The Midsummer Soiree was in full swing when Gilbert, Harry, and Reisden arrived at the ballroom of the Lakeside Hotel. Roar of voices, heat that made sweat stand out on the skin, and the orchestra violently sawing at the latest songs.
Reisden had not gone to a formal summer dance since Vienna. Outside, the fairy lights were strung through the tree branches as if this were a dance at Hofbrünnerstein’s. The smells were the same: crushed geranium leaves, crushed flowers, perfume and punch, sex and sweat and anticipation.
A dance is sex in good clothes, in which eligible young women and men may meet, and walk, and talk, may look at each other’s palms and trace each other’s future with one finger, finding each other fascinating. A young man may take a young woman to see the fairy-lights strung out in the dark trees, and when the moon is full and there is a lake to reflect the moon, they may find more trees and lakes and moons than chaperones; and who knows what comes next? For a young man of good presence, the spring of a dance floor underfoot is as good as the promise of a woman. Reisden was astonished at how many women there were in the world tonight. It was a new way of forgetting when he should be thinking, but without any conscious effort he undressed them with his eyes, stripping off bugle skirts and spiky bodices to look at the astonishing curves of breasts and bellies and thighs. He was apparently going to go directly from madness to satyriasis.
“Mr. Knight,” Anna Fen purred, “you called me this afternoon, my maid said.”
She was a confection of tulle and lace and moon-colored charmeuse, covered with silken lilies and geraniums and glittering bugle beads. Her dress plunged on top just to the bound of discretion, so that he could see she had a beauty mark on the side of one ample breast, and rose discreetly at the hem so that her slim silk ankles showed themselves. Reisden took a long comprehensive look. Jay was dead, which he would have to tell her to learn her reaction, and he didn’t like her overmuch, and the dress looked like a drunken dream. Still he looked her up and down and mentally filled in hidden details under the silk. Her eyes demurely dropped to below his waist. He mentally cursed the woman. Mrs. Fen was a public convenience, which is sometimes all that’s required; but he didn’t want to feel like one too. “I am so sorry she put you off. Do call again,” Mrs. Fen said. “Come for tea. I shall always be at home to you.” She turned and swayed away, presenting them with a magnificent rear end. Even Gilbert stared.
“Richard, you seem distracted,” Gilbert said. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Oh, much more than I expected.” He smiled.
“Have you seen Perdita?”
“No.” She was expected to be in pink. He was still standing on his vantage point on the stairs and he looked over the pink dresses in the crowd, but didn’t see her. “You must dance with her when you find her,” he told Gilbert.
“Harry says he’s taken all her dances, but I hope he will give me one. He must give you one.”
“You shall have mine, Gilbert. ” He thought about their dance lesson—yesterday, in the music room, when she had told him that she had given up music for Harry’s sake. Then in the barn; only yesterday, in the barn? She would not want the reminder. And tonight he felt dangerous. No, not Harry’s Perdita.
Charlie Adair came by, in a dark suit, not formal dress, looking tired and discouraged. Gilbert took his arm and the two men went off, moving out toward the chairs on the terrace. Reisden was besieged with requests to sign dance cards. Here, as in Vienna, the dance card was the legal tender of dances; it was a small booklet with a pencil attached on a silk cord, showing the types of dances, the music, and the order in which they would be played. “Waltz, Fair Rose. Two-step, Can't You Eat a Bull- Dog?” What?—a song about Yale. “Waltz medley, from The Merry Widow.” Men asked for dances by asking women for permission to sign their dance cards, then writing their names for the dances they wanted. The system was cumbersome and required no little diplomacy, since once a man had permission to sign a girl’s dance card, he could sign for more than one dance. Men were given no aide-memoire, but were expected to commit to memory the combinations of women and dances with which they had been favored.
The women’s system ran smoothly on a roadbed of forgeries, prevarication, and erasures—dance card pencils deliberately had no erasers, but most women learned to make do with the inside of a roll from the buffet. The stag line, on the other hand, was as full of confusion here as it was in Vienna: “Which one’s Whitwell’s sister? I think I've got the next dance with her, and I don’t know her from a puppy.” Reisden pleaded honestly that he didn’t know any of them, thus could dance only with women who were not already taken for that dance. This offended all the right people. Every mama’s girl wanted to dance with the eligible bachelor Richard Knight, but none wanted to confess herself deserted for that very dance.
He danced several times with a clever girl who knew exactly what she was doing—plain face, splendid body—and once each with a series of delightful American virgins, whom he chose for their variety of body shapes like a pasha going through a harem. A little blonde so shy she almost melted in his arms; a brunette who talked about tennis while her small, round breasts jiggled; a big, warm, comfortable girl whom one could have licked like ice cream.
In Vienna—or even, say, in New York, if he had spent the summer as Louis had wanted—one part of a dance would have led very naturally to another. In Vienna, virgins were off limits but wives were not; one would move through the dances making a little verbal love here, there pressing a hand for a few extra moments; men and women cooperated very naturally, female sensuality rubbing and pressing against male, as the waltzes became slower and the hour later, eyes looked into eyes, hands pressed against hips; and when Reisden, at two or three or four o’clock in the morning, took some laughing woman up the discreet backstairs in the Schwarzenbergplatz or stripped her in her own bedroom, it was the whole dance they climaxed, all the men she had danced with, all the women he had.
Here he did not know the rules, except those Anna Fen had offered him. He didn’t know what was permitted, and there were far too many virgins, who did not dance as well as in Vienna; but the same slow electricity was building up, and he played the mental game of deciding who, of all these beautiful women, he would want to end the evening with.
He took a glass of wine and stood at the top of the stairs on a little balcony with a wrought iron railing in the shape of vines. He could see across the dance floor; and out of all the wealth of women, his eye was caught by one because her dress was simpler than the rest and an odd color, almost a bronze. She was a woman of medium height, slim, with beautiful shoulders and small high breasts; the rest he had to leave to imagination under the dress, which was in the Greek style, one perfect line falling from her breasts to the floor.
She stood as gracefully as if she had been barefoot. He took one almost painful breath, swept by an emotion like the moment in music when the theme declares itself. He felt a line stretching between him and the woman, something like the tug of a fish-line, a simple, painful precision of desire. She was talking with Efnie Pelham, and she gestured with one of her hands, large hands for her size, with long fingers; and he was looking at her now because he had looked at her all summer.
Perdita.
Harry shouldered his way through the crowd and took Perdita by one arm, leading her toward the dance floor. He put his arms around her in a bear hug and shuffled back and forth, out of step with the music. Perdita kept in step with him. This was her only season for dancing. At Christmas she would be married to this oaf who couldn’t dance and, knowing Harry’s possessiveness of her, she would never dance with anyone else again. Reisden wanted for her a night of waltzes with someone better than Harry; but not himself, not when he so simply and impossibly wanted her. Harry danced badly, grabbing Perdita by the spine and running her up and down the dance floor like a football. Reisden wanted her; he wanted to put his hands on her and feel the curve of her hips underneath her dress; he wanted to plunge into this beautiful woman, away from everything that had happened in the last two days; and, because she was Harry’s Perdita, for her sake Reisden wanted anything but that complication.
The orchestra took a pause. Harry brought Perdita back to the edge of the floor and, when the music started again, took out her cousin Efnie instead, as if there were no difference between the two. Efnie leaned her head against Harry’s arm and simpered. On the edge of the dance floor, not quite out of its traffic and not near any of the few paths on which even the sighted could get from one area to another in this crowded place, Perdita was standing against a pillar. She was so beautiful Reisden’s heart hurt. On the other side of the room Harry and Efnie had found a group of girls, apparently school friends of Efnie’s, and she was introducing him to them, leaning against his arm. Harry stood there talking to them; someone brought him a glass of punch. He was in no hurry to come back to Perdita.
Gilbert should have been there to rescue her, but he was deep in conversation with Charlie on the other side of the room. Reisden came down the stairs toward her, too unsure of himself to be glad.
“Perdita, may I have this dance?”
He swung her onto the dance floor in something like a dazed waltz. The floor was crowded, too many people on it to have dancing room for anyone; she said something to him, but over the noise of talking and the music, he couldn’t hear it. They were pressed together, body to body, and he felt the imprint of every soft inch of her.
She spoke something. “What?” He couldn’t hear her, just feel her breath in his ear.
“Who ... I’m sorry, I have to ask. What was in the barn?”
She hadn’t known and he hadn’t thought to tell her. Someone jostled against them.
“Come out of here,” he said, breaking off the dance and leading her toward an exit door close by. “We’ll go on the terrace,” he meant it, no farther; they would walk, and talk, and he would do no more than hold her familiar hand.
They found themselves in a service corridor behind the ballroom. Like the ballroom, the walls were mirrored, so that the dim corridor looked spacious. Sometimes, clearly, it was used for entertaining; banquettes lit by small electric candles lined recesses along one wall. Tonight it was deserted but for a big silver coffee um brewing on a rolling cart, and, on another cart, piles of clean spoons and gilt-edged cups and saucers.
“Jay,” he said.
She gave one long, heaving sigh. “Not you.”
“Not me in any case.” Now he was lying to her.
“That’s terrible.”
“Yes.”
She walked a few steps away from him, holding her hands fisted by her sides and shaking her head. “I don’t want to think of it. We were talking Shakespeare on the next floor down for weeks—and Harry will—I don’t want to think about that.”
He recognized his own reaction. “It complicates everything.”
She nodded.
“Would you like to walk, or go back to the dance? Whatever you like.”
“It’s awful, but I want to dance. If we go back into the ballroom, I’ll have to stay with Harry. Will you dance with me here?”
The music came clearly, but muted, from the ballroom next door, the rhythm a little stronger because of what the wall did to the harmonics, one-two-three, one-two-three, a heartbeat. He said nothing but took her in his arms, in the classic dance position, and began to dance with her. Plain box step first, what he had done with a little girl in Gilbert Knight’s music room yesterday, a thousand years ago; and then as they got the rhythm of each other he began to do turns with her, singly at first, then in a series, so that the corridor dizzied a little around them. He told her always to look at one thing, not to get giddy; but the place must have been too dark for her, so that she only smiled and as the music slowed she leaned her head against his arm, her breast brushing his arm. His heart beat and he held her a little more closely. The music went on with hardly a pause: a single violin, playing a slow and simple waltz, and then the whole orchestra coming in behind. He recognized it, new that year, and so popular that even scientists in Switzerland had heard it: the waltz from Lehir’s Die lustige Witwe, The Merry Widow, bittersweet, irresistible, and Viennese.
O komme doch, O kommt ihr Ballsirenen—
They began to do turns again, the simple ones and then the Viennese turns that are a whole new category of motion, spiraling outward, circling inward to stillness. They danced, danced until they were dizzy, and the dizziness spread out of them and the world whirled, but they were as quiet in the center as two candles burning together. Their bodies were warm against each other. He put both hands on her waist, at the curve of her hips. She gave a great sigh, and their bodies fitted against each other as naturally as the rhythm of their dancing. He could not tell her body from his own. The music must have stopped at some time, because they moved more slowly; but he could not let her go, and she shuddered, and put her arms around him.
He led her over to one of the banquettes. They sat with their arms around each other. He tilted her head up. She was pale, her eyes were closed; she was panting as if she had run a race. “No?” he asked her gently, “or yes?” She nodded her head, silently, yes, as if she were taking a dare; his lips touched hers, and they were kissing desperately, the two of them enlaced in each other’s arms. He stroked down the length of her side with the tips of his fingers, and felt her generous hips and thighs beneath the silk of her dress. She kissed him as if he were a wonder; kissed almost like a little girl still, half taught, half awakened. He touched the hollow at the base of her neck, ran his hand down the softness of her inner arm, touched the crook of her elbow and her shoulder blade, made her tremble. She touched his arms and his chest; moved down as far as his waist, blushed, and stopped. Every inch of his body was as sensitive to her touch as fingertips or tongue. She moved her hands to his face again, touching his face all over; she trembled and pressed her whole body against his. His need for her ached like his heart. He moved his fingertips over the round tenseness of her breasts. He wanted to go inside her as innocently as a bee inside a flower; he wanted to force her, hurt her, love her, explode inside her like a bomb; and he took her by the shoulders and gently moved her away from him.
“We had better stop now,” he said, “or we’ll go wrong.”
Harry’s Perdita. She drew one hand away and held it over her face as if she were ashamed. He wanted her to be older so that she would understand or younger so that he could simply comfort her; but he could not say the banalities that one says to women who have gone further than they intended and are ashamed. He had gone too far himself and he was no comfort to her.
In the old days in Vienna he had finished with such moments by helping the woman to rearrange her flowers and dress. One of the snaps of Perdita’s beaded collar had opened and he pressed it shut. The knot of her hair had come half down. He used his own clean comb and between them they twisted it into a good approximation of the knot it had had. He looked for hairpins on the banquette, remembering a woman whose husband counted her hairpins at the beginnings and the ends of dances. He smoothed her silk dress back into its folds, trying the impossible job of touching the dress without brushing the skin beneath it. She retied his tie and had to do it twice because her hands trembled. He combed his disordered hair. They held hands. In the mirrored walls they looked the same as before and impossibly different; whatever they did, they could do nothing to change the bruised look about their mouths or the luminescence of her skin. In the mirror, as Reisden watched her standing beside him, knowing they made too obvious a couple, he saw the door from the ballroom open and Charlie Adair come through.
Reisden shook his head; no, go away. The two men’s eyes met in the mirror. Charlie Adair turned away, pale, sickened, and silent. The door closed silently to Reisden’s ears, but Perdita turned. “There’s no one here,” Reisden told her, not knowing how to protect her for this evening except by making her believe she had not been seen. He would have to talk with Charlie.
When they stepped back through the door into the ballroom, Harry had stopped dancing with Efnie, but the two were still laughing together.