“You didn’t go dancing in New York? You feel looser. You aren’t counting for once.”
Sebastian had always mocked how I mutteredone-two-threeunder my breath. But there was too much else to feel in this moment—the familiar seams of the parquet floor, Veronica’s archery calluses, the bounce of my old shoes.
“Are you saying I dance like an accountant?”
“Many accountants are fine dancers,” she said. “Music is numbers, after all. Maybe it’s all that time spent with ordinaries.”
A hitch in my step. A frown from Veronica.
She guided me through underarm turns, chassés, butterflies, propelling me across the floor, slicing through the space around us. We became aggressive, expansive, taking full possession of the empty ballroom. Like our hand-to-hand combat lessons when I was little, the interlocking of bodies, reflexes, intent.
Halfway through a series of Viennese figures, the piece ended.
We drifted though one last spin, and Veronica stepped back. The vinyl crackled between tracks.
“Not bad.” She sounded almost surprised. “Maybe all you needed was a whack to the head.”
The next piece began, and she went back to the milk crate on the table. “Something more challenging, perhaps.”
I stood where she’d left me. “Was I really so terrible, back then?”
“You were competent, Jessica, as always. But you lacked flow.” A shrug as she leafed through more records. “You’re feeling the rhythm now. Sex with a target has loosened you up.”
A target.
My eyes closed, shutting out the room. The floor fell away in pieces, and for a moment I was underwater—compressed and breathless.
“It will get easier,” Veronica murmured.
Her words were a test. I couldn’t react. I couldn’tnotreact.
That’s when the music made its way in.
It was a choral piece, a prayer in Latin interwoven with strings and pipe organ. I’d heard it countless times, but this was somehow different. From the frayed piece of vinyl something new had risen up, flawless, coursing, vast.
The music engulfed me, whirling, as my body had whirled moments before. It cycled in patterns, like ripples colliding in a pond.
I could still see the math of it—each measure with its count, each harmony, its ratios. But the usual sums had spun themselves into lavish, superfluid excess.
The numbers were on fire.
The chorus of voices blazed, under my fingernails, at the back of my throat, in the trickles of sweat under my clothes. It rushed to fill the missing part of me, cut away by the crash. For a moment, I almost saw what I had lost.
Then the record finished. The needle of the aging phonograph failed to lift, trapped in a loop of rustle and static.
The music, gone.
The parquet floor rose again to meet my feet.
When my eyes opened, Veronica was taking the record off, placing another on the turntable. She came to join me on the dance floor, and stood looking at my face.
“What?” I asked, the word small in my ears.
“Nothing.” She reached out to brush a tear from my cheek. “How well do you remember your foxtrot?”
46
Over the next few weeks, I tried to be the perfect Morton.