In the gym there were only four girls left who hadn't completed the solo test. Laura leaned against a window casement in the shadow of a long stream of sunlight waiting her turn. Nordstrom picked the next window and glanced at her somewhat furtively but turned away when he found her staring at him. He watched a plump girl thump and twist around to a Modern Jazz Quartet number and smiled idiotically with tension. The teacher approached him with a smile and said that she wanted him to watch the next performance closely and then merely react to it in his own dance. He swallowed with difficulty and nodded as Laura put on a Debussy record and began to dance with an inconsolable grace. He felt a lump arise beneath his breastbone and swim toward his throat, then the emergence of the inevitable hard-on at which point he put a hand in his pocket and squeezed it painfully to make it go away. By the time she finished he was a moon walker with feet of tingling fluff.
In fact he scarcely noticed when the teacher wrapped a blindfold around his eyes. Laura had gotten up slowly from the floor where she had lain on her stomach limply in imitation of death, with the soft, damp leotard drawn up tightly between her legs dividing the buttocks which owned a sheen of sweat. Then he was blinded and the teacher said that would relax him. He heard Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin above his breathing and went berserk with the berserk music.
Twenty-three years later in a large apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts, the event still seemed the most extraordinary of his life. It had taken that long to dance alone again. The teacher had removed the blindfold, laughed and kissed his forehead. He saw Laura standing by the door then abruptly leave. He buried his face in the towel, returning freely to his native embarrassment. He got drunk with some acquaintances in the dorm and missed his bus, barely awakening to make the bus the next day. Throughout the summer he brooded while working for his father's small company that specialized in building cabins for the cottagers that came to northern Wisconsin from the cities each summer. His family were provident Scandinavians and Nordstrom had worked summers since his twelfth year, saving for college he had thought, but really simply "saving" as is the want of the stern, mostly snowbound Lutherans of the north. While others were playing baseball he learned rough carpentry, how to mix mortar, and finally how to lay blocks and bricks. And that particular summer he volunteered for all the roughest jobs: digging well-pits, the foundation work, unloading cement blocks and mortar and carrying the squares of roofing up the ladders. He was trying to exhaust his infatuation with the girl in manual labor but secretly fantasized a run-in where he would thrash her basketball player. He had been embarrassed when his grades had arrived and the "A" in Modern Dance had amused his father into saying, "You must cut a rug."
To abbreviate our tale, Nordstrom spent nearly another year before he made contact with Laura again. Frankly, he lacked imagination. He would stare at her name and number in the student directory, sigh and occasionally go out with a girl from his hometown who had at least a fashionable promiscuity in her favor. But she was a cheerleader type and often when he hovered above her punching away, Nordstrom thought of this act of love as only a tolerable form of masturbation. His mind was elsewhere. Once he saw Laura across the floor at a basketball game and he had to leave, so deep did his heart plummet. Then in mid-May, in a tavern habituated by the sorority and fraternity sorts where he only stepped in one Friday afternoon to get out of the rain he felt, of all things, a wet finger in his ear as he stood at the bar.
"You never called me. I thought you would call me," Laura said.
He was stunned and they drank for a while with two of her "sisters," Nordstrom very quickly to overcome shyness; then even more quickly when a group of athletes joined them. The athletes arm-wrestled to see who would buy pitchers of beer and to their surprise Nordstrom beat them having been raised on the sport and the labor it takes to be good at it. Then the athletes bet on Nordstrom against all comers until he was tied by a Polish football tackle and Laura stood and said she had to go back to the house to get ready for her date. Nordstrom was stunned and followed her to the door. She put an arm around him and said she was tied up for the weekend except perhaps Sunday afternoon and to stop by at three.
Years later Nordstrom pondered the degree of accident in human affection as do all intelligent mortals. What if it hadn't rained that Friday? How tentative and restless an idea: he ended up marrying Laura because it rained one Friday afternoon in May in Madison, Wisconsin. The rain led directly in specific steps to the Sunday afternoon which began in a light rain and a drive in her car into the country with a half-gallon of red Cribari wine. Then the rain lightened and it became warm and muggy and they walked through a woodlot into a field of green knee-high winter wheat. At the far edge of the field he spread his trench coat at her insistence and they sat down and drank the wine. She wore penny loafers, no stockings, a brown poplin skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. Sitting there while she laughed and talked he felt totally lucky for the first time in his life. Her legs were brown because she had gone to Florida for spring vacation. She stared upward at the marsh hawk. He stared downward at her legs and the skirt slipping upward a bit while she leaned back to gaze at the hawk skirting the field in quadrants. He was transfixed and wanted to lay there until the green wheat grew through him.
"You're looking up my legs," she said.
"No I wasn't."
"If you're honest you can kiss them."
"I was."
He kissed her legs until neither of them wore anything. And the hawk now perched in a tree in the woodlot could see an imprecise circle of flattened green wheat and two bodies entwined until late in the afternoon when it began to rain again. The man tried to cover the girl with the coat but she stood up, did a dance and drank more wine.
Such simple events last lovers a long time. Scarcely anyone can turn their backs on the best thing that has happened to them. So she went to California for the summer and he retrieved her for the last year of school in the fall after a hundred letters both ways. He bloomed as much as perhaps he ever would and they were married to the mild disgust of her ambitious parents and the delight of his own the week after graduation. They moved to California where she worked for a small company that made documentary movies for corporations and he worked for a large oil company. They lived in a duplex out in Westwood and after one year Laura gave birth to a daughter, returning to her career a year later. It was the sexual mystery that made their marriage last eighteen years. The word "mystery" is still appropriate despite the implacable vulgarizing of the media, so total in attempt that it must express our desire to smash this last grace note in our lives. (On the way back from California after the summer before their senior year they had made love in the car in the daylight, standing up for novelty in gas station bathrooms, like dogs back in the roadside evergreens with pine needles sticking to knees and palms, on a picnic table in North Dakota, on motel room floors, in a sleeping bag in a cold fog near Brainerd, Minnesota, in a movie theatre (East of Eden) in La Crosse, Wisconsin:
Do you want to screw Julie Harris?
I don't know. Never thought about it. Do you want to screw James Dean?
Of course. Don't be silly. But he just died.
The marriage had been unhappy for years before it ended rather amicably. He suspected that she had a lover and the lover had turned out to be a good friend of the family, Martin Gold. Both Nordstrom and Laura had been successful but never together. She traveled a great deal as a line producer and he made a great deal of money with the oil company. The sole meeting point had been their daughter Sonia, a rather fragile child until the summer of her twelfth year when it seemed she gained health and vitality overnight. But this seemed to remove their only mutual concern and they faded into their careers. Laura became more important to her company which gradually had entered the television market with feature specials and made-for-TV movies, most of them shot on location. Nordstrom owned a nagging jealousy over the glamor of her business compared to the boardroom composure of his own. Businessmen are by and large hapless wretches like anyone else and Nordstrom had that rare particular strength of the well disciplined, intelligent, good-looking man who never shoots off his mouth; terribly solid, never slick with the "sticktoitiveness" that Nordstrom's father-in-law so admired when he saw the fruits of the labor—a fine home in Beverly Glen.