Free The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter Page B

downtown and crammed bridges leading to the city. The rain slashed down the way it does in New Orleans, like someone is up there chucking celestial buckets down everyone’s necks. The subways were down and it was hard to get to the place for eight o’clock, the time printed on the ticket. But I did it. I got there on time and the place was empty. I sat at a little table and drank a gin and tonic slowly, then another, while eleven or twelve more people filtered in. I knew lots of gigs didn’t start until a couple of hours after the doors opened, to give people time to warm up and spend lots of money at the bar, but by ten I realized the rain and the traffic congestion had kept everyone away. At ten thirty I spied some glorious Spanish women and men looking tense behind the stage. A woman with a comb full of roses like mine stepped up and explained we were waiting for a busload of ticket-holders stuck on the bridge. Another hour went by and normally I’d have packed it in and gone home to bed, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. At half an hour before midnight five men in black hats took seats onstage, and the women, in full Spanish lace and frill and piled hair and dangling earrings started a real firecracker dance set, all the imploded sexual rage of Spanish womanhood concentrated and then flung into the room with a flare of flaming skirt, a floorboard-shaking hard rain of nails, and those hands, twining incantations in the dim air, rings flashing— their foreheads and arms a sheen of sweat; little puddles glittering in the dips of their beautiful collarbones … but where was Ben?
    The seated men had a special function and he was not among them. They played guitar or clapped: the clapping was fervent and meticulous—it gave voice to the dance and its rhythm was absolute, necessary and serious. The men’s role was complicated and mathematical—the rhythm they clapped was far from obvious; completely unpredictable to me, yet perfect and dangerous. I decided Ben was not going to appear onstage after all and resigned myself to watching the show without him. I felt terrible about being one of only a dozen audience members and I’d be damned if I was going to leave before the show was over.
    But then began a different kind of song: a break in the feverish Spanish passion wars. One of the men began playing an accordion— Under Paris Skies —and the dancer in the white dress—a woman I now supposed must be Leni—floated from stage left to meet … yes, it was … in a beret , and carrying a folded umbrella … Ben, floating to take her hand and, straight out of a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec, the two waltzed together while the other dancers caught their breath backstage and perhaps drank gargantuan glasses of cold water. Ben did not do any of the steps I had seen him practise in the park. He was all soft-shoe. Together he and Leni finished the waltz and sailed offstage, not one clack of a castanet. Had he worn a striped jersey with a red cravat? I couldn’t remember. I left the barman a tip and rose from my solitary table, which I realized felt lonely, and went home.
    What had I expected? A cabaret full of people in mantillas? Bangles to the elbows? Billows of cigar smoke and a few treacherous moustaches? I had not expected a Parisian waltz, that was for sure. How disappointed Ben and Leni and the other dancers must have been, to find not enough people had shown up to make even the appearance of a real audience. How I’d wished I could turn myself into forty people.
    I did not see Ben selling his magazines at the fruit market for some time. But when I did, I was with Gerald. I’d told Gerald about Ben, about the day in the park and the flamenco evening and how we should buy L’Itinéraire whenever we saw anyone selling it, and he always bought it now. I introduced Gerald to Ben and Gerald bought a copy. It featured a cover story about a New York