Dancing in the Dark

by David Donnell

  It’s crowded, warm and a little smoky despite the open windows. Jack appears from behind several couples and a bass saxophone, he’s wearing a dark blue blazer, double-breasted, and chinos, he looks academic and confused. He gives Tom a hug and says something about rock & roll, and Tom gestures with a wide abrasive hand. “How am I supposed to keep my mind on writing great songs when there are beautiful people walking around taking their clothes off?” He’s conscious of his voice saying people, rather than girls, for example, gender conscious, all the Desperados tend to be politically correct even down to what magazines they read. Rolling Stone is good, New York Magazine is shit. And also of the crowds, the warmth, and of being a little drunk although it’s still fairly early evening. He’s also conscious of being rather proud of the party to which he’s invited Jack, the number of interesting people, this ridiculously beautiful girl, the music, Tom feels he’s way up in the world, above the net baskets, walking on clouds.

  “You’re just hard luck,” says Jack, “it’s because you’re a bull-headed Italian guy, and you don’t subscribe to Paris Review.

  Tom shrugs off the sensitive Paris Review comment and says that he thinks the girl is at least as beautiful as Botticelli’s Venus coming out of the sea. He should know, shouldn’t he? Tom says he wouldn’t want, he means desire, the girl himself. But that she would be wonderful for Henry.

  Henry is an ex teaching assistant in philosophy at NYU, and a friend of Jack and Tom’s. He’s a short, rumpled 2nd generation Czechoslovakian guy about 35, and he now works as a book-store clerk down west of the village. Jack used to work with Henry at one point before he got this cushy new job in a feed warehouse as an inventory clerk which allows him to read magazines all day and still dream, to some degree, of becoming a writer. Tom used to go to films with Henry a lot in the afternoons, European films. Tom was the expert on Italian, Rossellini, for example, and Henry was the expert on East European, Skolimowicz, Wajda, people of that approach.

  The girl’s breasts are rather wonderful, they make him think of a Man Ray poster he’s seen, full, uplifted, the rosy nipples poke through the white shaving cream like plump rosebuds. Too good for Henry, his friend, the expert on Hegel, the expert on Strauss, who is at this moment as far as Tom knows somewhere out by the kitchen where there is more food than an army of tartar press agents could eat. Henry, although short, caustic, and not very heavy, is quite a gourmet, or gourmand, one of the two.

  A kid with blond hair and dark blue shades leans over Vitalis and dabs a touch of cream off with his forefinger, tastes it and makes an enormous face. “I thought it was whipping cream,” he says outraged. The girl smiles irresponsibly, in love with herself as a phenomenon. She probably has a Ph.D.

  Just a joke, more beautiful than guys mooning out of ’67 Buicks, he guesses, tongue in his mouth. He tries to remain cool. This is part of his new role in life apparently, to be less animated more clean-shaven, cooler, more a making the scene kind of guy whereas before he was the quintessence of the casual but animated, all out on the surface emotions pinned to his torn sleeve waiting for the vultures to get at him, to hit on him.

  The girl passes she’s almost up to his chin long legs tight black leather boots swinging one perfect hip exaggeratedly to get around a craggy hulk of a guy, a producer someone said innocently, with a full reddish beard and stained brown leather western hat on the other side of Tom. His left eye flops like a heron plunging after fish some early dawn childhood morning on eastern Lake Erie. Even calmed down by the Gallo, he’s been drinking plastic glassfuls, Tom’s not too cool. He’s usually a fairly laconic guy, but these band events and his new-found prestige make him a little dizzy and excited, put him in a sort of overdrive, make him a bit of a show-off.

  Whitney is part of this problem. He has no sooner lucked in, if indeed it is luck, to becoming a songwriter and receiving one of his first big cheques, than suddenly Whitney is singing for the group and getting all kinds of attention.

  Jack speaks light-heartedly to her, the dog, well, he leans forward politely, smiling that earnest graduate school steel-rims smile, and says, “Do you want my jacket? There’s a handkerchief in the pocket you can use.”

  The tall beautiful girl gives Jack a smile full of warm irony and bats blue eyes like cool banjos. “No, it’s okay,” she says in a clear Boston voice, “I’m just doing this to advertise a friend’s album. Besides,” she adds, “I’m afraid we might get a lot of this Gillette shaving cream all over your jacket.” Tom watches her disappear lazily into the crowd of people like a jogger disappearing into a subway crowd.

  “You didn’t tell me she was a friend of yours,” he says to Jack with mock dumb resentment.

  “Just an acquaintance.” Jack looks embarrassed. He was meant to be a Fine Arts instructor. That was years ago, already time seems like a fluid, elliptical elastic band. Jack is 27 now. Jack started writing during his last undergraduate year in Kansas. Then he changed to English. Then he dropped out and came to New York and met Tom.

  “There are millions of girls here,” Tom says, “and they’ve all got that ‘it’ look.”

  Jack laughs. “You’ve got gorgeous Whitney. How do you find the time to be interested?”

  “Not me, fella, I’m taken.” He is indeed, or he would like to be.

  But actually Whitney is beautiful and a constant headache.

  “Okay,” says Jack, “look, we’ll make it a project, it’ll be fun, like the time we did the green hornet postering campaign all over West 29th. We’ll get Henry laid. Henry’s terrific but he doesn’t make enough moves. With the wildest girl here. Just like in one of those cornball French comedies, you know, angst and humour. It’ll be fun. It won’t be hard. Let’s do it.”

  Tom doesn’t think this sounds very much like García Márquez and Albert Camus talking about the soul of humanity; but of course, these 2 completely separate, different periods as the academics say, heroes of Tom’s lambent literary side, never did have a chance to meet.

  Whitney is on the other side of the room jawing with a smooth-shaven Aramis type guy from some publication like Vanity Fair. He was introduced to the guy, who has a handshake like a large pink and white clam, and the guy made a big production out of the fact that he used to be a fashion asst. for Conde Nast. Maybe they’re talking about fashion. Whitney loves fashion. Whitney looks delicious. She looks especially delicious tonight. She spent the night with Tom, but she doesn’t look tired. Women are different, Tom thinks, they don’t get tired, they just get up the next morning and shower. The more sex they get the more energy they seem to have. Whitney is fresh and vivacious, her hands moving in huge blue and gold circles, busy plugging the new Desperados LP with considerable verve. No expenditure of sperm. Women just become more and more energetic. Tom reflects vaguely at times on the feasibility of practising carezza. The Turks may have something.

  Jack and Tom used to have good discussions about sex, they weren’t discussions so much as they were conversations, exchanges. Jack would tell Tom about some escapade and Tom would supply comments appreciative or sympathetic and then Tom would tell Jack about some escapade. Their conversations weren’t locker-room style, and apart from the fact that they’re both guys and fairly tall guys, their conversations could easily be said to have a similarity to girl-talk.

  This changed of course after Jack got married and had a child. Now Jack is very simplistic on the subject. He likes his domestic situation, complains about money sometimes, not having enough time to write, and tells Tom stories about how smart his daughter is, she’s 2 ½, cute, and smart as a whip.

  Tom would like a permanent relationship, but he’s only 26 and looking vaguely ahead at the rosy abyss of 30. He likes hanging out with the group, and being able to move freely from one place to another in the evening, the line-ups are too big at Max’s Kansas City, he goes to hear blues groups at the Trading Company, and often wanders from there to Phil’s Bar or the Mohican Diner with its large orange and blue neon Indian head facing n
orth up Lexington. He reads a lot, Albert Camus and books about Camus’s Algeria, and of course he has read all the novels and stories of Paul Bowles, liking The Sheltering Sky about the best.

  Tom does 50 push-ups every morning, makes a ritual, despite the dilapidated bathroom, of turning up the shower to almost scalding and then reversing it to ice-cold for a minute or two. He diets despite the fact that he doesn’t need to: it isn’t hard on Tom’s budget; tortellini soup, chicken gumbo or soup with an egg. Morning hard-ons are part of this exercise: first thing in the morning Tom will leap out of bed, if he’s alone, that is, and hang shirts, sweaters, even a jacket sometimes on the levitating member, the white Tuscan eel that wants to be airborne. These simple, childish perhaps, games convince Tom of 2 things: 1, he is still young; 2, he will never die.

  Over beer one night at Chuga’s, they were both a little drunk, Jack leaned over and put his hands on Tom’s shoulders, with affection, nothing smart alec, big smile on his face, and said, “You know, I really love you, Tom. I think you’re fucken queer.” It was meant with affection; it was, in a sense, a comment on Jack’s marriage. Jack is on the verge of giving up his warehouse job, which Tom thinks is a good job for him, and of becoming an office worker. This in Tom’s eyes would make his best friend one of the fallen.

  Not having played basketball for over 6 years, Tom is obsessive about the Calvin Klein underwear ads. He wants his own body to be at least that good and doesn’t want it to change, ever.

  Bitterly discouraged in a long love affair with an older woman in 4th year he feels, although very casual on the surface, that there is no reason why men shouldn’t be at least as attractive to women as women are to men, if not more. Tom has an ego. One mouth, 2 eyes, 2 nipples, 2 hands and a big ego.

  “Those nomads,” Jack tells him one afternoon, “as far as I know those guys don’t smoke cigarettes, Tom.”

  He gives up Gauloises, which is what Camus smoked; he smokes Camels now, he loves the picture of the camel on the front of the package. Also, they taste better. And they’re cheap.

  A somewhat more relaxed and slightly juiced Tom Garrone, 26, songwriter, and Mason, the devastating young bassist from the Desperados, who came up with the perfect bass chords for the bridge in the middle of Tom’s recent hit single about a laid-off worker leaving a small town in Mississippi and moving to Texas, and a small crowd of other people are hanging out in front of the 4th floor john.

  A young woman who looks like Katharine Ross, but artsy and she’s got red hair, well-dressed, casual black linen open-necked suit, stands out in the group. For more reasons than General Motors has excuses. She has great legs, she’s wearing heels, fabulous aqua-marine eyes, plus she has a large pure white silky borzoi dog, on a leash.

  The warehouse john had broken down around 7 o’clock for some reason and Hayden, tall, sardonic, affable, dark pigmentation American, also the composer for the group, since he was in the area, commandeered the telephone and got in touch with a Spanish guy over on 7th who could apparently fix anything with threads at either end.

  “You look after this lady’s dog,” Hayden tells him. “I’ve got to go and get myself a cold beer and talk to Bats.” Bats Ekberg is the drummer for the Desperados; like Tom, he’s originally from Toronto.

  Tom smiles at her. “You seem to be at the head of the line,” he says.

  “I think I’m first, I’ve been here for hours,” says a plump girl with steel rims and a shaven head with neat little cross-lines running back and forth across her head like drunken Xs & Os. Sort of a grid haircut, suggesting some sort of affinity with gridlock, street maps, office floor designs, urban planning, UFOs, or radar screens.

  “You have indeed,” says Red very graciously. She brushes an imaginary white Borzoi from her gorgeous unbuttoned suit.

  The young woman fiddler across the room, 75% obscured by moving blurs of multicoloured people, is leaning with her back against one of the large industrial windows. She’s not participating in conversation very much with Whitney any more. Whitney is talking with her hands now, quite enthusiastic about something. The guy called Henner, important enough, well, he’s the group’s manager, older guy, suit; stupid name, Tom can’t quite see his face, just a corner of it from where he is standing, but the guy is obviously pitching something with a bit of a slant to Whitney. He looks a bit like a much older cousin. Sort of an interesting face, but weathered, slightly distorted. Tom has an odd flash of a Korean War veteran’s face, but very brief, fleeting, wonders about him.

  Mason licks a flake of Durham from his lip and nods as he picks up on Tom’s attention.

  “I really like your dog. He looks athletic,” Tom says to the girl.

  “My name’s Laura,” she says, “Laura Redfield.” She holds out a calm gloved hand.

  “Tom Garrone. I’m the songwriter.” He feels proud. The subtle shaded V at the top of her top button, she has no blouse underneath, is beginning to excite him.

  Tom gets excited easily, but it’s mostly walking on fences. People are very loose about sex in the group. They’re hard on drugs but they’re pretty loose on sex. He feels he should try out a few numbers, but doesn’t know himself how serious he is.

  “I’m a graphic artist,” she says, “actually, right now at least, I do a lot of photo research. Weird things.” She gestures airily, mock airily. “UFOs for a magazine article. Southern poor families who live on tinned possum meat.” She laughs, she thinks this last remark is apparently funny, almost daintily at first, and then breaks up; when she breaks up laughing she strikes Tom as extremely sexy, he wants to get into bed with her right this minute, what the hell, maybe the washroom, at least it’s got a door. He’s slightly drunk.

  He should probably go back to nothing but Lite beer. Meanwhile of course he’s still watching Whitney. This whole business of being so stacked on Whitney, and, at the same time, there being always so many other people around is beginning to faze and fumble on him. His big head is beginning to slip. It makes him a little dizzy.

  “Woops,” she says gustily as the plump girl comes out of the john and a young guy with romantic chestnut brown hair down past his shoulders, 60s revival neo 60s Sassoon, not hip at all, is about, glancing at Laura as he does so, to Gabriel into the can.

  She puts one gloved hand gently on Sassoon’s shoulder. “Do pardon me,” she says to the Gabriel look-alike, “I simply must pee. Otherwise,” she grins at Tom, whom she obviously likes but it’s all so crazy, what does it all mean, people floating about glancing off each other like atoms bombarding the inside of an accelerator, “my dog will get upset.”

  She leaves Borzoi to guard the door and sails in smoothing her skirt very deliberately across her buttocks for no apparent reason other than flair or flirtation.

  “Mason,” says Tom to Mason, sounding more like Mason than like himself, “my nostrils are full of Opium by St. Laurent.”

  “Easy boy,” Mason has a long draw on his handrolled cigarette and grins philosophically at Tom, almost squinting, “you’ve got to loosen up a little. You’ve got the star over there. What’s your problem? You heard what Hayden said,” he adds, “you’ve got to open up the bass notes on those songs. Got to cool down. We’re pulling out tomorrow. Tour bus galore. This is a big tour,” he says, “you’ve got to walk easy unless you’re busy on stage.”

  Tom imagines he can hear the sound of the beautiful red-haired girl’s golden urine tinkling against the dusty white porcelain toilet bowl over and above the multiple sounds of the revelry.

  Although last night with Whitney more than satisfied Tom’s basic carnal drives and animal needs, he’s wired for erotic signals, maybe as a result of living a quiet life on small dollars per week at the 12×16 container on East 16th, and seeing Barbara, wonderful but not bizazzy, 4 or 5 times a week. Whatever the causality, metaphysics doesn’t really have to come into it. Tom was a little on the shy side in late high school, or so he remembers, but has been somewhat wired fritzed shunted for erotic pulselights since so
metime after college.

  The girl’s perfume, red hair, she said her name was Laura, lingers in the air as he stands leaning against the wall outside the loft washroom talking to Mason. Tom is a little drunk, that’s one thing, well, almost drunk, one big double belt of Scotch that Yvonne gave him from a fifth in her handbag, “You’ll like this,” she said, “this is what you guys drink up north isn’t it?” and 4 or 5 Gallos have certainly made him a little loose. And parties seem to affect him this way, they rub him one way, he feels smothered, who are all these people, he’d like to be back in his favourite bar talking to his friend Jack, who is here somewhere now, or he’d like to be back in the Widener Library at Harvard, reading some of the material on the first Italian writers in New York, in the 1920s; but parties also affect him in the second way, they rev him, stoke him, shake him around, make him feel like doing various odd crazy manic things.

  So here he is, it’s a bit late in the evening, it’s getting dark outside, this party is probably going to go until the small hours although the Desperados themselves have to get up fairly early in the morning and pull out for Chicago (but that won’t stop them from partying all night if they feel like it, the crazy guys); and Tom is leaning against the wall talking to Mason who is actually talking to somebody else and Tom has all sorts of pretty colours going through his big head: party colours, sounds, the girl with red hair, that’s how he thinks of her, Laura. He leans down and pats the dog’s head, Borzoi, is that his name? The dog slants his head to the side and looks at him quizzically. Blue eyes, Tom thinks, since when do dogs have blue eyes?

  When Laura comes out, surrendering the washroom to Sassoon, Tom leans against the wall and talks to her very intimately. “I think we should probably get together,” he says, “have lunch,” forgetting that he and the Desperados, and Whitney, whom he seems to have forgotten about for the moment, are all going to be packing up and out of town by tomorrow afternoon, “someplace outdoors and sunny. I think we both have a lot to talk about.”