"If what? Who's we?"
He tenses his gray temples and grits those teeth that have not yet fallen out. "The girls'll be thrilled to their ditsy little anklets. And the guys will do it and like it."
Why not? A group movement lesson is just one two-step away from her own therapies. She gets away with half her rehabilitating sashays only because the hardened, proto-criminal street toughs, in their sick and wounded conditions, can't believe she comes from this planet. But even she would never dare suggest something like this without Nico's bankrolling.
Beyond all credibility, he gets his minions to turn out for a class in the Virginia reel. Clumsy, hulking, umber gang members barrel down the chute of the longways set like bombs pouring out of a carpeting bay. She gives them folk weaves and figure eights, kicks and turns that aren't "too femmy," keeping bodily contact to a fleeting minimum. She rolls out all sorts of pieces — Hopi, Mexican, Ashanti. Best are the enchainements and positional formations that even the crutches and wheelchairs can roll through.
They rapidly outpace Linda's passing competence. The best of them began beyond her. The Rapparition, recovering, concocts this elaborate triple-level, supersyncopated, free-falling gymnastic routine like nothing Espera has ever seen a body do. Its nearest living relatives are those dim, almost-forgotten jump-rope choreographies, the bastard inheritances of her confused, crosstown shuffle-up. Double Dutch, Double Irishes, Red-hot Peppers, here mutated, further displaced until nothing but the skipping fear, the shaky shake breakdown is still recognizable.
Last night, night before,
Twenty-four robbers at my door…
I was born in a frying pan;
Can you guess how old I am…?
Little Miss P, dressed in blue,
Died last night at quarter of two.
'Fore she died, told me this:
You better run or you gonna get hit…
Call the doctor, call the nurse.
Call the lady with the alligator purse…
Grandpa, Grandma, you ain't sick. All you gotta do is the Seaside Six.
Everything she can give them is not enough. Not anywhere near what they need. Nico comes to her after a workout, vaguely distressed. "Hey, you're okay and all. But we gotta call in the pros."
She phones around, she herself now suckered into believing lessons to be necessary for their collective next step. The last of her calls is to the one she's been avoiding by mutual consent these however many generations. "Want to take a girl out dancing?" Dancing? Girl? Capillary action works its sap into Kraft, unwelcome but irresistible. Bits of his skin crinkle like new clothes at the sound of her invitation. Take a girl dancing: template words that elicit images all over the cortex map. They promise the long-abandoned hope of heart-stopping prom night. Rustles of sweet silk delay, even here, the abrasive apotheosis of the land of instant gratification, where the pinnacle of sexiness is to lightly goose the twin cams at every stoplight, blasé behind double-polarizing wraparounds, blister-packed into phosphorescent sweats inscribed all over with slogans and retail insignia. (Why, Kraft has wondered since coming to this state, must one pay double for the kind of legible ads that they used to hire sandwich-board men to peddle?)
But: take a girl dancing. A girl, she says, offering up to him the regressive, politically objectionable term as decadent concession, crepe wrapped, shameless for an evening. Who would have thought a night of dance-floor romance was still possible, here, of all the world's sprawls? Who would have suspected there were dance floors left anywhere in these hundred and thirty incorporated hacienda nightmares, slipped in somewhere along the split fault-lip, wedged between the million-dollar, ranch-house historical destinies of capitalist revengineers and the noir-punk, cut-you-for-fucking-me-over disinherited who drift through downtown in a state of perpetual pre-aftermath?
But take a girl dancing. Yes. Oh yes; anywhere you lead. Yes, even the — where? — Pasadena Women's Club. Well, so be it, if that's the last bastion of fox-trot in this fifteen-million-souled nation flying point for westward expansion's cliff-dive into the Pacific.
Come Beginners' Night, Kraft hops behind the wheel and lets the vehicle do its thing. He's come to use the car more or less like a laser-guided toilet seat these days. Just slide in, snap down, plug into the man-machine interface, think the coordinates, and watch them come up like magic on the old plasma display pasted over the former windshield. Worktime playtime mealtime snacktime anytime. Sometimes he just likes to corkscrew up and down the parking garage ramp for relaxation. Last week he drove around the corporate limits for a good hour or two, trying to find a place to drop off his empties for recycling.
He pulls into the Women's Club parking lot with five minutes to spare before the departure of the first batch of box-steppers. He's got his best shoes on. They're oiled up and ready for anything short of jitterbugging.
She's waiting for him, swaying softly to herself on the steps. O beautiful for spacious! She's wearing the lightest conceivable summer cotton dress, embroidered all over in magenta and cyan mythical foliage, a weightless drape that hugs her perfect hips, clinging up and down her like a train of little-boy puppy-lovers on market day in some fairy fiesta town from the southerly extremes of magic realist fiction. This woman is half from another, completely foreign country. What does he know about her, about any alien land, let alone his own?
He rests his hands on her cottoned waist, too ephermerally thin. She curls like desert vegetation, the feathered tip of a talipot palm in bloom. What must he do — light a candle, leave a handwritten gracias recibido to the little unwed mother of God, cast a bit of homemade ceramic to hang by the altar in the shape of the revitalized part? She kisses him, takes him by the elbow and leads him inside, where he pays his two-fifty and she shows her receipt. They enter the meeting-turned-dance-hall, and before he can register, turn, and run, they ambush him. Dr. Kraft. Dr. Kraft. We knew you would come.
It's most of the baseball consortium, plus a new cadre of recruits. Some of the tenderfeet, to put it bluntly, will do no dancing tonight. A few are beyond motor maneuvering, beyond torso control at all. Ben, for one, a case Kraft helped on, is beyond a lower torso altogether. But each is grim and determined, demanding lessons to prepare them for some unspecified ballroom showdown.
"We had a spot of trouble at the door, let me tell you," Linda tells him. "Soon as they saw us coming up the walk, they were going to call the police for one of those discreet little arrests, like they slap on folks who heckle the president while he's addressing the Junior Chamber of Commerce?"
She's racing, trying to forestall his mouth from spilling its cries of treachery. "If they could have arrested a dozen kids without attracting attention, they would have. Tried to shag us off, but this is Beginners' Night. There's no other time we could come, and I paid full price for everybody, and isn't it illegal to discriminate by age? Huh? Somewhere?" Linda tugs at his sleeve while lovingly grinding his toe beneath hers. Isn't it, you cradle robber? She cops a feel, smiling like she hasn't had so much fun since college, t.p.-ing the rival sorority house.
The dancing teacher, redder than Moira Shearer's pumps, and her Korean step-modeling partner are both still in the throes of major-league embarrassment at the army of child cripples who have come for the Arthur Murray treatment. Teacher opens with one of those effusively flustered protests of liberal tolerance.
"As I'm sure you've noticed, we have a number of little visitors tonight…" Place is at least packed, which reduces the vulnerability. "And everyone, as always, is very welcome. So will all those who want to dance and who need partners form two lines and pair off." Then to the portable tape player, where the first of tonight's soundtracks lies in wait.