The money had been a big surprise to her. Darren had been managing the stripping tours of adult-film stars for about fifteen years by then. As a group, his clients required a great deal of managing—some were addicted to drugs, some were not very bright or practical, some were lazy—but they were good at attracting male audiences. Darren acted as producer. The club paid to book a show, and Darren paid the women salaries. So instead of taking ten or fifteen percent as a manager would have, he took about sixty, and let the women get rich on tips.
Before she had learned that Darren had money, he had talked her into signing a prenuptial agreement. “Honey,” he said. “It’s to protect your money and my pride. I can’t have people in the industry thinking I married a hot young star so I could live off her money. It’s emasculating. If we sign the agreement, our assets stay separate. I can say I support my wife, and haven’t touched a cent of her money.” She had signed. Shortly afterward, she realized how he had stayed rich through three marriages. But it had not bothered her.
What eventually did begin to bother her was that she was twenty-one and he was forty. She was bored. He was busy, obsessed with business, and not much fun. Then one day she was at the gym finishing the exercise class that Darren had put into her schedule, and on the way into the locker room she saw a sheet on the bulletin board. It said “DANCE CLASS: BALLROOM DANCING.” The small print said the class was to take place in the aerobics workout room later that afternoon, so she stayed to look through the glass wall into the room.
When Sylvie heard the music and saw the woman who was running the class demonstrate the dance, Sylvie began to move to the music, unconsciously imitating the steps. But the instructor—she had introduced herself as Fran a moment earlier—noticed, and beckoned to her through the glass.
Sylvie didn’t see Paul at first. She came into the room, keeping her eyes on the instructor and taking a few tentative steps of a samba, and then he was there beside her and they were dancing together. That was all. They had become partners. When the class was over, Paul stood with her for a few minutes in the big room outside where there were stationary bikes and treadmills and Nautilus machines. They exchanged names and the short versions of their histories that people constructed and carried around like calling cards. When she said, “I’ve got to go,” and he said, “I’ll look forward to seeing you on Thursday,” she walked off and noted that the capsule autobiography she had given him was a newly revised version. She had not mentioned that she had a husband.
On Thursday they simply walked in when the aerobics class ended and stood together but apart from the rest of the dance students, waiting to begin. At the class she wore her hair in the chignon she had worn all those years in ballet. Fran, the dance instructor, was a skinny middle-aged vegan who had been a physical-education teacher at one time. She moved like an anthropologist demonstrating the dances of a tribal culture. The steps were all mimicked with technical accuracy, but the passion and the grace were what she had not been able to bring back with her. She had to evoke them with words, exhort the better dancers to supply the missing qualities, and the best dancers were Sylvie and Paul. Paul was the sort of man that Madame Bazetnikova had called un danseur noble. But it wasn’t about him. It was, as in ballet, about her.
When she danced with Paul, Sylvie felt herself become beautiful and wild and somehow triumphant. After years of slouching, she held herself erect and was still not nearly as tall as he was. She had tried since she was in high school to look small, so she wouldn’t be noticed. Now she wanted to be noticed, to be admired. She felt light and graceful, as though she could float a foot above the floor.
When the music ended for the last time, and Fran put on her oversized sweater to leave, the rest of the class followed. Paul simply placed his hand on the small of Sylvie’s back and exerted the same gentle pressure that had been there since the dance had begun. They talked as they walked, mostly about the dancing, the parts they liked the most, the parts they wanted to work on and improve. But Sylvie was not thinking about the words. She was thinking about the large male hand on her back.
She thought about what he might mean by placing it there, and what it meant when she let it stay, and when she obeyed its pressure, walking where he guided her instead of turning to go into the women’s locker room to dress for her workout. He conducted her to the passenger side of his car, opened the door, and drove her to his apartment. On the way, they talked about the traffic, the summer heat, the houses on his street, and not about where they were going. She told herself it was faintly ridiculous for her to have been in those movies, but now to feel the tension of this moment, to feel the delicate ambiguity of each word or touch or glance.
She let him lead her into the apartment as he led her in the dance. She let him undress her, and she felt, for the first time, a sense of rightness. This was the way she had always wanted things to be. Later, when it was over, she lay in Paul’s bed for a few minutes, then sat up, walked into his living room, putting on her clothes as she found them on the floor. On the way back, they talked as they had before, about the songs they loved and the dance class.
The next Tuesday, the same thing happened, and Sylvie realized that it hadn’t been an isolated event, a mutual lapse that they would each silently wonder about forever. That had been the lie she had told herself. Soon she was lying to Darren about the exercise sessions she missed at the gym and about her partners in the dance class. Sometimes she would describe for him men who really were in the class, and sometimes, because there were more women than men, she would say that she had danced only with women that day.
After a few weeks, she told Paul that she was married. He said, “I saw the mark on your finger where you took off your ring.”
Two months later, Paul said, “We should be married. It’s time to get your divorce.”
She told him about the prenuptial agreement she had signed. “If I divorce him, I won’t have much money—only what I could save before I got married.”
“Does he have a lot of money?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’s made a mistake.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s only left you one way to get your share of it.”
Sylvie let the moment pass. She never asked, “What do you mean?” She said nothing. For two more months, she thought about what Paul had said. She knew he had meant it at least a little, because he had said it the way some men made jokes—the kind that really weren’t jokes, but questions. She detected certain feelings in herself that she should not be having. She resented Darren for having caught her at a weak moment and holding out marriage as the alternative to a bad part of her life. She began to wish that Darren were dead.
But Paul took care of Darren by himself. He waited for Darren to go out on one of his tours with a couple of women who had used the names Ray-Lee and Kay-Lee in their last few films. All actresses in adult cinema liked to do girl-on-girl scenes because they were so much easier, less dangerous and strenuous than regular sex. These two had temporarily captured the imaginations of the segment of the audience who liked to watch that sort of thing.
Paul flew to New York, drove to Philadelphia, and waited for Darren and the women to reach town. He took a room in the hotel where they would be staying, then waited until a morning when the women left the room beside Darren’s to go to the hotel’s spa. He stood outside Darren’s door holding a grocery bag and knocked. When Darren opened the door, he pushed his way in and closed the door. Paul’s bag held a .32 revolver with a plastic one-quart water bottle taped over the barrel to suppress the sound. Paul fired once into Darren’s chest, then stood over him and fired into his head. He walked out with the gun still inside the bag, and closed the door. If anyone heard the noises, they did not interpret them as shots. The women found Darren two hours later, when Paul was already in the airport waiting for his plane home.