Players

indicated the possibility of onlookers. The man being sheepish was George Sedbauer, heavy-set and balding. Lyle had seen news photos of him after the shooting. Of course he'd also seen him dead, although he wouldn't have been able to identify Sedbauer from those scattered glimpses on the floor. Rosemary handed him a drink. It had only two ice cubes in it. It wouldn't be cold enough. He wanted a cold drink. He realized, incredibly, that he'd forgotten what he was going to ask her. He had to work his way back to it.

'That's George, isn't it?”

'Yes.”

'Who's with him?”

'That's me in the middle. That's somebody Vilas or Vilar. I think it was on a weekend. We went to Lake Placid? It was supposed to be to ski. That's the lobby where we stayed. Or that's the room. I think that was someone's room.”

'Who's somebody Vilas?”

'That's the man who shot George.”

'Interesting,' he remarked.

'He was around a lot sometimes. Other times you never saw him for long periods.”

'I think that's interesting, said the wide-eyed young man.”

'George didn't ski. That was it. When we got all the way up there, George hated snow.”

Unsure of something, she'd narrow her eyes and gaze into space. She gestured slowly. Her face betrayed the barest abandonment when she turned to find him staring. It was necessary, he knew, to talk to her about herself. She was tall, more pale than fair, walking in a somber frost.

To be alone with her was to occupy the immediate center of things. There were no gradations to this kind of desire. Everything turned on the point of her chalk image. It would be essential to talk awhile. He would find his way to her through this process of filling in.

'This drink needs about eleven more ice cubes.”

'I don't think you can stay too long.”

'Let's sit in the living room. I'm a living-room fanatic. I'm a buff, really. I have this thing. Without a living room around I'm dead, just about.”

The sensual pleasure of banality was a subject worth the deepest investigation. He lingered in the kitchen to watch her walk into the next room. He sat facing her, ten feet away, knowing she would cross her legs. There were cigarettes and liquor, absolute necessities when he was with her. He tried to limit his remarks to tapered extensions of predictable types. He was working toward a pure state, some embryonic science of desire, perhaps to be known as reciprocal hypnotism. When she spoke he concentrated every effort on creating a face that would return to her not only a sense of what she'd said but of the person speaking, Rosemary Moore in a camisole dress. He moved to the sofa, settling in next to her. Together they would craft the branding instrument of character.

'When I was flying,' she said, 'I was always sleeping too little or too much. I used to sleep whole days sometimes. This is a little more regular. But I don't know how interesting it'll wind up being. There isn't enough to do. I have to see if I'm going to stay. The people are pretty nice, though. Not like this job with buyers that I had. That was insane. They would shout into the phone. I don't like when people do that.”

He took the glass out of her hand and put it on the end table next to his own drink. She moved her head briefly, shaking hair out of her eyes or ending one sequence of encounter to begin another. The second he touched her, touch turned to grip.

8

Pammy put tap shoes and tights into her shoulder bag. The class was on West Fourteenth Street, two evenings a week, eight-thirty to ten. In charge was Nan Fryer, a woman with brittle hair and a scar across one side of her jaw. There were as many as forty people there some nights. The studio was rented from a theater group called Dynamic Tranquillity. Nan was a member of the group and she attributed her prowess in tap to ethical systems of discipline. 'Hop, you're not hopping. Shuf-ful, shuf-ful.' Pammy danced before a mirror at the back of the room. Her body was suited to tights, one of the few such bodies in evidence. She was practicing a routine that involved a precarious off-balance change. Pammy loved tap. She had dancing feet, it appeared. A born hoofer. Arms flung up, toes crackling, heels beating out a series of magnetic stresses, she repeatedly sought a particular cadence, the single instance of lucidity that would lift her into some dizzy sphere of ecstasy and sweat. Tap was so crisp when done correctly, so pleasing to one's sense of the body as a coordinated organism able to make its own arithmetic.

Nan Fryer clapped her hands, bringing the tapping to a halt. People drooped somewhat, bodies throbbing. The men in class were dressed variously, from track suits to routine casual wear. Most of the women wore tights or flared slacks. Nan walked among them, talking. She wore silver shoes, cut-off jeans and a Dynamic Tranquillity T- shirt. It was an outfit that made her facial scar appear all the more tragic.

'I like your breathing. You're all breathing so well. This is important in that we're concerned with movement and the forces affecting movement. There are areas and awarenesses in you that tap makes accessible. You are accessible to yourself. Notice how calm you're getting. Little by little, deeper and deeper. Unblock your nervous systems. Believe in your breathing. This is so essential to getting the most out of tap. When I first came to tap, I thought it was just a ticky tacky dance. It can be so much more. Movement and force. Force and energy. Energy and peace. You are a free person for the first time in that your whole body is aware of the physical and moral universe.”

Pammy looked out a window at the back of the room. Traffic moved swiftly. There were flushes of sunset in a glass door across the street, a bargain shop. Her hands were over her ears.

'Okay, kids, crossover time.”

The rest of the session Pammy danced intently, cracking down on her heels, definitive contact. She worked awhile on the intermediate routine, step number two, moving sideways across the face of the mirror to confront a radiator and pipes. Nan played an old show tune on the phonograph and danced a set of advanced combinations. The students formed a circle around her. Soon they were all dancing, trying to duplicate the complex floor patterns, tapping, swaying, elbowing out into some private space to strut awhile, quietly, on the hardwood floor.

'Do not tight-ten. Com-plete loose-ness. Re-lax ank-les, Arnold Mas-low, do not tight-ten.”

Lyle stood in a phone booth in Grand Central waiting for McKechnie to pick up and watching people heading for their trains, skidding along, their shoulders collapsed-a day's work, a drink or two causing subtle destruction, a rumpling beyond the physical, all moving through constant sourceless noise, mouths slightly open, the fish of cities.

'You're sure it's not too late.”

'Lyle, say what you want to say.”

'The other day we talked about George Sedbauer. Who shot him, so on, so forth. Well remember you mentioned this secretary of Zeltner's one time? She knows a little about this. I got to know her a little. She first of all knew Sedbauer. She knew the man or knows the man who shot him. That's the key thing. There's a photograph. I saw it. And she knows about the gun, what kind of gun, but the gun she could have read in the paper. The key thing is the man who did the shooting. She knows him. Should somebody be told about this? Or what, Frank?”

'You saw this picture.”

'They were in it. George, her, the guy. Unless she's inventing. But why would she invent?”

'I want you to talk to a friend of mine,' McKechnie said. 'I'll have him get in touch with you. Yeah, we'd better do that.”

Ethan and Jack came over the next evening with meat loaf leftovers. They all went up to the roof, where management had laid slate over the tar and provided four picnic tables (chained to the walls) and several evergreen shrubs in large planters. Lyle arrived last, carrying drinks on a tray.

'I didn't know this was up here,' Jack said.

'It's to give Pammy a look at the World Trade Center whenever she's depressed. That gets her going