Waltz Into Darkness

5

Antoine’s, rushing all alight toward its nightly rendezvous with midnight; glittering, glowing, mirrored; crowded with celebrants, singing with laughter, sizzling with champagne; sparkling with half-a-thousand jeweled gas flames all over its ceilings and walls, in bowers of crystal; the gayest and best-known restaurant on this side of the ocean; the soul of Paris springing enchanted from the Delta mud.

The wedding table stretched lengthwise along one entire side of it, the guests occupying one side only, so that the outer side might be left clear for their view of the rest of the room — and the rest of the room’s view of them.

It was by now eleven and after, a disheveled mass of tortured napkins, sprawled flowers, glassware tinged with repeated refills of red wines and white; champagne and kirsch and little upright thimbles of benedictine for the ladies, no two alike at the same level of consumption. And in the center, dominating the table, a miracle of a cake, snow-white, sugar-spun, rising tier upon tier; badly eaten away by erosion now, so that one entire side was gone. But atop its highest pinnacle, still preserved intact, a little bride and groom in doll form, he in a thumbnail suit of black broadcloth, she with a wisp of tulle streaming from her head.

And opposite them, the two originals, in life-size; sitting shoulder pressed to shoulder, hands secretively clasped below the table, listening to some long-winded speech of eulogy. His head still held upright in polite pretense at attention; her head nestled dreamy-eyed against his shoulder.

He was in suitable evening garb now, and a quick trip to a dress-shop (first at her mention, but then at his insistence) before coming on here had changed her from her costume of arrival to a glorious creation of shimmering white satin, gardenias in her hair and at her throat. On the third finger of her left hand the new gold wedding-band; on the fourth, a solitaire diamond, a husband’s wedding gift to his wife, token of an engagement contract fulfilled rather than of one entered into before the event.

And her eyes, like any new wearer’s, stray over and over to these new adornments. But whether they go more often to the third finger or to the fourth, who is to detect and who is to say?

Flowers, wine, friendly laughing faces, toasts and wishes of wellbeing. The beginning of two lives. Or rather, the ending of two, the beginning of one.

“Shall we slip away now?” he whispers to her. “It’s getting on to twelve.”

“Yes. One more dance together first. Ask them to play again. And then we’ll lose ourselves, without coming back to the table.”

“As soon as Allan finishes speaking,” he assents. “If he’s ever going to.”

Allan Jardine, his business partner, has become so involved in the mazes of a congratulatory speech that he cannot seem to find his way out of it again. It has been going on for ten minutes; ten minutes that seem like forty.

Jardine’s wife, sitting beside him, and present only because of an unguessed but very strenuous domestic tug-of-war, has a dour, disapproving look on her face. Disapproving something, but doing her best to seem amiable, for the sake of her own husband’s business interests. Disapproving the good looks of the bride, or her youth, or perhaps the unorthodox circumstances of the preceding courtship. Or perhaps the fact that Durand has married at all, after having waited so many years already, without waiting a few years more for her own underage daughter to grow up. A favorite project which even her own husband has had no inkling of so far. And now will never have.

Durand took out a small card, wrote on it “Play another waltz.” Then he folded a currency note around it, motioned to a waiter, handed it to him to be taken to the musicians.

Jardine’s wife was surreptitiously tugging at the hem of his coat now, to get him to bring his oration to a conclusion.

“Allan,” she hissed. “Enough is enough. This is a wedding-supper, not a rally.”

“I’m nearly through,” he promised in an aside.

“You’re through now,” was the edict, delivered with a guillotine-like sweep of her hand.

“And so I give you the two newest apprentices to this great and happy profession of marriage. Julia (May I?” with a bow toward her) “and Louis.”

Glasses went up, down again. Jardine at last sat down, mopping his brow. His wife, for her part, fanned herself by hand, holding her mouth open as she did so, as if to get rid of a bad taste.

A chord of music sounded.

Durand and Julia rose; their alacrity would have been highly uncomplimentary if it had not been so understandable.

“Excuse us, we want to dance this together.”

And Durand solemnly winked at Jardine, to show him that he must not expect to see them back at their places again.

A fact which Jardine immediately imparted to his wife behind the back of his hand the moment they had left the table. Whereupon she seemed to disapprove that, too, in addition to everything else that she already disapproved about this affair, and took a prudish, astringent sip from her wineglass with a puckered mouth.

The bows of the violinists all rose together, fell together, and they swept into the waltz from Romeo and Juliet.

They stood facing one another for a moment, he and she, in the usual formal preliminary. Then she bent to pick up the loop of her furbelowed dress, he opened his arms, and she stepped into his embrace.

The waltz began, the swiftest of all paired dances. Around and around and around, then reversing, and around and around once more, the new way. The tables and the faces swept around them, as if they were standing still in the middle of a whirlpool, and the gaslights flashed by on the walls and ceilings like comets.

She held her neck arched, her head slightly back, looking straight upward into his eyes, as if to say “I am in your hands. Do with me as you will. Where you go, I will go. Where you turn, I will follow.”

“Are you happy, Julia?”

“Doesn’t my face tell you?”

“Do you regret coming down to New Orleans now?”

“Is there any other place but New Orleans now?” she asked with charming intensity.

Around and around and around; alone together, though there was a flurry of other skirts all around them.

“Our life together is going to be like this waltz, Julia. As sleek, as smooth, as harmonious. Never a wrong turn, never a jarring note. Together as close as this. One mind, one heart, one body.”

“A waltz for life,” she whispered raptly. “A waltz with wings. A waltz never ending. A waltz in the sunlight, a waltz in azure, in gold — and in spotless white.”

She closed her eyes, as if in ecstasy.

“Here’s the side way out. And no one’s watching.”

They came to a deft, toe-gliding halt, such as skaters use. They separated, and gave a quick look over at the oblivious wedding party table, half-screened from them by the dancers in between. Then he guided her before him, around palms, and a bronze statuette of a nymph, and a fluted column, out of the main dining room and into a scullery passage, redolent of steamy food and loud with unseen voices somewhere near at hand. She giggled as a small cat, coming their way, stopped to eye them amazed.

He took her by the hand now, and took the lead, and drew her after him, on quick-running joyous little steps, out to an outside alleyway that ran beside the building. And from here they emerged to the street at last. He threw up his arm at a carriage, and a moment later was sitting beside her in it, his arm protectively about her.

“St. Louis Street,” he ordered proudly. “I’ll show you where to stop,”

And as the bells of St. Louis Cathedral near by began their slow tolling of midnight, Louis Durand and his bride drove rapidly away toward their new home.