Ed Lacy - The Woman Aroused

     “We've been really through so many times,” I said.

     She shook her head sadly. “This time I mean it.”

     She went to the bathroom, washed her face, repainted it, and within a few minutes she was gone and the place was full of a haunting empty silence.

     It was exactly twenty after two a.m. and we had been “together” since Friday night. I poured myself a drink, tuned in one of the all-night disc jockeys, and sat down. It was the first few minutes after she left me that I always missed Flo most.

     We had been married almost a dozen years before, when she was 22 and I 35. We spent six years together, then the divorce and our frequent reunions. We loved each other, as the saying goes, but I suppose it was a case of neither of us being built for marriage. In our own way we worked things out fairly well. Our reunions stopped me from getting a little frantic about sex and companionship, and I guess it worked that way for Flo too. The first years hadn't been bad, but Flo is the efficient type that must go in for smart conversation all the time, dress like something out of the latest fashion magazines. Unfortunately, the magazines are usually six months ahead of the latest styles, so seeing Flo was a constant shock. This may sound like a hell of a lot of small reasons why our marriage didn't last, but it was all pretty important to me. Somehow, her extreme styles kept me at a distance. Of course there were other things; like her dancing in the coffee pot in those gold shoes and the new-look coat to end all new looks. It may have been I was too old and set for Flo.

     We hit it off well in bed, but when we decided to have a kid (and never did) she even spoiled that by a sort of efficient mechanical approach, asking me, “Darling, will this be it? Oh dearest be sure and do everything right. Make this the one. Are you doing everything right? Darling, will we make a boy or a girl?”

     Our days became a series of fights and we separated and she got a job as a bookkeeper for a smart dress house. It was the ideal job for Flo: it pleased her efficiency to handle a thousand and more details, and she was right in with the very newest styles. Her analyst thought it was the right job for her, and I suppose he really did her a world of good, although it was on his advice she got the divorce. In the settlement, she took the house, which only had one other tenant beside myself—the upstairs apartment that had once been the chauffeur's apartment (although we never had one; my father loved to drive the big car himself) was rented to a quiet old retired man named Francis F. Henderson. He'd been living there for years and paid eighty a month for his three rooms. I gave her the rent money, and took care of the house and paid the taxes for my rent.

     For about a year after she finished her analysis I didn't see Flo—she was busy analyzing all her friends. Then we began having tearful and wonderfully tender reunions—and just as tearful partings. Our reunions always seemed to come when I was fed up with being lonely, began to think about girls too much, glance at the bra ads in the subway with more than admiration for the copy and layout. I had to see her every month anyway to give her the rent, so spending a few days together every other month seemed to do us both nicely.

     When the disc jockey said it was three o'clock I decided I'd better call the coffee pot after all—I needed the nine dollars. I dialed the operator, told her I wanted a coffee pot—a restaurant—on the West side of Lexington Avenue, near 80th Street No, I had no idea of the name or street number. After a moment she gave me two phone numbers and the first one I dialed turned out to be the right one.

     The counterman said, “One of my partners comes on now, so I was counting the cash. Soon as I saw I was nine bucks over, I says, 'I short-changed some guy.' Then I remember you because that redheaded ba—your wife—was dancing in the red coat and the drunk said...”

     “What did the drunk say?” I asked.

     “Never mind, he was drunk. You...”

     “What did the drunk say? I'm curious.”

     “Mister,” the counterman said, his voice soft over the phone, “I don't even know the drunk. He said something about her legs. Look, you call for the money in the afternoon, after three, that's when I come on.”

     “Fine.”

     “Don't worry, it's safe.”

     “I know that. And thank you.” I hung up.

     I took out my blending bowl and mixed some tobacco, lit my pipe. I felt badly: I wanted to wake up in the morning and have Flo next to me, hear her chatter as we read the Sunday papers, feel the good warmth of her body against mine. The damn house seemed too quiet.

     I sat around, had another drink. Even my cat was out. Flo had her own place on 16th Street. Maybe by the time she reached there, she'd cool off, take a cab back. I could phone her but that would only start more talk. Besides, I wanted her to come back to me. (You're so right—I wasn't exactly a dilly to live with either.)

     By four I went to bed but I couldn't sleep and by five I was too restless to even lie down—I could smell Flo's perfume on the bed. I got up, put on sweat pants and a red sweat shirt, wool socks and tap shoes, and went downstairs to dance.

     The basement was a long room with a neat oil burner at one end. A mirror ran along one wall and the room was completely bare of any furniture except a phonograph with an automatic record changer.

     When I was a kid we lived in Washington Heights in fairly comfortable circumstances. My father was a hard working plumber. He started manufacturing bathroom fixtures and the money rolled in. When he bought the big brownstone on 76th Street and this garage which went with the house, we weren't trying to move in society or put on the ritz. My folks liked the neighborhood and father considered the houses the same as money in the bank. I was about seventeen then and raised like a rich man's son. At Columbia I studied journalism because I had a vague desire to write and mainly because the title “writer” was a lazy catch-all that covered so many phases of life—most of them empty. By merely calling himself a “writer” a man could get by with doing nothing all his life, if he had an income. When I graduated college I worked on a Bronx paper for a while as a copy boy, then played at working in the old man's sales department. Pop was an intelligent man, told me to enjoy myself, that money was meant to be spent. We lived happily and well, had one motto: “Never touch the principal, live on the interest.”

     The 1929 crash (it was actually two months before the crash) took my father's cash, his business, the big house, and even took his and mother's life shortly after. The garage was left only because nobody wanted to buy it. With his last few bucks, raised by borrowing on his insurance, we converted the garage into living quarters, and my folks brooded there till they died within a few weeks of each other. They were people who had risen from poverty and the loss of their security broke their hearts. I got in public relations, became a small-time “planter,”—a good-time Charley who made it his business to know reporters and columnists and big shots, so I could almost guarantee a story or a mention in a column in certain papers. But when I started working for the oil company and had a steady salary, I renovated the garage so I could rent out the upper floor and made the basement into my private dance studio.

     You see when we were still living on Washington Heights, my mother decided I had to take dancing lessons because it was “the thing” for polite kids to do. She sent me to a beautiful woman who claimed to have been part of the original Diaghileff Ballet Russe company Otto Kahn brought to America just before or after the first world war. She was a nervous, stocky little woman with an amazingly strong and limber body. Most of the time she jabbered so fast and her accent was so intense, I couldn't make out what she was saying. But she claimed to know or have known Fokine, Nijinsky, Matisse, Ravel, and Picasso... although the names didn't mean a thing to me at fifteen. She talked of the old Paris, what a dictator, snob, and genius Diaghileff was, as she put me through the strict discipline of the classical ballet.

     I was a tall, skinny kid, still scared some of my pals would find out I was taking dancing lessons—and ballet at that. I had absolutely no desire to study the dance, and even though my mother insisted, I would certainly have given it up if my teacher hadn't seduced me the third time I was in her studio. She thought nothing of it, would make love to me in French, her voice gay and light, but of course it was a great experience for me. I studied hard to be sure she would reward me with her favors. In time I was quite pleased with the hard mus-cularness my body began to take on.

     The truth is I soon liked—and still like—dancing. By the time I was eighteen the novelty of “Madame's” middle-aged body had worn off, but I studied as hard as before. I soon realized that like opera, the classic ballet is static, incoherent to us, reflecting only the past, the dull glories of a dead era. It is bound by a bric-a-brac tradition completely outdated. But in the modern dance I found my interpretation of life, although even the modern dance is still hindered by many of the silly old ballet traditions. I went in for tap dancing, went crazy over Martha Graham, and even tried ballroom dancing. At one time I thought I was a second Ted Shawn and while at Columbia, the stage bug bit me badly. I couldn't be bothered with college musicals, and decided the best and fastest way to get a break would be to become a chorus boy, where my great dancing ability would surely stand out, stop the show.

     One day I tried out for a Broadway show, certain it would only be a few days before I would be the premier danseur. As I was waiting in the wings for the try-out, I looked smugly at the chorus boys about me. To limber up, I did a few turns, followed by an entrechat, all in perfect form. Then some blond nance got up and did a tremendous jete, really a mad leap. I tried a few tap routines and then this joker broke out into a tap dance that would have put Fred Astaire to shame. I quietly took off my dance shoes, put on my coat and hat and walked out.

     That was the end of my “career,” but I still dance, mainly for the exercise and self-enjoyment, and of course I attend all the various dance recitals.

     I put ten records on the phonograph, a collection of classical, jazz, some Afro-Cuban, and even one be-bop. Then turned down the lights and began to dance—watching myself in the mirror. I did whatever I felt in the mood for; an odd mixture of ballet, tap, rumba, and a great deal of arm and body movements.

     It took a half hour for the records to play and then I rested for a few minutes, put on another ten records and danced again. By this time I was wet with sweat and so tired I could hardly move. I put the records away, went upstairs. Outside, it was turning light and I drank a glass of milk, spilled some in Slob's saucer—he was my cat and on the town for the night—and threw myself across the bed. I intended to get up in a few minutes, take a shower and dry off under the sun lamp. The next thing I new, the shrill sound of the doorbell cut into my sleep, seemed to drill through my head. I sat up, saw it was nearly nine.

     For a moment I sat there, listening to the bell, wondering who it was, my mind still full of sleep. Then I jumped out of bed, ran to the door. Of course it had to be Flo and I felt like a louse for not calling her. There was a great heavy wooden door, ceiling high, across the front of the living room. It had once been the garage doors, and in this a smaller door had been cut. I flung this open and stared pop-eyed at a plump man in an army uniform, gold major leafs on his shoulders, several bright ribbons on his chest. For a moment we stared at each other, he ran his eyes over my smelly sweat suit and then he suddenly laughed. He said, “Well by Christ I'm glad to see something that hasn't changed. Knew I could count on you, George, to be an institution.”

     “Well for—Hank Conroy!” I said as if I didn't believe my own voice. “Where did you drop from?”

     “From Frankfort. Landed at 4 a.m. Going to let me in?”

     “Sorry,” I said as he walked by me and I closed the door. I'd last seen Hank in 1942 when he came in on a ten-day leave after graduating officer school. Now he stood in the center of my living room, looking about slowly, as if seeing it for the first time, and I thought he was going to cry.

     He said, “Ah, George, you don't know how good it is to see you, this room. New York's frightened the pants off me, but you—this room—the house—you're all a wonderful reminder that some things in this world of confusion are still the same. George, you're the goddam backbone of something or other.”

     “Hank, carrying a load?”

     He took off his hat, opened his jacket and sat down. His hair was still thick and heavy. “Drinking doesn't do me any good anymore, George. Odd, I killed time at LaGuardia, then wandered around downtown, not wanting to wake you. And here you are, up and dancing. Same old George.”

     “That's me, the pillar of 74th Street. Come in the bathroom while I take a shower.”

     I showered and he sat on the clothes hamper and talked. He'd been in Africa, Italy, and France. Hank had returned to the States once in '45, then back to Italy and Germany. We'd been friends since high-school and I looked at his lined and worried face, his graying hair (and he was five years younger than I—and such important five years when you reach my age), and I wished to hell I hadn't been exempt. No matter what they beefed about, the raw deals they got, the guys in the service had been places, seen things—their life had been shaken... while I had been 41 years old at the start of the war and oh, so necessary to the war effort (whatever that was) because I was editing the house organ of an oil company, doing a job that meant nothing except buttering the conceit of my bosses and the stockholders.

     As I dried myself, wondering what Italy and Africa was like, I asked, “Out of the army, Hank?”

     “Will be in a few days.”

     “Somebody forget to tell you the war was over four or five years ago?” I asked, powdering my toes.

     He shrugged his plump shoulders. “No. Don't think I've been through combat, hell, and all that. I haven't, but somehow the war turned out to be the only real thing in my life, and I tried to hang onto it. Only I got sour on the idea of living like an English Sahib in Germany and...”