Dancing in the Dark (11 page)

“Whitney,” he said to her, sitting in the Blue Gulf Donut Shop in Jackson, Miss., “this is all going to work. My songs, your voice, you’re great on stage, and you’ve got Susan Sarandon legs from here to Wichita.”

A slight frown of concern had waltzed across her oval elegant face, sitting there in the Blue Gulf. “What I don’t like,” she said, and her voice was slower but more Vassar/California than usual, despite the Hawaiian tokes they had done up and away in the parking lot, Tom sprawled on the front seat, bliss, with his head in Whitney’s lap and one foot out the window, after the concert. “What I don’t like is the way that everything shifts sometimes after I sing; and the fans are applauding, and I think I’ve done something really brilliant, all the attention suddenly shifts to somebody like Mason talking about the goddamn governor of Mississippi. I don’t like it,” she said, “it’s not that I disagree with what they’re saying. Fuck,” she said, enjoying the word, “I’m not a smooth supperclub fox, or whatever that southerner Mason may think. But Tom, I am a lady. I’m a singer. And I think they should fucking well respect that, don’t you, Tom, think they should respect me?” It was warm, it was night, and she was troubled.

Of course he had said yes. He loves Whitney’s voice. It sends shivers of fine blue ice and raw bird bone up and down his long back. But sometimes he isn’t sure if she sees the Desperados as a complete band, or does she see it as a black-white blues band that she gets in front of and tears up brilliant caricatures of Helen Morgan?

Tom has a dry mouth and a visible blue vein under one huge grey eye, but the tall guy is cracking gum over the heads of about 150 friends of the Desperados in a new white cotton jacket lapels, you know, the works, big flap painter’s pockets and a bright red green & yellow Hawaiian shirt that signals every movement.

Most but not all of the 150 people in this loft are under 30, but there is
lots of diversity. There are photographers, a few painters, they’re not all music people.

Odd things happen. New York is full of illusions. Surprises abound in every loft or bar of the city. This tall blonde girl walking past Tom is naked from the bright sash waist of her faded blue denims. She has a lovely enigmatic blue-eyed smile and she has nothing but shaving cream, or maybe shampoo, thick white open swirls, on her full perfect but rather arrogant white breasts.

Tomorrow they leave on their western tour. To take America by storm, the America outside of New York & New Jersey, that is. This is not the night to think about abstractions like permanence, or the epistemology of purpose, or what is the true nature of true love. Ideas like that are as boring and heavy as empty biscuit boxes weighted with leadfoil. This is a good night to get drunk, to see how much it is possible for you to drink in one single sustained unbroken rush in one evening, to get laid, to make love with your honey or with someone else’s main squeeze or eternal delight, to Turkish the harem, or to Harem the turks, slap your best friends on the back repeatedly, hang out the big 1890s industrial windows looking down on East 6th; drop down paper bags of water on other friends’ heads, whatever.

It’s crowded, warm and a little smoky despite the open windows. Jack appears from behind several couples and a bass saxophone, he’s wearing a dark blue blazer, double-breasted, and chinos, he looks academic and confused. He gives Tom a hug and says something about rock & roll, and Tom gestures with a wide abrasive hand. “How am I supposed to keep my mind on writing great songs when there are beautiful people walking around taking their clothes off?” He’s conscious of his voice saying people, rather than girls, for example, gender conscious, all the Desperados tend to be politically correct even down to what magazines they read.
Rolling Stone
is good,
New York Magazine
is shit. And also of the crowds, the warmth, and of being a little drunk although it’s still fairly early evening. He’s also conscious of being rather proud of the party to which he’s invited Jack, the number of interesting people, this ridiculously beautiful girl, the music, Tom feels he’s way up in the world, above the net baskets, walking on clouds.

“You’re just hard luck,” says Jack, “it’s because you’re a bull-headed Italian guy, and you don’t subscribe to
Paris Review
.

Tom shrugs off the sensitive
Paris Review
comment and says that he thinks the girl is at least as beautiful as Botticelli’s Venus coming out of the sea. He should know, shouldn’t he? Tom says he wouldn’t want, he means desire, the girl himself. But that she would be wonderful for Henry.

Henry is an ex teaching assistant in philosophy at
NYU
, and a friend of Jack and Tom’s. He’s a short, rumpled 2nd generation Czechoslovakian guy about 35, and he now works as a book-store clerk down west of the village. Jack used to work with Henry at one point before he got this cushy new job in a feed warehouse as an inventory clerk which allows him to read magazines all day and still dream, to some degree, of becoming a writer. Tom used to go to films with Henry a lot in the afternoons, European films. Tom was the expert on Italian, Rossellini, for example, and Henry was the expert on East European, Skolimowicz, Wajda, people of that approach.

The girl’s breasts are rather wonderful, they make him think of a Man Ray poster he’s seen, full, uplifted, the rosy nipples poke through the white shaving cream like plump rosebuds. Too good for Henry, his friend, the expert on Hegel, the expert on Strauss, who is at this moment as far as Tom knows somewhere out by the kitchen where there is more food than an army of tartar press agents could eat. Henry, although short, caustic, and not very heavy, is quite a gourmet, or gourmand, one of the two.

A kid with blond hair and dark blue shades leans over Vitalis and dabs a touch of cream off with his forefinger, tastes it and makes an enormous face. “I thought it was whipping cream,” he says outraged. The girl smiles irresponsibly, in love with herself as a phenomenon. She probably has a Ph.D.

Just a joke, more beautiful than guys mooning out of ’67 Buicks, he guesses, tongue in his mouth. He tries to remain cool. This is part of his new role in life apparently, to be less animated more clean-shaven, cooler, more a making the scene kind of guy whereas before he was the quintessence of the casual but animated, all out on the surface emotions pinned to his torn sleeve waiting for the vultures to get at him, to hit on him.

The girl passes she’s almost up to his chin long legs tight black leather boots swinging one perfect hip exaggeratedly to get around a craggy hulk of a guy, a producer someone said innocently, with a full reddish beard and stained brown leather western hat on the other side of Tom. His left eye flops like a heron plunging after fish some early dawn childhood morning on eastern Lake Erie. Even calmed down by the Gallo, he’s been drinking plastic glassfuls, Tom’s not too cool. He’s usually a fairly laconic guy, but these band events and his new-found prestige make him a little dizzy and excited, put him in a sort of overdrive, make him a bit of a show-off.

Whitney is part of this problem. He has no sooner lucked in, if indeed it is luck, to becoming a songwriter and receiving one of his first big cheques, than suddenly Whitney is singing for the group and getting all kinds of attention.

Jack speaks light-heartedly to her, the dog, well, he leans forward politely, smiling that earnest graduate school steel-rims smile, and says, “Do you want my jacket? There’s a handkerchief in the pocket you can use.”

The tall beautiful girl gives Jack a smile full of warm irony and bats blue eyes like cool banjos. “No, it’s okay,” she says in a clear Boston voice, “I’m just doing this to advertise a friend’s album. Besides,” she adds, “I’m afraid we might get a lot of this Gillette shaving cream all over your jacket.” Tom watches her disappear lazily into the crowd of people like a jogger disappearing into a subway crowd.

“You didn’t tell me she was a friend of yours,” he says to Jack with mock dumb resentment.

“Just an acquaintance.” Jack looks embarrassed. He was meant to be a Fine Arts instructor. That was years ago, already time seems like a fluid, elliptical elastic band. Jack is 27 now. Jack started writing during his last undergraduate year in Kansas. Then he changed to English. Then he dropped out and came to New York and met Tom.

“There are millions of girls here,” Tom says, “and they’ve all got that ‘it’ look.”

Jack laughs. “You’ve got gorgeous Whitney. How do you find the time to be interested?”

“Not me, fella, I’m taken.” He is indeed, or he would like to be.

But actually Whitney is beautiful and a constant headache.

“Okay,” says Jack, “look, we’ll make it a project, it’ll be fun, like the time we did the green hornet postering campaign all over West 29th. We’ll get Henry laid. Henry’s terrific but he doesn’t make enough moves. With the wildest girl here. Just like in one of those cornball French comedies, you know, angst and humour. It’ll be fun. It won’t be hard. Let’s do it.”

Tom doesn’t think this sounds very much like García Márquez and Albert Camus talking about the soul of humanity; but of course, these 2 completely separate, different periods as the academics say, heroes of Tom’s lambent literary side, never did have a chance to meet.

Whitney is on the other side of the room jawing with a smooth-shaven Aramis type guy from some publication like
Vanity Fair
. He was introduced to the guy, who has a handshake like a large pink and white clam, and the guy made a big production out of the fact that he used to be a fashion asst. for Conde Nast. Maybe they’re talking about fashion. Whitney loves fashion. Whitney looks delicious. She looks especially delicious tonight. She spent the night with Tom, but she doesn’t look tired. Women are different, Tom thinks, they don’t get tired, they just get up the next morning and shower. The more sex they get the more energy they seem to have. Whitney is fresh and vivacious, her hands moving in huge blue and gold circles, busy plugging the new Desperados
LP
with considerable verve. No expenditure of sperm. Women just become more and more energetic. Tom reflects vaguely at times on the feasibility of practising carezza. The Turks may have something.

Jack and Tom used to have good discussions about sex, they weren’t discussions so much as they were conversations, exchanges. Jack would tell Tom about some escapade and Tom would supply comments appreciative or sympathetic and then Tom would tell Jack about some escapade. Their conversations weren’t locker-room style, and apart from the fact that they’re both guys and fairly tall guys, their conversations could easily be said to have a similarity to girl-talk.

This changed of course after Jack got married and had a child. Now Jack is very simplistic on the subject. He likes his domestic situation,
complains about money sometimes, not having enough time to write, and tells Tom stories about how smart his daughter is, she’s 2 ½, cute, and smart as a whip.

Tom would like a permanent relationship, but he’s only 26 and looking vaguely ahead at the rosy abyss of 30. He likes hanging out with the group, and being able to move freely from one place to another in the evening, the line-ups are too big at Max’s Kansas City, he goes to hear blues groups at the Trading Company, and often wanders from there to Phil’s Bar or the Mohican Diner with its large orange and blue neon Indian head facing north up Lexington. He reads a lot, Albert Camus and books about Camus’s Algeria, and of course he has read all the novels and stories of Paul Bowles, liking
The Sheltering Sky
about the best.

Tom does 50 push-ups every morning, makes a ritual, despite the dilapidated bathroom, of turning up the shower to almost scalding and then reversing it to ice-cold for a minute or two. He diets despite the fact that he doesn’t need to: it isn’t hard on Tom’s budget; tortellini soup, chicken gumbo or soup with an egg. Morning hard-ons are part of this exercise: first thing in the morning Tom will leap out of bed, if he’s alone, that is, and hang shirts, sweaters, even a jacket sometimes on the levitating member, the white Tuscan eel that wants to be airborne. These simple, childish perhaps, games convince Tom of 2 things: 1, he is still young; 2, he will never die.

Over beer one night at Chuga’s, they were both a little drunk, Jack leaned over and put his hands on Tom’s shoulders, with affection, nothing smart alec, big smile on his face, and said, “You know, I really love you, Tom. I think you’re fucken queer.” It was meant with affection; it was, in a sense, a comment on Jack’s marriage. Jack is on the verge of giving up his warehouse job, which Tom thinks is a good job for him, and of becoming an office worker. This in Tom’s eyes would make his best friend one of the fallen.

Not having played basketball for over 6 years, Tom is obsessive about the Calvin Klein underwear ads. He wants his own body to be at least that good and doesn’t want it to change, ever.

Bitterly discouraged in a long love affair with an older woman in 4th year he feels, although very casual on the surface, that there is no reason why men shouldn’t be at least as attractive to women as women are to men, if not more. Tom has an ego. One mouth, 2 eyes, 2 nipples, 2 hands and a big ego.

“Those nomads,” Jack tells him one afternoon, “as far as I know those guys don’t smoke cigarettes, Tom.”

He gives up Gauloises, which is what Camus smoked; he smokes Camels now, he loves the picture of the camel on the front of the package. Also, they taste better. And they’re cheap.

A somewhat more relaxed and slightly juiced Tom Garrone, 26, songwriter, and Mason, the devastating young bassist from the Desperados, who came up with the perfect bass chords for the bridge in the middle of Tom’s recent hit single about a laid-off worker leaving a small town in Mississippi and moving to Texas, and a small crowd of other people are hanging out in front of the 4th floor john.

A young woman who looks like Katharine Ross, but artsy and she’s got red hair, well-dressed, casual black linen open-necked suit, stands out in the group. For more reasons than General Motors has excuses. She has great legs, she’s wearing heels, fabulous aqua-marine eyes, plus she has a large pure white silky borzoi dog, on a leash.