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Authors: E. L. Doctorow
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music room—for Langley had opened the sliding doors between them—right in the middle of all that, with the cornet leading and the snare drum and tuba keeping the beat, and my commandeered piano and the soprano saxophone riffling along, and people snapping their fingers in time, I heard with my acute hearing the screeches upstairs of Lila van Dijk and the growly cursing responses of my brother, as they formally went about ending their marriage.
This will cost us a pretty penny, Langley said after Lila was gone. If she’d cried just once, if she had showed any vulnerability whatsoever, I would have tried to see things from her point of view if only out of respect for her womanhood. But she was intractable. Stubborn. Willful.
Homer, maybe can you tell me why I am fatally attracted to women who are no more than mirrors of myself.
THAT DAY WHEN PEOPLE came in from the street to hear the music of the Harold Robileaux Five may have been in the back of Langley’s mind when, some years later, he came up with the idea of a weekly tea dance. Or maybe he remembered howHarold spoke of playing at rent parties in people’s apartments in Harlem.
In the old days our parents would throw an occasional tea dance, opening up the public rooms and inviting all their friends over in the late afternoon. My mother used to dress us up for those occasions. She would duly present us to be insincerely complimented by the guests before the governess took us back upstairs. And Langley may have remembered the elegance of those dances and seen something of a business opportunity in reviving the custom. For of course we had done our research, going over to Broadway where a good dozen or so dance halls had sprung up that charged a dime a dance and had women employed there to accommodate the men who came in without a partner of their own. We would each buy a strip of tickets and dance our way through them, surrendering a ticket to each woman we took into our arms for a dance. It was an indifferent experience to say the least, in these drafty second-floor lofts, atmospheric with cigar smoke and odorous bodies, where the music was broadcast over loudspeakers and whoever was playing the records would sometimes forget when a song was over and you heard the click click of the needle on the blank groove or even the loud scrunch as the needle jumped out of the groove and slid across the label at the center of the record. And everyone would stand around and wait for the next record, and after a minute if nothing happened the men would whistle or shout and everyone would start clapping. One of these places had been a skating rink, that’s how cavernous and gloomy it was. Langley said it was lit with colored lights that only cheapenedeverything and that bouncers stood about with their arms folded. The women in these places tended to be bored, I thought, though some worked up enough energy to ask you your name and make small talk. If they were satisfied you weren’t a cop they might quietly make you a business proposition, which tended to happen to me more than to Langley since you don’t usually find police who are blind. But mostly they were overtired girls who’d clerked in the department stores, or waited tables, or worked in offices as typists, but were now on their uppers and trying to make a little money as piecework dancing partners. They turned in their collected tickets at the end of a shift and got paid accordingly. I could intuit their characters from their physicality, whether they were light to hold and to do the fox-trot with, or tended to lead you rather than be led, or were listless and maybe on some kind of drug, or were heavy and even fat so that you heard their stockings rub on the insides of their thighs as they stepped along with you. And just their hand in your hand told you a lot.
And as you’d suspect, Langley’s business idea was to give our dances for people who wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those dance halls.
For the first few
This will cost us a pretty penny, Langley said after Lila was gone. If she’d cried just once, if she had showed any vulnerability whatsoever, I would have tried to see things from her point of view if only out of respect for her womanhood. But she was intractable. Stubborn. Willful.
Homer, maybe can you tell me why I am fatally attracted to women who are no more than mirrors of myself.
THAT DAY WHEN PEOPLE came in from the street to hear the music of the Harold Robileaux Five may have been in the back of Langley’s mind when, some years later, he came up with the idea of a weekly tea dance. Or maybe he remembered howHarold spoke of playing at rent parties in people’s apartments in Harlem.
In the old days our parents would throw an occasional tea dance, opening up the public rooms and inviting all their friends over in the late afternoon. My mother used to dress us up for those occasions. She would duly present us to be insincerely complimented by the guests before the governess took us back upstairs. And Langley may have remembered the elegance of those dances and seen something of a business opportunity in reviving the custom. For of course we had done our research, going over to Broadway where a good dozen or so dance halls had sprung up that charged a dime a dance and had women employed there to accommodate the men who came in without a partner of their own. We would each buy a strip of tickets and dance our way through them, surrendering a ticket to each woman we took into our arms for a dance. It was an indifferent experience to say the least, in these drafty second-floor lofts, atmospheric with cigar smoke and odorous bodies, where the music was broadcast over loudspeakers and whoever was playing the records would sometimes forget when a song was over and you heard the click click of the needle on the blank groove or even the loud scrunch as the needle jumped out of the groove and slid across the label at the center of the record. And everyone would stand around and wait for the next record, and after a minute if nothing happened the men would whistle or shout and everyone would start clapping. One of these places had been a skating rink, that’s how cavernous and gloomy it was. Langley said it was lit with colored lights that only cheapenedeverything and that bouncers stood about with their arms folded. The women in these places tended to be bored, I thought, though some worked up enough energy to ask you your name and make small talk. If they were satisfied you weren’t a cop they might quietly make you a business proposition, which tended to happen to me more than to Langley since you don’t usually find police who are blind. But mostly they were overtired girls who’d clerked in the department stores, or waited tables, or worked in offices as typists, but were now on their uppers and trying to make a little money as piecework dancing partners. They turned in their collected tickets at the end of a shift and got paid accordingly. I could intuit their characters from their physicality, whether they were light to hold and to do the fox-trot with, or tended to lead you rather than be led, or were listless and maybe on some kind of drug, or were heavy and even fat so that you heard their stockings rub on the insides of their thighs as they stepped along with you. And just their hand in your hand told you a lot.
And as you’d suspect, Langley’s business idea was to give our dances for people who wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those dance halls.
For the first few
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