Death Is My Dancing Partner

1

When she woke up, he was standing there at the porthole, with his back to her, looking out. There was an outside glare outlined against his head and shoulders, as though somebody had sprinkled baking soda over him, but he made the cabin dim just by standing there like that and blocking the porthole.

It was like waking up in a Turkish bath. They seemed to have left the last breeze back outside the Atlantic end of the Canal, when they started through the night before. “What’d they cut it through?” she’d asked him one time during the night, “The hot ashes in somebody’s coal furnace?”

“Are we in?” she murmured.

“Been in for half an hour.”

“What does it look like?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what are you looking at through there?”

“What I’m looking at isn’t out there,” he answered. He turned his shoulder away, and let part of the glare in. Then he moved away entirely, and let all the rest of it in. It came in almost fizzing, like seydlitz powder, it was so strong.

“Stay there,” she pleaded. “At least you kept it shady.” She pulled a stocking up over her leg. “Oh, God. Even nylon scorches you.”

He’d started putting on a necktie. Then he changed his mind, took it off, crammed it in his pocket. “Weighs a ton.” He tipped a pitcher. “Have some water.”

“No, I remember what it tastes like from the last time.

They dunked part of the machinery in it, to soak off the rust.” She wiped her dry lips in recollection.

He watched a ripple of white descend over her, straighten into a spotless little sport-dress. “A woman always looks cool, even in this kind of heat. She’s about the only thing you can stand looking at.”

“Take the word of one,” she said tersely. “She may look it, but she doesn’t feel it. She’s you all over, inside, brother.”

“Am I as pretty as that inside?” he asked.

They both laughed.

An hour later, each with a bag weighing down each arm, they stepped out of the shade of the iron-roofed, cement-floored customs shed into the acetylene-blaze of Panama City. Tall feather-duster palms were vaguely somewhere in the background, bordering a plaza or lining some avenue, but even they looked wilted and tinder-dry.

“For God’s sake, let’s get something over our heads,” she gasped.

A taxi sliced in ahead of another one that had started for them. The leather of the seat burned their skins at first touch; they both hitched away from it for a moment, then eased back gradually.

“Do you know where the La Perla Café is?”

“Yes sorr; I teck you,” the driver promised in basic English.

It was out from the center of town. The taxi swerved off the highway suddenly and stopped.

“Why, it’s a... a soldiers’ and sailors’ dive. I bet they’ve got rooms upstairs for—”

She looked at him and he looked at her. Then he looked down at the ground. He smiled as he did so, but it was a pretty washed-out smile.

“How low can you get?” he murmured half-audibly.

She braced herself, pitched her head defiantly. “All right,” she said, “so I won’t go upstairs. And you better not let me catch you trying to sneak up behind my back. Let’s go in. The longer we stand looking at it from out here, the worse it looks.”

They went in, with a pretension of jauntiness that didn’t fool each other.

Inside, there was that forlorn look a night-time place has in the morning. Rows and rows of little round white-topped tables and the chairs that went with them, the latter all slanted over the tables so that their tops met above them. And mirrors galore, with nothing to reflect yet except the other mirrors across the way. The fans, somehow, had a denuded skeletal look, the way their motionless cross-arms stood starkly out. Dank paper streamers hung from the middle of each one. A sign over the bar said “Cinzano Vermouth.” It was plugged in to light up after dark. A comatose woman sat at the far end of the bar with her head lying upon it. A basket containing a residue of wilted gardenias rapidly turning rusty in color was on the floor next to her. A cat, lazily licking its forepaw and then massaging its head with it, was curled up further along at the foot of the bar.

A fat, greasy-looking man was sitting drinking a cup of coffee, far back at one of the little tables. He got up and came toward them, as the dimness came down like a knife and scraped the outside glare off their backs.

“Where’s the manager?” Jones said. “We’re the talent.”

He didn’t get it.

“We’re supposed to see somebody named Almagorda. Is there a man named Almagorda here?”

“Piso arriba.” He turned and indicated the stairs at the back.

Jones righted one of the chairs for Mari, motioned her into it. He righted a second one for himself and joined her. “No, not in this heat,” he muttered. “We’ll stay down at street-level.”

The man went over to the stairs, jabbered up them in Spanish. Somebody else jabbered down, in answer. Then he jabbered up some more, in answer to the answer.

Then he went back to his coffee.

There was a considerable stage wait. Finally a heavy, yet indolent, tread started coming down. They both turned that way. The man on the stairs had on a pongee suit, a shirt of a virulent apricot silk, a large diamond on his finger, another one in his necktie. There were introductions. He smiled a lot, and scraped. The diamonds winked all over the place, got in their heat-seared eyes. Finally he sat down with them. His hair smelled of perfumed brillantine, but with just a touch of rancid base underlying it.

He lit a cigar. That as least took some of the curse off it.

“How you like my place? You disappointed?” A blind man could have read their faces.

“No,” Jones said stoically. “We expected—”

“We’re not disappointed,” Mari quickly put in. Which was the same thought, but phrased more tactfully.

“It’s a good place, it meek good money,” he said, looking around him caressingly. “You get used to it,” he promised.

“Orrai, you want to show me maybe, long as nobody in here?”

Jones quickly shook his head. “We’re not auditioning, that’s not the idea. You’ve already signed us, remember. We were signed on up there. Six weeks and an option to renew.”

Almagorda shrugged philosophically. “I have already pay your boat fare for to com’ here, is true.”

“Which you get back out of our first three weeks pay-checks,” Jones reminded him.

“And if I do not put you on now, I do not collec’.” He shrugged again, much as to say: Bad or good, I’m stuck with you until I can get my investment back.

“Don’t let it fret you,” said Jones severely. “You don’t have to worry. We were good enough for Les Ambassadeurs, in Paris—”

“I know,” said Almagorda drily, “that’s why you’re here.”

She saw Jones swallow a lump in his throat, at the thrust. She quickly put her hand out and placed it atop his, in consolatory restraint. She half rose. “Let’s show the senor a bar or two, if he wants to see that badly.”

Jones stubbornly refused to move. “No, it’s become a point of honor now. If he thinks he’s being shortchanged—”

Almagorda wheeled both palms in front of his face. “No, no, no! Is orrai. We forget it. You go on, how you say, cold, if you want to. Anyway, the little lady she is ver’ pretty—”

“And talented,” insisted Jones tenaciously. Again her hand sought his soothingly, under the table. “When do we begin?”

“Tonight. Otherwise I have empty floor to show. I pay my others off las’ night already.” He relit his cigar. “You know how it work’, don’t you?”

“What do you mean, how it works?”

“They throw money. I think I better tell you before it hoppen. You not suppose’ to get insulted, eh? You got to pick it up. If you no pick it up, they no like that.” Jones swallowed again, this time harder than before. “We won’t get insulted.” He smiled mordantly. “We haven’t — been insulted about that in some time now.”

“Bueno! Entendido, then.” Almagorda prepared to rise. “You have foun’ some place to stay yet?”

“We just got off the boat.”

“Maybe I can help you out. I send you around to a friend of mine. A woman I know. She runs a good house. You tell her you work for Almagorda, she give you a professional rate.” He jotted an address on a card, handed it to Jones.

“You’re very good to us,” said Jones drily. “When do we go on?”

“I think you better go on early. Later they get too noisy, they doan pay attention so good.”

“I get what you mean,” said Jones. “We have to hit them while they’re still sober. Oh, brother,” he commented in an undertone for her benefit.

“About ten, fen-thirty,” opined Almagorda. “It doan have to be exact, on the minute, eh? Is no timetable here.”

“Just while they can still see straight,” concurred Jones. “Now, you got some place for us to dress?”

“Oh shue. Upstair, on secon’ floor. Is got no window, but I put in a little fan for you. You want to look at it?”

Mari quickly forestalled Jones. “Maybe we better not right now. The light might still be too good.”

They got up to go.

“Tonight, then.” Almagorda held out his hand.

Jones took it manfully. “Tonight, then. Our sentence begins.”

“What is mean sentence?” asked Almagorda, puzzled.

“Engagement,” she supplied tactfully. “It’s just another word for it.”

“Orrai, then,” Almagorda said naively. “I wish you lots of lock. I hope you have good, long sentence here.”

They went out of the place together. But they weren’t laughing.

The boarding house Almagorda had recommended them to wasn’t as bad as they had expected. Well, maybe nothing could have been. It was at least a little cleaner than La Perla. Well, again, maybe any place would have been. And the landlady tried to be friendly. She had a scraping of the bent English that thirty years of big-ditch digging had dumped all over the country like a busted keg of rusty nails and bolts. She scanned the card he had sent over.

“For him, I give you good room. He all-time friend my huss-baan. They how you say, two make one, in business.”

“Partners,” supplied Jones.

“Then my huss-baan get yellow fever. Is bite him little mosquito.” She swatted at it as though she could still see it. “Finish.”

She took them up and showed it to them. Well, it was a room. That was all you could say. It was a room.

“No open,” she warned them. “Make hot.”

“Then what was it before now?” Jones wondered, but he didn’t press the point. The climate wasn’t her fault, after all, it was Nature’s.

“At night, tin roof cool off,” she promised. “Mas fresco.”

She looked them both over with a sort of kindly curiosity. “You are artistas, no?” she said.

Mari went toward her suddenly, took her hand and clasped it. “Thank you,” she said gratefully, almost with a sob in her throat. “Thank you — for calling us that.”

Jones, with a quick and concerned side-look at her, gently eased the landlady out, closed the door after her.

He turned and they smiled at each other. Bravely, weakly, falteringly.

“Last stop, all off,” he said and dragged open the knot of his necktie.

“Could you use a drink?” he asked her.

She shook her head. Not yet. “I don’t want to start that too soon. I’ve got an idea I’ll be requiring a private distillery of my own, once I really get going on it.”

He tried the shutters, against the landlady’s injunction; quickly slapped them together again, rubbed his chin. “Ow!” he exclaimed ruefully. “Believe it or not, that positively stings.”

She started to laugh.

He didn’t like it from the first sound of it. It wasn’t funny laughter. It pulled at her too much.

It grew and grew and grew.

“Don’t. Cut it out.” He took her by the shoulders and tried to hold her steady, firm her.

A rational sentence unexpectedly came through the geyser of merriment. “I can’t stop, Max. Try and help me, Max. I can’t stop.”

“You’re hysterical. I don’t know how to.” He tried sealing her mouth with his hand, but that wouldn’t do it.

“Here, hold onto me. Lean against me.”

He stroked her hair. She kept laughing into him, laughing into him.

“I know. I know it’s tough. I know it’s lousy.”

Then the tears came. It was as though he had turned a key in her.

He let her cry all the laughter away, wash it out of herself.

“Why’re you crying?” he asked her soothingly at last.

“Because you’re you, and because I’m me. And because life is — what it is.”

That’s a good enough reason to cry. That’s a good enough reason for anyone.

2

It was filled, and it looked worse filled than it had empty. All outlines were soft, there was so much smoke. And the fans going full-tilt in the ceiling, only took it from one place and sent it another, instead of taking it away altogether. It was a dive, and the squirming, wriggling forms of life that infested it belonged below the ground, should never have come up out of it. Maggots with rouged lips, dark holes for eyes, in dance-shifts of fuchsia, green and tangerine; blind worms, invisible slits for eyes, seeming to try to climb down inside their own glasses. Wavering together, in static dance. You couldn’t tell when they were dancing, when they were not.

She leaned over the rail. “It sounds like a boiler-factory.”

“It’s not a court sentence, you know. You only have to say the word and—”

“We’re giving a show here tonight. If they don’t want to pay attention to it, they don’t have to. It’ll still be there, in back of all the noise.”

“Okay, I’ll start you.” He stopped three steps down, looked around and up at her. “Don’t get too near any of the ringside tables if you can help it,” he cautioned her. “They look like a handy kind of crowd.”

“I’ll stay out in the middle. If there is a middle. Break me into the first chorus from the top of the stairs.”

He went on down, crossed to the beat-up upright. Almagorda was standing by it, waiting to announce them.

“Quiet them down a little, can’t you?” Jones said out of the side of his mouth.

“That coam when she start. I hope. Is no use trying to before.”

He made the introduction bi-lingually. “Señores y senoritas. Ladiss en gentlemon.” And then on from there.

Jones threaded a soft-pitched accompaniment into it from mid-point on, and then brought it in crescendo as he finished.

She was coming down the stairs now. No spotlight. Jones stole a look at her, sideface, then went back to his business.

The noise was beginning to tone down. The piano-notes, steadily going upward, were beginning to top it now.

We’ve got it licked, he said to himself.

He could feel her moving around just in back of him, staying close to him. He could feel the air move, and once a tendril of her costume clambered over his arm and whisked away again.

They were pretty quiet now, as quiet as any better-type audience had ever been. Even the underdog understands death. Maybe more so than his betters; it’s closer to him most of the time.

She went back to the stairs for the finish, and took it there. They’d discarded the full-length fall; the floor was impossibly filthy, and also pretty badly splintered. She let herself expire there, supported by the stair-rail.

Notes that he wasn’t striking began to sound off from the floor; clinkers.

“Pick the moaney up, the moaney up!” Almagorda urged behind the back of his hand. “Otherwise you meek them sore. They think—”

Jones jumped from the bench. “Any picking up of money off the floor that’s going to be done around here,” he said grimly, “I’ll do it, not her.”

Almagorda watched him for a minute. “You doan do it ri’. You suppose to smile when you do it. You go around with sore face.”

“Smile? I’d like to throw it right in their kissers!” he vowed sullenly, and ran nimbly up the stairs, giving them his back without taking any bows.

When he burst into the scabrous dressing room, he dashed the coins against the wall and made them seem like flying sequins. It was pretty but it was untidy. “What are we, a couple of Bowery stumble-burns diving into the sawdust for butts?”

“It’s just Rome; do as they do.”

“I can’t take it, Mari. I can’t let you.”

“Come here, kiss me.” He branded her with raging, white-hot lips, but she didn’t seem to feel any pain. “We’re going to play out this contract. You can make a thing hard for yourself, or you can make it easy. You can make it important, or unimportant. If I dropped my glove or my handkerchief to the floor you’d pick it up for me. Well, you’re just... picking up my earnings for me, that’s all.”

“Logic,” he scowled scornfully. But for the second time that night he started picking money up from the floor.

You’re in a blue cotton wrapper with white cranes and chrysanthemums that came out from Japan, and he’s gone, and the room smells of stale face powder and stale cigarette smoke and baked tin roof, and you begin. You hold your glass and you begin.

The landlady knocks and she wants to know if you’d like to have the bed made up. You tell her no. No, leave it. Tonight when you’re working, she can come in and make it up.

She picks up her tin bucket and goes away again. You don’t hear her, she’s in felt slippers, but you hear the bucket, as if it were going away under its own power. A ghost-bucket. Cluck, cluck, clonk.

After that, it’s very quiet. Too quiet.

You put a record on, and you sit down there, you and your glass, and you dream. With your eyes wide open. Revery music. Music from out of the past. Things that speak to you alone. That whisper low, so no one else can hear.

Say, What do you Want to Make those Eyes at me for?... A cigarette hopped to the ground, and he stepped out from under the tree where he’d been waiting.

“Hello.”

He laughed. “I bet you don’t even know what a telephone is.

“Gee,” he burst out animatedly, “I’d like to take you around with me, show you T. V. sets and frigidaires. Think what you would do to Paris.”

She moved in closer. “But above all, show me love.”

“Why did you fall for me like this, anyway?”

“I don’t want you smart. I just want you the way you are.”

“I should’ve quit while I was ahead.”

He put his arm around her, and she leaned her head against his shoulder, and they strolled along like that, in and out of drippings of moon-glow that ran down their backs as they moved along.

“Boy, that moon! It’s making me do things. Like this. And this.”

“But watch me on the curves, honey. Dangerous curves ahead.”

“I’ll go around them with you.”

“I’m in a Jaguar and you’re in a jaloppy. It’s a shame to do this to you.”

Another drink, another record, another telecast from the past — moving, breathing, lighted-up, just as though it were real.

Someone to Watch Over Me.

“Here come the boys off the bandstand,” Bee said. “Keep count in the glass, now.”

Trumpet went by, clarinet went by, steel guitar went by. Even Max went by with a paper cup of coca cola.

“How many did you count?” Bee asked her.

“Six,” said Mari.

“Never mind telling me who’s missing,” Bee said, “I’m way ahead of you. Is that your hairbrush? Can I borrow it for a minute? He’s standing down there lighting her cigarette, bent way over with his heinie sticking out.

“I’ll pay you for the broken hairbrush,” Bee promised.

“I never can tell if they are or aren’t,” Bradley tried to explain, rubbing himself. “So when I look at them like that, all I’m doing is wondering if they are or aren’t.”

“If you look at them, brother, they are all right!” Bee brayed.

“I’m crazy in love with him,” she whispered to Mari. “Crazy in love with him.”

Remember Me?

“You can get up from your knees,” she told him disdainfully. “My maid takes care of that.”

“You gave my candy to the doorman.”

“I shouldn’t have, I wouldn’t want to contaminate him.”

“You gave my flowers to the hospital.”

“They made me sick.”

“You gave my perfume to your maid.”

“She has the cheapest taste.”

“You sent my diamond watch back to the jewelers.”

“I knew the time already, and since I wasn’t going any place with you, I didn’t need to know it any more exactly than I did.”

“Couldn’t you leave your knife out of me in one place, at least?”

“For heaven’s sake, what do I want with pork?”

“What was that?” her maid cried out, terrified. “Look how it made all the lights shake!”

“Maybe there was someone out there just now who hates walls,” Mari shrugged.

For I’m the chap who has the key to your front door, And I’m the guy you go and buy your groceries for, Yes, I’m the man you save your goodnight kisses for, Re-mem-ber me?

They’d made a record of it, once, the boys and he.

This same record she was holding in her hand right now, just going to play. That was he, he and the boys, on there! Those sounds, that music. And in a little while Bee’s voice would come on, and sing the words. Remember Bee? (Whatever happened to her? Where is she now?)

It brings back a night in New York, back at the very beginning. Before the climb had started, while they were still marking time. A night when she’d had him all to herself. Almost.

There was a ring at the doorbell of Bee and Bradley’s flat. They were looking after her there. They were both out someplace, and she was alone there. She got up, and put something around her, and went to see who it was.

He was standing out there, good-natured, foolish, the worse for wear. He didn’t do that much, and this was between engagements anyway. He made a lovely lush. Some men get fighty, brutal; he on the other hand he got tractable as a puppy. He had this record under his arm, this one, now; just newly pressed. She never did find out, then or later, what had brought him there, what had made him stray toward their door that night. There was a record-player there, and maybe he’d wanted to try out the new side on it. One thing she could be sure of, it wasn’t her. He only identified her, remembered who she was, after a brief pause, and with some little concentration. “Oh, you’re our kid. You’re our little make-with-the-muscles. Thass who you are. You look diff’rent in that bathrobe.”

He leaned against her, and she transported him, on the lean, over to a chair, and let him go on doing his leaning in that. He was so friendly and confidential, not like when he was sober. He made her an equal, opened his heart to her, entrusted her with all his confidences. How he’d won twenty-seven dollars from the boys at poker couple nights ago, and how he’d selected this oldie to record and he thought it was going to do a lot for them (she put it on for him then and there, and from then on he wouldn’t let her take it off the turntable); and how she reminded him of Marie, just like Marie, just like her. This gave her a bad moment, but it turned out Marie was his first sweetheart, back in Elkhart, and had two children now.

She could even boss him. She tried it a little, daringly, and it worked, he obeyed her! That made her glow all over. It was just like being his wife.

She said, “You stay in that chair. You be quiet now,” with mock severity, and she went in to make him some black coffee. She came back to the door, and said “What did I tell you? Did I tell you not to move?” and clapped her hands at him twice, and he sank meekly back again.

She brought the coffee in, and knelt down on the floor beside him, and fed it to him spoon by spoon. “Open. Now swallow. Now close.” And it was a love-scene, complete. Her first.

He said, “When you grow up, you’re gonna be wunnaful.”

“I am grown up now,” she answered rebukingly. But that went over his head.

He said, “Can I stay here? Feels good here. Wushja have any objections if I stayed here? I wanna be a gentlemen about it, buss sure comptable here.”

She said, so low and modestly he probably could not have heard it at all, “Well, legally, we’re sort of married in a way, after all. And I could... I could — Bee has this big couch out here, she and Bradley could—”

She even helped him go to bed. Up to a point, that is. Got down and took off his shoes for him. Then went to the door and threatened, “I’m coming back in five minutes, and I want to find you under those covers and quiet!”

“Yes’m,” he said muffledly, and she had to hang onto the door-knob with both hands to keep from going back in there and giving him a kiss. At last, at last; someone of your own, to love and order around. What was the difference if it was the liquor, she would have settled for that; she would have kept him pickled a year if she could have.

Then when the five minutes was nearly up, the doorbell rang again. She thought it was Bee and Brad, and she ran to tell them; she knew how glad they’d both be for her sake.

But it wasn’t. It was a strange girl.

And she showed Mari how to really boss a man. Not like a kitten, like a bobcat.

“Is he here?” she demanded, and then she walked straight through and slammed the bedroom door behind her. Mari didn’t have the nerve to open it and go in there after her.

Then in a minute or two she flung it open and brought I him out with her, shoes back on. “If you want to relax so bad,” she growled, “I got everything you need for it, right where I am. You don’t need to go ’round ringing on doorbells!”

He said to Mari on the side, in passing, “Keep the record on. I’ll be back. You ’n’ me’ll listen to it.” And he winked at her.

“Yeah, he’ll be back,” promised his captor drily, “when I get my first gray hairs. I’ll wheel him around to you again and leave him at the door.” And she hauled him (off, like an over-friendly puppy who’s too familiar with Strangers to suit his owner.

And the record stayed on, and played on, and played on, while the tears dribbled down one to a note. Tears in four-four time. While she crouched there, sideswept on the floor, with her cheek pressed disconsolately against the console.

She wouldn’t let it stop. Because he’d said he’d be back. Because it was magic, it was the spell you cast, the words you said, the wish you made, that would bring him back. It had to work, it had to!

Simply because you’re near me, Funny but when you’re near me—

Then it was daylight, and Bee’s arm reached out above her downcast head and turned it off. And Bee raised her gently to her feet, and held her against her, and patted her shoulder.

And he hadn’t come back after all. The magic spell of the record had been a bust. I’m in the Mood for Love.

The bottle’s empty now, and the glass is too. The record is going whissssh, at that blank groove at the end where there’s no more sound. Just going round and round. Like you, like life.

Revery-music. Ghost-melodies. Music from out of the past. Whispering low, to you, to you alone. Breaking all over again your already broken heart.

3

And then suddenly one night a tight-packed roll, paper.

They didn’t throw paper currency; paper can’t be thrown.

He broke his rule and looked at it, even before reaching the stairs. It was paper currency, tightly rolled. A rubber band had been slipped over it to hold it in place. It was American, even the glimpse at it that he’d taken was enough to tell that.

From the stairs, his eyes roved the room. Who in this place could afford a gesture like that?

His searching glance found them right away. They were easy to find. They stood out conspicuously from the rest of the ragged crowd. They had a small table to themselves. That was a feat in itself in this place. There were two of them. Both men, both young. And yet the two of them were stag; they had no women with them. That was even more of a feat. But they must have wanted it that way, for it to be that way. They must have used a flyswatter, when they’d first come in.

One of them had on a striped jersey, with short sleeves. What was called a Basque shirt. That and a rakish yachting cap. But he wasn’t just some oiler or merchant mariner spruced up. The three-figure gold watch-bracelet on his wrist did away with that notion. He had a gold cigarette-case split open on the table in front of him, both leaves thin as the cutting-edge of an adze. He had champagne in his glass; he wasn’t drinking it, just leasing the table with it. He was just being informal. Just slumming.

His tablemate had on the dark trousers and light mess-jacket of tropical evening dress. Broadway musical comedy version, not what was customary down here. Complete even to a cummerbund. He was about thirty, a very beat thirty, a thirty that showed hard wear.

He raised his glass toward her, and tried to salute her. He only saluted the back of her heel, as it lifted itself up off the topmost step and whisked from sight. Jones liked that; it was as though she’d given him a kick in his champagne glass.

He closed the dressing-room door after him and dumped out the take. “This was in it just now,” he told her. He scraped the rubber band off, unrolled the wad, and showed her. Five fives. Twenty-five dollars, American. “From those two fellows in the costume-party get-up. Did you see them?”

“I don’t see anyone,” she said.

It didn’t reassure him any. They had seen her.

“They’re loaded, and we’re broke. That still makes it bad taste. They’re only showing us that they’re loaded and we’re broke.”

“We’re not broke,” she said gently. “We have two hundred sixty-five dollars that we’ve worked for, all expenses taken out, and two weeks from Friday we can leave here.”

“Now a note will come to the door, asking you to come down to their table and join them.”

“Which will be refused—”

The knock had already sounded before she quite got to the period.

Even he had to laugh a little.

He went over and opened the door.

“Dispense, Señor. Los dos Caballeros—”

“We know; we saw them,” he cut the waiter off.

The card said Hugh Fontaine, engraved. And then, “Would like you to be his table-guest” had been added.

“That burn,” he said savagely. “I’ve heard of him. Alcohol and oil oozing out at every pore. With a train of girls carrying blotters following him around everywhere, doing their best to mop him dry.” He slanted the card to tearing angle.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ll handle it.”

She took the card, a pencil from the waiter, and wrote five words, three of them underlined. “Please excuse Mrs. Maxwell Jones.”

“Shall we send the money back?” she asked him.

“No, that would just be returning bad taste in kind.” He handed the entire twenty-five to the waiter. “Tell the gentlemen you’ve been tipped. Don’t accept anything more from them now, Ramon.”

“That’s the only way to live,” she said gratefully, when he reclosed the door and turned back to her, “That’s still the only way to live. The way we always have. The grand gesture. Way up, or way down. Never just middling, flat.”

She came over and kissed him.

“And I love you for the way you are. Stay the way you are. Be broke if you have to, but don’t give up the grand gesture.”

“Through with your makeup? Shall we go?”

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go home and go to sleep. We’re just two working people, and we’ve finished work for tonight.”

It hadn’t been the right technique. They were there again the next night; same table, same gold cigarette-case, same snubbed champagne.

They didn’t throw any money this time; at least they’d gotten that much through their heads.

He liked that even less. At least you can do something about money; give it back, or tear it up, or throw it away. They were minding their own business. And the trouble was, their business was her.

One of the coins rolled too near their table, and he deliberately passed it up, wouldn’t go after it; wouldn’t bend down that close to their feet and pick something up from the floor. He was half hoping one of them would do it for him, and then he’d have a reason for smashing him in the face.

One foot started out toward the coin, to push it closer over within his reach. Another foot came down heavily on top the first, and pinned it where it was.

The face that was doing the wincing, when he glanced up, was that of the wearer of the Basque shirt. That placed Fontaine for him. The other was just a stooge.

They applauded till their hands smoked, Fontaine and stooge.

He closed the door. “They were there again.”

“I didn’t see them the first time, so how would I know them the second?” She was only trying to make him feel good; he knew that.

The knock made even faster time than the night before; it hit in about three-and-a-half minutes.

“Station break,” he said bitterly, and opened the door as if he were wringing the neck of the knob.

This time it was Almagorda in person, and pop-eyed with the importance of his tidings.

“I have a special invitation for the senorita — and for you too senor-for to come downstair’ to private party.” He made criss-cross motions with excited palms. “Just special party for you alone. Is nobody else going to be there.”

“How chummy,” she murmured in the background, swabbing her face.

“Not tonight, Joe,” Jones said with deadly calm. “That’s the message. ‘Some other night, maybe, but not tonight, Joe.’ You won’t understand it, but maybe they will. Now kill the draft.”

“But you don’t onderstan. Luke.” He winnowed through a sheaf of green bills. “He have, how you say, rent my whole place for rest of night. Is shot or the doors. I have to get or and say to everyone, Place is closing now. It has been taken over for private party.”

Jones gave him foot-instructions, as if he were a stage-manager rehearsing a hoofer. “Back a little with that one the left. That’s it. Now the other one, even them up. He shot the door home and the interview had been cut short.

“He’s a little bit corny, isn’t he?” he suggested. “They used to do that back in the Floradora period, didn’t they? Rent out the whole place for the evening—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t take it personally,” she said lightly. “Maybe the man’s interested in real estate.”

The second knock was very polite, unassuming. If a knock can be called charming, it was a charming knock. It’s your door, and you don’t have to open it; but I’d appreciate it if you would.

“What’s that,” he asked her, “a butterfly with velvet bumpers?”

“It seems Mr. Fontaine can’t take no for an answer.”

He went ahead and opened it, with one more offside commentary. “‘High life behind the scenes at the La Perla Café,’ or ‘Her Big Moment.’” Still, that knock would have opened almost any door.

The old young man of thirty in the Basque shirt was standing there. At close range his face was even more wizened than it had seemed downstairs. He must have been born wrinkled, thought Jones. He was holding the yachting cap deferentially upended against his stomach.

“Will you let me introduce myself?” he said. Strictly to Jones, as though she weren’t there at all, to make it all the more difficult to resent. How can you refuse to let a man give you his name, anyway? What is more respectful than that?

“I’m Hugh Fontaine, Mr. Jones, and I came up to tell you how very much I enjoyed watching your work just now. Am I being too annoying?”

They were performers, after all. He had them there. Maybe they both knew he had them, but he had them just the same. It was no slap in the face, it was no kick in the shins.

No answer from Jones. “Thank you,” restrainedly, from her.

He wouldn’t get out of the doorway. And he hadn’t done anything to warrant closing the door in his face.

“We were just going home,” said Jones. Then he added, stingily, “My wife, Mrs. Jones.”

“Good evening,” he said, with enough unction to have lubricated even Jones’ stiff neck.

“Good evening.”

And now they couldn’t shut the door in his face; they’d met him. They still didn’t ask him in; there was only one chair, anyway, and she was on it.

“I couldn’t persuade the two of you to join us downstairs?”

She answered for them. “I’m sorry, Mr. Fontaine, we’ve already given the performance. We never give more than one performance a night in this heat.”

He was horrified. “Oh, but you don’t understand. What did that fat manager do, garble my message? I’m asking you to join us as my guests.”

They neither of them answered immediately.

He went on without waiting. “Well, I’ll put my cards on the table. I have a business proposition I’d like to offer you. What I’d really like is to discuss a business proposition with you.”

“A business proposition?” Jones said warily.

She was ready to go now. She came over and stood with the two of them in the doorway.

“You see, my yacht, the Myrmidon, is anchored right out there. I’m down here with a party of friends on a cruise, and I’m giving a big party on board, a blow-out, on Friday night next. Now, do you think I could persuade you...?” He let the rest of it trail off, feeling his way. “To exhibit that dance,” she supplied, brittlely.

“I don’t think we’re interested,” Jones said tersely. “Yes, but you’re doing it here, aren’t you?”

“It’s riot quite the same thing. Not in the original version. And the, the type of audience we get here, doesn’t know what it is, isn’t aware of what they’re seeing. It’s just another cabaret dance, to most of them.”

He was used to getting his own way. “Look, the fee is no object. I want this party to be a success—”

“Most of yours are, Mr. Fontaine,” she said sweetly. “We’ve read about them so often — afterward.”

He refused to take offense. “No, nothing like that. As a matter of fact, most of those things they write about are exaggerated. These feature-writers don’t know what else to write about, so to turn out copy they always come back to me. ‘Old Reliable.’ I’m far more sinned against than sinning, believe me that’s the truth of it.”

“But anyway,” she smiled, turning away to go on down the stairs, “the word ‘sin’ is implicated, one way or another.”

Jones went after her, with a compressed “Nightfontaine” that made one word of it. Like a tight-wadded spitball thrown at him.

Fontaine trailed downstairs behind them, with the air of someone who has received a temporary setback but has by no means given up his purpose altogether.

She had inadvertently halted for a moment, in surprise. “So this is what it looks like with its crowd off.”

He took advantage of that to reform the little group of three they had just now consisted of upstairs. So that he was still with them, in spite of themselves.

His tablemate, the only remaining person in the place, had risen and posted himself behind one of the chairs with headwaiter-etiquette, ready to move it out for her.

Fontaine shook his head to him with a wan smile. “Mrs. Jones doesn’t like me,” he said. “She’s given herself every opportunity of forming an unbiased opinion — all of a minute, minute and a half — and I just don’t rate. Put the chair back, Steve. We’ll have to drink our little toast to her by ourselves. We’ll mean it just as sincerely, but we’ll have to do it without her.”

She gave Jones an expressive look, as if to say “You tell me how to get out of this, if you know a way!”

“You know every grip and hold, don’t you?” she said to Fontaine with a sort of mellowing coldness, if the combination is to be imagined. “Who trained you, Strangler Lewis? You don’t care how you do it, just so long as you pin them down.”

“I’m a gentleman,” he protested, with a wry grimace of amusement that somehow took the corn out of it. “I wouldn’t dream of pinning you down—”

“Well, I’m a gentleman too.” she said firmly, “and you have pinned me down.” She went over and accepted the seat.

“And I’m not a gentleman,” said Jones bluntly, “so I’ll sit in on this to make sure you are a gentleman.”

The two men laughed with insincere uproariousness at this.

When strangers laugh at your jokes, Jones told himself, keep your eye on them.

“Mrs. Jones, this is Captain Randall, my skipper.” He’d snapped his fingers offside while he was making the introduction, and there was champagne waiting there before he’d finished it. Just like that.

“Homage to a very lovely lady,” he said, rising with filled glass.

“You’d better be more specific,” she suggested. “You probably know so many, Mr. Fontaine.”

“I only know one tonight,” he said gallantly.

“Big lie or a short memory,” she said mercilessly.

“We both enjoyed your performance so much—” Randall started to say to her, trying to distract her attention.

He failed. “No,” she protested suddenly. “Now wait a minute, Mr. Fontaine. What is that you’re writing?”

He was scribbling with a fountain pen along a pale-blue oblong on the table before him, that had come out of a check-folder.

“It’s not for you,” he lied smoothly. “Look, I’ll slip it under the bottom of my glass when I’m finished, like this, and let it stay there. Now, that isn’t anywhere near you, is it? I always write checks like this, when I’m sitting at a table. The two things seem to go together.”

“And do you also always wink to Mr. Randall on the side, while you’re doing it, like you did this time? ‘Ten thousand dollars,’” she read from it, upside down. “The cover charge here at La Perla, no doubt.”

Back in their own room Jones said to her, “You get his angle, don’t you?”

“Something more than just wanting me to dance?”

“What does he really care about the dance itself. He’s a betting man. He’s known all over the world for his crazy bets. He’ll bet on which of two clouds hits the sun first. On which of two raindrops beats the other down a windowpane. On two matchsticks burning all the way down to their ends. His whole life’s one long bet.”

“And now on someone dying.” She smiled bleakly.

“His check’s in my handbag right now,” she said. “I’m not supposed to know I brought it home with me. I saw him when he slipped it in. The other one was trying to glass reflected his hand, dipping in and out. A very swollen hand, but I could make out what it was doing.” She handed it to him. “Open it and see if I’m not right.”

He opened it. Took it out, glanced at it. “Ten thousand,” he said. “Why didn’t you sing out?”

“He would have only kept on insisting, and I was getting tired of it. There’s nothing final about it’s being in there. We can either keep it or we can tear it up.”

He gave it a little swirl around on the tabletop and left it lying there. “What do we do, tear it up? Or swallow our pride?”

“How much pride can you swallow?”

“You’re the one dances, you’re the one decides.” He turned away, flung off his necktie, swung it like a lariat around a closet-door hook. He turned back again presently. It was no longer in sight. “Where is it?” he asked.

She laughed at her own phrase. “It’s in the bag.”

4

Fontaine’s private motor-launch was waiting for them at the landing, complete with saluting deck-officer, when they got out of the taxi at the waterfront.

“Transportation too,” Jones murmured. “Am I supposed to salute him back? I don’t know the regulations on yachts. Never having owned one.”

She said, as they sat down together in the stem, “Who wants a yacht?”

They took off with a sound like a jet of seltzer leaving a siphon, rocking a little at first, then steadying almost to the feel of motionlessness.

The water was paved with illusionary floating blocks of scarlet, ruby, green and yellow and white, like multicolored tiles awash, from the lights of all the craft anchored about in the bay. The launch seemed to slash its way through them, leaving a black wake in this case instead of a white one. Then the phantom mosaics coalesced again behind it, closed their ranks, scarlet, ruby, green, yellow, white. They made it like confetti-colored water.

His yacht was one of the furthest out of all, and it was like a little self-contained blob of sunrise coming up out of the dark water, it glowed so. It throbbed and vibrated, and when they got in close, with a wide, scythe-like sweep, the throbbing became dance-music. An orchestra was playing “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think,” and the restless shadows of dancers could be seen, upside down, milling around on the underside of the white canopy that stretched across the stern.

“Mr. Fontaine’s theme song,” she observed wryly.

Fontaine came to greet them at the head of the Jacob’s ladder. For her he had both hands, for Jones just a superficial nod.

“Now you’re here the night will really begin.” He must have said it a thousand times before, she supposed, on a thousand other nights, at a thousand other parties, it came out so glibly.

“This way. Let me show you.” He guided her with an arm about her waist. He didn’t leave it there continuously; just started her off with it, then took it away, then brought it back again once or twice to keep her going in the right direction, then let it slip off again. But her waist was on its mind.

Jones followed close behind them, watching its ups and downs with a fairly unsympathetic eye.

“I’ve had the after deck cleared for your performance. There, where you see them dancing right now. We’ll bring out chairs in a little while and seat them. And I thought, roll back the canopy, so that the spotlight can reach you from the deck-roof above. Will that be all right? You don’t mind dancing under the open sky?”

“I think it will be very effective. You can’t wire stars like that to a roof or ceiling, for any amount of money.”

“I got the exact color slide for you that you specified. I couldn’t get one here in the Zone, so I had to have it flown down from the States. On loan; it has to be back Monday.”

He’d taken them down below, and into a stateroom. Jones still the rearguard.

He took champagne from a gilt bucket and poised it interrogatively over goblets ranged at the ready.

“I never drink before I dance,” she refused with a smile.

His interrogation of Jones was just an inquiring hitch of the head, as though this postscript bored him.

“Nup,” Jones said, and made his voice sound equally bored.

Fontaine drank a little himself, just as a token to toast them with. “To a knockout,” he said.

“Thank you. We’ll try not to disappoint.”

He looked around. “I think you’ll find everything— Would you like a maid? I have one for the ladies.”

“I can manage faster alone.”

He went to the door. Then he came partially forward again. He seemed to want to say something further.

“You are... you are — going to do that thing of yours, aren’t you?”

“What thing?” she said, intentionally obtuse.

“I mean, you are going to do the real one, the one that’s loaded — not spike it in any way.”

“It’s pretty grim for a shipboard party,” she pointed out.

“But that’s the whole purpose of my — inviting you.”

“You don’t have to say ‘inviting.’ ‘Hiring.’”

“Inviting with pay,” compromised Jones sardonically.

“That’s for you to decide, Mr. Fontaine. You’re giving the party.”

He clenched his fist. “Then I want it with the lid off! Give it the works. Go to town on it.”

“You’re not afraid — something may happen?” she smiled.

His eyes glittered at her for a moment, in a look that was almost feverish. “I’m afraid — something may not,” he said, quietly but distinctly.

She stared at Jones, after he’d gone.

“Did you hear that?”

“I told you he was betting on it,” he said. “He’ll bet on anything that comes along; he’s well-known for that. Horses, fighters, dogs — now this. If you ask me, I think the guy’s completely off his rocker. Not just peculiar, completely batty.”

“What was he trying to do, fix me ahead of time?”

“Just protect his bets, I suppose, by making sure you’d dance on the up and up.”

She practically wrenched her dress off her shoulder, as she began to get ready.

“That make you sore?”

“No,” she replied resentfully. “But it does make me feel a little bit like something under a blanket being fed lumps of sugar.”

There was a knock on the door. Jones opened it.

A statuesque blonde all in white walked in past him and closed it behind her. She lowered a wisp of tulle from her hair, said: “Good evening, I’m Constance Ryan. You’re the young lady who — knocks them dead, I believe.”

“I try not to,” Mari said neutrally.

“Could I have a word with you alone?” Her eyes flicked at Jones, then back again.

“He’s my husband.”

She was amiably patronizing. Like when you go down to visit the steerage, or something. “Oh, I didn’t know you were man and wife.”

“Yes, we — saw others doing it, so we thought we’d copy them and do it ourselves.”

Miss Ryan was too intent on her own purpose to be even aware she’d been pricked. “Can you control it? It doesn’t run away with you — does it?” she asked aridly.

Jones had gone over to the stateroom-window to make himself unobtrusive, was smoking out through it.

“Our being man and wife?” Mari misunderstood sweetly.

“You’re playing with me,” said the blonde impatiently.

“Oh, the dance,” corrected Mari. “I couldn’t say. I honestly couldn’t say, because I’m not sure myself. Is that what you wanted to know, Miss Ryan?”

“You could say!” snapped the blonde.

“Really, you’re extremely kind to take this much interest,” Mari said gratefully. “It’s just in the interests of research, I guess.”

The blonde held her wrist out.

“How do you like my bracelet?” she said abruptly.

“I hadn’t noticed it until now.”

“Well-notice it.”

“It’s noticed,” notified Mari, cutting it dead with one swift movement of the eyes.

“You keep it as security,” the blonde said, starting to take it off. “After the dance, you get five thousand.”

“Five thousand what, for what?”

Miss Ryan gave her tongue a castanet-like snap of exasperation. “Let’s cut out this kindergarten routine. You’re of age. You’ve been around longer than that. No sense making any bones about it. I have a bet of twenty-five thousand on the dance — not to show. I’m willing to give you five, just so I can collect the other twenty.”

“I don’t play that way,” Mari told her, almost roughly. The blonde drew a sharp breath. “You’re kind of difficult to talk to, aren’t you?”

“Very. Then why not stop trying, that’s all you have to do. It would suit me fine.”

The blonde gave her bracelet a discarded shove back higher up on her arm. “Is there anything else I’ve got you like?” she persisted desperately.

“Your nerve.”

“Get out, lady,” Jones suddenly ordered, and went over and held the door open for her.

It was a difficult audience to dance to. Some were on deck-chairs and salon-chairs brought forward for the purpose, some were down at floor level, actually seated on the deck itself, and by far the greater number, most of them men, were standing up. Those who were unattached to any particular spot kept moving about freely, too freely. Hands kept going into breast-or back-pockets, and bets were being exchanged all over the place. In front of one of the ship’s officers there was actually a line of three or four, waiting their turn single file, as at a ticket-window.

She was standing at the back of the crowd, trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible while she waited for her cue.

Two girls came wavering by, the worse for wear. One had a stray wisp of hair dangling down over her eye, and kept blowing up at it to try to get it out of the way. They stared, first at her, then inquiringly at one another.

“That her?” one said in a highball laryngitis.

“Must be,” said the other.

“I think I better double up on my parlay. She looks to me like she could.”

“Where you going to get the money from?”

“Man,” was the explicit answer. “Same one as before. You want to come in on it with me?”

“Neh, got men of my own I haven’t even used yet.”

They went back to wherever it was they’d just come from, leaving a distinct trace on the air as though a spirit lamp had just been swung all around, then emptied out bodily on the deck.

Fontaine was going forward now to introduce her. The band gave him a fanfare for attention.

Miss Ryan was nowhere in sight.

The cue had to be relayed. She caught Max’s eye and nodded. He in turn caught the band leader’s eye and nodded. The percussion sounded an opening chord. She started forward.

It was a ridiculous way to enter. She came out at a quick little run, to bridge the awkward preliminary, circled to face them, and stood still.

They quieted a little. Just momentary curiosity.

The rest was the performance.

Miss Ryan had reappeared in the audience. She was standing there at Fontaine’s elbow, brimming glass of champagne poised low almost at her hip. His arms were bent at chest-level; he was struggling with something held between his two clasped hands. Something he was trying to force open or pry apart. She couldn’t tell what it was. A cigarette-case, a balky lighter, it could have been anything.

Faces and lanterns and thin white deck-stanchions in a receding row that were like chalk-lines against the licorice-black night, all started to quiver and wave and ooze, like images seen through heat-refraction. But that was because she was writhing, herself.

Then the outlines coalesced once more, like patches of oil running together, and everything was sharply etched, dry-point etched. Miss Ryan was just raising her champagne-glass to her lips. Fontaine’s hands were gone now, back inside his pockets.

Mari veered toward her suddenly, swiped circularly at the glass. Miss Ryan was holding her hand out empty, where the glass had just been, and the deck was sprinkled with rhinestones.

She stared first, blankly, then glowered.

The dance had come to a halt. The music trailed to a stop after it.

“He put something in that!” Mari cried. “I saw him.”

Miss Ryan glanced at him, as if dazed, then back at her again.

“You fool!” Mari exclaimed. “Don’t believe me then, if you don’t want to. Why would I tell you so?”

“The bet,” Miss Ryan whispered, as if to herself. She swung her head around to him suddenly. “Is that how you win your bets, Hugh?”

Without answering, he strode to the rail and threw something over it. Something that glinted metallically for an instant, the way a match-box or small pill-box would have. He was as matter-of-fact about it as if it were the most harmless gesture in the world.

“Do I need the money that badly?” he said, coming back to her.

“No, it isn’t the money,” she agreed bitterly. “It’s the idea of losing the bet. I know you, you wouldn’t stop at anything. It’s not just the bet with me, you know. Almost everyone on the ship had put something down on the dance — and you were the only one out of all of us that was betting the other way, that it would strike somebody down.”

He shrugged. “It was just a gag, anyway. It wasn’t anything that would have hurt you. Just knockout drops.”

“Thanks just the same,” she murmured, beginning to cry into her two hands. “That’s something I’ll never be certain about, from now on.”

Mari pushed on, her eyes averted, trying to get through the crowd to where Max was. Fontaine was suddenly standing in her way. His eyes were like pools of poison. As she stared into them, almost hypnotized, she knew for a certainty that he was deranged, whether others could tell it about him or not.

His shoulder twitched, and there was a stinging impact on Mari’s cheek.

“Keep out of things that don’t concern you! You dime-a-dozen cooch-dancer!”

It took her a moment or two to realize she’d been slapped. And by then Max had fought his way through to them. He jerked Fontaine around toward him by the back of the collar, and swung from below up, in a pulverizing haymaker. Fontaine’s head went over, his concussion-clamped teeth appearing to grin horribly, and he hit the deck with a terrible sliding sort of fall as though he were being dragged along it. And lay still, completely out for a moment.

“Max,” she pleaded. “Max. For God’s sake, get me out of here!”

He put his arm shelteringly around her, and hurried her over to the head of the ladder, through a wide path the crowd made for them, out of newborn respect for his prowess. She herself had never realized he could hit so forcefully, he was so easy-going most of the time.

The escort-officer didn’t raise a hand to him as they brushed by him. Maybe it was a blow he’d dreamed of giving, himself, many a long year.

Behind them, as if on cue, the band suddenly blared out with “Toot Toot Tootsie, Goo’bye,” to drown out the din and commotion that had started in.

5

They stood there alone on the little stone quay where the launch had deposited them. The wake of the launch, on its way back to the yacht now, made a sound like sand being poured into a tin bucket; its little stern-light bobbed and hobbled like a glistening red golf ball streaking through a black rough. Then dropped into some unsuspected hole along the course.

She didn’t make a move to go on from there; so he didn’t press her, let her be. Just stood there at her side, with his arm at her waist. The dank before-dawn breeze licking in from the harbor played with her dress; made it seem like something tattered, though it was whole.

“This is the end of something or other, Max. We can’t go any further than this.”

“We didn’t do anything,” he said sturdily. “What did we do?”

But all she said, again, was, “This is the end of something or other, Max.”

“Shall we go back to the room?”

She nodded slowly. “A woman is supposed to go indoors at night. And I have no other place to go to.”

She saw him looking around to try to sight a taxi. “Let’s walk,” she said. “It isn’t so terribly far.”

They walked along together slowly. They were like two lovers, from the back. His arm about her, her head against the turn of his shoulder. But from the front, they were like two lost people, sightless eyes staring ahead.

“You’re never going to dance again at La Perla.”

“No,” she agreed dispiritedly. “I’m never going to dance again at La Perla. You knew I was just thinking that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I could tell.”

“So close,” she murmured, “that now we can even read one another’s thoughts without a word between us.”

“That’s marriage. We’re married in every way. We’re one. And it has nothing to do with a ring, or the words from a book.”

“Then you do share my fear, my certainty that there’s something wrong.”

“There is something wrong,” he agreed reluctantly. She caught him fiercely by the arm, pressing both her hands to it at once, as if to draw it out of him in that way.

“Let’s admit it. Let’s face it. We’re alone together. It’s night. There’s no one can hear us. Oh, let’s come out with it. It isn’t La Perla. It wasn’t that souse-party on the yacht tonight. Let’s name it. Let’s pin it down. Let’s say it out loud to each other.”

And then she drew in breath deeply. And she said it into his face, turning her own up toward it to do so.

“It’s the dance.”

He bowed his head. And that was agreement.

“It’s always been the dance.”

His head was still bowed.

“It’s ruined our lives. First it shot us way up. Then it dragged us way down.”

Their footsteps, in the quiet of the night, were like an underscoring to this monologue of despair.

Only she spoke. He didn’t have to, for she was speaking for the two of them. Finding the words that were in his heart as well.

They reached the boarding house.

They put the light on in their room, closing the shutters to forestall winged things.

She didn’t watch what he was doing, he didn’t watch what she was. And yet they never had been so aware of one another before; everything they did, was thinking of the other.

He looked finally, and she was on the bed. Still in the dress she’d come away from the party in. She was leaning over sidewise on it, as if in indolence, one arm cross-bent beneath her; and yet outlining her indolence, pulsing from it, was a tautness.

Her eyes had been waiting for him to turn her way. He’d never seen them so intense before. They fastened on his and held them, as if they were vises edged with lashes.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about. I think you already know, without hearing it. Look how rigid your neck is suddenly, you can’t move it. Look how big the black pits in the middle of your eyes have grown, until they fill nearly the whole pupil. Look how still you are standing all at once.”

“Because you’re speaking to me.”

“No. Because your heart already knows what I am going to say. Before I have even said it.”

“Tomorrow you’ll tell me.”

“No, I’ll tell you now. Now. It has to be now. Here. In the middle of the night.”

“Then tell me,” he capitulated.

She shook her head. “This isn’t a thing you talk about over cigarettes. Put it away.”

She told him the long way around, lolling there at ease, eyes thoughtfully far off in space somewhere.

“There may be something to it, there may not. You know what I’m talking about now, don’t you?”

“It,” he said crushedly.

“I’m going to know, before I drop it once and for all. That way it can never hurt us again. Will you take a chance with me?”

His face was getting paler. But very slowly, not with a sudden rush. Long-term fright, deep within you, long within you; not the swift, superficial kind, outside.

“For the sake of our love, for the sake of our happiness, for whatever future there still is left for us? Will you risk it with me?”

His tongue was frightened too. Too frightened to answer.

“Each time it’s happened in the crowd around me, disguising itself with a ‘might have been’ or a ‘might not.’ I don’t have to remind you, I don’t have to go over our little obituary list, so short, so terrible. The colored man who did Mort’s shoes, his heart had been weak from childhood, from living in a Harlem tenement. The Italian in Milan, his blood pressure was up, he ate too heavily, he’d been quarrelling violently with his daughters right as he ate his meals, for weeks and weeks before. The man in Montreal, he’d been in a Jap prison camp for over two years.

“Maybe they would have all died, at those exact moments, on those same nights, even if they’d been at home reading a book. Even if they’d been asleep, in bed.

“It’s always had its alibi. It’s always had a dozen, or fifty, or a hundred people around, to safely cover up for it. Now it’s not going to get away with it any more.

“I’ve never put it to the real test. I’ve never danced it when there was no one else around but me. All alone with it in a locked room. No one else there for it to strike. No one else there to be struck.”

“No-Mari!”

“That’s what I’m going to do now. And that’s what you’re going to let me do.”

“No! For God’s sake, don’t! Let it alone. Hasn’t it done enough to us—”

“Every word that comes from your mouth only proves that in your heart you do believe it’s deadly, you are afraid of it. You may not know this yourself, Max, but your whole reaction gives it away. We’re both living with that, that buried fear. It is a real snake after all, and not a myth; a snake that has coiled itself around our hearts and is crushing them, and gnawing steadily with poisoned bites. And now I’m going to pull its fangs.”

She started to get up slowly from the bed. And as she did so, he drew warily back a step or two, without noticing it himself. Frightened, not of her, but of the purpose she was carrying in her.

“You’re going to go outside this room. You’re going to leave me alone in it, with not another human being. I’m going to lock the door and take the key out of it. There’s not going to be another living thing inside here but me — for it to strike, if it does strike.”

Those black pits in the centers of his eyes grew larger still, until they’d swallowed up the whole pupil around them. That was the only signal of his tension, and he didn’t know he was giving it.

“I’m going to put a record on that little player we have over there in the corner. And I’m going to dance it as I’ve never danced it before. As you’ve never seen me dance it yet. With all the stops out. As they taught me to dance it in the temple; when it hadn’t become an entertainment, when it was still a prayer. With all the things in it that I’ve left out ever since.”

He kept saying no, but not with his voice; just with his head, and his soundlessly pronouncing lips.

“And when it’s done, if I’m alive, I’m going to put the key back in the door, and open it, and come out to you. And we’re never going to be afraid again, you and I. The shadow will lift. The strangeness will go. We’ll be as others, you and I. We may be poor, we may be rich; we may be good, we may be bad; we may be happy, we may be miserable; but we’ll never again be different from all the rest.”

“We’re not different now; we breathe, we speak, we eat, we love, we’re together. Oh, let’s leave it that way; don’t let’s crowd it, don’t let’s monkey around.”

“You see, you do. You do believe. Every protest you make says it for you. Says just the opposite of what you’re trying to make it say.”

“No, I don’t believe, I don’t. There isn’t anything to believe in.”

“Those drops of wet on your forehead, they believe, though. What brought them out, then, if there isn’t anything to believe in? What made them come? Ah, Max, you don’t believe; but your skin does, your pores do. And you’re inside that skin, so which one is really you?”

“But why go out of your way, why not let well enough alone, why invite— All you have to do is just not ever dance it again, keep away from it — and... and nothing will happen, it’ll let us alone. Why turn yourself into some sort of a human lightning-conductor?”

“But if there is no lightning there to strike, then the conductor is safe. And that’s what we’re trying to prove.”

She opened the door, and reached out for his hand, and tried to draw him toward it, so that he would go through.

“How long does it take me? Ten minutes. And then you won’t be afraid any more. I won’t have to see your eyes as they are now, won’t have to see that look in them any more. Don’t try to change them; that’s the one thing you can’t tell a lie with, the eyes.”

“Let me go on being afraid then. Don’t do this. It’s late, you’re tired, we’re both disheartened. Lie down and get some sleep; I’ll sit here by you, watch over you, I’ll keep the blues off you. Tomorrow I’ll take you away from here.”

“But tonight,” she insisted, “I’m auditioning. For life — or death.”

She had him backed to the open doorway now. She raised her arms past his shoulders and twined them caressingly about the back of his neck.

“Kiss me for a little while. Just so long for five or ten minutes, that’s all. Go downstairs and smoke a cigarette on the steps, like a fellow does when he’s calling for his girl and she’s not quite ready yet to go out with him. Or go down to that little place on the corner and have a drink; just one, and then come back again.”

Their lips met as though they’d never met before; as though they’d just found out what a kiss was, after longing for one another all their lives through.

She drew back slowly within the closing door-gap.

“Let me have another,” he said hauntedly. “Just one more.”

“In a minute from now,” she promised, as the narrowing door shaded his face, dimmed it, like time, like death; “as I reopen this door. Don’t be afraid, dear, don’t be afraid. I’ll be right out.”

The last note, the signature note, the throb of a drumbeat, elongated, thinned away, like a reluctant bubble clinging to the downturned mouth of a retort; then severed itself, faded, and there were no more. The needle-arm kept traveling around and endlessly around trapped in the muted groove at the end of the record, and the only sound was like dried fall leaves scraping against each other and sighing on an eddy of seasonal death. With over and over a dessicated stem snapping at the end of their sigh. Not breaking clean, just lightly snapping.

She lay inert on the floor, face down. Her flickering wrist had just fallen still atop her own head. Nothing about her moved. The dance was done. For the last of all times, the dance was done.

The needle-arm was wearying now. It struggled and it strove against the slowly ebbing record. Suddenly it fell over aslant, and had stopped. Another kind of death, a smaller one, over there on the turntable.

Silence and stillness.

Heartbeats can’t move. Thoughts can’t be heard.

But each heartbeat said, I live; I live; I live. And each heartbeat was the living testimony to its own truthful claim. And her thoughts said, timid, smothered: I’ve won. It was a lie, it was nothing. It hasn’t harmed me. It wasn’t there to harm me. Now I can feel fear going slowly away, emptying out at each pore, like night-mist, and happiness creeping on, like morning light across the floor. But lie still awhile yet, don’t make a premature move, give them time to fully change places.

Suddenly motion, the antithesis to death. Motion in a triumphant swirl. She was on her knees now, alone there in the room. Upper body straining upward, exultant, ecstatic. Her eyes were wet and beaming.

Ah, thank you, thank you, for my life and for his.

The knob on the door was turning, then turning back again. Without sound, in breathless question. Turning, then turning back again. He must be standing there close, right up against it. Too fearful to knock at it with his hand. Too unsure to call to her. Afraid if he called, there might be no answer. The turning and counterturning knob just kept pleading to her silently.

She went across to the door on her knees. Capable of rising, but in too great a hurry to do so. Traveled on her knees, “walked” on the points of them, arms triumphantly outstretched toward the door and him.

“I’m coming. Darling, can you hear me? I’m coming. I’m still in here. I’m almost there — I’m there!”

Then at the door rose to the full height she’d denied herself before, and face close against it, could hear the sound of his breathing just on the other side. His frightened, pleading breathing just on the other side. Breaths as close as the breaths that escort a kiss to its resting place.

“Max, Max, can you hear me? I’m right here on the other side. It’s over, it’s through, I’m opening the door. Answer me, Max. Tell me you hear me. It takes such a long time to get a key in—”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m all right. Don’t you hear me. It was a lie, it wasn’t true, it’s gone. Get your arms ready, I’m coming into them—”

The door-seam parted narrowly and they looked at one another. The eyes, the mirrors of the soul.

His arms were held out toward her, to claim her. She threw the door out of the way, cast it aside as though it were some loose, unattached plank or panel encumbering her. The opening was wide now, very wide, full width. Wide enough for life to come back in through, wide enough for death to scurry out through, only seeking to make its own escape from a place where it had been worsted.

She flung herself into his arms, and they claimed and held her.

Their kiss was like an inchoate, stammering attempt to express pure flame by faltering word of mouth. Transcribe ecstasy into a clay hieroglyph.

“We’ve won. We’ve won. We start over. Happiness begins—”

His arms could not maintain themselves. As though her shoulders, her sides, were oiled, were traced with some unguent, they slipped down, encircling her in a noose, a bracelet, a slipknot, of love. And with them, down went his head. Too low to kiss her any more, or for her to kiss.

To her breast at first, as if in a deep hungry devotion, or in sorrow, or in search of solace. Then to her waist, sodden, or like a penitent.

The surfacing of the floor thudded out dolorously, something turned lazily over upon it and settled to rest, and his face lay upturned now, across her two feet.

His eyes were open but they didn’t see her any more.

His face was turned upon her but it didn’t know her any. And before she had made the first fruitless move to sink down beside him, she knew that he was dead.