“The winner!” he cries.
Sarina feigns dramatic, faltering loss. Ben feigns accepting bouquets from an audience. She feigns cutting her own throat in agony. He feigns running to her: resuscitation. She feigns death. He feigns imploring heaven for answers. Receiving none, he stabs himself in the chest. Then they are both dead.
“Good luck,” Martin, tired of waiting, calls out as he drives away.
Sarina and Ben watch him leave from the fountain. “Martin!” Ben says. “You traitor.”
“I think saying good luck to someone is the meanest thing,” Sarina says. “I’ll call you a cab. You suck at dying.”
From one of the apartments above them, a Frank Sinatra song. They help each other up. Their breath in the fountain.
“Where is that coming from?” Ben’s eyes are bright. “Should we dance?”
Sarina puts her hands at twelve and three, like Madame Jennings instructs her children to do at Saint Anthony’s. “Donce?” she says, performing a deep plié.
“Dance.” Ben encircles her with one arm.
Sarina rests her chin on his shoulder. All of this is between his hand and her bare skin: her thick coat, blouse, camisole, black lace bra, citrus lotion.
The song keeps going. The courtyard smells like bike grease and Ben’s skin. He holds her hand in his gloved hand. There is no wind. Ta tum, ta tum, Ben sings into her ear. Ta tum.
Several streets away, Martin slows at a stop sign. Over an abandoned lot, the PSFS building looms. An elevator climbs its spine. The lot is filled with old bar signs and truck parts. Martin lets out a low whistle. “Get a load of that pretty city.”
The song comes to an end and a faster one begins.
Ben releases Sarina and performs a wild one-two-three he hopes will make her laugh. But the neighbors rethink music; it ceases with an unceremonious click. A television turns on.
“I guess that’s it,” he says.
On her porch, Sarina roots in her bag for her keys. The dirty light from her neighbor’s porch makes everyone on hers seem shoddy.
Ben’s mind is peaceful and blank. The whiskey has made his jaw feel achy and sparkly, as if he has blown up a balloon.
If she asks him to come in, he will say no. To ask to come in would not only acknowledge but cross the line they have been skirting all night. Since he cannot ask to come in or accept any invitation to do so, he wants the whole thing to be over. He yearns to leave so he can think about her. He will buy himself a pear at one of the twenty-four-hour places so he has something to toss to himself as he walks. He will reference the hand that held her like an important emissary. In his mind, he is already crossing the courtyard. He is buying the pear. He is saying to the vendor, “Love pears. Red Anjou, green Anjou, An Jou-st don’t care.”
Find your keys, Sarina.
He can no longer stand on this porch in agony. He can no longer sit in that car, on the night of that dance when he did everything wrong. He heard a few days later that her father had left her family, so on prom night she had been newly abandoned. How many girls did he take out in college and law school to atone? How many relationships did he solidify, even when his investment was weak to wavering?
“Do you want to come in? I make a killer martini.” She cringes. She is not the kind of girl who calls martinis killer.
“I can’t.” He sounds early for his cue. “Busy day tomorrow.”
“I found them!” She jangles her keys.
“At last.”
“There is something I want to say.” It’s a lie. She only wants to keep him here, on her porch, for another moment.
“Anything.” He worries she will say something that will drag the night’s meaning into full view. He worries even more that she won’t. Her neighbor’s television is loud enough to hear that it is a rebroadcast of the game, but not loud enough to hear the score.
“I forget what I wanted to say.”
“I’ll wait.”
“You might be here a while,” she says. “My memory is worse than a goldfish’s.”
He pauses in the yellow light. “No hurry.”
There is rustling next to them, the sound of a window being thrown open. A girl wearing a Santa hat and a clothespin on her nose climbs out. “Miss Greene?” she says, as if standing in front of a deep forest, calling out for anyone she knows.
Sarina’s jaw slackens with surprise. “Madeleine?”
1:00 A.M
After their wedding, Ben and Annie buy a town house in Olde City and protect it with a top-of-the-line security system. Every night, Annie smooths moisturizer into her elbows and lists the following day’s To Do items. Depositions, recycling, the post office. Ben watches her as if from the other side of a bay. Who is this tall, freckled woman and why has he done something as important as marriage to her? He makes excuses to linger in his home office, tapping at his manuscript. She seems relieved. The sexless weeks pile up.
He tries coming at her from behind, in the shower, like a predatory fish. This dissolves into polite intercourse. He moves into her as if he doesn’t wish to disturb her. Any interruption, a loud commercial or a passing siren, derails their tenuous physicality and they fall asleep, separate and worried.
Every time they leave their town house, they punch the security code into a panel by the door and when they return, same code.
Ben blames his job. He decides to quit to try writing fulltime. She resents the extra burden placed on her salary and discusses their problems loudly on the phone to her girlfriends. “He’s not a sexual person, is all,” she tells them, toeing one battered, elegant slipper. “Most men like sex. This one doesn’t.”
Her supple elbows. Her pale, elegant neck. He cannot imagine ever wanting to fuck her again. One night, sleeping on the couch, he jolts awake to find her standing at the foot. “There’s only one thing to be done,” she says.
Their relationship had been careening toward it the entire time, he realizes, like the inevitable shoe drop of death.
During their first salsa lesson, the instructor explains that Cuban salsa moves on the one, and that the clave, “Cuba’s answer to the cowbell,” will guide them. Instead of Annie, Ben is paired with Rue, the assistant, who has forgotten to get old. Her laugh is easy, her ass taut. She leads him through the moves whose Spanish terms translate roughly into misogynist commands: Give me the girl! Tell her no! Ben immediately takes to the simple “Coca Cola,” where he releases Rue for a beat before winding her back. “Date her cousin!” the instructor barks as they flop across the floor. “Plug her in!” Ben focuses on finding and maintaining the one, as across the room, Annie coca colas fearfully with her own partner, a tax attorney whose blinking face seems overexposed, like it is missing a pair of glasses. He treads on her toe and Annie giggles, looking for a moment like the young, sick girl Ben met outside Ethics of Law. That night, they return home, sweaty and hopeful. You liked it, didn’t you? It wasn’t bad at all. Perhaps the chance to rekindle comes around as often as the one, Ben thinks, if you listen for it.
Wednesday night becomes salsa night. Ben likes how the students say encouraging things to one another when it is their turn to cross the floor. He likes the tax attorney’s contented grimace when he accomplishes a new move. He likes that everyone laughs at one another’s jokes, even when they aren’t funny, because it isn’t about being clever, it’s about being present. He likes the idea of working on his dance phrasing, that everyone has a dance floor persona. Clara hits heavy on the floor, while Rue is airier, like a responsive, silk curtain. He likes that dance is a conversation, conducted in pressings made through the hands or against the small of his partner’s back.