2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas

1:00 A.M

After their wedding, Ben and Annie buy a town house in Olde City and protect it with a top-of-the-line security system. Every night, Annie smooths moisturizer into her elbows and lists the following day’s To Do items. Depositions, recycling, the post office. Ben watches her as if from the other side of a bay. Who is this tall, freckled woman and why has he done something as important as marriage to her? He makes excuses to linger in his home office, tapping at his manuscript. She seems relieved. The sexless weeks pile up.

He tries coming at her from behind, in the shower, like a predatory fish. This dissolves into polite intercourse. He moves into her as if he doesn’t wish to disturb her. Any interruption, a loud commercial or a passing siren, derails their tenuous physicality and they fall asleep, separate and worried.

Every time they leave their town house, they punch the security code into a panel by the door and when they return, same code.

Ben blames his job. He decides to quit to try writing fulltime. She resents the extra burden placed on her salary and discusses their problems loudly on the phone to her girlfriends. “He’s not a sexual person, is all,” she tells them, toeing one battered, elegant slipper. “Most men like sex. This one doesn’t.”

Her supple elbows. Her pale, elegant neck. He cannot imagine ever wanting to fuck her again. One night, sleeping on the couch, he jolts awake to find her standing at the foot. “There’s only one thing to be done,” she says.

Their relationship had been careening toward it the entire time, he realizes, like the inevitable shoe drop of death.

During their first salsa lesson, the instructor explains that Cuban salsa moves on the one, and that the clave, “Cuba’s answer to the cowbell,” will guide them. Instead of Annie, Ben is paired with Rue, the assistant, who has forgotten to get old. Her laugh is easy, her ass taut. She leads him through the moves whose Spanish terms translate roughly into misogynist commands: Give me the girl! Tell her no! Ben immediately takes to the simple “Coca Cola,” where he releases Rue for a beat before winding her back. “Date her cousin!” the instructor barks as they flop across the floor. “Plug her in!” Ben focuses on finding and maintaining the one, as across the room, Annie coca colas fearfully with her own partner, a tax attorney whose blinking face seems overexposed, like it is missing a pair of glasses. He treads on her toe and Annie giggles, looking for a moment like the young, sick girl Ben met outside Ethics of Law. That night, they return home, sweaty and hopeful. You liked it, didn’t you? It wasn’t bad at all. Perhaps the chance to rekindle comes around as often as the one, Ben thinks, if you listen for it.

Wednesday night becomes salsa night. Ben likes how the students say encouraging things to one another when it is their turn to cross the floor. He likes the tax attorney’s contented grimace when he accomplishes a new move. He likes that everyone laughs at one another’s jokes, even when they aren’t funny, because it isn’t about being clever, it’s about being present. He likes the idea of working on his dance phrasing, that everyone has a dance floor persona. Clara hits heavy on the floor, while Rue is airier, like a responsive, silk curtain. He likes that dance is a conversation, conducted in pressings made through the hands or against the small of his partner’s back.

One night, the unthinkable happens. Ben tells her no at the right time and forgets to panic. This combination triggers a feeling of well-being as he and Rue cross the floor. Within rhythm are spaces large enough for experimentation, he realizes. He enters those spaces with his body. He dates her cousin, and it works. Rue, sensing the window that has been created by Ben’s new ease, performs a butt twitch that sends a start through his pelvis. They slap the floor with their feet, they take preening, buoyant stances. Everything they attempt succeeds. They finish, laminated in sweat. The class thrills and cheers.

Why, Ben thinks, panting and frozen in his final pose, would dancing be something you’d ever do with your wife?

After class, stabbing the code into the security system, Annie ticks off insults against Rue and the class. She accuses him of faking his initial hesitance to force her into looking like a fool. She tosses a blanket and pillow at him and Ben takes his place on the couch.

The next morning, crisp and pressed, Annie informs him that salsa is boring and not helping. They will quit the class and make an appointment with a couples therapist.

Ben finds himself in the unexpected position of being devastated. He begins to sneak out. Walking home from one of these clandestine lessons, toweling off telltale sweat, he imagines cradling the small of Sarina Greene’s back and, over and over, guiding her to the floor.

The little girl’s diminutive stature does not match her world-weary voice. Sarina updates Ben under her breath: this is the girl she told him about with the singing and the apples and the head lice. Ben is drunk and loves and trusts this whirling coincidental night. Of course, why shouldn’t they meet the girl from the story? What else can this night put forth? In advance, he accepts!

“I live here,” the little girl tells Sarina, pointing to her house. “I live right here.”

Sarina uses what must be her teaching tone. “Go back to bed,” she says. “I will apologize to your father in the morning.”

“A freight train couldn’t wake him up. Who’s that?”

“My friend Ben.”

Ben holds out his hand. “How do you do.”

Her face is blotchy with sleep. Her clothes are wrinkled and old looking. “Madeleine,” she says. “Charmed.”

“And what is it that you do?” he flirts. “Do you sell real estate? Do you preside over family court?” Ben can tell when he’s winning someone by the corners of their mouth. One side normally relents first. This girl’s mouth keeps its downward shape.

“I’m a student at Saint Anthony’s grade school. Or, I was. I got expelled today.”

“So, you spend your days student-ing.”

“This is not the girl,” Sarina whispers. Ben can tell it’s a warning, but he is in a different part of the city with Sarina and a strange girl and he has done more in one night than he has in two years.

“Would you like to see a magic trick?” he says. “I can make this whole courtyard disappear.”

“Do it then.” Madeleine has the bluntness of a city girl. She will watch a magic trick, but it had better be good.

“I’ll need a few things. Your sweater. Off.”

“My sweater?” Sarina says. “Why?”

“You girls ask a lot of questions.”

Sarina removes her sweater, revealing the shell of her blouse for an instant before it is covered by her coat. Ben takes his time folding it onto the ground in front of the little girl. He moves one hand over it as if stirring a cauldron. “Before we begin,” he says, “take in the courtyard around you. What do you see? Bikes, stacks of newspapers, the fountain, your front door, everyone else’s front door, the window boxes, the bikes, the street through the arch.” The girl obliges, looks around. “Your cares, your sorrows. All of those things are about to be gone. Are you prepared?”

“Do it already.”

“Don’t rush me, little girl.” He conjures the sweater. “Count to seven.”

“Don’t you mean three?” she says.

“Who has time to do anything in three seconds?”

The girl still doesn’t laugh.

“One …” he begins.

“… two,” she says.

“Threefourfive,” helps Sarina.

“Six,” the girl decides. “And seven.”

Ben flips the sweater up into the air and covers the girl’s face.

“Presto! The courtyard has vanished.”

“This is bullshit,” the girl says, underneath the sweater.

“Language,” Sarina says, helping to free her.

“You do something then,” Ben says. “And don’t try to sell me a duplex because I already have one.”

The girl smooths her eyebrows and skirt. “I sing.”

Sarina’s breath catches in her throat. “I’ve never heard you sing.”

“Do it!” Ben says. “You can’t say you can sing and then not sing. It’s like saying you can sing and then not singing.”

The girl searches his face for something that tells her whether he is worth it. Ben is accustomed to this look. It is normally followed by the slam of a bedroom door and a night of uninterrupted History Channel. However, this little girl finds what she is looking for.

“Okay,” she nods.

He is surprised by how much this pleases him. “Back up!” he announces. He positions Sarina on the bottom step. He attempts to lean against the pillar but his foot finds no ground. He has forgotten the two steps leading up to the porch. He falls up. One leg vaults out in front of him; the other, bent at the knee, follows. Unsupported by either leg, arms thrown back toward Sarina’s door, he forms a four-pointed star in the air. He lands gracelessly, elbow hitting the hard steps before the back of his head, calves, ass. He sees white then gray then white. In the air hangs the smell of wet roses, but that can’t be, it’s the wrong season. Sarina is behind a thick pane of glass cheering for him as he swims underwater. What is she saying? She cheers: Ben! Ben! He wants to answer but his mouth is filled with tin and chalk. He manages a sitting position on the ground, gravel sticking to his palms. “Give me a minute. I think I need to do this.” He places his head between his knees.

“Your hand is bleeding.” Sarina encircles his wrist and shows him his own injury. “I’m getting a towel.” She disappears inside her apartment.

Ben dabs at his lip. “Quite a show, huh?”

The little girl shifts from foot to foot. “I’ve seen worse.”

“I’m sorry about the apples,” he says. “And the lice. It doesn’t seem fair.”

“Life’s not fair,” she says.

“Tush,” he says. “The world is much more interesting than that. Sometimes, of course, it’s not fair. But sometimes it’s very fair, overly fair, so fair that you want to throw up from all the fairness. Then it goes back to being unfair. The world is cyclical.” He shakes a cigarette from his pack. “Do you mind?”

“Can I have one?”

“She”—he jerks a thumb toward the door—“would throttle me.” He smokes. He checks; Sarina is still inside. “One drag.”

The girl inhales and hands the cigarette back. “Do you know about The Cat’s Pajamas?”

This is what Sarina passes as she hurries toward the kitchen: a sofa with stray glitter collected in its folds, a smattering of Popsicle sticks, a CD of songs with the word home in them, a guide to making killer martinis, dark chocolate, darker chocolate, a life-size model of a heart, and an almost-finished painting on her easel. In it a man strides halfway out the front door of a common-looking family room. The viewer cannot see his face: his attention is turned toward a farther room where a boy lurks in a doorway. Half of the man’s head is flayed, the skin collected in uniform curlicues at the base of his neck. The elements of his brain, each lobe and gland, are rendered in meticulous detail. His neck and arms are whole, but his torso is also stripped, revealing the heart’s tender ventricles. They tumble out of the body and wind around the bank of tulips on the porch, reach toward the boy. Other canvases stacked against the wall depict similar scenes of people and animals whose interior workings are on display. An older couple walks a transparent dog in the park. An excoriated bus driver turns the enormous, flat wheel of a bus.

Sarina dampens a dish towel and trills past everything again on her way outside, where Ben sits smoking on the step that tried to delete him. She helps him arrange the ice cubes around his elbow. “I think you should go inside, Madeleine. I will see you in school next week.”

“No,” Madeleine says. “You won’t.”

“I’m sorry, but we can talk in the morning.”

“Fine.” Madeleine hoists one leg over the windowsill then the other. “Later, skaters.” The sash snaps shut.

“Your neighborhood is much more exciting than mine,” Ben says. They sit on the stoop. Sarina imagines millions of white blood cells attending to Ben’s elbow, repairing thin tissue with screws and glue. “I want to dance,” she admits.

“There is a place,” Ben says. “It’s very special. It’s called The Cat’s Pajamas.”

Sarina laughs. “You want to DONCE with Marcos?”

“Why not?”

“How’s your bleeding?”

Ben holds his wrist to his ear as if checking a watch. “How are you doing, bleeding?” He waits for an answer. “Stopped,” he says. “Ready to walk.”

Behind her curtains, Madeleine eavesdrops. She hears Miss Greene and Ben say they will go to The Cat’s Pajamas. This starts the engine of her heart. It triple-time steps, heel drop, hit. Pas de bourrée. Pas de bourrée.

Madeleine watches them arrange their coats and scarves, getting ready to leave. She weighs several options in the time it takes to cinch a knot.

She could open the window and scream: Take me with you!

She could do nothing.

She could follow them.

She could unload a sleeve of crackers into her mouth.

A voice in her mind says: Junk that jazz book, go to bed, get your GED, marry early, have a child. Bury your useless pipes inside you in a box labeled: never open. Everyone will say, what a wise and rational girl you turned out to be. So different from your nutso mother.

Madeleine closes her eyes and plucks a random card from her mother’s recipe box.

DO WHAT SCARES YOU.

She flips it over. On the other side, her mother has printed: BRING A SCARF.

Miss Greene and Ben have disappeared beyond the archway. Madeleine wraps her scarf and coat around her, throws open the sash, and with a final look back into the warm square of her bedroom, clears the sill in one leap.