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You Too Can Learn to Dance

Matthew Licht

    Distance and secrecy, real or imagined, kept communication between us to a minimum. Nothing we did together felt like routine, but that was a one-sided view of the situation. Phone calls were one-way affairs. I called her.
    “Hello,” I said. “I’ll be in your town on Friday afternoon.”
    She’d told me she needed a few days to get organized. She had a new part-time job, and the schedule was fairly loose. Her son was almost finished with High School. She’d sent a few pictures of this strapping young man who wanted to join the Police. Her daughter, who worked at the hospital, in the cafeteria, had moved out of their apartment, but had decided not to move in with her boyfriend.
    “Friday’s my birthday,” she said.
    “Oh yeah, of course.”
    She didn’t press. “You always decide what we do when we go out.”
    Dinner or lunch, then sex. Or sex, then lunch or dinner. We ate at various places, but intimacy was reserved for her uncomfortable car. “You’re right,” I said, instead of sorry.
    “So Friday it’s my turn.”
    “Sure. Great.”
    The train trip seemed shorter than usual. Low cloud cover on the shortest day of the year. She wasn’t on the platform, which seemed dire. The train station in her town is way too big, built to accomodate military traffic, but now there’s hardly any. Ghosts in uniform had deserted their white elephant.
    She was parked out front, the only car with a human being in it. She’d treated herself to a radical cut and dye to become a spunky redhead.
    She jumped when I rapped on her window, took off before we could really say hello.
    She drove even faster than usual, and stopped at what seemed like a vacant lot hard by the industrial harbor’s truck port.
    “Happy birthday,” I said, when she cut the engine.
    “Oh. Thanks.” She seemed to have forgotten. “There was another place in town, but I don’t want to run into anyone I know. This is sort of embarrassing.”
    Various unpleasant scenarios flashed by on the windshield, which framed a cement landscape.
    “I wanted us to learn to dance together,” she said. “I’ve already paid for lessons.”
    She owned her apartment, but didn’t have money to throw around.
    “Good idea,” I said. “You know, I always wanted to be able to at least waltz.”
    We got out and entered a structure which looked like a high school gym on the inside, but with mirrored walls. Loudspeakers protruded from the walls like alien hunting trophies.
    “We’re early,” she said. “I thought we’d stop for a drink first, to loosen up, but then I changed my mind.”
    “If no one else shows up, we’ll get a private lesson.”
    That wasn’t to be. Another, older couple appeared. They said hello, said they’d walked from town to digest their lunch. They shook out their coats as though they’d rolled through invisible dead leaves along the way. The old man patted the garments into place on the hooks in the dark vestibule.
    The dance instructors were a couple too, or pretended to be one while on the job. Music filled the room in a wave, and they swept in through a velvet curtain the color of arterial blood. The lady dance teacher hit her spot with a toe-tap and finger flourish swirls cha cha cha!
    “Loredana,” she said, in a husky whisper.
    “Ernesto,” the man said, with a toothy smile. “Gentlemen, take your partners. Guide them naturally, with great gentleness.”
    He showed us how this was done, with Loredana.
    My partner had worn her highest heels to balance out difference in height. The other couple were an even match, or time had shrunk them to fit. Orbits were established. Their experience gave them precedence. They moved well together. The elderly fellow bore his responsibility with gravity. He aimed to please his wife, if that’s who the elderly woman in his arms was.
    A warm wordless song blended into another instrumental number.
    “Move differently,” Ernesto said. “But without transition. Never pause. Hold her with your gaze as well as your hands. Don’t force anything. Flow into the next set of steps.”
    Loredana had only said her name, but that was plenty. She flew, at Ernesto’s light touch. Gravity had no hold on her. I tried to watch and not stare, as though there was something I might learn from her motion picture.
    “This is nice,” I said, softly. And it was true. My mind hadn’t projected itself into the usual hump date in the back seat of her car before dinner and the last train out of town.
    Eyes open, she was lost in a dream.
    After the lesson, when it was dark and we were in the back seat of her car up on the deserted black hill that hulks over the port town where she lives, she said, “You were hoping that dance teacher would separate us and take you around the room a few times.”
    “Yeah maybe,” I said. “Sorry I stepped on your toes.”
    Her towering shoes were on the car floor.
    “You dance so well,” I said. “They should hire you instead of Miss Esmeralda.”
    “Don’t pretend you forgot her name,” she said. “But I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that she’s more your size.”
    “That bad, huh.”
    “You’ll improve, if you want to.”
    My work schedule is a routine. My other life was flexible. Train tickets were cheap. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons were reserved for dance lessons, for a while.
    Other couples came and went. The elderly pair from our first lesson together were regulars. Dance lessons were either a crucial element in their happiness, or truces in a life-long battle. There was no socializing at the dance school. Couples were never separated.
    One spring evening after school we went to a beach slightly north. She wanted to watch the sunset. There’s no tourism or nudism in that part of the world. She keeps plaid blankets neatly folded in plastic covers in the trunk of her car.
    “Thank you,” she said, as the sky turned pink, then red. “You’ve improved. We’ve improved. Everything has.”
    Maybe a shade smoother, the hands surer, fewer toes crushed. “It’s a pleasure,” I said. There was a lot more I should’ve expressed out loud.
    She stood up, brushed sand off her skirt. Small black-faced seagulls streaked across the low skyline, screeching. “Can we try one without music, and without Miss Loredana?”
    “Of course,” I said, and stood too. I’d taken my shoes off, she hadn’t.
    Hand in hand, hands on shoulders, the waves told us when to start.
    A cruise ship appeared on the darkening horizon, headed slowly south towards the islands. There might’ve been music aboard, couples and people who wanted to be coupled up enjoying a drink before dinner, after which there’d be dancing in the main ballroom. Hard to imagine an ocean liner without a ballroom. We were too far away to hear the sounds.
    The islands’ silhouettes disappeared in a rose-colored evening mist. In the daytime they look like the faces of giants beyond the world’s edge, looking up at the sky to find out where the stars have gone.

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