Dancing in the Dark

by Joan Barfoot

  This did not make him a reformer, or someone who wanted to alter from within. No grand schemes here, and he was honest about that, too. No, he was happy to steer launchings of new products, make deals, and shuffle contracts, the sweet and simple authority of it all. His joy was in power, however directed. “It’s almost like coming,” he told me once.

  He walked behind me, up the stairs to my apartment. It made me uneasy, wondering how I looked from behind.

  “I’ll get my notes.”

  “Do you have any coffee? We could have a coffee first. Unless you have to do something. Do you have time?”

  Of course. If he wanted to stay, I would make all the coffee he could drink.

  “Nice place,” he said, but not enthusiastically. I looked around and saw it for the first time as an outsider would have to. No one had been here before but me, and my father that first day.

  Yes, it was shabby. The house itself was shabby, the hallway and the stairs were shabby, and so was this apartment on the second floor. But it was mine.

  After all these years of comfortable middle-classness, even I remember it with some dismay; if also recollected fondness. After so many years of tables suiting chairs, and couches and curtains matching, that apartment would be unthinkable now. But it was mine.

  This room, where I sit so straight by the large window, is not mine. It was not my choice, and has nothing to do with me. Only that first apartment and then the house were mine.

  It was not, I think, because that apartment was so shabby that I didn’t have the same compulsion to keep it spotless that I did later with the house. I think it was because just for me, that wasn’t so important. In my house, for Harry, it was vital.

  The apartment had a small single bed behind a heavy curtain that hung by rings from a bar across the doorway separating the tiny corner that was the bedroom from the living room. There, a cot with green, brown, and yellow cushions, ghastly now in memory, was the couch. A heap of books was piled against a wall. Later Harry made me a bookcase from red bricks and golden boards, the kind he said a lot of students had.

  The kitchen had a battered fridge and stove, a small counter, single sink, and two rough cupboards, two chipped cream-painted wooden kitchen chairs, and an old, small wooden table for both studying and eating. Beyond it was the bathroom, with old and irrevocably stained fixtures. I had scrubbed and scrubbed them, with the thought that the stains were who knew what kind of germs, but it made no difference.

  When I think of that apartment now, I have an impression of length and darkness, an aura of past tenants’ grime and cooking odours and paleness and unhealth, and my own small efforts to overcome all that. But then, it was mine.

  I made the coffee while he looked around. “Why this?” he asked, and he was pointing to a wall in the living room.

  Well, I had made some attempts to decorate with things that struck me, colour photographs clipped from magazines and pinned unframed to the walls. The one he was pointing to was a portrait of a young girl dancing, whirling, entirely intent on herself, her movements, and her body.

  “Oh her,” I said. What could I say about what she meant? “It makes me feel good to look at her, she seems so happy and full of what she’s doing.” This was true: some uplifting about her concentrated joy.

  “And this one?”

  This was an old woman full of lines and thought.

  “Well, I think that’s character. She’s suffered, you see, in her life, and it’s like she’s saying, ‘It can be tough but I’ve gotten something from it. I made it.’ She’s—triumphant, kind of.” That did not properly explain what I saw in the lines of that old woman’s face, but part of it.

  Did he hear my fear? Or maybe he thought I was profound, or sensitive. He sipped at his too-bitter coffee, asked, “You like living alone?”

  “Oh yes.” I had no idea. It was simply how it was.

  Did he, from that, deduce that I was independent and certain of myself? Certainly he could not have seen me as I saw myself, and I was careful that he shouldn’t.

  “Maybe,” he said at last, “I could take a look at those notes.”

  Of course he would want to do that, he’d want to go over them quickly and leave. I know what it means, that expression, “My heart sank.” That’s precisely what it was, the heart sinking like a stone.

  The apartment wouldn’t be the same when he was gone. As if he’d been a breeze and a light flowing through the place, all its bits of nastiness had been exposed. When he left, I would be lonely instead of just alone.

  All this because he had the missing face. Because he laughed and spoke the truth and because his body was lean and because he was here, in my apartment.

  “You have really clear handwriting,” he was saying. “How do you do that when you have to go so fast in class?”

  “Oh, I just take things down in point form. I write up the real notes later.” And then could have kicked myself: appearing once more the drudge. I might as well have greasy hair and glasses.

  “Must take a lot of time.”

  He was standing, leaving, and I would see him out the door and down the stairs and gone and that would be the end of it. How would I be able to go back into that apartment, sit down behind those curtains in my chair to watch again?

  “Feel like a movie some time next week?”

  The heart leaps back and floats into the throat. “Yes. Yes, I’d like that.”

  “Good. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”

  “He won’t,” I thought. But he did.

  My handwriting here, following the straight lines of this notebook, is so fine I could weep at the beauty of it.

  10

  Listen, people invest in the stockmarket, in real estate, in gold. They put their money, what is valuable to them, into something from which they believe they can expect a reasonable return. They give up, perhaps, immediate rewards for the prospect of something better in the future.

  People make investments all the time. I, too. I took the only thing I had, my sole possession, myself, whatever that might have turned out to be, and invested it in Harry. People make investments all the time. Why not me?

  I thought it built up, like a savings account, a safe six, eight, ten per cent a year. After a few dabblings in the market—those high school dances, the gritting of teeth, the money spent on lipsticks and powders, the university tuition, and a poem—comes the real plunge: all my assets diving into Harry.

  My mother used to say, “Whatever you do will come back to you.” When I was a child, that filled me with terror. My small sins—to have, in a moment of wanton rebellion, stuck out my tongue at her behind her back; to have secretly plucked all the hair from one of Stella’s dolls; to have ridden my bicycle around the block when I was not supposed to go beyond the corner—these things made the night uneasy. I wondered what form my sins might take, returning on me.

  But it should work the other way as well. If I did good, kind, and helpful things, they should also come back to me.

  I was as good as it seemed reasonable to be. I am no saint, and one has to make accommodations to reality. Otherwise there would be nothing one could eat that did not have some wickedness in its past, and no place one could move (although I didn’t move a great deal, and for myself, ate little).

  I was faithful and tried to be kind. When people came to the door canvassing for heart funds or for cancer, I gave them money. And I read the newspapers and magazines, I could identify the worst offenders, and if I saw grapes in the supermarket that came from Chile, or apples from South Africa, I did not buy them if there was some other choice.

  But one must have a sense of balance about these things. Harry liked grapes (as I did, for that matter), and he also liked crisp, sharp-tasting apples. Those places were so far away, and Harry was right here. And there were conflicting viewpoints: what difference did it make if I did not buy the grapes? Who was hurt? The generals in Chile would not say, “Edna Cormick didn’t buy our food today,” and in South Af
rica they did not say, “Edna Cormick turned down our apples.” Of course I believed in peace and full stomachs and in fairness. (It’s only fair, Edna, said Dottie Franklin.) But who or what was I intended to serve first? The man who came home, or faceless people far away?

  I was not the sort of person to carry a sign, march in front of an embassy, shout slogans into television cameras. I was a small woman doing her best. These things are too big for such a person to work out, and all I could do was my best; so I tried to keep my own small portion safe and pass by the grapes and apples when there was some other choice, and thought if I made my own tiny universe safe and good, that should be enough, and would meet the payments on whatever might be owed.

  Maybe I didn’t go far enough. But I went further than a lot of other people. And I was unobtrusive. Who would notice me, going down a street or in a supermarket aisle? For such a failure in my investment, I should have been another person altogether.

  I invested the goodness I had in Harry, and I did expect compounded goodness would be my return.

  A blue-chip stock, my life with Harry should have been.

  11

  “Talk to me, Edna,” he’d say.

  Yes, but what about?

  Really, I preferred to listen. And really, he preferred to talk. He’d given up quite a lot for me, I thought—other girls, for instance, there’d been those—and there weren’t so many ways I could repay him for that. Listening, mainly. All I gave up was writing out my notes each evening and my watching. Maybe poems. But poems vanished when he appeared. If they had ever come, it would have been from fear and desolation, and Harry filled so much space that fear and desolation sank deeper and deeper under his weight until they were just small things crouching at the bottom of my soul.

  Even the dancing and singing life was gone. No time for it now, and who needed made-up things when real events were going on?

  We went to movies or to bars (where I found that beer has a queer and bitter taste and wondered how people, including Harry, could enjoy so much of it), and often we sat in my living room. It was private there, just the two of us. We couldn’t often go to his apartment because he shared it with another business student and it was hard to be alone.

  He’d sit beside me on the cot-couch, hands folded behind his head, eyes closed, telling dreams. “I want so many things, Edna,” he said. “To do something big. It’s not just being rich, although,” and he laughed, “that’s part of it, that would be nice. But it’s doing something, making something, being somebody. I don’t want to get old and die and think I missed anything or that nobody noticed me or it didn’t matter. I want to matter.”

  I nodded, although his eyes were closed. “Yes, I know.” Although in fact I didn’t. He seemed to see much further than I. My own vision now didn’t go beyond his closed-eyed presence in my living room, where I could lean forward and touch him.

  But whether I understood or not was not the point. The point was, he trusted me with his dreams. “You’ll be somebody,” I told him.

  If he had gotten old, would he have been satisfied? Would he have been able to sit back and say, “Yes, I missed nothing. People noticed. What I did mattered. I mattered”?

  “Talk to me, Edna,” he said sometimes.

  “What about?”

  “You. I’ve told you what I want, now it’s your turn. Tell me what you want.”

  I wanted him; but that was too bold a thing to say.

  “I’m not sure. I’m not like you, I’m not sure what I want.”

  “But you must have some ideas, some plans. For what you’ll do when you graduate.”

  “Well, there’s only so much you can do with a degree in English. I’ll probably end up teaching.” Dreary prospect; one reason I didn’t care to look beyond the slim figure unwound in my living room, whose presence astonished me and seemed a miracle, which I couldn’t tell him because it would say far too much about the fear.

  “And get married some day?” His eyes were glinting, laughing: testing my intent to trap him?

  “Maybe. If it happens.”

  “But you’re not really aiming at anything in particular? There’s nothing you have in mind that you really want to do?”

  He made me feel very small and useless. Amazed, he was, that someone young and starting out would not have a dream. I could have said, perhaps, “I’ve thought of telling stories, or seeing Timbuktu.” But those were only fantasies.

  “Okay then,” he was saying, “if there’s nothing special you want to do, what do you want to be?”

  There was a difference? I frowned and shook my head. I might have said, “I want to be safe,” or “I want to be happy,” but that would have disappointed him, and sounded stupid even unspoken and I didn’t want to answer stupidly, so kept silent.

  I do see now, though, what he might have meant. I spent all those years with him assuming that I was what I was doing and that I was doing what I was. But now I’ve done something that must be different from what I am, I cannot be a person who would do that. So maybe that’s sort of what he meant. Although nothing so drastic, I’m sure.

  “You want kids?”

  “Well yes, I suppose so.” It was not a matter of longing for children, no maternal yearnings and growlings deep in my body somewhere; only an assumption. Children appeared in people’s lives, the order of things, and I supposed that in the order of things they would appear in mine. What was inconceivable, although becoming less so with Harry in my living room when he could have been other places, was the gap between who I was and getting there.

  “I can see you as a mother. You’d be a good one.”

  Possibly that was true.

  Other nights, other questions. “Tell me about your family,” he demanded, and I did what I could.

  “It doesn’t sound to me as if you like them much.”

  “But of course I love them.” Startled. “They’re my family.”

  “Maybe. But it doesn’t sound as though you like them.”

  He tried to make me see these differences: between being and doing, liking and loving. He was much wiser than I.

  He always seemed to see things more clearly. He wasn’t afraid. Except once, he was afraid.

  His eyes were open and he was looking at me. “You don’t like talking about yourself, do you? You’re shy.”

  It was the kindness, the rare gentleness on his face, the care, that did it.

  “I don’t know how.”

  That just came blurting out, and the words hung there all by themselves. It shook me, hearing the echoes of them. There was some great rock lodged in my chest that had been there as long as I could remember, so that I had taken its weight for granted, and all of a sudden it was breaking into splinters and pieces were flying loose and the weight was gone and I was trembling, my face was all screwing up on itself and tears were pouring down it, out of my control.

  “Hey!” He must have been astounded. “What’s the matter? Edna? What is it?” His arms were around me, a hand was pressing my face into his shoulder and he was rocking me back and forth, back and forth, crooning, “Hey, hey, it’s all right,” a lullaby, letting me weep.

  Oh, sometimes I had cried—as a child for hurt knees, in my teens for loneliness—but never before like this, not with my whole body wrenching like some kind of fit, tears flushing all my veins and arteries. It hurt, and I wanted to stop; but also didn’t want to, the rocking and crooning were pleasant and comforting and kept me safe while I cried. It went on and on while I thought, “Oh God, it’s so awful,” by which I meant everything, I think, up till then, and also, “This is so nice.” It made it hard to stop, but finally the tears hit bone and finished, and I felt limp and weary and was hiccuping as well. I thought, “I must really trust him to be able to do this.” And then thought, “So I must really love him.” I’d only permitted that word in fantasy before, made-up conversations, drifting off to sleep alone.

  I straightened, wiped my face. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I must look aw
ful.” I didn’t want him to see me ugly, now that I was alert to love right here in the flesh. One of the things I understood was looking one’s best in order to get love in return.

  “You look fine.” He was stroking my hair, and down along my shoulder and my arm. His voice was so gentle. If mine was shaken, his was kind.

  I think now that if he had never seen me weep, we never might have married. I think it made that difference.

  Later, I could say to him, without a tremor or a hint of tears, “You know, I’ve never heard anybody in my family say, ‘I love you.’ Nobody has ever said it.” I now found that strange, although it hadn’t occurred to me quite that way before. Now I could see because I was away and because Harry was teaching me to see and because I could trust and therefore love him.

  “Well then, why don’t you say it? Maybe it only takes one person and you’d shake things up so everybody could.”

  But it would be like walking naked in front of them. Everything might disintegrate with the shock.

  His people, when I eventually met them, were quite different. His mother was small and grey-haired and charming and his father was big and tall and grey-haired and courtly. They touched each other often and smiled at Harry. Just small touches, a pat on the hand or the back. They seemed fond of each other, and they were proud of Harry. He was their only child. “That makes a difference,” he said. “They only had me to love.”

  Yes, well that hurt a bit, although he wouldn’t have meant it to.

  They were well-dressed and prosperous. His mother wore a grey silk dress that made her hair glint at the lunch at which Harry introduced us all, and his father wore a charcoal three-piece suit. Harry, too. “It’s the family uniform,” he joked.

  I wore a new dress that Harry had helped me choose. I had only ordinary school clothes, skirts and sweaters. This dress was cotton, ivory with thin pink stripes. Plain, with matched buttons down the front and a matching belt around the waist. Simple, and a bit expensive. Another thing I was learning: that simplicity can cost more than the elaborate, and is in better taste.