Dancing After Hours

by Andre Dubus

  In the eighth month, on a night of gently falling snow, she went to dinner with the three women. The restaurant was expensive and darkened, and her three friends were all happy on the same night, and that was as uncommon as their dressing prettily to go without men to an elegant place. She drank two martinis, then wine, then two cognacs, and everyone was funny and laughing. Then at home she brushed her teeth, watching herself in the mirror, tasting mint foaming with the flavors of garlic and wine and brandy; and she looked at the light in her eyes and the flush of her cheeks, then knew that for the first time in eight months she had had fun. But after that night she was cautious again about drinking, and sipped a glass of wine while cooking and brought it once replenished to dinner, and many nights she drank nothing at all. For she could no longer trust drinking simply to relax her; it could loosen the hold she had on herself; it could break her.

  She devoted much of her tenacity to being a good divorced mother. This was the bank of the river. She tried never to malign him before her daughters; sometimes she failed, and apologized. She gave him whatever time with them he wanted; their family life was now one of doors: those of her house, of her husband’s car, opening for her daughters’ departures and returns. One morning in late winter they went to his wedding.

  This was in New England. In April, snow thawed and rain fell and the earth was mud, the sky gray, and the trees and their new growing leaves were dark in the pale light. She wore sweaters and a down vest and boots. Then for two or three days, then for a week, the sky was blue, and the dry sunlit air brightened the leaves and grass. She sat on the patio, drinking a soft drink without sugar, and knew that she longed for spring even as she watched it; she was last April’s leaves fallen in autumn, then frosted, then frozen under snow, and in March wet again and becoming part of the earth, while spring was moving before her eyes, leaving her with the other dead it gave life to a year ago, when not only her skin but her heart felt the touch and light of the sun.

  For two days in May she turned the soil of a sunlit rectangle of her lawn and planted vegetables and herbs because she wanted to kneel sweating in the dirt and probe it with her fingers and place seeds in it, and she wanted in summer to watch the green plants grow, white and pink radishes push upward into light, tomatoes green, then yellow, then red on the vines.

  Her first lover surprised her: his existence did, his passion; hers. They met by chance in a video store. When she told her friends, they were happy; plans shone in their eyes, hopes. She had none. All three were divorced; all three wanted husbands, or at least—or perhaps better still—a constant and honorable lover. That was in their eyes, the corners of their mouths. They came to believe that she looked upon love for a man as an ephemeral passion. They marveled; they envied; and she watched herself and her friends, and listened to their words and hers, and wondered why none of them saw in her eyes and at the corners of her lips the dark glisten and static quiver of stored tears.

  The man was pleasant and humorous enough; he was flesh. Her friends were right about this: she delighted in making love only for the act itself, the sensations that did not touch her heart. At times, dressing at the mirror, waiting for him, she felt like the woman her friends thought her to be. He was divorced, a father of two small children, and when he declared his love and spoke of marriage, she stopped seeing him.

  At a Christmas party, she met a man who became her lover for years. His first wife had hurt him deeply, with lies and infidelity, then the prolonged assault of divorce for the rest of his life, denying him his children but for the scant time allowed by the court, and telling his children that he was the adulterer, the liar, and taking the house and half of everything else; he would never again marry. He would never again live with a woman. She learned all of this while drinking two Manhattans at the party; then she went home with him, to his apartment without plants or flowers or feminine scents, a place that seemed without light, though its windows were tall and broad; then she knew why: it was not a place where someone lived; he ate and slept there and did this in his double bed, did this tenderly, wickedly; his home was like an ill-kept motel.

  They did not become a couple. They were rarely together more than twice a week, and never slept together, to wake to the harsh or tender or surprising light of morning. Her daughters married, and at the receptions she was polite with the woman whose perfume she had smelled years ago as she embraced her husband. The weddings were three years apart, and at both of them she watched the girl in white, and with belief and hope she raised a hand to her slow tears, pressed and brushed them with her fingers as joy spread through her, filling her, so her body felt too small for it, and she deepened her breath to contain it, to compress it, to keep it in place in her heart.

  Falling in Love

  TED BRIGGS CAME BACK FROM THE WAR seven years before it ended, and in spring two years after it ended he met Susan Dorsey at a cast party after a play’s final performance, on a Sunday night, in a small town north of Boston. He did not want to go to the play or to the party, but he was drinking with Nick. They started late Sunday afternoon at the bar of a Boston steak house. In the bar’s long mirror they watched women. Nick said: “Come with me. My sister likes it.”

  “She’s directing it.”

  “She’s hard to please.”

  “What’s the play?”

  “I forget. Some Frenchman. You’d know the name.” Ted looked at him. “It sounds like another word. Which isn’t the point. The party is the point. These theater people didn’t need the sexual revolution.”

  “I don’t have to see a play to get laid.”

  “Why are you pissed off? You act benighted. You’re always reading something; you go to plays.” Nick motioned to the bartender, then waved his hand at the hostess standing near the front door; when she looked at him, he signaled with his first two fingers in a V and pointed to the tables behind them. Ted looked at his fingers and said: “It’s that.”

  Nick lowered his hand to the bar and said: “It’s what?”

  “The peace sign. I was at a party once, with artists. People asked about my leg. I told them. They were polite.”

  “Polite.”

  “It was an effort.”

  “For them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hey, we’re lawyers. They’ll hate both of us.”

  Ted looked at Nick’s dark and eager face and said: “We can’t let our work keep us home, can we?”

  “Men like us.”

  “Men like us.”

  Ted Briggs was a tall man with a big chest and strong arms and a thick brown mustache, and Susan Dorsey liked his face when she saw him walk into the party, into the large and crowded living room in an apartment she had walked to from the theater where she had worked so well that now, drinking gin and tonic, she felt larger than the room. She did not show this to anyone. She acted small, modest. She was twenty-two and had been acting with passion for seven years, and she knew that she could show her elation only to someone with whom she was intimate. To anyone else it would look like bravado. Her work was a frightening risk, and during the run of the play she had become Lucile as fully as she could, and she knew that what she felt now was less pride than gratitude. She also knew this fullness would leave her, perhaps in three days, and then for a while she would feel arid and lost. But now she drank and moved among people to the man with a drink in his left hand, his right hand resting on a cane, his biceps filling the short sleeves of his green shirt. Beside him was a shorter and older man with dark skin and black curls over his brow. She stopped in front of them and said her name, and knew from their eyes that they had not seen her in the play. Nick’s last name was Kakonis. Ted leaned his cane against his leg and shook her hand. She looked at his eyes and said: “Did you like the play?”

  “We just got here,” Nick said, and Ted said: “What was it?”

  “The Rehearsal. By Jean Anouilh.”

  “That Frenchman,” Nick said.

  “I like his plays,” Ted said. “Were
you in it?”

  “I was Lucile.”

  “We got lost,” Ted said.

  They got lost in vodka, in wine with their steaks, in cognac; then Nick drove them out of the city and north. Once they had to piss and Nick left the highway and stopped on a country road, and they stood beside the car, pissing on grass. Then he drove on the highway again; they talked about work and women, and time was not important. They were leaving the city and going to the cast party. If the play started on time, the curtain had opened while they were driving out of Boston. When they reached the town and found the theater, they were an hour and five minutes late; they drank coffee at a café and, through its window, watched the theater’s entrance across the brick street. When people came out, Ted and Nick went to the theater, and in the lobby, among moving people, Nick found his sister, a large woman in a black dress; her face was wide and beautiful, and she said to Nick: “Asshole.”

  Then she hugged him and shook Ted’s hand. Her name was Cindy. They walked on brick sidewalks to the apartment of the stage manager, who taught drama at a college. The air was cool and Ted could smell the ocean; he felt sober and knew he was not. Outside the apartment, an old two-story house, he heard voices and a saxophone solo. They climbed to the second floor and Cindy introduced them to people standing near the door, and left them. Ted and Nick went to the long table holding liquor and an ice chest and poured scotch into plastic glasses. They stood with their backs to a window and Ted looked at a young red-haired woman in a beige dress walking toward him, looking at his eyes, and smiling. He exhaled and for a moment did not breathe.

  Then she was there, looking at him still; her eyes were green; she looked at Nick and said: “Susan Dorsey,” and gave him her hand. Ted leaned his cane against his leg and took her hand. For the rest of the party he stayed with her, except to go to the bathroom; to go to the table and pour their drinks, stirring hers with the knife he used to cut the lime; to go to Nick and say “Excuse me” to the woman Nick was with; to turn Nick away from her and say in his ear: “Does this town have a train station?”

  Nick put his arm around Ted and squeezed.

  “You don’t need one,” he said. “She lives in Boston.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Cindy told me. I might be heading a bit farther north. How do I look?”

  “You look great.”

  At one o’clock Susan finished her gin and tonic, and when Ted took her glass, she said: “I’ll have a Coke.”

  She was afraid of dying young. She had talent and everything was ahead of her and she was afraid it would be taken away. This fear came to her in images of death in a car, in a plane. There was no music now, and people had been speaking quietly since eleven, when the stage manager asked them to remember his neighbors. She watched Ted walking toward her, her glass and his in the palm of his left hand. A shell from a mortar had exploded and flung him off the earth and he had fallen back to it, alive. She wanted to be naked, holding him naked. She took the Coke from his hand and said: “I need an hour. I don’t want to drive drunk.”

  “Are you?”

  “It’s hard to tell, after working.”

  Her car was small, and when they got in, he pushed his seat back to make room for his leg; its knee did not bend. She pushed her seat back and turned to him and held him and kissed him. She liked the strength in his arms hugging her. She started the car and left the seat where it was; only the upper half of her foot was on the gas pedal. She drove out of the town and through wooded country and toward the highway, then said: “You have very sad eyes.”

  “Not now.”

  “Even when they twinkle. You wanted to be a corpsman.”

  “It wasn’t what you think. I joined the Navy to get it over with, on a ship. Before I got through boot camp, I felt like a cop-out. Then I asked to be a corpsman and to go with the Marines. A lot of times at Khe Sanh, I wished I had just joined the Marines.”

  “So you could shoot back?”

  “Something like that. Were you good in the play?”

  Yes filled her, and she closed her lips against it and reached into her purse on the floor, her arm pressing his leg; then she put her hand on the wheel again and looked at the tree-shadowed road and said: “I forgot to buy cigarettes.”

  “From a squirrel?”

  He lit one of his Lucky Strikes and gave it to her and she drew on it and inhaled and held it, but the smoke did not touch what filled her. She blew it out the window and said: “I was great in the play.”

  After he came home from the war, making love was easy. He had joined the Navy after his freshman year at Boston College, because his mind could no longer contain the arguments and discussions he had had with friends, most of them boys, and with himself since he was sixteen years old. One morning he woke with a hangover and an instinct he followed to the Navy recruiting office. When he came home from the war and eight months in the Navy hospital in Philadelphia, kept there by infections, he returned to Boston College and lived in the dormitory. He had made love in high school and college before the war, but the first time with each girl had surprised him. After the war he was not surprised anymore. He knew that if a girl would come to his room or invite him to hers or go on a date with him, off the campus, walking in Boston, she would make love. There were some girls who did not want to know him because he had been in the war and his cane was like a uniform. Few of them said anything, but he saw it in their eyes. He felt pain and fury but kept silent.

  There were boys like that, too, and men who were his teachers, people he wanted to hit. In his room he punched a medium bag and worked with weights. Sometimes, drunk in bed with a girl, he talked about this until he wept. No girl could comfort him, because the source of his tears was not himself. It was for the men he knew in the war, the ones he bandaged, the ones he saved, the ones he could not save; and for the men who were there for thirteen months and were not touched by bullets, mortars, artillery. “They’re not abstractions in somebody else’s mind,” he said one night to a girl; and, holding her, he said aloud some of their names; for him they were clearly in the dark room; but not for her. Then looking at her face, he saw himself in the war, bandaging and bandaging and bandaging, and he stopped crying. He said: “How the fuck would you like to be hated because you did a good job, without getting killed?” This one soothed him; she said she’d want to kill somebody.

  Now he was twenty-eight and it was still easy; it could be counted on; he only had to invite a woman to go someplace, for a drink, or dinner. The women decided quickly and usually he could see it in their eyes within the first hour of the date. If they felt desire and affection, they made love. Susan would, too. They were on the highway now and he looked at her profile. He was drunk and in love. Nearly always he felt he was in love on his first night with a woman. It happened quickly, as they drank and talked and glanced at menus. It lasted for months, weeks, sometimes days. He touched Susan’s cheek and said: “Maybe I should court you. Bring you flowers. Hold your hand in movies. Take you to restaurants, and on picnics. Kiss you good night at your door.”

  “You’ve got about twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five.”

  Lying beside him, using the ashtray he held on his chest, she wanted to feel what she was feeling, had wanted to for a long time, this rush of love, pulling her up the three flights of stairs to her small apartment, into the bathroom for the diaphragm she had used often this year with different men, but now her heart was full, as it had not been for over a year, and she was not certain whether it was love that filled her or so wonderfully being Lucile and ending that work with this strong man with sad eyes and a bad knee and a history she could feel in his kiss. When they made love, she could feel the war in him, could feel him ascending from what he had seen, what he had done; from being blown up. Her heart knew she was in love. She said: “I like you a lot.”

  “But what?”

  “Nothing. Am I going to see you again?”

  “Has that happened to you?”

 
“Of course it has. I’m easy. So are you.”

  “You’ll see me a lot. Let’s have dinner tonight. French—for the play.”

  “That you missed.”

  “We weren’t lost. We drank too much. We talked too much.”

  “And you both got lucky.”

  “I think I got more than lucky.”

  “You did. I wish you had seen me.”

  “So do I. I’ll see the next one, every night.”

  “It’s at the Charles Playhouse. We start rehearsals in two weeks.” He moved the ashtray to the bedside table and she put her hand on his chest and looked at his eyes. “After that I’m going to New York. Last month I got an agent.”

  “Good. It’s where you should be.”

  “Yes. I want all of it: movies too.”

  “New York is just a shuttle away.”

  “I hope more than one.”

  She kissed him; she held him.

  He ate lunch with Nick. They wore suits and ties. He had slept for two hours, waked at seven to Susan’s clock radio, turned it off before she woke, phoned for a cab he waited for on the sidewalk, gone to his apartment to shower and shave and dress, and then walked to his office. At nine o’clock he was at his desk. Nick came forty minutes later, and stopped at Ted’s door to smile, shrug, say: “Lunch?”

  At lunch Nick ordered a Bloody Mary, and said: “I hate Monday hangovers. You don’t have one.”