Dancing on Coral

by Glenda Adams

  “We’d better call in Dr. Freud,” Tom said, then asked Elizabeth, “Did you ever makes plans to move to another part of the world to escape a nuclear war? Often, occasionally, once or twice, never?”

  Elizabeth laughed. “We’re going to France fairly soon,” she patted her abdomen, “and taking little Henri here. That’ll be right in the middle of things, when the big bang goes off.” She turned to Lark, hunched over the teapot, pouring the tea. “Gorgeous tea cozy,” she said.

  “If the U.S. does become involved in a nuclear war, how much chance do you think there is of your community or city being attacked? Very real danger, slight, no danger, no opinion?”

  “Very real,” said Lark.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Very real danger, I’d say.”

  Lark handed the cups around, waiting for Tom to tell Elizabeth about his proposal.

  “How would you describe yourself politically? Moderate, radical, conservative, liberal, other?”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “Radical? Moderate? Moderate radical? It depends. What about you, Lark?”

  Tom seized the tea cozy and put it on his head. “Lark has no opinion,” he said, mimicking a woman’s voice. “But we’re trying to get her to say ‘radical’ when asked that question.”

  “Cute hat,” said Elizabeth. She looked from Tom to Lark. “Why don’t you two get married? You get along so well.”

  “You must have E.S.P.,” said Tom, looking disappointed. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do. In the not-too-distant. I was just about to tell you.”

  Elizabeth kissed them and clapped her hands, crying out at the wonder of it all.

  “It’s not going to be your conventional kind of marriage. We think of it as partly satisfying the unicellular urge to merge,” said Tom. “Right, Lark?” Then, seeing her dismay, he added, “Just joking.”

  After Elizabeth had gone, Tom picked up his books.

  “You’re leaving?” said Lark.

  “See you around the block,” Tom said. “I’m going to the library. And please, don’t humiliate me in front of my friends.”

  “Humiliate?” Lark searched back. Could it have been the tea cozy, or her dreams?

  “You said I like to keep people guessing, that I don’t tell things straight.” He went to the door.

  “I’m sorry,” said Lark. “I didn’t realize.”

  He came back from the door and kissed her lightly, then tickled her. She writhed away, squealing. “Get out,” she cried. “Away with you.”

  Tom stopped. “If that’s how you want it.” He picked up his books again and walked down the hall.

  “I didn’t mean get out,’’ Lark said.

  “Then why did you say it?”

  “That’s what I say,” she said. “Get out. It means stop that. It’s cultural, like tea.” She took his arm. “I don’t want you to go.”

  Tom looked at his watch. “I have to go, anyway. Lots to do.”

  Lark wrote to Solomon Blank. “I hope you are well and happy. I really enjoyed seeing you in Chicago. Sometimes I feel the need to talk to someone who knew me as I was, who knew the streets I used to walk, and the beach. Also, my good news is that I am getting married. To an American. To a social theorist.

  Greetings to your wife.”

  “An early wedding present. Household effects,” said Elizabeth. She was standing at the door of Lark’s apartment with several shopping bags filled with household items—a breadboard, an espresso coffee pot, an egg whisk. “We can’t take everything to France with us, so we’re bequeathing them to you and hope they bring you good luck.” She handed the bags to Lark and sighed, rubbing her back with one hand. “I am certainly very, very pregnant,” she said.

  “I’ll make you some tea,” said Lark very quietly. She did not want Tom to tease her. “Come and sit down.”

  Tom came up behind Lark and peered into the shopping bags. “Loot,” he said. “I was thinking about what we should do for our wedding, since we don’t want an ordinary, bourgeois affair like everybody else.”

  “Uh-oh, you can trust Tom to come up with something different,” said Elizabeth.

  Lark and Elizabeth followed Tom into the living room.

  “I can only stay a minute. Jean-Claude said he’d pick me up here,” said Elizabeth.

  “In Java, when someone wants to celebrate something, the whole village joins in,” Tom said. “For instance, you’d rent a film and a screen and a projector and run the film in the middle of the village for everyone. People would just walk by and sit down on the ground and watch, on either side of the screen.”

  He was lifting the items out of the shopping bag, one by one, nodding in approval. “We’ll have our wedding outdoors,” Tom said. “When it gets a bit warmer.”

  “Do you know someone with a garden you can use?” Elizabeth asked. “Someone with a brownstone or in the suburbs?”

  “We don’t have any rich friends. We’ll have it on the street right outside,” said Tom, triumphant. “Anyone and everyone can come. We won’t send out invitations. We’ll rent a film, et cetera, and then stick up notices all around the neighborhood telling people to come and watch a film for free. Manfred will love it.” He grabbed Lark and waltzed her around the room. “It’ll be a riot. Different. Not one of these routine, hypocritical affairs. I don’t mean you and Jean-Claude, Elizabeth. He’s French. He’s got a tradition to perpetuate.”

  “What do you think, Lark?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Where will you show the film?” Lark was confused, dizzy. “Will they allow you to do that?”

  “Allow, allow. You’re still so worried by authority.” Tom waved his arm, then seized Lark’s hand and swung her wide. “It’ll be a like a street fair. It’s easy to get a permit. Maybe the Times will cover it. There’s plenty of time to organize it. It’ll be like organizing a political action.”

  “What film shall we have?” Lark gasped, breathless from whirling about.

  “The Sky Above and the Mud Below.” Tom was doing a kind of solo jitterbug, holding onto Lark and pirouetting, snapping his fingers. “Manfred recommends it. Anthropological. About New Guinea. Made by some Frenchmen, or Swiss. They really understand human nature.”

  The doorbell rang, and at the same time the telephone. Lark let Jean-Claude in, then picked up the phone. “Who is this?” It was a woman’s voice. Then there was the sound of another receiver being picked up. “Hello?” Lark said. There was silence.

  Then one receiver was hung up, followed by the other.

  Tom had been telling Jean-Claude about his wedding plans.

  “Tres original,” said Jean-Claude.

  “Make sure you do it before we leave,” said Elizabeth. “We wouldn’t want to miss it.”

  “We’ll do it in May, when it’s warm. On May Day? No, that’s too hokey.”

  “Mayday is a distress call.” Lark paused. “There seemed to be two people on the line just now. But neither spoke to me. Just a woman asking ‘Who is this?’ Then two people hung up.”

  “You’ve got to hand it to them,” said Tom. “The university, the C.I.A., F.B.I., whoever, is hard at work, keeping us under surveillance.”

  “Why us, you?”

  Tom shrugged. “We seem like troublemakers, that’s all. We don’t go along with the party line, we question authority. Once the technical ability to gather and store information is acquired, then information must be gathered and stored. It seems to be a law of postindustrial society. Just as, when we had an atom bomb, we used it. And that’s why we’ll have a nuclear war sometime. The weapons exist, they demand to be used.”

  “Soon you’ll be able to make a bomb and drive it across France in a little Citroën, a little deux chevaux.” Jean-Claude pretended to be driving in a little car, putt-putting along as if he were in a horse-drawn cart.

  Solomon Blank wrote, in his first communication since the meeting in Chicago: “What a pleasant surprise to hear from you. Amanda is pregnant, just as we had planned, and I ha
ve revised my article for the scholarly journal. Amanda, after some considerable effort, has at last found a job, part-time, which unfortunately she will have to leave when the baby is born, of course. Of course, we are very, very happy. Everything is turning out just as we had planned and hoped. We don’t get to New York at all in the ordinary course of events, so we both offer you our best wishes for your impending marriage. You will find that being married to an American is quite charming. If you ever happen to be in the great Midwest, we would both be very glad to see you both. It’s really quite civilized here in Illinois.’’

  And then there was a postscript: “I have often worried about the letter I sent you once defining a baseball term which I misheard. I thought the word was ‘ringcheck,’ and it was, of course, ‘rain check.’ I don’t suppose it matters much, and now you won’t have any occasion to use it. It just shows how unreliable I am.”

  “Tea?” Lark asked.

  Manfred Bird turned on her, frowning. “I just stopped by to give a word of advice to young Tom. Since he’s getting married tomorrow, I thought he would have nothing more important to do than to consider my comments on government and secrecy.” He pushed a flat brown-paper parcel into Lark’s arms. “Our present. As I recall it, the week before a marriage, the groom isn’t needed at all and is largely in the way.”

  Inside the parcel was a cane tray in a design of squares. “Don’t worry,” said Manfred, “it’s not from my collection, so you can use it.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t give us one of yours,” said Lark. At first she had thought it was the basket with the arms and legs and no head that she had seen in Manfred’s cabinet.

  “Portia bought it. It’s Japanese, I suppose.”

  “I got the permit to show the film in the street, my students are taping up the notices all over the place, and Elizabeth and Jean-Claude have delivered the press releases,” said Tom. “It has taken months to organize, but now it’s all done and I’ve got nothing to do. Lark is going out.” Tom had told Lark she made him feel guilty for liking Manfred and was uncomfortable with Lark and Manfred together. “She’s going to The Strand. She’s been looking for a wedding present for me, and I told her I wanted a book. I told her to surprise me. The Strand’s the best place, don’t you think, for surprises?”

  Manfred looked at his watch.

  “I’ll just put the kettle on,” said Lark. “You can make the tea, or coffee, as you wish.”

  Manfred Bird had already begun his analysis. “I do not agree with the author of the article that, because of the surveys and opinion polls that are now prevalent in this country, Americans are the most nakedly exposed, and in this sense the most unfree, people in history. That’s balderdash, the idea that the government’s security system is destroying this society because it permits the Executive to deceive and manipulate the people.”

  “You could argue, I must insist, that if the security system were removed, lying by the government would be more difficult,” Tom offered. “The people have lost their privacy. Only the government retains privacy.”

  “The government knows best—at least the right government knows best, not our current one. And Tom, be careful when you talk about mendacity. Our government doesn’t lie. We are free. Except when petty bureaucrats use their power and impound, for instance, my stuff. There’s rare Aboriginal and New Guinea art there. They’ll probably wreck it.”

  “If the security system were removed, it would be more difficult for the government to lie,” said Tom.

  They did not hear the doorbell ring. Lark answered the door. A smiling young Chinese man stood at the door.

  “I’m the telephone repairman,” he said. “I’m new to the job. But they told me you have a problem?”

  He had come to check the line, as Lark had requested. He went to the basement for a while, then came back and said he had found an extra line leading from their telephone line to the basement of the new building next door. Then he said, “But don’t worry, miss, I cut it.” Off he went, smiling, pleased.

  “But we could try,” Tom was saying, with no idea that the repairman had come and gone, “having a time limit on government privacy, say a couple of months, after which all activities would be made known to the public.”

  “What on earth for?” cried Professor Bird. “The public doesn’t want to know.”

  “Perhaps the public doesn’t know that it needs to know.”

  Lark listened happily from the kitchen. Tom was right. He had his own ideas, and he was at last trying to stand up to Manfred Bird. A good sign. “I shall go now,” she said to the two men.

  “I thought you’d gone,” said Tom.

  “You’re still here?” said Manfred Bird.

  “Peace,” said Tom.

  In the dark aisles of The Strand Lark was uneasy. The lights were dim, and she was finding it hard to read the titles. She ran her hand along the spines of the books. She was in the section on war and had fingered Masefield’s Gallipoli, wondering if Tom would like that, then she contemplated a book on the great escape from Dunkirk. She really had no idea how to amuse him, surprise him. He seemed unsurprisable. He knew everything. Even if she wore a panda suit to the wedding, he would not notice, or at least would not comment on it.

  Then she found it, Charles Blank’s autobiography, My Life in the Service of God in the South Pacific. It was the book she had touched while she waited for Tom in the stacks at the university in Sydney. Lark took the old volume from the shelf and found, as the frontispiece, a photograph of the man himself, with the same perplexed expression that Solomon Blank often wore, an expression that could slide into one of sadness or hurt. “It is an offense,” she read at random, “for a native to sit with his legs outstretched, and unpardonable to be stingy, especially with food.” Perhaps this book would surprise and amuse Tom. She went to the cash register and paid for it, then, reluctant to return to the apartment while Manfred Bird and Tom were conversing, she went back among the books, and leaning against one of the shelves she continued reading the book. “They are kind, lovable, polite in intercourse, but extremely sensitive to insult. Wars are carried on for generations. When they are about to enter battle, the two sides have ceremonial drinks together, then say ‘Shall we trample grass?’ and the battle begins.”

  Lark felt a hand on her arm and heard a whisper close to her ear. “So, the battle begins?”

  It was Donna Bird, smiling broadly, as if they had seen each other only the day before, rather than months ago on the island. She was holding a book with a worn gray cover. “My Life in the Service of God in the South Pacific?” Donna said, turning over the book Lark was holding and peering at the title.

  “What are you doing here?” Lark snatched the book back, holding it close to her.

  Donna Bird proffered the book she was holding. “This is the book I was telling you about? English Short Stories of Today?” Again, she spoke as if they had had the discussion about that particular book just yesterday. “I just found it—this is a wonderful bookshop, I’m so glad you have discovered it, it’s one of New York’s truly great assets—my copy in school had a red cover. And here,” she was turning the first few pages, “you see, callow, this tourist I told you about.” She pointed at the page and read aloud. “‘I’m not going to sit and catch pneumonia under those fancy gadgets like a callow tourist.’ That’s what this young man, Leonard, is saying. He has ordered them to scrap the electric fans on the ship. In the tropics? You see, I don’t lie.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What everybody does here, running into people, buying books. We all go round and round the world, remember? It’s just one of the things we do. We just circle the globe. Adventurers, you might say. Or vagabonds?”

  Lark backed away. Donna Bird was no longer wearing her visor. Her hair was now shorter, flying free, curly, bushy, forming a nest for her head, but she was still tossing it around as she spoke, as if it were still long. She looked Lark up and down, leaning back and peering at h
er in the gloom of the shelves. “And how is our Tom?”

  “Tom?” said Lark, as if she had no idea whom Donna was referring to.

  “And the rest of your voyage on the Avis Maris? How was that? Pretty peaceful?”

  Lark wanted to rush from the shop, but Donna Bird stood in front of her, blocking her escape. Donna Bird stepped close to Lark. Lark drew in her breath. She was hardly able to breathe. That face was so close that Lark had to turn away, weak, resting her head against the books on the shelf. She ran her fingers along the books, along the bindings, as if each might let out a separate note, a cry, when touched.

  “So afraid?” Donna’s whisper was almost inaudible. “Because you left me stranded on the island? Because you saw me on the dock waving, running to get the ship?”

  “Leave me alone.” Lark pushed Donna Bird aside and ran to the front of the shop, turning to see if she was being followed. She saw a shadow at the end of one of the aisles. She ran past the cashier onto the street, still clutching My Life in the Service of God in the South Pacific, open, to her chest. Outside she leant against the wall, catching her breath. The cashier had followed her. “Where’s the fire?” he asked, and took her book, checking to see that she had not stolen it.

  Lark ran to the corner and looking back, saw a dim figure standing in the doorway of The Strand. She ran around the corner, along the block, and around the next corner, so that she would be out of sight if Donna Bird came in pursuit. As she slowed to a walk, several blocks from The Strand, she wondered, looking over her shoulder every now and then, if she had imagined the encounter with Donna Bird. After all, she had been holding the book, reading about customs of the people of the South Pacific and about their long feuds and their behavior toward enemies. The aisles of The Strand were dark and the shadows could be easily misconstrued. How could Donna Bird not appear before her, given such conditions?