Dancing Aztecs (38 page)

Bobbi had arrived at this Holiday Inn, not very far from Oil City, Pennsylvania, a little after eleven. She had wanted to make it as far as Ohio tonight, but the quick sandwich in her car just hadn't quelled her hunger pangs, and in any event she'd felt herself tiring, so upon seeing this joint's sign she'd come right in, saying to the desk clerk, “Can I still get something to eat?”

“Usually,” he'd said, “our kitchen is closed by now, but we're having a high school reunion tonight. If you hurry, you should still have time for dinner.”

She'd hurried, and she'd had time for dinner, but her first view of the high school reunion had given her pause. It was a
fiftieth
reunion, a couple of dozen seventy-year-olds chortling and hollering around a bunch of tables connected in a big U next to the dance floor. The waitress, a stocky charmer who'd had a local beauty parlor do its level best to make her natural hair look like a cheap wig, had been smiling and cheerful and gregarious, humanized and sentimentalized by all those beaming survivors. Bobbi had ordered a Gibson on the rocks, Roquefort dressing on the salad, shrimp scampi, neither the baked
nor
the french-fried potatoes, a half-bottle of Blue Nun liebfraumilch, a cup of coffee, and a sambucca. No sambucca? Okay, anisette. (The waitress hadn't been sure about the anisette, but after an extended conference with the bartender back she had come with the clear liquid in a proper little glass.) And now she was sitting and watching the high-school crowd (most of whom had finished their meal with some variation on apricot brandy) table-hop and dance and laugh and wave and tell stories and generally goof around.

Bobbi was not the only nongrad present, three other tables also being occupied. In a corner were a fiftyish couple in pastels and blued hair, who were eating steaks and pointedly not talking to one another; they did their silent quarrel so well that it testified to years of practice. At another table near them was a stout rumpled salesman eating Yankee pot roast and reading a newspaper that seemed to be called the
Meadville Register & Sun-Democrat
. And beyond the celebrators was a youngish man of about Bobbi's own age, eating surf and turf and drinking Heineken's beer and giving the reunion crowd little squints and frowns, as though he didn't quite get it.

Well, in fact, Bobbi didn't quite get it either. It seemed somehow as though that group had some sort of specific reference to herself and her departure from Chuck, but what? Studying them, sipping her coffee and her anisette, she felt herself giving the group the same little squints and frowns as the young man across the way.

Well, what was the story with these oldsters? They were locals, obviously, who had stayed local. Most of them looked reasonably prosperous. The men tended to be dressed in styles rather too young for them, and the women were dressed as though for church. Some of the men seemed to have heard of alcohol before, but every last one of the women was made giggly at the very thought of liquor in a glass.

And were they
all
old grads? No; obviously a few of them were husbands or wives of old grads, though the majority were widows and widowers. Having outlasted their sexually active lives, they were cheerfully returning to the pointless raillery and flirtations of fifty years before, picking up the same jokes and the same playful relationships that had been dropped for grown-up life half a century earlier.

Should I stay with Chuck? Are these people suggesting it doesn't matter, none of it matters, I shouldn't struggle, because all the decisions finally come down to the same place, anyway?

“In Dreams I Kiss Your HAND, Madame” … One couple moved alone on the tiny Holiday Inn dance floor, he in powder-blue sports jacket, white shirt, red and black bow tie, pale gray slacks, highly polished black shoes, she in gold slippers and a pink and gold floral design gown like anteroom wallpaper, with a loosely fitting bodice and a tubular skirt. They were doing ballroom dancing together, and they'd
been
doing ballroom dancing together for forty years. They had danced like that to Ray Noble, and now they were dancing the same way to everything the clarinetist could remember about Benny Goodman, which wasn't very much. His hair was dyed black, and her blue-gray hair had been placed in the control of the same Junker beauty operator who had plasticized the waitress, but it didn't matter. They were graceful, smooth, comfortable, and accomplished, and they smiled continuously together. The last time either of them had made a mistake—or surprised the other, for good or for ill—was in 1942.

Their dance was a mating ritual, and much more obviously so than more recent dances. His moves were authoritative, masculine, in command; smooth, capable, easy, and reliable. Her moves were graceful, complementary, feminine, in agreement; not subservient but still auxiliary, necessary but deferential. They were a smoothly functioning team, but not a team of equals.

No, not quite that. They
were
equal, in their importance to the dance, in the scope of movement given each partner, in the relationships between their movements, in the amount of spotlight that each received. But the team nevertheless consisted of a leader and a follower.

The other old grads were watching with great smiles on their faces, laughing out loud at particularly felicitous spins and turns. They weren't so much watching the dance as sharing in it; if a part of their group was capable of this,
all
were capable of it. How many divorces, unhappy marriages, unfaithful husbands and wives, lost loves, missed opportunities were represented at that U-shaped table? Yet, none of them mattered. The couple that had honed its movements, its partnership, its unity for forty years represented them all.

I was right to quit Chuck. Because if it doesn't matter at the end, so what? It's
during
the life that it matters. If Chuck and I were here, with thirty more years together, we wouldn't be the couple on the dance floor, we'd be among the also-rans at the tables, pretending the dancers represented our own lives.

The number ended, and everyone applauded; the old people, Bobbi, the musicians, even the quarreling fifty-year-olds, who were both looking misty-eyed now and who, after the applause, held one another's hands over the dirty dishes. Saved from truth once more.

“If we can prove we're old enough, you think they'll let us dance?”

Bobbi looked up in surprise, and it was the young man from across the room, the Heineken's drinker. Glenn Miller's “In the Mood” was being run through the accordion and clarinet like steak through a meat grinder. The young man had a rather tough-looking face, relieved by a kind of quizzically amused grin and clear level eyes.

It's a new world
, Bobbi thought “I'm not as good as
they
are,” she said.

“We'll plead youth and inexperience.” And he held out his hand for her.

She took it.

A good half of the old people were dancing to “In the Mood”; chins rested on shoulders all over the place. The ballroom couple had toned down their movements, but were still the most graceful and charming sight in the county; elsewhere, a certain stiffness harked back yet again to high school dances, except that fifty years ago it had been shyness and now it was sciatica.

Bobbi and the young man stepped onto the floor, and he grinned at her again, saying, “Do you Hustle?”

“To this?”

“It's perfect,” he said. “Trust me. Have I ever lied to you?”

He took her hands.
La
-da-da, de-dada, la-da-
da
-de-da Da. Their shoulders, flat and level and set back from their bodies, moved in unison as though operated by a marionettist from above. Their hips had an undulating underslung motion; understated sex. Their feet slid left and right, just above the floor.

“Nice,” Bobbi said. She was smiling, and he was smiling. Their hands were warm together. Other dancers, catching their eye, smiled and nodded at them. Everybody was happy. In the corner, the fiftyish couple paid their bill and left, arm in arm. The salesman went away with a newspaper under his arm. The male half of the ballroom dancers caught Bobbi's eye and winked; she laughed, and winked back.

La
-de-da, de-dada, la-da-
da
-de-da Da.

The next number was “Ease on Down the Road.” Bobbi and the young man looked at the musicians in pleased surprise, and the clarinetist nodded at them, smiling his inverted T while doobing through his clarinet.

Ease on dow-own. The ballroom dancers did their best; they frugged or something, without touching. The spear carriers retired. Bobbi and the young man held each other's elbows, and spun around the floor. “My name is Jerry,” he said, “and I'm from New York.”

“Of course,” she said.

ON THE TRAIL …

Jerry said, “Where you heading?”

“Los Angeles,” Bobbi said.

The old folks had gone, laughing and shouting into the night. The musicians had packed up their axes, lit up their Trues, and decamped. The waitress, much of her sentimentalism draining away, had requested payment of her checks and had walked from the kitchen to the exit wearing a black-and-red hunting jacket over her white uniform. The bartender had rinsed a hundred glasses, had played the bells on his cash register for ten minutes, and had finally turned off a lot of lights and gone away. And Jerry and Bobbi sat alone in the Holiday Inn dining room, nursing a pair of anisettes and haying a conversation.

“Los Angeles?” Jerry shook his head. “Why?”

“Why not?” she said.

Which wasn't an answer, but what the hell. Jerry played it her way: “Because it isn't New York,” he said.

“Maybe that's the reason.”

Jerry frowned at her in disbelief. “You don't like New York?”

“Well, I'm not a real New Yorker. I only lived there seven years.”

“Lady, I was born in Queens,” Jerry told her, “and let me tell you something.
Nobody's
a real New Yorker. You get closer, and you get closer, but nobody gets
inside
. You know?”

“No,” she said. “
You're
a New Yorker.”

He shook his head. “Up till a couple days ago, I hadn't been in Manhattan in four, five years. I used it up when I was in high school, you know? I got to be seventeen, eighteen, I thought I knew about, Manhattan, I thought it was a bore, you know what I mean? But all the Manhattan I ever used up was just some dumb kid's
idea
of it. The last couple days, I been in the city, moving around, looking around, and I don't know that place at all. You ever been in Vegas?”

“Where?”

“Las Vegas.”

“No. Have you?”

“Sure.” Jerry held up a finger. “It's one neighborhood,” he said. “That's what every place is, except New York. One neighborhood. You could be in Vegas six days, there wouldn't be anything left you didn't know. I'd like to visit New York sometime, you know? Pretend like my place is a hotel, go out every day, see the city.”

She laughed, looking at him with interested eyes. “That's a very funny idea.”

“Why not? The first week, do all the tourist stuff: Radio City Music Hall, Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Staten Island Ferry, UN Building, all of that. Second week, the stuff that only some of the tourists know, like the Cloisters up at Fort Tryon Park, and the Circle Line, and the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, and like that. Third week, the nut stuff, things I'd just like to do. Like ride all the subway lines on the same token; you know you can do that? Some kid did it about twenty years ago, took him twenty-four hours. Or how about the Staten Island Rapid Transit; ever hear of that?”

“Never,” she said. “What is it?”

“The Toonerville Trolley, that's what it is. You ever go watch the Stock Exchange?”

“No, I never did.”

“Neither did I,” Jerry said, “and I lived in New York all my life. You can go there and watch them down on the floor. How many places got a Stock Exchange?”

“Very few,” she said.

He glanced at her, and then away. Every time he looked across the table at her she was smiling at him as though it was Christmas time and she'd found him under her tree. He'd never had a girl look at him like that before, and especially not a girl he was figuring to rob a little later tonight. It was confusing, and unsettling, and he didn't know what to do about it, so he covered himself by a steady stream of talk. Christ knows what he was talking about.

New York. The girl said, “You know, I never did any of those things. Except the Statue of Liberty, we went there once. But that's all.”

“Then you're a New Yorker,” he told her. “You gotta be a tourist to see the place. Ever eat in Chinatown?”

“I didn't know where the good places are.”

“They're
all
good places, and they all look like crap. I went a few times when I was in high school, I'd like to go back there again. And Rockefeller Center. I used to know a guy in school, he was a nut, he liked to sneak around where people couldn't see him, he fell in love with Rockefeller Center. You know there's a whole other level down underneath, with stores and wide walkways and everything?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “I've gone down there to get out of the rain sometimes. You can go two or three blocks underground.”

“You can go all
over
underground,” Jerry told her. ‘This guy claimed he could get out of the subway at Grand Central and walk underground as far as 51st Street and Eighth Avenue. I'd like to find out if that's the truth.”

“Oh, I know one!” She was getting caught up in it now. “The escalators at Lincoln Center!”

“Escalators?”

“All the buildings there have huge windows,” she explained. “And escalators. A girl I know in the orchestra says it's a
terrific
kick to ride up and down the escalators and look out the windows at the same time. You go up and you start with just the fountain, really, and then there's Ninth Avenue and Broadway, and the traffic, and the other buildings, and it just keeps changing. I've always wanted to do that.”