After the Last Dance

by Sarra Manning

  Phil shook his head. ‘You don’t. You look pretty. Real pretty.’

  He was staring at her so unashamedly that she didn’t know what to say. ‘You look very nice too,’ she managed, which wasn’t altogether true. He was tall and strapping but also rather homely-looking and had an alarming gap between his front teeth, but he was one of the nicest people Rose had ever met. He reminded her of the golden retriever her best friend Patience had owned before the war. Prince had had the same look of happy devotion when you called him a ‘good boy’ or patted his head. ‘And you’ve been so sweet. Gone above and beyond anything I expected when I accosted you at King’s Cross.’

  Thankfully Phil didn’t have a chance to say how pretty Rose was again because the waitress was back. ‘There you are,’ she said, whipping a laden plate off her tray. ‘House special.’

  The house special was a mound of misshapen hot doughnuts. ‘The guys back at base call this place Dunker’s Den,’ Phil told her. He pushed the plate nearer. ‘Go on. Have one.’

  Rose was scared to touch them in case they weren’t real but when she reached out to take one of the deep-fried, sugar-coated apparitions, it was hot enough that she snatched back her hand and sucked her injured fingers into her mouth. She closed her eyes as the sweet, sweet, sweet crystals coated her tongue.

  Then she didn’t care what she looked like as she tore one of the doughnuts in half and crammed it into her mouth. It was hot and greasy and she closed her eyes again in a moment of still, quiet bliss and when she opened them again, Phil was beaming.

  ‘Have as many as you like,’ he said munificently. ‘Do you want something to wash it down with?’ Phil gestured at the two glasses that she hadn’t even noticed. They were full of an unappetising, effervescent brown liquid.

  ‘Is that root beer?’ she ventured.

  ‘No.’ Phil grinned, all teeth and gums. ‘Guess again.’

  ‘I haven’t a clue. May I?’

  ‘Knock yourself out.’

  Rose picked up one of the glasses and took a cautious sniff. The carbonated bubbles leapt out of the glass to tickle her nostrils. She sipped hesitantly and then it took every ounce of willpower she possessed not to screw up her face and spit it out. It tasted vile , like the most hateful kind of expectorant. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said and she must have sounded convincing because Phil let out a deep breath as if he’d been scared that she wouldn’t like it. ‘Delicious. What is it?’

  ‘It’s Coca-Cola,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s going to help us win the war.’

  Maybe the US Army planned to spray it on the Nazi hordes instead of dropping bombs on them. ‘Do Americans drink this a lot? How extraordinary.’ Rose picked up her glass and tried to gulp down as much as possible, interspersed with bites of doughnut to get rid of the taste. It was a waste of perfectly good doughnuts.

  After she’d eaten all but one of the doughnuts and drunk the entire glass of Coca-Cola, which now sloshed around in her belly, Rose felt as if she was getting her energy back even though it had been such a long, eventful day. There was a restlessness that she couldn’t quell, which made her fingers drum on the table, and her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering even though she was as warm as anything.

  ‘Let’s go and dance some more,’ she said standing up so she could take off her cardigan and tie it around her shoulders. ‘That’s if you want to.’

  Many, many dances later, the band stopped playing and couples drifted off the dancefloor arm in arm. Phil said it was too late for him to find digs and so they floated like ghosts up the stairs and through the club until they found an empty sofa tucked away in a corner. It was hard to remember to sit stiff-backed with legs elegantly crossed at the ankle when Rose also couldn’t remember ever being so tired or staying up so late.

  As Phil described Des Moines, Iowa to Rose, which seemed to contain a lot of cows and cornfields and a department store, improbably called Younkers, it was a terrible effort to stifle her yawns and open her eyes again each time she blinked. His voice sounded as if it were coming from further and further away and it was harder to smile and say, ‘Gosh, that sounds interesting,’ at appropriate intervals, but it was important that she tried.

  She rested her head on Phil’s shoulder and she didn’t even care when he gingerly put his arm around her. ‘You can go to sleep if you like,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind. I’m feeling kind of beat myself.’

  Rose had to clench her jaw to stop herself from yawning. ‘Well, perhaps we could have a little nap,’ she suggested. ‘But only a little one, because I really do want to hear more about Des Moines. It sounds charming.’

  ‘It’s the finest place I know,’ Phil agreed, but he didn’t sound quite so perky as he had done and when he shifted on the sofa so they could both slump, it was a lot more comfortable. Then he shut his eyes and he fell asleep even before Rose did.

  3

  After they struck their deal, became maybe engaged, they introduced themselves. ‘Leo,’ he said. He had a firm handshake – she liked that in a man.

  ‘Jane,’ she said and once they’d got that out of the way, they could get to know each other.

  Although Jane already knew everything she needed to know from the thirty minutes she’d spent sitting next to him. Under the bar spotlights, she could clearly see the lines starting to creep around his eyes and his pretty, almost girlish mouth, which always seemed to be on the verge of a lazy grin, like smiling properly was too much of an effort.

  Even slouched on a very uncomfortable barstool Leo was tall and rangy, though Jane would bet that underneath his Ramones T-shirt there was the beginnings of a paunch from too much alcohol and takeaway food snatched from whatever place was still open when he was kicked out of whichever bar he’d been holed up in. Still, there was something sexy about him. Maybe it was to do with the way he looked as if he’d been round the block a few too many times but was still ready for the next adventure. If you got rid of the shaggy hair (the bleached ends were begging to be cut off), spruced him up and put him in a suit, it would make all the difference. There was darkness to him, but an uncomplicated darkness; back in the day he’d have been described as louche, and he was flirting shamelessly with her.

  ‘I’m not prying, that’s not my style, but whoever it was that you didn’t get married to… he’s a dick,’ he told her. ‘Obviously he didn’t deserve you.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ she said. Her voice sounded muddied. They’d been drinking for an hour. Or rather he kept buying her drinks and she kept drinking them, though he was still nursing his second whisky. ‘I could be on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for all you know.’

  ‘You’re too beautiful to be a career criminal,’ Leo said.

  ‘How many career criminals have you met?’

  ‘Oh, loads and loads. You’re also too beautiful to look so sad,’ he told her quietly, but he had a way of looking at her as if she wasn’t just another beautiful woman, as if her heart were as beautiful as her face, that made Jane want to share all the sorrow festering inside her. Well, that and the four vodka tonics.

  ‘I spent three years with him. Three years! Then, in the space of five minutes, none of that matters any more.’ Jane was dangerously close to ranting. She pushed her glass away, straightened her shoulders and took a couple of deep breaths. ‘All because of a bloody patent application.’

  Leo frowned. ‘Come again?’

  ‘It’s too boring,’ Jane demurred, but she needed to give him some context. ‘He, Andrew, my… I always hated the word fiancé or intended, or betrothed. They all sound so…’ She couldn’t find her words today.

  ‘Naff?’ Leo suggested ‘Shall we just call him Mr Ex? Seems appropriate.’

  Jane nodded. ‘He was designing this face and voice recognition software that had all sorts of people excited: Google, Apple, the Chinese government – don’t even ask me to go into details because I couldn’t. He had venture capitalists chomping at the bit. Millions in seed capital. Then today, when we had fifty of his closes
t family and friends waiting on one of the terraces at THEHotel at Mandalay Bay, he gets a phone call to say he’s filed his patent applications wrong. Missed out a couple of circuit boards or chips or lines of code. Or forgot to write down his full name. Who knows?’

  ‘Hardly the end of the world though, is it?’ Leo obviously had no idea how catastrophic a bad patent application was.

  ‘Oh, it is. It couldn’t even wait a couple of hours for us to get married. He had to leave there and then. I’m a very understanding person.’ Jane put a hand to her heart, which wasn’t thrumming as frantically as it had been. Before, it had felt as if it wanted to burst free from her chest, worm its way out of the boned bodice of her dress and lie on the ground, limply beating. ‘But I have my limits and he was so cold, uncaring of my feelings…’

  ‘I told you that he didn’t deserve you,’ Leo chimed in. He was still staring at her with those soulful blue eyes, though generally she didn’t think that blue eyes could be soulful. ‘I can’t believe he cared more about Google or the Chinese government than he did about you.’

  ‘I didn’t mind him being driven. I quite liked it. Being the sole focus of someone’s life… well, it’s just too much pressure, but I never expected him to leave me at the altar, or as near as damn it. Said he had to go to New York to sort it all out and that getting married was no longer a priority. Then he left without even saying goodbye.’ She picked up her discarded glass and drained the contents. ‘It’s not a very nice feeling to know that you don’t matter to someone you were planning to spend the rest of your life with.’

  ‘Oh, now you’re looking sad again. I’ll get you another drink,’ Leo said. He signalled the barman and pulled out another wrinkled ten-dollar bill from his back pocket. Jane wasn’t even sure that he was listening to her, really listening, or if he just liked the way her lips made shapes as she spoke.

  But then he turned back to her, looked at her again and his mouth hung slightly open, like he’d forgotten that by some fluke of nature and the attentions of two very good plastic surgeons her features – eyes, nose, mouth and the rest – were arranged in a very pleasing fashion. ‘God, you are so beautiful. I’d love to paint you.’

  ‘Really? Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘Because I’m an artist,’ Leo said and he held out his hands so she could see the speckled blobs of blue and yellow paint. ‘An impoverished artist. I mean, is there any other kind?’

  Jane hadn’t the heart to tell him that there was. That she knew artists who got paid millions and millions of pounds for pickling dead animals or spray-painting graffiti tags on the walls of the homes of rap stars, so she nodded. ‘Does that involve lots of starving in garrets?’

  ‘Yeah. I have to sell my body to buy paint,’ he said and he leaned in closer. ‘Problem is that my body isn’t up to much and paint is so expensive. See! I knew I could make you smile.’

  ‘You keep going and I might be able to muster up a giggle,’ Jane said, and then she did giggle, because it was impossible not to. She glanced at the sliver of platinum around her wrist. The hour was up. While Leo wouldn’t be her first choice, or her second, or even a choice at all if her circumstances hadn’t changed quite so drastically, she could do a lot worse.

  He had a sense of humour. That counted for a lot. He was easy going. He was also unreliable. Shiftless. Feckless, but he didn’t have what it took to hurt someone like her.

  ‘There is another way you could make me smile,’ she said.

  Leo leaned in close enough that her skin prickled and she could smell the faint tang of whisky. ‘And what would that be?’ His voice was smoky and low and he had a way of looking at you as if you were the only girl in the world. Jane was sure he’d left quite a lot of women sobbing into their pillows. She’d never been much of a crier though. ‘I think I would still like to get married. Are you game, darling?’

  For one moment, Leo looked utterly panic-stricken, as if they’d been dating since high school and living together for at least five years and she’d hit him with a positive pregnancy test and an ultimatum. He took a couple of deep breaths. ‘OK. Yeah. I did offer, didn’t I?’ His words, which started hesitantly, ended with a lot more conviction and freed Jane from her fretting. ‘Got to try everything at least once, right?’

  ‘Oh, definitely.’ She clasped her hands together. She’d be his Vegas anecdote. The crazy tale he’d tell about the wife he met in a bar and married an hour later. That was fine with her. She’d been worse things than a cautionary tale against marrying in haste. ‘You do have your passport on you, don’t you?’

  Leo said he did and he even paid for the cab to the Cook County Marriage License Bureau. As they waited in line with the other couples – some drunk, some unlikely and a pair of teenagers who looked like they’d just skipped out on their senior prom – Leo solicited opinions about the best wedding chapels.

  ‘How do you feel about an Elvis impersonator?’ he asked once the special licence had been tucked away in her handbag.

  Jane shook her head. ‘Nothing that clichéd,’ she said firmly. ‘Nothing tacky. No hula girls. No neon. Absolutely no Elvis impersonators. Somewhere tasteful.’

  Leo googled ‘tasteful Las Vegas wedding chapels’ on his phone and eventually they found a chapel with a gazebo – ‘apparently they replace the lilies every day’ – and a cancellation.

  When they got to the chapel, although they hadn’t even discussed tactics, they marched straight up to the gum-snapping, middle-aged receptionist and Jane started to haggle, because everyone knew that you never paid the ticket price. After she’d gently explained that in a way, a rather large way, she and Leo were doing them a favour by taking the empty spot, Leo moved in for the kill. ‘Sorry that we’ve just rocked up at the very last minute,’ he said. ‘I bet you’re sick of looking at girls in white dresses all day long.’ He leaned over the desk so he could drop his voice; let his eyes linger on her crêpey cleavage displayed in plunging leopard print. ‘Listen, I’ll let you into a secret – if I hadn’t already promised myself to this one, I’d be getting down on one knee right about now.’ He gave the receptionist just a mere flicker of the insinuating smile that he’d given Jane and she knocked another fifty dollars off the price, handed them a ring binder and told them to pick their vows.

  Moments later they were standing in front of a glib man with an orange tan, alarmingly white teeth and a rusty brown combover who asked them to hold hands.

  Two hours ago they hadn’t even met and now they were about to promise to love and cherish each other for better for worse, for richer for poorer. I should have made them take that part out , Jane thought as she parroted the vows back to the officiate. Then Leo took her hands in his, and her eyes, which had been fixed on the lilies interwoven through the rails of the gazebo, focused on him.

  He smiled at her and raised his eyebrows as if to say, Well, here we are .

  Jane gave him the smile she’d promised him earlier, gently squeezed his hands, and maybe, for this moment at least, they both felt some slight connection; a little pull towards each other.

  ‘Repeat after me: “I, Leo William Hurst, take you, Jane Audrey Monroe…”’

  They’d chosen the traditional vows, as the laminated cards in the ring binder had veered heavily towards talk of souls entwining and completing each other. Getting married was one thing, but souls entwining wasn’t part of the deal. However now, as this stranger promised to honour her with his body, the sentiment behind the words touched something in her. Not for very long, but fleetingly, the words mattered.

  ‘Repeat after me: “I, Jane Audrey Monroe, take you, Leo William Hurst…”’

  Leo hadn’t expected her voice to tremble. Jane turned her pristine, perfect profile away from him, swallowed, and after that her words were as clear and crisp as drops of champagne. When she smiled at him, it wasn’t because this was a huge joke, a crazy Vegas night that he’d bore people with for decades to come, but because in this moment, in this tasteful gaze
bo, they understood each other. Two bruised people looking for a little comfort, some kind of distraction, and they’d found it with each other.

  For an extra ten dollars, the chapel had provided rings. Leo slid the thin band of silver-coloured metal onto Jane’s finger so it could nestle against her huge art deco diamond engagement ring.

  Then it was her turn to slide a matching ring onto his finger and they were still holding hands as they were pronounced husband and wife.

  ‘You can kiss now,’ the officiate reminded them. ‘You’re legal.’

  ‘We don’t have to kiss,’ Jane whispered at Leo. ‘Not if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Why? Don’t you want me to kiss you?’ he whispered back.

  They heard shouting from behind the gazebo. ‘I don’t want to harsh your special moment, but if you two could move things along…’

  ‘Let’s do this,’ Jane decided while Leo was still dithering. She tugged at the sweetheart neckline of her dress with one hand and primped her hair with the other. ‘Unless you really don’t want to.’