Players (9 page)

Pammy put tap shoes and tights into her shoulder bag. The class was on West Fourteenth Street, two evenings a week, eight-thirty to ten. In charge was Nan Fryer, a woman with brittle hair and a scar across one side of her jaw. There were as many as forty people there some nights. The studio was rented from a theater group called Dynamic Tranquillity. Nan was a member of the group and she attributed her prowess in tap to ethical systems of discipline.

“Hop, you’re not hopping. Shuf-
ful
, shuf-
ful
.”

Pammy danced before a mirror at the back of the room. Her body was suited to tights, one of the few such bodies in evidence. She was practicing a routine that involved a precarious off-balance change. Pammy loved tap. She had dancing feet, it appeared. A born hoofer. Arms flung up, toes crackling, heels beating out a series of magnetic stresses, she repeatedly sought a particular cadence, the single instance of lucidity that would lift her into some dizzy sphere of ecstasy
and sweat. Tap was so crisp when done correctly, so pleasing to one’s sense of the body as a coordinated organism able to make its own arithmetic.

Nan Fryer clapped her hands, bringing the tapping to a halt. People drooped somewhat, bodies throbbing. The men in class were dressed variously, from track suits to routine casual wear. Most of the women wore tights or flared slacks. Nan walked among them, talking. She wore silver shoes, cut-off jeans and a Dynamic Tranquillity T-shirt. It was an outfit that made her facial scar appear all the more tragic.

“I like your breathing. You’re all breathing so well. This is important in that we’re concerned with movement and the forces affecting movement. There are areas and awarenesses in you that tap makes accessible. You are accessible to yourself. Notice how calm you’re getting. Little by little, deeper and deeper. Unblock your nervous systems. Believe in your breathing. This is so essential to getting the most out of tap. When I first came to tap, I thought it was just a ticky tacky dance. It can be so much more. Movement and force. Force and energy. Energy and peace. You are a free person for the first time in that your whole body is aware of the physical and moral universe.”

Pammy looked out a window at the back of the room. Traffic moved swiftly. There were flushes of sunset in a glass door across the street, a bargain shop. Her hands were over her ears.

“Okay, kids, crossover time.”

The rest of the session Pammy danced intently, cracking down on her heels, definitive contact. She worked awhile on the intermediate routine, step number two, moving sideways
across the face of the mirror to confront a radiator and pipes. Nan played an old show tune on the phonograph and danced a set of advanced combinations. The students formed a circle around her. Soon they were all dancing, trying to duplicate the complex floor patterns, tapping, swaying, elbowing out into some private space to strut awhile, quietly, on the hardwood floor.

“Do not tight-
ten
. Com-plete loose-ness. Re-lax ank-les, Arnold Mas-low, do not tight-
ten
.”

Lyle stood in a phone booth in Grand Central waiting for McKechnie to pick up and watching people heading for their trains, skidding along, their shoulders collapsed—a day’s work, a drink or two causing subtle destruction, a rumpling beyond the physical, all moving through constant sourceless noise, mouths slightly open, the fish of cities.

“You’re sure it’s not too late.”

“Lyle, say what you want to say.”

“The other day we talked about George Sedbauer. Who shot him, so on, so forth. Well remember you mentioned this secretary of Zeltner’s one time? She knows a little about this. I got to know her a little. She first of all knew Sedbauer. She knew the man or knows the man who shot him. That’s the key thing. There’s a photograph. I saw it. And she knows about the gun, what kind of gun, but the gun she could have read in the paper. The key thing is the man who did the shooting. She knows him. Should somebody be told about this? Or what, Frank?”

“You saw this picture.”

“They were in it. George, her, the guy. Unless she’s inventing. But why would she invent?”

“I want you to talk to a friend of mine,” McKechnie said. “I’ll have him get in touch with you. Yeah, we’d better do that.”

Ethan and Jack came over the next evening with meat loaf leftovers. They all went up to the roof, where management had laid slate over the tar and provided four picnic tables (chained to the walls) and several evergreen shrubs in large planters. Lyle arrived last, carrying drinks on a tray.

“I didn’t know this was up here,” Jack said.

“It’s to give Pammy a look at the World Trade Center whenever she’s depressed. That gets her going again.”

“I want to drink something classic,” Ethan said. “None of this tequila business. What is that, tequila? I’ve decided to live after all. No more poison pinwheels.”

“A bit of poetry, that,” Pammy said. “Here, somebody serve. Give me a small piece. Are we eating or drinking? I’m confused and we’re just getting started.”

“What’s that?” Jack said. “Is that the Municipal Building? Is that, what, the Woolworth Building? You can’t see that far from here, can you?”

“If you’d brought wine I could give you something classic. I could give you wine.”

“We brought meat loaf. Who else brings meat loaf?”

“You left the wine in the cab, I take it, from past experience.”

“We had this cabdriver coming up here,” Jack said. “No spikka da English too good. Tried to come up here via Chinatown.”

“Ah so.”

“Threats of bodily harm,” Ethan said.

“Who’s what here? I’d like some bread with this. No, I wouldn’t. Forget that. Cancel that order, waiter. I’m a dancer now. Austerity is my life. What’s it called—an austere regimen. I will accept a drink, however, if one of you turdnagels will pass me a glass, being careful at all times, these being new and extremely high-priced drinking vessels.”

“This salad’s fabulous.”

“Thank you, Jack.”

“A salad among salads,” Ethan said.

“Lyle tossed it.”

“Loud and prolonged applause.”

“I tossed it.”

“Meaning to ask, Lyle, what’s happening on the street?”

“The street of streets.”

“Have you been declared officially antiquated or what? Are you viable, Lyle? We all want to know. Will there be a floor to trade on in the near future? Or does it all pass into the mists of history, ladies and gentlemen, and you are there.”

“I vote for the mists of history. But who knows, really? There’s an awful strong argument for the membership’s point of view. But the current’s the other way.”

“Really, you’d haul it all down?”

“It’s not hauling it down. It’s opening it up. Of course you don’t know exactly what it is you’re opening up. That’s the trouble with currents.”

“They can take you right over the falls.”

“Right over the falls and your barrel too.”

“Should we be worried?” Ethan said.

“Pick an opening and move right in. That’s the only, you know, method of, whatever—maintaining some kind of self-determination,
a specific presence. Out into the streets, clerks of history, package-wrappers. Freedom, freedom.”

“You’ve learned your lesson well, Spartacus.”

It was nearly dark. Lyle went down for more liquor and ice. He dialed Rosemary’s number. No one answered. In the kitchen he moved past a glass cabinet and realized there was a flaw in his likeness. Something unfamiliar in the middle of his face. At the same time he felt dampness there. He went into the bathroom. It was his nose, bleeding. He held some tissue there until the flow diminished. Then he put a box of Kleenex on the tray, along with tequila, vodka, bitter lemon and ice, and went back up to the roof. Someone was at one of the other tables. It was a small boy wearing a straw fedora. He stood against the chair, eyes averted. Lyle sensed that the others were watching him to measure the comic dimensions of his reaction to the boy. He walked toward them, looking out over the umbrella that was set into the table. Deliberately he placed the tray down, moving objects out of the way with calculated disdain. They waited for him to say something. He sat, moving slowly as possible. His nose started bleeding again. This became the joke, of course. It was funnier than anything he could have said. He inserted a tissue in his nostril and let it hang there, his expression one of weary forbearance.

“His mother left him,” Jack said. “She’d come right back. You leave kids on roofs?”

“He’s a forties kid,” Pammy said.

“But that hat, I can’t believe.”

“He’s a forties kid. He’s got a two-toned little suit. I bet he never grows up. He’ll stay three feet something. He’ll smoke a little pipe and never go anywhere without that hat and two-toned
suit. His name will be Bert Follett and I’d like to marry him. I’d also like a white wine with club soda please.”

“Where am I supposed to get it?”

“Wherever it is. It exists, that’s all. Existentially you should be able to get it.”

“She’s such a snarly nymphet,” Ethan said. “Isn’t she at times? In the office they fear her on sight.”

“Oh, she’s a proper moll, she is.”

“Take the Kleenex out of your nose.”

“Nose, what, who … he trailed off.”

They finished the meat loaf. Pammy went over to talk to the boy. They had a pleasant conversation about dogs in the neighborhood. Her attentions made him glow a little. She felt he was aware of the whole scene, not just their talk. He was enjoying
himself
as part of it. Child among adults. Cute suit. The ambiance. His mother came to take him away and Pammy rejoined the others.

“I’m saying this is it,” Lyle said, “and we don’t know what it means. It’s collapsed right in on us. It’s ahead of schedule. Look who’s back looking a little sick about something. It’s backed into us. It’s here.”

“Vales of time and space.”

“If I had a mother like that,” Jack said, “I’d hang around on rooftops too. I do anyway, hubba hubba.”

“What is this, tequila?” Ethan said. “I don’t want this. Take it away, someone. If this is tequila and if I’m drinking it, there’s something seriously amiss.”

“That plane looks like it’s going to hit.”

“I think I’m sick, guys.”

“I wanted so very much for us to be brilliant together this evening.”

“I think I may blow my cookies any minute.”

“I was sure it would hit,” Jack said.

“I don’t want to blame the meat loaf but there’s something happening in my stomach that’s not supposed to.”

“She’s going to blow her cookies, Lyle. Get her out of here.”

“If we had something brilliant to drink perhaps. Too long I’ve accepted second best.”

“Lyle, you smoke? I didn’t know you smoked. When did you start smoking?”

In the bathroom mirror he watched the blood seep out. It was pretty in a way. It came so slowly, an idealized flow, no sense at all of some impelling force. He watched it fill the indentation above his lip. The color of his blood intrigued him, its meaty bloom, a near sheen of the gayest sap imaginable. He held his head back, finally, until the bleeding stopped, then went into the kitchen, where Pammy stood before the steaming basin. He opened the refrigerator, pressing her against the sink as he did so, an offhand attempt to annoy, not even mildly riling, and lifted out a jar of olives.

“How come no dishwasher?”

“I want these glasses to know what it feels like to be washed by human hands,” she said. “I don’t want them to grow up thinking everything’s done the easy way, by machine, with impersonal detergent.”

“It’s broke again?”

“You call.”

“You, for once.”

“I called the other.”

“I’m not calling. I don’t care. Let it be broke.”

“Don’t call. We won’t call. I don’t care.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “I don’t care.”

“I won’t be here, so.”

“Neither will I except in and out.”

She made a prissy face and delivered a distorted version of his tone of voice.

“
Neither will I except in and out
.”

After the close Lyle showed up at the office. She wasn’t at her desk. He lingered in the area, trying to be inconspicuous. Deciding finally that she’d left early or hadn’t come in at all, he went into an empty office and called her at home. She didn’t answer. Three times, at ten-minute intervals, he returned to dial her number. On the elevator he thought:
grieved suitor
. Was he coming to understand the motivating concepts that led to obsession, despair, crimes of passion? Haw haw haw. Denial and assertion. The trap of wanting. The blessedness of being wronged. What sweet vistas it opens, huge neurotic landscapes, what exemptions. Gaw damn, Miss Molly. In the taxi he was oddly calm. He had the driver take him two blocks past his destination. (It was that kind of involvement, already.) He called her number from a booth near a gas station. When she didn’t answer he walked to the house and rang her bell in the vestibule. He waited there an hour, then went back to the phone booth. There was no answer. He thought he saw the VW turn into her street. He ran across Queens Boulevard and hurried to the corner. The car was parked in front of her building. It was still early, at least two
hours of sunlight left. He smoked and waited. A man and a woman (not Rosemary) came out of the building. The car moved north. He went to the house and pressed her bell again. No one came to the door. He remained in the vestibule half an hour, ringing and waiting. Then he went to the booth near the gas station and dialed her number. There was no answer. He waited five minutes and dialed again. Then he decided to count to fifty. At fifty he would call one last time. When she didn’t answer, he lowered the count to twenty-five.

Pammy in the back of a rented limousine sat drinking from a Thermos bottle full of gin and dry vermouth. When the car passed a delicatessen near the Midtown Tunnel she asked the driver to stop. She ran inside and bought a lemon. She came running out, in high boots and a puffy cap, her getaway gear. Back in the car she tore off a strip of lemon rind with her teeth and thumbnail. She rubbed it over the inner edge of the Thermos cup, then dropped it in. If she had to fly, she would do it at less than total consciousness. She drank much faster than usual. It was roughly eight parts gin to one vermouth. She didn’t like martinis particularly but felt they represented a certain flamboyant abandon, at least in theory—a devil-may-care quality that suited a trip to the airport. If she had to go to the airport at all, she would go in a limousine, wearing high boots, faded denims and a street kid’s jive cap. She knew she looked pretty terrific. She also knew Ethan and Jack would enjoy her story of going out to the airport, smashed, in a mile-long limo, although she had to admit she disliked hearing other people go on about their drinking or drug-taking, the quantities involved, the comic episodes that ensued. But they’d
be glad to see her and they’d love her outfit. She felt so good, leaving. Maine was up there somewhere, vast miles of granite and pine. She could see Jack’s face when she walked into the arrivals area, hear Ethan’s arch greeting. It would be a separation from the world of legalities and claims, an edifying loss of definition. She poured another cup. When the land began to flatten and empty out, she knew they were in the vicinity of the airport. It was a landscape that acceded readily to a sense of pre-emption. She lowered the shades on the side windows and rode the rest of the way in semidarkness, conscientiously sipping from the cup.