Billy
“We should mark this day on our calendar,” Billy said, out loud, because he was changing out of his pajamas.
It was about a week later, a Saturday morning. He slid into his stretchy dance pants and then threw on a sweatshirt, because dance pants and a pajama top was just too weird a combination, even for Billy. Even for Billy with no one around to witness the fashion faux pas.
Then he turned on the light inside his closet and worked his way back to the standing chest of drawers. He reached into the top drawer, identifying his tap shoes by feel. His tap shoes. Not the ancient, archival pair from his childhood that he’d loaned to Grace. His regular adult tap shoes, the ones he’d worn at his most recent tap performance. Which, of course, had been none too recent. He pulled them out, and held them under his nose, remembering the subtle but distinctive smell of the old leather, and every memory that came along for the ride.
All the memories, as a package deal. No picking and choosing allowed.
He put them on in the living room, Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat watching with uncharacteristic fascination, as if even she could smell the momentous atmosphere of this occasion.
Then he stretched. Got down on the worn-out old carpet and assumed familiar old positions, and cried out with unfamiliar pain when his muscles didn’t yield to the acrobatics they had used to perform so easily.
In a moment balanced halfway between succeeding and deciding it was all pointless, Billy levered to his feet, walked carefully on the slippery taps to Grace’s plywood dance floor, and began to choreograph a dance suitable for her school performance.
He would have done it sooner, but Grace had needed a full week to rest her injured hip.
“I guess she can at least start with a time step,” he said out loud. “Just to work into the rhythm slowly.”
He knew from experience that it was best to start a big performance with something easy and familiar, because the first few seconds were the hardest. If you were going to freeze, or make a mistake, it would be on the first couple of steps. If your mind was going to go blank, it would be right up front. After the first few seconds of dancing, a sort of autopilot would kick in, and everything would fall into place.
So, he believed, if you’re lucky enough to be in charge of your own fate on the subject, you start with a step you can almost literally perform in your sleep.
He began the strange process of slowly reminding his feet how that time step phenomenon had used to go. It was a weird feeling. His mind picked the step up again immediately. Everything from his brain through the nerve signals he sent to his muscles felt exactly the same. But the response from those muscles reminded him of a certain category of terrible dream, the one where you try to run from the monster, but your legs suddenly weigh hundreds of pounds or feel as though they’re mired in warm tar.
He stopped, and stood still a moment in disheartenment, staring at the cat, who stared back.
“Relax, Billy,” he said after a time. “We could get it back in a few months if we wanted to.”
Well, some of it, he could. But he was twelve years older now. And there was no getting that back. If there were, someone would have bottled it and sold it to the public years ago.
“She’ll need turns,” he said, trying out a few. “She could do some triple Buffalo turns, that would look flashy. Not too flashy. Just flashy enough.”
He slowly plotted them out on the six-foot-square dance floor, just to be sure they wouldn’t send him flying off on to the rug. There was barely enough room to execute a series of turns, which he began slowly to move through.
Grace was smaller, and her legs were shorter, so if he could do it, so could she. She’d have to pay almost perfect attention, but that was good. The practice in discipline would serve her well. Then, on the school stage, she wouldn’t lose track of her arc of turns and fall right into the orchestra pit. The six-foot dance floor would teach her to keep her turns tight and crisp. It would be the dancer’s equivalent of swinging three bats around.
Billy stopped suddenly, struck, without warning, by an echo of something he had said out loud much earlier. He’d said, “We could get it back in a few months if we wanted to.”
He stood nearly still, rhythmically tapping the toe tap of his right shoe and hearing the question in his head as if for the first time.
Then he held completely still, not even tapping.
“Do we want to?” he asked out loud.
But no answer seemed to present itself, and there was more choreography to be done, and changing the subject again sounded attractive.
“Maybe something syncopated,” he said, trying out some wings, some traveling wing steps with toe hits, because they were more sophisticated.
He’d spent several minutes, and worked out quite a fancy routine, before realizing the flaw in his thinking. He stopped dead and thought it over more deeply.
“No,” he said out loud. “Big mistake there, Billy Boy. You’re visualizing your audience. Visualize hers. They don’t want something that sophisticated. In fact, they might even think she was making mistakes, falling off her rhythm. No, they’ll want something dependable. Balanced. User-friendly. Yet flashy! Everybody likes a little flash.”
“I’ve got it,” he said, and moved into something different.
A series of trebles. Treble hops. Seven on one side, seven on the other, then bring it in tight, maybe down to four on each side, then two, then tighten up for a nice ending…
He counted it out as he danced it.
“One, two, three, four, five, six seven, hop…one, two, three, four, five, six seven, hop…one, two, three, four…one, two, three, four…one and a two, and a one and a two, and a one and a two, and a three and a stop.”
He ended suddenly with one foot smartly raised. A sudden burst of ending. The applause moment. He stood still, just for a split second expecting to hear it.
Instead he heard a signal knock at his door.
He walked carefully across the carpet to open it.
On the other side of the door was Grace, and a man Billy had never met. An African-American man with a shaved head and a full beard shot through with gray. He wasn’t terribly old, though. Maybe mid-forties. He had eyes that Billy could only describe as sparkly. He had a single ruby stud-earring in his left lobe.
“Oh, my God, Billy!” Grace shrieked. “Look at you! You’re all dressed!”
“Don’t make it sound like such a rare occasion,” he said, flipping his chin subtly in the direction of the stranger.
It was a hint that sailed well over Grace’s head.
“It’s only the very first time since I’ve known you, Billy, so that’s pretty rare, don’t you think?”
“Who’s your friend?” Billy asked, hoping his face wasn’t obviously red.
“This is Jesse. He’s our new neighbor.”
Jesse looked right into Billy’s eyes, causing him to look away. He wondered if Jesse was smart enough to sense that Billy did that with everyone. Equal opportunity evasion.
Then Jesse reached out a hand and Billy shook it, bearing up under the pressure of the nerve signals, which he felt as shards of glass in his brain and gut, warning him against skin contact with any stranger.
In fact, he suddenly wondered, should Grace be hanging around the building with a man none of them knew?
Billy took a deep breath. He’d always prided himself on being a good judge of character. Remembering this, he forced himself to look directly into the stranger’s eyes for a fraction of a second. Then he looked away again, and let out a long breath of air.
It was OK. Jesse was OK.
“So,” Billy said, wanting to normalize the conversation, “you moved in upstairs? Mr. Lafferty’s old place?”
“Yeah,” Grace said. “He did. The apartment where Mr. Lafferty shot himself. But it’s OK. Because Jesse doesn’t scare so easy. Not like our last new neighbor.”
“What last new neighbor?”
“Oh, right. You never even met her, did you? She was here for, like, one day. Then she said there was a creepy vibe in there and she moved out. I told Jesse but he didn’t care. He said he had some…what did you say you had, Jesse?”
“Sage,” Jesse said. “White sage.” It was the first time Billy had heard his voice. It was deep, smooth and reassuring.
“Yeah, sage,” Grace said. “That’s it. He said he was going to grunge the place with white sage.”
“Smudge,” Jesse said.
“Huh?”
“I said I was going to smudge the apartment with white sage.”
“Oh, right. Smudge. Where did I get grunge?”
“I’m not sure. Somewhere in your interesting and imaginative brain, I’ve no doubt.”
“Anyway,” Grace said, “when you smudge with white sage it chases away evil spirits.”
“Actually,” Jesse said, “I don’t really believe there is such a thing as evil spirits, but if somebody left some bad energy hanging around, it might help. If I really thought there was some kind of spirit haunting the place, which I very much doubt, I wouldn’t so much chase him away as make peace with him.”
“That would be a better tack to take with Mr. Lafferty,” Billy said.
“It’s a better tack to take with everybody,” Jesse replied.
Then they all stood awkwardly for a moment, and Billy realized he was being rude by not inviting them in. But he didn’t do strangers in the apartment, especially not on short notice.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’d ask you in, but—”
Grace interjected. Interrupted, really, though it was far from unwelcome.
“No, we gotta go,” she said. “I gotta take him to meet Felipe and then Mrs. Hinman.”
“He already met Rayleen?”
“Oh, yeah,” Grace said. There was something unusual hiding in the way she said it. A hint of subtext. But it was completely indecipherable based on the information Billy had to work with. “Oh, my God!” she shrieked. “Billy! You’re wearing tap shoes!”
“I am.”
“I didn’t even know you had those tap shoes. Those aren’t the ones you used to loan me. Oh, right. Never mind. I just got it. These are ones for grown-ups. So why didn’t you tell me you still had tap shoes?”
“I guess I thought it went without saying.”
“Wrong. Were you dancing just now?”
“I was choreographing some dance moves for you to learn for your big school performance.”
“Great!” she shouted. “Yea, yea, yea! As soon as I introduce Jesse to everybody I’ll come back down and we can get started. I think I feel better enough to start.”
“Nice meeting you, Billy,” Jesse said.
“Likewise,” Billy said, and made sure by his tone and facial expression that his new neighbor would realize he meant it sincerely.
He watched Grace drag Jesse to the stairs, holding one of his hands in both of hers. It made him feel just a little tiny bit left out.
“Billy doesn’t like people,” he heard Grace tell Jesse on their way up the stairs. “He’s…different. But he’s a good guy.”
? ? ?
Grace arrived back about twenty minutes later, and grabbed up her cat before doing anything else.
“Before I start dancing,” she said, “I have to tell you a secret.”
“How can you tell me if it’s a secret?”
“It’s not that kind of secret.”
“What kind is it?”
“The kind where you see something with your own eyes, and you know you want to tell somebody, but you know you don’t want them to tell the whole world.”
“And you figure I’ll be talking to the whole world in the near future?”
“Don’t be weird, Billy. I mean, don’t tell Felipe or Mrs. Hinman — and definitely don’t tell Rayleen.”
“OK, deal.”
They sat on the couch together, setting the stage for Grace’s momentous secret.
“You ready?” she asked, still squeezing the cat.
“More than ready.”
“Jesse likes Rayleen.”
“Oh. How can you tell?”
“It was so easy. Right from the time I met him I was saying, ‘You should come to our meeting, we’re having a meeting today and you should come.’ And he kept saying stuff like he had to unpack, and maybe everybody else would mind having him there because they didn’t know him. And then I took him to meet Rayleen. And then the minute we walked out of there, he said, ‘So what time is that meeting?’”
“Oh, right. What time is that meeting?”
“I don’t know. Whatever time I yell that the meeting is starting, I guess.”
“Well. Doesn’t that just give you all the power?”
Grace punched him lightly on the arm. “You pick a time, then. I just figured I was the only one who really wanted the meeting.”
“You can say that again.”
“So what did you think of my big secret?”
“Well. It’s not too surprising. Rayleen is a very attractive woman.”
“Yeah. She’s pretty. And she’s nice. But…”
“But what? There’s something you don’t like about Rayleen?”
“Oh, no. I like her all the way through. I was just gonna say that we don’t really know her that well.”
“We don’t?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I thought we did.”
“I just know she works on people’s nails at a salon, and that’s sort of all I know. Not that I know a bunch more about Felipe or Mrs. Hinman, but in another way I sort of do. It shows. With them it shows. But Rayleen doesn’t show much. The only thing I know about her because it shows is what she’s afraid of.”
Billy thought a moment, wondering if whatever Grace had observed about Rayleen showed to him, too. After all, he’d just noted that he prided himself on being a good judge of character. But as far as he had ever known, or even sensed, Rayleen wasn’t afraid of anything.
“And what’s that?”
“The county.”
“The county?”
“You didn’t hear me?”
“It doesn’t really make sense. She’s afraid of the county of Los Angeles?”
“Right.”
“What’s she afraid it’ll do?”
“Like, come and take a kid away.”
“Oh. Like that.”
“Yeah. Like that. Like maybe the county came and took her away when she was a kid.”
“Or maybe she had a kid and the county took the kid away. I guess if she wanted to tell us about it, she would.”
“That’s why we’re having the meetings,” Grace said. A little exasperated, as though it should be obvious. “Nobody wants to tell somebody else bad stuff like that. You have to push a little harder to get that stuff out of people.”
“Are you ready to dance?”
He asked it quickly, in case she was about to push a little harder on him.
“Are you kidding? I’ve been ready for a week,” she said. “I’ll go get my tap shoes on. They’re at Rayleen’s. I’ll be right back. You won’t tell Rayleen my secret, right?”
“But she was there. She was there when you introduced her to Jesse. So, if he likes her, don’t you think she knows?”
“I don’t know. You never can tell with grown-ups. They miss some really obvious stuff. Anyway, I sure wouldn’t want her to know we were over here talking about it.”
“Talking about what?”
“About Jesse and Rayleen!” she shouted, fully exasperated, probably loud enough for Rayleen to hear across the hall.
“It’s kind of a joke,” Billy said. “It’s a little signal. It means I already forgot there was anything to tell.”
“Why didn’t you say so? How was I supposed to know that?”
“I thought everybody did. I thought it was a cultural thing. Like it was part of the collective unconscious by now.”
Grace rolled her eyes skyward.
“You’re so weird, Billy.”
“Thank you,” he said, quietly, to her back, as she walked out his door.
He made his way carefully back to the dance floor and moved slowly through the routine one more time. He ended even more crisply than before, and stood, one foot raised, again thinking he was about to hear applause.
But not his applause. It was not about him this time. This was Grace’s applause. Grace’s first experience with the public ovation.
“Oh, good God,” Billy said, suddenly, and out loud. “I really do need to be there. Shit.”