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By Root 364 0

interlocking circles across the floor, so that there were moments when I felt that she wasn’t really dancing with me at all, but simply employing me as a kind of fulcrum, a hub on which to hang the whirling spokes of her own private revolutions. And no wonder, I thought; if I were her I certainly wouldn’t have wanted anyone to think that I could possibly have chosen such an elephantine piece of machinery as myself, all vacuum tubes and gear work with a plain old analog dial of a face, such a dented, gas-guzzling old Galaxie 500 of a man, for a dance partner. But then she would open her eyes, favor me with her spacious Utah smile, and give me her hands, so that I could spin her for a second or two. Whenever our faces drew within each other’s orbit I felt compelled to speak, generally to express my doubts about the wisdom of my dancing, with her, at all, and when Double Down broke their set again I was relieved, and I started for the table. But she took hold of my wrist, dragged me over to the magic black telephone, and dialed up three songs.

“‘Just My Imagination,’” she told the operator, without consulting the tattered playlist. “‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ That’s right And ‘Get It While You Can.’”

“Uh oh,” I said. “I’m in trouble.”

“Hush now,” said Hannah, as she reached up and put her arms around my neck.

“I’m going to regret this tomorrow,” I said.

“That’s nice,” she said. “Everybody ought to have a hobby.”

A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I’d never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair. Somewhere in the middle of Percy Sledge’s testimony the combination of substances I’d introduced into my bloodstream in the course of the evening reached a kind of equilibrium, and I forgot, for a moment, all the bad things that had already happened to me that day as a result of my foolishness and bad behavior, and all the good reasons I had for leaving poor Hannah Green alone. I was happy. I kissed Hannah’s apple yellow hair. I could feel them unlimbering the old siege engine down inside my boxers. I think that I must have sighed, then, and for all the fizz and ichor flowing at that moment through the ventricles of my heart, it must have come out sounding unutterably sad.

“I’ve been rereading Arsonist,” she told me, to cheer me up, I supposed. “It’s so great.” She was referring to my second novel, The Arsonist’s Girl, an unpleasant little story of love and madness I’d written during the Final Days, down inside the doomed bunker of my second marriage to a San Francisco weatherwoman whom I’ll just call Eva B. It was a slender book, whose composition had cost me a lot of misery, and I had a pretty low opinion of it, myself, although it did contain a nice description of a fire at a petting zoo, and a pretty good two-page sex scene in which my reader was given a taste of the heroine’s rectum. “It’s so fucking tragic, and beautiful, Grady. I love the way you write. It’s so natural. It’s so plain. I was thinking it’s like all your sentences seem as if they’ve always existed, waiting around up there, in Style Heaven, or wherever, for you to fetch them down.”

“I thank you,” I said.

“And I love what you wrote in your inscription, Grady.”

“I’m glad.”

“Only I’m not quite the downy innocent you think I am.”

“I hope that isn’t true,” I said, and at that moment I happened to catch a glimpse, in the smoky mirrored wall of the Hi-Hat, of an overweight, hobbled, bespectacled, aging, lank-haired, stoop-shouldered Sasquatch, his furry eye sockets dim, his gait unsteady, His arms enfolded so tightly around the bones of a helpless young angel that it was impossible to say if she was holding him up or if, on the contrary, he was dragging her down. I stopped dancing and let go of Hannah Green, and