Free Us Conductors by Sean Michaels Page B

said, and arrogant. You were eighteen years old.

    WHEN WE HAD FINISHED our drinks we went outside. The sky was a dark midnight blue, that strange nighttime blue of big cities, and it seemed so clean. Couples jostled past us, men in dinner jackets and women in dresses, hats, gold at their wrists. They were going dancing. We watched them. “Do you dance?” you said. It was just a question.
    “I do,” I said. I tried to speak with the same transparency.
    “Do you?”
    Your face lit up. “Yes.”
    A moment passed. “Would you like to go dancing?”
    You hesitated for a second. I don’t know if it was because of me, or of some other beau, or the thought of your parents at home. Then your face seemed to apologize for the hesitation, and you said: “That’d be nice.”
    I glanced at the ground, where your feet stood beside my feet, and I thought the silly thought that in that second we were standing perfectly in our own footprints.
    I took you to the Make-Believe. It had the largest ballroom in the world, a room as big as Rybinsk’s town hall, the ceiling strung with paper lanterns and the walls done up in stars. We left our coats with the twins who kept the coats, I tipped the maître d’, and he brought us straight to a table and we straightaway got up. For the first time in the history of the world, since the seas cooled and birds alighted in the trees, Clara Reisenberg and Lev Sergeyvich Termen danced together. There was no band at the Make-Believe—there were two gramophones and their minders, a man and a woman, a library of records visible from the floor. The couple moved back and forth across the shelves, choosing the next song. They chose swing from New York and swing from Chicago, swing from London and Paris and Montreal. We stepped together and apart, leapt, grinned. I clasped you in my arms and I threw you away.
    Later, breathless, we leaned on the bar and drank long glasses of water. “Now what?” you asked. We grabbed our coats and went to the Roseland. The club was just heating up. A man tossed his partner three feet into the air. A woman slipped beneath her partner’s legs and rose up like a geyser. You asked me where I had learned to dance. I told you in Leningrad, that we did not have jazz but the bands played other quick songs. You danced the Charleston and I followed. You reminded me of Katia—but just for an instant, the way the rain reminds you for a moment of a particular spring. I had been trying not to think of her, the woman who had followed me on a ship. She was in New Jersey. She was, I told myself, a million miles away.
    I asked you where you’d learned to dance. You said you had always known and twirled in your skinny dress. The air seemed to whistle. I placed one hand at the small of your back and held one of yours with the other. You breathed against my chest and the source of that breath seemed so close by, rising and fallingin smooth suddennesses. We were skipping ahead of our footprints. The band played a drumroll and my heart played a drumroll. You stepped on my toe. “Whoops,” you said. The bandleader lifted his baton. The trumpeters premiered a rare new racket.
    A little while after, you stood fanning your face with a menu. I was sweating in my suit. I couldn’t tell the Roseland’s painted flowers from its real ones. You put down the menu and massaged your right arm near the elbow. There was a shadow behind your eyes.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “Nothing,” you said. You shook your arm out and summoned a crooked grin. The grin was unpersuasive at first but then abruptly you seemed to believe it. The grin said:
Now what?
I looked around. The other dancers didn’t seem real. They were paper dolls. I looked at my hands and then I looked at you.
    We took a taxi to La Conga. We bought half pineapples full of juice and tipped gracious strangers’ rum inside. I sipped through the straw and gazed out into the room, where the men’s cufflinks were flashing in the lights.