Dancing with the Dead Read Online Free PDF

not just with my hands, then I’m sorry as hell. I been doing it all my life. Christ, I hate myself right now, Mary.”
    “I’ve gotta hang up now, Jake.”
    “Mary, lemme see you again, okay?”
    “I don’t think so, Jake.”
    “Mary! Don’t hang up, Mary. Mary?”
    She slowly replaced the receiver.
    Absently, she switched on the TV, then slid the tape of the Ohio Star Ball into the VCR and punched Play.
    But when she’d sat back down on the sofa and resubmerged her tired feet, she didn’t watch the dancers whirling on the flickering screen. She thought about Jake, how he could control her with his love, his violence, and his self-pity. Bondage wasn’t too strong a word. But now it was bondage broken. She wasn’t sure if she’d really been in love with Jake, because no one had ever given her a reliable definition of love. Jake could be violent, but he could also be as gentle as a kind father, and as approving and encouraging. Yet always the other half of him was there, a lurking ugliness of soul, a beast leering out from beneath the surface and somehow holding her in thrall.
    And at the studio there was Mel. There was no violence in Mel, she was sure. He was so young, only in his twenties, and professionally solicitous and handsome. Mary suspected that if her money ran out, so would Mel’s affection. But did it matter? Mel was, in his fashion, no less a real love object than Jake. She saw both men in her own way, mentally shaping them to her intimate yearnings, as if they were romantic figures in a novel she was reading and wanted to continue and conclude at the same time. She was nurtured not by the present, but by what might grow from their relationships someday.
    That was her problem, she thought. She lived for Someday.
    But she’d been abused for the last time. Now it would be a someday without Jake.
    Familiar music blared and her eyes focused on the TV screen. The tango finals had begun.
    In the searing water, her feet moved.
    He stood staring into the freezer. Before the repairman had arrived, he’d wrapped everything in white butcher paper. Even the knife. The knife had to be kept in the freezer to keep it pure and free of the disease. It wouldn’t have done for the repairman to see what was in the freezer.
    Somewhere he’d read that near the South Pole tiny animals that had lived and been frozen alive before the birth of Christ had been thawed out and were still alive today. So there was no reason time couldn’t be made to stand still in a small freezer that was just as cold.
    Anyway, the repairman had finished and said the freezer was as good as new and would last for years. Years would be fine; a new freezer could be bought soon, one that would last a lifetime. Some of them even had lifetime guarantees.
    He unwrapped the knife and looked at it, looked at what else was in the freezer, and smiled.
    There was no way to guarantee a lifetime.

7
    H ELEN J AMES SAID, “The police don’t think it’s significant that she danced.”
    “That who danced?” Mary asked, working her feet into her Latin shoes. Leaning down from where she was seated on the vinyl bench, she fastened their straps in the last hole, so the shoes would stay tight; tonight’s lesson was going to cover cha-cha and mambo, which meant lots of pressure against the floor.
    “Danielle Verlane.” Helen had her shoes on and was waiting for her seven-thirty private lesson with her instructor, Nick. She stood with her weight on one foot and was avidly reading this morning’s Post. “She’s the woman who was killed in New Orleans, remember?”
    Mary said she remembered. She didn’t feel like talking about Danielle Verlane. Or listening. Work today at Summers Realty, where she was a closing woman, one of two brokers who handled final transfers of titles, had been a blur, an exercise she’d gone through automatically merely so she could reach this evening as soon as possible. She’d been so mindless she’d made mistakes she’d have