When he got out of high school and decided early on in college that he wanted to be a doctor, his musical taste took a more serious turn. “Ode to Billie Joe” was perhaps his favorite song that year, all haunting and solemn with ominous cello passages and dark hints of abortion or infanticide or both. When he turned nineteen, pop music seemed to go out of his life completely. The future was looming. “Mrs. Robinson” perhaps best exemplified for him the turn from a silly childish past to a mature responsible future. He was, after all, twenty-six and already a doctor when he first met young Helen Barrister on the bank of the Charles.
Tonight, much older but perhaps no wiser, he holds in his arms a radiant twenty-seven-year-old who floats with him to the strains of “Moonlight Serenade” and “You Made Me Love You,” rendered as Glenn Miller and Harry James must have done them back in the dim, dark forties before either he or Kate was born. He knows how foolhardy it was for a clumsy oaf like himself to have asked a dancer, a professional dancer, to go dancing with him, but here they are and she makes him feel like Fred Astaire in Top Hat, makes him feel like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, makes him feel light-footed and light-hearted and light-headed as he glides her airily about the floor to these Golden Oldies neither he nor she recalls. To David, a Golden Oldie is Elvis Presley’s “Surrender.” To Kate, a Golden Oldie is Styx’s “Too Much Time on My Hands.”
Most of the patrons here have come to dance. Many of the women are wearing ballroom gowns, although this is a mere Wednesday night. One dark-haired woman in a long red gown is even wearing a tiara. The couples drift about the floor like so many versions of Velez and Yolanda, showing off their ballroom training in whirls and dips and fancy turns — but their brilliance kneels to Kate’s luster. You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate, he thinks out of nowhere, and wonders again about the wisdom of bringing her here to a place where he can be seen dancing with her in public.
She is wearing black tonight.
He is beginning to think that any color is her color, but she wears black superbly, her fingernails painted not to match the sleeveless, V-necked mini she is wearing, thank God, but echoing instead the carnivorous red lipstick on her mouth and the dangling red earrings on her ears. She has left a sheer, black, long-sleeved jacket over the back of her chair, and she steps out now in just the short flirty dress, piped in white at the hem and neck, flaring out dramatically over long legs sheathed in black. Her hair is swept up and away from her face, ribboned with the same piped fabric entwined around a fake white carnation tilted recklessly onto her elegant brow. Black high-heeled strapped sandals designed for a runway rather than a dance floor add several inches to her already spectacular height.
She is leading him, he realizes.
But perhaps she’s been leading him from the start.
He suddenly remembers her seduction of poor hapless Charlie. And wonders why she did that. And wonders again why she soul-kissed that kid from the bicycle shop. But the frown that creases his forehead is only momentary. He is lost in the scent of her perfume, lost in the dazzle of her flying feet, lost in the silken feel of her in the gossamer gown.
But perhaps, too, he was lost from the very start.
He has developed the philanderer’s habit of checking out a room the moment he enters it, reconnoitering it further as the evening progresses, wanting to be prepared for any unexpected contingency that will force him to explain, plausibly he hopes, what he is doing here with this young and beautiful dancer. As they come off the floor now...
The bandleader has announced something called “Elk’s Parade” which turns out to be a jumpy tune David has never heard in his life, and something neither he nor Kate would care to dance to, though he’s sure she can dance to anything and make it look spectacular...
...as they come off the floor, he scans the room again, checking out the diners, checking out the men and women moving off the floor or onto it, even searching the faces of the waiters and busboys to make sure there are no surprises lurking in the shadows here. He has thought of how he might introduce Kate if he ran into anyone he knows, but he has not come up with anything that would sound even remotely plausible. This is a psychiatrist from Seattle, we’re attending the same seminar. Nice try, David. This is a student of mine at Mount Sinai, I’m instructing her in Dance Therapy as a course of treatment for premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Oh yes, completely believable, David. Hi, this is my daughter’s first-grade teacher, I’m filling her in on Annie’s feats and foibles. Sure, David. Nudge in the ribs, accompanied by sly conspiratorial wink. The vast Brotherhood of Philanderers. Or, as it is known in the profession, the Order of Priapic Disorder Victims. Just kidding, folks. But he finds none of this funny.
The steaks are good.
He doesn’t very often eat red meat because he is a physician and well aware of the fact that his father suffered a serious heart attack when he was only fifty-seven, eleven years from now on David’s personal calendar. Moreover, until six years ago, he was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day — Marlboros, no less — and he knows his former habit increases his relatively high genetic risk. No need, therefore, to increase the old cholesterol intake, hmm? No need either, he supposes, to take this risk tonight, perhaps far more dangerous to his health than any tiny little cholesters, as he thinks of them, swimming around and clogging his arteries.
They are on coffee and dessert when Kate asks whether it might be possible for them to get out of the city for the next two nights, maybe find a little country inn...
“Well, I...”
“...someplace, figure out something...”
“I’d have to talk to Stanley first,” he says. “Make sure he can justify...”
“You can say one of the lecturers lives out of town.”
“That’s a possibility.”
“And can’t travel because he broke his leg or something.”
“Like you.”
“God forbid. All I told him was that I sprained my ankle. Which leaves me free, you see. That’s why I thought...”
“I guess there’s nothing really tying us to the city, is there?”
“Not until my ankle heals.”
“Where’d you have in mind?”
“Not Massachusetts. Too close to her.”
“Connecticut then?”
“Too close to her.”
He looks at her, puzzled.
“I was thinking maybe New Hope,” she says. “Have you ever been to New Hope?”
“Once. Long ago.”
“With her?”
“With Helen, yes.”
But why does she think Connecticut is close to Martha’s Vineyard? Or has he misunderstood her?
“I’ll talk to Stanley,” he says. “See what he thinks.”
“Don’t leave the thinking to Stanley. Stanley sounds like a jackass.”
“He is.”
“Then tell him what you’d like to do...”
“Well, I can’t...”
“Not about me, of course. Just say you’re finding it very dreary, hanging around all alone in the city, and you’d like to get out of town, and you’ve figured out a way to make it sound plausible.”
“Yes, what’s the way?”
“I don’t know. You’re the married one. I don’t have to make excuses.”
“You’ve already made one to your stage manager.”
“Yes, but not because I wanted to get out of town.”
The band is playing something he recognizes, but it’s something everyone recognizes, Artie Shaw’s arrangement of “Stardust.” The dance floor is suddenly filled again with stiletto-thin men and women, gliding, floating, drifting to the sound of the soaring clarinet. He tells her about the time he was in Liberty Music on Madison Avenue and Artie Shaw was in there buying records. This was around Christmastime, oh, ten, twelve years ago...