We Were Kings Read Online Free PDF Page A

“You can dance to anything if it’s got music in it—dance this waltz with me, please.”
    Dante shook his head. “Ahh, give it a rest.” He nodded to the men about the room. “If I dance with you they’ll think we’re a couple; you’ll lose your chance with one of these lucky stiffs.”
    Undeterred, Claudia turned to Cal. “What about you?”
    “With these legs, Claudia? My dancing days are long over.”
    “Go on, Cal,” Anne urged as she took Owen’s hand and he rose from the table. “Nobody sits here.”
    “Nobody but me. Tonight I’d rather watch.”
    For a while the three of them sat and looked on as Owen and Anne danced but when it became clear that Claudia was a woman without any attachments—Cal and Dante had been discussing Dante’s need for work and his recent job hunt—men began coming to the table. Now the dance floor filled as men walked from their chairs and asked the women sitting on the opposite side of the room to dance.
    A young Irishman with black hair greased back with Brylcreem approached their table, and his pale cheeks flushed with blood.
    “Would you mind?” he said, and the three of them looked at him as he held out his hand to Claudia. “I mean, might you be up for taking a spin on the floor?”
    He glanced at Dante and Cal, who smiled encouragingly, and Claudia said: “Of course!” And, grinning, the young man took her hand, and they joined the crowd as the band began another waltz.
    After the waltz, the music picked up, Irish-inflected big band merging with jazz and bop, and a thousand pairs of feet banged the wood so that the room seemed to vibrate as if from distant thunder, and Dante watched Claudia with her dancing partner and saw the carefree way she now had about her and something stiffened inside him. He realized he resented this new Claudia, so capable of throwing off her yoke of martyrdom. How easy she made it look—she was almost flaunting this new person in his face. It was as if he were looking at a stranger; he didn’t recognize this woman at all. Gone was her grief, her need to exist in solitude and pain. Gone was her desire to inflict suffering upon herself, to descend into her despair and isolation, her spinsterhood, as if it were somehow a badge of honor.
    He stared at her in the dress he hadn’t even known she had as she spun beneath the shafts of reflected light. Her petticoat swirled back and forth about her wide hips. He looked at her face, smiling and then laughing at something her dancing partner said to her. The way she placed her hand partially over that smile in mock horror at what he’d said. Dante realized that Claudia’s newfound freedom and the release of inhibitions that came with it was a sort of betrayal.
    Cal nudged him. “Claudia,” he said, “she’s a fine dancer. I never knew she could dance like that. You should get her out more often. She looks like she’s having the time of her life; I’ve never seen her so happy.”
    “She thinks she’s Irene Dunne in Anna and the King of Siam .”
    “And what’s the matter with that? Can’t she be whoever she wants to be? Look at her. She’s having a ball, for Christ’s sake.”
    “Jesus, since when did you become so chipper?”
      
    The room was sweltering, the air hot and still with hundreds of bodies pressed together. Cal didn’t know how they could all fit in the room. The tuxedoed attendants and the cops were lost in the throng. Up on the stage the band worked furiously; above their jacket lapels, the collars of their dress shirts had darkened with sweat.
    Cal looked at the dancers moving across the parquet. He felt the familiar dissonance now, keenly, and tried to contain it, ensure that it did not affect Owen’s birthday celebrations, but every time he looked at the dance floor and the dancers there, he was transported to a time ten years before with Lynne—only the clothes and music had changed slightly; it was like looking at two images superimposed over each other