Ballroom: A Novel Read online

  Dedication

  To those who refused to dance with me.

  Epigraph

  Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

  —Voltaire

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Harry Korn

  Chapter 2: Maria Rodriguez

  Chapter 3: Sarah Dreyfus

  Chapter 4: Joseph

  Chapter 5: Gabriel Katz

  Chapter 6: Angel Morez

  Chapter 7: Maria

  Chapter 8: Joseph

  Chapter 9: Sarah

  Chapter 10: Harry

  Chapter 11: Joseph

  Chapter 12: Angel

  Chapter 13: Gabriel

  Chapter 14: Angel

  Chapter 15: Harry

  Chapter 16: Maria

  Chapter 17: Harry

  Chapter 18: Maria

  Chapter 19: Sarah

  Chapter 20: Joseph

  Chapter 21: Joseph

  Chapter 22: Joseph

  Chapter 23: Sarah

  Chapter 24: Harry

  Chapter 25: Harry

  Chapter 26: Sarah

  Chapter 27: Angel

  Chapter 28: Sarah

  Chapter 29: Gabriel

  Chapter 30: Sarah

  Chapter 31: Gabriel

  Chapter 32: Angel

  Chapter 33: Harry

  Chapter 34: Maria

  Chapter 35: Sarah

  Chapter 36: Angel

  Chapter 37: Maria

  Chapter 38: Angel

  Chapter 39: Harry

  Chapter 40: Angel

  Chapter 41: Manuel

  Chapter 42: Maria

  Chapter 43: Sarah

  Chapter 44: Joseph

  Chapter 45: Sarah

  Chapter 46: Angel

  Chapter 47: Gabriel

  Epilogue

  Ballroom Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  The Story Behind the Book

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Sheathed in a black netted gown

  the Ballroom awaits the arrival

  of the wrecking ball,

  like her next dance partner.

  He arrives late

  one September afternoon.

  No music plays.

  No Latin rhythms.

  No ardent tangos.

  The indigo ceiling once held in place

  by fake Corinthian columns

  is peeled away, admitting daylight,

  to reveal a worn-out parquet floor

  without spring,

  obscured by spilled soft drinks and dust.

  Mirror fragments, like mica,

  lie on the floor

  once swirling with a million stars.

  Chapter 1

  Harry Korn

  The dancing-master should be in the highest sense of the term a gentleman; he should be thoroughly schooled in the laws of etiquette; he should be a man of good moral character; he should be a physiologist; he should be a reformer.

  —Thomas E. Hill, Evils of the Ball, 1883

  When Harry Korn is awakened by his own scream, he is terrified that Manuel Rodriguez has heard him three floors below. Harry wants no trouble. His neck is clammy, his T-shirt soaked, and in his mouth is the same dry taste of the plaster dust of his dream. It is the time of night, halfway to a January morning, when everything has an unreal haze. In the blue half-light, there are eerie ghostlike shadows cast from the street. Each time a car passes, the shadows move across the ceiling and onto the wall next to his bed. Turning on the lamp reassures him that everything is in place.

  He walks to the open window. All is still. The surface of his skin tingles as the air cools the perspiration. Out over the indigo Twelfth Street landscape of tenement roofs, all is as it was when he went to sleep, and—except for the street lamp and the darkness outside its aureole—as it will be in the morning, when he will wait to catch a glimpse of Maria.

  Back in bed, he takes deep breaths to slow down the pounding in his chest. Whatever the dream was, it happened a long time ago.

  Harry never pulls down the shade when he sleeps, preferring to waken and judge the day by the morning light as it filters through his fourth-floor window. The January sky is striated with bare hints of orange and gray. Harry sits up; rubbing his swollen eyes with his palms, he rotates his shoulders and then circles his arms. The motion of his neck sends a rush of pain, and he hears a crackling sound, like the crushing of stones inside his head.

  His knees are stiff, and his back doesn’t easily straighten. As he does every morning at seven, he hobbles to one side of the window, where, hidden by the sheer curtain, he watches Maria Rodriguez walk down the front steps. He holds his breath while he watches her and feels the anxious beating of his heart. As she moves down Twelfth Street toward Avenue A, he embraces the meander of her hips, adores the soft curved muscles of her calves, worships the poise of her bearing while feeling the cold glass against his forehead. Then she vanishes.

  Manuel, Maria’s father, is already sweeping away the night’s collection of beer bottles, plastic bags, and garbage. When he turns, Harry quickly steps out of view.

  Lying down on the floor in the sun, he does seventy-five sit-ups, moaning with each motion. Reaching bony fingers toward his toes, he counts out fifty stretches.

  In the steam-filled bathroom he looks in the mirror of the old medicine cabinet. Like every other door in the apartment, it is coated with layers of paint and won’t close. The mirror and his glasses fog over, and he is relieved not to face his reflection. As he removes his glasses and steps into the shower, he feels the water burn his shoulders, chest, groin, but soothe his knees and feet. Harry scrubs with a stiff brush until his skin is red, raw, and painful. Opening his mouth, he lets the scalding water burn his tongue and throat like a first sip of schnapps. He lets out a fierce animal sound.

  He shuffles into the kitchen, puts water to boil. The instant coffee is almost gone; he measures out a half teaspoon, and when it’s made he dunks his toasted bread, one of the things he’s been taking from the East Village Senior Cafeteria, secreted in his newspaper. Taking his savings passbook from the kitchen table drawer, he considers the balance. Almost enough to take Maria to start a new life in Buenos Aires.

  He needs more students. The middle-aged women who think that if they improve their skills, they will be asked to dance more often. They are the dreamers, believing they will find love again. Though initially he hadn’t wanted to spend the money, he’s bought a new boom box. He considers it a business expense and appreciates the clear sound, the full rich tones and the articulation of notes. It’s light enough for him to carry uptown to the Hungarian Dance Hall, where he rents space by the hour to teach. He’s determined to find one new student on Sunday night at the Ballroom.

  When the Simon Shoe Factory took its operations to Mexico five years ago, the company gave him a decent pension. He’s sixty-five, living on Social Security and cash from private lessons. It affords him the necessities, and he’s been able to save. He’s lived in the fourth-floor walkup on the Lower East Side since 1950, when at seventeen he first went to work at Simon. It is now 1999, and the rent is only $380.

  Often at night he awakens from recurring dreams of drowning, in a panic that he’ll lose the apartment. Where will he go if he loses Maria? For that reason he rarely speaks to anyone in the building, allows no strangers in the apartment to make repairs, especially not the super, Maria’s father, Manuel Rodriguez. He doesn’t want trouble with anyone.

  Friday is his favorite day. He go
es to market early to buy his week’s groceries—eggs, buttermilk, a can of tuna, grapefruits, bananas, a soup chicken, and a package of soup vegetables. Thirty dollars. The grocery list never changes. At the checkout, he asks the girl to double-bag his purchases in paper. When she turns her back, he takes six more bags.

  Once everything is put away, he flattens the bags on the table. Starting at the front door, he takes up the sixteen brown paper bags that form a pathway through the small apartment, washes the linoleum floors, and puts down new bags.

  In the evening, he dresses in black polyester pants and a black shirt as he plays music on the Latin station La Mega. At seven fifteen he pushes the kitchen table and chairs against the wall, then pulls the large, ornate gold mirror from beside the refrigerator and polishes its glass. With a correction of his posture, a slight lifting of his abdomen and chest, he practices mambo steps in front of the mirror and listens for Maria’s hushed knock at the door.

  Chapter 2

  Maria Rodriguez

  . . . and it should be the grand object of your life, whether in public or in private, to pass along noiselessly and beloved, and leaving only the impress of your fairy footsteps.

  —W. P. Hazard, The Ball-Room Companion, 1849

  At seven thirty every Friday night, Maria Rodriguez quietly knocks, steps over the threshold, and follows the path of grocery bags to Harry Korn’s kitchen, where, through the years, the magic of the songs, the dance steps, have embedded themselves into her bones and blood. She can barely wait to be in his arms. Dancing with Harry, she forgets the secret they share; she forgets the shame.

  She can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to dance. It began when she tiptoed upstairs to sit on the cold stone steps outside Harry’s door while Papi worked, just to hear the rumbas, mambos, and tangos, wishing Harry would teach her to dance as he always promised.

  One Friday when she was eight, Harry invited her in, and she had her first lesson. His belief that she could be a dancer became hers, and in his sure embrace it seemed possible. For the past twelve years she has promised him her Friday nights, when it is simply the two of them dancing to La Mega in his kitchen. It is a secret they keep from her father.

  Harry waits on the other side of the door. He has never seen her win bronze, silver, or gold with Angel Morez, and keeps his promise to leave the Ballroom before she and Angel arrive at nine on Sunday nights.

  She loves the Ballroom, the ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom of the bass as the door opens, the air undulating with fleeting fragrances: perfumes, Fritos, popcorn, and stale beer. Twelve steps—twelve dollars to dance. Check your coat. Mary, the bleached blonde who has probably been there since vaudeville, will hold it for a dollar.

  Maria listens for the Ballroom’s rhythms. Their ebb and flow is like blood moving through the passages of her heart. Each Sunday after meeting Angel at Union Square, she hesitates at the entrance to the once-grand room, which by nine is already a swell of counterclockwise movement—a blur of torsos, legs, and arms. Inside the shadowy ballroom, colored spotlights throb as dancers seem caught in a whirlwind. Greeted by friends, they make their way to the center of the dance floor. And then there is that singular moment when she holds her breath and steps into Angel’s arms. Under the spotlight, all the clatter and jangle of her brain is canceled in their first dance, everything is as fresh as that night when she was fourteen at Our Lady of Sorrows, when he first led her in a tango; before knowing she was good enough to be his dance partner. She is still seduced by the stories of the songs—of promise, longing, and betrayal. Sometimes forgiveness.

  Chapter 3

  Sarah Dreyfus

  For ladies’ dress there are no rules. Avoid too much display and dressing for affect; your handkerchief should be as fine as “a snowy cobweb,” it should be bordered with deep rich lace, and delicately perfumed. As to gloves, white kid; shoes, small wafer-like yet strong, fitting exquisitely; and French silk stockings.

  —W. P. Hazard, The Ball-Room Companion, 1849

  January is Norma Shearer month on the American Movie Channel. Norma Shearer. Her close-ups. Her elegant profile. At eight o’clock they are showing Marie Antoinette, a film with lavish sets and magnificent costumes; Shearer’s defining role, for which she was nominated for Best Actress at the 1938 Academy Awards. Sarah adores 1940s movies—with the clothes, the hair, the glamour, and the make-believe that rarely exist in contemporary films, or real life for that matter. Lost in black-and-white romance, she wishes her life was more like the movies.

  It is getting late, and if she is going to get to the Ballroom by seven thirty, she has to leave Brooklyn by half past six. On Sundays, Sarah is always on edge. She eats a late light lunch, skips dinner, just two glasses of water with lemon juice, then brushes her teeth and tongue, swirls mouthwash around her mouth. The dreadful time she creates for herself, deciding what to wear. Always at the last minute. Sunday at the Ballroom just catches up with her somehow.

  It begins just before five. Rummaging through closets. Trying on this and that. Throwing things on the bed. Discarding one outfit after another. The blue tailored dress. Suitable for a secretary. She likes the swing of the skirt in the beige flowered print, but the top makes her look like Marian the Librarian from The Music Man. She’s already worn the sexy rust-colored skirt and black top at the last two dances. She doesn’t have panty hose without runs. Next month she’ll buy something new, brightly colored, low-cut, and clingy, a dress with a skirt that splits softly to reveal a length of leg. She’s asked Tina to go with her. Tina always looks together and sexy when she dances. Sarah needs something that says tango, so that Gabriel Katz will notice her.

  At six fifteen she settles on beige slacks and a matching silk blouse. Not exactly a dance costume, but she looks all right. Looking in the mirror, she can’t help but notice that she looks washed out. Her eyes look tired. At thirty-eight she has lost the sexiness of her twenties. First too much makeup, and after she washes it off, too little. She tries a different eye makeup and blush. Of course, worst of all is her totally unmanageable, shoulder-length, hopelessly frizzy red hair, the bane of her existence. It is definitely going to rain; because her hair has become like Brillo.

  Sarah wears Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue. She likes that it is a fragrance created during the Belle Epoque, before the Roaring Twenties, and inspired by the blue hour, the time when it’s no longer day but not quite night, when the stars just begin to appear. She believes it is a romantic fragrance, Catherine Deneuve’s favorite, and likely worn by the movie stars of the 1940s.

  By six thirty, it is time to be out the door. Exhausted, she wonders, why go at all?

  Chapter 4

  Joseph

  It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that dress, though often considered a trifling matter, is one of considerable importance, for a man’s personal appearance is a sort of “index and obscure prologue” to his character.

  —Edward Ferrero, The Art of Dancing, 1859

  Joseph spits on the plate of the iron, pressing and sliding it along the damp shirt he will wear to the Ballroom. Moving along invisible paths, attentive to every wrinkle, he avoids the tears in the cover and adds “ironing board cover” to his long mental list of things that need repair or replacement in his life.

  A sour smell rises from the underarm. He presses his nose to the shirt. It’s a weak and fleeting scent. He adds “new shirts” to the list.

  Joseph always thought he would marry, but while he has hopes of a home and family, they elude him. He imagines coming home from work, his dinner waiting, kissing his children good night, and reading the newspaper in his favorite chair. He has worked for thirty years at the telephone company, is sixty years old, yet he’s never met the right person. That is, before he met Sarah Dreyfus at the Ballroom.

  He has considered taking an early retirement in two years, 2001, and moving back to Italy, even though he hasn’t been there in more than fifty years. But he’s very comfortable in his apartment. Maybe he’ll fina
lly fix the place up when he retires.

  He pictures Sarah at the Ballroom, how she walks down the stairs, stops to pay, looks his way, and smiles. As though she is expecting him. Would she be disappointed if he wasn’t there? When she approaches and brushes her cheek against his, she exudes the scent of the season. In July her skin is warm and somewhat damp against his, offering a fruity fragrance that doesn’t offend him in its fragile freshness. In January, the evening chill issues from her skin, and there are rose petals on her cheeks and nose.

  “Joseph.”

  Her mouth is like a kiss when she says his name.

  “Save me a dance,” she says.

  Always. A fox-trot. He wants the first and last dance to be a fox-trot with Sarah.

  Turning the shirt, he discovers a spot on the pocket where one of his pens leaked at work. Damn. Stains don’t come out of polyester. But since he never takes his jacket off at the Ballroom, no one will notice.

  Just as he’s never missed a day of work, Joseph has never in twenty years missed a Sunday at the Ballroom. The boredom of his job at the phone company, the solitude of his evenings after work, his unfulfilled plans, are all forgotten. He needs only concentrate on the music, the lead, and the woman in his arms. He hopes it will be Sarah.

  As always on Sunday, like clockwork, he is up early to eat a hearty breakfast at the corner café, and then he walks from Perry Street in the village to the Upper West Side. He enjoys the vigorous walk, even in these cold days of January, counting out a rhythm to his pace, just as when he dances. After stopping on 100th Street for Spanish coffee at Flor de Mayo, he likes to sit on a bench in Riverside Park to read sections of the New York Times: Arts and Leisure, the Book Review, and especially Friday’s film and theater reviews. He searches for the articles that he thinks he could discuss with Sarah when they sit out a dance. At two, the sky begins to cloud up, and he reminds himself to take an umbrella with him later. He picks up his pace on the way home, to nap, shower, and get ready for the evening. If he is to get a slice at Ray’s, he must leave his apartment by six.