Wait Till You See Me Dance

Home > Other > Wait Till You See Me Dance > Page 8
Wait Till You See Me Dance Page 8

by Deb Olin Unferth


  We walked four blocks through the freezing cold to an upscale, unpopular joint in the nighttime-deadtime downtown. We sat in giant stuffed chairs in a dark room, empty of anyone but us and the bartender. They all looked over at me, waiting. At last I said, “Has anyone read Candide?”

  “Yes, yes,” they murmured. “Voltaire. Of course.” As I said, this was an educated crowd. They’d read it in college, they said. Or they’d read it when they were twelve and had found it confusing. Or they’d liked it and had read his other works since and found them less fun.

  “Let’s play a game,” I said. “Let’s each tell the story of the worst thing that’s happened to us.”

  “In our lives?”

  I hesitated. I wanted to talk about the boyfriend who’d left me, and even in my traumatized state I had to admit it wasn’t the worst thing that had happened in my life. I’d had people die on me. I’d once had a fire burn up all my things. Besides, this boyfriend left me a lot. We were on the third or the fourth time now, depending on how you were counting. Those were the days when the same boyfriend left me over and over, and each time felt like a tragedy.

  “Lately,” I said.

  They looked hesitant.

  “And whoever tells the worst story wins,” I said.

  “What do they win?”

  “Well, they get to be the winner.”

  They looked disappointed. “But the winner of what?”

  “Voltaire night,” I said.

  As a matter of fact, Candide had solicited his crowd, had not wanted to sail alone, and I could understand that. He’d had it announced in town, had taken out an ad in a circular: Will pay passage for the most unfortunate man in the land. So many unfortunate men showed up, an entire fleet of boats could not have taken them all away.

  The students were into it, but nervous. The first told a silly story, something about a drawer that held important papers getting stuck and his having to saw it open with a chain saw. Another said she’d gained ten pounds. Another said her final grandparent had died and she was unnerved—what, with only one generation between her and death. A second round of drinks and the stories grew more personal. One man divorced last month. He hadn’t wanted a divorce. He was in a new apartment in a strange neighborhood. He’d been married fourteen years. He felt so old. One man’s teenager had run away that year and it had taken a week to find her, and when he did finally locate her and went to pick her up, the girl screamed, “I hate you!” while he stood in the driveway, stunned. Why did she hate him? What had he done? One woman had learned she had cancer. She’d had her first round of radiation last week—a curable kind, but still. The mood in the room grew somber, and we felt protective of one another, commiserative, full of solidarity. Then one guy said, “Well, I got a flat last week in the rain,” and we all shouted, “You lose!” and threw pretzels and straws at him.

  I did tell the story of the boyfriend, not the long absurd version that my friends were all sick of, but the miniature version, the kind I’d tell on the bus, and I told it in a dramatic fashion: “The man I love no longer loves me and I can’t seem to get over him, no matter what I do or where I go.” The students all rose to my defense. They were indignant, outraged. The guy was obviously a fool. I deserved better. “I know, I know,” I said, shaking my head. Who can explain love? we all wondered, eating our peanut mix. Who can explain the recession of love? Love’s sneaky decline?

  I don’t recall who won Voltaire night that first time, but I know we voted and had a winner who received extra rounds of commiseration and drinks and a couple of comradely hugs as we all parted at the door and hurried through the cold for separate trains or lots.

  It was a grand night, our first Voltaire night.

  The class went six weeks and restarted the next month like a new moon. Perhaps because I’d done well with the first class, or perhaps because no one in the office was paying any attention at all, I was given the course again and several students from the first class signed up. It was an open class, noncredit, at the service of anyone in the world who could show up on Tuesdays and pay the (exorbitant) fee. But the old students claimed an elevated status over the new ones anyway—not by their superior writing (they were all equally bad and no one had improved) but by talking about Voltaire night. The best night of the class, they agreed. One of the best nights of the past year, in fact, for them all. It had been so fun. And enriching. Too bad the new students had missed out.

  Hey, the new students said, they wanted a chance at Voltaire night. It wasn’t fair that I had picked favorites and wouldn’t grant the new students this educational opportunity. So we planned a second Voltaire night, and the final night of the class, we trudged out into the cold.

  It was March now, but the wind was still punishing in that evil Chicago way. I talked again about the cruel boyfriend who didn’t love me, who even after these months was still causing me pain. He had come back in the meantime but had left again, and again I got all the commiseration I could hope for, and Voltaire night was special all over again—even if we did stay out a bit late, due to the fact that the bar closed at one, and maybe we had too many drinks, but it was okay. We all waved good-bye at last and crept off into the night calling that we’d see one another next month.

  It didn’t slip by me that the meaninglessness on their faces might gleam only when they came to class—those faces turned toward me, hoping for not success, but proof that they were at least worthy of some intangible (maybe nonexistent) thing, even if they never got it. But maybe at home they were happy. A few, of course, took the class merely as an extracurricular, nothing more—women, mostly. These had happy lives that brought fulfillment. They tended to take the class for only one session, wrote friendly, honest evaluations encouraging me to do such and such (what that thing was always differed: talk more, talk less, fewer or more handouts), and they’d wave good-bye and we’d never see them again. Some were like that, but not many.

  Voltaire night took hold. It became an institution, part of class. Leading up to it, the students conferred. Where should it be held? Should food be involved? And the parameters—the worst thing in the past five years? since Christmas? as a kid? They’d settle in and tell their stories as if we were around a campfire, as if these were the stories of their lives: their disappointments and frustrations, what they’d striven for and hadn’t gotten, the promises made to them that had been broken, the people who were gone or who were still there but seemed changed somehow, not what they’d once been, or perhaps it was the students themselves who had changed. Blame the vicissitudes of life, or, alternately, its flatness, the dullness of it, the sad fact of aging. This of course took a lot longer than our original three-minute summaries, so Voltaire night grew long. We’d all be drunk, having closed down several places, and the folks from the suburbs missed the very last train and had to curl on a bench at the station, like criminals down on their luck (which weren’t we all, in some way?), until the 5:30 a.m. shuttle. But it was worth it, we all said, for how else could everyone have gotten a turn? How else could everyone have told their story?

  As for me, I’d arrive home at four in the morning and spend a few days cursing myself. The trouble I could get in for this. Unseemly. Voltaire night was out of control, a monster I had to rein in but didn’t know how to rein in. I didn’t want to rein it in. Voltaire night was the one night I looked forward to, all of that sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. I would have liked to do it every night.

  There was the Voltaire night when Max accidently smashed several glasses onto the floor and Stuart threw up on the sidewalk. There was the Voltaire night I somehow found myself separated from them all at two in the morning, smoking pot with strangers at a faraway club. How had I gotten there?

  There were other things going on with me. Voltaire night was just a handful of nights out of that year, but the other nights weren’t so very different.

  I had to change. In many ways I had to change.

  One Voltaire night, a clear sp
ring night, after a winter that had seemed to go on for years (and in fact this was my second year on the job), the students voted to tell the worst thing of their entire lives.

  I don’t know why we hadn’t done that yet. Worst thing ever. It seems like it would be a fast place to go once you’re on the worst-thing roller coaster, but we hadn’t. Maybe we’d refrained because we knew once we’d done it, future Voltaire nights would be uncomfortable. Once you’d told the worst, how could you complain about the past three months, which contained only the usual disillusionments, the familiar slow-burn panic that you were doing nothing with your life, had not lived up to your “potential,” or, worse, you had and it had changed nothing, that you had not yet even learned how to love? But the students voted. The worst-ever Voltaire night. We went to a nice place for dinner and ordered several bottles of wine.

  Among us was a new guy who had been with us only one session and had barely spoken in class. I hadn’t noticed him much among the brash, flirty, loud men. He raised his glass. “I’ll go next.”

  “All right, all right,” we said. The newcomers often went first, were fool enough to go when people were just settling in. The regulars knew to wait. The best spot was an hour or two in, when people were happy, when the deep-level drunk hadn’t set in yet, turning the night into a disco or a disorderly blur.

  “The worst thing that ever happened to me,” he said, “began with an experiment. You ever see those ads asking for human subjects? A hundred bucks to take some drugs, fifty to do some puzzles?”

  “Uh-huh,” we said, meeting eyes with one another. A human-subject-experiment story, here we go. Our stories would top that.

  “I was living in Hyde Park, newly married. My wife was pregnant. Four months. We were overjoyed, but poor. I did freelance design back then, my wife was in sales, and no matter how much work I managed to scrape together, it wasn’t going to be enough. So I used to answer those ads for a few bucks. Cover an eye and identify colors. Recite words I was told to remember.”

  “Uh-huh,” we said.

  “Well, one day I came across an ad that said, Twelve-week experiment, fifteen thousand dollars, and I thought, Wow, fifteen thousand dollars! I went down and signed up.”

  I’m not sure I have the details right. I want to be clear about that. I’m not sure if it was fifteen thousand or ten or eleven, or if she was five months along or four. I’m pretty sure it was twelve weeks. What one hears at Voltaire night stays at Voltaire night, and it is only now that I am violating this contract.

  “It turned out they paid you fifteen thousand dollars because the study was miserable, and no one would do it unless for a lot. They wanted to chart the temperatures of nocturnal humans—humans who had been deprived of all natural light.” He leaned forward and sketched the light in the air. “So two guys came over and spent all afternoon removing the light from our apartment. They blocked up our windows. They used heavy black boards and put black tape around the edges so no light could possibly slip in. You were required to sleep in the day and be up at night. And you were forbidden to leave the house while the least bit of sun stood in the sky.”

  “For twelve weeks?” we said. We were laughing hysterically.

  “They gave you a sun calendar so you would know when the day was over, and since the study went into summer, you could see on the calendar that by the end you were going to be inside a lot.”

  “That’s crazy,” we said.

  “You don’t get used to it,” he said, “if you’re wondering. But that wasn’t the worst part.”

  “What could be worse?”

  “In order to have your temperature charted, you had to have a tiny rectal thermometer inserted in your anus, twenty-four hours a day for twelve weeks.”

  We looked around nervously to be sure we were still laughing. How much would you have to be paid to do that? we wondered. Would you do that for fifteen or eight or eleven or whatever thousand dollars? What was that worth?

  “The thermometer was sort of surgically put in there. I had to go get it checked twice a week, make sure it was still in place, because a man has to shit, you know. So I’d lie in bed all day, unable to sleep, in an apartment with blackened windows, not a single slip of light, and my wife would go to work. Long after dark I’d go to the lab and bend over so they could check my thermometer. How do you feel? they’d say. Are you experiencing discomfort? Then I’d go home through the dark to the apartment and eat and watch TV and try to stay awake and do my freelance projects, although it was hard to work under those conditions and gradually I sought fewer and fewer. But still I was not unhappy, because my wife was getting a little bigger each day, a little rounder, and she held my daughter inside her (by this time we knew we had a girl), and I knew that when my daughter arrived, she would have everything she needed because of my suffering through this.”

  “The weeks went by and I have to admit it got worse. Outside, spring was shifting to summer, and inside, the nights grew shorter and stuffier. I stayed inside through it all. The thermometer was uncomfortable. I could feel it in there, although they’d initially told me I wouldn’t. It began to get a tiny bit painful but they checked it and said it was fine. I sat up through the night, but sleeping in the day became harder as my initial determination wore off and was replaced by a lethargy. The weeks were interminable, each week seemed like an ordeal, a string of hot days before me that seemed endless. We had no air-conditioning, just a meek fan that rotated the dead air in a room whose windows were taped shut. I didn’t want to spend money on an air conditioner. I barely saw my wife. She worked all day and had to be up early. She was leaving for work as I was going to sleep, though I couldn’t sleep. I was achy, exhausted, although all I did was sit around, all day and night, alone mostly. Even my outings to the lab—the cooling darkness, going through the neighborhoods, outings that should have held joy because each one marked another step toward the end—were tinged with bad feelings. You’d think I’d go for walks at night, meet friends for late dinners and drinks—that’s what I had planned—but I did so less and less. The thermometer was uncomfortable, I was too sleep-deprived to be much company. No, my visits to the lab, my late-night trips to the grocery, my stops for gas, became my only outings. I stayed in, watched TV or played video games that involved blowing up objects and leaving huge craters in the earth.”

  “Why didn’t you just quit?” we said. We were not laughing. “I would have quit, by God. No way could I do that.”

  “That’s what my wife said,” he admitted. “Oh, I wanted to, all right. I came close to giving up, but if I did, all the weeks I’d suffered would be for nothing. If you quit in the middle, you got only five hundred bucks. And the truth that I hadn’t told my wife was that despite my plan to double our money, I’d stopped working nearly altogether. She believed my workday began in earnest after she’d gone to sleep, but I quit the moment I saw the light switch off in the bedroom. Unless I finished the experiment and got the money, we’d wind up with a loss.”

  “Oh, that’s bad, that’s very bad,” we said, settling back down.

  “So the weeks stretched in front of me, and every week that passed, I thought, Thank God that’s over, but the idea of six or seven more like it seemed impossible. But I thought of my coming daughter, how beautiful she’d be, how much like her mother, and I soldiered on. And one day it was five weeks left, and one day it was four weeks left, and one day it was three weeks left.”

  “Sometimes I just couldn’t face the hot apartment and my wife, who was more annoyed by the day with the experiment. Sometimes I stopped at a bar on my way back from the lab. The first time one drink was enough to push me home. The second time it was two drinks, the third time, four. I arrived home later and later, and my wife went from annoyed to disturbed to enraged. One night (I’d gone out every other night for a week at that point), she screamed over her belly, I don’t even know who you are anymore!

  “I remember it so well. It felt so unfair. I was close, less than a week away,
only a few more days. I screamed something back, incoherent and nasty.

  “Would you just get out? she yelled. Get out, just get out.

  “I’d never been a drinker, beyond some nights in college, and the bar I went to was the worst place on the planet: Christmas lights strung in July, broken tables, stained linoleum, a line of human subjects sipping their lot, the kind of place the postmen went before they shot themselves in the heart. I sat down and ordered a drink.”

  This was going to turn out to be the final Voltaire night, though we didn’t know it yet. The restaurant was quiet that evening, glasses emptying and refilling, the windows covered in lights.

  Candide and his hapless crew. I could see them in my mind, gathering on the dock, their trunks and boxes piled on the wet wood, their fingers in their pockets wrapped around their last coins, while Candide strolled among them. Why did they all want to get on that ship? What was wrong with where they were? Were they fleeing the scene? Making a humble retreat? Or had they been told—politely but firmly—to leave?

  Or were they going toward something, looking for a better life?

  “The next thing I remember is that I couldn’t open my eyes. Something was pressing down on my face. I couldn’t get the lids up. I struggled to lift myself to consciousness, felt my body pushing itself to the surface, breaking through ice and pebbles and glass. I opened my eyes.

  “Illumination. Beautiful, glorious daylight. Unfettered. Lawless. It was as if a drain had been unclogged and light had spilled out—pale, glowing, garish. The earth was swept with it and yet light itself is landless, has more in common with water, the way it rushes through and fills up any space between objects.

  “So this, I thought, is what it is to be nocturnal.”

  “Where were you?” we said. We could hardly breathe.

 

‹ Prev