"That," I pointed, "is my demesne, abode, diggings--"
"I know. I asked. And moved."
"Why, exactly?"
I suppose she wanted her eyes to be interesting. They were
just--disturbed. "To tease you."
"Tease _whom_?"
She blushed the peach tinge I'd noticed before. "Me." Then she shook
her head at herself. "Because I'm lonely, maybe. Because I have a kind
of phobia about hotels. I don't know."
I took her to the Crépuscule--the steps down and the moonlit air
conditioning--the blue leather benches--the violin, cello, and piano
accordion--the little dance floor in the corner with mirrors on two
sides--and the French cuisine. The trio there has rhythm and the
cellist plays maracas when he feels like it, so you can rumba.
She had a dry Martini and I had tomato juice. Then I asked her and
we danced a couple of fox trots. She was a little bit nervous for a
minute or so and presently she wasn't. I asked the trio for a bolero;
the two other couples quit; and we danced alone. Afterward we danced
to a piece called "Cu-Gu-Tu-Ru" which is also known as "Jack-Jack."
She understood, technically, about dancing the rumba and she gave some
indication of feelings for the part that is more instinctive than
planned. Once or twice she tried to lead me--without being aware of it.
If you know a good deal about dancing, you can tell a good deal about
girls that you'd be a long time in learning by any other means. People
are animals--and dancing among animals is several hundred million years
older than the species that calls itself Homo sapiens. There was rhythm
on the planet long before there were ballrooms. So you can expect
vestiges, at least, in woman-the-animal, of impulses which belong
to the skeleton, muscles, and nerves and not to society--vestiges
specifically interpreted, disciplined or repressed by the individual in
your arms. The woman's dancing says, This is what the world has done to
me--or hasn't. And it is the same for men--which is why women, who live
closer to their instincts, like to dance.
This circumstance, alas, has for so long been repudiated by our
forebears that the dancing of most American males is rude and boorish
and clumsy, at once self-assertive and self-conscious, unimaginative,
disrhythmic, unsubtle--paranoid. It is what the world has done to them.
You can talk to a woman all night and persuade her of nothing.
You can hold her hand and a chemical change will take place in her.
You can kiss her in certain ways and the Old Memories will do what
rhetoric cannot.
And you can dance with her.
If you can dance.
You can dance by fox trot, the American way, the integration of
surfaces. We know the same steps, the same skills, the same beat. We
look well together. We make a matched pair. The thresholds of our
sentiments mesh, dovetail, tongue-and-groove. We are, indeed, in the
groove.
You can use the dance of conquest and gradual assent, the tango.
Or the rumba.
Which is African. Studied teleology, stylized candor, libido embedded
in the music, suspended in cadences, arrested, sustained--beyond
intellect, this side of ecstasy. It is a sophistication that northern
countries never knew of--a primitive deliberation, a hot-blooded
coolness. For not knowing, they are punished by going without--and
in other, obscure fashions. Very few northern women and fewer men,
excepting among the young, are able to discover the essence.
They rumba--they say.
They wave their tails like pennants, the oscillating flesh corrupt in
Christian purity.
Yvonne was one of the few.
She came honestly by the name, I thought.
"Huguenots," she said when we sat down. "On mother's side."
How can the Americans ever cleanse themselves?