Chapter Five

Saturday evening Laura called Lillian again. Staying home on the off-chance that Dante might call didn’t make sense. Maybe Lillian wanted to see West Side Story—wasn’t that old-old but anyway had dance numbers—or Marry Me, with Jennifer Lopez. Lillian wasn’t home.

She flipped a coin. West Side Story, the coin decided. Laura felt brave enough to face the scorn of couples in love and go on her own. She put on her rawhide jacket and clattered down the stairs. If he calls, he’ll see that I’m not just waiting around for him, she thought.

She found a long line at the theatre, as she’d expected. She got in the ticket buyers’ line, then the ticket holders’. She would have to say she was astonished when she looked up to see Richard, of all people, blithely passing by. “Hey, Decter,” she called after him.

He must have thought he was hearing things, the way he turned around so reluctantly. But he spotted Laura at once, then searched with his eyes for her companion. “I’m alone,” she announced as he approached, as if he were an idiot to think otherwise. (She of all people wouldn’t lower herself to have a Saturday night date.)

“Are you seeing this movie?” he asked her.

“No, I’m practicing waiting for the Lexington Avenue bus,” she told him in an unkind tone.

“I’m supposed to meet Elise at ten-thirty,” Richard said, glancing dubiously at the marquis to read the title of the film.

“This thing gets out at ten o’clock, so if you like, you can go and get yourself a ticket. Unless you’ve wandered over from Central Park West in search of a copy of the Sunday Times.” She smiled at him, glad to see his face.

“I wonder if they have any tickets left?” He was still uncertain about the prospect of seeing the movie with her. “I saw the Kahlo show again at the Modern, then had a bite to eat on 52nd. I thought I’d take the BMT over to the West Side now.” He made up his mind. “Wait here. I’ll get a ticket.” In two minutes he was back.

“My grandfather was disappointed,” he began again. “He’s sure you’re ‘the real thing,’ like my grandmother, ‘God rest her soul.’ And, think, she never even played a hand of bridge.” Richard laughed gently. “He’s a good old man.”

“Then you oughtn’t to lie to him. By the way, thanks. I received your check.”

“It wasn’t much, was it? But we’ll see better days, I hope.”

Laura frowned at his obsession with money, then the line started to move. They went inside and for two hours she was twisted around by the rawness of a passionate encounter in a couple’s life.

The theatre lights went on. “I have to stay and watch the first part again,” she told Richard as they stood. He was going to Elise, after all, wasn’t he?

“Oh, you liked it then?” he asked rather innocently.

“My God, didn’t you?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, truthfully. “It wasn’t at all what I expected. It’s probably more a woman’s movie.”

She could never fall in love with such a man, she decided. If ever she felt tempted to become romantically interested in him, she would remember this moment. That and the fact that he could be involved with a woman like Elise. Laura dropped back into her seat. “So long then. Nice bumping into you. Say hello to Elise for me.”

He looked irritated. “Good-bye. Don’t forget next Sunday. And I’m not going to mention seeing you to Elise. She might misunderstand.”

Richard left and Laura watched the new American girl watching the American man she was so attracted to. If anyone understood what needing romance in her life was like, it was Laura. After another half-hour or so, she left the theatre, wondering where that perfect stranger she could fall in love with was. After all, she was available, and willing to travel (perhaps…).

As she got home, the phone was ringing. It stopped just as she opened the door. Whoever had been calling had hung up without leaving a message. “Damn,” she said, taking off her jacket. The phone rang again and she rushed to pick up the receiver.

“It’s about time,” a man told her grumpily.

The sound of Dante’s voice thrilled her to the soul. The fact that he had called at this moment seemed most agreeable. “I just saw West Side Story,” she informed him.

“Great. The dance numbers are charming, aren’t they? Come out and meet me. We’ll discuss it. I haven’t caught you with another man, though, have I?”

“Not exactly. I was thinking of the boy star, whose name I actually don’t recall.” She giggled into the phone. “But he’s a bit too …something or other…even for me. I might as well spend some time with you.”

“I’m at O’Neal’s right across from Lincoln Center. I’ll give you twenty-five minutes to get here. Now hurry.” He waited a second for her to protest and hung up while she was still trying to decide if she ought to go.

She hurried. Rushing from the East Side to the West on a Saturday night as fast as Dante had demanded (washing and changing first) was physically impossible, and he knew it. He wanted to call the shots, that was all. A darn good thing he was cute and cuddly. “This one has a girlfriend, too,” she reminded herself.

She arrived fifteen minutes later than bidden and found Dante standing at the bar with Maxwell. She shouldn’t have come here, Laura groaned to herself. This wasn’t exactly her scene anyway. She had wasted ten dollars on the cab.

Dante nodded at her coolly while Maxwell barely acknowledged Laura at all. He was in the middle of one of his tirades—something about that evening’s rehearsal. “Now go home,” Maxwell ordered his newest dancer. “You can’t stay out the night before a performance.” Maxwell turned and gestured toward Laura. “You’re dancing tomorrow, so leave her alone.”

Laura was stunned at the implication. She didn’t quite know how to respond to Maxwell’s insult, so she simply stood and watched the dance teacher gulp down the rest of his stein of beer. The moment passed. Maxwell, staggering somewhat, went off to the men’s room. Dante put his arm around Laura. “Would you like a drink before we go?” he offered.

“No,” she steamed. “Tell me, is Maxwell dancing tomorrow?”

“Maxwell?” He laughed. “What makes you think that Maxwell’s still even a dancer? He danced six months ago, that’s true. But have you noticed the man’s belly expanding? Still, he’s a good choreographer. And he does know how to hold the company together. When I’m his age… Who knows? I’ll probably just want to bounce my grandchildren on my knee.” He grinned. The domestic picture sounded truly unlike Dante, but thinking that was an underlying interest of his warmed her heart momentarily.

“Here’s Maxwell again. Wait for me at the door,” he suggested.

She stood by the exit and watched Dante listening to Maxwell a moment, then he joined her.

They took a taxi back to the East Side. Dante didn’t seem to like to talk in cabs and was silent. When they reached her apartment, he paid for the cab and let it go. “Do you mind if I come up for a while?” he asked. “I want to sit someplace quiet for ten minutes or so. Maxwell has been screaming all night, and I’’ have to listen to even more screaming when I arrive home.”

She nodded and took out her apartment keys. So his girlfriend screamed at Dante. That didn’t surprise her. She had thought that the two weren’t living together, but he must spend most of his time over there. This didn’t astonish Laura either, although it caused a lump of disappointment to settle into her digestive tract.

Upstairs, her guest plopped into her most comfortable chair as if completely worn out. “I’m really good in this piece,” he told her. “I hope I’m good tomorrow afternoon. If I’m not, blame it on nerves. I think I’m really good, anyway. Maybe I’m not. But I seem to be at least as good as the others. It’s hell, isn’t it, never knowing exactly how good you are? Do you ever wonder?”

“I’m not good enough at anything to wonder,” Laura said. “I always knew I was only so-so as an artist and I’ve never actually had a chance as a dancer. I think I could be… well, not physically great—I started too old—but I think I could dance with inspiration. Can I get you anything?”

“Yes. Yourself. Come sit on my lap.”

“That’s too dangerous,” she answered, her head dropping.

“Don’t be silly.”

Laura shook a little and she worried that tears might fall from her eyes any minute now, which she most certainly didn’t want them to. “There’s your screaming woman at home,” she reminded Dante.

That seemed to amuse him. “My screaming woman? You think only women scream? I was talking about my father. I live at home. How else do you think I manage financially? My father’s a drunk. No, pardon me, my father’s a weekend drunk, that’s better. During the week, he’s a top Eastern salesman for a petroleum company. He sells Con Edison, two of the airlines, all that.” It was his eyes that tears came to, which seemed to embarrass Dante not the slightest bit.

Laura came a little closer. “That woman though,” she went on. “Straight, jet-black hair, Egyptian nose, 27 or so, maybe five-foot-seven, one-hundred-and-twenty-three pounds. Dark eyes. She wears specially tailored blue jeans that must cost a hundred-and-fifty dollars or so. Do you know who I mean?”

“Yes, yes, I know.” The truth of the woman was in his eyes. He didn’t say anything else for a long time and Laura retreated across the room and sat on the couch. “Can’t you come here anyway, damn it,” he finally said. “Never mind about her. I’m not asking you anything about your life, am I? Why bother about Melissa now? You don’t know me well enough for that. Don’t you like me? You do, don’t you?”

Laura felt rent in two by pain and desire. Yes, why think about the other woman? Why not just go to him as he’d asked? She was stupid not to, since she wanted to so much. She saw the hurt in his eyes too.

She did go to him. She sat on his lap and began to cry. He pulled her against his chest and held her close. She wept with the most luxurious feeling of release. Having his arms around her at last was wonderful.

She stopped crying and the two of them breathed quietly together while he stroked her hair. “Oh hell,” he said. “In five minutes I’ll go. I told you, didn’t I, she’s not my girlfriend. We’ve been seeing one another occasionally for a while now. I shouldn’t have to apologize for that, should I?”

“No,” Laura answered. She felt calm now. In a moment, he kissed her. The kiss wasn’t simply a kiss, it was a deep conversation. Afterward, he ran his hand soothingly across her back, then picked her up as he stood from the chair.

“You make me feel rotten,” he told her, putting her down.

“Why?”

“Why can’t you be like everybody else? Why expect so much from me? Men are only human, too, you know.” She understood at once that he was right. And that she had loved him from the beginning. She thought that feeling for him was just as disastrous now as she had then.

The good-bye kiss was on the cheek. “See you tomorrow,” Dante said. He sounded tired. Then he spoke once more before walking away. “All that matters to me is making it as a dancer. I don’t care about anything else and I never will.” He left her with that to think about.

Sunday morning, Laura slept later than she usually dared, and after she woke up, she didn’t get out of bed for quite some time. She was relieved to deduce from the chirping at her window that birds still lived in New York City. Otherwise, the day promised to be quite bleak. All at once, she hurried out of bed and dressed.

She went to the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Modern where the crowd made her so uncomfortable that she had to leave. The day was much more pleasant outside and she strolled in the direction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She didn’t go inside for fear of interrupting a mass—although dozens of tourists marched in and out without hesitation—but she admired the setting. Since she was right near the Midtown branch of her health club, she decided to rent a suit and go for a swim.

At the club, Helen, the attendant, gave Laura three suits to try on and she finally chose the one closest to decency. She paid for a towel also and went downstairs.

The spa area was drafty, so she put her towel and suit on a hook and rushed into the sauna where she sat on the wooden bench and calculated how much time she had before this afternoon’s performance. Not much. That was one event she was going to be on time for.

She thought, as she had been doing all morning, about last night. She was rash, she had decided, to consider herself in love simply because she was attracted to him. Dante was—obviously—magnetically handsome. Yet he wasn’t someone a woman could rely on. Or maybe reliability and desirability were simply too at odds to blend together in one man.

But suppose for a minute, an inner voice whispered, that his involvement with that woman isn’t so serious after all. Was it a crime for him to have been lonely and to have turned to her occasionally? Give him time, let him learn to trust you, and he’ll offer more of himself in return, the voice said. Laura was caught between her two visions of the dancer.

The door to the sauna opened and closed, opened and closed. Laura, coming out of her self-absorption, looked around. She didn’t recognize the woman opposite her—without makeup—or anything else—at first.

“Lorelei, isn’t it?” Elise said to her.

“Laura,” Laura corrected Elise firmly. She was annoyed now by both Richard and his girlfriend, and by the thought that, for a passing instant, she might have been interested in a man as stodgy as Richard.

“Richard tells me the two of you went to the movies last night,” Elise continued in candid irritation.

Laura looked around. Two other women were in the sauna. The last thing Laura wanted was a scene. “He told you that?”

“Yes, he tells me everything.” Elise smiled at having Richard right under her thumb.

Laura hated to see such an attitude of disrespect for the beloved other. “I doubt if he told you everything about last evening,” she responded coldly. She wondered at once why she had said such a thing. But she found it strangely funny that the comment had popped out of her.

Elise gave Laura a look of disdain. “Oh, I know Richard rather well,” said the model. “I know his background too, you see. I doubt if a type such as you could attract his interest.”

That was completely too much. What a dud Richard must be to get on with a woman like this. Laura stared at her, then finally spoke, “Elise, I don’t want Richard, but neither do you. You’re looking for a lifestyle, not a man. You want a lot of things, and places, and happenings to make up for all that nothing you have inside.” She didn’t say this entirely in anger, though she knew that she was being cruel. She also voiced those words out of her own frustration and loneliness, and she realized it even the sentences tumbled out.

Elise’s face and eyes were on fire. “You snotty little peasant…” Elise began raising her voice into a screech. Laura hurried out of the sauna. Her heart thudded away as she entered the shower, then put her bathing suit on. She had been very wrong to tell Elise those things. She had behaved very badly.

Laura hurried out to the whirlpool, frightened that Elise would follow her there. She dunked herself into the hot water, then giggled, hiding her face behind her hands. She wasn’t nice, but she had been right. She took a deep breath and put on a straight face so the others in the whirlpool wouldn’t be alarmed.

Of course that speech hadn’t simply been for Elise, but for Dante’s girlfriend too, who struck her as being very much in the same category. What a bad girl Laura was. She wasn’t yet the perfect creature that her mother had told her she must be. She had the blonde hair, the blue eyes, the long limbs, the innocent look. But she also possessed a really terrible temper.

She swam, one eye nervously on the clock, the other eye nervously on the women’s spa exit. Elise didn’t come out after Laura, arms flailing, an axe in one hand… (“Insultress,” Elise would shout at her target.)

Laura went into the eucalyptus room to open up her lungs. Another hot room, but with a difference—men. Today, one mustached model type, one blond—maybe he was a Russian gymnast or a Swedish soccer player. Laura favored the blond for his countrified aura. “Not very crowded for a Sunday, is it?” she said to him.

“Sunday mornings are never too crowded,” he replied.

She smiled at him, then looked over at the clock. But good Lord, here came Elise!

“Do you usually come to this club during the week?” her new friend was asking her.

“I…” Elise’s opening the door distracted her. Elise sat down. Laura smiled nervously at the man next to her. Elise seemed to have calmed herself.

“Since you’ve told me something about myself, let me tell you something about you,” began Elise.

“I’m sorry, Elise. I really am. I had no right to say such a thing to you. It was very wrong of me.” Laura humbled herself sincerely. She wanted to flee again.

“Yes, that’s fine,” agreed Elise. “But I’m still going to tell you. You’re frightened of everything. That’s your theme song. But you’re frightened of men in particular. I can tell from meeting that man you run around with. Men like that prefer to hang out with frightened little girls. And it’s because you’re that kind, that I know Richard will never have anything to do with you.”

Elise got up and marched out of the narrow little room. She was a splendidly beautiful woman, Laura acknowledged. And, like Laura herself, not nice, but truthful all the same. Laura knew that since Shetley, she had been very, very frightened. But was Dante as Elise saw him, actually?

Laura turned to the blond young man. He seemed understandably embarrassed. Laura wished she could explain the incident away with a single word. She shrugged her shoulders and gave him a sad smile then got up to leave, saying, “Good-bye.”

She showered and washed her hair with plain soap (what would her mother have said!). She rushed so that she would have time to dry her hair. Soon, she was dressed and ready to go with time to spare, and her hair didn’t look half bad, either.

“I thought I’d missed you,” said the blond country gentleman, rising from one of the chairs in the lobby.

“Oh,” Laura answered, smiling, thinking to herself, Good heavens, isn’t life confusing enough? Why had she spoken to him in the first place?

“Would you like to go somewhere and have a coffee?”

“My friend is dancing today at three,” she told him. “I’m in a super hurry. I feel like an awful fool, for everything. I hope you’ll forgive that scene before.”

“There’s nothing to forgive. Why don’t you give me your telephone number?”

She did, just to prove she wasn’t entirely terrified of men. Yet she had very mixed feelings about doing that. In fact, she had very confused emotions about so many things nowadays. Mostly men. Regarding everything else, she knew pretty much just where she stood.

Outside, she waved good-bye to her new acquaintance, John, and waved for a taxi. She gave the driver the address of the uptown Y where the Studio group was dancing today. She ought to have sent Dante an email, she thought, though she didn’t have his email address—or bought him some masculine flower like… no—white roses for him. And a scepter and a crown. That was how she saw him.

The auditorium was large and hard to fill. The place wasn’t full, but a considerable crowd had gathered. Laura’s seat was decently toward the middle and she settled into it. What she had said to Elise remained very much on her mind. A full measure of the guilts was rising up into her stomach.

Maxwell came and leaned over everyone in Laura’s row and sprayed Laura with words. He was excited. He was even excited to see Laura. “Bernice Midden is here from the Voice,” he told her triumphantly. “And someone from Dance Magazine. Alex Corda may come from the Times. And Newsday might send a reviewer.”

All that wasn’t unlikely. Maxwell’s name was as familiar in dance circles as Limon and Cunningham. That was his category. National Endowment funding even in these days of slender grants. New York State Council money. A nod from Ford and a couple of those guys. The dancers in Maxwell’s company made AGMA (American Guild of Musical Artists) scale.

In a way, Laura realized, she would be wiser to study somewhere else for a while. She would never feel comfortable working with Maxwell now that she knew what he was like. A good idea would also be to let a few other dance schools with attached companies have a look at her work. Well, once her work was together enough. If she ever had the time and money to concentrate on her work.

The audience quieted as the lights went down. This was not Maxwell’s “season,” but a sort of pre-showing. He wanted good reviews to help him with bookings for an East Coast tour and whatever else he or his booking agent could drum up. Maxwell’s reputation, his place in modern dance “history” helped a lot.

Watching the dancers, Laura realized once again that Maxwell deserved a great deal of the acclaim given him. His choreography was lyrical and innovative, pleasing yet filled with ideas. And not just his old dances, either, but the new pieces he was introducing too.

Laura couldn’t remember having seen Dante dance before. The idea that she hadn’t seen him in motion formally surprised her. She wasn’t even sure if she had seen him work out in a class. He was breathtaking, she thought. She watched him especially, then she watched him in comparison with the other men. No, he wasn’t the best, but he was very, very good.

When Dante danced with Paulette, Laura’s teacher, Laura imagined that he was dancing soul to soul with Laura. An ecstatic vibration filled her being. Didn’t that mean they were meant for one another, perfectly attuned as eternal lovers? She was flushed with this vision of the two of them.

Dance filled her with great emotion as much as thoughts of Dante did. Dance provided the means to the immortal attainment of pure Love. It was the door to transcendence of the most blissful sort. Working with the body, she could overcome its limitation. She could reach the heights of liberation and no longer be frightened by anything.

The dance ended; the moment was gone. The auditorium began to clear. Laura drifted toward the dressing rooms, uncertain about entering. Pushing past her was Dante’s girlfriend, Melissa, the woman from Laura’s health club. Laura felt saddened by the situation.

She knew he would want her to come right in, to praise him greatly, to tell him how wonderful he had been. He would put his arm around her even as the other woman stood beside him. But then he would release her and turn away. Laura would be left with no one to speak to but Maxwell and Paulette, both of whom would be too busy to welcome her intrusion.

In this instance, Laura favored self-respect. She walked home, stopping along the way at one of the many Italian espresso places near her apartment. She ordered a big Italian pastry, but when it came, couldn’t bring herself to have more than a bite. She bought the Times for the entertainment reviews and went home.