Dancing in the Dark

by Joan Barfoot

  I also bought white pumps and a small white handbag for the occasion.

  They were pleasant and polite and kind and proper. Prosperous, although not rich, and their prosperity and satisfaction showed in small ways that made them different from my family—the way they handled their forks, the way they ate—the meal a ceremony of some pleasure, not an uncomfortable tongue-tying necessity. I managed to say some things about myself and to ask polite questions in return. Harry carried things along. It seemed he could take care of any awkward moments. Afterward he said they liked me. “They said you seem a nice girl,” and he grinned as if we knew much better. It was a new pleasure to be secretly daring, cleverly deceptive; because by then we were going to bed together, an astonishing leap for someone like me so many years ago.

  I wonder what they would have thought of me if they had known. I wonder how I felt myself.

  Our two families at the wedding, such a contrast. Except for Stella, of course, who danced and danced and seemed more likely to be Harry’s sister than mine.

  12

  He had a wonderful body.

  “Edna, come on,” he said. “I love you.” I could never, despite my joy and greed for him, have been the first to say those words. But now he demanded, “You love me, don’t you?” It was hard: as if the words were taboo, and I could be struck down for saying them.

  True enough, one can be. They leave quite a gap.

  I thought myself a moral person, and this was more than twenty years ago, when these things mattered. But Harry’s and mine was a separate world, a small and enclosed universe, and nothing outside seemed to apply here.

  He undressed me slowly, gently, and with admiration in each step. He kissed each breast and then, startlingly, my thighs. He was—almost pure about it; as if he were removing wrappings from a lovely statue. As if the object were to worship, not to hold.

  But he did hold. I lay beneath blankets while he undressed. He was much quicker with himself than with me: swift, efficient undoing of buttons, a shrug to discard the shirt, a zipper rasp, hands thrust beneath elastic, bending, stepping free, sitting on the end of the bed, leaning over for the socks and then standing and this was it, a naked man.

  I thought of mirrors and pillows and what had been unimaginable then and would now be real.

  He slid beneath the blankets with me, turned on his side. For a while he just touched fingers and lips lightly here and there. I felt, now and then, tremors rippling through his body, but he was patient.

  This was pleasant. It really did feel fine, as I’d imagined, to feel the length of a body, warm all the way down, alongside mine.

  I was nervous when he pulled the covers back and raised himself up on one elbow to stare at me; but I was proud, too, that my body did not have obvious flaws. His did not either, although I could see his bones. It was fine and hard and slim.

  He never let his body go. Neither of us let ourselves get flabby.

  The act itself wasn’t long enough for me to absorb all the things it meant. That here he was, this man, this real warm flesh, this piece of magic. I was too amazed to be very aware of the thing itself.

  But we did it again and again. There was plenty of time. There were hours in that little bed. It remained a miracle, to have this body everywhere around me.

  Afterward, when he collapsed, his face in my neck and the length of him a warm weight along the length of me, that was the time I liked best: when I could stroke his shoulders and his hair, tenderness and gentleness in my own hands, repaying his before. That was my time, afterward.

  We slept curled together. Nothing could reach me, with his body wrapped behind mine, a long arm flung over my ribs, across my breasts.

  It wasn’t the way one reads about, all that ecstasy in novels. I guess that was somehow what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that way at all. I thought it was probably better, in a way, to feel the warmth and tenderness, if not the passion.

  He felt the passion, I’m sure that was unmistakable. And it made me a bit uneasy. It seemed wrong for him to need me so much, to show so much desire, when the truth, apart from bodies, was the opposite.

  I prefer to give than to receive; to need than to be needed; to want than to be wanted. The pressure of being given to, wanted, needed, is hard for me.

  When I was a girl kissing pillows and mirrors, I thought, “Well, this is practice. It will be different with the real thing.”

  Of course it was different. Pillows and mirrors do not kiss breasts or hold you in the night.

  But I’d thought the difference would be something else: that in the act there would be a loss of self, a splitting of bonds. I thought when it happened I would soar beyond myself to some place unaware and free. That I might disappear completely. I’d imagined some transcendence that would be unimaginable and indescribable.

  I was amazed by the kind of magic there was in that small bed with Harry; but also amazed that the other magic, apparently, was an illusion.

  Because all the time, each time, before and while he was inside and afterward, there I was, my body and all my thoughts, alert to each sensation and every move, all the pantings and perspiration. Not for a moment was I lost.

  Are there people who get lost? Or do the books lie, as they seem to have about so many other things?

  But I was safe.

  I was safe even in ways I hadn’t considered. I must have assumed that if outside rules did not apply in our two-person world, outside accidents would also not occur.

  Harry was not so foolish. He must have been looking at it all quite differently from me, and it’s just as well, although ironic that it turned out to be unnecessary.

  There were strange shufflings and cracklings, clumsy shiftings, but I didn’t catch on right away what he was doing. Afterward, there was a small damp milky balloon twisted shut with a knot, lying beside the bed.

  It was repulsive, a white slug of a thing, and Harry caught my surprised grimace. “It’s a safe, honey,” he said, and leaning over me, picked it up. “So you don’t get pregnant. See all those little maybe-babies? Zillions of the little devils.”

  Later he told me he didn’t like using them. “You don’t feel as much as you do without them.” So what did he feel? So much pumping and desire with them, how much without?

  Such a puzzle to understand someone else’s body. Oh, I could watch his, he encouraged me to look at him and even touch him, and I got used to the sight of him rising and flushing and the feeling of him jerking and throbbing to the touch of my fingertips; and later I could see him shrinking, fading, and withdrawing. But how it happened, that was some excitement I could not grasp.

  He tried to watch me in the same way, but I wouldn’t let him. Those parts, I think, are not beautiful. Those parts of him weren’t beautiful either, but he was so proud. He looked at himself sometimes with wonder, as if he also didn’t understand it. It must be odd to be a man, so exposed. In women, everything is tucked away and hidden.

  So I didn’t understand his body, no. But I thought the act in general was of the heart, not of the body, and that those parts of us down there were symbols, ways of showing, and not the thing itself.

  “I love you,” we told each other before and after. During, even he was mute.

  13

  And then there we were, married, and there I was safe on the other side of twenty and the gap. A leap hand in hand with Harry, like in a movie.

  Twenty years between then and the appearance of another gap and a leap into danger again. Still, twenty years of safety.

  What if he hadn’t asked? But I was sure he would.

  I was sure he had to. From the first moment, his presence, his existence, blocked the world. I could not see it, nor could it touch me. He surrounded me, was in every direction I looked, filling up my view.

  Once we went to a public beach and, far out in the water, standing up and moving with the waves, made love. It must have been apparent, if anyone had looked, what we were doing; and I never thought of that.
Or if I did, it was only that a watcher would be far off and anonymous, while here was Harry. We were invisible, or our passion must have blinded people. We were all that existed, our twined-together two-ness made all the world our own possession, unreal except as we might admit it. It was delicious, this satisfying protection we made together.

  Did I fill up his view that way? I suppose I didn’t. He may have been keeping an eye on the beach over my shoulder.

  What if he hadn’t asked? If I’d gone out and found a job, taught English all these years, hating it I’m sure, putting my own pay cheques in the bank, paying rent on some small apartment somewhere, watching, watching all the time all the ordinary people, coveting their ordinariness—would I choose that if I could undo how this has ended?

  I had twenty years. I can’t see giving them up. The thing is to see how much was true.

  He was quite a while working up to asking. Sometimes I saw him watching me in a speculative way, and I thought I knew what he was wondering. I did my best; was my best. And finally, I guess, he too found it the only thing to be done, came to my conclusion (but by what route?), took a deep breath, said, “Let’s get married.”

  He sat beside me on my old couch-cot, holding both my hands, turned towards me, looking at me, more than that, into me—was he trying to see through and past me into the future, to calculate the risk?

  “But before you answer,” he was saying, “we have to have an understanding.” I nodded willingly. Whatever.

  “The thing is, I’m scared of feeling trapped. I know myself, and I know I can’t take that feeling. So if we’re going to do the paper and promises, I want to be sure they won’t make any difference. I know you let me be, but sometimes that can change when people get married, and I have to be able to feel free. I don’t want to have to answer to anybody.”

  “But,” I protested, “have I ever?”

  No, I was careful. I said, “Don’t worry about it, that’s fine,” when he called to say he had to study or was going out for a drink with some friends. I would never have said, “Oh, but I was counting on you. I have nothing else to do.”

  “No, of course you haven’t, or we wouldn’t still be together. Look, I’ll tell you what I think: if I had to feel responsible I’d resent it, and when I resent something I get mad and then I blow up and get the hell away from whatever it is. See?

  “But if I don’t feel any demands, I can give you everything. I’ll want to give you everything. It’s just a matter of whether I feel forced or not. I have to want to want to.

  “Do you see what I mean at all? I know I’m putting it badly. I didn’t mean to, I had it all worked out how to say it, but I got off the track,” and he gave me that appealing, tippy little smile he had, where one side of his mouth went up and the skin around his eyes wrinkled around them, so that he was kind of peeking, like a little boy.

  Well yes, I could see in a way what he meant, looking at it from his point of view and knowing him as I did.

  Me, I was the opposite. I longed for the obligations and the demands. They would fence my life.

  One would think that would make us fit perfectly together. It did seem to.

  Still, I was a little hurt that he could apparently foresee me so easily as a burden. On the other hand, he was honest at least. “But I love you,” I said, as if that would explain everything.

  “I love you, too,” he said and smiled and leaned forward and kissed my forehead.

  When we made love, I could feel the perfect infinite future of this. It made it a much larger event.

  I never broke the promise. Whatever else, I never broke that promise. It hardly even seemed to matter that I had made it. He told me so much: it didn’t seem possible there could be any secrets.

  He broke it. I never did.

  In those days, one pledged to “love, honour, and obey,” although I gather that has now changed and one can promise what one wants. Or not. Sometimes it seems no one promises anything any more.

  But I took the pledge for granted; welcomed it, in fact.

  What about him? Was he frightened, despite our private pact, of love, honour, and obedience? Did he look at me uneasily and wonder what he might be giving up?

  I was uneasy and afraid. I was afraid I might not be good enough, that my alertness might falter for a moment, and like a broken spell, all this would vanish.

  I felt I was being called to perfection (and it was just like that, a vocation, something one is called to—by whom? what?) and I might not measure up. I added more private, silent promises: to be indispensable and absolute.

  Obviously I failed. Obviously there were things missed, the small pin lodged in the carpet. I did not try quite hard enough, although I did try very hard.

  I’m sure I could have been perfect, with more effort. And then Harry might have been perfect too. As it was, there were flaws and shortcomings, and his faults, although more glaring and gashing, were only reflections of my own.

  “Ah, you’re perfect, Edna,” he told me sometimes. But I was not.

  So much hung on that day we were married: all my unhappy, forlorn past and all our brilliant, sturdy future. There would have had to be great fireworks, explosions in the sky, and rumblings and upheavals in the earth, to be the day it meant to me.

  Of course there were not. But I was dazed by expectations. They were: that marrying Harry resolved—everything. I would work hard at it, true, but it was work I could understand and could do and that had a purpose. I was safe, inside two, and questions and fear had no place any more; might even be a kind of wickedness, betrayal. That is what twenty years meant, although at the time I pictured it forever.

  So much fussing, and none to do with the point of all this. Stella pushing and pulling at my hair, my mother tugging at my dress. They worried about the flowers for the church and whether the guests would all be seated properly. They went over the order of people in the receiving line, and were nervous when the photographer was late. But it was all for me, they were on my side: they too wanted this to be perfect.

  I would have liked to stop. To sit alone for a while in my bedroom and let what it meant soak into me, to absorb it until I could feel it fill me.

  But there was no time, and no quiet.

  “If I can remember everything,” I thought, “I’ll be able to go over it later as much as I want.” But while I could, and did many times, the recollection was as unreal as the reality.

  To be married, wasn’t that something, now. I couldn’t even look at Harry in the ceremony. He would have to be enormous, fill up the church to its gilded rafters, to be what he meant.

  I overheard my mother saying, “Isn’t it nice to see Edna so happy and relaxed.” I was frantic with excitement, which may have been similar to happiness. But I was certainly not relaxed. This was my life here, didn’t she see?

  I heard Harry’s voice beside me in the ceremony and felt his hand on my elbow as we walked back up the aisle. His arm rested alongside mine in the receiving line, and at the reception I heard him laughing and talking beside me, and felt him pulling me to my feet when they tinkled the glasses for a kiss. We were our own magic circle in the midst of all this, but I closed my eyes.

  I lay awake that night listening to my husband breathe beside me. I’d lain awake before, listening to Harry breathe, but this was new: Harry my husband, my husband Harry.

  It seems to me that what he was saying that day was, “In return for this, I get that.” And what I was saying was, “In return for this, I will always have that.”

  14

  What did he see? What did he see all those years?

  Oh God, I want to know. I want him here. I want to talk to him and ask him, I want him to tell me what it was all about and what he saw. I want to know why.

  It must have been quite different from my view. That’s what’s shattering, how different it must have been.

  If we could talk now, we could tell the truth.

  I guess I miss Harry. I suppose I mourn him in a way
. Although I can’t quite grasp it.

  But what I do miss is his presence. We could sit and chat, I miss that, just the sound of his voice, even a conversation about what to watch on television, even that I would cherish. We could sit on the couch together, him with a newspaper or a magazine, me with a book. The quietness. I took the ordinary quietness for granted. I would like to see him reach forward to pour another glass of wine, or to light my cigarette. I would like to be out in the car with him, hear him cursing another driver or singing with the radio. I’d like to hear him arguing with one of the men from his office. I’d like to hear him say, “Another drink, Don? How about you, Lois?” when we had company. I would like to see him gulping orange juice in the morning, saying, “Jesus Christ, I’m late.” I would like to hear his car in the driveway, the garage door opening and closing, his “Hi, Edna, God what a day, feel like a drink?” I would like to feel his hand touch my shoulder lightly or see him grin as he grabbed my breasts or pinched my bottom as he passed by me. I would like once again to lie awake in the night listening to him breathe. I would like to be wakened by a snore. I would like to be cleaning the bathroom in the morning and smell his aftershave, and to fold his pyjamas beneath his pillow. I would like to pull the covers off our vacant bed and see the imprint of his body, both our bodies, and know they would be there again. I would like to empty the ashtray, filled with the butts of our cigarettes. Where did it all go? I would like to reach back and have it all again.

  15

  They say it’s nearly the middle of October. What good are pages and pages of neat, precise letters spiralling into tidy words and paragraphs, if they only look good? Underneath it is a mess.

  I must look more closely, pay more attention, see everything. All the details and the tiny things, that must be where it is.

  So I note, sitting here in this flowered chair, notebook squarely in my lap, my back rigid against the cushioned softness, that some leaves are falling.