Strivers Row (9 page)

Here, it felt different—as if the ballroom had nothing to do with what was outside, all the shoving MPs and the loud, crude mobs of white soldiers and sailors. The white women on the floor actually laughing out loud, their black partners grinning back. He saw at least two mixed couples kiss on the mouth as they left the floor. Nobody looked at them twice, or said anything. The crowd around the dance floor only working itself up into a lather as they watched the jitterbuggers, still insisting on their favorite:

“ ‘Flying Home'! ‘Flying Home'!
Play
‘Flying Home'!”

At last the band gave in. They swung almost casually into the number, as if it were no big deal, teasing the crowd some more— but the dancers wouldn't let them get away with it. Malcolm could feel the floor bounce under his feet from the first note on Hampton's vibraphone. Couples were running out onto the dance floor, holding hands, throwing themselves into the struggling, wriggling mass out there, the women throwing off their heels and whipping on sneakers in anticipation.

He wanted to go out himself, he wanted to grab the girl nearest to him—one of those bare-backed, barely dressed cooks and maids all around him—but he held back. Still thinking of how it had been with Laura, at Roseland.
His embarrassment as he saw how much better she was. Tripping over his own feet when she let loose—that demure, light-skinned girl. Who knew—

He felt a hand slip into his own and turned, startled, to find a woman pulling him out to the floor. She was tall and lithe, with long legs and long straight hair, combed up with a single orchid in it that matched the color of her side-cut, lavender skirt. Her palm was soft and moist against his own, and she had a sensuous face—her lips and cheeks just slightly swollen. It reminded him overwhelmingly of someone, though he was certain he had never seen her before, that he could never have forgotten such a face. She was easily the most beautiful woman he had seen all night—and she was white.

Still he hung back, as much as he wanted to dance, thinking of the disaster with Laura. The white woman still pulling him out, laughing at him—

No, not laughing at him,
he saw then.
Laughing with excitement at the whole scene, the dancers throwing themselves wildly about all around them, the sweat spraying through the air like sea foam—

He let her take him. Tripping on out to the floor as the tempo built, the drum pounding atop the bass line, then the trombones circling back to the theme again and again in long, dizzying loops, working the dancers harder and harder—

Flying home,

Flying home—

She pulled him to her, but once he was out there she let him take control. He had never had a partner, black or white, who was so responsive. All it took was the slightest touch on her arms, her back, her high, slim waist and she would go where he wanted her to go. Spinning her away from him, pulling her back and turning her around. He felt infinitely powerful, half-afraid that he would throw her up so high she would hit the ceiling—

Flying home!

Then came the moment they had all been waiting for. Illinois Jacquet stepped forward again, a slim, scowling boy, barely older than Malcolm himself but almost regal in his concentration. Without any further ceremony he launched into the solo they had all been waiting for. He played it impossibly fast and hard, even faster and tighter than anything that had been played already that night. Breaking always on the same, single note—
bop!
—over and over again, an incredible twelve times in a row, stunning them into submission. Then doing it
again
—another twelve times, coming back again and again just when it seemed impossible that he could play it again.

It drove them mad. The crowd chanting and counting out the number of times he hit that note. The noise welling up all around them, one couple after another falling out from sheer exhaustion well before the young man with the saxophone did. The dance floor was thinning out—and now Malcolm was aware of how many people were watching
them
, him and this mysterious woman, cheering them on. When Jacquet finally finished and turned it back to the band, he could hear their cries of,
“Go, Red! Go, Red! Work that white girl!”
He was the center of all their attention, it was another daydream come true, and it spurred him on to move even faster, pushing her as fast as she could go.

But she could keep up. He had never seen a dancer like her, moving with him as if she knew what he was going to do before he did it. He circled slowly backward toward the center of the dance floor, his own feet moving more easily and naturally than they ever had. Bringing her with him, swinging her up over his hip, his elbow, his shoulder. Straight up, sideways, backward—all of it as if she were weightless.

When he pulled her to him, he tried to get a good look at her face—but all he saw was that her eyes were watching his. Large and grey and steady, anticipating everything he could do. He reached for her waist—and she was already vaulting up into the air. Whirling around, her loose skirt snapping as he split, stood up, spun her up the other way, split again, stood up and caught her in his arms. Her heels gone now, flung off somewhere along the way, doing it all in her bare feet.

Flying home! Flying home!

Joe Newman's trumpet was swapping riffs with Hampton's vibes now, back and forth, back and forth, the music still building relentlessly. Through a veil of sweat Malcolm made out that he and his partner were now making their way up toward the section Sandy had pointed out as Cat's Corner. He could see the long man with the twisted mouth watching him as he came, and his stomach knotted. He tried to look down, to see where his feet were, save himself from the lightning-fast kick that he was sure would leave him lying on the floor in pain and humiliation—but there was no time for that.

He slid her through his legs, and she came out the other side, whirled around, and caught his tie in one hand. Leading him forward while he followed dumbly for a moment—a little embarrassed, unsure of what she was doing—but then grinning, snapping his fingers, putting a step into it. Letting her lead him until she turned
again
, slid back through his legs and clung tightly around one pants leg, just waiting for him to pull her up. He boosted her off his left hip, then his right, then back again, over and over—as all the brass jumped in now, the saxes and the trombones and the trumpets, and Hamp's band headed at last to the big finish. Her eyes still following his, mirroring everything he did, and he knew in that instant he had never danced so well in his life. Even the tall man in the white suit grinning at him—
at least Malcolm thought he was, through that twisted, sardonic mouth
—and backing away, giving him room as they conquered every inch of The Track, and the band made its last, dizzying turn, and came back to earth.

Then the other couples were all around them again, shaking his hand, asking where he came from. Twist Mouth Ganaway himself half-bowing to them, grinning, pretending to wave away smoke from the boards—
“Oh, no more dancin' here for a while! No dancin'! He left the floor too hot to follow!”
Lionel and Willard and Sandy pounding his back like lunatics—

“Oh, Red, oh, Red, this is your
night
!”

“Where'd you learn to dance like that, you marin-y son of a bitch!”

Malcolm only looked around frantically for his partner, thinking she had slipped out in the confusion. But no—she was right there in front of him again, as Hamp's band swung into a slower number. Sliding her hand into his again, putting his left one around her waist, he remaining too stunned for the moment to do it himself.

He felt slightly uncomfortable, embarrassed by the sweat sticking his zoot jacket to his back by now. She still looked as cool as lemon ice somehow, even the purple orchid that she wore in her hair to match her dress still in place. That was the one, unhip part about her, even he recognized, the flower like some white girl's clumsy imitation of Billie Holiday. But he didn't care, it just gave him confidence, endeared her to him all the more in her unknowing, white-girl way. Her body was still floating with his, lingering casually against him from time to time as they danced.

“What's your name?” he asked when he could say anything at all—hating the slight tremble in his voice.

“Oh, never mind about that,” she said, her voice throaty and deep, and somehow familiar, too, just like her face, though he still could not fathom where he might have seen her before. Thinking maybe that she reminded him of Merle Oberon, whom he had dreamed about for weeks after seeing her in
Forever and a Day
at the Loew's on Mass Ave—

“Red, that's what they call you?”

“Oh, yeah, for the conk,” he said, suddenly embarrassed, running a hand up under his wide-brimmed hat. “I prefer Harpy. At least I used to.”

“Nah, you're Red. I like that. This your first time here, Red?”

He wanted to lie but he knew she would see through it, and so he just nodded his head.

“Mmm, I thought so. You'll do fine,” she murmured, then put her head down on his shoulder. Malcolm moving stiffly again, so conscious of her beautiful face against his jacket, of the other couples sneaking looks at them. Smelling her perfume, the fragrance of her skin so close. They swayed about the dance floor for two slow, lingering numbers like that, his new partner only lifting her head from his shoulder to smile and kiss him on the cheek.

Then a voluptuous young woman he didn't know strutted onto the stage like a queen, and proceeded to sing the house down with “Salty Papa Blues.” Her voice was as rich and full as a whole brass section, and Malcolm cheered and clapped along, and stomped his feet with everyone else. But when he looked around for his partner again, he found that this time she had gone, vanished back into the crowd.

The rest of the kitchen crew materialized back at his side.

“Where'd she go?”

“That white hen? Over there someplace—”

Willard waved vaguely toward the side booths.

“Where? I wanted another number with her!”

“Ah, Red, you know these chalk chicks. They come an' go like they please.”

“She was a hard-hitting gray, though,” Lionel admitted.

“A hurricane blizzard!”

He insisted on staying right where he was, in case she might be coming back. Only when the young girl with the big voice had wrung the last note out of her song, when Hamp's band took its break and the house band, the Savoy Sultans, mounted the number two bandstand and began to swing into “Second Balcony Jump,” did Malcolm finally let them drag him out. His crewmates were rubbing their eyes by then, but he still wasn't ready to go back to the boardinghouse.

“I'm dead-beat for shut-eye. Maybe we should cop a trot over Mrs. Fisher's, collar some winks 'fore they give away our softies—”

Malcolm hung back, fidgeting around in his zoot-jacket pocket for a smoke—and pulled out one of the scraps of paper someone on the street had thrust on him earlier. There was an address printed on it, and an invitation:

“Let's go!” he said, flashing the card in front of them.

“I dunno, Red. We gotta train to catch tomorrow—”

“Ah, let's take the boy. First night in Harlem, he oughta see a rent party!”

They flagged a cab, just beating out a pair of white soldiers who banged their hands angrily on the trunk, a string of profanities trailing them up Seventh Avenue. By now it was completely dark, the summer night around them hot and close. It was not as dark as Roxbury, where there was a real blackout enforced every night, but the dimmed, soupy light from the streetlamps made everything seem unreal—as if they were in some time between night and day. It was after midnight but it felt as though nobody was asleep yet, the streets filled with murky figures, still walking quickly somewhere.

“Here it is!” Lionel called out when they arrived in front of the towering redbrick apartment house on St. Nicholas Avenue.

“ 'Most Sugar Hill. Nome, you're gunning for some high-class action now!”

They looked up for the window with the blue light in it that would indicate the rent party, but it wasn't necessary. They could
hear
the party the moment they stepped inside the front door. Not just the usual party noises of excited talk and drunken laughter, but the roll of a live piano and horns, and even a drum. The neighbors leaning sleeplessly out over their landings in their robes and pajamas, listening to the music reverberate down the stairs. The four of them hurried after it, even potbellied Sandy, wheezing with every new half flight of stairs until they came to a partly open door on the fourth floor. They pushed it open—and came face-to-face with a short, dour-faced woman wrapped in a sarong, who immediately thrust a hand out at them.

“It's my party. Seventy-five cents!”

“Seventy-five! It's only fifty cent to get in the
Savoy
!”

“You never heard a wartime inflation? Seventy-five cents, an' you get a taste a Mr. King Kong.”

She held out a coffee cup in her other hand, half-filled with liquid that looked as clear and smooth as tap water. Malcolm reached for it but Lionel stopped him before he could hand over his six bits.

“Hold on, Nome! You got to test that it's real shake-up whiskey, an' not just some Sterno an' Whistle.”

“Sterno an' Whistle!” the dour-faced woman snorted. “That's real king kong, made fresh last night in the bathtub!”

Lionel took the cup and gave it a hard shake, perusing the resultant bubbles as carefully as a jeweler looking over a fine diamond before he finally nodded his head in agreement.

“All right. That
looks
okay.”

“What you mean,
looks
?” the woman said, but Malcolm was already tossing back his mouthful. It tasted surprisingly smooth at first—then something like an electric shock crackled up his spine, making his tongue go dry and his eyes tear up.