Come and Join the Dance

by Joyce Johnson

  Should she go uptown? Should she go downtown? She had no reason, no desire to go in either direction.

  All around her people were being carried to their destinations. There was a stout man on the corner shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!”; busses stopped to absorb passengers; the subway rumbled beneath her feet; and each pedestrian was marching to an unknown, inevitable door. She was the only one in the street who walked aimlessly—except for the young man a few feet ahead of her, who was waiting now for the light to change.

  She had watched him for several blocks. He had paused at every newsstand to read the same headlines, had lingered in front of shop windows that couldn’t possibly have interested him, and he too had methodically peered into all the luncheonettes. He had a loping, undecided walk, and a head that hung forward as if it were too heavy for his shoulders. She felt a curious tenderness for him, for the back of his head, at least—she had not seen his face, but perhaps if he turned around they would recognize each other. Sometimes you came face to face with someone you didn’t know, yet found yourself and the stranger exchanging a look of recognition. It seemed wasteful that she and this unknown young man were not walking together. Soon he would be across 110th Street, and she would be walking on the other side of Broadway back to the college, since after all there was no other place to go. But she wanted to see his face. She almost cried out to him, “Turn around, please!”

  Just before the light changed, she saw him step forward as a car swerved around the corner. He stepped back almost casually and watched the car disappear. It was then that he turned toward her and she realized he was someone she knew—Kay’s friend, Peter. Kay had met him just a few weeks before she left school, and lately she seemed always to be going over to his apartment. Susan found herself running to catch up with him.

  “Hello!” she called loudly. “Hello, Peter!” When he turned, he had the look of someone startled out of sleep. “I’m just taking a walk,” she said, feeling unbearably foolish. Why was he studying her so gravely? Could he tell that she had been running? “Somehow I always meet people on Broadway.”

  He smiled at her uncertainly. “I’m just taking a walk myself. Where are you headed?” he asked.

  She shrugged and laughed a little, feeling that she would choke if she answered him.

  “Would you like some coffee?” he said.

  “Oh … ” she said. “Well, yes.”

  He had an amused look—she must have sounded awfully eager. “How about the College Inn? Is that all right?”

  “That’s fine,” she said.

  They turned and began to walk back uptown. There was a silence between them that contented her, although she usually found silence uncomfortable, a kind of failure, especially if she was with someone she did not know very well. She barely knew Peter, although she knew a lot about him because of all the things Kay had told her. Kay had taken her to some of his parties, and a few times when she had met Kay at the Riverside, Peter had sat at their table. Yet she had scarcely spoken to him. This was the first time they had ever been alone together.

  When they passed Schulte’s Kay was still there, sitting all by herself at the counter. Susan almost said, “Oh, look—there’s Kay,” but without quite knowing why, she didn’t; the silence was left intact. When they were halfway up the block she wondered whether Kay had seen them pass, not that Kay would have minded—she was beautifully unpossessive of people, and just because she talked about Peter so much, it didn’t mean that she was in love with him; Kay had never said so… . Why should she have the uneasy feeling that she had done something wrong?

  They were the only customers in the College Inn. They sat down in a booth near the window, considered the menu and ordered coffee. For a while, Peter stared at her across the table. His eyes were gray, deep-set, almost blank at times. His mouth was very thin when he wasn’t smiling.

  “Susan,” Peter said abruptly, “do you have a quarter?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, find it. We can have some music.”

  She began to search through her pocketbook obediently, as though young men had always asked her for quarters, and she heard Peter impatiently beating out a private rhythm on the table. “Here’s one,” she said at last, dropping it into his hand.

  “Excellent.” He walked to the jukebox, read the titles of all the songs, then turned to her. “What would you like to hear?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you being polite when you say that, or don’t you care?”

  Was he attacking her? She had a moment of panic. “I guess I don’t care.”

  “It’s your quarter,” he said in mock reproach. “But since you’re not interested, you’re at my mercy.” He pressed three buttons and walked back to the booth. There was a roll of jungle drums over the loudspeaker, then a woman began to shout ferociously about love. “Don’t you like music?” Peter asked anxiously. They both began to laugh. “Listen, Susan,” he said, “I’m completely broke. I can’t even pay for your coffee. Does that matter?”

  “Oh, I can pay for everything,” she found herself saying.

  “My check probably came yesterday, but I haven’t been back to the apartment yet. I spent all my money on gasoline.” He sounded apologetic, defensive, as if she had asked him for an explanation.

  “I’ve really got lots of money,” Susan said.

  “You’re young—you don’t have a mailbox full of bills.” His laugh was bitter. “I don’t know why I came back to New York this time,” he said.

  “You’ve been away?”

  “Oh, I disappeared for a few days—I do that now and then.”

  “Where do you go when you disappear?”

  “This time I went to Chicago… . You’ve never seen my car, have you?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Well, you ought to come and see it. It’s beautiful. A big black Packard—1938. It’s the only beautiful thing I own. It’s starting to fall apart now.” He sounded very sad when he said that; the car seemed to be more than just a car to him. “I should have made this trip a long one—God, I felt like it!”

  “Why didn’t you?” she asked shyly.

  He took a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. “No money, for one thing,” he said in a flat voice. “Obligations—I’m supposed to finish my thesis next semester. I can’t keep getting checks from home for the rest of my life.”

  “Are you almost finished?” she asked.

  “I’ve been ‘almost finished’ for the last five years.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to finish. I mean, maybe you don’t want to find out what’s going to happen to you next… . ” Peter was silent. She felt terribly embarrassed. Why on earth had she said that to him?—he was someone she hardly knew.

  But then he said, “Maybe I don’t,” and she could tell he wasn’t angry. He leaned toward her across the table with a sudden eagerness. “You know, Susan, I’ve never heard you say anything before. You come to my parties with Kay, you sit on the sofa, you listen to someone very dutifully, and every now and then you tell a story or a little joke—and that’s all.”

  She laughed painfully. His description was accurate. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “I don’t know—is it? Is it enough for you?”

  Carefully, she folded her paper napkin into a triangle. “I really don’t want this conversation,” she said.

  “Of course you don’t,” she heard him say.

  “I don’t see why everybody has to be so terribly warm and interested in everyone they meet just because they’re afraid they’ll be caught being trivial.”

  “But is that what we’re doing?” he said quietly.

  “I don’t know.” She had a feeling of helplessness, of vast ignorance. “I never really know whether or not I mean what I’m saying anyway.”

  “By the time you’re my age you�
�ll know even less.”

  “Your age! You’re not that much older than I am.”

  “I’ll be thirty in October.”

  “You thirty?” She laughed in disbelief.

  “I thought you knew,” he said.

  She realized that of course she had known it all along—Peter’s age, a piece of information. She had taken it for granted and then forgotten it, perhaps when she had seen him talking politics excitedly with Anthony Leone, who was only eighteen, or when he had been a little drunk at a party once and had done a crazy, disorganized dance in the middle of the room to please a girl and then had followed her around saying, “Listen now, don’t be that way,” while the girl giggled nervously. She looked at him again now and saw that he was indeed almost thirty; his face was hollower than Jerry’s would be for many years. She remembered Kay telling her that Peter had once been married; she remembered hearing someone refer to him as “that perpetual student.” Five years was a long time to work on a thesis. There was a desk in his living room with piles of manuscript and journals on it, all thick with dust.

  Peter was grinning. “Susan … stop looking grim. We’re all getting older. But I’m going to be a promising young man as long as possible. If you haven’t got all the time in the world, what else is there?”

  For a moment she wanted to challenge him: “How much time does anyone really have?” But she knew that he had probably long ago rejected his own excuses, that he must be bitterly aware that the people who came to the university were a little younger every fall.

  “You see through all this?” he said wryly.

  She shook her head. “I see it.”

  “You’ll be thirty someday.”

  “Today I had my last examination,” she said. “I keep telling myself school’s over, now something else begins. But nothing’s any different. I haven’t changed. Maybe I never will. When I was eight, I used to look forward to being twenty. Now I’m twenty and I’m still the same person. I really am. I may even be the same at thirty.”

  “You have no patience,” he said.

  “Well, what if there’s nothing to look forward to!”

  “Maybe there isn’t.” His voice was quiet. “No point in getting upset.”

  “I think you have to get upset!” She realized, astonished, that she had almost been shouting.

  He got up from the table and stood beside her, putting his hand on her shoulder. “You’re a nice girl,” he said. “You’re worth saving.”

  “But who’s going to save me?”

  “Not me,” he said cheerfully. “Thank God!”

  “Peter, what will I be when I’m thirty?”

  “Anything,” he said. “Anything you want.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  She spent the rest of the afternoon with Peter. He borrowed four dollars from her and they left the College Inn and went all around the neighborhood paying off his debts; he retrieved his shirts from the laundry, his shoes from the shoemaker, and redeemed his library card. Susan followed him happily, never bothering to ask, “Where are we going now, Peter?” For this afternoon, at least, her life had been absorbed by his, and yet at the same time, everything was peculiarly important, peculiarly distinct—the pyramids of oranges in a grocery window, the names on the marquee of the Nemo movie theater, and Peter calling, “Here cats! Here cats!” in a cracked, plaintive voice, until the thin gray cat that had been eying them crept under a car and they both laughed helplessly. She thought she would remember that forever, and the faces of the people in e streets would also be remembered and exactly how warm the sun was on her shoulders, and the fact that on 114th Street Peter grabbed her hand for an instant, saying “Wait! Look at that!” and there on the sidewalk had been a wonderfully elaborate chalk drawing of a neckless man on a lopsided horse.

  The afternoon ended in a secondhand bookstore. “Let’s stop in here for a minute,” he had said; for the next hour he had restlessly searched the shelves for something he wanted. “There must be a book. I have to buy a book,” he cried. “You help me now.” She had ransacked stacks of books for him until her eyes smarted from the dust. “Let me know when you’ve had it,” he called to her once, and she had replied gaily, “But you don’t really give a damn.”

  Then all at once it was over. “It’s five o’clock,” he announced soberly.

  “Oh, what will we do now?” she asked.

  “I have to go back,” he said. “I have to go back to the apartment.”

  She felt perilously close to having the words “Don’t go” wrenched from her, but knew you could never say things like that and said only, “I see,” because that was meaningless.

  “I’m sorry… . You see—I have an application for a fellowship due at five tomorrow. I’ve been avoiding it all semester, but I ought to try to get it done… . Funny—I actually feel a little like working now.” They stood before each other in silence, awkwardly. “So … ” he sighed at last.

  “You didn’t buy a book,” she reminded him crisply.

  “Couldn’t have anyway. I’ve spent all your money.” They laughed. Their eyes caught for a moment as they walked out of the store into the street. “So long.” He grinned at her painfully and she found that his hand had somehow captured hers. Then he let it go and began to stride down the block, disappearing at last around the corner.

  Standing by herself outside the bookstore, she suddenly discovered that she could stand still in the street if she wanted to, that aimlessness could have its own legality. If she wanted to, she would walk five times around the block or take a subway downtown to no place in particular. There was no shame then in accepting temporary shelters. She walked back up Broadway to the college.

  As soon as she had pushed open the green gate, she saw Jerry. He was sitting on the concrete steps outside Brooks Hall, a copy of the New Yorker open on his lap. She wondered how long he had been staring at the same page.

  She was not at all surprised to see him, but thought, Of course. Of course he’s here. He had expected her to come; she had expected to find him. If there had been no one waiting for her on the steps, she would very likely have rushed into the lobby and asked the girl at the desk hadn’t there been any calls, hadn’t anyone come and then gone away. And yet she was as angry with him as if he had cheated her of something.

  “Hello, Jerry.”

  “Susan!” He scrambled to his feet, trying to jam the New Yorker into the pocket of his jacket. She wondered why and almost asked him. He was frantically grinning at her.

  “I took a walk,” she said finally, feeling that there was nothing they could say to each other that would be appropriate; anything would be hopelessly out of context.

  “I figured.”

  “Have you been waiting long?”

  “No. Not long. Not long at all,” he said. But he couldn’t quite look at her.

  “You didn’t have to wait. You could have called.”

  He was silent. For a moment his eyes searched hers anxiously. “I wanted to see you!” he cried.

  She felt a sudden relief that he hadn’t lied to her, that he hadn’t said, “Well, I just thought I’d sit here and read.” She wondered why she always underestimated Jerry. “I didn’t think you’d want to,” she said lamely.

  “I thought we’d talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk, Jerry! I really don’t.”

  “Okay,” he said sadly. “We won’t talk. Shall I go away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He took off his glasses and rubbed them against the sleeve of his jacket and tried to smile at her. Why hadn’t someone warned him not to wait?

  “Listen,” he said, “let me take you to dinner. You don’t want to eat dinner with a lot of girls.”

  “Jerry … you’re terribly nice.” She felt herself trapped by his niceness.

  He caught her by the shoulders. “Let’s g
o downtown. We’ll really go out. We’ll go to some great place, some French place, anything you like.”

  Should she get dressed up, go downtown with him? She could wear her black Shantung dress, which was the one dress she owned that made her feel worldly, and the long silver earrings her mother had given her. Jerry would inevitably tell her that she looked like the 1920s and they would drink cocktails and be very gay. Maybe she could be gay if she made the effort. “Will you buy me champagne?” she asked.

  “We’ll get drunk,” he announced extravagantly. “That’s what we’ll do.”

  “All right. Let’s get drunk.”

  He laughed uncertainly. “You know, we could. There’s no school tomorrow.”

  “There’s no more school at all!” She flung the words at him. “And I meant it about getting drunk.”

  “Okay,” he said, bewildered.

  The listlessness of the afternoon settled heavily upon her again, and she knew she could be neither gay, nor kind, nor cruel—only blank, a spectator of herself, immensely bored. She told Jerry she had to go upstairs for a little while; at least there would be no one to talk to there, she thought.

  “Why?” he demanded anxiously.

  “To get dressed.” As good an excuse as any.

  “But you look okay… . ”

  “I have to get dressed up if you’re taking me out.” Already her hand was pressed against the heavy glass door. “I’ll be just a minute!” she called over her shoulder.

  “Susan!” he cried out.

  Susan turned. “Well?” she asked impatiently.

  “Don’t forget to come down.” He looked so small and frightened. Perhaps if he had not been waiting for her, she would have telephoned him when she had come back to her room—not to apologize, but to talk. Somehow she would have managed to be great, just great. She wondered sadly why she was always being deprived of her greatness. “Of course I’ll come down,” she said.

  It was seven o’clock when they got off the Fifth Avenue bus at 57th Street—a soft evening. The city seemed deserted, except for a few couples strolling languidly down the avenue. Susan wondered where all the afternoon people had vanished—to cocktail parties perhaps, or the icy darkness of bars; surely they were all doing something infinitely graceful, not just lingering at a bus stop because they had no idea where to go next. Across the street, the mannequins in their summer dresses stood in the muted light of the Bonwit Teller windows, their wooden limbs twisted into an impossible, infuriating sophistication. “Just look at them!” Susan cried. “They are all waiting for taxis.”