by John Gardner
Her husband, Pete Duggers, taught tap-dance in the mirror-walled studio below. He was nearly as small as she was, but thicker, almost stout, in fact, and he looked and moved like some Disney cartoon of a tap-dance teacher. He had a red face and wonderfully merry blue eyes, wore vests and old-fashioned arm-suspenders. If he ever touched the floor when he walked (and he did), it seemed at least to Joan that he did so by momentary whim. Jacqui’s movements at the barre had a look not of lightness, the cancellation of gravity, but of majestic, powerful control, as if her muscles were steel and could no more speed up or slow down against her will than the hands of a clock could escape the inclinations of their mainspring. Rising on her toes in the middle of the room—a brief jerk and click as the heel and ankle locked, a brief trembling like a spasm, then the firmness of an iron wedge—she gave the impression that touching her calf or thigh would be like touching a wall. Pete’s dancing feet moved, on the other hand, as if swinging by themselves, as if his body were suspended like a puppet’s from invisible wires. His taps were light and quick, as if he never put his weight down with either foot, and they rattled out around him as gaily and casually—and as incredibly fast—as the fingers of his Negro piano player, a tall, flat-haired boy who sat sprawling in his chair with his head tipped far over so that he seemed to be always, except for his forearms and fingers, fast asleep. The speed and lightness with which Pete Duggers danced were amazing to behold, but what was truly miraculous, so that it made you catch your breath, was the way he could stop, completely relaxed, leaning his elbow on empty air and grinning as if he’d been standing there for hours, all that movement and sound you’d been hearing pure phantom and illusion. That was unfailingly the climax when he danced: the slow build, the elegant shuffles and turns, then more speed, and more, and more and still more until it seemed that the room spun drunkenly, crazily, all leading—direct as the path of an arrow—to nothing—everything—a sudden stillness like an escape from reality, a sudden floating, whether terrible or wonderful she could never tell: the abrupt hush of a symphonic orchestra dropped away, falling back from the soaring melody of a single French horn—or then again, perhaps, the frightening silence one read about in novels when a buzz-bomb shut off over London. He stood perfectly still, the piano was still, his young students gaped, and then abruptly reality came back again as the piano tinkled lightly and he listlessly danced and, as he did so, leaned toward his students and winked and said, “You see? Magic!”
Olive Street was already going down at that time, so the storefront was shoddy, solo dancers and dance-class pictures on the windows, big, vulgar stars, the glass around the pictures crudely painted dark blue, as if the Duggers School of the Dance were some miserable third-rate establishment not worth breaking into or stealing from, though the door was not locked. But that was a trick—the dancing Duggerses had trunkfuls of tricks: artists to the marrow of their chipped and splintered bones. The scuffed, unpainted door in front opened into a scuffed, unpainted entryway with a door to the left and a knotty, crooked stairway leading upward. On the door to the left, a sign said tap dance studio, and above the worn railing at the side of the stairs, a sign, cocked parallel to the railing, said, SCHOOL OF THE BALLET. When you opened the door to the tap-dance studio for the first time, you did a mighty double-take: there were glittering mirrors with round-arched tops and etched designs of the sort Joan would occasionally discover years later in the oldest London pubs, and above the mirrors there were walls of red and gold and a magnificent stamped-tin ceiling. It was a large building, at one time a theater. The tap-dance studio (and the ballet studio directly above it) took up the first thirty feet; then there was a railing, also red and gold, from which one looked out at the long, wide ballroom floor, at the front an enormous stage with ratty wine-colored velvet curtains, along the side-walls wall-candelabra between high painted panels—dancing graces, Zeus in his majesty, nymphs and satyrs, peacocks and fat, reclining nudes done in highly unsuccessful imitation of the style of Rubens.
She’d walked there with Buddy once, when he’d motorcycled in from his school in Indiana and offered to drive her to work in her father’s DeSoto. He’d driven fast, as usual, his eye rolling up to the rear-view mirror, on the look-out for police cars, and had gotten her to work much too early.
“Care to have an interesting experience?” she’d said.
Their footsteps echoed. The ballroom was fairly dark. They could just make out the carved figures on the ceiling, two storeys up, circling around the empty spaces from which once had hung huge chandeliers.
“It’s like a church,” he said.
She’d squeezed his hand and they’d stopped and, after a moment, kissed, then walked on, up to the front of the ballroom and up onto the stage, where the Duggers students gave their dance recitals. They looked up at the shuttered lights, ropes, catwalks—it was darker here, and spooky, as if the stage machinery belonged not only to a different time but to a different planet. Again they paused to kiss, and he put his arms around her and after a minute she moved his hand to the front of her sweater, then under the sweater to her breast. With his usual difficulty, for all his practice, he unsnapped her bra. She felt her nipples rising, and he pressed closer to her. With a grandiose sweep of his free arm in the direction of the dim, ghost-filled ballroom, he said, “Lady, how would you like to be fucked, right here in front of all these people?”
“Hmm,” she said. After a moment, still with his hand on her breast, her hand keeping it there, she led him toward the further wing and the small door opening on a room she’d discovered weeks earlier, half-filled with crates, electric wire, old tools, and the rotting frames of old sets. There were a few old pieces of furniture—chairs, tables, couches—protected from the dust by tarpaulins. “Maybe we need a rehearsal,” she said. They passed under a high window through which a single crack of light came and she glanced at her watch. Ten minutes. She stood looking around, both his hands on her breasts, until he finally noticed the couch and went over and pulled away the tarpaulin. As he came into her, huge and overeager, as always—but so was she, so was she—she said, “Isn’t this an interesting experience?”
The whole left side of the building, as you entered from the street, was the Duggerses’ apartment. It was the most beautiful apartment she’d ever seen, though not as original or even as spectacularly tasteful as she imagined at the time; she would see many like it in San Francisco, and far more elegant examples of the white-on-white style in London and Paris. Everything was white, the walls, the furniture, the chains that held the chandeliers, the wooden shutters on the windows. Against all that white, the things they’d collected stood out in bold relief: paintings, presumably by friends, all very curious and impressive, at least to Joan—smudges, bright splashes of color, one canvas all white with little scratches of gray and bright blue; sculptures—a beautiful abstraction in dark wood, a ballet dancer made out of pieces of old wire, museum reproductions, a mobile of wood and stainless steel; books and records, shelves upon shelves of them. Their record-player was the largest she’d ever seen and had a speaker that stood separate from the rest. Once when Jacqui invited her in, to write Joan her check for her week’s work, Jacqui, leading the way to the kitchen, stopped suddenly, turned with a ballerina’s step, and said, “Joanie, I must show you my shoes, no?” “I’d like to see them,” Joan said. Jacqui swept over to the side of the room, her small hand gracefully flying ahead of her, and pushed open a white sliding door. Joan stared. On tilted shelves that filled half the room’s wall, Jacqui had three hundred pairs of tiny shoes. She had all colors—gold and silver, yellow, red, green, some with long ties as bright as new ribbons, some with little bows, some black and as plain as the inside of a pocket. “Where’d you get all these?” Joan said. Jacqui laughed. “Mostly Paris.” She gave Joan a quick, appraising look. “Dahling, Paris you are going to love. There is a store, a department store, Au Printemps. When you go there, blow a kiss for Jacqui!” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Ah, the Fren
ch!”
Years later, the first time Joan shopped at Au Printemps, she would remember that, and would do as she’d been told. And she would remember Jacqui too a few years later when, at Lambert Field in St. Louis, deplaning with her family from a European trip, a news crew of very cool, very smart blacks from KSDF-TV approached her with camera and wind-baffled shotgun microphones and asked if she had any suggestions for the improvement of services at the airport. “Way-el,” she said, smiling prettily, batting her lashes, and speaking in her sweetest Possum Hollow drawl. She tapped her mouth with a bejewelled finger and gazed thoughtfully down the baggage area, then said pertly, as if it were something she’d been thinking for a long time and rather hated to bring up, “Ah thank it would be nice if awl these people spoke French.” Her performance was included in that night’s local news. Her parents missed it, as was perhaps just as well. Relatives called to tell them with pleasure that Joanie had been on television. No one mentioned that anything she’d said was funny, much less “peculiar.”
“I wonder if I ever will get to Paris,” she’d said thoughtfully, that afternoon in Jacqui’s apartment.
Jacqui had laughed like a young girl, though she was then over forty. “Keep playing the piano and don’t theenk twice,” Jacqui said. “If you don’t go to Paris, then Paris will have to come to you.”
Where would they have gone, Joan wondered now, when the neighborhood had grown too dangerous to live in? Were they still alive? It came to her suddenly, for no apparent reason, that Pete Duggers had looked like the hero of her favorite childhood book, Mr. Mixiedough, in the story of the whole world’s slipping into darkness. It was a book she’d wanted for Evan and Mary, but there seemed to be no copies left anywhere; not even the book-search people from whom Martin got his rare old books could find a trace of it. Had it been the same, perhaps, with Pete and Jacqui Duggers—swallowed up, vanished into blackness? She’d asked about him once at the Abbey, on 13th Street in New York, when she’d gone to, three times, a show called The Hoofers, which had brought back all the great old soft-shoe and tap men. On the sidewalk in front of the theater afterward, while she was waiting for Martin to come and pick her up, she’d talked with Bojangles Robinson and Sand Man Sims—they’d shown her some steps and had laughed and clapped their hands, dancing one on each side of her—and she’d asked if either of them had ever heard of Pete Duggers.
The Sand Man rolled up his eyes and lifted off his hat as if to look inside it. “Duggers,” he’d said, searching through his memory.
“You say the man worked out of San Looie?” Bojangles said.
“I played piano for his wife,” Joan said. “She taught ballet.”
“Duggers,” said the Sand Man. “That surely does sound familiar.”
“White man married to a ballet teacher,” Bojangles said, and ran his hand across his mouth. “Boy that surely rings a bell, some way.”
“Duggers,” the Sand Man said, squinting at the lighted sky. “Duggers.”
“He used to go faster and faster and then suddenly stand still,” she said. “He was a wonderful dancer.”
“Duggers,” Bojangles echoed, thoughtful, staring at his shoes. “I know the man sure as I’m standing here. I got him right on the tip of my mind.”
Seven
“Change our lives?” Martin said, as if wearily amused, raising his eyebrows. It was Joan who had made the absurd suggestion, watching with narrowed eyes as Paul Brotsky stood stirring the martinis, around and around, looking at the carpet, thinking his own thoughts, or listening to the circling music. The suggestion wasn’t really absurd, of course; more painful than that. He knew what changes he would make, if change were possible. But he, Martin, was fighting no more fights. Should he admire men stronger and braver than himself, destiny hunters who left skeletons in their wake like Melville’s whalers—like Melville himself, when it came to that? He would accept what by chance and stupidity he had become: straight man to a clowning, half-wit universe, merry-go-round of Dame Fortune, stiff, groping zodiac. He would bury himself in events one more time, and one more, and one more, learn to breathe without air. He would write when he was able, patch up the age-old necessary illusions as painters repair old carousel panels, and would keep himself, the rest of the time, just slightly, not belligerently, drunk.
He looked over at his children, seated back to back with an oversize, woven Greek pillow between them on the waterbed couch beside the door leading out to the front lawn. Their long blond hair, the gentleness of their faces, the stillness with which they sat were almost identical—“Of course, my dear boy, two Capricorns, you see!” John Napper would say. Which suggested that they were there to see that all went well—Capricorn vigilance. No need to fear, my beloved cautious watchers, he thought; but they couldn’t know that, after all they’d been through; nor could he. “Cancer and Leo!” John Napper had said, shaking his wild, majestic head, eyes twinkling merrily, standing away from his painting a moment to consider from this new, unexpected angle the miracle of life. “Makes for the stormiest of all possible marriages—high water and hell respectively, you know—but splendid when it finally settles itself!” He lifted his head, lips pursed, that strange, mad joy of his bursting from his eyes and hair like Blakean sunlight, or like the light that redeemed all memory in one of his own incomparable landscapes. “Splendid,” he said, and hung fire like a conductor delaying for an instant the expected jubilant final chord, beaming with delight, divinely impish, then said it again, the universe from end to end his shining orchestra: “Splendid!” And Martin, for all his doubts about his marriage, had believed him absolutely. How could one doubt such authority? But he was now less certain of the things he’d believed that summer in England, in John Napper’s sun-filled studio: remembered his feelings only as one remembers the feelings one had while reading, say, Anna Karenina sometime fifteen years ago.
Though it was true, of course, that his watchful Capricorns had influence. More influence, probably, than any to be found in the warring Crab and Lion. Loving his children, he could not help but be marginally optimistic; observing how they loved their mother, he couldn’t help but see that his absolute distrust of her must be—in some way he couldn’t yet fathom—a mistake. For that reason too he would bury his feelings, watch and wait. —Yet that was not, he would realize later, what he did. Mockingly, meaning to provoke wrath, he said—though he was unaware himself that his voice was mocking—“How in the hell are we supposed to, as you say, change our lives?” He held out his glass, and Paul Brotsky poured martini in from the pitcher he’d just mixed.
Stirring again, allowing the martini to water a touch more before pouring one for Joan, Paul said, “I don’t know, I think change is possible.” He spoke casually yet seriously, subtly avoiding confrontation by treating the question as essentially abstract, philosophical. He stood looking at the floor, stirring absentmindedly. He was black-bearded, short and heavy, stooped with what looked like weariness or too much thought, though he wasn’t yet thirty. Without looking up he turned and carried the pitcher to where Joan sat, surrounded by large pillows, on the waterbed couch opposite the children’s. He walked, as always, like a man slowly pacing, alone in his office. There were reasons for that. In Viet Nam he’d been separated from the company he’d trained with—temporarily drawn from the group for a desk job—and in their first mission every one of them had been killed.
He wrote fiction now, or tried to. He had the necessary sympathy born of pain, the necessary intelligence and insight, even wisdom, and more than the necessary ability with words. But grief and self-doubt made his heart unsteady, undermined his purpose. He was still too close to that dramatic proof of the ultimate senselessness of all human acts to walk with much confidence on solid ground.
“Joan, you ready for more?” he said. She held out her glass, touched her throat with her left hand, and nodded. She wore a midnight-green Japanese robe with golden dragons, a plunging neckline, a golden belt, one of the many things she’d bought
on their trip for the U.S. Information Service. Watching the two of them, his head tipped down, his two hands closed on his martini glass, Martin Orrick thought, coolly, objectively, what dramatic promise the scene would hold if one were to see it on a movie screen: a luxurious room overlooking a lighted swimming pool, an elegant wine rack—nearly full—across most of one wall, an abundance of standing and hanging plants, all furiously healthy, so that the place was like a jungle, and at the center of the shot a magnificently beautiful, tallish, slim red-head, and, pouring her martini, a brown-eyed, round-faced, elegant young man—he might have been a Polish officer out of uniform—and [CAMERA PULLS BACK, REVEALING:] himself, a strange-looking older man—he would seem, on film, much older than either of them, in shoulder-length yellowish-silver hair, his look of slightly too studied gloom intensified by the clean gold, red, and black of his Japanese raw silk smoking jacket. The music in the background, or, rather, coming from all around the room, is Mozart, so the drama is to be, of course, philosophical and tragic: keenly intelligent, sophisticated people are driven by dark, secret passions to … whatever.
“Yes, everything’s possible,” Martin said, speaking lightly, jokingly, because the children were listening. “But is it worth anything, this changing one’s life? Shall we be astronauts? Barbers?”
“I shall be—” Evan said, looking up with a sudden smile from his book, “a fifteen-point master of Go.”