Not beneath such cheap flattery, Florence blushed. She put her hands around his thin neck. In the smoky mirror that multiplied the dozen other couples on the dance floor, she saw herself laying her head gently down on his shoulder (in her heels, she was the slightly taller of the two). A surprising, not unpleasant smell, the brilliantine in his heavily sleeked hair, accosted her nose. Leon, hoping to devastate Florence in style, had bought the cream that afternoon, from a music store that sold it as a grease for trombones. Waltzing past them, a stout, elegantly turned-out older couple angled their heads and smiled, seeing in the young lovers the happiness of all Soviet youth.
And maybe it was this vision of them that woke Florence with a start. Was it an instinct toward their future life together that she was already sensing, which made her pull back? For what she was seeing suddenly, in her mind’s eye, was an image of the two of them dancing on the edge of the world, not realizing they were about to fall off. With the clarity of a premonition, she suddenly understood that all night her discomfort had been running deeper than insincere feminine guilt. What she felt around Leon was a fear so pure it was almost like ecstasy. But here was the strange part: It was fear not for herself, but for him. As if, by accepting his love, she would bring about his ruin, make him pay for loving her with nothing less than his life.
How did she know this? She would not have been able to say. The only words that came to her were “Leon, I’d like us to be friends, for now.”
But her feeble clairvoyance was no match for his resolve. “Are you trying to make me mad?” he said, studying her face.
“No!”
“You don’t want to see me?”
“I’m saying I want to take things…more slow, is all.”
“How much slower, Florence? Even cold molasses gotta know which way’s down.”
Between the bursts of laughter and drunken cheers, their song was dissolving into a prolonged rustle from the percussion section, a murmurous warning of the countdown to the new year. The carousel of pink and green lights passed over Leon’s face as he studied her. “I get it. You’re the type that wants a fella to toss her on the floor,” he said unpleasantly, “give it to her against a wall somewhere, while you turn your little head away, sniffling ‘No, no, no, no,’ and loving every minute of it.”
His voice had gone brittle with scorn, without any of the old playfulness. “I didn’t peg you for one of those frail little clinging vines….”
“Lemme go, you egg!” She turned sideward and gasped as he clenched her forearm.
“You’ve been giving me the sign ever since we met. Don’t think I couldn’t have obliged you, if I thought that’s all we both wanted.”
“Get off me!”
And to her surprise, he did—tossing her arm aside and making her stumble backward on her heels.
She stood holding her sore wrist.
She watched him prowl toward the frosted Palladian doors, which a waiter was just then opening. His “obliged” still hung cruelly between them. But his eyes had spoken a different story; before turning away they had been sparkling like broken shards with humiliation and pain.
The percussive countdown to 1935 had begun.
Florence looked at the faces around the ballroom, certain that they had all been staring at her. But the band had started up once more, playing some nostalgic anthemlike song, and all attention was on the bandleader in his maestro’s white tails, delivering a final toast over the throbbing melody—“To the New Year, to the New Happiness!”
Through the clog of bodies, Florence saw Seldon Parker in his half-fogged glasses, bending to light a cigarette off of the sparkler in Essie’s hand. Catching sight of her, Seldon wagged his hand. Their faces, the sparklers, the lurid sounds of vodka-laughter no longer seemed real to her. What she’d allowed to happen had diverged so sharply from what she’d set out to do that she was gripped once again by the same painful suspicion about herself that all her efforts to do good and be good couldn’t seem to erase: the feeling that, despite her intentions to live honestly and to hurt no one, everything she said and did was a lie; that she was at the mercy of urges—loyalty and rivalry, selflessness but also colossal narcissism—too contrary to be reconciled. She was sure Leon was wrong about her on every count, about being a tease and a slut, but she feared nonetheless that he had torn her open like a sheet of gypsum to expose her wiring. She saw how decisively he could free himself of her, how ruthless he could be if she pushed him too far, and it made her feel with some consolation that everything she’d thought about him was wrong.
She made a sharp turn for the lobby, where Leon had gone.
He was nowhere to be seen.
Under the scattered light of the foyer’s chandeliers, the settees were strewn with pensive-looking Russian men leaning together in serious conversations, as well as impatient lovers not waiting for the New Year’s bell.
Then she saw him. Coming out of the cloakroom, his coat in hand. He lifted his head and saw her, and before he could look away she called his name, not recognizing the voice that came out of her throat like the dying squeak of a balloon.
He waited, with perceptible reluctance, for her to approach him. The clock’s chimes had started; from inside the banquet hall could be heard shouts of “Six! Five! Four!” And then a collective cheer of “Urrah!” followed by a burst of music from the band.
Reaching him, she let out a dramatic exhale and hung her head. “You’re twenty, Leon, how can you possibly know what you want?”
He didn’t seem to want to meet her eyes and looked instead in the direction of the music. “It isn’t a choice, Florence. A man isn’t free to choose when he walks into an elevator shaft. I walked in—okay—but there were no floors to select, no buttons to push. I just fell right down.”
The area where they stood was cold and damp, infused with the musty smells of the garderobe. Nothing had warned her about what it might feel like to be cared for this much. He was young, yes, but he spoke like a man. And maybe, she thought, it was youth that made him capable of that kind of certainty. He had no family to abide by. He was not always looking over his shoulder, like Sergey. Tied down to nothing, he was free to love her completely. And she sensed now that such devotion might not come her way again for a long time.
Leon was unprepared for the kiss she planted on his loose mouth, returning it first like a child, with startled confusion, and then with the vigorous force of someone working out a knot of pain. She closed her eyes and let him bury his lips in her temple, press his forehead to hers. There was such a logic to their togetherness that she wondered how she had ever imagined she’d have the strength to pull away. “All right, Potemkin,” she said, taking his hand. “Let’s go in before they drink all our champagne.”
In this way, Leon and Florence began the year 1935.