Really I'm thinking, oh please, oh please, oh please, be there this afternoon Fertility Hollis.
Inside the mausoleum front doors, there's the usual cheap reproductions of real beautiful music to make you feel not so alone. It's the same ten songs only with just the music and no singing. They don't play it except for certain days. Some of the old galleries in the Sincerity and New Hope wings never have the music. You don't hear it anywhere unless you really listen.
It's music as wallpaper, utilitarian, music as Prozac or Xanax to control how you feel. Music as aerosol room freshener.
I walk through the Serenity wing and don't see Fertility. I go through Faith, Joy, and Tranquillity, and she's not here. I swipe some plastic roses off some dead person's crypt so I won't show up empty-handed.
I'm heading into hatred, anger, fear, and resignation, and there, standing at Crypt 678 in Contentment, is Fertility Hollis with her red hair. She waits until I've been walked up next to her for two hundred and forty seconds before she turns and says hi.
She can't be the same person who was screaming her orgasm at me over the phone.
I say, Hi.
In her hands is a bunch of fake orange blossoms, nice enough but nothing I'd bother to steal. Her dress today is the same kind of brocade they make curtains out of, patterned white on a white background. It looks stiff and flame-retardant. Stain-repellent. Wrinkle-resistant. Mother-of-the-bride modest in her pleated skirt with long sleeves, she says, 'Do you miss him, too?'
Everything about her looks martyr-proofed.
I ask, Miss who?
'Trevor,' she says. She's barefoot on the stone floor.
Yeah right, Trevor, I tell myself. My secret sodomite lover. I forgot.
I say, Yeah. I miss him, too.
Her hair looks gathered in a field and piled on her head to dry. 'Did he ever tell you about the cruise he took me on?'
No.
'It was completely illegal.'
She looks from Crypt Number 678 to up at the ceiling where the music comes down from the little speakers next to the painted-on clouds and angels.
'First, he made me take dancing lessons with him. We learned all the ballroom dances they call the Cha- Cha and the Fox-trot. The Rumba and the Swing. The Waltz. The Waltz was easy.'
The angels play their music above us for a minute, telling her something, and Fertility Hollis listens.
'Here,' she says and turns to me. She takes my flowers and hers and puts them against the wall. She asks, 'You can waltz, right?'
Wrong.
'I can't believe you could know Trevor and not know how to waltz,' she says and shakes her head.
In her head, there's a picture of Trevor and me dancing together. Laughing together. Having anal sex. This is the handicap I'm up against, this and the idea I killed her brother.
She says, 'Open your arms.'
And I do.
She comes in face-to-face close with me and cups one hand on the back of my neck. Her other hand grabs my hand and pulls it out far away from us. She says, 'Take your other hand and put it against my bra.'
So I do.
'On my back!' she says, and twists away from me. 'Put your hand on my bra where it crosses my spine.'
So I do.
For our feet, she shows me how to step forward with my left foot, then my right foot, then bring my feet together while she does this all in the opposite direction.
'It's called a Box Step,' she says. 'Now listen to the music.'
She counts, 'One, two, three.'
The music goes, One. Two. Three.
We count over and over, and step each time we count and we're dancing. The flowers in all the crypts up and down the walls lean out over us. The marble smooths under our feet. We're dancing. The light is through stained-glass windows. The statues are carved in their niches. The music comes out the speakers weak and echoes off the stone until it's moving back and forth in drafts and currents, notes and chords around us. And we're dancing.
'What I remember about the cruise,' Fertility says, and her arm is curved to rest against the whole length of my arm. 'I remember the faces of the last passengers as their lifeboats were lowered past the ballroom windows. Their orange canvas life vests sort of framed their heads, so their heads looked cut off and put on orange pillows, and they just stared with big wide-open fish eyes at Trevor and me still inside the ship's ballroom while the ship was starting to sink.'
She was on a sinking boat?
'A ship,' Fertility says. 'It was called the
And it was sinking?
'It was beautiful,' she says. 'The travel agent said not to come crying back to her. It was an old French Line ship, the travel agent warned us, only now it was sold to some outfit in South America. It was very art deco. It was trashed. It was the Chrysler Building floating sideways in the ocean and cruising up and down the Atlantic coast of South America full of lower-middle-class people from Argentina and their wives and kids. Argentineans. All the light fixtures on the walls were pink glass shaped into gigantic marquise-cut diamond shapes. Everything on the ship was in this pink diamond light and the carpets had big stains and worn-out spots.'
We're dancing in place, and then we start to turn.
The one, two, three, box step of it. The forward and back of the hesitation step. The lift of the heel in a perfect bit of Cuban step-two-three, I turn with Fertility Hollis bent inside the hug of my arm. We turn again and again, we turn again, turn again, turn again.
And Fertility says how the lifeboats were gone. All the lifeboats were gone, and the ship trailed its empty lifeboat rigging in the relaxed Caribbean evening. The lifeboats rowed off into the sunset, the crowd in their orange life vests starting to wail and scam for their jewelry and prescriptions. People were doing that sign of the cross thing.
Fertility and I one, two, three; waltz, two, three, across the marble gallery.
In her story, Fertility and Trevor waltzed across the tilting mahogany parquet, the Versailles Ballroom tilting as the bow sank and the stern pointed the four-leaf clovers of each cloverleaf propeller into the evening air. A flock
