Dance with Me

by Luanne Rice

  He nodded. He reached into his pocket—he was wearing a plaid short-sleeved shirt and rumpled khakis—for a handkerchief. It was clean and white, immaculately folded. That made Jane think of her sister, Sylvie, who was obsessive about perfectly folded laundry, and the connection was so strong, she was drawn to look deeply into his eyes.

  “There,” he said, dabbing at her eyebrow.

  She felt a rumble of emotion. Her father had left when she was very young. She had had a female pediatrician. Shy and studious, she hadn’t had any real boyfriends. She couldn’t think of any time in her life that a man had ever been so sweet and caring to her before. She bit her lip.

  His touch was gentle. He pressed her cheek with the cool fingers of one hand while wiping away the blood above her eye with the other.

  “I think you might need stitches,” he said.

  “No, I’m sure it’s fine . . .” she began, but the sensations in her heart were so strong, she could barely speak.

  “I’ll worry about you, about you having a scar, if you don’t,” he said. “I couldn’t stand to think I’d caused a scar on your face.”

  “I don’t scar,” she said, grinning at him, noticing the flecks of gold in his blue eyes, wondering why he looked so worried. “I’m tough.”

  “If you say so,” he said doubtfully, grinning back. They began to gather their books. Jane took hers; Jeffrey took his. They shook hands and said good-bye.

  It wasn’t until she went back to her dorm that she realized that she was missing one of her books, Myths: From Medieval to Post-Modern, and had one of his, The History of Literary Criticism. He had written his name in front: Jeffrey Hayden, Wayland. She wracked her brain for his dorm’s location; just across George Street, from where she lived in Littlefield.

  She carried his book around in her backpack for a day and a half, till she saw him again, at a table with his friends at the Sharpe Refectory.

  When she handed him his book, he reached into his briefcase for hers. They smiled at each other as she saw that he had a big, purple bump on his forehead, just like hers.

  He cleared off the seat beside him, and they ate together that day. They began to study together. Both planned to major in English. Jane wanted to write and teach high school. Jeffrey planned to become a professor. From the very beginning, Jane adored his brilliance, but he used to tell her that his mind was only a fraction as huge and sharp as hers. She would be lost in reading, deep into Beowulf or Sir Gawain, and when she glanced up, she’d catch him staring at her.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Studying,” he said.

  “No, you’re watching me.”

  “Literature’s supposed to be the story of the world,” he said. “And you’re the world.”

  That was before he’d even kissed her.

  Their kisses . . .

  These were the things Jane dreamed about, back at home in her old bed, fifteen years later. Jeffrey’s kisses.

  In her dreams, just as in real life, they had been so tender.

  Jane was lying on her back, on the narrow bed in her dorm room. Jeffrey was at the desk. Crazy bright light was coming through the window, as if the sun was setting in the hedge just outside. Jane squinted and shielded her eyes. Music thumped in the corridor.

  Suddenly Jeffrey was kneeling on the floor beside the bed. Jane held one hand over her face, to block the angle of the setting sun. It was October. His bruised forehead had long healed. But his eyes were just as worried as they’d been the first day they’d met. She wanted to ask him what he was so worried about. She opened her mouth to ask.

  His lips were thin and taut. She stared at them. His fingers touched her cheek; they felt smooth. She remembered their crash—how gently he had caressed her. The memory gave her an involuntary shake—a miniseizure. Then he kissed her.

  In her dreams, the kiss was as real as it had been that day. Jeffrey bent down, his face just above hers, kissing her softly, again and again. Just the sweetest, softest brush of his lips, then another, then another. Their arms were at their sides. His mouth was warm on hers. Jane arched, wanting something more.

  Her hand touched his arm. His upper arm, his muscle. Her fingers slid up the sleeve of his blue short-sleeved shirt. The twilight made him look tan, although like Jane, he was library-pale. Her eyes opened and closed. She was on fire, and she wanted to be sure she was still alive. His tongue touched hers. It was all over.

  They fell in love.

  He was from Oceanside, Long Island. She was from Twin Rivers, Rhode Island. School was their life. They loved Brown and each other. They went to football games together, wrapped in each other’s jackets as the Bruins consistently avoided victory. They thrilled to their classmates shouting, “Let’s go, Bruno—Bruno, let’s go!” but were both too shy to shout themselves.

  She had one sister and a mother and had been abandoned by her father as a young girl. He had one brother and two sisters, and his father was a doctor, and his parents had just celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. When Thanksgiving came, she cried, because they would be apart for four days.

  Christmas break was even harder. They spent the bare minimums at their homes, with the families they both adored, in order to return to Providence the instant the dormitories reopened.

  They had sex. It was wonderful. Jane was Catholic, so there was quite a bit of guilt and sin to get past. Her mother had drilled into her the idea that nice girls saved themselves for marriage, and deep down Jane had absorbed that credo and believed it to her core. But she loved Jeffrey so much, and he loved her. It was unthinkable that they would ever be with anyone else, that they wouldn’t get married.

  It was a tautological impossibility.

  She was taking Philosophy 101, learning to open her mind in ways she had previously considered impossible—considering that her mind had been youthfully and culturally and religiously and even tribally closed—so she philosophically thought about love, and about sex, and about time, and she decided that time was the problem: Since she and Jeffrey loved each other and always would, what did the sequence actually matter? Sex before or after an actual marriage ceremony? Connection was the important thing. Connection and love.

  Sex was the bridge between their bodies and minds. When Jeffrey held her in his arms, their thin bodies pressing together, they didn’t need language. Their skin spoke. It really did. Jane felt his love in his mouth and his arms and his penis. She felt it in her own toes and fingers and breasts.

  Being alive took on new meaning. Life exploded. Music had new significance and emotional depth, stories were to be related to their own lives, to each other. Sex was the decoder ring to everything. Jane’s mother distrusted men—and sadly, rightly so. Obviously Thomas, Jane’s father, was no Jeffrey. For many years, Jane and Sylvie had been soaking up their mother’s unhappiness; Jane couldn’t wait till her sister met someone like Jeffrey, to prove how wrong their mother had been.

  No myth had ever been written that wasn’t about Jane and Jeffrey. Pyramus and Thisbe: they had the same kind of love, all but the unhappy ending. Shakespeare had had them in mind when he’d invented Romeo and Juliet—the bliss part, not the tragedy.

  There could never be anything tragic about Jane and Jeffrey.

  Freshman year, sophomore year. Conscious of their responsibilities to each other, they both practiced birth control. Jane went on the pill. For the first month, until the hormones took effect, Jeffrey used condoms. The pill made her gain a little weight, but Jeffrey loved when her breasts got bigger. She popped out of her old bra, went to Davol Square Lingerie to buy some new ones.

  But no matter how sexy Jeffrey found her new body, Jane never liked the feelings. Her nipples hurt. And she didn’t like the fullness that made her old jeans feel too snug and her thighs rub together.

  She went back to the doctor and got fitted for a diaphragm. Jeffrey supported her decision, and to be extra safe, went back to using condoms and foam as well. Jane knew the church w
ould condemn her for using birth control, but Jeffrey told her that attitude was patriarchal and, if it made her feel guilty, even cruel—that she was the best person on earth, and she should trust herself, rely on her own goodness and excellent judgment.

  Jane loved him for that. To her, birth control was just a tool, a way to help women enjoy their own bodies and lives, to express love to the men they had chosen to spend their lives with.

  Sophomore year, she lived with two roommates on Wriston Quad and he shared a suite with three other guys in Morriss-Champlin. They took turns sleeping at each other’s dorm; and they began to talk about getting into a coed suite together for junior year. Jane had a part-time job at Sharpe Refectory, and whenever they made pies, she would save a little bit of crust and make tiny fruit or jelly tarts for her beloved.

  They began to talk about where they would go to graduate school. Whether they should get married before or after Jane got her master’s degree. They knew they couldn’t wait until Jeffrey finished his Ph.D.

  Jane’s recurring dream, the one she had every night after meeting Chloe’s uncle, was of the night Chloe was conceived.

  It was Campus Dance, the spring of sophomore year. Her dream was as vivid as the night itself had been. The Friday night of graduation and reunion weekend, the campus was transformed into a magical ballroom under the stars, with six hundred glowing paper lanterns.

  Seniors and their families, classmates, alumni older than Jane and Jeffrey’s grandparents, and Brown faculty gathered together to dance the night away. People wore everything from gowns and tuxedos to Hawaiian shirts and sarongs. Jeffrey wore his father’s dinner jacket over one of his habitual plaid shirts; Jane wore a simple black dress she’d had since high school graduation.

  They danced to Duke and the Esoterics on the Main Green, student bands on Lincoln Field, and listened to jazz at Carrie Tower on the Front Green. The night was so romantic, and Jane felt so in love. She was with the man she loved, in the place where they had met, where they belonged.

  “I want to take you somewhere,” Jeffrey whispered, holding her in his arms as if he couldn’t bear to not be touching her constantly.

  “Where?”

  “Our place,” he said. “They’re going to change the name after we graduate.”

  She followed him, having no idea what he meant. They crossed the stately Main Green, transformed from academia to romance by music and lanterns and dancing and laughter. Neoclassical and brick buildings rose around them. Carrie Tower, romantically named for someone’s wife—or was it daughter?—looked like an Italian bell tower. The great and massive wrought-iron fence surrounded the green, coming together at the Van Wickle Gates, opened only twice each year: to greet the incoming freshmen and to discharge the graduating seniors.

  Running past the Rock—the imposing and modern John D. Rockefeller Library, where they had done so much studying and kissing at carrels downstairs—they crossed George Street, and there they were. Jeffrey swept his arm into the sky, as if he wanted to give it to Jane, as part of the night’s package.

  “Here it is,” he said. “The Jane and Jeffrey Porter-Hayden English Department.”

  “That’s Horace Mann.” She smiled, staring up at the big square brick building.

  “Horace who? Wasn’t he the valedictorian for the class of 1819? Well, times change. And for all the great oratory and education Horace gave the world, making Brown proud, this building should be known for something more important.”

  “What?” Jane asked, looking into Jeffrey’s gold-flecked blue eyes as he put his hands on both sides of her face and smiled. For the first time, she noticed that he had lost his look of worry. It was totally gone. “What should this place be known for?”

  The music from Campus Dance echoed between the buildings. They heard Duke segue from “Moon River” to “Keep on Rocking in the Free World.” Jane’s heart fluttered in her chest, right up to her throat.

  “For us,” Jeffrey whispered, pulling her close, dancing with her to the music. “For bringing us together.”

  “You’re right: Horace who?”

  They laughed.

  He kissed her lips, touched her forehead. She could almost feel the original bruise. She brushed his forehead, and they laughed. He led her up the steps. There were two front doors, an oddity: Before housing the English Department, the building had had the distinction of being the first coed dorm in the Ivy League, and it had separate entrances for men and women.

  Jane tried one door, and it swung open. Shocked, they looked at each other. They started to back away, then, laughing quietly, stepped inside. Was a professor working late, or had someone forgotten to lock up?

  The hall was dark. Holding hands, they walked along, their footsteps echoing as the strains of Duke drifted in. Shadows came through the tall windows, otherworldly and surreal.

  “Geeks,” Jeffrey said, kissing her neck.

  “Who, us?”

  “Everyone else is out dancing under the stars, and we’re making out in the English Department.” He tugged on her zipper. She untucked his shirt. Pressing her against the wall, he kissed her hard. Filled with passion, she could barely breathe.

  They had never made love in a public place. It was fun, it was funny, it was wildly exciting, it was outrageously adult. No one in their class had ever done this, Jane was sure. No one in her family would be so bold, so daring with love.

  Jeffrey led her into a downstairs office. He placed his father’s jacket and plaid shirt on the Chinese rug behind the secretary’s desk and lowered Jane onto them. Their eyes locked, and she felt the worry showing between her eyes.

  “Do you have . . . ?” she began.

  “I didn’t bring one,” he said. “You don’t have the . . .”

  She giggled. “I don’t carry it with me.”

  He kissed her. His eyes were earnest, but worry-free. “Do you know if it’s a safe time?”

  “I’m not a math major.”

  They both laughed, and she tried to calculate, but she had never been sure which were the safe times of the month—some girls said the middle of the cycle was when people got pregnant, but her roommate knew someone who had had sex during her period one month and had missed it the next. So Jane closed her eyes and tried to count back, to remember the dates of her last period, but she wasn’t someone who kept track, didn’t have a clear mental calendar regarding her body.

  “It’s just this once,” he whispered.

  “But . . .” she began.

  “I love you, Jane.”

  “I love you, Jeffrey.”

  The words rang in the air. Weren’t those words what mattered? Didn’t they tell a story more profound than any tome that had ever been taught at Brown? Love was the thing. Love was everything. Love was bigger than space. It took up Jane’s entire heart, entire being, it took up space, it took Jane everywhere she went.

  They made love. He entered her. She closed her eyes, feeling him glide in. The wetness was amazing. He filled her. No two people had ever created such heat. The intensity rushed through her, from the spot just between her legs, straight into her heart. It felt like an arrow, and for the first time in her life, she understood everything about the myth of Cupid.

  The arrow struck deeply, and forever.

  Jane got pregnant that night.

  Jane knew the minute it happened. She held onto the secret, even from Jeffrey. She wanted to be sure. Filled with love, she had expected to be filled with dread. But that expectation and Jane’s honest emotions were two really different things.

  She fell in love with the baby.

  Instantly, totally: as much as—no, more than she was in love with the father. The baby was part of her, and she of it. How was such a feeling possible, and how could she explain it?

  She didn’t explain it; at least, not at first. After Campus Dance came Pops Concert, and then graduation and the commencement procession, when the Van Wickle gates opened for the second time that academic year. Jeffrey would be going
to New York, to a summer job as research assistant to someone at Columbia, and Jane would be working for her mother’s cousin at the Twin Rivers Bakery. They would return to Brown in September, along with Jane’s sister Sylvie, who would be starting her freshman year.

  Jane had wept to say good-bye. So had Jeffrey. They had held each other so hard, never suspecting it would be the last time. Or almost the last time.

  In her dreams in her old room at her mother’s house, Jane cried until her pillow was soaked. She held her body, as if she could hold it together, hold everything inside, take everything back, pull all the pieces of three lives back together.

  One night Sylvie, hearing Jane cry, stumbled into her room. Cool blue moonlight came through the almost-bare April trees, and when Jane opened her eyes, she saw her sister on her bed in a white nightgown. Jane’s dream had ripped her heart from her chest, as if the past were a lion that could eat her alive.

  Sylvie held Jane’s hand. The wind blew, and the branches scraped the window. Jane sobbed, shaking her head.

  “Let it be over, Jane,” Sylvie whispered.

  “But it’s not . . .” Jane said.

  “It is if you’ll let it. Let it all stay in the past.”

  “It’s not possible, Sylvie.”

  “You’re torturing yourself,” she said. “It happens every time you come home.”

  Jane stared at her sister, feeling her breath slow down. She was awake now. The dream was over. Or was it? The dream never really ended.

  Jane closed her eyes. If only Sylvie knew what it was like. A scrap of Jane’s heart had torn free, was out in the world. Alive and vibrant and living on the edge of an orchard. Liked apple tarts. Named by her mother, named by Jane.

  Named Chloe.

  CHAPTER 8

  Two Saturdays in a row and several after-school afternoons in between, Chloe worked on the stand. On the second Saturday, the air was fresh. It smelled of new grass and wet paint. The apple blossoms were heavy on the boughs, clusters of hot pink about to burst into snow white flowers.