Dancing After Hours Read Online Free PDF Page A

seeing him.
    At a Christmas party, she met a man who became her lover for years. His first wife had hurt him deeply, with lies and infidelity, then the prolonged assault of divorce for the rest of his life, denying him his children but for the scant time allowed by the court, and telling his children that he was the adulterer, the liar, and taking the house and half of everything else; he would never again marry. He would never again live with a woman. She learned all of this while drinking twoManhattans at the party; then she went home with him, to his apartment without plants or flowers or feminine scents, a place that seemed without light, though its windows were tall and broad; then she knew why: it was not a place where someone lived; he ate and slept there and did this in his double bed, did this tenderly, wickedly; his home was like an ill-kept motel.
    They did not become a couple. They were rarely together more than twice a week, and never slept together, to wake to the harsh or tender or surprising light of morning. Her daughters married, and at the receptions she was polite with the woman whose perfume she had smelled years ago as she embraced her husband. The weddings were three years apart, and at both of them she watched the girl in white, and with belief and hope she raised a hand to her slow tears, pressed and brushed them with her fingers as joy spread through her, filling her, so her body felt too small for it, and she deepened her breath to contain it, to compress it, to keep it in place in her heart.

Falling in Love
    T ED BRIGGS CAME BACK FROM THE WAR seven years before it ended, and in spring two years after it ended he met Susan Dorsey at a cast party after a play’s final performance, on a Sunday night, in a small town north of Boston. He did not want to go to the play or to the party, but he was drinking with Nick. They started late Sunday afternoon at the bar of a Boston steak house. In the bar’s long mirror they watched women. Nick said: “Come with me. My sister likes it.”
    “She’s directing it.”
    “She’s hard to please.”
    “What’s the play?”
    “I forget. Some Frenchman. You’d know the name.” Ted looked at him. “It sounds like another word.Which isn’t the point. The party is the point. These theater people didn’t need the sexual revolution.”
    “I don’t have to see a play to get laid.”
    “Why are you pissed off? You act benighted. You’re always reading something; you go to plays.” Nick motioned to the bartender, then waved his hand at the hostess standing near the front door; when she looked at him, he signaled with his first two fingers in a V and pointed to the tables behind them. Ted looked at his fingers and said: “It’s that.”
    Nick lowered his hand to the bar and said: “It’s what?”
    “The peace sign. I was at a party once, with artists. People asked about my leg. I told them. They were polite.”
    “Polite.”
    “It was an effort.”
    “For them.”
    “Yes.”
    “Hey, we’re lawyers. They’ll hate both of us.”
    Ted looked at Nick’s dark and eager face and said: “We can’t let our work keep us home, can we?”
    “Men like us.”
    “Men like us.”
    Ted Briggs was a tall man with a big chest and strong arms and a thick brown mustache, and Susan Dorsey liked his face when she saw him walk into the party, into the large and crowded living room in an apartment she had walked to from the theater where she had worked so well that now, drinking gin and tonic, she felt larger than the room. She did not show this to anyone. Sheacted small, modest. She was twenty-two and had been acting with passion for seven years, and she knew that she could show her elation only to someone with whom she was intimate. To anyone else it would look like bravado. Her work was a frightening risk, and during the run of the play she had become Lucile as fully as she could, and she knew that what she felt now was less pride than gratitude. She also knew