Dancing After Hours Read Online Free PDF

this fullness would leave her, perhaps in three days, and then for a while she would feel arid and lost. But now she drank and moved among people to the man with a drink in his left hand, his right hand resting on a cane, his biceps filling the short sleeves of his green shirt. Beside him was a shorter and older man with dark skin and black curls over his brow. She stopped in front of them and said her name, and knew from their eyes that they had not seen her in the play. Nick’s last name was Kakonis. Ted leaned his cane against his leg and shook her hand. She looked at his eyes and said: “Did you like the play?”
    “We just got here,” Nick said, and Ted said: “What was it?”
    “
The Rehearsal
. By Jean Anouilh.”
    “
That
Frenchman,” Nick said.
    “I like his plays,” Ted said. “Were you in it?”
    “I was Lucile.”
    “We got lost,” Ted said.
    They got lost in vodka, in wine with their steaks, in cognac; then Nick drove them out of the city and north. Once they had to piss and Nick left the highway and stopped on a country road, and they stood beside the car, pissing on grass. Then he drove on the highwayagain; they talked about work and women, and time was not important. They were leaving the city and going to the cast party. If the play started on time, the curtain had opened while they were driving out of Boston. When they reached the town and found the theater, they were an hour and five minutes late; they drank coffee at a café and, through its window, watched the theater’s entrance across the brick street. When people came out, Ted and Nick went to the theater, and in the lobby, among moving people, Nick found his sister, a large woman in a black dress; her face was wide and beautiful, and she said to Nick: “Asshole.”
    Then she hugged him and shook Ted’s hand. Her name was Cindy. They walked on brick sidewalks to the apartment of the stage manager, who taught drama at a college. The air was cool and Ted could smell the ocean; he felt sober and knew he was not. Outside the apartment, an old two-story house, he heard voices and a saxophone solo. They climbed to the second floor and Cindy introduced them to people standing near the door, and left them. Ted and Nick went to the long table holding liquor and an ice chest and poured scotch into plastic glasses. They stood with their backs to a window and Ted looked at a young red-haired woman in a beige dress walking toward him, looking at his eyes, and smiling. He exhaled and for a moment did not breathe.
    Then she was there, looking at him still; her eyes were green; she looked at Nick and said: “Susan Dorsey,” and gave him her hand. Ted leaned his cane against his leg and took her hand. For the rest of the party he stayed with her, except to go to the bathroom; to go to the table and pour their drinks, stirring herswith the knife he used to cut the lime; to go to Nick and say “Excuse me” to the woman Nick was with; to turn Nick away from her and say in his ear: “Does this town have a train station?”
    Nick put his arm around Ted and squeezed.
    “You don’t need one,” he said. “She lives in Boston.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Cindy told me. I might be heading a bit farther north. How do I look?”
    “You look great.”
    At one o’clock Susan finished her gin and tonic, and when Ted took her glass, she said: “I’ll have a Coke.”
    She was afraid of dying young. She had talent and everything was ahead of her and she was afraid it would be taken away. This fear came to her in images of death in a car, in a plane. There was no music now, and people had been speaking quietly since eleven, when the stage manager asked them to remember his neighbors. She watched Ted walking toward her, her glass and his in the palm of his left hand. A shell from a mortar had exploded and flung him off the earth and he had fallen back to it, alive. She wanted to be naked, holding him naked. She took the Coke from his hand and said: “I