Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [47]
“Oh, does it now?” I say, pushing her off me. To show interest at this point, I sense, would be courting disaster.
There's nothing to Greek dancing really. It's very simple, and almost impossible to get wrong. Basically, several people form a line with their arms strapped across each other's shoulders and can-can their way around the room like boozed-up Rockettes. That's it.
Once we're ready to go, the four-piece band of three bouzoukis and a drum strikes up with a new version of the same melody they seem to have been playing all night, the one that sounds like a grand piano being thrown down two flights of stairs, and everyone starts to move around, with me at the end of the line doing my best to keep up.
A zeibekiko is basically a slow tantrum. But we've barely started when an interesting thing happens. I find myself hijacked by Joanna's mother, a buxom dwarf who dances with all the grace of someone who can't. She's wearing a shin-length black skirt and a blue nylon spangly top, inside which two pendulous breasts pursue their own line in choreography independent of the rest of her. A hostage to the bouzouki's terpsichorean rhythms, she advances and retreats several times around my body without ever looking at me, obviously following a blueprint in her head that reduces her partner to a colorful but unimportant accessory. Back she comes, and away she goes, hands held aloft, turning east, then west, swirling and twirling, repeating the same sequence many times over, like one of those robot vacuum cleaners when it gets wedged under a dressing table. But then, once it's over, after the music rises to a rousing, out-of-tune flourish, eliciting loud applause from around the restaurant, something strange happens. Joanna's mother, yanked from her trance and suddenly realizing whom she's been dancing with all this time, shoots me an odd look, one of utter disgust, and charges back to the table, scowling.
What the hell was that about?
Before I have chance to ask, the band starts up again. Same out-of-tune tune, only faster. Fingers skitter over strings. Drums pound. The lead vocalist mumbles a song, taking a drag on a cigarette between verses and letting the smoke dribble from his lips as he sings.
“This is a dance for strong men; for hard men,” Joanna growls earthakittishly, staring up at me, projecting pure sex. “It talks about pain, about love, passion, and despair.”
Oh, does it, now?
Obviously, Eric or Mark put her up to this, because, without being asked, she leads me from the floor to a bench, then onto a table—onto it, not under it, note; she hasn't mastered that move, after all—where, caught in the thrall of the primal rhythm, she abandons all pretension to dignity by crushing herself against me, grinding at my crotch with her ass, and running her fingers up and down my body in a jitterbug of seduction, squeezing my buttocks to the beat, clawing at my shorts, and fumbling with my shirt.
For the record, here's how a woman might end up with two boyfriends she can't get rid of!
“Okay, cut. Thanks, everyone.” Director Mark steps in to save me, signaling the end of both the dance and the entire Lesbos shoot.
Not our best show, it has to be said—it would need to have actual content and subject matter for that—but more entertaining than we expected, certainly.
Still panting, and leaving the crew to mop up shots of the band, I throw myself down at the table, where I begin picking at the food. Apparently, this affords Joanna the opportunity she's been waiting for, because she sidles in like a horny crab beside me, her usually neat blonde-streaked hair more than a little askew. I don't know how many ouzos she's knocked back by now, but the woman's hammered, and, trust me, she makes a maudlin, broody drunk.
“What am I going to do about my two men, Cash?” she sighs after a moment, pouring herself another glass. “It is a big problem. I wish you would advise me. I have no clue what decision I should make.”
“Why not dump them both?” I suggest playfully, giving it the minimum of thought.
“What are you talking about?”