Dancing
by Hunter Stern
Jeff was now close enough to know that the blue flames were really just cellophane blown into crinkles by giant fans and illuminated by floodlights of midnight blue. Jon had been going on and on about the flames shooting up behind the go-go dancers, and how, when they flared massively, as they did every couple of minutes, the ambiance of the club turned into a giant gasp of expectation, a communal holding of breath to see if the dancers would disappear into the flames behind them.
Jeff wasn't disappointed that it wasn't really fire. That it looked like blue fire was enough for him. It seemed to be enough for everyone else too. They wanted the go-go dancers to burn but they were elastic in their definition of the word, and burning could just as well mean disappearing behind a sheet of blue cellophane as it could mean melting through the bars of the dance cages. No one wanted to call 911, and even if there was some mishap that involved an injury, none of the club-goers could imagine that the club staff, who lurked in the dark corners, would not immediately remove anything unsettling to save them from an uncomfortable intrusion of responsibility. That was what Jeff liked about going on these forays with Jon and Andy: the absolute renunciation of caring about what happened, even to himself. He felt indestructible, not because he was strong, but because he was weak to the point of transparency, so that anything that could hurt him would simply pass right through, as if he was a hologram.
"What's the name of this club again?" asked Jeff, putting his mouth as close to Andy's ear as possible, close enough to slide his voice over the thumping dance music.
"Club Branchement."
"You know what that means, right?" said Jon.
"What? Means what?"
"Club Hookup!"
Jeff tried to say something back, but the noise could only be pierced by shouted declarative statements. Discussion was impossible.
"Hookup!" shouted Jeff.
"Hookup!" shouted Jon and Andy.
Jeff thought of Martha, who was at home, as he downed his whiskey sour.
"Have fun with your friends," she had said the night before when Jeff told her he was going out with Jon and Andy.
When Martha talked about his friends, especially his nights out with them, the sound of her voice was like the trailing end of a sentence blowing past him in the wind. He knew she wasn't happy about it, but she also didn't seem to object, and her lack of anger made him angry, as if she was tolerating his behavior because it was too stupid to get worked up about. They had been married for only three months, and this was a trait he hadn’t noticed before. These new details of her personality disturbed him. He had thought living together for a year prior to their marriage would have revealed her to him completely. Something had changed since she became his wife .
He needed the opinion of another married guy — as both Jon and Andy were, and if he could have heard Jon or Andy above the pulsing throb of the dance beat he would have brought the subject up. Instead, he set his glass down and looked around the club.
Club Branchement was lit by a spectrum of blue light. The lights above the horseshoe-shaped bar were light blue, giving every drink, no matter how plain, a tinge of exotica, as if a special glowing blue liquor had been mixed in. In front of the bar, the main dance floor spread out asymmetrically like a giant splash of water. Above the main floor there were other curved platforms that jutted from the walls like haphazardly placed opera booths. Attached to the ceiling was a revolving metal chassis that held articulated blue floodlights moving like robot torsos on an assembly line. Each torso managed a spot light or some other kind of device for disbursing light in patterns and flung down upon the welter of dancers sparkling bits of glittering turquoise. Jeff felt he was standing at the very entrance to a warp in the fabric of space, as if everything before him — the multiple dance floors, the jerking light machines, the human bodies were proof that more that three dimensions existed. He felt the extra dimensions in his bones, deep down in the marrow, where the bodies and the music and the light were being impressed through his skin, like tiny toxic particles that were the oxygen of this place.
Jeff finished another drink and slunk away from the bar onto the dance floor. He was now moving close to the dancers, bobbing his head but not yet dancing. He was looking for a partner, moving towards the crowded groups that might harbor a single woman. Hands with fingers outstretched and tensed so that veins rose from the skin swished by like mini scythes. Hair rose and fell and whirled above the juking hands. He saw a girl spinning in a latex skirt. The skirt ended just below the line of her waist, and he went towards her. He came close enough that he could feel the turbulence of her dancing and he smelled gin on her breath but then the music changed and the lights darkened over his patch of dance floor. When the blue light came back she was gone. He thought of his wife and told himself what Andy and Jon had told him to tell himself when the thought of her became strong enough to induce a bit of guilt.
"It's just dancing," Jon had said.
"Yeah man, its just dancing," Andy repeated.
Jon had a system.
“You see,” he had said with a proprietary smile, as though the information he was about to divulge had earned him a patent, “you have to setup the environment so that when the time comes, you can’t be blamed. And believe me, the time will come. Women find out. It’s almost as though they share a sort of a estrogen based super-consciousness. Something like a giant peer-to-peer network, setup to operate in the most promiscuous mode possible.” Jon, Andy, and Jeff worked together at a high tech company and the shared jargon from work tended to color the analogies they used when trying to explain non-technical phenomenon. “So it’s like each woman is a node on a network and once one woman gets a new piece of information she broadcasts it to every other node. So you just have to start from the assumption that whatever you do with one women, will be automatically known by all women.”
Jeff, who wasn’t very good at rationalizing, counted on Jon to do it for him. Jon had the skills. He was in marketing.
"So what you want to do is inoculate yourself against blame. Here's what you do. Take Martha out to a dance club and dance like you have two left feet. Step on her toes, stumble around, twirl her too fast or too slow, trip her up, maybe even fall down if you really want to make your point.
“So now, when she thinks of you dancing, she sees a clumsy man who just absolutely couldn't make a woman happy as her dance partner. So what's the point of all this? It's simple. When she finds out you went dancing with someone else, she's going to remember how terrible you were on the dance floor, and the thought of you dancing with another women won't make her jealous, it will make her laugh. She'll probably feel sorry for the poor girl who had the bad fortune to be chosen as your partner. So instead of jealousy, instead of feeling cheated on, as though dancing is really a horizontal form of fucking, she dismisses the whole thing, knowing that no woman could ever be seduced by your moves."
Jeff had followed Jon's advice, taking Martha out to a little club in the city, a club small enough to allow his humiliation to occur in front of only a few other dancers. He had twirled Martha awkwardly, stepped on her toes, even pretended to trip over her feet and fall on the floor. It was demeaning to him, for he thought of himself as a good dancer, but in the end he went through with it, accepting the pain the way a patient accepts the prick of the needle that delivers a life-saving medication. As they drove home that night, Jeff apologized over and over for dancing like a man suffering mild epileptic seizures.
Martha, adjusting her hair in the fold-down mirror, smiled and said, "We might want to think about dance lessons before we go out again." She was good-hearted in her amusement, in no way embarrassed or angry. That night, when they made love, he took his time, carefully focusing on the areas, some not quite obvious, that could induce in her the maximum amount of pleasure.
After they had finished, she curled against him, her mouth near his shoulder where he could feel the steady, drawn out breath of her post-coital inhales and exhales, the re-normalization of her body after the strenuous round of sex that he had focused on getting right with as much deliberation as he had focused on getting the dancing wrong. She said to him, "How can you be such a bad dancer and fuck so well." He looked at her face, nestled next to his arm, and studied the way her short, straight hair had fallen, so that a bit of it was stuck to the wetness on her bottom lip. She had a face that was not trusting, but was perpetually open to trust, as though she wanted more than anything to have Jeff earn the right to be absolutely trustworthy. Even after one year of living together and three months of marriage, her eyes were not content, as though she needed something more from him that would make all the difference, something, that to him, was totally and completely unknowable. Slowly moving across the dance floor, he wondered what it was that Martha needed.
Surely it was not something to be found at the club. Did she wish he was a better dancer? That would be funny, hilarious in fact, for here he was dancing, dancing with poise and synchronized with the beat, doing an altogether serviceable job, but not doing it with her. Oh Martha, he thought, why am I here with Andy and Jon, but not with you. And then he answered his own question. He needed variety. He needed that unknown quality that came into existence when the blue lights flashed, and the entire dance floor and the undulating woman were held, just for that instant, in his head like a photograph. In that flash he could make out the erotic shapes that so wonderfully subverted the comforting, nearly commonplace sexual arousal and release of a love-making session with Martha. It was the variety of the unknown. A variety that was guaranteed to surprise him with something beyond the world of his experience with Martha.
There was a woman with white hair dancing along the side of the wall. She was wearing a loosely swinging halter that allowed Jeff to glimpse the lacy black cups of her bra when she threw her arms over her head. Black tights emerged from under a leather mini-skirt and ended at low black boots with tiny spiked heels. He danced over besides her, not actually facing her, but within arm's reach. That she was dancing alone surprised him. Maybe she would disappear when he moved closer and the lights changed, like the girl in latex.
She looked over at him and he registered the serious look on her face, as though dancing at the club was an intense and all-consuming job that required concentration, that required a certain commitment beyond just the idea of "fun." He breathed in and moved in front of her, making sure his face showed the same level of commitment. She danced with her hands held at chest-level for a time, and then she would throw her arms up and turn around, dancing with her back to him, so that he could see the angularity of her shoulders and could let his eyes play down the curvature of her spine, which jutted under the flimsy halter to a point just above where her skirt began. His movements became trained by her movements until he was flinging his arms up exactly when she did and was moving his hands in a way that, with her hands moving below his, cut the air into a tight little cube of space between them. They danced along the edge of the wall, carrying the cube with them. When she turned to face the wall he put his hands on her waist, exerting just enough pressure to feel how deep a purchase the soft surface of her body would give him. She would whirl around and then their hands were moving again, parallel blurs bounding the invisible box that became a playful part of their movement. She even reached out and touched his hands and they traced together the shape of a square, moving their hands up, left, down, and right. The sides of her nose were shiny with sweat and he noticed bits of glitter on her eyelids. He held one of her hands and pointed to the bar. She nodded, still serious, but no longer dancing as fast, slow enough that he could see her clearly for the first time.
He imagined that if she had thrown herself through a plate of glass she would have emerged unscathed, such was the hard angular quality of her body. Her face was almost triangular as was her mouth and eyes and nose. It had something to do with the way her makeup was applied and something to do with the natural lines of her body. As he led her by the hand to the bar, he could feel the cut of her long nails. He could feel how she gently resisted the force of his hand moving her forward, as though she wanted to be dragged from the dance floor, or maybe just dragged.
They got to the bar and he ordered drinks, which they took with them to a corner of the club where the noise abated to the sound of slowly turning drill bits and the beat could be felt more than heard. There, in the corner, was an empty sofa. Before it, a low, lacquered table was strewn with half-finished drinks - some knocked on their side - used swizzle sticks, and a damp playbill for a play called "Forgotten Regrets." She finished her drink in one fluid motion and placed it carelessly on the table where it tipped over and rolled to the edge besides the other overturned glasses. He set his drink down and gave himself over to watching her.
"What's your name?" he shouted.
"Miranda. What's yours?" she shouted back.
"I'm Jeff."
Jeff was trying to think of a subject to talk about that would only require the exchange of shouted two-word sentences when she moved close to him. Her legs pressed against his legs and her face became the whole of his view. He placed his hand high up on her neck, where his fingertips could brush the lobe of her ear. Pulling her gently towards him by an ear lobe he pressed his face forward until their lips met. She began making an undulating motion with her head, which he picked up on and imitated so that their kiss alternated between a gentle brushing together of lips and a fully engaged sharing of tongues. Her softness came as a surprise. He had been expecting sharp angles, had felt the trepidation of the inexperienced sword swallower when she pushed her tongue so deep that the prospect of having his heart pierced made him think how wonderful some forms of death could be.
He placed a hand on one of her small hard breasts.
Abruptly, she stood up and held out her hand. He took it and she lead him on a circuitous route through the club, a route where the same faces appeared again and again. It seemed to make no sense so he closed his eyes and let himself be led blindly. 'Were they going to the restroom?' he wondered, anticipating the decision he would have to make if that was their destination.
Exactly what kind of behavior did his "inoculation" cover? Three months of marriage. Such a short time. What did that mean? Imagine if it was three years or thirty years. Now there was a commitment. There was a marriage that would make doing what he was about to do hard instead of easy. But it should have been hard at three months too. The newness of their marriage, the sense of mutual exploration of new terrain, not just living together, but living together as husband and wife, those weighty titles bestowed on them at a ceremony that wassupposed to mark the division in their lives between casual and serious relationships should have empowered him to forsake the kind of behavior he was being led towards. Maybe doing it after three months wasn't so bad, maybe it was smart. He recognized the futility of resisting in the long run, and he didn't want the torture of desperately withholding from himself the thing that Jon probably had another fool-proof system for rationalizing away.
Miranda was leading him up a flight of stairs, then two more flights of stairs and then through a door to one of the balconies overlooking the dance floor. She pulled him down on an empty couch and they became caught up in each other again. This time their hands were not tentative. His hand was under her skirt and she was wrestling his belt buckle undone inch by inch. As fabrics stretched and were pushed aside to gain access, or simply ripped apart, the cacophony of the club became distant and a strange isolation took hold. It was as though their senses had suddenly recalibrated so that everything outside the oblong sphere of their outstretched bodies decelerated and moved in slow waves, almost as if they were lying on a beach and the blue of the club was really water lapping gently against the shore on which they were enacting their frenzy. For a while they used their hands as if they were sculpting each other a completely and then he found himself lying back on the couch with her straddling him. He arched back his neck in anticipation.
At precisely that moment a huge sound shattered their isolation. The music stopped and yelling voices called out for help from below. They looked at each other with wonder and fear, and then moved to the edge of the balcony to peer over. One of the go-go dancer's cages had plummeted to the floor. Somehow the wire suspending it had given way and now a crowd of people, mostly club staff, were gathered around the cage that was lying on its side.
They were trying to remove the trapped dancer. From his vantage point, Jeff could see a body being extracted from between the warped bars. The revolving dance lights had not caught up to the seriousness of the moment and cones of shining blue were still sweeping over the crowd that had formed around the cage.
In a short time paramedics appeared and strapped the woman onto a Gurney, immobilizing her head with a plastic neck brace.
Once they were gone the broken cage was pulled off the floor, mops were applied to the area of impact, and the music was restarted. The remaining go-go dancer began to move to the music and the floor once again filled with dancers.
The blue cellophane flared and the crowd gasped as they had before. The bar was again crowded with patrons watching the dancers and refreshing their drinks. The line of automatons on the ceiling disbursed the blue light in familiar patterns.
Jeff was fixated on the broken cord that hung from the ceiling where the fallen cage used to be. He thought of the moment the cord had snapped, the startled feeling and then the terror of the falling dancer, the brutal impact.
Miranda was lying back on the couch waiting to pick-up where they had left off.
Jeff walked past Miranda and down the stairs. He spent a few minutes looking for Andy and Jon but they were no where to be found. He left the club, hailed a cab and went home.
When he arrived, Martha was still up, watching television and sipping tea in a terry-cloth robe. Her feet were curled under her on the couch and Jeff sat down and pressed himself against the soft fabric, intuiting the curves of her body beneath its covering.
"So, did you enjoy the club" she asked, letting her tea bag slip into the cup.
"It was alright, I think maybe Jon and Andy had a better time."
"Why, because they're better dancers than you?"
"Yeah, they're better dancers. But I'm getting better too — you'd be surprised.
Let's go out next week and I'll show you what I've learned since last time."
"Oh, I don't know, Jeff. Did you learn that stepping on your partner's feet isn't part of dancing? Did you learn not to fall? Just how much better have you gotten?" She smiled and looked over at him, a careful but amused wariness in her eyes that let him know she was game.
"I've learned a lot. And don't worry, I won't fall. I won't let the cord snap."
She looked at him not knowing what to say and then she sipped her tea. They sat in silence, watching television, waiting for the weather report before going to bed.