Come and Join the Dance (6 page)

“Sometimes … nothing,” she whispered, her face burning.

“Well, Susan, I got very drunk last night and called you. Kay knows.”

Kay was a white blur across the table. Susan had to force herself to speak. “I'm glad I wasn't in.”

Peter laughed too quickly.

“Say, Susan, we should go to the museum,” Anthony said.

“I'll drive you downtown,” said Peter.

Anthony seemed puzzled. “Oh, we can get there… . And you have that fellowship thing… . ”

“It's late, Peter!” Kay cried.

“I can't get it done. It has to be in at five. There wouldn't even be time to type it.”

“I'll type it for you,” Kay said wearily. “I won't go to work.”

“I don't want any favors, Kay. I can't get it done. I can't just sit down and write it carelessly now.”

“You've got three hours, Peter. You could try.”

“I'll try again in the fall,” he said brusquely. “It comes up again in the fall.” He got up from the table and turned to Anthony. “Come on,” he said. “I'll drive you. Maybe we'll all just go for a drive and have a beer somewhere. It's a good day for that.”

“Well … all right,” Anthony said dubiously. “You'll come?” he asked Susan.

Susan avoided Peter's eyes. She knew if she said she wouldn't come, he might go back to his apartment, he might even fill out the application. They were all waiting for her to answer.

It was a good day for a drive, she thought. Broadway was full of sun and cars and racing children. She wanted to be set in motion too, to run mindlessly and not feel too much. She couldn't do what Kay would have done. She was herself. She wanted to be saved from boredom even for a few hours. “I guess I'll come,” she said.

“Let's go and find the car,” Peter said to Anthony.

She watched them go up Broadway. A sprinkler truck groaned by, spraying the streets, and she saw them step back on the sidewalk a moment too late to escape the wave of wet mist. Peter wiped his face. It seemed very funny. “Peter got wet,” she said to Kay. When she looked out of the window again, she had lost them. “I wonder if he remembers where he parked the car. He seems terribly inefficient.” Kay still had said nothing. “You're coming with us, Kay, aren't you?”

“I have to go to work.”

“Oh … I always forget that you're not in school.” She watched Kay stub out her cigarette and take another one from the pack. “What's the matter, Kay? What's happened?” she asked, even though she knew, they both knew. Kay's face was blank. “I mean, are you angry with me?”

“Angry? No. I'm not angry.” Kay's dark eyes narrowed, trying to focus. “I think I will go on the drive,” she said abruptly. “I don't feel much like working. Sometimes it's like being buried alive surrounded by all those books. It's stupid, though—I need the money.” Her face was very tired, as if she knew too much. Perhaps she would look that way all the time when she was forty. “I've had a hundred afternoons like this,” she said. “No one doing anything—me, Anthony … I knew Peter wouldn't try for the fellowship, you know.”

“Kay!” Susan cried. “Do you think I use people?” She had been rehearsing those words for a long time. “Jerry said so last night. Do
you
think I do?”

“We all use each other,” Kay said.

“But I did use Jerry.”

“And Jerry used you. Everybody uses everybody. That's the way it is.” Kay's voice was flat.

“But there has to be more than that, doesn't there? There has to be love. Maybe I've never really loved anyone.” Her confession terrified her. She had only half thought of it before, had never meant to say it.

“I think you're worried about words,” Kay said. There was no absolution.

“But I don't want to go on using people!”

“It's just the way you look at it,” Kay said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I
N AN ODD WAY
, Peter's car was the place where he really lived—he only inhabited his apartment. It was true that, like most of the things Peter owned, the ramshackle black Packard should have been allowed to die quietly ten years ago, but a curious desperate joy possessed Peter at the wheel as long as everything went fast, and he always kept the back seat littered with the fragmentary preparations for a journey: blankets, an old raincoat, books, aspirins, a box of crackers, can openers, socks—as though the chaos of his living room had simply been extended. Peter didn't seem to care that the car shook every time it hit a bump and that its insides were ticking so loudly that everything had to be shouted. “This car is going to shake itself to pieces one of these days!” he called out cheerfully.

“Why don't you get it checked?” Anthony asked.

“Because I'd find out too much was wrong with it. I'd never be able to bail it out again.”

They were all in his power that afternoon; he had made the car their only reality. “Sing,” he'd command them, and they'd sing. No unfinished work existed in their world. He was golden and they were golden. They drank a lot of beer. Is it because of the beer? Susan wondered. Even Kay was smiling. She sang all the choruses low-voiced, but anyway she sang. They drove twice through Central Park, then all the way down to the Battery, passing gray office buildings, processions of gray people down avenues—“You're too serious!” Anthony shouted at them through the window. By four o'clock, they were uptown again, passing 116th Street, the red buildings of the college somewhere behind the apartment houses. “Are we going to New Jersey?” Susan asked, but she knew it didn't matter. They had destroyed logic three hours ago, made the afternoon their midnight. “I'm drunk!” she laughed, letting her head fall against Anthony's shoulder. “I'm so drunk. I feel like everything is twenty miles away.”

Anthony kissed her. “Am I twenty miles away?”

“Oh … maybe fifteen.” She liked having him kiss her. It was all part of the ride. Everything fitted. “You smell of soap,” she said, “like a little boy.”

“How come you know so much about little boys?”

“None of your business.”

“Susan, why don't you adopt me?” Anthony said. “I'm young, I'm hungry, I'm broke, I'm miserable. We'd have a ball.”

“I can't adopt anyone,” she said, enjoying the game. “I'm going to Paris in a week.”

“We'd have a whole week,” he said.

“No. I have too much ironing to do.” She expected him to laugh, but he only looked unhappy. It occurred to her that he might be serious.

“Oh, adopt him!” Peter had turned around to look at them. “Why don't you adopt him? Just walk hand in hand into the Southwick Arms Hotel, have breakfast in Bickford's. It would be awfully good experience, Susan.”

Her anger surprised her. “Why don't you watch the road!” she cried.

“Perhaps I should.” With an infuriating smile, Peter turned away again.

They left the West Side Highway and began to drive through Washington Heights, through endless streets of blond brick apartment houses and stores with names like “Foam Rubber City” and “Food-O-Thon” and women wheeling baby carriages home from the supermarkets. Edgecombe Avenue, Fort Washington Avenue—“There are too goddamn many avenues here,” Peter said. “Too goddamn many living rooms. You be a good girl, Susan, and they might let you live up here. You could have a living room with wall-to-wall carpeting and a dishwashing machine.”

“I don't want to be a good girl!”

“Too bad. That's your particular fate.”

Peter was looking for a way to get down to a little dirt road he remembered that ran by the river—there was a mad Puerto Rican bar there, he told them, and a dilapidated yacht club. Once he had found the road by accident and looked at the water all night. “It's the greatest place in New York, if we can just get there.” But all the streets led back to the highway. He began to drive too fast; the car was shaking and ticking. Kay sat rigid in the front seat, clutching her pocketbook. “It's getting late,” she said.

“It's four-thirty,” Peter said icily. “Why is that late?” He was forcing the car up a hill. “Why doesn't someone sing, ‘
In the evening, by the moonlight, you can hear the darkies singing
… '? Kay, how does that one go?”

“I don't like that song.”

“I knew you wouldn't sing it.” He laughed and put one arm around her. “Kay, Kay … don't be dull. Don't be a self-conscious liberal.”

“I am what I am,” Kay said sadly.

“Christ! If I thought that, I'd kill myself.” The car screeched around a corner.

“Peter! Don't!” Kay cried.

“Wow—take it easy, man!” said Anthony.

“What's the matter with all of you? Don't you want to fly? It's the slow people who have accidents—you should know that. You want to fly, Susan, don't you?”

“I don't want to get killed,” she said, but she almost shouted “Drive faster!” She wanted to ride in the front seat with Peter into night and emptiness, to a place where all the clocks had stopped and no one cared. She would sing for him if he asked her to… .

Anthony had moved close to her again. Now he reached out and took her hand, which became an object, something someone else was holding. “We both have dirty hands,” he whispered. She pretended not to hear him. She was tired of the game. Maybe she would never say “Drive faster” to anyone, but only the frightened words she didn't mean. But it must be beautiful to fly, even if it killed you. “Peter!” she called out desperately, “Peter!”

“Do you want me to slow down?” he said. “All right, I'll slow down.”

“No … I just—wondered where we were.” She couldn't quite remember now what it was she had wanted to say, and she would drown if she thought about it. She laughed helplessly and leaned back against Anthony's arm. “Peter, perhaps I will adopt Anthony,” she said brightly, trying to pick up the lost pieces of the game—it was safer, safer.

“Yes, go ahead—adopt him,” said Peter. “Every young girl should adopt someone.”

“Shall I take you on?” she asked Anthony.

“If you do, you'll have to sleep with me.”

“But I've never slept with anyone.”

“No!” he said incredulously. “Well, I think you should start.”

“Oh I agree.” The game was spinning itself out thinner and thinner. “Do you think I should, Peter?”

“Do whatever you want,” he said with an odd impatience. “I give no advice.” Kay had turned a locked, mute face to her.

Suddenly she thought, Why not? Why not? “Yes,” she said. “Okay, Anthony. I'll meet you tomorrow.”

“What about immediately!” he cried, acting his part. “This afternoon! Now! Now!”

“All right,” she said. The car had stopped for a red light. She opened the door and got out.

“Susan! Where are you going?” How funny it was that Anthony was still playing the game—if she got back into the car again nothing would be changed; she would simply have made a rather elaborate joke. Peter and Kay were staring.

“Let's go downtown.” Even then Anthony didn't believe her. No one believed her.

“The light's going to change,” Peter said very patiently.

“Aren't you coming downtown, Anthony?” She walked carefully to the sidewalk. Everything was racing now. The air was full of eyes. She stood on the curb and waited for something to happen.

“Listen! Just a minute!” Anthony was scrambling out of the car at last. He leaned through the rolled-down window and whispered something to Peter, who nodded, his face expressionless. Then she saw Peter hand Anthony something—a key. They seemed very businesslike, almost formal. But why didn't Peter cry out, “Susan, don't go! What are you doing!” although she might have known he wouldn't do that—perhaps not even if he cared. Kay would be alone with him now; they might even find the road by the river. Susan smiled at her, wishing that Kay wouldn't look so concerned; you could tell she was thinking, “Susan's flipping.” That made it all so dreary, and this was her moment. She had never had a moment.

The car started forward as soon as the light turned green. Anthony stepped toward her, tall and solemn. “Shall we take the IRT?” he asked awkwardly.

“Fine.” She hooked her arm through his and they began the march to the subway. I'm doing it, she thought. I'm doing it. I'm doing it.

For a long time she thought she heard the car just behind them, the machine-gun tick of its innards. Once she looked back, which was silly, because she knew the car had gone in the opposite direction.

CHAPTER NINE

“I
DIDN'T THINK
you'd do it,” Anthony said.

“What?”

“Come back with me, I mean.”

“I said I would.” Susan laughed. For half an hour everything had made her laugh.

“I kept thinking you'd escape in the subway.”

“I almost did.”

“You're mad,” Anthony said approvingly.

“All right. I'll leave right now.” She brushed a lock of hair off her forehead and began to walk sedately, heels clicking, down the hall, but that was only part of the game. She felt fine, like someone in a movie.

Anthony grabbed her wrist at exactly the right moment. “Sure. Go on. Leave.” They smiled at each other; then they both looked at Peter's door, which they hadn't opened yet. “I'll find the key,” Anthony whispered. He was still holding her hand, as if he didn't quite know what to do with it. She realized they had been standing in the hallway for a long time, whispering at each other like two children about to do something dangerous. He opened the door and then stepped back and waited for a moment as if he were reluctant to go in, but at last she followed him into the courtyard dreariness of the apartment. “I'll turn on a light,” he said.

“Not the overhead light! I hate that.”

“Okay. The lamp.” He walked to the door, which she had left standing open, shut it, and she heard him fumbling with the chain and for the first time felt frightened.

“Oh don't lock it!” she cried.

“What's the matter?”

“It's locked already.”

“Okay.” He stared at her, puzzled, a little sad. She kicked off her shoes and crossed her legs under her on the couch, trying to look comfortable. “Can I have a cigarette?”

“Here.” He was still watching her. There seemed to be nothing to talk about. “You shouldn't smoke,” he said finally. “You don't inhale—that's a waste.”

“Sometimes I want to smoke.”

He came and sat next to her and took the cigarette away and put his arms tightly around her. “Let's go into the bedroom,” he whispered.

“Not yet.”

“Come on.” She felt his lips against her neck.

“No. Please, not yet.”

“All right. Do you want to talk? You talk—I can't.” He sat on the arm of the couch. “I keep thinking about laying you!” he cried joyously. “I've been looking at you for about two years. You were always with some hopeless guy. Today I thought you were after Peter—he was turning you on.”

“I'm not after Peter,” she said angrily.

“Look, I don't care! We're here—that's the crazy thing. Don't you understand anything? We're here.”

She got up from the couch and walked aimlessly across the room to the bookcase. She had never looked at Peter's books before.

“What's wrong?” Anthony said.

“Nothing.”

“Are you afraid?”

She shook her head.

“I won't hurt you.”

“I know.”

“Just maybe a little.”

“I know all that. I know everything. I had Modern Living when I was a freshman.”

“That's very, very good,” he said sarcastically. “Jesus Christ! Don't say things like that!”

“Why not?”

“Oh, come off it. Why do you want to sound like a dried-up old woman? I've seen the alumnae from your school with their suits and their hair screwed behind their ears. Why do you have to sound like you're so tough? I know you've never been laid. I think that's great. I don't care if you talk like a virgin. I know you're scared.”

“I'm not scared,” she snapped.

“Well, you should be.”

“That would please you?” He did not say anything at all. Her words hung in the air until a moment too late she realized they were from the wrong movie; she had not meant to sound that way. Anthony was turning on the radio—a blur of stations, the news, Campbell Soup, “
I'm all shook up/Oh, I'm all shook up
.” Shaken up, she thought facetiously.
Shaken
up.
Shaken
up. The song fell apart. “It's too loud, Anthony,” she said.

“It's a loud song.”

“What's he all shook up about, I wonder?”

Anthony shrugged.

“Don't you know?”

“Maybe you should listen to the radio now and then. You can't read Virginia Woolf all the time.”

“I don't especially like Virginia Woolf.”

“Shall we have a literary discussion?” Anthony said bitterly. He got up, grabbed the nearest book and walked out of the room. She heard the bedroom door slam. The radio was really much too loud. She couldn't think. She considered turning it off. Her hair was a mess and her lipstick was all gone, no doubt, but she had left her pocketbook on the table near the door. She couldn't reach it. She wondered if she were expected to leave now, or was Anthony lying on the bed waiting for her to come in, listening for the sound of her footsteps in the hall, the opening of the door he had shut. But Anthony didn't know she couldn't move. Susan imagined Peter and Kay coming back hours later and finding her still sitting paralyzed on the couch. They would ask her what was wrong, and she would say, “Nothing,” and they would all go out for coffee at Schulte's—they might even go for another ride.

After one more song, she thought, I'll stand up. And she concentrated fiercely on the impossible act of standing and managed to uncurl her legs, and stood. Either I'll go in or I won't. But no one just stood in the middle of a room—that was more embarrassing than sitting—so she walked up the hall.

When she rapped on the door, there was no answer. “Anthony … Anthony … ” He was playing his part too, she decided. She pushed the door open, said, “Hi,” and sat down quite calmly beside him on the bed. To her surprise, everything had become automatic again. He was smoking a cigarette and staring up at the ceiling.

“I thought you'd gone,” he said after a long while. “Are you going back to the dorms now?”

“I don't know.”

“I think you should.”

“Anthony … can't we talk?” she asked uncertainly.

“I don't want to talk. I don't have anything to say.”

“Please don't be angry.”

“I'm not angry with you.” He sat up now and looked at her. “I think you have a lot of guts for a girl—up to a certain point. And that's all right.”

“I don't have any guts at all,” she said, feeling a terrible sadness and an anger with herself for telling him this. “I just do things sometimes, and don't even know why. That's not having guts.”

“I don't know,” Anthony said slowly. She had wanted him to say, “Yes, it is. Yes, it is.” Why else would you tell anyone something like that about yourself? She wanted to fix her eyes on his until she saw her concealed image in them, but he had turned away as if he were embarrassed.

Anthony slid off the bed and stretched his arms. “Christ! You'd think it was the middle of the night in here!” He walked over to the window and pulled up the blinds. Suddenly the glare of late afternoon was in the room. Shadows raced across the ceiling.

In another apartment, someone was practicing a Clementi sonatina, picking it apart, each note separate, wavering. “I used to play that when I was a kid,” Susan said, wanting desperately for a moment to be the little girl she had once been, but somewhere the continuity of her past had broken. The little girl was a stranger now, almost a fiction—once upon a time there was a little girl named Susan who practiced the piano. Now there was a different Susan who was stretching herself out on a bed, deliberately, without conviction, without love or whatever it was one was supposed to feel. Her body had never seemed so long; the sheet was terribly far away.

Anthony was standing over her. “Come on. Get up. Don't you know it's dangerous to lie around on beds?”

“Just a minute.” She began to laugh because it was all inevitable, all decided now, and he didn't know it. The outlaws were about to welcome another member.

“Come on. I'll walk you back to the dorms.”

“But I'm lazy.”

He stared down at her, absurdly serious. “You can get up. Give me your hand.”

“Here.” She extended a limp wrist to him. Anthony sat down beside her.

“What are you doing, Susan?” he whispered. She felt herself smile at him, and then she reached up and touched his hair, which was strangely soft, like a child's. He seized her hand and held it away from him, squeezing her fingers together until they hurt.

“Don't do anything you don't mean!” he cried.

“How do you know what I mean?”

“I don't get you at all,” he said painfully. “Maybe you're just a bitch.”

She said, “Maybe,” just to say something, because what was said didn't really matter. She felt nothing but an immense curiosity about what was going to happen next. She stared in wonder at the walls of the little room—it seemed as though at any moment they would spring shut like a trap and she and Anthony would be buried in darkness—but Anthony didn't necessarily have to be there at all; it wouldn't make any difference who was with her.

“Okay,” Anthony said. “Okay.” And she felt the bed shake a little when he got up. Then the blinds were drawn down, and she knew he was standing in the corner by the window, taking off his clothes. In the darkness she could barely see the walls of the room; they hadn't shut her in after all, but had fallen away, dropping her into the middle of a vast, unknown space. “It's so dark,” she said.

“Susan … ” She felt Anthony's body press against hers.

“Wait,” she whispered. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she began to undress. “Clothes are terribly complicated, aren't they?”

“Yeah,” he said shyly. He was watching her, of course—her back prickled with the knowledge of his eyes and she was slower than she need have been—it seemed as though he might have asked permission. When she lay beside him again, his hands were impersonal, tracing invisible lines on her body, measuring her, not touching. How odd to be naked with a stranger! She wished he were someone she had known all her life with all the suspense between the two of them of never having known how the other really looked. Instead it had been very easy, something that could be done lightly. It's like people at the beach, she thought, with a tightness in her throat that made her think she was going to laugh.

There was not even much pain—a vague feeling of something inside her, moving. This was what going to bed with a man must be like. She could hear everything very well: the bed, his breathing, the tick of the alarm clock on the bureau. His body drove at hers over and over again. Her legs were cramped. She hadn't thought it would take so long. She would have to tell him he was too heavy, complain that the sheets were wet—she didn't want to lie between them any more—now she remembered that they had been Peter's and Kay's first. But she had always assumed that the sheets would be clean. She wondered if the used sheets made the experience what her mother would call “sordid.”

“Anthony … ”

“I love you,” he whispered. “Don't talk.”

All at once, when she despaired of it ever being over, he cried out, almost as if he were in pain. Perhaps something had gone wrong. She felt him shuddering against her and he sounded as if he were crying. Not knowing what else to do, she put her arms around him. He was terribly thin. She could feel all his bones, the sharp, delicate skeleton of a bird. It was embarrassing. She had always imagined a rape, an overwhelming of herself, the victim, never that she would be left with a starved, spent child and the guilty sense of her own heaviness. “Are you all right?” she asked helplessly.