Ballroom: A Novel

by Alice Simpson

  “You’re hurting my arm.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  Weaving in and out of the crowd like a skilled driver, he is artful in the attention he pays, looking ahead, planning his direction, carefully avoiding other dancers. Under his breath he counts the rhythm. One-two-three and four. Counting calms him; rids his head of the jangle, the bad thoughts. Five-six-seven and eight.

  “Andrea says that some men here are married,” she says. “Are you?”

  Despite how he feels about Sarah, he hates her prying and worries that even in the dark she may see his discomfort. Under the colored lights of the Ballroom, he suddenly notices wrinkles around her eyes when she smiles. She looks older than forty; too old to have children. She’s lost weight; the soft plumpness of her arms is gone. The music is a Tito Puente mambo. He wants to dance with someone else.

  She pulls away from him slightly, stares into his eyes. “You really do look like Adolphe Menjou. I just found a photo of him in 1926 from A Social Celebrity, a lost film with Louise Brooks. He was young, and elegant. I’ll bet you were quite handsome when you were twenty.”

  He should never have invited her to Roseland. He dislikes this, the constant chatter.

  “Do you look like your father or mother?” She is off beat. He is losing step.

  “My father.” He can’t get the count.

  “What did he do?”

  “He was a professor and played the viola.” He apologizes as he bumps into Andrea and her partner.

  “What did he look like?” This is like an exam. Off balance, he steps on her foot.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it is my fault,” she says. “I’m not paying attention to the step.”

  “My . . . my father? Handsome, I suppose. I never saw him after we came to America when I was nine. I think he, uh . . . had a way with the women.”

  He’s never revealed anything so personal. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. About my father.” He stops so they can get back on the beat.

  “Don’t be silly. I’d love to see pictures of him—of you, when you were young.”

  Why has he spoken of his father’s indiscretions? Sarah talks too much and asks too many personal questions. Now she’s pressing herself against him rudely. He doesn’t want anyone at the Ballroom to know anything about him. Her body is warm against his. Even Ben Thorp at the office, his best friend, knows little about him. He can feel her heartbeat. Or is it his own? Ben’s wife Joanie always asks questions, too. He has to find a way to cancel Roseland.

  Relieved that the dance is over, he firmly walks her to the side of the floor.

  She reaches out and takes hold of his arm. “Why don’t we get together for a drink later? You could show me your photographs.”

  “Not . . . tonight. I’m sorry, perhaps, uh . . . another time.”

  “We’re friends, and I know so little about you.”

  The song ends. He wants to dance with someone else, but Sarah still has her arm around him.

  “We’ll meet at ten. I’ll wait for you at the top of the stairs.” She laughs. “That way, no one will see us leave together.”

  “I . . . uh . . .” He’s trapped. His mother used to ask him questions like this when all he wanted to do was read the paper. Since she passed, he likes spending evenings by himself. Sarah is too talkative.

  “Joseph, what is your last name? Two years, and you still haven’t told me.”

  Suddenly a young man from the Fred Astaire studio takes hold of her for the next dance.

  He’s relieved to avoid her question, but still disappointed to lose her.

  “Ciao,” she says with a sweet smile and a nod. Her partner is boyish and slight, wearing blue jeans, no jacket or tie, and she is laughing as they break into a hustle.

  Joseph feels a fool, unable to say no. He feels abandoned by her, and yet terrified of meeting her at the top of the stairs; he wishes he could laugh more.

  On Monday morning, when Ben asks the dreaded two questions, “So, how did it go? Meet any girls?” Joseph answers, “Of course,” and then changes the subject.

  Ben’s office is across from his at the phone company, and they often eat lunch together. Four times a year Ben invites him to a barbecue at his home in Forest Hills. In the 1970s his wife, Joanie, used to fix him up with her single girlfriends.

  “So?” Ben would ask.

  “She was pleasant,” Joseph would say. They were usually pleasant, friendly, nice, or intelligent, but never anyone he wanted to see again.

  “Did you get her number?”

  “Not this time.”

  In the 1980s, they were divorcées with children.

  “I want my own family—and to be honest with you, Ben, I prefer a younger woman.”

  “You’re no spring chicken.”

  “Well, you may be right. I just don’t know how I feel about someone else’s children.”

  “We’ll keep trying.” Finally Joanie stopped fixing him up. Now it is just Joanie, Ben, and their three children, and Joseph prefers it that way.

  There was little laughter in Joseph’s house when he was growing up. He vividly remembers one day when he was nine. He usually stopped by in the late afternoon after school to say hello to his father. He’d knocked on the door to the study, which was on the top floor of their house in the suburban town of Trastevere, outside Rome. But on this particular morning he had feigned a stomachache so he could miss the mathematics exam for which he believed he was not prepared. He hated math. If only he could just study literature and history. He waited for his mother to go to the market before going into Papa’s study. Before sliding the heavy oak doors apart, he’d waited for Papa’s deep, theatrical voice, but Papa was away giving a lecture. Joseph was not very strong, and the doors felt heavy and important. It took much of his strength to open them enough to slip through. Papa’s study was full of beautiful things, and mysterious. Mysterious because Papa didn’t like visitors.

  Entering, partially sliding the doors closed, so that he could hear if his mother returned earlier than usual, he sat in his father’s leather desk chair and spun around several times.

  A beam of light streamed through the casement window, momentarily blinding him. He reached for the suspended fragments of dust that made a path to Papa’s desk like many fireflies, and attempted to capture the particles. The light caught brilliantly on the edges of the two cut-crystal ink bottles, Papa’s silver pen, and his polished silver cigarette box. It illuminated the burnished burgundy leather desk set, its pencil cup, letter opener, and roller blotter. The warmth of this time of day and the closeness of the room brought out its scents of musty books, polished wood, and more than a week’s worth of cigarette stubs still in the ashtray. It was Papa’s scent. Mama smelled of the soap and mothballs she sprinkled in drawers and closets to keep the moths from eating their woolens.

  While the rest of their home was modest and unadorned, this room in the back of the house was to Joseph a magical place, rich with Papa’s beloved music, art books, and the clutter of treasured objects collected on his travels. He returned from each trip with a small artifact—a sculpture, a decorative box, or a framed miniature painting or drawing—that he proudly displayed. The story of its discovery, price, and purchase was told and retold. Then these articles took their place on a shelf to gather dust. To Joseph, it was a room of endless exploration.

  When Papa was at home and busy preparing his university lectures, he usually dismissed Joseph with a pat on the head after asking, “How was school today? Are you doing well?” He rarely paid attention to the answers. Joseph always longed to stay, to look more closely at Papa’s miniature framed pencil drawings of nude women and his collection of small bronze statues.

  Now alone in the study for the first time, he took down one of the bronze statues, ran his hands along the curves of the streamlined female figure, armless and headless. It was inscribed with the name “Archipenko,” and sat among others in a row on the first shelf of the bookcase. It
felt cool and polished, sleek to the touch.

  “Joseph, leave my things,” Papa had said whenever Joseph touched something on the shelves.

  When he rocked the leather blotter, it reminded him of a ship at sea, and its hieroglyphs became waves and sea animals. He pressed the clips that encircled the two crystal bottles filled with brown and purple inks. As he opened and closed the silver-capped inkwells, they became his puppets, to which he gave voices, first as pirates and then as American cowboys. He wished he could dip the silver pen into the purple ink, make marks, and watch the spread of the ink on the absorbent paper.

  The best thing of all in the room was the metronome, which Papa used when he played the viola. Joseph carefully opened the cover of the metronome, moved the balance up and down, set its fascinating workings in motion to determine the rhythm. If Papa had been there, he would have brushed his hands away, as if swatting a fly, and reprimanded him. He would have reminded Joseph, “It’s a precious instrument, boy. An 1816 Mälzel, and I paid a great deal of money for it.”

  Alone, Joseph sat back in the calm of the metronome’s slow motion. Tick-tock, tick-tock, with fingers on his wrist finding the beating of his heart. Tick-tock, tick-tock. He imitated the sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Tick-tock, tick-tock, as he read Treasure Island in the afternoon light.

  At the end of a chapter, he put the book down for a moment and noticed that Papa had left a key in the lock of one of the drawers. Until now he had never looked beyond the desk’s surface. Turning the key, he felt it catch and open. Remember where every item rests, he warned himself.

  Three ballpoint pens formed the letter N to the right of the drawer. Just beneath was a bankbook from Banco Italiano. He took careful note of its position in the drawer before picking it up. On the first page, on October 28, 1932, was the first entry. Papa had made a deposit every two weeks, and over the past ten years these amounts increased, as did the withdrawals. It seemed to Joseph that Papa had a great deal of money. They must be rich.

  Papa always dressed with great style, on the edge of flamboyance. He took pride in the quality and costliness of his purchases: his Cuban cigars, custom-made shoes, English suits, and silk cravats. At every opportunity Papa boasted to Uncle Theo of the cost of everything, and he loved acquiring new and beautiful things. Yet Mama had so little. She dressed in plain clothes of somber color. Holidays were frugally celebrated. He and his sisters received one gift each at Christmas, while Mama worried about the cost of every item she bought at the market.

  In the back of the drawer Joseph noticed a parchment envelope. Its open edge revealed a photo with two pair of feet. Those planted firmly on the ground were clearly his father’s. The other pair, with weight on only one foot, while the other daintily pointed behind, was definitely not his mother’s. Mama had never worn such pretty shoes. Drawing the photo from the envelope, he recognized Papa’s proud stance, the broadness of his chest, ears close to the square-jawed head, the graying beard, and his long, muscular legs. As he had suspected, the woman was not his mother, who was small, with pudgy fingers, plump arms and ankles, a comforting lap, and a serene gaze.

  This woman, the top of whose head reached almost to Papa’s ear, had her arm draped ever so casually around his shoulder, her wrist, hand, each finger, as dainty and graceful as a dancer’s. Her hair was bobbed like a movie star’s, and like a dark valentine, her cheerful mouth smiled between dimpled cheeks. Papa’s arm was around her tiny waist, and the way she leaned on one hip reminded Joseph of Papa’s bronzes.

  They were looking at each other as though someone had told them a joke. It was a recent picture, he was certain, because he recognized the striped shirt and trousers. Papa had brought that shirt home in a box under his arm in June before leaving to lecture in Paris. Walking by his parents’ bedroom, Joseph had caught sight of his father admiring himself in the mirror. He remembered because his father looked very handsome in the shirt, and he wondered if he would be as handsome when he grew up.

  “Do you think Joseph will be as handsome as his papa?” Aunt Theresa had asked Mama when she last visited.

  Often Joseph had looked at himself in that very mirror, searching for an elusive resemblance. He couldn’t imagine ever being as handsome and self-assured as his father. Everyone said his father looked noble.

  The photo in Papa’s drawer was not like the framed photo on his parents’ dresser, which had been taken in a photographer’s studio. Mama, unsmiling, sat in a wicker chair, and Papa stood next to her, looking stern and straight ahead in his three-piece suit. Joseph and his sisters, Consuela and Yvonne, were arranged by size, dark Consuela being the tallest and oldest at fifteen. A year younger, little Yvonne, blond and blue-eyed, was at the edge of the photo. The year before, when the photo had been taken, Joseph was already tall for his age, so he stood between them. Only a brocade curtain hung behind them. (No wild mountain paths, no strangely unfamiliar pine trees.) Certainly there had been no amusing stories.

  He placed the photo back in the drawer. It had given him an uncomfortable feeling. It was Papa’s secret, and Joseph wished he could tear Papa’s secret into a million pieces. He didn’t want his mother to see it. He replaced the bankbook, the arrangement of pens like an N. Everything as it was.

  The tick-tock of the metronome could no longer keep time with his rapid heartbeat. Taking hold of the arm, he stopped its motion, and then replaced the cover. Sliding the oak doors closed as he left the study, he looked back into the room one last time, dazzled by the rays of the setting sun.

  When Joseph’s mother had come to live with him twenty-six years ago, after her sister Theresa died in Chicago, he had thought it would be temporary, that she would ultimately get her own place. Part of him wished she would go, but another part of him was afraid to be alone. They got along well enough, and she was quiet company. After work he’d find her in the living room, sitting on a chair, staring out the window onto Perry Street, fingering her rosary. Familiar dinners awaited him; she washed and mended his clothes and kept the apartment neat. They didn’t talk much. He could sit and read the New York Times.

  Fifteen years ago, when her younger brother Theo died, Joseph realized she was never moving and gave her the bedroom, while he slept on the sofa.

  Every Sunday his sisters, Consuela and Yvonne, both unmarried schoolteachers, took turns coming in from Jersey to pick her up for dinner at the Hoboken Diner and a movie at the Rialto while he went dancing at the Ballroom.

  When her health deteriorated three years ago, there had been emergency trips to St. Vincent’s Hospital in the middle of the night. In the ambulance, listening to numbers being called out—the measure of her vital signs—as the doctors ripped off her nightgown to intubate her, he’d had to look at the time-ravaged body that she’d always carefully hidden from him, private places he was not intended to see. The thought of her death terrified him, sleepless, alone in the apartment.

  “Joey, bring the wool bed jacket from the middle drawer,” she would demand. “My hospital room is cold. It was Theresa’s, God rest her soul. Pick up a chocolate milkshake at the coffee shop—and just a little syrup—and get me an Inquirer at the Associated Market. Make sure it’s not last week’s.”

  Searching through the drawers of her dresser, touching her underwear, made him sick to his stomach. The personal scent of her clothing was too intimate.

  When her flesh-colored underthings hung by wooden clothespins above the bathtub, he closed the shower curtain. He hated the huge cups of her brassieres, her thick elastic stockings, the girdles with bands of rubber going this way and that to contain her considerable stomach. He didn’t want to think about her body.

  Once at Ben and Joanie’s, he had noticed Joan’s underwear hanging on padded satin hangers inside the fancy shower curtain. Black lace roses encircled the bra cups, small and dainty places for her breasts. A tiny bow was perched between the cups like a small bird. Her black lace bikini panties were cut deep in front like the letter V, remin
ding him of a blackbird in flight. There, in the pink-tiled bathroom with the door locked, he touched her bra, looking at his fingers through the mysterious lace, put his face to her panties and smelled something like musky seawater. He’d wanted to put them in his pocket.

  Chapter 12

  Angel

  The true gentleman is one who has been fashioned after the highest models. . . . His qualities depend not on fashion or manners but upon moral worth—not on personal possessions but upon personal qualities.

  —Samuel Smiles, Happy Homes and the Hearts that Make Them, 1882

  Maria!” Angel calls from under the awning at the subway station at Fourteenth Street across from the Ballroom. It is half past eight.

  “Hey, sugar! Ready to dance?” With a big hug and generous grin he takes her bag, puts his arm through hers, guides her into the coffee shop. She seems luminescent and smells of gardenias, a symbol of innocence.

  “Mambo Mama! Dios mío, you’re beautiful in red.” As he helps her off with her coat, he admires her café con leche skin. Her head turns toward him, her dark eyes dancing at his compliment. Once he dreamed that he’d made love to her in a heart-shaped bed, and that she wrote “Te amo” on his stomach with her Real Red lipstick.

  “You look hot yourself!” she replies. He’s gelled his hair back and wears a black collarless silk shirt with black crepe pleats.

  “If I could blush, I would!”

  “I’m having a real hard time concentrating—with school and exams. I keep thinking about Dance International. I want to win so bad, Angel. We’ve worked so hard. We’re so good.”

  “We’ve got till July. We’ll do great. You know we’re the best. You got to pay attention to school, too. Grad school,” he says with awe. “Hey, top of your class at Barnard. Soon Hunter. The business world is yours for the taking! You could be president of a bank, or AT&T, or anything.”

  “Do you really think so? Sometimes I think I’ll never get off Twelfth Street.”