Dancing in the Dark

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to invite you to the wedding, Toby.”

“It would be a very bad idea.”

Anne dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin and rose. So did I.

“I’m a little late,” she said. “I’ve got to hurry.”

I nodded and got up.

Anne came around the table, touched my hand, and kissed my cheek. I think she was crying. At least I like to think there was a tear or two. Then she was gone.

I left a big tip and was turning toward the cash register when the skinny waitress appeared, picked up the tip, and said, “She dump ya?”

“Yeah.”

“Figures. She didn’t eat and you leave a big tip.”

“You should be a detective,” I said.

“Helps to have a little knowledge of human nature in this job,” she said. “Go get a little drunk. I do when I get dumped.”

“I don’t drink,” I said.

She shrugged and answered the upheld hand of a distant customer.

Less than twenty minutes later I was at the Y.M.C.A. downtown on Hope Street. I looked for Doc Hodgdon or someone else for a handball game. No luck. So I got my stiff light gloves from my locker, loosened them up, and attacked the heavy punching bag in the corner of the gym, near an old guy with dyed red hair who was steadily shooting free throws.

After twenty minutes of punching and a shower, I felt tired and a little better. There was a Loew’s theater a few blocks from the Y. I walked over and saw a March of Time about the New Canada and They Got Me Covered with Bob Hope. It was only a little after four when I got out and closed my eyes against the afternoon sun.

I got in my car and drove to the Roxy, where I saw He’s My Guy with Joan Davis, Dick Foran, and the Mills Brothers. There was also a musical short with Borrah Minevitch’s Original Harmonica Rascals. I remember the little guy, Johnny Puleo, wearing cowboy chaps and trying to muscle his way into the act. That’s all I remember of what I had seen in the dark that day. Joan Davis and Bob Hope had gotten a few smiles out of me but that was it.

The sun was still up but not as bright and there was a chill in the air. I headed home. It was about dinnertime, but I wasn’t hungry.

I found a space on Heliotrope about half a block down from Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse, walked down the street and up the three steps of the white wooden porch.

Mrs. Plaut was just inside the screen door waiting for me, arms folded across her tiny twig of a body, clutching what looked like a tattered ream of paper to her slender bosom. Mrs. Plaut was somewhere between seventy-five and ninety, with the constitution of Primo Carnera and the energy of Ray Bolger. Her hearing had long ago begun to fail her, but she more than made up for it with eyesight and determination.

“Mr. Peelers, I have a list,” she shouted.

“Mrs. Plaut,” I answered loudly, seeing that she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid. “This day has turned from a toe-tapping joy to thoughts, if not of suicide, at least of a dark room, a few hours of radio, and lots of dreamless sleep.”

“Sometimes I fail to understand you, Mr. Peelers,” she said with a shake of her head. “If your toes are cramped, don’t climb in bed feeling sorry for yourself. Do what the Mister always did, stomp around the floor barefoot. And don’t breathe in that Flit stuff.”

Mrs. Plaut, when it fit her agenda, thought I was an exterminator or an editor for a small but prestigious publisher. I do not know where she got these ideas. Attempts to find out had proved both fruitless and maddening.

“I’ll stomp around, Mrs. Plaut,” I said.

“There is a potato shortage, you know,” she said moving from small talk to Item One on her agenda.

“I’ve heard.”

“There is a black market in potatoes.”

“Ah,” I said knowingly, looking longingly at the stairs behind her that led to my room.

“I should like you to use your resources to obtain as many pounds of baking potatoes as you can.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll think about it tomorrow. I promise.”

“Promises are daisies. Delivering the goods is orchids. The Mister said that.”

The Mister was long, long gone. I had never had the pleasure of meeting him. But he was a legend in the House of Plaut.

“And,” she went on, “more meat rationing is coming April eleventh.”

“I’ll give you my meat-ration stamps,” I said. “Now, if I can. .”

She handed me the papers in her hand, lined sheets covered with Mrs. Plaut’s precisely written pen-and-ink words. It was the latest chapter in the endless saga of her family. I was expected to edit-minimally-and comment- favorably-on each chapter handed to me. I was expected to do this quickly and to be ready for an interrogation to prove I had read her latest offering carefully.

“At breakfast tomorrow morning, you can critique,” she said. “We’re having Waterbury crescent scones crafted with mince, orange peel, and a dash of nutmeg.”

“I’ll have to make it a quick breakfast, Mrs. P.,” I said, trying to inch past her, letting my slightly outstretched arms clutching her manuscript run interference.

But Mrs. Plaut was not to be denied. She cut me off.

“Where is it you have to run? Call, make it later. You have the chapter about Aunt Bess and Cousin Leo’s fateful encounter with Pancho Villa.”

“I have a dance lesson with Fred Astaire,” I countered.

“The movie Fred Astaire?”

“Not the streetcar conductor,” I said.

“He is trying to teach you to dance?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I’m having a lesson.”

“He will fail miserably,” she said with a shake of her head.

“I appreciate your confidence and support,” I said. “I’ll read this tonight.”

“Potatoes,” she said, finally standing aside to let me pass.

I paused on the steps and turned to her with, “Have you ever seen Preston Stewart?”

“In the flesh, no. In the movies, yes.”

“What do you think?”

“About Preston Stewart? If I were fifty years younger, I’d hide in his bedroom closet and jump on his bones when he came home.”

“Thanks,” I said, starting up the stairs. Behind me Mrs. Plaut said, “That’s what my niece Rhoda did with Valentino. And she said it worked.”

The only person I could or would talk to about me and Anne was Gunther Wherthman, who was my best friend, Swiss, and about the same size as Johnny Puleo of the Harmonica Rascals. He was either a midget or a little person, depending on who you were talking to. I wanted to talk to Gunther, who had gotten me the room in Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse three years earlier when Mrs. Eastwood had thrown me out of my apartment. Gunther was always proper. Gunther was always perfectly dressed, down to his tiny three-piece suits and a fob with a regular- size watch attached. Gunther spent his days translating books into English from about a dozen languages. He had more work than he could handle with government contracts, industrial and popular publishers. But Gunther was out of town with the normal-sized young woman he was dating and considering marrying, a graduate student in music history at the University of San Francisco.

I didn’t want to think about anybody marrying anybody.

I went into my room and was greeted by a loud series of demanding “meows” from Dash. The sun was almost down but not quite. I hit the light switch and surveyed my domicile, Mrs. Plaut’s manuscript pages in my hand.

A flowery ancient sofa to my left had a purple pillow resting on it. Stitched onto the pillow by Mrs. Plaut was