Tours of the Black Clock

100

BLAINE DIDN’T ACTUALLY LIVE in this particular hotel room; he’d taken it only some time after the client first hired him to follow and watch Dania, and when Dania then moved in with Ingrid from her place uptown near where Blaine left her on Riverside Drive wrapped in his coat one night. That was the night he no longer worked for the client, that was the night the client’s case became a different sort of case. The client had said that night that none of what happened made sense since Dania wasn’t beautiful, but it was pretty obvious to Blaine that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He’d seen her dance many times. He discovered that every time she danced something terrible happened, something terrible to slow aging men like himself. He didn’t understand what the dance meant, the only dancing he’d ever seen before was the kind in clubs and movies. No more than Joaquin Young, who was smarter and more sophisticated than Blaine, was Blaine able to consciously understand how she danced to the resurrection of his memories and certain possibilities precluded forever; he hadn’t begun to be even more than dimly aware that there were possibilities until long after he’d allowed them to slip away. Blaine was caught to the moment of Dania like the strand of her hair to the wet red of her mouth when the dance finished. He’d been devastated by that first inkling which everyone eventually knows, that there are things which are irrevocable. This moment is the one when one either saves his spirit or watches it die in tandem with his body.

The morning after he’d followed her to the door of his own room, he followed her to work. She was about to turn when he raised his hand and waved; she was relieved to see him. She no longer had the sense of someone following her. When she told him she was a dancer he said the only dancers he knew were in clubs and movies. I don’t dance anymore, she told him. Why, he still wondered, there on the sidewalk outside her bookstore eight hours later, his hands in his coat pockets that were secretly stuffed with newspaper clippings. I used to dance this one dance, she tried to explain in Washington Square, as she moved from the shadow of one tree to the shadow of the next, circling Blaine as he remained in place, his hands in his pockets now black with ink; sometimes he could see her speaking and sometimes he could only hear her. She tried to explain in a way that she understood herself, let alone him. This dance was written especially for me. She paused and went on. There was something dangerous about it; it was written for something dangerous in me. She paused; he couldn’t see her now; and went on. And, uh, I knew it was dangerous, and I loved it. She stepped from the shadow of the tree into one of the lights of the square. She turned to Blaine and he could see her beautiful face more clearly than he’d ever seen it. But then I stopped loving it, she said returning to something of a circle again: it hurt too many people. And when I finished with the dance, I finished with all dances.

I finished with all the dances, she says to herself in the dark, behind the door of Ingrid’s building as she listens to Blaine walk away. She’s been saying it to herself since Washington Square, in the silence of their return home; and now she knows she doesn’t believe it. Now she knows the danger of it still lures her, the depraved druglike thrill of it beckons her on the other side of resolve, and she hasn’t gotten three steps up the stairs toward Ingrid’s flat before she’s turned and, peering surreptitiously out the door, loosed herself back into the night and the street. She looks toward Blaine’s window to make certain he doesn’t see her; it’s still dark, he hasn’t gotten up to the room yet. She walks down the street and turns toward the direction of the theater. Halfway there she hears all their footsteps, not one lover or two but a legion of them. When she comes to the theater she goes around the back and walks up the twelve flights; by the eighth she’s pulling the dress off over her head. By the time she’s in the dark studio before the long window that looks out over Manhattan she’s nude, absolutely alone in the single light that shines from the ceiling. As she begins to dance she’s unaware of Joaquin and Paul; Joaquin and Paul are unaware of each other there, and barely aware of her. They’re mostly aware of their own danger, which they allow themselves to believe, as most men do, has something to do with her. In their approach to her they’re frozen in a way that suggests they’re moving in relation to each other; only when they recognize that relationship, however, does it lapse into something hostile. If she’s aware of the presence of either of them, she’s displayed no recognition; perhaps she loves not being aware of them in the way she loved being loved by a lover she never saw. It’s as though no one could conceivably be worthy of this moment or this danger; circling her own reflection in the mirror she can barely see the forms of Joaquin and Paul in confrontation with each other against the night and the city beyond the window, until they simply take off from her dance, grappling. The shatter of the window cuts off midchord. She stops and for a stunned moment considers that men who were there a moment ago are gone now: there’s nothing in the window but the still Manhattan night rushing in at her.

Blaine did not need to turn on the light in his room to see the clippings. Sitting at the desk, he pulled them from his pockets with his dark grubby fingers and laid them out before him; he’d studied them so many times that now he knew which was which by their shapes. If he turned on the switch and was faced with them in the bald light, he would once again begin to feel the guilt, and then he’d certainly want a drink, and he’d tried hard for some time now not to have a drink. And at this moment he might well have succumbed to his desire for a drink, even in the dark, had he not looked out the window just as Dania was walking up the street. By the time Blaine got down to the street she was already gone. He walked around the neighborhood a quarter of an hour and when he didn’t see her the only place he could think of was where he’d seen her so many times before. In front of the theater he watched the studio window high above him, waiting as discreetly as he knew how until she came back down. He had certainly never seen anything in his life before like the two men who launched themselves out into the night in a spray of glass. Oddly, in their fall, they regained the balletic composure they’d abandoned when interlocked with each other; but Blaine didn’t know much about that. There was no sound as they fell, they didn’t even cry out. In Blaine’s mind perhaps, but only in his mind, was the echo of the glass breaking. He followed them down with his gaze, he watched the way the two men danced down. There was silence for several moments and after they hit there was only the small sound from twelve floors above him, and it took some time for him to recognize it.

She doesn’t look at the window. She kneels on the floor wondering, in the middle of the strange sound that comes from her, what in the turning of the black clock has made her play this role. She finally rises. Walking away from the window, she still doesn’t look, in the same way she didn’t look at either her father in the street or Reimes in the glass of his own window nearly ten years before; she doesn’t look at herself in the mirror, she doesn’t need to look to see the woman who couldn’t resist dancing one last time. She doesn’t take the elevator down. She walks the twelve flights figuring that around the sixth she’ll pull her dress back over her head and around the third she’ll begin to hear the sirens. She hasn’t a clue how to explain it. As it happens she’s all the way to the bottom before the sirens come, and they’re so far away there’s no telling which atrocity in the city they’re answering. She opens the back door of the theater and steps across its threshold to find the tide that’s come in, that rolls into Manhattan in our sleep, leaving the edifices dark and wet and its watermark high above our heads. She dives into the street and the roots of civilization drift past her black cold glide.