"On my back!" she says, and twists away from me. "Put your hand on my bra where it crosses my spine."
So I do.
For our feet, she shows me how to step forward with my left foot, then my right foot, then bring my feet together while she does this all in the opposite direction.
"It's called a Box Step," she says. "Now listen to the music."
She counts, "One, two, three."
The music goes, One. Two. Three.
We count over and over, and step each time we count and we're dancing. The flowers in all the crypts up and down the walls lean out over us. The marble smooths under our feet. We're dancing. The light is through stained-glass windows. The statues are carved in their niches. The music comes out the speakers weak and echoes off the stone until it's moving back and forth in drafts and currents, notes and chords around us. And we're dancing.
"What I remember about the cruise," Fertility says, and her arm is curved to rest against the whole length of my arm. "I remember the faces of the last passengers as their lifeboats were lowered past the ballroom windows. Their orange canvas life vests sort of framed their heads, so their heads looked cut off and put on orange pillows, and they just stared with big wide-open fish eyes at Trevor and me still inside the ship's ballroom while the ship was starting to sink."
She was on a sinking boat?
"A ship," Fertility says. "It was called the Ocean Excursion. Try to say that three times fast."
And it was sinking?
"It was beautiful," she says. "The travel agent said not to come crying back to her. It was an old French Line ship, the travel agent warned us, only now it was sold to some outfit in South America. It was very art deco. It was trashed. It was the Chrysler Building floating sideways in the ocean and cruising up and down the Atlantic coast of South America full of lower-middle-class people from Argentina and their wives and kids. Argentineans. All the light fixtures on the walls were pink glass shaped into gigantic marquise-cut diamond shapes. Everything on the ship was in this pink diamond light and the carpets had big stains and worn-out spots."
We're dancing in place, and then we start to turn.
The one, two, three, box step of it. The forward and back of the hesitation step. The lift of the heel in a perfect bit of Cuban step-two-three, I turn with Fertility Hollis bent inside the hug of my arm. We turn again and again, we turn again, turn again, turn again.
And Fertility says how the lifeboats were gone. All the lifeboats were gone, and the ship trailed its empty lifeboat rigging in the relaxed Caribbean evening. The lifeboats rowed off into the sunset, the crowd in their orange life vests starting to wail and scam for their jewelry and prescriptions. People were doing that sign of the cross thing.
Fertility and I one, two, three; waltz, two, three, across the marble gallery.
In her story, Fertility and Trevor waltzed across the tilting mahogany parquet, the Versailles Ballroom tilting as the bow sank and the stern pointed the four-leaf clovers of each cloverleaf propeller into the evening air. A flock of little gilt ballroom chairs hurried past them and collected under a statue of that Greek moon goddess, Diana. The gold brocade curtains hung crooked across each window. They were the last passengers aboard the SS Ocean Excursion.
The steam was still up because the pink chandeliers—"Just like regular chandeliers," Fertility says, "but on an ocean liner they hang rigid as icicles"—the chandeliers in the Versailles Ballroom sparkled, and the public address system still filled the ship with a crackling music, one after another of elevator waltzes melting into each other as Trevor and Fertility turned, turned, turned.
As Fertility and I turn, turn, and step in place, then slide toe to toe across the mausoleum floor.
Below decks, the Caribbean was rising in the Trianon Dining Room, floating the edges of a hundred linen tablecloths.
The ship was drifting with all engines dead.
The warm blue water was spread out flat to the horizon in every direction.
Under even a little water, the checkerboard floor of mahogany and walnut parquet looked lost and out of reach. Here was one last look at the continent of Atlantis, with salt water rising around the statues and the marble pillars as Trevor and Fertility waltzed past the legend of a lost civilization, gold-painted carvings and carved French palace tables. Sea level rose diagonal against life-sized paintings of queens wearing crowns as the ship tilted and vases spilled flowers: roses and orchids and stalks of ginger into the water where bottles of champagne bobbed and Trevor and Fertility splashed past.
The metal skeleton of the ship, the bulkheads behind the lining of paneling and tapestries, shuddered and groaned.
I ask, was she going to drown herself?
"Don't be stupid," Fertility says with her head against my chest, breathing the poison smell all over me. "Trevor was never wrong. That was his whole problem."
Never wrong about what?
Trevor Hollis had dreams, she told me. He'd dream a plane was going to crash. Trevor would tell the airline, and no one would believe him. Then the plane would crash and the FBI would bring him in for questioning. It was always easier to believe he was a terrorist than a psychic. The dreams got so he couldn't sleep. He didn't dare read a newspaper or watch television or he'd see the report of some two hundred people dying in a plane crash he knew would happen, but couldn't stop.
He couldn't save anybody.
"Our mom killed herself because she had the same kind of dreams," Fertility says. "Suicide is an old family tradition for us."
Still dancing, I tell myself, At least we have something in common.
"He knew the ship was only going to sink about halfway. Some valve or something was going to fail and water would fill the engine rooms and some of the big public rooms on the lower decks," Fertility says. "He knew from his dreams that we'd have hours with the whole ship to ourselves. We'd have all that food and wine. Then someone would come along to rescue us."
Still dancing, I ask, Is that why he killed himself?
The music is my only answer for a minute.
"You can't imagine how beautiful it all was, the flooded ballrooms with pianos under water and all the needlepoint furniture floating around," Fertility says against my chest. "It was my nicest memory, ever."
We dance past statues of saints in somebody else's religion. To me they're just rock shaped into glorified nobodies.
"The Atlantic water was so clear. It was pouring down the grand staircase," she says. "We just took off our shoes and kept dancing."
Still dancing, counting one to three, I ask, does she have the same kind of dreams?
"A little bit," she says. "Not very much. More and more all the time. More than I want to."
I ask, so is she going to kill herself the same as her brother?
"No," Fertility says. She lifts her head and smiles at me.
We dance, one, two, three.
She says, "No way would I shoot myself. I'd probably take pills."
At home is my stash of government-issue antidepressants, hypnodes, mood equalizers, sedatives, MAO inhibitors in the candy dish beside my goldfish on my fridge.
We dance, one, two, three.
She says, "Just kidding."
We dance.
She puts her head back on my chest and says, "It all depends on how terrible my dreams get."
It's that night I start answering the phone again. This is after I'm so horny I have to go downtown and hunt for something to steal. This isn't so much for the cash as to get off. It's okay. The caseworker says it's okay. It's a sexual release, she tells me. It's perfectly natural. You find what you want. You stalk it. You grab it and make it your own. After you've had it, you throw it away.