Samuel Florman - The Aftermath

We also share a taste for line dancing—or at least that’s what first brought us together. Aboard ship, a lesson in this popular pastime was one of the social events intended to help the younger, single passengers get to know each other, and soon after we left port, I was among the first to sign up. It wasn’t that I knew exactly what line dancing was, or cared, but rather that I liked the look of the young woman in front of me in the sign-up line. When she chose the three o’clock class, so did I.

Her name is Sarah Darby. She grew up in Philadelphia, majored in English literature at Swarthmore, and came on the cruise with her parents. Her mother is the engineer, an eminent authority on lasers. All this I learned as we walked away from the sign-up desk. Before we reached the end of the corridor, I was in love. In the ordinary course of events, maybe it would have turned out to be merely a shipboard romance. Who knows? And at this point I really couldn’t care less. Sarah has dark brown hair, hazel eyes, an aristocratic nose, flawless skin, and a body both athletic and beautiful. At college, when she wasn’t deconstructing Hawthorne, she played lacrosse.

We met again at the class that afternoon, looked intently at each other, held hands as partners, and it’s been that way ever since. If the world had to end for me to be with Sarah, then so be it. That’s no way to think, I know, but sometimes I get carried away.

The line-dancing class was not a big draw. In fact, only five students showed up. This five, plus the teacher, gathered in the center of one of the dining salons, standing uneasily under a glit tering chandelier, glancing toward the door to see if others might be coming to join us. After a while it became apparent that the group was not going to get any larger. Sarah and I talked quietly with each other, and I didn’t care if we stood there waiting forever.

As the minutes passed, I became vaguely aware that there was another pair who had eyes only for each other. Tom and Mary, as I was soon to learn, are both engineers, and they seemed to be conversing in technical terminology that to my ears was close to being a foreign language. But this was just a courting ritual. You could see that their mutual attraction was more than technological. Tom is one of the stars of our traveling seminar, one of those wizards from the “Frontiers of Engineering” program I mentioned earlier. He is—was—a star professor of materials engineering at Stanford, and has a wizard’s understanding of plastics, ceramics, carbon fibers, and all such stuff. His real name is Alfred Swift, but when, at an early age, his talent for tinkering became manifest, people started calling him Tom. Tom Swift. What better name can there be for an engineer?

Mary O’Connor, a russet-haired colleen who makes me think of those old Maureen O’Hara movies I’ve seen on videotape (my dad loves them), is also a member of the technical species. You would never guess it by her looks. She was close to receiving her civil engineering degree from Manhattan College in New York City, following the same career path as her father, who is president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Mary is tall, about six feet, and stands and moves gracefully, like a dancer. She looked extremely comfortable next to Tom, who is about six six, lanky, and rumpled in a suitably engineering kind of way.

The fifth member of the class was Herbert Green. Like Mary, his home was New York, but, as Sarah whispered to me at one point, the two of them seemed to come from different planets. Herb is short, quick-moving, verging on nervous, and to my southerner’s way of thinking, the quintessential urbanite. In his final year at NYU Law School, Herb’s special interest was environmental law. As he was happy to tell us as soon as we became acquainted, he hoped some day to save the natural world from the effects of human greed and mismanagement. His outspoken hostility to technological enterprise was a constant irritant to his father, the dean of the engineering school at Columbia University. When Tom Swift first heard one of Herb’s tirades, his comment was: “Green, you bet! He wants to take us back to the forests of our ancestors.”

Our dance instructor was Roxanne Ford from Texas. No college credentials for Roxy. Just a quick exit from the small town where she had been born, and which she never wanted to identify, followed by a career as an itinerant dance teacher. She loves travel, she loves people, and she loves to dance. Working on a cruise ship was her idea of paradise. I am tempted to call her a blond bombshell because that’s the way she first struck me, decked out for work in a tight-fitting cowgirl costume, complete with red boots and a rhinestone-studded vest. But Roxy defies simplistic typecasting. She’s a hedonist of sorts, but in a philosophical rather than a frivolous way. She takes the world as she finds it, and loves not only the people in it but the animals as well. She has traveled to the Indian subcontinent, falling under the spell of Eastern religious beliefs—reverence for every living creature, curiosity about reincarnation, that sort of thing. If I had known then what I know now, I would have understood that Roxy and Herb were made for each other. But looking at them at the time, they seemed a most unlikely pair.

In fact, we all seemed a somewhat mismatched group, standing around looking at each other and glancing not so furtively at our watches. Finally, Tom said, “Well, it looks like we’re going to have to abort this launch.”

“Not on your life,” said Roxy. “There’s just more room for those of us who are here. Let’s get started,” With that, she pushed a button on the boom box she had brought with her, and a lively country-pop tune by Shania Twain poured forth.

Then she gave instructions: “Everybody stand over there with your back against the wall. Put your heels against the wall and pull your shoulders back. Try to press the small of your back into that wall and lift your stomach and rib cage up and in. Lift your chin so that it’s parallel to the floor. Now, move away from the wall and try to maintain your posture. Don’t look down! Try walking forward and back, taking small steps. That’s the spirit!”

I don’t know what spirit she was referring to, since her three male students were staggering about, each more awkward than the next. Sarah Darby and Mary O’Connor, admittedly, looked great.

“Come on, guys,” Roxy urged. “Put your thumbs in your pockets and stand tall. Okay, a little more walking around, listening to the music—then we’ll be ready for partners.”

Roxy saw that Sarah and I were standing close together, as were Tom and Mary, so she grabbed Herb.

“Here we go, mister,” she said, standing beside Herb and slightly in front, placing his right hand on her right hip, his left hand holding her left hand slightly elevated, like a couple of figure skaters. I was to learn later that this was called the modified sweetheart position. In a few minutes we were stepping around the room in pairs, and magic was at work. We were becoming sweethearts, nothing modified about it. Yet, even as each of the three couples started to fall in love, so too was a very special bond established among the six of us.

That first afternoon we followed a routine that we stuck to for ten fabulous days, until it was disrupted by the end of the world. The line-dancing class began promptly at three o’clock. Roxy removed the listing of the class from the daily notice of activities so that it remained limited to just our own little group. I can’t say that we became accomplished dancers, but we had a hell of a lot of fun; and we did improve (the guys a little, the girls a lot; they were naturals). First we tackled “Cowboy Hustle” and “Tennessee Stroll,” then Roxy took us to a higher level with “Country Strut” and “Eight Corners.” After an hour of lively stepping, we retreated to our favorite lounge, one of the dozen or so on the ship. It was at these gatherings that we quickly became a debating club. We discovered a shared passion for discussion—for argument, I should say—that developed from the group’s natural chemistry.