Come and Join the Dance

by Joyce Johnson

  “I saw you with your boy friend last night,” Anthony said accusingly, as if there were some dark meaning in having seen them.

  “Did you?”

  “All dressed up in a black dress, getting on a bus. Did you have a good time?”

  “We broke up,” Susan said, feeling the words carve themselves at that moment on the walls of the living room. Somehow she had been waiting for a chance to tell Anthony that. Jerry was further away than ever now—history.

  “Good!” Anthony cried exuberantly. “Glad to hear it! I think people should break up more often. Did you know that I’m a girl-stealer?”

  “Are you really?”

  “Yes. Also a parasite. Also a genuine indolent bum. There are terrible stories about me.”

  “I’ve heard some,” she admitted.

  “All true. But someday I’ll be a great man. I think society should take care of its artists.”

  “Oh definitely,” Susan agreed gaily.

  “Oh definitely,” he jeered. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got rich parents. I suppose you believe in truth and beauty like all the other poopsies.”

  “I do believe in truth and beauty. Even if it’s kind of a cliché, I guess.” She couldn’t be angry with him; she liked the ridiculous way he flailed the air with his arms when he talked. He looked a little like a windmill, she decided. “What are poopsies?” she asked.

  “Sensitive souls who won’t drink anything but Italian coffee and talk about Paris being better. There are armies of poopsies at the Museum of Modern Art—all waiting to be picked up.”

  “What happens to poopsies in Paris?”

  “Nothing serious. They get laid a few times.”

  Susan laughed. “I’m going to Paris.”

  “You’ll get laid too.”

  “No,” she said gravely. “Maybe I’ll just walk around and look at things.”

  He smiled down at her benevolently. “You’re a funny chick,” he said. Stretching out one of his long arms, he tentatively touched her hair. “You have pretty hair. That’s something.” His hand lingered on the back of her neck. Susan sat very still. She thought of saying, “Look here, we hardly know each other,” but she didn’t really mind his hand. Somehow it was no more sinister to be touched by Anthony than to be touched by a child. What would it be like if Peter ever touched her? The jazz sounded like the way he walked, the shambling, uneven steps, the forward thrust of his head. She made herself think of Kay and Peter talking to each other now in the warm, blind-drawn dimness of the bedroom, the closed door shutting them in together—that was the way it should be. They even looked a bit alike with their heavy heads, and their voices had the same feverish quietness. It would really be beautiful for them if they loved each other. There were amazingly few people in the world that you could love. Maybe she would find someone in Paris… . Anthony would call that “getting laid” and maybe that was all it would be for her, a gratuitous act of sex—those words at least had a kind of scholarly dignity. She supposed that after all she was a poopsie, but she’d die rather than admit it. Anthony’s face was moving closer and closer to hers—she could almost feel the warmth of his breath. Hastily, she stood up and walked to the window.

  “Susan!” she heard him say reproachfully, “I was going to kiss you.”

  “Oh it’s too early in the morning,” she said.

  “No excuse.” She was silent. Standing at the window with her back to him, she watched the janitor five flights below sweep the courtyard. Anthony hadn’t moved. He was probably staring gloomily at her back. It was a little disappointing. She was almost waiting for him to walk across the room. She wondered whether he was shy. After all, he was only eighteen, a little boy, a waif. When she turned away from the window, he was sitting on the sofa, bending over a book. “What are you reading?” she asked in a voice she recognized as the too interested voice grownups used with children.

  He did not look up. “Prison Etiquette,” he muttered grudgingly.

  “Oh, what’s that?” she said. She felt loathsome, utterly dishonest. It was all a game—she didn’t know what she wanted.

  “A book about C.O.’s—Conscientious Objectors, to you—how to get along in prison.”

  “Are you planning to go to prison?”

  “They might take me away,” he said. “I’ve had this book out six months from the library, and now I don’t even have an address for those postcards they bug you with.”

  She sat down beside him. “I can never return library books either. Once I had to pay an eight-dollar fine.”

  “Yeah? That was pretty dumb.” Suddenly he smiled at her. “You’re weird,” he said with evident satisfaction. “You’re another one.”

  “Another what?” she asked anxiously.

  “One of the club. I’m a freeloader. Peter wants to do himself in, preferably in the Packard. And you—you won’t let anyone touch you. That’s your particular little kick.”

  “That’s not true!” Susan protested.

  “Oh, I don’t care.” He yawned elaborately. “All I want is my breakfast. How are you fixed for money?”

  “You’d better get a job if you want money.” Her face was hot with anger.

  “I knew you’d come out with some bourgeois moral thing like that,” he said triumphantly. “Christ, I knew it the minute I saw you. I’m always running into girls like you. That’s my fate. I bet I’ll never meet a really great woman. Just little nowhere girls all my life until I marry one.” He stalked restlessly up and down the room. “I wish Peter would get up so I could have some breakfast. I wish they’d stop screwing in the bedroom. That’s really too much!”

  She tried to think slowly, carefully, to be calm. All of a sudden there were hundreds of little wheels spinning inside of her, as though Anthony’s words had set a machine in motion. She remembered the proud, shy way Kay had said, “Peter’s taken on my education.” If it was true that Kay went to bed with people, of course she’d go to bed with Peter. But Kay hadn’t told her, and she had always assumed that Kay told her everything. The wheels were turning much too fast. She wanted to get out of the apartment immediately. She didn’t want to look up the hall to the bedroom. And she didn’t want to care. “I think I’m going,” she said to Anthony. “Tell Kay I’ll see her.” She got up and walked to the door.

  “Now you’re angry,” Anthony said sadly.

  She shook her head. “No … ”

  “Oh look, don’t go. Christ, that’s so silly.”

  “I just—want to, that’s all. Besides, we weren’t getting along very well.”

  He had stood up now. “I really do think you’re very pretty,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And it’s really true that I’m hungry. All I had yesterday was a frankfurter.”

  She looked at his face and saw for the first time how white it was, how dark and huge his eyes were. There were two buttons missing from his shirt. “I can lend you a dollar.” She felt embarrassingly overfed.

  “Well gee … fifty cents would be fine. I don’t know when I can pay you back.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Why don’t I go down with you now? I’ll have breakfast and talk to you. And you’ll have coffee… . Okay?”

  Why not? she thought, why not? She knew she didn’t want to be alone.

  “Okay,” she said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ANTHONY WAS TWO years younger than she was, but a lot had happened to him. Only two years before, he had been a senior in a parochial high school in Pittsburgh. Something had boiled up in him that last year, a delinquency of books and violence. “I hadn’t read anything till then,” he told Susan. “Ivanhoe, Dickens, Popular Mechanics and the Bible—nothing! I played basketball.” Somehow he began to stumble across other books—Thomas Wolfe, Rimbaud, Huxley, D. H. Lawrence. “I read
some of Ulysses and thought Joyce was nutty. And of course I was reading a lot of crap too.” He wrote two notebooks of poetry and hid them in his locker. At the same time, he was terribly bored; he found himself provoking fights all the time and not even knowing why. In one of his classes he announced dramatically that he would no longer go to chapel because he could not believe in “the myth of God.” He was expelled. His father had beaten him. “Just because he believes that people should be beaten,” Anthony said, suddenly furious. “He didn’t care. He never went to school, that hypocritical old bastard.” His fists clenched; he eyed all the people in Schulte’s as if he were looking for someone to hit.

  “Okay,” Susan laughed. “It’s all right.”

  “He said he’d get me a job in the steel mill. Big deal! That’s where I’d end up if I went home now. I said the hell with that. Then the school said they’d take me back if I promised to go to chapel—I was a good student or something. So I went back. There’s an anticlimax! But I decided to have a good time. I went to town on some of the papers I wrote, almost caused a couple of riots. But anyway they gave me honors in a lot of crap when I graduated, and I got the scholarship I just bitched up… . By that time I was completely cynical.”

  “Are you still completely cynical?” Susan teased him.

  “Yeah.” He grinned.

  “What’s your poetry about?”

  “About? I don’t know—whatever hits me. It’s good. Listen—I wrote this one a week ago… . ” He recited the poem too rapidly, as if he wanted to say all of it at once.

  Somehow she could not really hear it. Perhaps it was good. Sitting in Schulte’s with Anthony, she could not take her eyes off the street. And yet it was funny, she thought—if she had been outside at that moment, she would have been staring in, at the tables, the people, probably at Anthony; so in a way you never ended up seeing the place where you really were at all, not that there was much to look at in Schulte’s. The same paper roses had been on the tables ever since she was a freshman; the same people continued to come even though the coffee was awful. Kay was always there. She said she only felt at home in nondescript places, so they usually ended up in Schulte’s on the long, shapeless afternoons when they had both cut classes. Kay had taught her what a significant and necessary thing it was to cut a class, not just an irresponsible act. Her parents, paying bills for “advantages we never had,” would not understand, but stolen time had such a liveness to it; you could really feel yourself exist, knowing that the barrage of facts was continuing six blocks away without you. How long it had taken her to discover this! Peter, Kay and Anthony must have always cut classes. They were outlaws, part of a mysterious underground brotherhood. How was it that she had suddenly become able to recognize them, thinking, There’s one, there’s another, the recognition instant and uncanny. “Screwed-up people,” Jerry called them, seeing them all as casualties, those who would never “make it.” “What’s wrong with Kay?” he would ask. “Why doesn’t she wear lipstick, go back to school?” “I don’t know,” Susan had answered, embarrassed because he made her feel that something should be done about Kay: “Listen, Kay, it’s such a simple thing to put on lipstick.” But for Kay it couldn’t be simple. Sometimes she thought Kay was like one of those captains who went down with their ships, although it was hard to believe in that sort of thing.

  It was strange that Anthony had called her “another one.” But of course she did have a bad reputation. Probably very few people thought she was still a virgin. No one knew how much she lied, how skillful she had become in making adjustments in reality: inferences, suggestions, a few dark strokes, a laugh she had learned from someone. A shy Southern girl in the dorms had once said wistfully, “Susan, sometimes you’re so-o-o bizarre.” Disgusting! She would have to stop lying in Paris. A fresh start, a clean break—she had begun to think like a criminal. It was bad enough to be a coward. It was all upside down for her too; most people were afraid of reputation, not of the acts themselves. It was stupid to ruin your reputation and have nothing to show for it. You didn’t even have the comfort of being defined as an outlaw—that was something to be, one of a community. Instead, she had always been a scrubbed, prissy little girl who ate all her cereal, who sat scared stiff with her hands folded while another little girl poured red ink on the floor “just to see what would happen” or said “I don’t care” to the teacher. It was easier to be good. But she had always secretly watched the wild girls, wanting to be one of them, never daring: eighth-grade Marjorie who had flunked history with a total lack of concern and had tagged after all the cigarette-smoking boys in high school; and now there was Kay. She had brought Anthony where Kay would have brought him, almost automatically. “Let’s go to Schulte’s,” she had said. “I like that place.”

  “I don’t know why. It’s no place at all.”

  “That’s why I like it.” They had both laughed—a moment of rapport. Later it might be harder to be Kay. If she spent the day with Anthony and he asked her to go to bed with him, Susan would have to say that he had misunderstood, or didn’t he see that it would all be so meaningless? She had always liked the word “meaningless”—it was something you said after everything happened to you, when you no longer cared about caring or not caring. It was a graceful way out, a regretful smile over a glass of champagne. “But it would all be so meaningless.” She would flourish that above her emptiness until it fitted her. And Kay would give love and never mention it and perhaps go bankrupt—putting her to shame as she listened outside the bedroom.

  “Let’s go soon,” Anthony said. She nodded. Half an hour before, he had said, “Let’s split,” and she had said “Soon” and ordered another cup of coffee, somehow reluctant to leave, afraid of missing something.

  Now she saw a man and a girl turn the corner two blocks away and begin to walk down Broadway, the girl shapeless in a black sweater, lagging a bit behind the man, whose walk had a peculiar uneven rhythm. He looked straight ahead, never back at the girl, who now and then caught up with him. She could not see their faces. It was difficult at first to tell that they were together. Susan watched them through the window coming closer and closer.

  A block away. There was still time to put down her cup, say, “Okay, let’s go,” pay the check, walk out and rescue the afternoon. Now Anthony was talking about taking her to the Frick Museum. “The Met’s too big. I go out of my mind there. There I am digging a Rembrandt and I’m thinking about the Japanese paintings I haven’t seen yet and the whole goddamn Greek wing, and I feel like running because I haven’t got time, because in two hours they’re going to close up the place.” Susan nodded absently, watching the two figures in the street. “But you don’t understand. For most of my life I didn’t see anything, anything at all. Then—New York. Wow! Too much.” Anthony shook his head sadly. “Too much. Hey, stop looking out the window!”

  “There’s Kay and Peter,” she said. She had been waiting for them all along. But it was only to see them, to see the fact of them together.

  “Where? Listen, let’s leave anyway. I want to talk to you.”

  “I just want to see Kay a minute.” She was beginning to feel completely treacherous.

  “Yeah. A minute,” Anthony jeered.

  They were crossing the street. Anthony stood up and waved to them through the glass. They saw him and waved back. It seemed to her that she had planned everything, even the waving.

  “Spies! Spies!” Anthony hooted as they came into Schulte’s. Everyone was laughing. She laughed too. She saw now that Peter and Kay had the same faces they always had. You couldn’t tell that they had made love to each other. Kay smiled at her in a rather embarrassed way and seemed to be trying to whisper something about being sorry. “Listen,” Peter was saying, “the system is inescapable. You might ask us to sit down.”

  “Breakfast or lunch, Peter?” said Anthony.

  “You son of a bitch! I’ll just have coffee. Have to get back to work
. That’s what Kay says, anyway.”

  “Have something to eat—some eggs,” Kay said softly.

  “But I never have eggs. I exist mainly on the Chinese dinner and the kindness of friends.” He paused as if he expected them to laugh, but the words had been too elaborate. The odd thing was that what he said was probably true. Susan wondered why she liked him. “Why do you always try to feed me, Kay?”

  “It’s an old Jewish custom,” Kay muttered.

  “But it’s much more sinister than that. Kay wants to fatten me up so that I’ll make my contribution to mankind. You should always walk behind me too, Kay, with a little bell, so that I won’t waste any more of my time. Do I have fifteen minutes left to have my coffee and get back to the apartment?” Kay was silent. “Maybe I won’t go back at all.”

  “Oh, you’ll go back,” she said.

  “Do you think you’ll get the fellowship, Peter?” Anthony asked.

  “I might stand a good chance, if I had more time to fill out the application.”

  “There’s enough time,” Kay said.

  “Five o’clock—three hours.”

  “Well, hurry up, man. Come on. Someone get the waitress.” Anthony stood up.

  “God!” Peter said. “If I could only get out of New York, out of that hole I’m in. You can get good cheap apartments at Harvard. I’d throw everything out, buy new furniture … ”

  “You should give a big party before you go,” said Anthony. “With a jazz band.”

  “Yes. A final disaster!” Peter agreed excitedly. “Will you come?” He spoke suddenly to Susan, forcing her to look at him.

  “I’ll be in Paris,” she said. He was sitting next to her and had stretched his arm along the back of the booth. An arm in a blue shirt sleeve. She resented it fiercely.