Stuart Kaminsky - Dancing in the Dark

“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 “God Bless Us Every One.” There had been a bed, but since I didn’t use it I finally convinced Mrs. Plaut that the room was too crowded and the frame and spring should be stored in the vast and overflowing garage in back of the house. The garage used to be a barn and still had the smell of long-ago livestock.

My bad back was a gift from a large Negro gentleman who had wanted to approach Mickey Rooney at a premiere. It had been my job to protect the Mick from overeager fans. I was all that stood between Rooney and the large gentleman. Rooney didn’t even know what was going on. The big man had given me a bear hug and dropped me on the ground amid the crowd of fans. By then Rooney was safely inside his car and on his way. I, on the other hand, was crawling for open air and feeling a pain in my back that would haunt me on and off from then on.

I slept on a thin, hard mattress on the floor. I cleaned my room every morning and made the bed. Mrs. Plaut had frequent and unannounced inspections. The rooms of her boardinghouse had no locks, not even in the shared bathroom. Mrs. Plaut didn’t believe in privacy. People only did things they shouldn’t when they knew they could lock their doors.

I moved to the small table near the window to my right. The table had two chairs. There was a small refrigerator and a small built-in cupboard behind the table. Mrs. Plaut forbade stoves in the room, but we could have hot plates. One of her relatives, an uncle, I think, had been burned to death in his house on the Nebraska plains. It wasn’t clear from her memoirs whether the deed had been done by Indians, bandits, or her aunt.

I got two cans of tuna from the shelf, opened them, gave Dash some fresh water and one can while I ate the other. I had a glass of milk and a couple of graham crackers decently dunked, took off my clothes and got under the blanket on my mattress, ill-prepared to deal with Mrs. Plaut’s Aunt Rhoda, Cousin Leo, and Pancho Villa. Dash and whatever gods may be are my witnesses that I tried.

As soon as Pancho Villa appeared on page 1,122, my imagination cast Preston Stewart in the role. I couldn’t shake the mental picture of all those teeth beneath the sombrero. I put the manuscript down and fell asleep to the sound of Dash lapping his water, planning a night on the neighborhood through the open window.

On the way to Fred Astaire at R.K.O. on a Wednesday morning with a tankful of gas, and close to rich with four hundred dollars, I wondered about where I was going to get black-market potatoes for Mrs. Plaut and whether Preston Stewart and the former Anne Peters had spent all or part of the night together.

I drove, ignoring a small, strange clinking somewhere under the hood of the car. I listened to the radio. A cute voice urged, “Gimme a little kiss, will you, huh?”

I turned off the radio and thought about Arthur Forbes, Luna Martin, Fred Astaire, and my city.