Dancers Linger by the Open Piano

The room had not yet decided it was finished with them.

Partners changed in the middle of the floor—hands released, laughter arriving a half-beat late, someone’s heel striking the sprung boards hard enough to make the mirrors shiver—and through all of it Soraya did not look away. Neither did he. The crowd moved the way crowds do when they believe they are the subject: bright, incidental, pleased with themselves. Between one shoulder and the next she found him again, or he had never been lost. Gunn stood with his weight settled, one hand loose at his side, as if the evening had already told him everything it meant to and he was only waiting to see whether she would pretend otherwise.

She catalogued the exits without turning her head. The street door, propped with a brick. The corridor that led to the borrowed dressing rooms, where coats were already being claimed. The narrow gap beside the piano, if one were willing to look ridiculous. Looking away first would be the more ridiculous thing. It would be a confession dressed up as manners.

Across the room he watched the half-inch reset of her shoulder. She did it when a partner came too close to the truth of a step—drew the joint back, set it again, made the correction look like style. He had seen it twice in the workshop and once, just now, when a woman laughed too loudly at nothing and the sound passed near Soraya’s ear like a hand. The shoulder went. The shoulder returned. She kept his eyes as if eye contact were a technical problem she had already solved.

Someone called a name that was not either of theirs. A coat sleeve cut the line of sight for the length of a breath. When it cleared, she was still there, exact and dry and armored in the courtesy she used on people she intended to survive. He did not cross. Crossing would have made it a scene. Staying made it a fact.

The room thinned the way rooms do when the interesting part is officially over. Goodnights. A bottle set down too hard. The brick kicked aside so the door could shut on the street. Soraya felt each departure as a subtraction from her cover. She smiled at a colleague, agreed that the counts had been murder, and did not move toward her bag. Gunn answered a question about the morning train without appearing to answer it. The mirrors kept them both, smaller each time someone left, until the studio was mostly floor and the particular quiet of a place that has been worked in.

He came only as far as the folding chairs. Not an approach. A relocation, the sort a reasonable person makes when the center of a room has become an embarrassment.

“You hold it,” he said.

She had been prepared for almost anything else. “The count?”

“The breath.” He did not soften it with a smile, which would have let her treat it as flirtation and dismiss it as badly done. “When you’re about to refuse something you want. You take it in and you keep it for a phrase. Four beats, sometimes eight. Then you speak, and what you say is perfectly sensible, and no one argues with you, because you’ve already done the difficult part where they can’t see it.”

The sentence sat between them with the indecent accuracy of a hand laid on a pulse.

Soraya’s mouth opened on the correction and did not produce it. The poise did not crack so much as miss its entrance. She could feel the air in her chest doing exactly what he had named—caught, held, counted without her permission—and the knowledge that he could see the mechanism made the mechanism fail. Heat arrived late, a professional embarrassment, as if she had dropped a prop in view of the house.

“That’s a rather presumptuous theory of breathing,” she said, when speech returned. It was almost the right tone. Almost.

“It’s not a theory.” He tipped his head, not unkind. “You did it when they asked you to stay for the second session. And when the pianist offered to slow the milonga. And just now, when I started to say it.”

She let the breath go. It did not help. “The 7:40,” she said, seizing the nearest ordinary object with both hands. “If you’re taking the early train, you’ll want the east platform. The board lies.”

“Does it.”

“Consistently.” She crossed to the chair nearest her bag and sat to occupy her hands with the strap of her left practice shoe, which had loosened in the last exercise and did not, strictly, need her. “People miss it because they trust the announcement. The announcement is nostalgic. It remembers a timetable from March.”

He took the chair one over, leaving the professional distance a teacher leaves when a student is fixing equipment and does not require an audience. The vinyl sighed. “March was optimistic.”

“March was wrong.” She worked the buckle. Her fingers were steady. She disliked them for it. “You disputed the count in the cross. You said the man leads on two. Half the room agreed with you out of politeness, which is not the same thing as time.”

“And you kept the woman’s one.”

“I kept the music.” The strap bit and released. She did not look up, which was its own tell, and she knew he would know it, which made the not-looking worse. “If you board at the announced minute you’ll be on the platform with the people who clap when the doors close. It’s a grim congregation.”

“I’ve been in worse.”

“I don’t doubt it.” She stood. The shoe was fine. She went to the barre anyway, because a barre was a reason, and lifted her left foot onto the wood, heel settled against it as if alignment were still available to her, the tights pulling taut along the raised leg. From there the shoe was at her hands and the mirror was at her eyes, and she could pretend the two had nothing to do with each other. The glass gave her the room behind her: Gunn rising without hurry, the last of the overheads humming, the far end of the studio gone dim where someone had killed a switch on their way out and left the piano’s lid propped open from the milonga, a dark wing against a darker wall. “You also rushed the resolution. After the cruzada. You treated the pause as optional.”

“It was a pause, not a votive offering.” He came as far as the barre. Not beside her. Near enough that the wood carried a second weight. His hand rested on it, a respectful distance from her raised heel, the sort of distance that could be measured and therefore defended. “You like the pause because it lets you decide whether the next step is a gift or a correction.”

“I like the pause because the phrase has one.” She turned the buckle again, fingers at the strap, eyes on the mirror, though the shoe had nothing left to confess. “The 7:40 also has a pause, if the signal at the junction sulks. You can lose nine minutes and still call it punctual if you’re the sort of person who negotiates with clocks.”

“I’m the sort who leaves before the clocks get ideas.”

There it was, almost said, and then covered, the way he covered things: with ease that had a seam in it. She heard the seam. She hated that she heard it. In the mirror their eyes met and did no one the courtesy of pretending the meeting was accidental. She looked at the strap. He looked at the place her shoulder had reset, and did not mention it, which was worse than mentioning it.

“Your left one,” he said, nodding at the shoe on the barre as mildly as a man remarking on the time. “It’s twisted. You’ll feel it on the stair.”

“I won’t be on the stair with you.”

“No.”

The word was so mild she almost missed the concession inside it. She fixed the twist. The leather was warm from her hand. When she brought her foot down and straightened, both heels on the boards again, the gap between them had become the gap a conversation requires rather than the gap a workshop enforces—still proper, still nameable, already smaller than the last time she had checked. She had not seen him move. Perhaps she had moved. The barre was a poor witness; it only knew weight.

“If the board says 7:42,” she said, “ignore it. That’s the fast service that isn’t. It stops where it claims it won’t, and then everyone stands in the aisle performing patience.”

“And if it says 7:40 and means it?”

“Then you should already be gone.” She heard herself. The sentence was perfectly sensible. Under it, the thing she would not put in the air pressed up against her teeth. She set her palm on the barre to have a fact. His hand was four fingers from hers. Three, when the building’s old radiator knocked and one of them—she would not audit which—answered with a shift no jury would convict.

From the corridor, a door shut. Laughter faded down the street side of the glass. The studio kept them, and the mirrors kept the keeping, and there was suddenly too much floor with too few reasons on it.

Gunn glanced toward the unlit edge, where the piano kept its own dark under its open lid and the last working bulb did not quite reach. “They’ve left the switch,” he said. “Someone will complain in the morning that we wasted the dark.”

“We aren’t wasting anything. We’re discussing a train.”

“We’re discussing a train,” he agreed, and started that way—not inviting, not leading, only continuing a subject that had begun to require a quieter room. She could have stayed at the barre. The barre had been neutral for a hundred years of other people’s balance. She followed because the sentence was unfinished, and because leaving it unfinished in the bright half of the studio would have been a louder act than walking.

At the dim end the floor changed temperature under her foot. She stopped where stopping could still be called a view of the piano. He stopped where a teacher stops when the combination is over and the student has not yet been dismissed. Between them remained a width of air that had once been a room. It was not a room anymore. It was a measurement, and it was losing.

“The count,” she said. Her voice had forgotten to bring its armor all the way. “After the cruzada. If you delay, the woman has to invent time. Invention reads as hesitation. Hesitation reads as doubt. Doubt is ugly on a body that’s been trained not to show its work.”

“And if she doesn’t invent it?” He shifted his weight toward the question—no more than a man does to hear better in a room where nothing is loud—and the measurement gave up half a stride without either of them signing for it. He was close enough now that she could hear the ordinary human fact of his breathing, unperformed. “If she simply arrives when he does?”

“Then it isn’t a discussion.” Soraya looked at his mouth and then, angrily, at the piano’s raised lid. “Then it’s a collision dressed up as musicality. People applaud collisions if they’re pretty.”

“You don’t.”

“I don’t applaud being legible.” The truth slipped out wearing the clothes of the argument. She felt it go. In the pause after, she did the thing—drew the breath, held it for the length of a phrase she could have danced in her sleep—and this time she knew he was watching the hold, not the words. The knowledge did not let her release it. It sharpened the holding into something like a hand extended and not taken.

Gunn did not fill the pause. That was the indecency. He let it stand as long as the phrase required, and when he spoke it was still about the train, still at the speed of people who have somewhere to be and are not going.

“East platform,” he said. “Ignore the board. Don’t trust March.”

“Yes.”

“And the strap.”

“Is fine.” She had fixed it herself, at the barre, with his eyes on her hands. They both knew it.

“It isn’t.” He did not look at the shoe when he said it. His gaze dropped, briefly, past the strap to the ankle above it, and returned to her face with nothing in it she could sue. The last of the neutral space was the distance between his hand and the place at her waist the workshop had kept professional all evening—the place a lead touches when the step needs a fact and not a feeling. He had not touched it. The not-touching had begun to make a sound.

Soraya’s fingers curled once against nothing, against the ghost of a shirt she had no business reaching for. She answered the last harmless sentence because the alternative was a sentence neither of them had survived saying.

“If you miss it,” she said, and the rest of the warning thinned on her tongue, “you’ll—”

The dark at the edge of the room did not move. He did not move. She held the breath. He watched her hold it. There was nowhere left to put the next ordinary word that would not have to pass through the inch between them, and the inch was no longer doing the work.

His hand closed the last of it at her waist, and her fingers were already in his shirt as if the reaching had been decided in the breath she was still holding. Mouths met without the interval a sentence would have needed; the unfinished warning about the train broke against his lip and did not resume. The hold in her chest failed its count. His other hand came up into her hair and did not pull—it simply arrived, the fingers spreading at the base of her skull with the flat certainty of a man setting his palm on a wall he has decided is load-bearing. She made a sound that stayed against his mouth. The street was close.

Gunn felt the evening’s distance give under his palm. She kissed the way she corrected: precise until the precision slipped. He walked her backward, two steps and then a third, into the strip of dark between the piano’s flank and the wall, where the raised lid stood between them and the long mirror and nothing else was asked to watch. The hand in her hair came down to join the other at her ribs. Her practice top rode up under both; he shoved it higher and she let it stay where it was pushed, bunched beneath her arms, an obstacle she declined to make into a decision. Her own hands went to his buttons and opened the ones they found, none of them ceremonial, the shirt falling open and staying on his shoulders because neither of them spent the second it would have taken. Her left shoe left her heel when the floor changed under a step neither of them had led. It struck once, soft, and neither looked down.

Soraya’s back met the cooler wall. The building kept its small noises—the radiator, a pipe, a door somewhere settling into its frame—and she kept hers leashed to the width of a throat. Breath against his neck. A word bitten off when his mouth found the place below her ear that the mirrors had never been asked to witness. She had meant to say something about the platform; the sentence stopped where skin began. Her hands were at his open shirt, then lower, dragging practice cloth aside with the same impersonal efficiency she used on a buckle, except the efficiency was shaking and she could not audit it into stillness. He watched that. She knew he watched it. His sleeve caught on the piano’s edge as he reached for her and the cuff came unfastened, a small dry scrape against the lacquer that neither of them stopped for, the loosened cuff falling open at his wrist. Then his thumbs were in the waistband of her tights and he was working them down over her hips—no grace in it, the fabric rolling and resisting the way practice fabric does—and she pulled her bare left foot free of the leg and let the right stay tangled at the ankle above the shoe she still wore. Nothing about it was pretty. It was done.

“Soraya.” He said it once, the way he had said the breath was not a theory. She did not give him his name back. The answer was the catch in her inhale, sharp, held a fraction too long, then broken against his shoulder when he lifted her and the wall took her weight and the right shoe dragged along the baseboard and the left stayed lost on the boards. He pushed into her, not all at once. The first of it drew a sound she had not arranged; the rest of it she took with her bare heel hooked behind his thigh and her fists already closed in his shirt. The street might have heard a louder thing. They did not give it one.

She felt the old mechanism try to rise—the shoulder, the half-inch, the correction made to look like style—and it missed its entrance. There was no room for it. His mouth was at her throat and then it was not; he lifted his head, and in the bad light his eyes found hers, and he kept them there. She could have turned her face into the dark and saved the last private thing. She did not. That was the whole of it: not what he did, which was plain and slow and then less slow, but that he looked at her while she stopped composing her face for it, and she let him. Her hands tightened in the open shirt until the seam at his shoulder complained. The breath came in and would not hold. It went out in pieces she could not count.

Gunn kept his own sound in his chest. He watched the exactness go—the jaw unclenching, the shoulder forgetting its job, her mouth open on nothing—and he did not look away, because looking was what had started this, and she was looking back, watching him watch, her eyes gone wide and unguarded and furious with it. When it took her, her spine left the wall by an inch and the sound she made was bitten before it could become a word, and her eyes stayed open the length of it. He followed close behind. It was her face that did it—the inhale that caught and did not recover its phrase, the armor simply not there—and his own breath went careless, finally, his forehead dropping against hers while it lasted. The radiator knocked. Somewhere a door considered closing and did not.

He let her down slowly. Her bare left foot found the floor first and flinched at the cold of it; the right followed, the shoe still on, the tights still ruined around that ankle. They stayed against the wall only as long as standing required. Then the ordinary room returned in increments: the temperature of the boards, the piano’s open lid, the business of fabric hauled back to where it had been rather than removed with any intention of display—her tights worked up over her hips again, the top pulled down, his trousers set right with the same absence of ceremony. Soraya’s hands, suddenly exact again, found the cuff that had come undone against the piano. She could not look at his face. She rebuttoned it with the care she used on a student’s wrist before a lift—impersonal, thorough, the button seated so it would not shame itself later—and the tenderness was entirely in the way she did not make a joke of the care. Her fingers were steady. She disliked them less than she had at the chair.

Gunn bent for the left shoe without being asked. The leather had kept the warmth of her hand from earlier, or he imagined it had. He set it on the floor by her bare foot, aligned as if the stair still mattered, and finished the sentence the contact had cut off, ordinary as weather, language offered back like a room with the lights restored.

“The 7:40, then.”

Soraya looked at the shoe, not at him. The strap was twisted again. She answered the train.

“East platform,” she said. Her voice had found a thinner armor and was wearing it. “Ignore the board.”