Without Reservations (27 page)

Perhaps it was the memory of dancing at the Latin American Ballroom that made me suddenly decide I wanted to go dancing that night at Lincoln College.

I ran back to the porter’s lodge hoping that Albert would still be there. When I arrived, breathless, he and the group were just setting out. I fell into step next to Ellen, who, I noticed, had changed from pants into a dress and high heels.

She greeted me with an amused look. “I see that maybe I am not the only one in need of some physical contact,” she said, smiling.

When we reached Lincoln College, Albert led us into one of the buildings and through a maze of hallways and steps to a large, almost empty room where our dance instructor, Barry, awaited us.

There were folding chairs placed on the bare wood floors and in the corner an ancient record player was blaring out the Bee Gees version of “Stayin’ Alive.” A few couples and two or three young men were already there, practicing the complicated steps in a way that suggested they did this a lot. One of the young men, particularly—a stocky fellow dancing alone—was really into it. The concentration on his face was like that of a surgeon about to make the first incision in the brain of a patient.

I don’t know what I expected, but somehow this stuffy bare room with its out-of-date sound system was not it.

Barry, however, was the greatest disappointment. Short, potbellied, and balding, Barry appeared to be in his early fifties. He wore a short-sleeved, wildly patterned Hawaiian shirt that stopped just beneath his pot belly. When he spoke, his accent was coarse and unpleasant. Despite all this, Barry exuded self-confidence. He seemed to see himself as Fred Astaire: dashing, debonair, and charming.

To my surprise Barry started us off with a lesson in the waltz. The married couples who’d come along had no trouble stumbling through their steps together; they after all had been partners for years and were used to one another’s mistakes. For those of us who were single it was more difficult. I felt especially timid and retired to a corner chair to watch.

It was interesting to observe the two married couples who’d chosen dancing over Chopin. They were really enjoying themselves, enjoying the physical pleasure of dancing. From my window at Brasenose I’d watch both of these couples walk across the quad
to breakfast. They were always holding hands. I watched them now, laughing and touching on the dance floor, and couldn’t help but feel a surge of envy.

It was only then that I noticed Albert. Albert, who off the dance floor seemed quite reserved, was a sensational and exciting dancer. Tall and elegant, he turned into a different person when he was dancing.

By this time, everyone was having fun. Except me. I had accepted Albert’s invitation to dance, but for some reason felt extremely uncomfortable dancing with him. Within minutes I found myself reverting to my awkward high school personality.
Excuse me. Was that your foot? Sorry. My fault.
My cheeks burned with embarrassment and humiliation.

After a brief turn around the floor, I thanked Albert and returned to sit on the sidelines. I didn’t know why I felt so uptight; there were quite a few people making fools of themselves on the dance floor. So what was stopping me?

A man’s voice interrupted my thoughts: “It’s time you got up and danced,” said the voice. It was Barry. Before I could say no, he pulled me out of the chair and onto the center of the floor.

“Now, with the aid of my partner,” Barry announced to the class, “I’m going to show you how to do the quickstep.”

Oh my God, I thought, he’s going to use
me
to teach the quickstep to the rest of the group? The only thing I knew about the quickstep was that I’d seen it done a few weeks earlier in a movie called
Strictly Ballroom.
And that it was, well, quick.

“Barry,” I said, “you’d better get another partner. I can’t do this.”

“Sure you can,” he said. “Just follow me, lovey.”

What can I say? It was like watching a caterpillar turn into a butterfly. Barry
was
Fred Astaire: incredibly light on his feet, graceful,
gentle in his touch but firm in his lead. After a few minutes of tension I relaxed and gave myself up to the dancing. And to Barry.

Through the quickstep—
Quick-quick-slow; quick-quick-slow
—I let Barry lead me. And the cha-cha:
One, two, cha-cha-cha; one, two, cha-cha-cha.
Then the foxtrot and the samba. By this time when Barry told me to do something I did it.

Once again I was the sixteen-year-old girl at the Latin American Ballroom, uninhibited and in touch with my body. I arched my back. I pointed my toes. I turned my head, first to one side, then the other, dipping as I did so, just like the ballroom dancers I’d seen on television. It was almost laughable that I, who did not like to be given directions, who liked instead to do things my own way, was so willing to do exactly what Barry told me to do.

For hours we glided, dipped, swooped, and laughed our way across the hallowed floors of Lincoln College. I danced with almost everyone there, including the man who liked to dance by himself. He turned out to be quite good, I thought, when he had a partner.

By the end of the evening no one in the group had any defenses left. We were all quite willing to make fools of ourselves by performing, under Barry’s instructions, some of the dances from
Saturday Night Fever.

Standing next to one another in a straight line, we danced to the sound of the Bee Gees singing “Stayin’ Alive …” I moved from side to side, first lifting one arm up toward the ceiling, index finger pointed; then swinging the same arm down across my body, I pointed to the floor. Just like John Travolta. Minus the white suit, of course.

We repeated this dance several times. The music grew louder and the room warmer. Perspiration dripped down my back and my hair stuck to my neck in a clump; I was sure my makeup had melted into an unflattering Phantom of the Opera look. But I didn’t care.
And I didn’t care that the music was corny and the dancing hopelessly unhip. This was not about being hip; it was about having fun. Pure, sheer, unabashed fun.

Why, I wondered, couldn’t I feel this way more often? The answer, I decided, was that having fun isn’t really what most of us do best. What most of us do best is work and worry. Often we combine the two into one consuming preoccupation: worrying about work. Are we doing a good job? Where do we stack up in terms of our colleagues? Do we work hard enough? Do we work too hard? And how can we do what it takes to have a successful career without sacrificing family life?

Worrying about children is high on the list, too. And it makes no difference, as I well knew, whether the children are three or thirty. A child is a child is a child. At least in the eyes of a parent.

Most of us are also quite skilled at worrying about money, about relationships, about our looks, about our health, and about weather. Worrying about weather seems to have become a national pastime. At least that’s the impression given by the number of television hours given over to discussing rain, snow, heat, humidity, wind chill, barometric pressure, and jet streams of air arriving from somewhere or another.

I found myself trying to figure out how much of my life had been consumed by worrying. If totaled up in years, what would it amount to? One year? Five? Ten? Whatever the figure, it was too high.

I once read an article on the psychoanalysis of worry. In it a British psychoanalyst, a man named Adam Phillips, expressed his view that worrying is an attempt by the worrier to simplify his life. “…  specific worries,” he wrote, “can be reassuring because they preempt what is in actuality an unknowable future.”

It made sense to me. Is there anything we dread more than an
unknowable future? And is there anything more likely to obscure our fear of this unpredictable future than the act of worrying? If we worry about weather or a bad haircut, for instance, we are relieved of the need to worry that something terrible may be waiting around the corner, ready to ambush us.

But worrying, I found, was quite a difficult thing to do while dancing the quickstep with Barry. Having fun was not.

Later, walking home in the moist night air, the domes and spires of Oxford stabbing the dark-blue sky above, I felt completely relaxed and carefree. I glanced at my watch; it was nearly midnight. The lateness of the hour surprised me. Then I realized that while dancing with Barry and the others I’d not been measuring time. I’d been living it.

When I got back to my rooms at Brasenose, I took out my journal and began writing down my feelings about Barry and the way dancing made me happy and carefree. Then I started to think it wasn’t
dancing
that made me feel that way; it was giving myself up to dancing. I wasn’t used to doing that, throwing myself so completely into something that had no definable goal. Or at least I hadn’t done it for a long time.

Still, it wasn’t hard to remember how as a girl I walked miles in winter to skate on frozen ponds and, in summer, swam fast-moving rivers to lie dreaming on sun-warmed rocks. I had no goal when I did such things. Unless it was simply a not-yet-diluted instinct to enjoy the world I saw around me.

When that changed I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that for the last couple of decades I had organized my life too much around the
illusionary principle of success and failure. Naturally, it was the verdict of success I wanted the world to hand down to me. Maybe my reluctance to join the others in a night of ballroom dancing was simply my fear of not being very good at it. Of failing.

But somehow when dancing with Barry I never once thought about failing. Or, for that matter, succeeding. It was enough to be alive and having fun, surrounded by music and laughter and people who, though I barely knew them, seemed on this night as familiar to me as lifelong friends.

I suppose it will always puzzle me, the riddle of why an important lesson is sometimes taught by the unlikeliest of professors. By Barry, for instance. Perhaps I was just ready to learn. Maybe it’s that simple. Although answers, once we’ve found them, always seem simple.

I wondered: was this then to be my Oxford learning experience? The lesson I would remember long after I’d forgotten rural England’s economic history and patterns of settlement? Was Barry to be the Oxford instructor I would remember above all others?

As if to answer, the church bells in Radcliffe Square began sounding their midnight chimes, telling me:
Yes, yes, yes.