“He always says that.”
“Did you know about this? Did you know there’d be girls ask the boys?”
“What if I did?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to sit down, George?”
“If you do.”
“I’m by myself,” she says, and lays her head on his shoulder. “I came with my folks.”
The cat has his tongue. In a bowling alley, in a bar, she would have had the story of his life by now, the comfort of his theories, but like this, in the dim room, a virgin in his arms, their bodies’ curves and hollows adjusted by the dance, customized by music as by tailoring, he has no words, is adrift in a soup of contrary sensations. He is that self-conscious. He wants to kiss her. But knows that if he does — she is with her folks; where are they? — it would be a declaration helpless and humiliating as the raw need of those chemical-flooded ladies to whom he’s ministered, revealing as a stump. He feels his erection, which he manages to keep out of her way, and glances furtively at the pants of the other male dancers to see if he’s out of line. He is astonished. There are erections everywhere. It’s a logjam of hard-ons.
“Why’d you ask if I knew Mr. David was going to make the girls ask the boys?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it because you thought I’d been watching you? Is that the reason, Mr. Stuck-Up?”
“No.”
The lights in the room are turned up and George can hear laughter, whistles, catcalls, bursts of applause. It’s the people on the golden chairs. They are appraising the swollen crotches of the men. The ballroom has exploded with laughter. The drummer peppers the hall with rim shots, great percussive booms. “All right, all right,” Stan David says, “let’s have some order here,” and the music sweetens, the lights dim. “Hey,” he says when the dancers have reestablished themselves with the dance music, “you like this, don’t you? Sure. We do all the work, background your courting like music in a movie, and you get the glory. Bet you’d like us around always. Be there in the trunk of the car playing your song. Hanging just out of sight, crouched behind bushes while you’re kissing good night. Or strung out on rooftops lining your way when you walk your girl home. Some nerve. Some nerve I say. Change partners! Go on, change partners or we quit playing. — All right. I warned you. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Lads?”
The music seems snagged, caught on the baton David jabs into the midst of the orchestra. A clarinet breaks off, a saxophone. The drummer quits in mid-phrase. Stan David snaps his baton in two like a pencil. The bass man leans his instrument against the proscenium, takes a folded newspaper out of his back pocket and sits in a chair to read it. Piecemeal, they wind down, the music thins, is gone.
“Come on, will you!” a voice calls from the dance floor. “Strike up the band!”
The bandleader shuts the piano lid. He turns on his bench and folds his arms.
A few of the dancers begin to hoot. It’s as if the film has gone out of synch in a movie house and they are whistling the attention of the projectionist.
“Nope,” Stan David says, “nope.”
“Come on, Stan. Play, for chrissake.”
They start to clap.
Lodt has climbed up on the stage to confer with Stan David. The bandleader shakes his head. Lodt turns to the crowd and shrugs.
George grins at Louise. “It’s part of the show. Is it part of the show?” George asks the nineteen-year-old girl.
“He’s really angry,” Lodt tells the crowd.
“Make him play or give us our money back.”
“I asked him,” Lodt says. “You all saw me.”
“Make him play.”
“He’s the bandleader,” Lodt says. “He’s like the captain of a ship. He’s in charge. He could marry you legal.”
Louise squeezes George’s hand. She is the one who has taken it. As soon as the music stopped George had let go, had taken his arm from about her waist.
“Come on,” someone shouts, “what do you think this is? Don’t jerk us around. We’re veterans here.”
“You’re veterans?” Stan David calls back. “Veterans? Oh, if you’re veterans,” he says in mock conciliation, and produces a new baton and gives a downbeat. The band strikes up a march tune and the veterans groan.
“I think it’s part of the show,” George Mills says.
The march is concluded. The trumpet sounds retreat. Stan David plays the national anthem on the piano.
Many of the dancers have lost their partners, couples walk off the dance floor together, a few wallflowers drift off by themselves. George Mills tags along beside Louise. It’s as if he had come with her. She introduces him to her friends, to a girl named Carol, to another named Sue. He meets Bernadette and her husband Ray. He meets the Olivers, Charles and Ruth. Ellen Rose and Herb, her fiancé. And this is something new to him from ordinary life. He can’t recall when he’s met so many people at one time. Or himself been formally introduced. When he was a child perhaps. Vaguely he remembers comments about his growth or the similarities of certain of his features to those of his father. He half expects these people to offer a remark about his eyes or smile, and though he realizes he is no longer tall for his age he would be more comfortable if they took note of his height or remarked upon some other aspect of his physical appearance. It is something to which he could respond, as he must have done in the past, smiling shyly or agreeably nodding. As it is he has no repertoire, is actually uncertain how to reply when someone says “Pleased to meet you, George.” He answers “Pleased to meet you, too,” but it sounds flat to him, foolish. He is uneasy among all these virgins — Louise, her girl friends — uneasy with her pals, the young marrieds. With Ruth Oliver, visibly pregnant, with Bernadette, who does not yet show in her fourth month.
“Yes,” Charles Oliver tells him when they shake hands, “I saw you dancing with Lulu,” and George feels himself blush.
Meanwhile Stan David has begun to play for them again. From time to time George thinks he recognizes a song he has played on the jukeboxes in the bars, and again he feels himself blush. He’s mildly afraid Louise will notice his embarrassment but knows she could never guess its source. The men would understand of course, Charles and Herb and Ray, and though they are four and five years younger than he, there could have been times before they’d ever met their wives when they too had been at the mercy of glands, their willful and whimsical insides, their rude juices.
“My friends like you,” Louise whispers in his ear when they are on the dance floor again.
He wishes she wouldn’t do this. He wishes to be in control of his body. Breath in his ear does things to him. He knows how reckless he has become, his polite analyses forgotten, his calm science, when even slatterns in bars have brushed his ear with their lips.
“Change partners,” Stan David says ominously. The bandleader’s words are a kind of fatality, a soft force as threatening to mood as an announcement of war or a train conductor’s no-nonsense “All aboard.”
“Damn,” George says, and Louise smiles. Somehow she takes the measure of the music, absorbs its implications and impulses, the secret energies of the song, and takes them into her body, changing not partners but patterns, by some subtle shift of weight signaling George to follow, to come with her, and it’s as if they’re hiding in the melody, dancing counterclockwise, their gait disguised, their bodies subsumed within some more anonymous shape. Their form throws off detail, thickens to silhouette, and George feels invisible.