Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

Next to him an older man wearing red suspenders gyrated to music Jim suspected he had never heard before. Jim was bad with ages—people his exact same age always looked much older or much younger to him—but he thought the man must be over sixty. He danced with a woman who might have been his daughter, but Jim didn’t think so. Unattached women at Jack’s tended be quite democratic with their dance partners. To be otherwise might send an unwanted message about their motivations for being there. The guy appeared to be using the music as an excuse for exercise, holding off death as best he could. Jim wondered if he had any romantic interest in the younger woman. It was doubtful, but you could never tell for sure.

For ten years Jim had been coming to Jack’s for “oldies” on Friday nights. The mix of ages and singles versus marrieds had stayed pretty constant during that time. But ten years had been long enough for the newer music, played from eleven to midnight each evening, to become part of the oldies musical rotation in subsequent years. At this point the regulars usually started losing interest, most of them eventually dropping out altogether. Jim often wondered what they did on their Fridays instead. He suspected that a particular sort of sad self-consciousness had come into the experience for them as the music aged, preventing them from completely abandoning themselves to the music.

Jim felt himself immune to sadness. He’d long ago concluded it was like checking into a bad hotel room. You just went down to see the manager and requested another. No sense being anxious over a chance encounter—what was life beyond a series of chance encounters?

This evening few smiled out on the dance floor. Either they had their minds on other activities or they were so focused on doing the current activity correctly they forgot how their faces should appear. A smile wasn’t always best, of course, but it was a convenient default.

Explaining some new intention to exercise or diet or tan or purchase or hairdo or make-up style, Clara used to say, “After all, your body is a vessel.” Jim hadn’t always taken the statement seriously: she threw it away too easily. He supposed she didn’t really understand it herself, despite the fact that she’d always been obsessed with her “vessel”: keeping it fit and clean, adorning it to fit the times and her mood, reshaping it as a final, desperate measure when it no longer resembled what it used to be.

Out on the dance floor these vessels bobbed up and down on a tide of rhythmic noise, mouths and minds open, receptive to whatever filling might be available: jobs, partners, a life in the suburbs, a vacation on the beach, a trip out of town, a grope in the back of a shiny black van. Like dancers at some voodoo ceremony, waiting for a random god to possess them. No matter what people said about their lives, none of it was true in any sort of fundamental way. Even your name, he thought, is arbitrary. A physical body dancing in the tide is as close to what you are as anything.

A dark-haired woman with a white streak like a curved knife blade above one ear stood at the edge of the floor watching him. He looked around. Apparently at some point his dance partner had disappeared, and at the moment he had no memory of what she had looked like. He wondered how long he’d been dancing by himself, thinking it should embarrass him, but it did not. He had seen people—mostly drunk, mostly women but not always—dance by themselves before.

He stopped dancing, but not so abruptly as to draw additional attention. He found himself swaying rhythmically as he moved off the floor. He couldn’t help himself. The woman continued to stare at him. He thought at first to avoid her—the bold ones almost invariably became drunk and irritating—but found himself exiting the dance area close to where she stood. Maybe it was the hair. She looked more curious than anything. Jim didn’t think he’d ever seen her here before.

“You seem to have lost your partner.” She smiled, letting him know the comment was friendly.

He smiled back. He seldom went long without a dance partner, but smiling was something he rarely did. The small events of a life were simply not that amusing. “And you don’t appear to have a partner.”

The woman began to dance, moving slowly out to the floor, and after a brief hesitation he joined her. He thought it staged and somewhat silly, but it was almost closing time, and he had been there for hours, so why fight it—she seemed like a nice lady.

Still, he would have just finished this little dance and said his goodnights if she hadn’t stared at him the way she did, eyes wide open like a curious child’s, taking in every detail of his face and expression. If only to distract her he remarked, “I don’t believe I’ve seen you in here before.”

“I buried my husband two weeks ago,” she said, as if that were a logical reply.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, well, I’m sorry. It’s not something to share in a first meeting.”

“It’s this place. People find themselves saying strange things.” But of course she wasn’t one of those people. She was simply being perfectly honest. Looking at her, he suspected she was barely capable of anything else.

“You must have been coming here for awhile.” Women had said this to him before, of course, but it bridled him a bit because he could tell she expected an honest answer.

“Years,” he said. “But it hasn’t improved my dancing any.”

And she laughed a genuine laugh, which made her seem too vulnerable to be in a place like this, and he began wondering how it would feel to hurt her.

After Jack’s closed they walked outside together. This was not something Jim usually did. Usually he ignored all invitations spoken or implied, said his goodbyes, and returned to his apartment alone. It was a small place, hardly big enough for his own concerns.

But when Helen asked him outside for a walk (“It’s strange, I’m not sleepy at all.”) he had said yes. Of course. And had allowed her to take his arm.

There was really no place to walk outside Jack’s. The building was off an access road by a major north/south interstate, the hot air rank with oil and diesel fumes. Every few minutes a tractor trailer would blow its air horn and rumble past on its way to a nearby depot. Jack’s neighbors were other bars and run-down hotels, a storage business and a lumber yard. Very little grass grew above the curbs, but even here an effort at landscaping had been made with rounded, white-painted stones and the occasional flower bed. Jack wondered what kind of person put out such effort, when it had no chance of being noticed. But at least it gave them a place to walk off the pavement. Property fences ended a few feet from the curbs, so that there was a continuous strip of this poor vegetation and painful landscaping. By including the occasional tree used to obscure side entrances or other semi-private features, an optimistic imagination might envision a parkway in the early morning darkness. He suspected that to be her particular fantasy—she seemed far too at ease for his own comfort.

“It’s probably unseemly for me to go out so soon, but he was ill for such a long time, and I was so afraid I’d turn into one of those women.”

“Those women?”

“Women who stay at home the rest of their lives, or until they can’t stand it anymore and come out of hiding just to make the worst possible choices.”

“Is that important to you, making good choices?”

She stopped and gripped his hand tighter, looking up at him. When had they started holding hands? He had no idea. Like school kids. He wanted to get his hand away from her, but didn’t want to break the curious tone of the evening. “Probably not as important as it should be,” she said.