Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

than the hands of a clock could escape the inclinations of their mainspring. Rising on her toes in the middle of the room—a brief jerk and click as the heel and ankle locked, a brief trembling like a spasm, then the firmness of an iron wedge—she gave the impression that touching her calf or thigh would be like touching a wall. Pete’s dancing feet moved, on the other hand, as if swinging by themselves, as if his body were suspended like a puppet’s from invisible wires. His taps were light and quick, as if he never put his weight down with either foot, and they rattled out around him as gaily and casually—and as incredibly fast—as the fingers of his Negro piano player, a tall, flat-haired boy who sat sprawling in his chair with his head tipped far over so that he seemed to be always, except for his forearms and fingers, fast asleep. The speed and lightness with which Pete Duggers danced were amazing to behold, but what was truly miraculous, so that it made you catch your breath, was the way he could stop, completely relaxed, leaning his elbow on empty air and grinning as if he’d been standing there for hours, all that movement and sound you’d been hearing pure phantom and illusion. That was unfailingly the climax when he danced: the slow build, the elegant shuffles and turns, then more speed, and more, and more and still more until it seemed that the room spun drunkenly, crazily, all leading—direct as the path of an arrow—to nothing—everything—a sudden stillness like an escape from reality, a sudden floating, whether terrible or wonderful she could never tell: the abrupt hush of a symphonic orchestra dropped away, falling back from the soaring melody of a single French horn—or then again, perhaps, the frightening silence one read about in novels when a buzz-bomb shut off over London. He stood perfectly still, the piano was still, his young students gaped, and then abruptly reality came back again as the piano tinkled lightly and he listlessly danced and, as he did so, leaned toward his students and winked and said, “You see? Magic!”

Olive Street was already going down at that time, so the storefront was shoddy, solo dancers and dance-class pictures on the windows, big, vulgar stars, the glass around the pictures crudely painted dark blue, as if the Duggers School of the Dance were some miserable third-rate establishment not worth breaking into or stealing from, though the door was not locked. But that was a trick—the dancing Duggerses had trunkfuls of tricks: artists to the marrow of their chipped and splintered bones. The scuffed, unpainted door in front opened into a scuffed, unpainted entryway with a door to the left and a knotty, crooked stairway leading upward. On the door to the left, a sign said tap dance studio, and above the worn railing at the side of the stairs, a sign, cocked parallel to the railing, said, SCHOOL OF THE BALLET. When you opened the door to the tap-dance studio for the first time, you did a mighty double-take: there were glittering mirrors with round-arched tops and etched designs of the sort Joan would occasionally discover years later in the oldest London pubs, and above the mirrors there were walls of red and gold and a magnificent stamped-tin ceiling. It was a large building, at one time a theater. The tap-dance studio (and the ballet studio directly above it) took up the first thirty feet; then there was a railing, also red and gold, from which one looked out at the long, wide ballroom floor, at the front an enormous stage with ratty wine-colored velvet curtains, along the side-walls wall-candelabra between high painted panels—dancing graces, Zeus in his majesty, nymphs and satyrs, peacocks and fat, reclining nudes done in highly unsuccessful imitation of the style of Rubens.

She’d walked there with Buddy once, when he’d motorcycled in from his school in Indiana and offered to drive her to work in her father’s DeSoto. He’d driven fast, as usual, his eye rolling up to the rear-view mirror, on the look-out for police cars, and had gotten her to work much too early.

“Care to have an interesting experience?” she’d said.

Their footsteps echoed. The ballroom was fairly dark. They could just make out the carved figures on the ceiling, two storeys up, circling around the empty spaces from which once had hung huge chandeliers.

“It’s like a church,” he said.

She’d squeezed his hand and they’d stopped and, after a moment, kissed, then walked on, up to the front of the ballroom and up onto the stage, where the Duggers students gave their dance recitals. They looked up at the shuttered lights, ropes, catwalks—it was darker here, and spooky, as if the stage machinery belonged not only to a different time but to a different planet. Again they paused to kiss, and he put his arms around her and after a minute she moved his hand to the front of her sweater, then under the sweater to her breast. With his usual difficulty, for all his practice, he unsnapped her bra. She felt her nipples rising, and he pressed closer to her. With a grandiose sweep of his free arm in the direction of the dim, ghost-filled ballroom, he said, “Lady, how would you like to be fucked, right here in front of all these people?”

“Hmm,” she said. After a moment, still with his hand on her breast, her hand keeping it there, she led him toward the further wing and the small door opening on a room she’d discovered weeks earlier, half-filled with crates, electric wire, old tools, and the rotting frames of old sets. There were a few old pieces of furniture—chairs, tables, couches—protected from the dust by tarpaulins. “Maybe we need a rehearsal,” she said. They passed under a high window through which a single crack of light came and she glanced at her watch. Ten minutes. She stood looking around, both his hands