Away from Home

by Rona Jaffe

  Waiters were pushing their way through the crowd with plates of ice cream, trying to put it on the tables and remove the rest of the food and get the whole thing over with before they were wounded in action. Nobody seemed very interested in food anyway, except Neil, who was devouring automatically as he always did no matter how hot the room was. Margie had withdrawn into a corner and was powdering her face and trying to smooth back her damp hair. For a moment Helen had a pang of conscience, imagining how wet and bedraggled she herself must look, but then she didn’t care. She had never felt this way before—so mindless and happy, like a vessel filled with music and nothing else. She climbed on a chair and stepped on to the table, kicking off her shoes to the floor.

  The table was long, rather like a ramp in a musical comedy on which the dancers can go out among the audience. She looked down at the people jumping and rocking below her and she began to sway in time to the music, at first self-consciously because she had never danced on top of a table before and some people were looking at her, and then abandonedly. It was much cooler here on top of the table and she could look down and see everyone in a kaleidoscope of color and movement. She held up her arms and moved her bare feet in her own intricate speeded-up version of the samba, aware only of the music and her own movements. From below, the men who passed by in the snake dance waved at her and called out and some even tried to grab at her ankles, but she laughed at them. Other people were climbing up on tables now, dancing in pairs or alone.

  How strange it was! She did not feel like Helen Sinclair, American Housewife—she felt like an anonymous Brazilian dancer, loved by everyone down there on the dance floor, waved at and smiled at and idolized. She waved at them all and smiled at them all. Someone squirted her with ether. It felt icy cold on her bare skin. The sweet, sickly smell of the ether bombs was everywhere in the room, blending with the moist heat. She felt as if she were drowning in flowers, but not bouquet flowers as she had known them; these were strange exotic flowers that grew wildly in the night and intoxicated anyone who breathed their odor.

  Behind her a row of men had climbed up on to the table and were dancing too. The table was swaying slightly under their weight and for a moment Helen wondered if it would break, and if it did, where everyone could possibly fall. She kicked aside several empty glasses that had spilled on the tablecloth. The tablecloth was entirely black now, wrinkled, wet, and covered with mud from the pounding shoes. Waiters’ hands were frantically tugging at it to remove it from under the dancing feet. Someone stepped on someone’s plate of strawberry ice cream. The waiters finally pulled off the tablecloth, and Helen and the strangers were dancing on the bare boards.

  Directly below her, between two tables, a man put his hand inside another man’s trousers. “Take your hand out of my pants,” the second man shouted. The first did not. The second one grabbed a glass, broke off the top of it on the edge of the table, and cut the first man’s throat. Hands reached out, taking and holding the attacker and the attacked, taking them away. The music blared on and no one else paid any attention.

  Across the room a man, very drunk from liquor and ether, fell off a table on to his head. He bounced once and lay still for a moment, while his friends on the table gasped. Then he sat up, looked around, and stood up, oblivious of the blood pouring down his face. He began to dance again. Helen looked at him, shocked, until she remembered that ether is an anesthetic.

  The table was rocking dangerously now and she was beginning to tire. She had only a few inches of space left to dance on anyway, so reluctantly she climbed down to the floor. She drank more water ravenously and looked for Bert. He had disappeared. Behind her was an exit and through it she could see the veranda and the black night sky. She searched under the table until she found her shoes and then she went out on to the veranda.

  It was cool outside and the sky was filled with large white stars. There were couples resting against the veranda railing, talking inaudibly. Above the edge of the railing Helen could see the outlines of palm fronds. The street below was lighted by strings of lights and filled with people watching the people on the veranda. The music inside the hotel was less noisy now, pleasanter, almost like a heartbeat. She pulled off her turban and gasped with pleasure as the breeze blew through her wet hair. She imagined herself steaming, the way a hot frying pan does when you run cold water on it. She stood leaning against the railing, her back to the street, looking at the people strolling out of the ballroom. There were a great many couples dressed in Alpine shorts and green hats this year; perhaps because it was an easy costume and cool. But there seemed to be more people dressed as fantastic blackamoors than anything else, with the face masks that looked like a black stocking pulled over the head with little holes cut out for the eyes and mouth.

  A tall, beautiful boy with café-au-lait skin strolled by, dressed as an angel complete with halo and huge golden wings. Helen smiled at him because his costume was so exquisitely made, and murmured, “Ah, lindo.” He glared at her and walked on, and she realized then that he was one of the homosexuals, who sometimes had the most imaginative and lovely costumes of all.

  Near the doorway was a group of people dressed as rich Colonial Brazilians. They looked a little like the American southern aristocracy of the Civil War. They seemed different from the other revelers at the ball because they were quieter, more observers than participants, and the women especially seemed very conscious of their elaborate costumes. They talked quietly among themselves and fanned themselves and allowed passers-by to glance admiringly at them, as if they had come to the ball only to discover the effects of their fantaseas and then would go home. Surely none of them could dance in those huge hoopskirts on the crowded dance floor. The group turned and walked slowly into the hotel now, except for one of the men, who came toward the railing near where Helen was standing. She did not recognize him until he was next to her because he was wearing a mask and a wig.

  “Hello, darling,” Sergio said quietly.

  “I didn’t recognize you,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be here.” She held out her hand, rather formally, filled with confusion at seeing him so unexpectedly. He kissed her hand and held it for a minute.

  “I wasn’t going to come with them,” Sergio said. “I don’t like Carnival. My wife is on the farm, and I was just going to stay in my apartment and go to bed.” He smiled ruefully and shook his head. “I say that every year. This year, I say, I will not go to Carnival. I hate it. I drink too much, and I stay up all night, and I sniff too much ether until I feel sick. It’s an orgy; it’s ridiculous. But there’s something in my blood.… I don’t know. I say I won’t go, I lie on my bed, and then I hear the music coming from the favellas on the hill behind my apartment house. It happens every year this way. I listen to that music and I start to writhe on my bed like a snake. And then I put on a costume and here I am again.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Helen said.

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You look beautiful. You have a Bahiana!” He surveyed her affectionately and proudly, as if she were a very clever child; she had noticed that look on other Brazilians when they saw an American who was enjoying himself at Carnival as much as they were. She smiled at him.

  “It wasn’t difficult to buy.”

  “You should wear it all the time.”

  “I’d like to,” she said.

  “Would you like champagne?”

  “Is there any?”

  “Come with me.”

  He led her adroitly through the crowd in the hot, brilliantly lighted ballroom, through another smaller ballroom, and finally to a room where there was a bar. There were orchestras in every room, playing loudly, pounding out the music that never stopped. In every room people were dancing, bobbing up and down, perspiring, smiling, pushing, until Helen felt as though she were wandering in a labyrinth that had been made to confuse the wanderer because everything everywhere was so exactly the same and so extreme, like a dream.


  Sergio bought the entire bottle of champagne from the bartender and took it to a vacant table in the corner. The champagne was cold and on the sweet side, and Helen had two glasses. He drank the rest himself. Helen had never seen him drink so much before. From his pocket he pulled out a gilded aerosol can of the perfumed ether.

  “Have you ever tried this?”

  “What do they do with it?”

  He looked around for an instant to make sure no one was watching. “Don’t make a big display,” he said very quietly. “It offends some people when they see what I’m going to do.” He squirted some of the ether into his handkerchief and quickly held the handkerchief over his nose and mouth, breathing deeply. He was holding his head down so it looked fairly innocent, as if he might be only going to sneeze. “Do you want to try?”

  “I … don’t know.”

  “I’ll only give you a little. It will make you feel drunker, and happy. You must breathe it in immediately after I give you the handkerchief because it evaporates.” He squirted more ether on the handkerchief and held it to Helen’s nose.

  She had a moment of terror, reminded of when she had had her tonsils out as a child and ether on a white piece of gauze had made her unconscious. She breathed in, shallowly and fearfully.

  “You’ve let it all escape. Quickly!” he whispered.

  He wet the handkerchief again, and this time she took a deep breath. The damp handkerchief felt cold against her lips and smelled like those same sickly sweet flowers. She breathed it again, closing her eyes.

  She felt a little lightheaded, but it might only have been from excitement or from breathing so deeply. She smiled at him. “Give me more. I don’t feel a thing!”

  “I think you’ve had enough,” he said. “I don’t want to make you drunk; I only wanted you to see how it feels.” He put the lança perfuma quickly into his pocket. “I don’t even like it when I do it to myself,” he said. “Tomorrow I will feel sick, and I will probably call the doctor to give me vitamin injections. But tonight … well …” He finished the last of the bottle of champagne and lighted a cigarette.

  “Why do you do it, then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I always do it at Carnival. At the same time I’m doing it I’m laughing at myself. Do you want to dance?”

  “Yes.”

  They went into the other room, hesitated for an instant, and threw themselves into the pack of dancers. It was hotter than ever, so hot now that it did not matter any more that it was hot or that there was no longer anyone who was reasonably dry or reasonably sane or whose greasepaint had not run and smeared in streams of glistening perspiration. Helen held tightly to Sergio, her feet moving rapidly to the rhythm of the music, her smile stiffening. Her happy exchange of grins to the other dancers was becoming automatic now and she felt exhausted, her legs beginning to ache. She had been here for hours. She had never danced so fast and strenuously, or for so long, before. At the beginning of the evening the wild dancing had been a release, but now she only wanted to stand very quietly with Sergio and have him put his arms around her.

  “It’s so hot,” she gasped.

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  He took her hand and led her through the dancers with the same swift expertise as he had when they had been looking for a drink. They were outside again, and the night air was cool and wonderful. Neither one of them said anything. They smiled at each other and walked quietly to the railing, hand in hand. They leaned against the railing for a moment looking down at the crowds still gathered on the street, and then Sergio turned and put his arms around her. It was what she had wanted him to do. She leaned against him and he kissed her forehead and neither of them spoke.

  She could hear the music, softly, and dimly see other couples walking by or standing in embrace. It did not matter; she did not know any of them. She hardly knew herself. She knew only that she felt very much at peace with herself, very quiet inside, as if all this were the most natural thing in the world. She had her arms around Sergio’s waist and he had his arms around her; her head was against his chest, their bodies tightly together. She wondered what any of his friends or her friends would think if they came out on the terrace and saw the two of them that way. And Bert … But she felt charmed, lucky, as if no one would ever dare to come out on that terrace now except strangers, because she and Sergio were strangers now to the whole world. Neither of them moved or spoke.

  Then when they moved they moved at the same time. She lifted her face and he kissed her. Their faces were wet and it was strange—a strange kiss, tender and desperate, the kiss of strangers who have wanted to kiss each other for a long time. They looked into each other’s faces, wonderingly at first, as if that kiss had somehow changed them. It was a glance almost of surprise. Then they kissed again, but this time it was a kiss of neither surprise nor questioning but of passion.

  She felt the faint brush of other people passing by her on the veranda but she was only dimly aware of them, as if their footsteps and voices and accidental touch were only changes in the current of the air.

  Sergio looked at her. “I will take you away after Carnival,” he whispered. “Will you come with me?”

  She wanted to ask him not to speak, not to make anything real, only to stay there and kiss her. But she felt against her will her lips forming the word Yes.

  At two-thirty in the morning it was really only the middle of the evening for most of the dancers at the Baile des Artistes. Mort Baker had vanished somewhere with a girl dressed as a black cat. Margie Davidow, exhausted, was sitting on a chair and refusing to dance, looking with admiration at her husband bobbing up and down on the crowded dance floor with first one stranger and then another. Bert Sinclair, who always seemed to be pursued by older women, had found himself in the clutch of a dyed-haired woman of fifty who was dressed as a courtesan of the ancient Roman court and who had one arm around his neck while pretending to eat a bunch of purple grapes from the other hand. Helen came in from the cool veranda and put on her turban again, hot and heavy with its weight of artificial fruit, and she felt as if she were putting on some instrument of torture. She went to Margie.

  “Is anyone interested in going home?”

  “I am!” Margie said. Her eyes began to sparkle with the first real pleasure they had shown in over an hour.

  “Do you think they’ll think we’re spoiling everything? I’m dead.”

  “Oh, so am I!”

  “Where’s Mort?”

  “Off with a girl,” Margie said lightly. “He’ll find his way home—if he comes home at all. I’ll get my husband.” She climbed up on to the table and began waving and gesturing at Neil.

  Neil broke away from the dancers and came over reluctantly. “We want to go home,” Margie said. “I’ve had enough.”

  “What time is it?” he asked, beginning to protest.

  “Two-thirty. Please!”

  Helen had never seen Margie look so tired. She had dark circles under her eyes where her make-up had worn off. But it was not so much fatigue that made her look so limp; it was more a look of hopelessness, a kind of sagging exhaustion. There was something odd going on with those three—Margie, Neil and Mort—and Helen did not know what it was, but it was there. Perhaps Margie resented having the second man in her home all the time—Margie had such a sense of order and such precise, neat ways, and Mort certainly was a Bohemian. Helen remembered Margie’s outburst Christmas Eve about her marital privacy. It was always hard to tell what Margie really felt about private things; she covered up so well. You always had the feeling that Margie had some kind of painful secret in her life, but that she was able to keep it to herself because she first of all kept it from herself. For a woman that was really the only way to deceive others artfully; you had to convince yourself first.

  Helen waved to Bert and he came over to their group. “What are we doing now?” he asked.

  “We’d love to go home. If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind.”

&n
bsp; They drove along the beach, and Helen felt the first signs of the exhaustion and muscle stiffness she knew would last for several days. She had never dreamed she would have as much energy as she had shown all night. She put her head on Bert’s shoulder and he put his arm around her. He had removed his shirt because it was completely wet and he was holding it out the car window to dry. It flapped in the air from the moving automobile like a castaway’s rescue signal.

  “I love you,” Helen whispered.

  “I should hope so.”

  There was kindness and affection and strength in the way he said it, and if she could have cut out her heart at that moment and handed it to him she would have done so. The minutes on the terrace with Sergio seemed like a bad dream. How could people do such things? She thought of Sergio’s wife only in passing, as if the woman were some kind of figure, not a real person. Their relationship in their marriage had nothing to do with her. She thought of Bert, here with his arm trustingly around her, protecting her, and she was filled with pain for him. She didn’t want to hurt him, no matter what he might do. She had thought at times that he was sleeping with some woman on one of those long trips he took so often, but that really didn’t matter now. She didn’t know for sure that he had slept with someone else, and even if he did, if he didn’t love the other woman, then it really didn’t matter. She didn’t want to know any more about it. He was her husband and he loved her, and he always came back to her. Nothing else mattered, or could matter, or else they would not have a marriage. I almost hurt you, she thought guiltily, looking up at his profile shadowed in the dark car. I never will hurt you again, darling, I promise. I promise.…

  “Do you want to stop off at our house for coffee?” Margie asked. She did not sound very enthusiastic about it.

  “You’re too tired,” Bert said quickly.

  “What a bunch of deadheads,” Neil said in mock scorn. “Three o’clock in the morning and you want to give up.”

  “Do you want a dead wife?” Margie asked.