Free The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin Page B

when maybe all it is is that nobody has asked you. This way, if you applaud, prospective partners will see that you take an interest and maybe you’ll get asked to dance.”
    “Very good,” Clara said.
    “It is very good,” Flesh said, “but I thought Mr. Clone had a good point.”
    “Oh, Mr. Flesh; ladies and gentlemen, this gentleman is our host for tonight’s very special gala—Mr. Ben Flesh.”
    They applauded and Ben nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ve brought some guests to join us tonight.” He turned to his group. “The food and drink is over there. Why don’t you all put your parcels on the stage where they’ll be safe. Then you can join the festivities.”
    “Maestro,” Clara said. Jenny left her partner, came to the stage, and put on more records. She played “Night and Day,” “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You,” “September Song,” “Two Sleepy People,” “Falling in Love with Love,” “Get Out of Town,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “Blue Moon,” “Let’s Take a Walk Around the Block,” “Love Thy Neighbor,” “Moonglow,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me.”
    Flesh smoked the joint Luis had brought him and listened to the beautiful music. The last tingling left his hand. He was suddenly caught up in a complex and true and magnificent idea. He would have to tell them, but could not bear to break into the music or the gorgeous motions of the dancers. One of the people he had brought with him—a woman in her mid-fifties—was dancing with a golden-ager. Her left hand lay gently on his right shoulder. Flesh was touched by the shopping bag she still carried. In her dreamy mood she held the bag by only one beautiful handle and a bottle of ketchup dropped from it, making a lovely splash on the floor. Their shoes looked so vulnerable as the dancers guided each other through the sticky stuff that Ben wanted to cry. Lai-op, lai-op, lai-op. They smeared the ballroom floor with a jelly of ketchup. It was beautiful, the pasty, tomato-y brushstrokes like single-hued rainbows. The high heels of the women smashed explosively against the broken glass adding to the percussive effect of the music. Everything was rhythm. He climbed on the stage and gulped when he looked down and saw the splendid red evidence of the dance. Studying the floor, he perceived from the various footprints, the rough male rectangles and female exclamation points, where each couple had been, their progress, where they had occupied space others had occupied before them, the intensity of color recapturing the actual measure, the music made visible. From these and other signals he felt he understood why what they did was called the “conversation step.” It was a conversation of spatial displacement, the ebb and flow of presence, invasions, and polite withdrawals as each couple moved in to take the place other couples had abandoned. A minuet of hitherings and yonnings, the lovely close-order drill of ordinary life. So civilized. So gentle were men. He explained this to them over the loudspeaker, explained how it was possible to re-create from the ordinary shmutz of a broken ketchup bottle, not just where the dancers had stood, but where they had stood in time , that movement was nothing more than multiple exposure. Perhaps, were he musical—he felt musical, as musical as Terpsichore; wasn’t she the Goddess of Dance? who would be the Muse of Song? muse, music, ah yes, music; there were no accidents, idiom was fundamental as gravity; who would be the Goddess of Song? it was on the tip of his tongue; oh yes, it had to be…it had to be— Orchestra! —he could, by reading their glide, even have told them the song that had been playing at the time. There was more. As he studied the dancers he realized that not only—if you knew how to read the signs—did movement remain, a testimony lingering like scent that men had been by, but that it was impossible to teach what