Come and Join the Dance Read Free Page B

a woman began to shout ferociously about love. “Don’t you like music?” Peter asked anxiously. They both began to laugh. “Listen, Susan,” he said, “I’m completely broke. I can’t even pay for your coffee. Does that matter?”
    â€œOh, I can pay for everything,” she found herself saying.
    â€œMy check probably came yesterday, but I haven’t been back to the apartment yet. I spent all my money on gasoline.” He sounded apologetic, defensive, as if she had asked him for an explanation.
    â€œI’ve really got lots of money,” Susan said.
    â€œYou’re young—you don’t have a mailbox full of bills.” His laugh was bitter. “I don’t know why I came back to New York this time,” he said.
    â€œYou’ve been away?”
    â€œOh, I disappeared for a few days—I do that now and then.”
    â€œWhere do you go when you disappear?”
    â€œThis time I went to Chicago… . You’ve never seen my car, have you?”
    â€œI don’t think so,” she said.
    â€œWell, you ought to come and see it. It’s beautiful. A big black Packard—1938. It’s the only beautiful thing I own. It’s starting to fall apart now.” He sounded very sad when he said that; the car seemed to be more than just a car to him. “I should have made this trip a long one—God, I felt like it!”
    â€œWhy didn’t you?” she asked shyly.
    He took a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. “No money, for one thing,” he said in a flat voice. “Obligations—I’m supposed to finish my thesis next semester. I can’t keep getting checks from home for the rest of my life.”
    â€œAre you almost finished?” she asked.
    â€œI’ve been ‘almost finished’ for the last five years.”
    â€œMaybe you don’t want to finish. I mean, maybe you don’t want to find out what’s going to happen to you next… . ” Peter was silent. She felt terribly embarrassed. Why on earth had she said that to him?—he was someone she hardly knew.
    But then he said, “Maybe I don’t,” and she could tell he wasn’t angry. He leaned toward her across the table with a sudden eagerness. “You know, Susan, I’ve never heard you say anything before. You come to my parties with Kay, you sit on the sofa, you listen to someone very dutifully, and every now and then you tell a story or a little joke—and that’s all.”
    She laughed painfully. His description was accurate. “Isn’t that enough?”
    â€œI don’t know—is it? Is it enough for you?”
    Carefully, she folded her paper napkin into a triangle. “I really don’t want this conversation,” she said.
    â€œOf course you don’t,” she heard him say.
    â€œI don’t see why everybody has to be so terribly warm and interested in everyone they meet just because they’re afraid they’ll be caught being trivial.”
    â€œBut is that what we’re doing?” he said quietly.
    â€œI don’t know.” She had a feeling of helplessness, of vast ignorance. “I never really know whether or not I mean what I’m saying anyway.”
    â€œBy the time you’re my age you’ll know even less.”
    â€œYour age! You’re not that much older than I am.”
    â€œI’ll be thirty in October.”
    â€œ You thirty?” She laughed in disbelief.
    â€œI thought you knew,” he said.
    She realized that of course she had known it all along—Peter’s age, a piece of information. She had taken it for granted and then forgotten it, perhaps when she had seen him talking politics excitedly with Anthony Leone, who was only eighteen, or when he had been a little drunk at a party once and had done a crazy, disorganized dance in the middle of the room to please a girl and then had followed her around