Night’s Edge (29 page)

She wouldn’t have put it past him.

“I love him—I want him—but…how can you love someone you don’t really know?”

“Of course you can. You loved Sandy, and there were parts of him that you never knew. And he loved you, enough to return from beyond the grave to help you—you weren’t his dupe, and his words of loving to you were not a lie. We love people differently at different stages of our knowledge of them. As love changes its shape and its nature, we have to decide what we’re going to do about that love on any given day. And on
this
given day,” added Diana, “your Philip may be out of the hospital already—the doctors said they were going to release him this morning, and it’s past noon now.”

“They’ll release him,” said Maddie quietly. “But with the Glendower Building burned to the ground, I don’t think he has anywhere to go.”

P
HIL CAME THAT EVENING
with Tessa, Tessa filthy with soot and exhausted, but determined to catch an audition prep class being given at one of the other studios. “I mean, like, everybody else in the school has spent the whole day prepping for the audition while I’ve been shoveling out files,” she said, emerging from the bathroom already resplendent in tights and leotard, winding her wet hair into a bun. “I’d like to know who Mrs. Dayforth bribed. Thank God I wasn’t trying to break in my new shoes last night, so the ones I lost were the old ones…. That sounds so cold, when poor Mrs. Dayforth just lost her studio. I mean, it was insured up the wazoo, but there were all her posters of herself, and mementos of when she was dancing…. Will you stay here tonight?”

She turned to Phil, who was sitting on the end of Maddie’s bed devouring kebabs and couscous as if he were a starving man. He ducked his head a little and said, “I’m lining up a couch at Hobbsie’s place in Queens.” Maddie had thought she recognized the shirt Phil was wearing as belonging to the Dance Loft’s star male pupil.

Tessa looked a little surprised, and Maddie said shyly, “It would be all right if you stayed here.”

Phil scooted a last fragment of onion around the plate with an empty kebab skewer, not looking up. “Thank you. I figured you ladies would have enough to worry about, without me sleeping on your carpet.” He glanced sidelong at Maddie as he said it and added, “Right now you don’t need to spend your energy wondering if I’m going to turn into the Thing That Wouldn’t Leave.”

Maddie smiled. “I trust you.”

Their eyes met. Phil said, for her ears only, “That’s a scary thing to say. Thank you.”

“Well, if you ever get tired of Beefcake on Parade over in Hobbsie’s apartment,” said Tessa, stuffing her shoes and a towel into a plastic grocery sack from a Chinese market in lieu of a gym bag, “the door is open here. We’ll even give you your own dish.”

She and Phil left together—Phil had gotten a job playing for one of the audition classes at a studio in Brooklyn—and Maddie dropped at once into deep sleep untroubled by dreams of either Sandy, Philip or the nightmare that had burned to ashes on Twenty-ninth Street. She dreamed of flying, of dancing wreathed in clouds at the heart of the world.

She didn’t see Phil until two nights later, at Tessa’s I-Got-Into-the-ABA! party at Al-Medina.

Abdullah had offered the girls the Big Room, a long chamber two stories tall with a gallery around it that was never used these days. The curtained booths that overlooked the main floor were given over mostly to storage, or served as changing rooms for the dancers. Maddie and Tessa invited everyone they knew—the Dayforths didn’t come, having little use for belly dancers, but Quincy and Diana both did—and Tessa borrowed one of Josi’s pink veils and did the Spirits of Coffee Dance from the
Nutcracker,
to the music of flute and
doumbek
and wild applause.

It was while Maddie was dancing that she saw Phil. He sat on one of the wall divans near the small band, a bottle of Moroccan beer in hand, watching with fascinated delight. Since this was a party and not a gig, Maddie was doing a sword dance, the curved blade balanced across the top of her head, a form of the art
that she enjoyed but that was not much in demand. She caught his eye and gave him half a smile, sank to the floor in front of him—long, rippling movements of each arm, of the chest, the hips, the rest of her body still, the weapon on her head never wavering. The band gave her flourishes, to let her show off each isolated motion: her eyes touched Phil’s again.

Do you understand?

It’s all dancing. Skill infused with joy. Weaving jewelry out of dreams.

He returned her smile.

“Y
OU’RE GOOD,” SAID HIS VOICE
behind her when she’d whirled herself off and climbed the narrow stairs to the curtained gallery booth she was using as a dressing room. She turned, still panting a little from the last frenzied drum solo. Saw him standing framed in the dim light of the corridor, rumpled and a little tired-looking in jeans and a gray linen shirt.

It seemed impossible to her that she could ever have mistaken Lucius Glendower’s shadow—or Sandy’s memory—for him.

“So’re you. I played those CDs on my way back from a gig the other night—I never got a chance to tell you.”

“I’m glad you like them. Thank God most of my stock, and the master tapes, were in storage. That music down there tonight—the rhythms they use, and the way they use them. I’ll have to try that.”

“You’ll look great,” promised Maddie with a grin. “I’ll get Josi to lend you that little pink outfit of hers with the valentines on it….”

The curtain fell over the door behind him and he crossed the booth to where she stood, with her back to
a curlicued pillar. Put one hand on the wall on either side of her shoulders. Looked down into her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Do you?” His hand touched her face, slipped beneath the heavy swags of her hair.

“I think so.”

His thumb traced her cheekbone, her lips and her chin. Then lower, brushing the bruises on her neck and shoulder that she’d covered with an elaborate necklace of ersatz topaz and diamonds. “I never got a chance to say I’m sorry,” he said. “You know I’d never hurt you.”

“I know.”

“I love you.”

She reached behind her hair and unfastened the necklace, the jewels sliding, glittering, over his hand and down her breasts, where he gathered them like a fistful of stars. She whispered, “It’s hard to say. It’s not something I ever wanted to feel again.”

“You don’t have to say anything. Or feel anything.” He drew back from her. “It’s what
I
say. And what
I
feel. I’m not expecting you to do anything about it.”

She put her arms behind his neck, drew his mouth down to hers. “It would be a lie,” she murmured, “for me to say anything else. I love you.”

His hands smoothed the bare skin of her belly and sides, stroked her back when she unfastened the heavy, jeweled bra. Her own hands parted his shirt, slipped over the heavy muscle, the washboard bones of his ribs, slow music from below spiraling through the red velvet curtains, mingling with the sound of their breath.

He lifted her, carried her to one of the divans, her hair spread out over the pillows as he stood above her,
looking down. “You’re so beautiful.” He knelt and stretched out at her side. His hands cupped her breasts, gently exploring, then slid up under the silken clouds of skirts. Maddie arched her back, moving like a cat with his caresses, her world and her consciousness narrowed to the rough friction of his hands, the scent of his body, and widened, it seemed, to take in all of night, and all of life.

She took her time, endless time in the crimson gloom, as if she were dancing to the music down below. Her fingernails scraped lightly across his back and arms, and later his butt and thighs, teasing and sampling, in no hurry. Later they locked together, tighter and tighter, as if their bones would meld. He was patient, exploring the secrets that differ from woman to woman, and sometimes in the same woman from night to night. Maddie groaned and clung to him, guiding sometimes, sometimes taken by surprise at sensations she’d never guessed she could feel—later she was not the only one with bite marks on her neck and arms.

She thought as he entered her,
Why did I wait?
But she knew she hadn’t been waiting for
a
man, but for
this
man. And for the healed woman that she was only now becoming. The Dancer at the Heart of the World.

Afterward they lay together panting on the dusty velvet, listening to the voices of Josi and Tessa in the corridor outside, to the quiet in the dining room downstairs. The music had ceased. The chatter had turned desultory.

Hobbsie’s voice drifted up from below, “Anybody seen him? I said I’d give him a ride back to my place.”

Phil started to sit up; Maddie laid a hand on his back. “Tell him you’re coming home with me.”

He lay down again at her side. Maddie felt she could
have spent the whole night that way, the whole winter, close to his warmth. Relearning what it was to spend nights alternately talking and dozing, and sinking into loving like young animals mating in spring.

“I meant what I said, about not wanting to become something you get sick of seeing. I don’t want…” His fingertips stroked her palm. “I don’t want it to turn into that. I don’t want
us
to turn into that. In a couple of months I’ll have the money to get my own place—I never planned to spend longer than that sleeping on the studio floor. Rather than risk losing what I think we can have, I’ll couch-surf until then.”

Drowsily, Maddie reached across to touch his face. “Now who doesn’t trust who?” she asked. “Do you think we’ll lose what I think we’re going to have?”

“No.” There wasn’t a trace of doubt in his voice. “I don’t think anything in the world can touch us. Or in any other world.”

Maddie smiled. “Nor do I.” She felt very calm as she said it, lifted out of herself, beyond the shadows of a haunted past. As if more than a building full of ghosts and memories had burned down the other night, releasing those imprisoned within. “Do you want to move in?”

He sighed. “I should be a sensitive New Age guy and say no, no, you need your space…. But ever since I met you, I’ve been wondering what it’s like to wake up next to you in the morning.” He brought her palm to his lips. “And I want to be next to you when I fall asleep at night.”

“We can’t know the future,” said Maddie softly. “We can only know ourselves. And maybe, if we’re lucky, each other.”

He leaned over her, pressed his lips to hers. “Then I think you’ve got yourself another roommate.”

They rose from the divan and dressed, then went down to join their friends, afterward walking to the subway together through the icy January night.