So Dance

SO DANCE

In the Disney version, they let the grasshopper in. They put a blanket around his shoulders and give him some hot cocoa. It's been a while; the part about the hot cocoa may not be true. But the grasshopper is toasting his Jiminy Cricket spats in front of the ants' fire at the end of the short, that much is certain. With a tear of gratitude standing at half-mast in his preternaturally huge Disney eyeball. As it should be. Cocoa or no cocoa.

I was there when she opened the letter, and I laughed too, shaking my head just as she did.

"Rob," was all she said. She handed me the letter. "Can you believe it?"

I read the letter, but I wasn't quite paying attention; I was wondering why she had handed it to me. We didn't have that kind of relationship. She would have told me what it said, yes, even read the relevant parts aloud, I was expecting that. But to hand over the opened, handwritten letter of an ex-lover--I didn't know her that well, really. Maybe not ever, but certainly not any more.

"Naturally," she went on. "I mean, why can't he call?"

"Maybe he thought you'd say no," I said. The letter didn't really phrase it as a request. It said that he was coming up to New York "to visit" her the next weekend. It transparently assumed that she would allow him to stay at her apartment. But I was listening to her.

"I wouldn't have. It's not that he can't crash on the floor after all this, but it'd have been nice to call and ask."

"You'd think." There were other pages, but she hadn't gone on to them yet so I couldn't either. I gave the letter back. She folded it up and put it in her pocket. "Well, let's go."

I followed her out the door of the foyer into the bright street. Sunlight off concrete has always bothered my eyes. I looked at her for relief. Her dark hair was in the same shape it had been in for the last four years, and surrounded a face that looked less familiar each time I saw it. But I was having trouble recognizing my own face in the mirror lately. The clothes were more reassuring. Same style. Tailored; a lot of black with bright accents. Nipped waists.

Aware that I had no style, and never had, I walked beside her to the restaurant. It still bothered me that she had shown me the letter. It hadn't felt like a gesture of intimacy toward me, so it must have been a gesture of contempt for him. When she first broke up with him, she was still in love with him. I had not seen her much since then.

The restaurant looked out of my price range, but I said nothing. I didn't see her very often. We sat down in a panelled booth.

"What has he been doing since he left home?" I asked. "I never hear from anyone."

She laughed. "Looking into applying to law school, grad school, div school and for all I know Apex Tech. And probably playing guitar a lot in his bedroom, although he didn't mention that part. In the meantime he's working for a bicycle courier service in DC."

"Is that good money?"

She shrugged. "I think he says he makes $20 an hour."

Good money. But I saw what she meant. We weren't supposed to be getting paid by the hour any more. Even I wasn't paid by the hour. "What's he coming up here for?"

"I don't know." She shook her head and her gaze rested on the middle distance between us. "I hope he isn't going to stay."

"What do you mean, stay?"

"In New York." Her eyes focused on mine. "Because from the way he says it--I don't know. It sounds like he's planning to move."

"Oh dear." I hadn't gotten that impression--but I couldn't check the letter again, because it was folded up and stuck into the inner pocket of her blazer, and the way her arms were crossed it looked like she was protecting it now.

I think in the Disney version they are having a square dance inside the anthill when the shivering grasshopper shows up at the door. But now when I close my eyes I see slow, linked circles, a rhythmic advance, retreat, entwining and unraveling. And they aren't ants, not even anthropomorphic ants, but stylized figures in green dresses and green jackets, twirling in dim light, without distinguishable features. I do not recognize the music.

I didn't see her again until he came. There was nothing that would throw us together by chance. She worked in a tall reflective building made entirely out of glass; I bent all day over vellum pages in dim light. When we met she told stories about policy conferences and office politics. I was interested at the time in representations of Dives in medieval illuminations. There were very few people who wanted to hear about that over dinner.

But I went out with them soon after he came. This time the window display I halted in front of looked within my means. And within the means of someone who was making $20 an hour.

They were already seated in a red vinyl booth, and walking toward them I had a moment of dislocation. I had seen them sit together so many times, in our common room, in the dining hall, but never after the breakup because that was after he graduated. And whenever they had been sitting together, the space between them had looked as if it was not really space, but a continuation of the arc of her arm or the inclination of his head. The red vinyl space looked the same way space always had between them. So I thought, for a minute, that I must be back in college. When I saw his face I knew that I wasn't.

It hadn't changed, really. The unsettling thing had always been there. But two years ago flesh softening the bridge of his nose and the outline of his skull had disguised it. Now he had lost weight the eyebrows came out more, and the corners of his jaw. It was something I hadn't expected to suddenly find in him--apprehension, one animal's appraisal of another's speed and agility. I had seen something like this face before but it had never made me think of myself as a predator.

He didn't stand up to greet me but I hadn't expected him to. When I sat down she was poking him in the ribs and denouncing his rudeness. That I had expected. So had he.

"So how are you doing?"

Our conversation was not important. The questions that had to be asked were asked; the patina of rehearsal coated the replies, even the sincere ones. I really did love art history. But whenever I met someone from college, and told them that, the words came out slick, untrustworthy. And the most frustrating part was the other person's nod, and the knowledge that they could see the sick sheen on your words, as you could see it on theirs, and you both knew this was not right, but you were standing in the middle of a department store and had dinner to get to and there was no time to effect a rescue.

There was time enough here. But the time passed without any improvement that I could see. Then the dessert came and she took her first forkful, tossing her bangs back and glancing behind her shoulder at him. He laughed. I saw. They had already gotten past it. They had traction with each other. So I had been left to skid on the oily surface.

It was all right, though. Because she turned back and took the second forkful, and threw off a glitter that was meant for me. So I thought, when they threw their napkins at each other and got up to go, that we were all friends again, they with each other and I with them. I walked with them out to the door of the restaurant and stood at the corner, happy.

"It was good to see you."

A lot depends on inflection. His voice rose on "see" with a kind of sliding whistle, so that I knew it was the seeing that struck him as important, that after three years it was impressive in a way to see me again, to discover with a mild shock that I still existed. Hers dipped low and strong on "good," because that was what she wanted me to take away: good to keep in touch, good to have these talks, good to preserve the connection. We must do this more often, that's what she meant, and as I nodded and watched them leave, he waving his arms in his patented slouching walk, she clasping her pocketbook in front of her with both hands, I thought, maybe we will, now that he's in town.

The grasshopper even pulls out his fiddle, I think, and plays the tune for their square dance. So that in a way he is earning his shelter and his food, restoring order, taking up his position in the masque. The masque as an art form has fallen into disuse, which seems stranger and stranger to me as time passes. I would have thought that we needed them now more than ever. But maybe that's exactly the reason we don't have them. The masque only worked when you knew, and didn't know, who was really underneath that costume--when you knew, and didn't know, that it was Queen Anne giving you her hand for the gavotte, that power was dressed in the symbolism of power and for once that meant harmony, measure, beauty. We, in our time, we'll never be able to know, and not know, who's in charge with the same serenity. And when it came time for the revels the audience wouldn't know the steps.

She wanted to see me, but not at her apartment, so I offered mine, even though a vague shame connected with the state of the building made me try to avoid bringing my friends into it. She was wearing her glasses when I opened the door. One of those glitches in the morning routine--a sign that she had overslept, or been interrupted, or an appliance had failed to perform. Wet hair was the other one but it was evening and it would have dried by now anyway. I went for the fridge. She located and sat on the couch, drawing her feet up underneath her.

Conversation drifted between us for a few minutes before I asked. "Have you heard from Rob?"

"Heard and seen. He's still on my living room floor."

"Still?" I handed her the water and sat in the armchair. "I didn't know he was still in town."

It had been three weeks since I had met them at the restaurant and I assumed he had gone home already. "How long is he planning to stay?"

"If he knew, that would be one thing." After the first sip she always toyed with a drink for a while before going back to it.

"Aha."

"Indeed."

"But...doesn't he have stuff back in D.C.? A lease?"

"His stuff is in his car, which has been in guest parking since he got here."

"And the lease?"

"He was with Marc in a two-bedroom. Marc's subletting."

"And he doesn't miss the glory and honor that was his daily portion as a bicycle courier?" To the look she gave me, I answered, "Well, it's the kind of thing I can see him getting really into. Athletic, yet alternative."

"Well, it's not calling him home, that's for sure." Strategically she returned to her water. During the sip I prompted, "Is he looking for an apartment?"

"An apartment?" She was brutally, frankly amazed.

"I guess not."

"Not."

We sat for a minute without speaking. There had been silences like this before, when we lived together and I knew how to read them. It was that made us friends in the first place, I suppose; my dry, diagnostic skill, my deft handling of what is askew or awry. Different from sympathy. But the same--the same or else why practice it? Why wake the brain and fix the eyes on the flaw in the pattern and do the triangulation that formulates the question?

"It bothers you."

"You could say that."

"I mean that you knew about it."

"Knew about--"

"Before this happened. Didn't you? Know that he wouldn't really...get started?"

She lowered the glass and looked at me over it. "That wasn't why we broke up."

"I know."

"Yeah, I mean, I knew. Didn't you know, too? Even before he graduated."

"I thought he mightn't," I admitted. "But they all seemed that way. No one in his class knew where they were going."

"It was a bad year." But I knew she was thinking our year had been a bad year too, and here we both were. And every month or so a piece of news would reach me about someone else, somewhere, who had got on board. Into a firm, into government, into public television, into law school, into education, into academia, into anything that had a teleology. It made it seem like drifting; as if innumerable great slow wheels rolled us one by one into position and locked each of us into a groove with a quarter-turn and a soft click. All across the country, we were being quietly drawn toward our coordinates. As if time itself was gravity, was magnetism, was culling us from the unresisting air down to the grid and our plotted points.

"He's not even trying," she said. "I've talked to him about it every night since he's been here. He says he can't think of anything for him to do but every time I try to suggest something he gets mad. So I've stopped talking."

"Is he still composing?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen him at it."

"If he was...well. You know. It would be something."

"Yes, but he's not." She put the glass down without looking for a coaster. I don't own any, as she would have known. "I don't know what to do about him."

"It's hard. I mean you can't just throw him out, but--"

A word that her mouth had been forming died as she was marshalling the breath behind it.

"He's got to figure out a solution eventually, right?" I asked. "If nothing else, this town has plenty of bicycle couriers."

"He sold his bicycle."

"Goodness. That was foolish."

"Exactly!" She jumped on my response with an eagerness that made me regret it. It had come out involuntarily; flown into the air and bypassed the censor. Something must have gone wrong with my wiring. "Even the one thing he has learned to get paid for he makes impossible for himself. Why has he got to do this?"

"Probably even he doesn't want to be a bicycle courier forever."

"But he'll have to do something else then. And he wouldn't even know how to start. Forget the problem about what to wear to the interview. He wouldn't know where to send resumes."

"Neither would I."

She shook her head. "No. Don't start with that. You're not the same. You got your applications out on time. It's a totally different thing with him."

"I guess."

"It's true. You're going to be all right. He's not."

I stretched my feet out in front of me and looked at them. My legs from the knees down I am proud of; they look good in tights. Between my knees and my shoulders everything is wrong, inappropriate and out of scale. But I do like my ankles. So I tend to look at them when I am working up to resistance. Of course that means that most of my moments of resistance have come to me when I was sitting in a chair, listening to someone speak to me, gently, pausing sometimes for my responses. I am not a warrior. I am not brave.

"But wasn't it because of that we liked him? Because he never filed a flight plan?"

The affection I had tried to invoke hovered but never established itself. "It's not like he would have to wear a suit and tie and trade securities. He doesn't have a future. He doesn't want one. He's afraid of having to live through one."

"Well, why should he have to have one?" I said. "Why should it be like this, where we're always living somewhere that hasn't happened yet and just haunting now like a ghost that can sit in chairs and open doors but can't touch anything or speak?"

"Pardon?"

It was the old word, the friendly pinprick she had been using for years to deflate my rhetoric. It worked, again. "Sorry. But really. Wasn't that what was the good thing about him? How can we hurt him for it now?"

I couldn't tell whether she noticed the "we;" I wished I hadn't said it. It made me feel stupid, delusional. "We." As if I had ever been anything but the recorder, the blinking eye. "Maybe." She stared into her melting ice cubes. "Anyway. He's my problem." She looked up with her smile. "You got any?"

Of course we do have masques. It's just not the same. The blaze of costumery and the stylized movements, the intricate sets and their artificial depth, the formulaic exchanges and the illusion of perspective, we have all that. Scattered in different places--beauty pageants, the Oscars, presidential inaugurations, talk shows. In every event, a piece of that fascinating crystal, a glittering fragment holding our attention. But the star cannot be reassembled. The figure and ground are broken up. So we are left still in our seats.

I would say that the grasshopper is performing a vital service, then, fiddling for the ants' square dance. Getting them out from behind their desks and onto the stage floor for the revels. Only I think in the Disney version they had been dancing before he showed up. Started without him.

"Do you need to get back?" she asked.

We were sitting in the same restaurant she had taken him to his first night in town. Chosen out of defiance, perversity maybe. Or because it was cheap. Or sentimentality. Though it was a strange time for it.

"Not especially. You want to go?"

"No."

I motioned for another coffee refill. "Avoiding Rob?"

"You could say." She brushed her bangs aside and fixed on my eyes, challenging my response in advance. "I threw him out."

There was nothing to do but repeat, "Threw?"

"I came home on my lunch hour and tossed his stuff into the hall and locked the door."

"He doesn't have a key?"

She is one of the only people I know who really blushes. Not prettily like in Victorian novels or like makeup but a real blotchy flush up the neck to the cheekbones, leaving her mottled and uncomfortable. Looking down at her empty plate she said, "I had the locks changed."

She must have known it was the premeditation that would trigger me. She was right. "How long did you plan for this? Jesus! Did you have your phone number changed too?"

"What could I do? I asked him to leave; he wouldn't."

"You mean he just sat there and said, 'Make me'?"

"Oh, you know what he did; you know exactly how he would handle it," she said, her fork travelling erratically through the air. "Sure, I'll leave tomorrow, I just have to blahblahblah. For a week and a half. Calling my bluff."

"So you just threw his stuff out."

"I knew you wouldn't--"

"I can't imagine that he wouldn't eventually just have left on his--"

"He wouldn't! Because why should he? Company, meals, a place to stay and all for free. Even if he had somewhere else to go--"

"But--" I knew she was right. And I wasn't right, I knew that. But. "So you haven't been back since you locked him out?"

"No. That's why I wanted to have dinner with you." I laughed. "I mean--no. Really. Not like that. It's because--it's because you knew him. You knew us together. I just--I hate talking about it, I hate even thinking about this miserable thing, but I wanted to be with you because you know. Even if you don't say anything."

What I know. When she knew he wanted her, her face in the window light trying to decide, when they celebrated anniversaries, what they fought over, how they looked sleeping crushed against each other in that narrow dorm room bed at 10:00 on Saturday mornings, his names for her, her names for him, how each pronounced the word "love," her method of birth control, her agonized failure to be sure about how she felt. What I don't know. How she got to love him. How she stopped. How the person whose naked form you knew like your own becomes someone who has to change in the bathroom and sleep on the floor. How you kick this person out of your apartment, taking the precaution of changing the locks in advance.

"I know he was never easy."

She shook her head. "Nope."

"Also that he was never mean."

"No." A pause, and then the fork stabbed the air at me. "That's just it. It's the niceness that drove me insane. He's still considerate. Washed dishes, bought groceries sometimes, did laundry. Being like that is aggressive too. Refusing to give offence. Making people mistreat him."

"I don't know about--"

"That's what it is," she said, suddenly convinced. "Being nice is a weapon for him, the only one he really knows how to use. How can anyone do anything to him without feeling awful? Like I feel. But he wouldn't leave."

I couldn't say anything right then. I was adjusting for some things. Proof that love died and that even after love died friendship also could be killed. That the interstices and crannies and niches had closed up and a merciless sun's light rebounded like steel off the seamless hard skin of the world. That it was the dawn of the era of zero tolerance. That it was just as well for me that I had allowed the wheel to lock me into my groove, because I wouldn't last long out on the surface, hands at my parched throat, my eyelids twitching in the dagger light.

"Well." I raised my glass. Unable to think of a sentence to follow it with, I drank, put the glass down, then said, finally, "There it is."

"There it is," she agreed.

We talked about something else. The further from the subject we got the better we both felt. Until at the end we were friends, laughing and open and aware of what we needed from each other. I knew exactly what he would have seen if he had walked in at that moment. What I had seen, that first time. But he didn't. Whatever he was doing at that point, it probably wasn't eating out.

We stood outside on the sidewalk, unsure what to do next. She didn't want to go home. And I didn't really either. Watching me, troubled, her home not hers, she looked real. Like she had back then, when her obscure unhappiness had met my articulation and we had given and gotten and changed things in each other. Maybe this Rob thing had shocked her out of sleep, as it had me. Maybe loneliness was reversible. Slowly. One night at a time.

"You want to go for a drink?" she asked.

Perversely, my hackles rose. "Nah, I don't think so. I don't really do the bar thing." She laughed, to make it look as if the suggestion had been a joke in the first place, instead of evidence that she had forgotten who she was with. "I'm sorry; I've got a lot of work to do. Are you going to be all right?"

She nodded, pulling the collar of her coat closer around her throat. "I'm giving it another couple hours and then I'll go back. Thanks for coming. You don't know what a help it's been." She gave me a hug. "I'll call you."

"Sure," I said. "Good luck."

I walked away first. What she knew about me: that I could read people; that I had a sense of humor; that I was uncomfortable inside my skin; that I talked fast but concealed a lot; that I sang sometimes when I thought I was alone; that I didn't drink and never had. What she didn't know: that I had studied the politics of three for so long there wasn't a move I didn't know the trick of, that I knew she was coming closer to me only because that would close him out, that I was mightily sick of being the point of exchange because more and more it was coming to look to me as if I would never have any other function, that I would never be half of a closed and decent dyad. That staring across the table at her I had been revulsed not by her treason but by an absolute failure to produce a single example in my own heart of--not of love, nothing as grandiose as that, but even friendship, affection that was not twisted into shapes of need and vanity. That what I wanted from her was complicated but did not involve being her date for the evening or taking his place.

I don't know how he got my address but he was on my stoop when I got home.

I had never thought of him as especially observant, and certainly I had never seen him paying much attention to me. I mean the details, as opposed to what anyone learns from talking to me. But he must have known more than I thought he did--that something in my guts would make it impossible for me to turn him away. Or else this was just his last resort and he had nothing to lose.

"Hey," I said when I saw him. He looked about the same--hair longer, but otherwise no obvious marks of despair or degeneracy. Except a certain awkwardness as he got to his feet.

"Hey," he answered.

"C'mon up," I said, unlocking the door. "I heard."

And I let him into my apartment. Because before I recognized him he was just a darkened hulk sitting on my stoop and I had had that moment you have when you are a woman living alone in a city every time you see, out of the corner of your eye, a shape that is not part of the ordinary landscape. It's over before you notice it; before you look at the shape and see it's a lamppost, it's a shrub, it's a guy with a boombox, it's a homeless man, it's a cop, it's someone else who lives in a parallel, nontangent universe to whom you are irrelevant. When you make the recognition, you've already stopped producing adrenalin and all you have to show for that reflex is a slowing heart rate and a kind of dying shudder in the muscles around your ribs. So when I saw his fair, limp hair and his brown jacket with the patches clustered around the left shoulder and his bitten fingers clasped around his knees, the queasy flux of fear and shame was still pulsing in my body. And I couldn't tell him to go away.

Misattribution of arousal, psychology would call that, and that same psychology would also demonstrate that I let him stay because I really was in love with him, no sorry desired him, there's no theoretic of love, but they would be wrong on both counts because by the time I actually extended my hand to him the thought in my head was he's nothing without her. Not misattribution, but deliberate mistranslation; letting him in because at that moment I felt meaner and more petty than I ever had, because I had discovered how sick I was of this problem, because I didn't want him to be there.

I forbade him to thank me. I am not generous. I am not brave, as I said before. Without courage intelligence is nothing. So I cannot work out a way to prevent the death of youth or the rise of the murderous sun. So I do not resist, myself. I am a sympathizer.

You're waiting--for what? For another grasshopper digression; or maybe you've been skipping those, maybe you're jumping ahead to the next part. And there, you wait for something to happen. For her to find him, for me to throw him out, for us to fall in love. But I can't tell you what happens. I'm not there yet. Right now, he sleeps on the floor by the kitchen and I, my thoughts are not troubled by the proximity of his sleeping body, I am used to that from the dorm, I am trying to work out a solution, another way for this story to end. Because we will not fall in love, she will not come to look for him, and I am turning everything I have ever learned over in my head to find a way not to go down this road past the platitudes like signposts only he can help I did everything I could but he has to take responsibility for his own until I finally reach the cul de sac, press my hands against the rough edges of the bricks in the wall, take the breath, turn on him, and say the lines. I have reviewed every plot I can think of from Milton to Ovid to Disney. But I haven't found the ending I want.

"But what am I to do?"

"What were you doing during the summer?"

"During the summer? I sang."

"So dance." And the door slams.

That's how La Fontaine ended it.

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