Stanley Elkin - George Mills

Stan David, his voice augmented by saxophones and clarinets, by drums and bass, calls the room to attention. He is neither seductive nor peremptory but matter-of-fact as someone returned from an errand. He breaks into their mood seamlessly. “The boys and I are awful glad to be playing for you folks tonight. It’s an important date for us because it’s the first time Mr. Lodt has asked us to do a Saturday night at the Delgado, so first off we want to thank those old friends who’ve so loyally supported our week-night appearances and who Mr. Lodt tells us have been requesting our engagement for the big one.”

Most of the people applaud Stan David’s announcement. George, on the strength of his good mood, applauds too.

“Well, thank you,” Stan David says, “thank you much. God bless you all.” He turns momentarily to the band and brings the song they’ve been playing to a conclusion. It is, George guesses, their theme song, though he does not recognize the melody. Immediately they begin another, softer, slower, as unfamiliar. “While we were jamming,” Stan says, turning back to them, “I noticed a few unfamiliar faces in the room, a few new friends, I hope, I hope.” There is additional, louder applause for David’s familiar tag line.

“You know, it’s funny, the lads and I have been doing gigs in this town since almost just after the war and, you have my word, I never forget a dancer. If a couple comes by the bandstand and I happen to spot them I have their style forever. I can recall all the different partners they dance with and know even the kinds of songs they sit out. That’s what our music’s about, you see — dancing. That’s our bread and butter, that’s what pays the rent. If just listening to music is what you prefer, better get yourself a high hat and a box at the opera. Buy records, a radio, tickets to concerts. Go with the highbrows when the symphony plays. That goes for the chaperones, that goes for the shy. Mr. Lodt thinks so too. He doesn’t want any wallflowers blocking his fire exits. We don’t get paid for our fancy solos and hotsy-totsy musicianship. It ain’t Juilliard here, it’s a dance hall. Now it’s a big floor…What’s that Mr. Lodt? Right. Square foot for square foot the biggest in the Midwest. So there’s no need to bump into anyone. We want you to enjoy yourselves but expect you to behave at all times according to the international rules of ballroom etiquette. If you’ve come to show off or act like a rowdy you might just as well leave right now, I hope, I hope.

“Okay? Okay. Now, you gals who are here for the first time, who came with your girl friends to see what it’s like, it’s a scientific fact, it takes forty-eight muscles to frown and only half a dozen to smile. You guys remember that, too. But everybody pay attention — we might just be playing your song when you fall in love!”

George has seen the bar, more like a soda fountain than a bar, more — though he has no firsthand experience of this — like the sinks and Coke cupboards in rec rooms, finished basements. He has a forlorn sense of other people’s families, of uncles and dads in sports shirts, of daughters who babysit one and two years after they have graduated high school, a notion of these girls in baby doll pajamas, rollers, furry slippers, of brothers called out for swim practice, track, even during vacation. They run punishment laps.

But it is the girls who choke his spirit, the peerless globes of their behinds full as geometry, their breasts scentless as health. He imagines their lingerie, the white cotton average as laundry. He knows there are virgins about, feels the concentrated weight of their incurious apathy, their inert, deadpan, ho-hum hearts. And is oppressed by obstacle, the insurmountability of things.

Yet he knows that it is only through some such girl — he hasn’t seen her yet, has merely glimpsed her type gossiping over a soft drink, or dancing with a young man or another girl, not heedless so much as inattentive, not wanton, even when her partner tentatively divides her thighs with his leg, so much as absolved, locked into a higher modesty — that he may begin his life, be freed from the peculiar celibacy that has marked it, his periodic, furious bachelor passions like seizures. But he has seen the beerless, liquorless bar who till now has only wooed with chemicals the chemically primed. There is no jukebox. How may he cope? He is ready to leave. And is actually walking toward the exit and past the gilt chairs that line the margins of the dance floor when Stan David speaks.

“Girls ask the boys to dance. Girls ask the boys to dance. Step up to some fellow, girls, and invite him to dance.”

“You want to dance?” Louise asks him.

“Me?”

“Stan says.”

“Sure. I guess. I’m not much of a dancer.”

“It’s a box step.”

“Oh, a box step.”

“You can do a box step, can’t you?”

“Is this a box step?”

“That’s right. You’ve got it.”

“Like this?”

“You’ve got it.”

“I’m dancing,” George says.

“Louise Mead,” Louise says.

“George Mills.”

“Mrs. Louise Mills. Mrs. George Mills. George and Louise Mills.”

“What?”

“Oh,” she laughs, “you’re not from around here. When a girl tells a boy her name and the boy tells his, the girl gets to say what her name would be if the girl and the boy were married.”

“I’m not really a boy.”

“What a thing to say!”

“I mean I’m twenty-seven years old.”

“An older man,” Louise says. “You’re an older man.”

“That depends,” he says, pleased with his response.

“I’m nineteen,” she says, and he has a sense that things are going well. He’s following the conversation and doing the box step. The song — Stan David and his orchestra are playing “Getting To Know You”—has been going on for almost seven minutes.

“Did you come with someone, George?”

“No. Did you?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Oh.”

“Do you think I did?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not very flattering. It’s Saturday night. I’m nineteen years old. Do you think I’d come to a place like this by myself?”

“I guess not,” George says.

“It’s still the same song,” Stan David says. “It’s still girls ask the boys, and it’s still the same song.”

“I love your togs,” Louise says.

“My togs?”

“Your clothes, silly.”

“They’re brand new. They’re brand new togs.”

“The boys and I just might play this song right to the end of the set. We might play it all evening. Does this tell you something about the human heart? Anybody can fall in love with anybody if they stand close enough long enough.”

“He always says that.”

“Did you know about this? Did you know there’d be girls ask the boys?”

“What if I did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to sit down, George?”

“If you do.”

“I’m by myself,” she says, and lays her head on his shoulder. “I came with my folks.”

The cat has his tongue. In a bowling alley, in a bar, she would have had the story of his life by now, the comfort of his theories, but like this, in the dim room, a virgin in his arms, their bodies’ curves and hollows adjusted by the dance, customized by music as by tailoring, he has no words, is adrift in a soup of contrary sensations. He is that self-conscious. He wants to kiss her. But knows that if he does — she is with her folks; where are they? — it would be a declaration helpless and humiliating as the raw need of those chemical-flooded ladies to whom he’s ministered, revealing as a stump. He feels his erection, which he manages to keep out of her way, and glances furtively at the pants of the other male dancers to see if he’s out of line. He is astonished. There are erections everywhere. It’s a logjam of hard-ons.