story of the whole world's slipping into darkness. It was a book she'd wanted for Evan and Mary, but there seemed to be no copies left anywhere; not even the book-search people from whom Martin got his rare old books could find a trace of it. Had it been the same, perhaps, with Pete and Jacqui Duggers—swallowed into blackness? She'd asked about him once at the Abbey, on Thirteenth Street in New York, when she'd gone—three times—to a show called
The Hoofers
, which had brought back all the great soft-shoe and tap men. On the sidewalk in front of the theater afterward, while she was waiting for Martin to come and pick her up, she'd talked with Bojangles Robinson and Sandman Sims—they'd shown her some steps and had laughed and clapped their hands, dancing one on each side of her—and she'd asked if either of them had ever heard of Pete Duggers.

The Sandman rolled up his eyes and lifted off his hat as if to look inside it. “Duggers,” he'd said, searching through his memory.

“You say the man worked out of San Looie?” Bojangles said.

“I played piano for his wife,” Joan said. “She taught ballet.”

“Duggers,” said the Sandman. “That surely does sound familiar.”