Mr. Flesh stands tux’d, his formal pants and jacket glowing like a black comb, his patent-leather shoes vaulted smooth and tensionless as perfect architecture. He might be standing in the skin of a ripe bright black apple. He feels, in the inky clothes, showered, springy, bouncy, knows in remissioned tactility around his shins, his clean twin sheathing of tall silk hose, can almost feel the condition of his soles, their shade like Negroes’ palms. He is accessoried.
In his old-fashioned white dress shirt his delicious burgundy studs are as latent with color as the warning lights on a dashboard. Onyx links, round and flat as elevator buttons, seal his cuffs, and dark suspenders lie on him with an increment of weight that suggests the thin holsters of G-men, and indeed there is something governmental in his dress, something maritime, chief-of-staff. The golden fasteners beneath his jacket could be captain’s bars. A black bow tie lies across his throat like a propeller.
The studio is in the Great Northern Building on Randolph Street, in a loft. (Or this is how it seems. He knows there are floors above this one.) He remembers the days when the seventh-floor corridor had been flanked with the branch offices of costume jewelry and watchband firms, a barber shop, lawyers’ offices, his father’s theatrical costume business. Now, except for the barber shop, there is only the studio ballroom and the rooms for private instruction made over from the old lawyers’ suites. A sort of stage is at one end of the large room. He knows it is only his father’s long old cutting tables shoved close together — nailed and covered over with Armstrong vinyl asbestos Chem-tile. He knows that the waterfall of velvet that flows over the lip of the “stage” conceals only the carpenter’s reinforcing scaffold, scaffold like a wine rack; that the flats, flies, tormentors, teasers, and borders that ornament the stage with perspective are only a plywood contact paper studded with a kind of gritty sheen like the surface of a ping-pong paddle.
He knows it is a losing proposition. Yet feels good anyway. Reassured by Randolph Street invisible at his back behind the opaque drapes, by the restaurant, a Henrici’s he can almost feel, the Woods Theater, the Oriental, the novelty jokes and tricks shop he remembers from his youth across the street, the out-of-town-paper stand on the corner, the proliferating porno bookstores he finds so appealing, as all muted lust is appealing to him, bringing out qualities of shyness and the awkward, the peremptory imposition of respected distances, boundaries, the territorial waters of self. Like his students. Wallflowers who bought their courage with their lessons, who came out — as if it were an accredited finishing school — at the parties and balls and galas they threw themselves every few weeks at the end of one session or the getting-to-know-you beginning of the next. Getting to know again and again — the turnover never as great as the recidivism — those they knew from before. He had seen them, expansive as the fathers of brides at the punch table, or stopping the hors d’oeuvres tray as it went past carried by an instructor, demanding that their guests, themselves hosts, eat, drink, at last forcing the instructors themselves into accepting a hospitality that was by its very nature communal, and disguising this by a boisterous, reflexive generosity. Ballroom dancing? They had taught themselves to solo.
Clara was with a private student. She had said that she would turn the student over to Jenny or Hope, but Flesh insisted that she finish the hour. He had left the Office of Admissions and come into the ballroom. He sat down in a straight-back chair — a chair like a chair at a dinner table — near one of the staggered, tall, smoked mirrors that offered the room the illusion of several entrances.
He had not looked at the books but had a pretty good notion of how things were. He could tell from the music — or lack of it — that business was bad. In the old days he could stand in the Office of Admissions and hear fox-trot, bossa nova, cha-cha, waltz, polka, rhumba, and tango rhythms coming from record players in the private instruction studios. It had been like being in a bazaar where many tongues were spoken. Now only the “Carousel Waltz” wafted through the thin wallboard of one of the private instruction studios. After sitting a moment he got up and went back into the Office of Admissions.
“For God’s sake,” he told Luis, his Latin rhythms instructor, who was working the switchboard, “it’s like a morgue in there. Why isn’t there any music in the ballroom?”
“Overhead.”
“Suppose the phone rings? If there were music the caller would hear it in the background. He might think something’s happening here.”
“I got that FM you brung last time. It’s tuned to this all-music station, just like you said. If the phone rings I turn it on.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t a good idea. Suppose there’s a commercial? I think we should go back to the old system.”
“Sure, Mr. Flesh. What do you want to hear?”
“What is it, you do requests? I don’t care. It’s too quiet. Turn on the stereo. Where’s Clara?”
“Clara’s still back there with the waltzer.”
“And Hope and Jenny? Where’s Al?” Al was his other male instructor.
“Jenny and Hope are around somewhere. I think they’re doing each other’s hair for the gala. You want me to get them?”
“No, the phone might ring. How many do we expect at the gala tonight?”
“Gee, Mr. Flesh, I can’t say. There’s the Fishers, they’ll be here. Runley said he was coming. Johnson and—”
“You can name them? My God, you can name them? It’s bad as that? That’s terrible.”
Luis nodded.
“Where’s Al?”
“Al went to get cookies for the gala.”
“Cookies.”
“It’s pretty quiet, Mr. Flesh. The old people stay in their condominiums. Those buildings got social directors who teach them the steps. A lot are afraid to come downtown. It’s different times, Mr. Flesh.”
Flesh nodded. “Here,” he said. He took his Diners Club card out of his wallet. “Run down to Fritzel’s. Have them make up a tray of sliced turkey. Get roast beef, too. Rare. Tell them rare. Make it so we can serve at least fifty people.”
“There won’t be no fifty people, Mr. Flesh,” Luis said.
“They can take what’s left over in fucking doggy bags!” Flesh roared. “I’m feeding fifty people! The gala’s at nine, right?”
“Nine, yes, sir. Nine.”
“It’s not yet eight. All right, give the guy ten bucks. Let him bring the stuff over and set it up for us. When you’re through at Fritzel’s, cross over to Don the Beachcomber and have them do us some hot hors d’oeuvres. They deliver?”
“No, sir, and Don the Beachcomber ain’t no take-out joint either, Mr. Flesh.”
“Luis,” Flesh said, “I got five people working for me — you, Clara, Al, Jenny, and Hope. One is off somewhere buying cookies and two are having their hair done. Now if a busy guy like me with a hot commercial property like the Fred Astaire Dance Studio can let his personnel crap around on company time, Mr. Beachcomber can send someone in a rickshaw with the hors d’oeuvres. Here, give him twenty bucks. I want the stuff at nine-thirty. Liquor, what about liquor?”
“We ain’t licensed, Mr. Flesh.”
“I ain’t selling, Trini, I’m giving it away. Martinis. Scotch. Bourbon. And plenty of ice. I don’t want to run out of ice.”