Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,36

Margaret couldn’t swing dance I would teach her how. And then sex would ensue.

Nonunion construction workers didn’t make a lot of money on Cape Cod in 1974 and I had no intention of spending what little I had on drinks. So before picking Margaret up in my blue 1969 Peugeot, I purchased a pint of tequila. When I knocked on the door of her family’s sprawling house Margaret answered and looked exactly as I remembered her. The diffidence was new, but I ascribed that to not having seen each other in two years. Her parents loomed disapprovingly in the hallway. Gray and thin-lipped, they were a matching set ordered from an L.L. Bean catalog. Margaret’s mother would develop Alzheimer’s. Her father would die from a massive heart attack. I could tell they didn’t like me so I shot them my best Burt Reynolds smile and hustled their ripe daughter into the beckoning evening.

On the drive to the club, Margaret told me she had just finished her freshman year at the University of New Hampshire. I had no problem with that. It wasn’t like I was going to marry her. I asked her what she planned to major in and, honestly, it’s hard for me to remember her answer. She sounded less interested in it than I was. Next came some desultory reminiscing about the few days we had spent together in France. By the time we arrived at the club, I was afraid we might have exhausted the conversational possibilities for the evening.

Connie’s had once been a large, private home but walls had been ripped out and a bar and dance floor installed. Now the place jumped from June to Labor Day. I paid the cover charge and we sat at a table and ordered beers as we continued to chat about nothing. Margaret liked college. She was working as a waitress at a clam shack for the summer. One of her brothers had beaten the shit out of a guy she’d been dating and served six months in jail for assault. What? That was interesting. He’d just been released and had moved back in with Margaret’s parents. I asked her why he had done it and she told me it was because she had asked him. Did I want to meet him? Not really, I said. Then she laughed like she was kidding about the whole thing.

The band started to play and they were terrific. I had been eager for them to go on because I was hoping that, however difficult our verbal communication was, Margaret and I might find communion on the dance floor. But when I stood in front of her with my hand extended in my best Fred-to-Ginger gesture, she demurred. “I don’t know how to dance to this,” she said. I told her it didn’t matter, that it was easy, that I would teach her. I might as well have been talking to a lobster. The vivacity of the music, revelers popping and jiving all around us, the beers—nothing made an impression. It was then I realized that smoothly moving along a French glacier in a haze of sunshine and Tuborg will make anyone seem fascinating. I sat back down and stared at the band, who were tearing their way through “Choo Choo Ch’boogie” by Louis Jordan. Margaret went to the ladies’ room. My plan for the evening was not working and clearly I needed another. I drained the remainder of my second beer, removed the pint of tequila from my pocket and emptied the contents into the beer glass: sixteen ounces of pure Jose Cuervo. Over the next ninety minutes, I proceeded to drink every last drop. I have absolutely no recollection of what I discussed with Margaret. All I remember is that the tequila made the conversation a lot more scintillating than what had come before. But I was tired of not dancing.

I excused myself and stepped out on the small dance floor where I began to do the modified neo-lindy hop that passed for swing dancing in the post-hippie era. This is not the easiest thing to do without a partner. I looked completely spastic but I didn’t care what these people thought. Two taps of the left foot, two taps of the right, and I swung my arms around and spun, accidentally slapping the woman next to me hard across the face with the back of my hand. Her boyfriend took exception to this and smashed his fist into my chin,