Dancing on Coral

by Glenda Adams

  Professor Bird paced up and down, like a proctor in an exam.

  “Solomon, Gilbert, Ellice, Marshall?” Elizabeth was peering over Lark’s shoulder.

  “They were named after islands in the Pacific,” Lark whispered to her.

  “No talking,” said Professor Bird.

  “Sorry,” said Elizabeth, going back to her own list.

  Professor Bird cried out, “Time’s up. Let me have your names.” He seized Elizabeth’s list, and Jean-Claude’s. As he held his hand out for Lark’s, she found herself holding onto it.

  “I’ll keep mine. I haven’t finished.”

  “But I will interpret your life. It’s a game, for you. For me, it’s my work. I need your list.” He tilted his head and read Lark’s list sideways. “You started at the beginning. I said to do last week. Well, let’s see, Watter, Baker, Blank. Anglo-Saxon names, and distorted French, possibly Huguenot. Could be in Britain, or any of the British colonies or excolonies. No other children’s names for a while—this must be an only child. No aunts, no uncles. This family is isolated. Solomon, Gilbert, Marshall. Hmmm. Names of islands in the Pacific. This family is probably involved in some way. Their ancestors should have stayed at home. The world would be better off.”

  “You heard me talking to Elizabeth,” said Lark. “And you already knew my background.”

  Professor Bird stood back, offended.

  “Here,” said Portia to her husband, “interpret my list.”

  “I know your list already,” said Professor Bird. “I know who you are and everything about you. You are my wife.”

  Portia drew back her list, unperturbed.

  Professor Bird seized the list of his oldest son, and opened his mouth to read it aloud, then stopped. He folded the list. “You go to the bathroom and wash out your mouth, young man.” He pointed at the boy, then at the door. The boy scrambled to his feet, and his brothers jumped up beside him. They raced out of the room, exploding in giggles.

  “He’s going to murder them one day,” said Portia. “We had to bring them with us, or the babysitter wouldn’t stay with the baby. She says all four are too much.” Portia pursed her lips happily at the combined effect of her boys.

  “Interpret mine,” said Elizabeth.

  Professor Bird took her list. “I’ll just take them with me. They’re for an article I’m writing. Portia, we can deduct the bottle of wine we brought from our taxes because I’m doing my work.” He gave a laugh. “Help me collect them, will you?”

  Portia scurried around the room taking the sheets of paper, now covered with names, from the bewildered guests. “He’s really a pit—all bark and no bite, really,” she said, as she went around.

  “I’ll just keep mine,” said Lark, who would have swallowed her list rather than let it fall into the hands of Manfred Bird, who stood before Lark again, waiting for her to hand over her list.

  “Say,” cried Tom, “here’s something you ought to see, Manfred.” He disappeared and came back holding aloft Lark’s espadrilles. “How would you interpret these? Their history?”

  Professor Bird frowned at the shoes, turning them over gingerly. “Cut up,” he said. “Glass? Walking around New York streets would do that to a rope-soled shoe.”

  “Coral,” said Tom triumphantly. They could have been his shoes. It could have been he who had made the coral walk. Yet Lark had felt that he had not believed her at all when she told him. “These shoes have been walking on coral, in the middle of the Pacific.” He twirled them around on his fingers. “Tell him, Larkie. She was with Donna, you remember, Manfred. They coral-walked together.”

  Now Lark felt suddenly important, valuable. Tom was pleased with her after all. She could contribute, even if it was only a pair of rope-soled espadrilles.

  “She’s an original,” said Professor Bird.

  Lark smiled modestly.

  “That Donna of mine always was. If anyone would go walking on coral she would be the one.”

  “We both walked,” Lark insisted, even though she knew she had had to be forced into it. “It was such fun. It’s not every day you get a chance to walk in the middle of the ocean. We were crossing the equator and had to be dunked in water for good luck.”

  “What an adventure,” said Elizabeth. “I’m only going to France.”

  “France is not ‘only,’” protested Jean-Claude.

  Elizabeth patted his cheek and kissed her lips at him to placate him.

  “You should all stay home,” said Professor Bird. “You’re all spoiling the world. It’s getting harder and harder for us anthropologists to do our work.” He frowned. “And then when ignorant, left-winged governments interfere with your work—they impounded my valuable stuff. Customs was told there was something suspicious about the cargo.”

  Das Schaudern, das Schaudern, Lark hummed. She was the one responsible. She had told the pilot on the Avis Maris. He must have been listening to her, after all.

  “They say it could be a federal case—international theft of art work. They’re out to get me because I am not afraid to speak out with unpopular ideas.”

  But it was finally Donna Bird’s fault that the father was in a fix. She had gone to great lengths to persuade Lark that the cargo was suspicious and dangerous.

  The doorbell rang. It was the downstairs neighbor. “What is this? A brothel?” He was holding out items of Lark’s underwear. “Some kind of joke? These were being draped across my window sill.”

  “The boys,” Portia gasped and dashed into the bedroom. “You bed boys. You promised.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” said Lark to the neighbor, taking back her clothes.

  “It was just the boys,” said Portia, from the doorway of the bedroom. “They were just lowering things, on a string. An experiment, I’m afraid. They’re always experimenting. So curious. Typical boys.”

  The neighbor stormed off.

  “It’s all right,” said Lark to the Bird family, although no one was actually offering her an apology. But it was just, in a way, that the Bird boys, Donna’s half-brothers, should embarrass her. It was a kind of repayment, for what she had done to Donna.

  Portia hustled the boys out. “We should go, Menfred. The baby-sitter, remember?”

  “Wait,” said Tom. “Just a moment.” He drew Lark with him to the center of the room. “You know the reason for this gathering?”

  Lark smiled brightly around the room.

  “To meet Lark, of course,” said Elizabeth, smiling at Lark, giving her a wink to remind her that they had shared intimate information about Tom and the key to cleverness.

  “That was the pretext,” cried Tom. “I wanted to announce some wonderful news, that I—” and for a moment Lark thought he was going to announce that they were getting married, although as far as she could remember he had never suggested it to her. She hoped that one day she would be qualified to marry Tom, after she had improved her mind. She was thinking of enrolling in a Ph.D. program, in history or sociology, so that he would want to listen when she spoke about the outcome of elections or economic policy.

  “I wanted to announce that I have been given a grant to travel this summer. A generous grant, I should add.”

  Everyone cheered. “Great, wonderful, good old Tom.”

  Tom put his arm around Lark and looked down at her.

  “You didn’t tell me,” Lark whispered, about to cry, but still smiling since everyone was looking at them, the happy couple.

  “What about me?” was what she wanted to cry out to him.

  “Lark’s coming, of course. Were going to turn her into a social critic.”

  “When are you going, exactly?” someone asked.

  “A-ha,” said Tom. “It’s a surprise.”

  “You’d do better to stay put and publish some solid articles,” said Manfred. “Work on something substantial, mainstream. Look to your mentors.”

  Later, after everyone had left and Lark and Tom were picking up peanut shells and glasses and ashtrays, Lark
asked where they were going, but Tom wagged his finger at her and shook his head. Then she asked, somewhat timidly, “Do you think we might get married? One day?”

  “Married?” Tom hesitated. He gave Lark a bear hug and kissed her. “Let’s just put that on the back burner.”

  Lark saw a stove with pots boiling away on front burners and a little bridal couple, up to their necks in hot water, simmering on the back burner.

  Tom returned from teaching his first class of the new semester. It was the day after the peanut party.

  “In class I sat at the back,” he told Lark. “The students didn’t even realize I was the teacher. That shows you the kind of authority that a desk at the front of a room bestows on a person.”

  Lark went to him and touched his shoulders. He dropped his head to show that he would accept a massage of his tense neck and shoulder muscles.

  “What kind of practical joke was that?” Lark asked. “The poor students must have been confused.”

  “It’s a political tactic, Lark. Don’t you see? I sat there at the back of the class for ten minutes. The students were getting restless, shifting around, looking at their watches. Finally, I said, very quietly, ‘When are you going to get your act together? Are you waiting for some authority figure to come along and tell you what to do? When they tell you to go to Vietnam, are you just going to go?’ They froze in their chairs and sat very still, saying nothing. ‘I thought you guys might want to have a say in your own curriculum, define your own syllabus, teach one another.’ And do you know what one of them said? ‘We’re here to learn, sir.’ ‘Sir,’ he said. Sir!” Tom was shaking his head. He shrugged Lark’s hands from his shoulders. “It seems you have to force freedom on some people, lead them to water and make them drink.”

  Lark stood on the balcony again. The crane, on its long leg, had added to its own height and raised itself one story, keeping pace with the rising height of the building under construction. “That Irishman thought the Russian was K.G.B.,” Lark called back into the room.

  “Maybe he’s gone to Rotterdam to count N.A.T.O. ships,” said Tom. “Just joking. It’s the West that is busy counting these days.”

  “Then do you think Manfred is C.I.A.?” She went to the bookshelf and took down Alone in the Garden, riffling its pages as if it were a book of moving pictures.

  Tom shook his head, shrugged, and waggled his toes in time to “The Trout” on the radio. Tom was sitting in the comfortable armchair in the corner next to the swaying bookshelves, his papers and books spread in concentric circles on the floor surrounding him. “Thank God they’re giving us a break from Telemann,” he said to his papers.

  “He’s a poet,” said Lark. “The Irishman.” She dangled the book at Tom. “My first poet.”

  “Here, show me that book.” Tom looked at the first few pages, then threw the book down. “This is a vanity press. That asshole paid to have his own book published.”

  Lark took in a breath, not so much at the revelation as at Tom’s metaphor, which never failed to produce for her the literal image.

  “He ran for Ireland in the Olympics.”

  “All he probably ran for was coffee,” said Tom. “He’s a reactionary crock of shit. And a liar.”

  Lark paused to consider this new image. “Then why did you invite him to my party?”

  “The Irish quota. Just joking. He is one of the Carnegie Fellows and some of my best friends are Carnegie Fellows, and sometimes even Carnegie Fellows can be lemons. That guy’s a fake.” The phone rang. “He seems to have impressed you. But then, you aren’t used to meeting the cross-section of types we get here, just as a matter of course.” Tom went back to jotting in his note pad.

  “I thought he was dreadful,” said Lark, crossing to the phone. “Hello?”

  It was Elizabeth. At the same time, someone else came on the line. A man. Elizabeth said, “Hello,” and the man said, “Hello?” and Lark said, “Hello?”

  “This is my phone number,” Lark said to the strange, third voice.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Who are you?” Lark asked. “Why is my phone connected to yours? Where are you?” She heard another voice in the background calling out to the man on the line. “Shit,” the man muttered, and hung up.

  Elizabeth laughed. “It’s some kind of surveillance. They’re probably watching Tom. It’s well known that universities spy on their teachers these days.”

  “Couldn’t it just be crossed lines?”

  “It’s more likely to be a tap,” said Elizabeth, “and that’s not even being paranoid. Say, I wanted to thank you and Tom for last night. Great peanuts.”

  “Tell her to come over,” said Tom. “Immediately.” He waved some papers in the air. “I’ve got this questionnaire and I need subjects.”

  “Don’t you think it was just crossed lines?” Lark asked Tom when she was off the phone.

  He gave a little snorting laugh. “If you have any sense at all, Larkie, you’ll just take it for granted that the phone is always tapped. Always. Period.”

  Lark went to the balcony to watch for Elizabeth. “This is a test of the emergency broadcast system,” the radio announced, and there followed a long shriek from a siren. How could Manhattan ever be evacuated? Just the cars parked on this street would have trouble lining up and turning north to get away.

  “We could get out your car and go to the beach,” Lark said. “We could walk along the sand. I’d like to see some ocean.”

  Tom kept his car in a garage and never used it. It was too much trouble to walk to get it and too much trouble to park once you got where you were going, Tom explained. He pulled a face, shook his head, and indicated the papers on the floor.

  Lark saw that farther down the block, a man was walking back and forth on one section of the sidewalk, passing and repassing a green station wagon. When he got past the station wagon, each time he stopped and looked around to see if anyone was watching.

  “I think that man is about to steal a car,” Lark said.

  Tom got up and looked, then drew back. “Get out of sight,” he said. Lark was leaning out over the balcony, about to start shouting. He put his arm around Lark’s shoulder and drew her to him, his hand pressing her head to his shoulder in an unexpectedly warm gesture. Lark stayed still in the circle of his arm, feeling the cotton of his shirt against her cheek, his chin against her head.

  The man was standing beside the station wagon. He had a short blade in his hand, which he inserted between the door and the body of the car, and ran it quickly up, then down. Then he unlatched the door of the car, got in, and drove off.

  “We should have shouted out at him, stopped him doing that,” said Lark, ashamed of what she had allowed in exchange for an embrace.

  “Maybe it was his car.” Tom went back to his chair. “In any case, the people have a right to take the material possessions of the rich, which are created through the labor of the poor.” But he looked uncomfortable, and Lark knew he had been afraid. “Remember, this is New York. You can get hurt. People carry guns. You’re not in Sydney now.” He looked up at her and tried to make her smile at him, then shrugged when she turned away. “It was just one small event in a day of small events.”

  “We should have stopped him. Why did we hide? Like middle-class cowards?”

  Tom cleared his throat. “Come here and sit on my knee, Larkie.”

  Lark stayed standing, looking at him. Tom patted his knee. “Come on. I want to propose. I’ve been thinking. Let’s get married.”

  The doorbell rang, and Elizabeth walked in, beaming.

  “Congratulations,” she cried. “You’re under some kind of surveillance. That’s called really making it in these parts, Lark. Your Tom is a better guy than we thought.”

  “Tea?” Lark asked.

  “She can’t let anyone in the door without offering tea,” said Tom. “Come here, Larkie, and let me give you a hug. It’s cultural, you know. Someone walks in, Lark’s right hand reaches for the kettle and
her left hand turns on the faucet.” Lark, smiling like a good sport, went to stand beside Tom in the chair, and he put his arm around her legs and gave her a squeeze. “In Australia I drank so much tea that my back teeth sang ‘Anchors Aweigh.’ Ladies would ask me if I wanted a drink, and of course I always did, but what they gave me was tea.”

  Lark saw a chorus line of teeth—molars, bicuspids, incisors, the lot—dancing on their roots, kicking high and singing on the deck of a ship that floated on an ocean of tea.

  “Well, actually, I do feel like tea,” said Elizabeth, winking at Lark.

  “You don’t look like tea,” said Tom.

  “What kind do you have?”

  “Pardon? Oh, just tea.”

  “Then just tea will be great,” said Elizabeth.

  Lark went to the kitchen. She suddenly felt tired. It seemed that every day she had to be alert in order to comprehend the forces around her. It was the feeling she had had all the time on board the Avis Maris. The world was indeed a tricky place, as Henry Watter had warned. But she had to remember that everything was going to be all right. Tom wanted to marry her.

  “Did you ever feel any anxiety about the possibility of a nuclear war or a nuclear attack?” Tom asked Elizabeth.

  “What?”

  “Significant, moderate, slight, none?”

  “Significant, why?”

  “Did you ever have any nightmares dealing with a nuclear war or nuclear attack? Often, occasionally, once or twice, never?”

  “Say, what is all this?”

  “He’ll never tell you,” said Lark, poking her head around the kitchen door. “He likes you to guess.”

  “Dreams? As opposed to nightmares?”

  Lark bore in the tray with cups and the teapot covered with a tea cozy knitted by her mother. “It’s a survey, Elizabeth, for a seminar in political ideas.”

  “You’ve gone and told her and spoiled it,” said Tom.

  “I have dreams,” said Lark, “all the time, about deadly games, war, explosions. Often it’s an atom bomb dropping on Sydney, but the other night I dreamt the two towers we can see from here exploded and we had to breathe air filled with radioactive particles the consistency of gravel.”