Free You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe Page B

faces, Karl was semiliterate in the language of bodies, but he squinted and tried and thought hers said she found him and his easily wounded and deterred affection a chore. Her face was blurred by his drink and the bar’s dim light, whereas he remembered and had been made to swoon by the extra facial crispness of her. He didn’t know if he could go on loving a woman with a blurry face. Each couple needed at least one person with sharp facial contours lest the two become a single fool.
    “Dance with me,” he said.
    She tensed up. “I don’t like to dance.”
    “You just did.”
    She pressed her lips together hard—two fat garden slugs making love—and still had not looked his way.
    “At one time, in the forest, you wanted to hug me. One might also wish to believe you enjoyed it.”
    She exhaled in what Karl would normally have understood was exasperation, but something was off, he sensed he lacked at least one key piece of information whose absence prevented him from accurate assimilation of events now transpiring in this bar; this was not so dissimilar from the state of affairs of his days in general, with the difference that rather than staying still and keeping quiet as much as was possible, now he blundered on, acting and saying, damning the consequences even as, rough beasts, they slouched toward him to be borne.
    She poured another double in his glass, retrieved a second glass of the same size from behind the bar, filled that one, raised it toward him, said, “To forgiveness,” didn’t mean it, downed her double, left glass and bottle on the bar, walked methodically around the bar, stood next to him, did not face him, still would not look him in the eye. “Well?” she said.
    “What?”
    “You gonna dance with me?”
    “You gonna dance with me ?”
    “I’m here, ain’t I?”
    “You’re supposed to face me.”
    She did. “Cry” was on again, or still. “Is this ‘Cry’?” he asked.
    “It’s ‘Wail,’” she said.
    He put his arms around her and tried to sway with her but she would not. She glanced toward the back hall where Clem had gone. Karl put some muscle in his grip and pressed himself to her from knees to neck.
    “Wait!” she said, and disengaged, and poured herself another double shot, and drank.
    “You’re in distress,” it finally occurred to him to say. “Why?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Yes you do.”
    “I mean, I know, but please don’t ask me to talk about it now. Let’s just dance.”
    “You don’t seem to want to dance any more than you want to talk.”
    “I do. I like it.”
    “Really?”
    She softened all at once and eased her hips into his.
    He was strong now and controlled his body and thoughts and those of Sylvia, whom he danced, which she very much liked, deliberately up and down the dark and dirty bar floor to songs called “Sob,” “Faint,” “Come,” and “Die.” Because he knew her body’s needs, he danced her toward the bar to take another double shot, and took one more himself; not much later, same again. A well-timed drink is like fifty dance lessons. A good dancer does not know what his partner wants, he teaches her what she wants, then does not give it to her, not all of it, not yet. Her mouth found his, in passing, and was soft and sophisticated, as he knew it would be, and careless yet considerate. They did not kiss so much as their mouths exchanged brief, pensive, tactile communications. He knew kung fu now too, and would use it on Clem if that eventuality arose. It did—it might. He—Clem—swam up through the back hall’s gloom once more. She went stiff again, her skin repelled Karl’s hands. Clem did not enter the room, he faded back into the hall, but Karl had lost the loving and submissive girl of the several dances. These changes astounded him. She’d already put the bar between them. She looked at him in fear, at the hall, the wall, the window, stools, bottles, jukebox, floor.
    Her eyes found his. They were wet and further