The saxophonist was giving the pianist room to do some fancy stuff on the keyboard. He leaned over to me and said, a mind-reader, “Go ahead, ask her to dance. What’s the worst that could happen?”
So I walked off to do that very thing. Later I found out he was the lemonade girl’s father, and that’s probably who he meant.
But the woman I had my eye on was with yet another man, this one skinny and pimple faced, with an active Adam’s apple—was he talking, or swallowing nervously? She made the way she dodged his jabbing elbows into a little ballet. I lost heart. She was too good, and though I knew I could outdance any of the men here, I couldn’t outdance her. Who could?
I caught up with her at the refreshment table.
“May I?” I asked. The lemonade was free. My offer was only to accept the drink from the fat girl and hand it over.
My woman smiled. “Surely. Thank you.”
The lemonade girl handed me a dripping glass, though earlier her aim had been faultless.
“My name is Mike Sharp,” I told the dark-haired woman. I waited for her recognition. The saxophonist said to the piano player, “See?”
“I’m Jessica Howard,” she said. She wiped the glass with a handful of her black skirt, which was made of bands of lace you could see light through: it was a Roman Colosseum of a skirt. Beneath it, she wore a dark red slip. “That guy I was dancing with?” she said. “Voice like a saltine cracker. Made me thirsty.”
The sax player pulled his instrument apart and laid it in its velvet lined case.
“No more music,” Jessica said sadly.
“Next time,” the saxophonist told her, despite himself, “I’ll play you a flamenco.”
She winked at him. Oh God, I thought, I need a wink like that myself. I said, “May I give you a ride home?”
“I don’t get in strange cars with men.”
“I don’t have a car,” I said, renouncing anything she might not like. “May I walk you home?”
She was looking at me with what was either contempt or the earliest stages of affection. “Why?”
“Why,” I repeated. “I’ve been away from Des Moines for a while. I’d like to take a walk. We could keep each other company.”
“Well, then,” she said. “Let’s walk.”
The air outside felt damp and cool, like something laid across the chest of an ailing child. I felt cured already. She had a kind of skipping stride. Maybe she was thinking of how she’d attack the flamenco at the next dance. I couldn’t decide if I liked the fact that she didn’t know I was the Movie Star. I was pretty sure I did.
“You dance beautifully,” I told her.
“Should,” she said. “It’s my business.”
“You dance professionally?”
“Have. Now I teach. But I danced with the Chicago Opera Company for two years.”
“Ah,” I said. “You teach ballet?”
“Everything. Ballet, tap, social. I could teach you.”
“I sort of already know,” I said, modest as I could. “People tell me I’m a pretty fair dancer.”
“Didn’t tonight,” she said.
The short sentences kept catching me by surprise. My turn? Already? “I just got into town. I guess I’m still tired.”
“Too tired to dance,” she said musingly. “So then: where?”
“I was in a dance marathon.” True enough: for a few days in 1929 when I was between bookings, I’d entered (and lost) a marathon. I hoped that would explain my enthusiasm and weariness.
“Good grief, that’s not dancing. That’s just”—she moved her shoulders around, imitating someone who mistakenly believed he was dancing—“that’s foolishness set to music. Dancing isn’t a race. You can’t do a marathon of it.”
“Well, then, I’ll come for a lesson.”
She smiled then, delightedly. “Do!” she said. “Here we are.” She turned to face me. She seemed to have her feet arranged in one of the five positions; I didn’t know which one. “Mr. Sharp,” she said, and that she’d remembered my name for a whole five blocks thrilled me. “Thank you.” She tipped an imaginary hat.
“When?” I asked.
“When what?”
“The lesson. When should I come?”
“An eager student!” She stuck a fist on one hip. “Tomorrow? Two-thirty? Call—it’s 9-0427—and make sure.” Then she turned and walked up the path to a brick house with a green door. Like my California house, it had a red Spanish-style roof; I nearly ran up the path and pointed that out to her. One strand of her black hair had come unwoven from her bun; it nearly reached her waist, and I wanted to fix it. I touched the corner of my mouth, as if she had kissed me. She hadn’t. She hadn’t touched me at all.
I walked back to Valley Junction, a considerable distance. I imagined I looked like Dick Powell, besotted with a girl, about to kick a can and burst into song. For a moment I thought: my father died two days ago. But on that long walk home it seemed I could remember one thing at a time—either Jessica dancing, or my father, and I chose. Every time I thought of Pop, I willed myself not to, so thoroughly that the next morning I had to take the streetcar into Des Moines to pick up the car.
I Could Keep Time by You
When I arrived the next day for my lesson, Jessica was dressed in leotards, a small flippy skirt tied around her waist. The girls in Hollywood, in vaude, wore next to nothing, sometimes, but in a house in Des Moines Jessica’s immodesty seemed revolutionary. She invited me in. Our houses, apart from the roofs, had nothing in common: the room I stepped into—her dance studio—was all wood, honey-polished from ballet slippers and dimpled from taps. In the corner a young man with dark hair that fell into his eyes sat at a grand piano, his shoulders already up to his ears, his hands above the keyboard, as though he was a character in a Swiss clock, waiting for the hour to strike.
“This is my brother Joseph,” she said. “Joseph, this is Mr. Sharp.”
He nodded and looked up at me through the hair. I could just make out one glinting navy-blue eye and three ugly pimples.
A Spanish poster advertising a bullfight was taped to the wall. A stout man, a dancer, frowned from a Lucite frame on top of the piano; he’d autographed his portrait to Jessica in Italian, and though I couldn’t read the words I knew they meant something fond and excessive.
“Well, Mr. Sharp,” Jessica said to me, “what can I teach you?”
“That’s what I’ve come to find out.”
“Let’s see what you know, then.” She put out her hands to indicate that I should step into them, and her brother began to play in waltz time. After a moment, Jessica laughed. “You can dance. Whoever told you that you couldn’t?”
“Whoever told me that I could?”
“I did.”
“Well, then,” I said. I tried to arrange my stupid smile into something suave, and stepped on her foot.
“That,” she said, “I can work with. To the left, dear. You keep wanting to dance me into the dining room. You’re not a clock. You may change directions, if it suits the dance.”
Oh, it suits me, I thought, though mostly it was being called dear. Mostly it was seeing her dining room right there, off the studio, the walls done up in a Polynesian-style paper, somebody’s toast plate still on the table, butter lumped in a cut-glass dish. Mostly it was my hand on her back, her leotard a little rough but lovely: she was a clock, I could tell by her thin black-clad arms and the steadiness of her feet and the ticking in her wrist. (I’d secretly slipped my thumb down, to feel her pulse as we danced. It was perfectly steady, and wreaking havoc with mine.) I could keep time by you, I thought.
“Your feet are fine,” said Jessica. “Now we have to work on your face.”
“It’s the only one I have.” I wasn’t the least bit insulted.
“Who told you that? Any dancer has more than one. First off, keep your mouth closed. You’ve got it hanging open. You look like you’re frightened of something happening in the other room. Concentrate on your partner.
Make her think that she’s the one who’s moving your feet. That’s the way it works: she moves your feet, and your feet move her feet, and you’re both in charge of the dance that way.”
I knew who was in charge. I hadn’t felt so deliciously bossed since Hattie, who I missed all over again, but you know? That sorrow was almost pleasant. I missed my father, too, in the same way: look, Pop, a nice Jewish girl I wish you could meet. All mourning should take place in waltz time. Des Moines was not so bad. I loved everyone: Annie, who had pressed my clothing this morning as she cried over my father; my mother, another small black-haired woman who sang under her breath.
Oh, my father would love you.
“What’s that?” Jessica said.
“Just counting,” I answered.
I wrote a check for my lesson, and said I wanted another. She consulted the calendar on her desk. “Next week—” she began.
“I’m much worse than that,” I said. “What do you have for tomorrow?”
My sisters thought my absentmindedness came of grief. Maybe it did. My mother died when I was a child, Hattie died when I was a teenager, and I had mourned like a child and like a teenager, first without understanding, and then with too much. Now I was a man with a job and money, and my father was dead, and maybe that meant it was time for me to take a wife after all.
Because all of a sudden that was what I wanted. I believed in my desire to marry Jessica as deeply as any skeptic converted by a miracle. Problem was, I had to go back to California soon. Rocky wired four times my first day in Iowa, and six times the second, notes full of condolences and information and requests for phone calls when I had time but not a moment before. Jimmy Durante would fill in for me on radio that Tuesday—two days after my father’s funeral—but then I needed to wrap things up. Our latest picture, Fly Boys, still needed its chase scene, though I was hardly necessary, since it involved Rocky escaping from an amusement park in a bumper car and driving down the boardwalk, where every plank made him blink. They needed me for reaction shots, flinging down my mortarboard, trying to get my own bumper car free from the bumper-car rink. I couldn’t dawdle in Des Moines.
You might think a guy like me would never meet a woman and want to marry her so quickly, but I ask you: can you imagine me dating her, me in California, she in Iowa? Can you imagine me waiting? I couldn’t go home with a phone number and a promise. I needed to bring back Jessica herself.
My secret. Nobody else knew. Sometimes I asked myself questions in Pop’s voice, and then in Rocky’s. Was she Jewish? Yes. Her father had been secretery at the same Orthodox shul that had employed my grandfather the rabbi. Cousins of mine had married cousins of hers, in that endless way of the Jews of Des Moines. She was only two years younger than me, but try as we might, we could not manage to come up with a single social event that we might have attended together as kids, not even weddings and funerals of mutual friends and distant relatives, or dances at the community center: she’d only gone to those after the death of her strict father.
Well then, my father would have said, she can work in the store. After all, I was going to stay. I couldn’t take a nice girl away from her home, could I? An orphaned girl, after all. Look after her.
Rocky would get me on the other side. He had told me, when we first met, that I should be ambitious in love, but I could hear in my head his questions, and I didn’t want to have to answer them. No, I hadn’t kissed her. No, I hadn’t asked her on a date. We’d only danced for educational purposes. She might have no idea of how I felt.
I could not wait to see her again; I did not think I could bear to see her again. She flat-out terrified me. She might upset that perfect romantic feeling, a pan of warm water inside my chest almost shoulder high, filled but perilous. It was the balancing that amazed me. Every time I thought of when I’d see her, the pan wobbled, but didn’t spill, and the feat of carrying it astounded me again.
“How did you know you loved Mommy?” one of my daughters asked years later. “I just knew,” I answered, which was not the truth. I realized I loved Jessica the day after I met her, when I mistakenly thought I saw her walking down the street toward me and I wanted to dive into a nearby bush and tremble with happiness, watching her pass.
The day after my father’s funeral, I sat in the kitchen with Rose and Annie, amid the ruins of the neighbors’ offerings. For lunch Annie had simply plunked a pie plate or Dutch oven in front of each of us: I had a chicken casserole, which I would have rather stepped in than eaten. Rose’s adventures with Quigley had made her slightly bawdy, given to elbow nudges. Annie played schoolmarm, but fondly. There were twenty-three years between them; there had only been seventeen between Annie and Mama. Two women of different generations: Annie still wore long dark skirts—she looked like Carry Nation, inconsolable over the loss of her hatchet—but modern Rose wore blue jeans and a western-style shirt. Now they kept house together, and I guessed they would for the rest of their lives. I worried that Rose, raised by a spinster, was doomed to become one.
“He never even saw one of my movies,” I said, running my fork across the ribbed edge of the white casserole dish.
“What are you talking about,” said Annie.
“Of course he did,” said Rose.
I looked at them. “Which one?”
“All of them,” said Annie.
“We took him,” said Rose. She pointed out the window. Annie took her finger and pushed it like a turnstile toward downtown. Rose laughed. “We took him. The Lyric removed a seat for us, to make room for his chair.”
“Some we saw twice,” said Annie.
“Three times,” said Rose.
“No kidding?” I said.
“He wouldn’t miss them!” said Annie.
“He loved you,” said Rose, who knew the limits of our father’s love.
I didn’t know that my father had ever been to a movie in his life. “No kidding,” I said, my voice cracking like a teenager’s. Pop at the Lyric in the front row, in a parking space made just for him, watching me, a kid who never graduated from anything, jump around in a mortarboard.
“No kidding!” my sisters said together.
Annie and Rose indulged me. They’d lived with my father, had seen him get sick. They might have seen him wish to die soon; they might have wished it themselves in some small way. He was ninety-four after all. Rose began slicing a rhubarb pie with the side of her fork. “I hate rhubarb,” she said, taking a bite.
“So what happened to Quigley?” I asked. Annie frowned, Rose smiled. They both shook their heads.
“That bad?” I asked.
“He hit me,” said Rose. “Once.”
I nodded. A terrible man, now gone.
“I mean, I might not have left anyhow, but I called Annie and told her.”
“I said, ‘Stay right there. I’m coming to get you.’ ”
Rose nodded. “So I packed my bags and waited. We lived in Kansas City, and Annie came on the train, which is not such a great way to make an escape. Billy figured it out and came to the station and begged me to stay. Sobbed, right there in Union Station.”
“Ugly,” said Annie. “Embarrassing.”
“But Annie carted me away. She was right. It was a mistake, marrying Billy.”
“You’re still in love with him,” I said.
“No!” said Annie.
“No,” said Rose. She was twenty-eight years old and had failed at running away from home. She smoothed her blue jeans nostalgically, not the least bit heartbroken. “Heavens, no. But some days I’m still in love with the mistake.”
Whose Dog Are You?
After my second lesson, Jessica looked at the clock on the mantelpiece, which was flanked by two porcelain dancers. “Would you like a glass of water?” she asked.
“I am thirsty,” I said, as though my thirst was proof of something.
Joseph sat with us on the back porch, drinking coffee. (When she offered me water, she really meant coffee, which was the only thing Jessica ever
drank.)
“Genevieve Gold can’t dance at all,” Joseph said suddenly.
“That’s true,” said Jessica. “She dances like a half-filled gallon jug.”
Poor Genevieve, whoever she was.
“So,” Joseph asked. “What do you do for a living?”
“I’m in show business,” I said.
He laughed and ladled the hair off his forehead with a hand. “I’m kidding. I’ve seen your pictures.”
I waited hopefully for some adjective.
“Doing?” Jessica said at last.
“I’m a comedian,” I said. “Part of a team.”
“He has a radio show,” Joseph said.
“I listen to music,” said Jessica.
“There’s music sometimes. He lives in Hollywood.”
“Right now,” I said, though I had no plans to leave it.
“I don’t like comedy,” said Jessica.
“I do,” Joseph said.
Okay, a setback, but maybe we could work around it. “Why not?”
She shrugged. I later found out that this was simply Jessica: there were plenty of things she didn’t like. Olives, for instance. Mothers, except for her own. Omaha.
She shrugged again. “Don’t. What kind are you?”
“Oh. Ordinary, I guess. My partner and I have a knockabout act. Sometimes I do a little singing.”
“That’s silly,” said Jessica. She didn’t sound mad, just certain. “And what brings you to town?”
“My father died,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” She took my empty coffee cup and examined it seriously, holding it, I imagined, as though it were my hand.
“How old was he?” Joseph asked.
I said, mournfully (I would go for sympathy if I couldn’t get laughs), “Ninety-four.”
But that, it turned out, was a punch line. They both laughed. “Really?” said Joseph.
I’d been looking at Jessica’s hand, her thumb on the lip of the cup where my mouth had been, and when I saw their faces I was confused. They looked oddly delighted: Not as sad a story as we thought. I was a young man, and they’d assumed that Pop’s death was premature, as their own father’s had been.
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