“How do you like it?” Astaire said with a real interest.
“Flat noodles,” I said, holding up a spoonful.
“That’s the secret,” he confirmed solemnly.
I gave him the very short version of my background as we finished eating. He nodded, listened, asked a question about my brother, Phil, and what I thought of various people I’d worked with, for, and, once in a while, against.
“You ever run into Preston Stewart?” I asked.
“Preston. .” he nibbled his lower lip, looked down at the table, and then snapped his fingers. “Right. Tall, tennis-player tan. B pictures.”
“That’s the one.”
“Ran into him a few times,” said Astaire. “Not much conversation, but he seemed likable enough and, as I remember, he was remarkably informed about dance.”
“I’m ready,” I said, getting up.
Astaire rose, turned a knob to warm up the phonograph, and stepped out onto the scuffed, massive floor.
“I’m going to walk you through some basic steps,” he said. “I’ll keep it simple. Stop me if you don’t understand. When you give Luna Martin the lesson, just do what I’m doing.”
I nodded.
“Good,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Very good. Now I’ll just put on a record.”
The record he put on was ancient and scratched, but I recognized “Hindustan” and would have bet that it was Isham Jones.
“Now,” said Astaire, “do this. Two sliding steps forward and one short one to your left.”
He demonstrated. I mimicked.
“Not bad,” he said. “Now do the same thing to the music. Pick up the beat and you’ll be doing the fox-trot.”
“We have a problem,” I said.
“You have a wooden leg,” Astaire said over the steady sound of the music.
“No,” I said.
“You are going blind. You suffer from horrible vertigo when you dance. You are massively embarrassed and have what you hope is a temporary insane feeling that you can’t move.”
“None of the above,” I said. “I can’t hear a beat.”
“Even the deaf can hear the beat, feel its vibration,” said Astaire. “Try it.”
I tried.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ll say ‘beat, beat, beat, beat,’ and you put your left foot out on the beat.”
“Right,” I said.
When that didn’t work, he tried counting one-two-three-four.
Ten minutes and three records later I still hadn’t found the beat. I hadn’t heard it. I decided it was some mysterious thing that other people heard and I was cursed to never experience.
Astaire was rubbing his chin and watching my feet. “You are a challenge,” he said.
I shrugged.
“We’ll search for the beat until you find it,” he said. “This time, forget the music. Just listen for the beat. The music will take care of itself.”
We searched for ten minutes more when Astaire finally said, “Stop.”
I stopped. We had been trying to find the beat in a waltz. I had been given to understand that there were three.
“I suggest that if Miss Martin asks you to show her a step, turn off the music, claim a case of dancer’s arthritis, and walk through the step. There will be a mercifully small number of steps to go through.”
He showed me steps. Tango, swing, fox-trot, waltz. I drew little pictures in my notebook with comments like, “Hesitation step, follow the flow of dance, keep your arms up, don’t dance on your heels, and don’t look at your partner when you’re waltzing or doing the fox-trot.”
After almost two hours of this, Astaire said, “Enough” and took off a Sammy Kaye recording of “Brown Eyes.”
He stood at the table in silence, looking at me, tapping his slender fingers together.
“It won’t work,” he said. “I thought I could teach anyone, but. .”
“I can fake it,” I said. “It’s part of my job.”
“I’m beginning to think this is not a terribly good idea,” Astaire said, plunging his hands into his pockets and heading toward me.
“I’m a professional,” I reminded him.
“So is Arthur Forbes,” he said.
“We have a deal,” I reminded him. “But if you want your money back. .” I reached for my wallet. He held out his left hand to stop me.
“Go ahead,” he said with a sigh. “But be careful.”
“If ‘careful’ works,” I said.
“All right,” Astaire said, arms folded, tapping his fingers on his elbows. “Once more.”
We concentrated on the waltz. I led him around the floor and before I flattened too many of his toes, he said, “Okay, forget the beat. Confidence. Complete confidence and a smile. Back straight. Stomach in. Elbows up. Use the whole floor. It’s yours.”
Something came over me when I didn’t have to worry about the beat. The “Missouri Waltz” scratched away on the phonograph and something inside me said, “What the hell.” I danced. I flowed. I led. I made my boxes, did progressives, turned Astaire. And then the music stopped.
“Not bad,” he said.
I was trying to catch my breath. I leaned over.
“I don’t know what I did,” I said.
“That, I could tell,” said Astaire. “But you pretended. You got carried away. Confidence will take you across any ballroom.”
“Hearing the beat would also help.”
“By pure luck you’ll get it about a quarter of the time,” Astaire said.
“I guess I’ll have to count on pure luck,” I said, straightening up.
“See this floor?” he said, looking down. “When we dance on a floor like this, we have to keep stopping so a crew can come in and clean up the foot marks. They all show on film. So you dance your routine and stop and wait while the ground crew comes in on their hands and knees with buckets and towels.”
There was a moral here but I wasn’t getting it.
“You are polishing my floor. I am sitting around waiting. You have the dirty job. I dance.”
“I also get paid,” I reminded him.
“So do I,” he said. “Which makes it much easier to watch young men endlessly polish the floor. Good luck, Toby. You have my number. Call me at home.”
We shook hands and he escorted me to the stage door.
“I think I’ll stay here for a while,” he said. “A few steps I want to try. Besides, I want to be sure I can still find the beat.”
The next day was Thursday, the day I met Luna Martin, Fingers Intaglia, and the Beast of Bombay, whose hand print was probably indelibly welted to my ass. Driving Lou Canton back to Glendale in agony and listening to him complain didn’t help my disposition.
I spent most of the rest of the day finding backup. I’d been told gently by Jeremy’s wife, Alice, that I was not to call on him for help again. Or, as she put it in a calming voice as we stood on the stairway of the Farraday Building while she gently rocked Baby Natasha, “If you so much as suggest that you might need his help for one of your dangerous, silly cases, I’ll personally tear off three of your toes.”
It was an effective warning. Alice, at nearly three hundred pounds, could do the job. But what made it effective was the specific number, three, the choice of an inspired imagination or someone who had thought long and hard about what might be effectively said and done.
Gunther Wherthman was my second choice. Tiny, easy to spot, maybe, but smart and loyal. Except Gunther was up north. That left Shelly, a less than formidable body, but a body.
I stopped at a diner called Mack’s on Melrose, ordered a tuna on white toast with a pickle and fries from an ancient waitress in a uniform left over from the Dr. Kildare series. Near the cash register was a display of emergency first-aid supplies-aspirin, Band-aids, Ex-Lax, and an ugly-looking pain salve in a purple jar. I picked up the jar. Then I called the office.
Violet answered, “Dr. Sheldon Minck’s office.”
“This is the office of Minck and Peters,” I corrected. “Can I help you?”
“Is this a joke?” she asked.
“Mrs. Gonsenelli, this is Mr. Peters. I thought we agreed that you would answer the phone with ‘Minck and Peters, can I help you?’ ”