Now that Justine had it in her head that Martin was on trial, she felt like she was a teacher giving a student marks for their performance. She knew a lot more about being a good student than she did about dating, so this was helpful.
Martin had been friendly and considerate all evening. She’d be a liar if she said he wasn’t good-looking. He was a good dancer, but not so good that Justine felt stupid trying to keep up with him. He made his leads obvious, so she could usually tell when he wanted her to twirl. She could also usually remember the things Georgette said about swinging her backside the Jitterbug way. She was having a really good time, but Jerry was having enough fun for all of them.
The dance floor was crowded, but people made room for the man who could make his wheelchair rock and spin. Jerry danced in his chair, holding Georgette’s right hand lightly with his left. Sometimes he leaned forward to lead her back and forth in complicated patterns that made Justine’s head swim. Sometimes he tossed her hand in the air as a cue for her to take a double turn on her own. And all the time, Jerry was laughing and smiling.
Justine could see why Georgette liked him.
***
Justine had lost count of how many songs she’d danced to, much less how many Planter’s Punches she’d had since Darlene recommended them, but she was starting to worry about sweating through the bodice of her dress. It was a relief when Martin said, “Do you want to get some fresh air?”
Putting a gentle but firm hand on her shoulder, he guided her through the crowd that blocked their way to the door. His hand made Justine acutely aware that her shoulder was bare except for a flimsy silk strap. Every time he steered her left or right, she ended up a little closer to him, so she was snugged right up under his arm by the time she felt the evening breeze on her face.
As they moved away from The TickTock’s brightly lit entry, his hand slid to her waist, but slowly, so slowly that she was sure he could have counted every hook and bone in her longline bra. She had no doubt that he was interested in what was under her dress, but it wasn’t her bra that he was thinking about. She was glad when his hand, gliding down the smooth silk of her bodice, stopped at her waist. It pressed her flesh in a way that left no question what he was trying to say to her.
Since her experience with the opposite sex was limited to fending off the awkward fumblings of teenagers whom the nuns had imported from a boys’ school to make the dances at her girls’ school more interesting, the enormity of her ignorance struck her hard. She knew one thing for certain. Martin had been to The TickTock at least once, most likely in the company of a woman, because he knew exactly where he was going. Steering her past a handful of couples pretending that the darkness hid their embraces, he pulled her around a corner of the club’s brick façade and into a secluded alcove.
Now both of his hands were on her waist, and he was turning her to face him. A boy would have already been pawing at her breasts and she would have been reflexively pushing him away. But Martin knew how to let the moment be. He held her just close enough, so that she could feel the heat radiating from the body that had just been dancing with hers. Justine wanted him to kiss her more than she had wanted anything for a long time.
Instead, he gave her what she’d always said she wanted. It was what she did want when she wasn’t pinned to a wall by a man she desired far more than she’d realized. He gave her a man who wanted to talk.
“I’m not staying in this town forever,” he said, his lips a quarter-inch from her brow. “I want things I can’t get here, but I don’t want to leave alone. There’s a whole world waiting for me. It could be waiting for us, you know.”
She tried to speak, but the words kept spilling out of him. “I know we just met. I can give you time, but I can’t give you much time, because I’ll die inside if I have to stay here much longer. And I’ll die inside if I have to leave without somebody to share the world with me. I’ve been around long enough to know that you’re one of a kind, Justine.”
She tried to tell him he was out of his mind, but nothing came out.
“I’ve been watching you for longer than you know, since I started working at the St. Charles plant. From the start, I couldn’t take my eyes off you. Don’t tell me you didn’t know I was there.”
She tried to tell him that she knew nothing about him, if only so she could hear the words and remind herself that they were true. Nothing came out.
“Give me a chance to show you what I’ve been feeling for a long time. Let me take you to dinner tomorrow night. And the next night. I want all your nights.”
She tried to tell him that the next night was out of the question because she had a date with Charles, but she couldn’t, because his mouth was on hers. Even if it hadn’t been, she couldn’t have spoken because he had taken her breath away.
***
Justine hoped her hair wasn’t rumpled as Martin guided her back to the table where Georgette and Jerry waited. Two full drinks were also waiting, thanks to Jerry. She didn’t want any more alcohol to come between her and her good sense, but she took a sip to be polite. The top layer was watery. She knew it wasn’t because the bartender was pouring her skimpy drinks, because Georgette had been right. The TickTock’s bartender seemed to want to be Justine’s friend for life. If this one was watery, then she and Martin had stayed outside long enough for the ice cubes to melt.
To hide her nerves, she took another sip, a deep one. Once she drained the watery top layer, she reached a layer that was more rum than pineapple juice. This was not optimal. She was now permanently dizzy, and it wasn’t just from a full night of Jitterbugging.
“You two missed some good songs. Let’s dance,” Georgette said. She reached out to tuck a loose strand of Justine’s hair behind her ear, and Justine knew by this that her hair was indeed rumpled. At least Georgette wasn’t feeling the need to straighten her dress out for her.
She made it onto the dance floor without staggering, no mean feat when wearing high heels while tipsy, and then muscle memory set in. Martin’s strong hands whipped her through turns and patterns that threw the whole room into a blur, but she was keeping up with him and she was still on her feet.
Georgette’s voice was calling out, “Look at her go!” It penetrated the background roar of happy voices, so she was apparently doing better than keeping up. She was dancing well. It was entirely possible that she would dance well until she dropped, and it was entirely possible that this was going to happen soon.
Georgette had been teaching her to make her turns smooth by keeping her eyes on a single spot, and Justine thought that this might save her. Her eyes, darting around in search of an anchor, landed on something that looked stationary, safe, dependable. Only when she had fully focused on her new anchor did she see what it was. As she finished her double turn and her eyes returned to that point, there stood Charles.
There was no doubt that he knew she was there because he was staring straight at her. His eyes were unreadable, but she could see one thing. The vulnerability, the humor, the kindness—everything that she had liked about Charles was gone. He raised a full glass and consumed half the amber liquid in it with a single swallow. Then he slammed the glass so hard on the table in front of him that some of his drink sloshed out, but he didn’t see it happen because his eyes never left her face.
What on earth was he doing at The TickTock? She knew that he hadn’t had longstanding plans to go dancing, since he’d asked her to go to a movie that very night.
Had he followed her? This was certainly possible. Just hours before, he’d been sitting on the bus that had deposited her at The Julia’s front door. It would have been easy to park himself somewhere nearby and wait for her to leave on her date. It seemed romantic when men did things like this in the movies, but the thought of it happening in reality made her queasy.
Justine leaned toward Martin and half-yelled, so that she could be heard over the band playing the intro to the next song. “I’m a little tired. Let’s go sit down for a minute.”
“Sure. I’ll order another round of drinks.”
Justine did not want another drink. Charles’s unreadable face made her want to gather her wits.
Georgette and Jerry must have seen them leave the dance floor, because they were right behind them. Justine thought that another trip to the ladies’ room might be in order, so that Georgette could reassure her that she was fretting over nothing. Then she saw that Charles had positioned himself so that she couldn’t get to the bathroom or the main exit without passing him. It had been almost two years since hundreds of people had died in a fire at a nightclub in Boston, the Cocoanut Grove, so surely there was an emergency door or a back door or a service door or something. Surely New Orleans had laws requiring such things by now. Surely her friends at The TickTock, who cared enough about her to pour her drinks that were mostly ethanol, wanted to make sure that she didn’t burn to death along with all the other revelers around her.
Justine settled herself in her seat, the same seat where she’d been having so much fun before Martin had so thoroughly confused her and before she’d seen Charles’s stare. Unfortunately, this put Charles behind her. If she craned her neck over her right shoulder, she could see him, but then he would see her looking at him. Instead, she busied herself with arranging her rustling black skirt under the snowy tablecloth. She could feel his eyes on the nape of her neck, which was tingling as the skin atop her cervical vertebrae crawled.
Justine’s distress apparently didn’t show, since Georgette, usually so perceptive, was leaning over with a grin to tell her something funny. Then Georgette’s face froze, still grinning as it stared past Justine’s shoulder.
“What’s he doing here, and why’s he looking at us like that?” Georgette’s voice was barely audible, but it trembled.
Justine felt the fear of a fox cornered by baying hounds. She felt like prey.
A wood-on-wood groan sounded, obvious even over the earsplitting band. Justine turned her head and saw Charles dragging a chair up to their table, which was only large enough to seat four. Determined, he shoved Jerry’s wheelchair until it rolled far enough forward to let him pass, then he jammed his chair and his body between Justine and Georgette. They both stared as his lean form dropped into the interloping chair. His body no longer looked lanky and harmless. It looked like a spring under tension.
“What’s cookin’?”
Charles smacked his drink on the table hard, but there was so little left in the glass that nothing sloshed out. Raising his hand, Charles made eye contact with a waiter, who hurried away to fetch him another drink. Before the waiter had taken three steps, Charles tossed the rest of his drink down his throat.
“You told me you weren’t much of a dancer this afternoon, Justine,” he said, leaning so close she could smell the bourbon. “You said it in the same breath that you said you were going dancing with another man. I had to come see whether you were just being modest. Turns out that you’re quite the hoofer.”
“I dance. I never said that I didn’t dance at all.” Wondering why she felt like she needed to defend her truthfulness, she got specific. “I only said that I didn’t Jitterbug much.”
The Planter’s Punches appeared to have loosened her tongue because she kept prattling on about dancing.
“I can Foxtrot. I can do the Lindy Hop. I can waltz.”
“Waltzing sounds like fun. Dancing slow, up close and face-to-face, can’t be bad.” His hand was flat on the table, but he was sliding it in the direction of hers, the one that wasn’t holding her drink. She switched her Planter’s Punch to that hand as a way to fend him off.
She was too nervous to make eye contact with Martin. The extra chair, the one that was holding Charles, had smashed the two couples uncomfortably close together, so she could feel Martin’s anger. Against her outer thigh, hip to knee, his leg was trembling.
Justine didn’t know what to do other than to keep blabbering about dancing. “You’re right. Waltzing is fun. So’s the Foxtrot. And the Polka. My godmother’s Polish, and she taught me to do the Polka. And my parents’ other friends taught me their dances, like the Der Deutsche and the Zwiefacher and the…”
“Der Deutsche?” Martin said. “That sounds German.”
Dizzied by the pent-up hostility around her, and also by the Planter’s Punches, Justine didn’t connect the word “German” with her country’s enemy, only with people she loved who had taught her their native dances. “A lot of my parents’ friends were German. A lot of them. There were a lot of people doing great physics in Germany back when my parents were alive. Guess they still do. Some of them got out in time, but some of them are still there.”
The rum was really talking now. She had admitted that her parents were dead, so she’d lost any protection she might have had from two touchy suitors who both knew where she lived.
“Are those people in Germany…are they Nazis?” Jerry asked. “Maybe they want to still be there.”
She felt Charles draw away from her, and her tipsy brain thought, Maybe this is how I can nip this thing in the bud. Maybe Charles doesn’t want to be stepping out with a woman who’s friendly with Germans. Of course, Martin may stop liking me, too. Do I care? I don’t know.
“I don’t know about most of my parents’ German colleagues. They seemed perfectly friendly and warm. But a few? I was pretty young when we were over there, but I heard what a few of them had to say about die Zigeuner and das Judentum. My parents gave me a talk about how wrong they were, and we never saw those people again. They wrote letters, but my mother threw them away. So yeah. Probably Nazis.”
“You’ve been to Germany?” Martin was silent a moment, then he said, “Do you speak German?”
“My parents started teaching me German when I was just a kid. More and more science is being published in English, but not so much that you can ignore German publications.”
And now she was compounding the sin of fraternizing with the enemy with the crime of being an eggheaded woman. Everybody at the table but Georgette looked shocked. Georgette looked like someone who wanted to be shocked but who also would never let down her friend.
Jerry and Martin were literally recoiling, leaning hard against their chairbacks. It seemed that Justine had perfected the art of pushing men away.
Charles, by contrast, had recovered from Justine’s revelation. His brushed-back dark hair fell onto his forehead as he leaned over to whisper in Justine’s ear, and it took everything in her to resist brushing it away from his brow. When he’d said what he had to say, he let his hand drop onto hers, caressing it in a way that was guaranteed to get a reaction from her date. His touch left Justine utterly shaken. Everything she had felt in Martin’s arms—the pounding heartbeat, the quickened breath, the all-over flush of blood suffusing her skin—all of it paled in comparison to the feel of Charles’s cool hand on hers and the resonance of his deep voice in her ear.
She turned her head to look at him, and there was a question in his sharp, intelligent eyes. She couldn’t have hid her answer if she had tried.
She didn’t know if Martin saw. Surely he saw.
Her date leapt to his feet, shouting, “Stop touching her or I’ll make you sorry. And you—” His eyes were on Justine, and his glance was as hostile Charles’s glare had been when she first saw him lurking across the room.
Standing in a half-crouch, Martin shoved the table hard in Charles’s direction, oblivious to yelps from Georgette and Justine, whose legs were battered by the table’s legs.
Charles’s hands shot up, palms out, and the moving table stopped like it had hit a brick wall. He rose to his feet and sent it back at Martin, harder, banging its legs against the women again. The table caught Martin just at the hinge of his hips. He folded, throwing his center of gravity so far forward that he couldn’t stay on his feet. When Martin went down onto the tabletop, sending their glasses to shatter on the polished wood floor, the word “Fight!” rippled through the crowd. Immediately, the groaning sound of a few hundred chairs being pushed back drowned out the band’s rendition of “Chattanooga Choo,” but the musicians had seen bar fights before. They kept on choo-chooing.
When Martin lifted himself off the table, leaving it clear of everything but the liquor-splashed tablecloth, Justine acted. Fed up with both men, she lifted the edge of the table a quarter-inch. Raising her toes, she set the nearest table leg down on the inner sole of her peep-toe shoes. Keeping her hands flat on the table for stability, it was easy to use her foot to lift her side of the table slightly off the floor and balance it in that precarious position for a moment.
When she saw that the men had fully distracted each other, Justine used the mechanical advantage of her strong thigh muscles to raise her foot three feet off the ground, canting it away from her so far that the table almost flipped onto its side. Then she yanked her shoe out from under the table’s leg and let it crash back to the ground.
Georgette must have been watching Justine’s every move, because when the table landed, she quickly jammed the toe of her own shoe under the leg nearest her, ready to repeat Justine’s trick. Or, judging by the set of her jaw, she was ready to flip it all the way over, if need be.
The three men, flabbergasted, stared at Justine while she smoothed her skirt back down over knees. “Stop it,” she said in a quiet, intense voice. “Stop it right now.” And they did.
Jerry’s voice was saying, “Cut it out, guys. The manager will call the police. Maybe he already did.”
Martin wasn’t listening. He still looked like he was about to crawl over the table to get to Charles.
Before Justine had drawn another breath, two men had appeared, one at her elbow and one at Georgette’s. It was Kenny, Darlene’s husband, and Ralph, Nelle’s husband. Kenny said, “You two don’t worry about these guys. We’ll look out for you.”
“Not that you need it,” Ralph said, aiming a nod of respect in Justine’s direction. “That table trick was slick.”
Hurrying up behind her husband, Darlene said simply, “Kenny.”
Justine saw fear in her friend’s eyes. It wasn’t safe for Ralph and Kenny to challenge White men. She had to make this stop.
Pasting on a smile, Justine said, “We’re fine, Kenny.” Locking eyes with Ralph, she said, “Truly, gentlemen. We’re fine. But thank you.”
Kenny and Ralph returned to their wives, and Justine saw Darlene’s hand grab Kenny’s arm so hard that it left marks.
Justine raised her eyes to scan the crowd and was shocked to see another familiar face.
Sonny.
He must have been there all evening, but he also must have been avoiding them. Either that, or he had somehow failed to notice them on the dance floor. This was hard to imagine, since they’d been with a man who could make a wheelchair spin. One thing was clear. Even though he worked beside Justine and Georgette every single day, he was not among the people rushing to their aid. Mrs. Sonny, a dark-haired woman so petite that her head hardly cleared the back of her chair, never even turned her head their way.
With her eyes locked on Sonny, Justine wasn’t watching when the table started tilting again. Martin was leaning on it with all his weight because he wasn’t finished trying to push Charles around with it. An enormous cracking sound brought her eyes to Jerry as his calm voice said, “I’m not kidding, fellas. That’s enough.”
He had produced a stout wooden baton from somewhere under the table, presumably from a holster strapped to his lower leg, and its assault on the table had been earsplitting.
“Just because I’m in this chair, it doesn’t mean I can’t take care of myself or these ladies…although they seem to be doing very well without my help. You gentlemen should presume that I’m always armed with something that lets me defend myself from a permanent sit-down position. Because I am.”
Charles and Martin looked like they would happily wring Jerry’s neck, if his simple but effective weapon weren’t making that unwise.
“The two of you are going to apologize to the ladies and settle up your bills, and then you’re going to exit the premises.” He paused, as if remembering that Justine might have something to say about him ejecting her date. “Is that okay with you, ma’am?”
She gave Martin a long, searching look, then she gave Charles one that was even longer. “Yes. It’s okay with me if they both leave.”
“So that’s how it is,” Jerry said. “I will make sure the women get home safely, but you two need to go now.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Charles trying to make eye contact with her as he threw a fistful of cash on the table. She refused to give him the satisfaction of meeting his gaze, but she heard what he was saying as he walked away, and it was “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
In refusing to look at Charles, she turned her head toward Martin, who was apparently too angry to speak. He tossed a wad of cash onto the soiled tablecloth and left her behind without a word.
The owner materialized at Jerry’s elbow, flanked by two large men. “Sir, is everything all right? Can I help you or the ladies in any way?”
Jerry was as calm and unflappable as he’d been all evening. “Everything’s fine. I hope we can keep the police out of this.” He produced a tip that the owner waved away.
“I thank you for this kind gesture,” he said, flashing a tight smile that was set off by a close-cut and razor-thin mustache. “And have no worries about the police. It is my policy to settle disputes without their assistance. As you can see, my bouncers are more than capable of helping your excitable friends find the door. And if either of them—or anybody else—thinks that they might want some revenge on people who were just trying to help out two lovely damsels in distress”—his eyes turned to Kenny and Ralph—“then my bouncers will take care of that problem, too.”
***
The distance between The TickTock Club and The Julia was substantial, but it had seemed like a mere stretch of the legs when Justine had walked it the first time, strolling and dancing without a care alongside Martin, Jerry, and Georgette. They had laughed. A light breeze had rustled Justine’s black silk skirt and the trailing ends of her green sash. Though she hadn’t been able to see the festive green rosette tucked into her curls, she had known it was there.
Georgette had glowed in her burgundy taffeta and the black shoes that she saved for dancing. Now, while retracing those carefree steps, loose brunette strands hung from the fashionable rolls of hair framing her face, and her dress was creased across the lap. She walked like her feet hurt her. Justine knew for certain that her own feet were hurting.
Jerry, though, looked just the same. He spoke to them in a quiet voice that somehow made everything better. Wheeling himself along the sidewalk with one hand, he used the other one to hold Georgette’s hand. Justine felt like she was barging in on their date, but she didn’t miss her own date a bit. She felt like she’d come to this point just in time. Martin was a very handsome and persuasive man, but she was repelled by the repressed violence she’d just seen on his face. His whole body had trembled with it.
Truth be told, she was more upset about Charles. He, too, had seemed drunk with the possibility of violence. He had also seemed drunk, plain and simple, and not in a I-had-one-drink-too-many kind of way. Justine did not need a staggering, mean drunk in her life. There was no way that she would be going to a movie with Charles in less than twenty-four hours, or ever. And she had really liked him.
She could still feel Charles’s hand on hers in that last moment before he left The TickTock Club. No man had ever touched her that way, not even Martin with his persistent caresses. Or perhaps it was better to say that no man’s touch had ever made her feel that way. His face had brushed hers as he leaned in to whisper in her ear. Even then, even when he was drunk and angry and dangerous, she wanted Charles, and that wasn’t good for her.
She could still hear what he had said to her and only to her. Nobody at their table could have understood his words. Even if he’d broadcast them to the entire TickTock Club, few others besides Justine would have known what he was saying, perhaps none. And Charles knew that this was true.
With a perfect accent and an appropriately idiomatic choice of words, he had said, “Ich bin so froh, dass Sie Deutsch sprechen.”
Drunk with rum and raging hormones, she’d felt her breath leave her, but not just because a man she wanted so badly was so close to her. Her breath had left her because of what he’d said.
I’m so glad that you speak German.