Dancing with the Dead

6

Mary’s apartment was on Utah, an upscale street in a part of town that changed personality block by block. Though her building was one of a row of rehabbed prewar apartments, some of them boasting ornamental stonework too expensive to create now, just a few blocks away the brick apartment buildings were crumbling with decay and peeling paint.

Her building was a slate-roofed brick structure with green wood trim and with regal stone lions flanking the front steps. The smell in the vestibule was exactly like that in the building where Angie lived, though the floor was veined marble and the mailboxes polished brass.

The stairway, however, was wooden. Mary trudged up the creaking steps to her second-floor unit, noticing that the bulb on the landing was burned out again. She’d have to call the landlord, or have Jake (Jake?) replace it.

Then she saw the flowers. They were lying like a cat’s offering on the black rubber welcome mat in front of her door. Roses again, this time with the delicate flower known as baby’s breath setting off their deep red blossoms. She bent and picked them up, then squinted to read the square white card in the faint light: “Sorry, sorry, sorry! Love, Jake.”

Cradling the tissue-wrapped bouquet as if it were an infant, Mary keyed the lock to let herself in.

That was when she noticed the marks on the doorjamb near the knob. They were slashes, and shallow notches that appeared to have been made by a large knife as someone butchered the wood while trying to pry open the door enough to force the lock.

The marks on the wood were apparently ineffectual; if someone had tried to get in, they didn’t seem to have succeeded.

Not daring to look around her in the dim hall, she entered the apartment quickly. After closing the door, she stood motionless for a moment. The air was still and stale, but it felt like home. Security. She was alone here, sheltered for a while.

She pictured someone working on her door with a knife and shivered. Jake? Maybe he’d forgotten his key and was angry, used the knife out of spite.

And then left roses? Not likely.

She turned around and set the deadbolt and chain-lock. Then she carried the roses into the kitchen and found a tall vase, ran some water into it, and stuffed the stems of the flowers down inside it. Roses and Jake, Jake and roses. How many times had he sent her roses? She took the vase into the living room and placed it on the low table that held the phone. The splash of bright red was vivid as an open wound.

Only the beige-shaded lamp by the sofa-the one she always left on when she wasn’t home at night-was glowing, and the living room was dim and shadowed. She switched on the brass floor lamp and illuminated the tasteful contemporary furniture that was mixed with older things given to her by Angie. Angie had explained there were certain possessions she didn’t want around anymore because they reminded her too much of Duke, so Mary was the recipient of a wing chair, the oak curio shelf that had held Duke’s bowling trophies, the floor lamp, and various odds and ends that felt like 1963 and childhood.

Mary slipped out of her shoes but didn’t sit down. Instead she wandered through the apartment to put her mind entirely at ease, even opening closet doors. The faith she’d placed in the heavy-duty locks the landlord had installed last summer seemed justified.

She went into the black-and-gray tiled bathroom and got a large Rubbermaid pan out from beneath the washbasin, ran hot water into it, then carried it and a folded white towel into the living room. She placed the pan on the floor, settled in a corner of the sofa and lowered her feet into the hot water.

Heaven! Dancing sure took a toll on the feet, but it was worth it.

Letting the hot moisture penetrate and loosen her stiff muscles, she wriggled her toes underwater and wondered if she should call the police about the door. That kind of thing happened in this neighborhood, so she was sure nothing would come of it, but she pulled the phone over to her anyway and punched out Information.

They were there sooner than Mary would have guessed. A young patrolman and an old one with a gray mustache. They studied the damaged doorjamb, made sure the lock was in order, and questioned Mary about potential enemies. She said she had none, glancing at the roses and not mentioning Jake.

Possibly it was the work of kids looking for drugs, the mustached cop speculated, as if that were in a league with playing hopscotch. His partner pointed out that there’d been a lot of that the past few months, frustrated addicts committing vandalism and random attempted break-ins because of a recent police crackdown on local dealers. They’d run extra patrols by her building, they assured her, and if she noticed anything suspicious she was to phone them.

Fifteen minutes after their arrival she was seated again on the sofa with her feet submerged in hot water, and they were no doubt a few blocks away looking into crimes actually committed. Probably they were right about the marks on her door. Frustrated vandalism. Not likely to be repeated.

She withdrew her bare feet from the water and patted them dry with the towel, then carried the pan into the bathroom and refilled it so the water was steaming.

When she’d placed the pan before the sofa again, she didn’t sit down. She was going to play the Ohio Star Ball video she’d taped from the Public Broadcast System presentation of last year’s finals. It showed only the highest levels of competition on the last night, when Juliet Prowse acted as hostess. But the same glitter and motion would be there during the earlier Novice and Intermediate Bronze pro-amateur competition, the categories in which Mary would dance with Mel.

As she stood up to pad over to the TV and slip the cassette into her VCR, the phone jangled.

She picked up the receiver and pressed cool plastic to her ear, standing gracefully with her feet in fifth position, waiting.

“Mary? It’s me, Jake.”

She wasn’t surprised. The old pattern was developing, the dance of contrition and forgiveness.

“You get the flowers?” There was music in the background. And voices. A woman laughed hysterically. Good times rolling. He was probably speaking from Skittles, the bar near where he worked. He’d go there often after his afternoon shift’s ten-thirty quitting time and stay until well past midnight, drinking with his warehouse buddies. “Hey, Mary? Babe?”

“Yeah, I got them, Jake.”

He was quiet for a moment. She wondered if he was drunk. Probably at least halfway.

“Jesus, Mary, I’m sorry!”

“It said that on the card that came with the flowers,” she told him.

He gave a short, sad laugh. “Yeah, I guess it did.”

“Jake, did you do something to my door?”

“Your door? What’s that mean?”

“Just what I asked.”

“Why would I do something to your door?”

“I thought you mighta forgot your key and tried to get in.”

“I always got my keys with me.” When she didn’t say anything right away, he said, “Mary?”

“You hurt me pretty bad, Jake.”

“How bad?”

“Bruised some ribs.”

“Christ! I’m sorry, babe, you know I am.”

“Do I?”

“Well, I hope you know.”

“You been drinking, Jake?”

“Some. I needed to get a little bit drunk so I’d have the guts to call. Last night-damn! I don’t know what the fuck came over me, Mary.”

“You never do.”

“I know it sounds dumb of me to promise it won’t happen again. But I can promise you this, and I swear it on all I hold holy: I’ll try my damndest not to ever let it happen again. I never meant to hurt you that way; I’d kill anybody that’d hurt you. I mean really hurt you. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know it, Jake.” And she did know it; she believed him.

“I guess you don’t wanna see me again.”

“Would you, if you were me?”

“No, I gotta admit I wouldn’t. Tell you the honest truth, I don’t know why you put up with the shit I hand out.”

“I don’t put up with it. I’ve quit. You and I are over, Jake.”

“I hear it but I can’t believe it, Mary.”

She said nothing, letting him squirm while she listened to the faint hollow hiss of the connection. She was pressing the receiver so hard to the side of her head that her ear was beginning to ache as if he’d hit her there.

“Lemme come over,” Jake pleaded. “We can talk about it, huh?”

“No, Jake, and don’t call me back.”

“Mary! Don’t hang up! Please! Give another shot, huh, babe? You know I mean well. It’s just that I got this…”

“Sickness?”

“If you wanna call it that. This sickness in me. I hurt people, and not just with my hands, then I’m sorry as hell. I been doing it all my life. Christ, I hate myself right now, Mary.”

“I’ve gotta hang up now, Jake.”

“Mary, lemme see you again, okay?”

“I don’t think so, Jake.”

“Mary! Don’t hang up, Mary. Mary?”

She slowly replaced the receiver.

Absently, she switched on the TV, then slid the tape of the Ohio Star Ball into the VCR and punched Play.

But when she’d sat back down on the sofa and resubmerged her tired feet, she didn’t watch the dancers whirling on the flickering screen. She thought about Jake, how he could control her with his love, his violence, and his self-pity. Bondage wasn’t too strong a word. But now it was bondage broken. She wasn’t sure if she’d really been in love with Jake, because no one had ever given her a reliable definition of love. Jake could be violent, but he could also be as gentle as a kind father, and as approving and encouraging. Yet always the other half of him was there, a lurking ugliness of soul, a beast leering out from beneath the surface and somehow holding her in thrall.

And at the studio there was Mel. There was no violence in Mel, she was sure. He was so young, only in his twenties, and professionally solicitous and handsome. Mary suspected that if her money ran out, so would Mel’s affection. But did it matter? Mel was, in his fashion, no less a real love object than Jake. She saw both men in her own way, mentally shaping them to her intimate yearnings, as if they were romantic figures in a novel she was reading and wanted to continue and conclude at the same time. She was nurtured not by the present, but by what might grow from their relationships someday.

That was her problem, she thought. She lived for Someday.

But she’d been abused for the last time. Now it would be a someday without Jake.

Familiar music blared and her eyes focused on the TV screen. The tango finals had begun.

In the searing water, her feet moved.

He stood staring into the freezer. Before the repairman had arrived, he’d wrapped everything in white butcher paper. Even the knife. The knife had to be kept in the freezer to keep it pure and free of the disease. It wouldn’t have done for the repairman to see what was in the freezer.

Somewhere he’d read that near the South Pole tiny animals that had lived and been frozen alive before the birth of Christ had been thawed out and were still alive today. So there was no reason time couldn’t be made to stand still in a small freezer that was just as cold.

Anyway, the repairman had finished and said the freezer was as good as new and would last for years. Years would be fine; a new freezer could be bought soon, one that would last a lifetime. Some of them even had lifetime guarantees.

He unwrapped the knife and looked at it, looked at what else was in the freezer, and smiled.

There was no way to guarantee a lifetime.