Come and Join the Dance

by Joyce Johnson

  “It’s locked already.”

  “Okay.” He stared at her, puzzled, a little sad. She kicked off her shoes and crossed her legs under her on the couch, trying to look comfortable. “Can I have a cigarette?”

  “Here.” He was still watching her. There seemed to be nothing to talk about. “You shouldn’t smoke,” he said finally. “You don’t inhale—that’s a waste.”

  “Sometimes I want to smoke.”

  He came and sat next to her and took the cigarette away and put his arms tightly around her. “Let’s go into the bedroom,” he whispered.

  “Not yet.”

  “Come on.” She felt his lips against her neck.

  “No. Please, not yet.”

  “All right. Do you want to talk? You talk—I can’t.” He sat on the arm of the couch. “I keep thinking about laying you!” he cried joyously. “I’ve been looking at you for about two years. You were always with some hopeless guy. Today I thought you were after Peter—he was turning you on.”

  “I’m not after Peter,” she said angrily.

  “Look, I don’t care! We’re here—that’s the crazy thing. Don’t you understand anything? We’re here.”

  She got up from the couch and walked aimlessly across the room to the bookcase. She had never looked at Peter’s books before.

  “What’s wrong?” Anthony said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  She shook her head.

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  “Just maybe a little.”

  “I know all that. I know everything. I had Modern Living when I was a freshman.”

  “That’s very, very good,” he said sarcastically. “Jesus Christ! Don’t say things like that!”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, come off it. Why do you want to sound like a dried-up old woman? I’ve seen the alumnae from your school with their suits and their hair screwed behind their ears. Why do you have to sound like you’re so tough? I know you’ve never been laid. I think that’s great. I don’t care if you talk like a virgin. I know you’re scared.”

  “I’m not scared,” she snapped.

  “Well, you should be.”

  “That would please you?” He did not say anything at all. Her words hung in the air until a moment too late she realized they were from the wrong movie; she had not meant to sound that way. Anthony was turning on the radio—a blur of stations, the news, Campbell Soup, “I’m all shook up/Oh, I’m all shook up.” Shaken up, she thought facetiously. Shaken up. Shaken up. The song fell apart. “It’s too loud, Anthony,” she said.

  “It’s a loud song.”

  “What’s he all shook up about, I wonder?”

  Anthony shrugged.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Maybe you should listen to the radio now and then. You can’t read Virginia Woolf all the time.”

  “I don’t especially like Virginia Woolf.”

  “Shall we have a literary discussion?” Anthony said bitterly. He got up, grabbed the nearest book and walked out of the room. She heard the bedroom door slam. The radio was really much too loud. She couldn’t think. She considered turning it off. Her hair was a mess and her lipstick was all gone, no doubt, but she had left her pocketbook on the table near the door. She couldn’t reach it. She wondered if she were expected to leave now, or was Anthony lying on the bed waiting for her to come in, listening for the sound of her footsteps in the hall, the opening of the door he had shut. But Anthony didn’t know she couldn’t move. Susan imagined Peter and Kay coming back hours later and finding her still sitting paralyzed on the couch. They would ask her what was wrong, and she would say, “Nothing,” and they would all go out for coffee at Schulte’s—they might even go for another ride.

  After one more song, she thought, I’ll stand up. And she concentrated fiercely on the impossible act of standing and managed to uncurl her legs, and stood. Either I’ll go in or I won’t. But no one just stood in the middle of a room—that was more embarrassing than sitting—so she walked up the hall.

  When she rapped on the door, there was no answer. “Anthony … Anthony … ” He was playing his part too, she decided. She pushed the door open, said, “Hi,” and sat down quite calmly beside him on the bed. To her surprise, everything had become automatic again. He was smoking a cigarette and staring up at the ceiling.

  “I thought you’d gone,” he said after a long while. “Are you going back to the dorms now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you should.”

  “Anthony … can’t we talk?” she asked uncertainly.

  “I don’t want to talk. I don’t have anything to say.”

  “Please don’t be angry.”

  “I’m not angry with you.” He sat up now and looked at her. “I think you have a lot of guts for a girl—up to a certain point. And that’s all right.”

  “I don’t have any guts at all,” she said, feeling a terrible sadness and an anger with herself for telling him this. “I just do things sometimes, and don’t even know why. That’s not having guts.”

  “I don’t know,” Anthony said slowly. She had wanted him to say, “Yes, it is. Yes, it is.” Why else would you tell anyone something like that about yourself? She wanted to fix her eyes on his until she saw her concealed image in them, but he had turned away as if he were embarrassed.

  Anthony slid off the bed and stretched his arms. “Christ! You’d think it was the middle of the night in here!” He walked over to the window and pulled up the blinds. Suddenly the glare of late afternoon was in the room. Shadows raced across the ceiling.

  In another apartment, someone was practicing a Clementi sonatina, picking it apart, each note separate, wavering. “I used to play that when I was a kid,” Susan said, wanting desperately for a moment to be the little girl she had once been, but somewhere the continuity of her past had broken. The little girl was a stranger now, almost a fiction—once upon a time there was a little girl named Susan who practiced the piano. Now there was a different Susan who was stretching herself out on a bed, deliberately, without conviction, without love or whatever it was one was supposed to feel. Her body had never seemed so long; the sheet was terribly far away.

  Anthony was standing over her. “Come on. Get up. Don’t you know it’s dangerous to lie around on beds?”

  “Just a minute.” She began to laugh because it was all inevitable, all decided now, and he didn’t know it. The outlaws were about to welcome another member.

  “Come on. I’ll walk you back to the dorms.”

  “But I’m lazy.”

  He stared down at her, absurdly serious. “You can get up. Give me your hand.”

  “Here.” She extended a limp wrist to him. Anthony sat down beside her.

  “What are you doing, Susan?” he whispered. She felt herself smile at him, and then she reached up and touched his hair, which was strangely soft, like a child’s. He seized her hand and held it away from him, squeezing her fingers together until they hurt.

  “Don’t do anything you don’t mean!” he cried.

  “How do you know what I mean?”

  “I don’t get you at all,” he said painfully. “Maybe you’re just a bitch.”

  She said, “Maybe,” just to say something, because what was said didn’t really matter. She felt nothing but an immense curiosity about what was going to happen next. She stared in wonder at the walls of the little room—it seemed as though at any moment they would spring shut like a trap and she and Anthony would be buried in darkness—but Anthony didn’t necessarily have to be there at all; it wouldn’t make any difference who was with her.

  “Okay,” Anthony said. “Okay.” And she felt the bed shake a little when he got up. Then the blinds were drawn down, and she knew he was standing in th
e corner by the window, taking off his clothes. In the darkness she could barely see the walls of the room; they hadn’t shut her in after all, but had fallen away, dropping her into the middle of a vast, unknown space. “It’s so dark,” she said.

  “Susan … ” She felt Anthony’s body press against hers.

  “Wait,” she whispered. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she began to undress. “Clothes are terribly complicated, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah,” he said shyly. He was watching her, of course—her back prickled with the knowledge of his eyes and she was slower than she need have been—it seemed as though he might have asked permission. When she lay beside him again, his hands were impersonal, tracing invisible lines on her body, measuring her, not touching. How odd to be naked with a stranger! She wished he were someone she had known all her life with all the suspense between the two of them of never having known how the other really looked. Instead it had been very easy, something that could be done lightly. It’s like people at the beach, she thought, with a tightness in her throat that made her think she was going to laugh.

  There was not even much pain—a vague feeling of something inside her, moving. This was what going to bed with a man must be like. She could hear everything very well: the bed, his breathing, the tick of the alarm clock on the bureau. His body drove at hers over and over again. Her legs were cramped. She hadn’t thought it would take so long. She would have to tell him he was too heavy, complain that the sheets were wet—she didn’t want to lie between them any more—now she remembered that they had been Peter’s and Kay’s first. But she had always assumed that the sheets would be clean. She wondered if the used sheets made the experience what her mother would call “sordid.”

  “Anthony … ”

  “I love you,” he whispered. “Don’t talk.”

  All at once, when she despaired of it ever being over, he cried out, almost as if he were in pain. Perhaps something had gone wrong. She felt him shuddering against her and he sounded as if he were crying. Not knowing what else to do, she put her arms around him. He was terribly thin. She could feel all his bones, the sharp, delicate skeleton of a bird. It was embarrassing. She had always imagined a rape, an overwhelming of herself, the victim, never that she would be left with a starved, spent child and the guilty sense of her own heaviness. “Are you all right?” she asked helplessly.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HE HAD SO many plans. He was going to show her things she had never seen before, reveal the city to her. “Have you ever seen shipyards at night? Have you ever seen white steam coming out of smokestacks with the sky pitch dark? It’s terrific! Tomorrow night we’ll go to the Brooklyn Navy Yard!” he shouted. “I’ll borrow Peter’s car.” Water was rushing into the sink in Peter’s kitchen, and Anthony was clattering cups and saucers around in it, delighting in the noise he made. He didn’t seem to notice her silence. “We’ll go back and forth on the Staten Island Ferry and eat hot dogs. Would you like that?”

  “I’ve been on the Staten Island Ferry,” she said.

  “Not with me!”

  She wanted to be alone—alone with her body and her emptiness and the unchanged face she had seen in the bathroom mirror. He had insisted on making coffee and she didn’t want coffee. There was something terrible about having coffee with him now, about watching him move around the kitchen as if their bodies had never even touched, and yet she still smelled like him. If something happened, why didn’t it really happen? Instead she was being promised smokestacks and ferry rides as if she were a child. Where was the moment when everything became luminous and the earth shook? She would remember being bored and not knowing what time it was.

  “It’s late,” she said, not wanting to speak at all, but in a little while she was going to say she had to leave and she didn’t want her voice to fail her. She was going to sound pleasant and ordinary. Why wasn’t it possible just to leave in silence?

  “It’s only nine. We’ve got hours, baby.” His arms swooped down in front of her, put cups on the table, saucers, spoons. His sleeve kept grazing her cheek. She stood up.

  “I’m in your way,” she said.

  He stared at her uncertainly for a moment, then smiled. “You’re not in my way.”

  She wished she hadn’t gotten up—it was too soon—how silly to have to sit down again. “Well … all right,” she said, subsiding awkwardly into the chair.

  He was still looking at her. “You’re pretty,” he said with an unnerving eagerness. “I like you best without lipstick.”

  “I don’t.”

  “That’s because you’re hung-up on being elegant. You like to put on that black dress and have some guy take you downtown and buy you cocktails. Right?”

  “Sometimes,” she shrugged, for some reason feeling a little ashamed, almost wanting to tell him that the black dress frightened her, that she had never quite lived up to it. But he was laughing now.

  “Oh yes, sometimes!” he joyfully mimicked her. “Listen—we’ll do that. That would be terrific. But you’ll have to pay—I haven’t any bread at all. I’ll pay for all the ferry rides.”

  She found herself laughing too. “I don’t love you, you know,” she said in desperation, “I don’t love anybody.”

  “Jesus!” he cried. “Who said anything about love?”

  “No one.”

  “I don’t love you. You don’t love me. Right?”

  “Right!” Susan said emphatically, but it had somehow become impossible to be honest with him even if she told him the truth.

  “But—we like each other?” He sat down opposite her and put his feet on the rung of her chair. “You’re strange,” he said, as if he were pleased, as if someone had given him a strange little animal to hold in his hands.

  “Strange?” She felt a frightened giddiness.

  “You like to make everything a little complicated. There’s nothing complicated about the Staten Island Ferry.”

  “Well … ” she said, “I’m going away in five days, that’s all,” believing that less than ever.

  “So we’ll have five days.” He began to wind a lock of her hair around his fingers. “Let’s not be sad now.”

  “But I have things to do.”

  “What things?” he asked indignantly.

  “Oh, shopping, seeing people. All kinds of class meetings.”

  “That’s shit,” he said. “You don’t have to do all that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You’ll go to the Staten Island Ferry,” he said a little belligerently. She didn’t answer. He unwound her hair and let it go.

  “If I were going to be around for more than a week you’d get pretty sick of me,” she said, trying to laugh. “You like to know lots of girls. You like to sit in that bar and talk to everybody and get drunk and say ‘C’est la vie.’”

  “That’s only because I’m not with you.”

  “No, you like it. Really. That’s the way you see yourself.”

  “I see myself with you this week,” he said sadly. “I see us talking and wandering. I see us making love. Then, okay—so you go. It’s not so complicated.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Listen, when I first came to this city, I used to walk everywhere—miles! Just walk and look. I wanted to live in Chinatown.”

  “It’s late,” she said again.

  She couldn’t quite look at his eyes, but she saw him moisten his lips with his tongue. “I want to be in my room,” she said. How odd that sounded, but why should it be odd to wish to be in one’s room? “I want to be alone.” Too loud, she thought immediately. It came out wrong, false, but she was somehow committed to it.

  He had gotten up, was standing at the stove watching the water boil.

  “I’m sorry … I’m tired, I guess.”

  “Sure,” he said, grimly cheerful, “alone, alone. Greta Garbo has to
be alone. Pour some instant in the cups, will you?”

  “I don’t think I want any.” But he took the pot off the stove and brought it to the table and stood silently waiting for her to open the jar and measure out two tablespoons of coffee. “It’s too warm for coffee.” Susan felt as if she were going to suffocate. “I’m sorry … ”

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  “Look—” he began. She looked at the pot which he still held and began to giggle guiltily. He banged the pot down on the table. “Listen to me!” He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Next time it’ll be better. Next time I’ll make you come!”

  “Your hands are wet!” she cried shrilly.

  After a moment, he removed them from her shoulders and with a white, desperate smile began to dry them on his shirt.

  “I really do want to leave,” she said, trembling. She made herself stand up.

  Anthony strode over to the refrigerator. “We’ll have iced coffee,” he said, jerking violently at the ice tray. “It’s not too warm for that.”

  “Anthony, listen … I … ” He began to pound the ice with his fists. “Oh stop! Please … ” She plucked at his sleeve and was shaken off like a kitten. “Anthony, it’s not your fault!”

  “Thanks!”

  “It had nothing to do with you. It was an experiment.” She had an astonished moment of triumph—she had never been more honest with anyone. “It was an experiment,” she repeated, “that’s all.” Everything in the kitchen was rattling. He seemed to be trying to pull the refrigerator down. Suddenly the ice tray came loose in Anthony’s hands. He turned slowly and confronted Susan holding it. There was blood running down his fingers—his eyes accused her.

  It was horribly quiet in the kitchen. She tried to think of something to say, but one sentence after another shattered inside her. “I don’t want any coffee,” she said.

  “Why don’t you go, then!” he yelled. “What are you hanging around for?”

  “I … I just wanted … ” But she couldn’t remember ever wanting anything.

  “Why don’t you go!” He flung up his arm and blindly hurled the ice tray away from him, across the room.