Текст книги "Illusion"

Автор книги: Фрэнк Перетти

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chapter

27

It snowed on Monday morning, so Eloise left for the ranch early. The little Bug made it to the gate and up the long driveway with time to spare—time to tap on the door—“Come in!”—go into the kitchen without taking off her coat and ask just to know for sure, “Is everything okay?”

Mr. Collins was just finishing his oat flakes and toast, and looked at her over his last sip of coffee. “I would say so, especially now,” he said. “How are you?”

“I just …” Groping for words again. One of these days, she deeply hoped, she’d be able to tell him everything.

“Your face looks like you lost a fight,” he said. “How’s the rest of you?”

“Sore.” She’d spent Saturday and Sunday trying to find a comfortable way to lie down while waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in. “I had to cancel the rest of the weekend.”

“I figured as much. Have a seat. Want some coffee?”

“Oh, no, thanks. Shirley wants to check me out on the tractor so I can plow the driveway. I just wanted to make sure … you know …”

“This’ll be on company time.” He gestured at the chair across the table from him, and she plopped into it with her coat still on. “You’re still troubled over Friday night.”

“Way troubled. It was a disaster.”

He put up his hand. “No, no, now don’t say that. The ending could have used a little work”—he winked at her—“but overall you pushed on through and made the best of it. I couldn’t have asked for more under the circumstances.”

A sack of bricks lifted from her shoulders and she let herself smile. “I’m so glad to hear that.”

He smiled back. “I’d just like to know, what were the circumstances?”

“What do you mean?”

He set down his coffee cup with a firm motion that sent the same message she could read in his eyes. Daddy used to do the same thing. “You know better than that.”

Her eyes dropped. It would be quite a list if she told him all about the tea-stained soup of hallucinations that messed up her show and got her hurt, the miserable night she spent in her apartment going over and over what happened and wondering if she’d gotten mixed up in the occult or a permanent drug trip or was being tormented by aliens or was just plain nuts and bound for worse and never better. That would be just the thing to tell him when all she could conclude during the last two miserable days was that she wanted to be here in this safe, real place more than anywhere else in the world.

She met his eyes. How much of the man she imagined—well, yeah, dreamed—him to be was he really?

He was waiting.

She could try a small step—as if a small step off a cliff wouldn’t hurt as much as a big one. Well … Geronimo!“It’s … I guess it’s my mental difficulties.”

“Don’t be afraid. Just tell me.”

“I was having flashbacks of the hospital.”

He crinkled his brow. “The hospital …”

Had he forgotten? “Yeah, the hospital, you know, where they thought I was crazy and had me locked up and then sent those guys after me.”

He cleared up and nodded. “Right. Thathospital.”

“It was like being in McCaffee’s and the hospital at the same time, stumbling around trying to figure out where I was and I couldn’t control it. I could see the hallways and the doctors and … and a really weird room.”

He was about to take a bite from his toast but set it down.

“It was dark, and there were lights and control panels like the inside of a spaceship, real sci-fi-looking. And then there was this big, empty room like a basement and two guys …” This was going to sound so weird! “And they were burning dead monkeys.”

He raised an eyebrow and his face was one big Huh?

“I know it sounds crazy. That’s because it is.”

“Describe it to me.”

Why? “Well, they had a black plastic bag full of dead monkeys and they were throwing them into a big furnace to burn them up.” And she didn’t want to go any further.

He seemed to be envisioning it. “Well. Those were quite the circumstances.”

“So I think … I think I need a breather—not from magic altogether, just from the weird stuff. I think it would be great—if I could, I mean—just to work here, just do whatever you need to have done and rest my brain, and then you could help me learn things that are, you know, from this planet, stuff I can get my hands on and work with and be … be here and not way out there.” Was he sold yet? “I’d work for free and you wouldn’t even have to train me.”

He tried that on for a second, then gave his hands a little toss. “Well. Okay. So what do the Calhouns say? How soon do they want you back?”

“As soon as I heal, I guess.”

“And you need to rest your brain.”

“I sure do.”

“Well, we could just make you an apprentice. I want to finish cleaning out the barn so we can move stuff out of the shop. Then we can make room in there for a working stage and develop a stand-up show featuring you. If you can show up every day—what would you like, a four– or a five-day week?”

She was trying to keep her emotions steady as she worked up an answer. “Umm … five, if we can work around my magic gigs.”

“Got a few?”

“Some birthday parties. I can show you my calendar.”

“We’ll work around your gigs. Always. You need to be out there.”

“Right, right.”

“Five days a week, and working around your magic gigs, which includes McCaffee’s when you’re ready?”

She was getting wide-eyed, nodding as her heart raced.

“I’ll get you on the payroll as an employee. You’ll earn an hourly wage while we put a show together and see if we can make it fly—uh, when your brain’s ready. Sound good so far?”

It sounded so good she was afraid it might not happen. “I want to work. I want to work and get my mind together, get my life together, get in charge of things …”

“Instead of things being in charge of you.”

Who wasthis guy? “Absolutely.”

“I’m all for that. All right. Why don’t you help me clean up the dishes here and then we’ll go unearth some history.”

The crates, trunks, and travel cases, all the imagined, designed, and painstakingly built props and illusions that brought thrill and sparkle to the Dane and Mandy stage for forty years, now rested in a great, squarish heap in the middle of the barn. To the farthest reaches of Dane’s knowledge, the stage lights blackened and the final curtain fell on Dane and Mandy when the last corner of the tarp was tucked in and the last knot in the rope was tied. He never imagined he would return, never thought he would look back, could not have dreamed that he would be standing before this monument with young Eloise. What an image: the finish and the start in the same moment gazing up at the span of time between them.

“Wow,” she said.

Yes. Wow.“Let’s see if we can get this rope undone.” He worked on one side, she worked on the other. The knots could be stubborn. He worked one loose. “How you doing?”

“I think I got it,” came her voice.

The rope went slack. He pulled it over to his side and let it fall. “Okay, come around and let’s ease this tarp off.”

They gently, even reverently, drew the tarp over and down, letting it gather in crackling folds at their feet, and then he gave her time to take it all in: the ruggedly built travel cases with steel edges and corners, the plywood crates nicked and scraped from years of touring, the solid wood trunks with their metal latches and hinges.

And stenciled on the side of every one of them were the words DANE AND MANDY, LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, USA.

Her eyes rested on the words. He remained silent, pretending to look things over and tuck away the tarp as he watched.

She lingered, her mouth open, then faintly smiling in amazement as she tilted, then wagged her head. “Her name was Mandy?”

“That’s right.”

She gazed at the name as if gazing into a face and then, reaching as a child reaches for her parent, she placed her hands flat upon either side of the name and framed it. “Whoa!”

“Forty years.”

“That is just so cool.” She studied the name as if reading it for the first time. “You know, I really like her.”

He was thinking of Mandy and looking at Eloise as he said, “So did I.”

She withdrew her hands and her eyes searched out every appearance of that name on every container, her eyes arcing over the stack as if she were in awe of a rainbow.

This would be enough. He could feel his soul, his insides warning him to move on. “I guess we’d better …”

She snapped out of it. “Oh, absolutely, yes. Didn’t mean to … It’s personal, I understand.”

“No problem.” He had to do a little acting, had to push them onward. “Now what I want to do is re-create a stage such as you would find in a small to medium venue, something with more geography. I’d like to build it in the shop and use some of this stuff to create a setting, just give you some things to work around, handle, bump into, use if it fits your style. Going from close-up to stage means everything has to be bigger, wider. Here’s a Zigzag. You know what that is?”

“The optical illusion. The lady stands in the box and then it looks like you remove the middle part of her.”

“Right. I … I don’t see you doing this as part of your act, but working with some larger props might be a good exercise to help you think in bigger, wider concepts.”

“I’d love the experience.”

“Here’s a sub trunk—uh, substitution trunk.”

“Metamorphosis!”

“Okay, you’ve seen this one.”

“The magician’s assistant gets tied inside a bag and locked inside the trunk. The magician raises a shroud around the trunk and then bammo! The magician trades places with her, just like that.”

“It uses a lot of basic principles: timing, misdirection, creating an expectation, and then defying it—and just plain physical ability. We could try that out to hone the basics. It’s easy in principle, not so easy to perform convincingly. Once again …”

“The magic is in the magician.”

“You get an A.” Now he had to laugh. “And this one … this is our old levitation. It’s a dinosaur. There are so many better designs out there now—which I guess you’re aware of.”

“I guess.”

“Mandy and I worked it into a gag routine and put a whole new life into it. That’s another lesson right there: even an old trick that everybody’s seen before can be fresh if you give it a little twist—which brings us to another little idea of mine. Considering how good you are with tennis balls and quarters, this might be just the thing.”

Just the thing?This was more than “just the thing,” this was a God thing, a reunion, an awakening of an old happiness she remembered but hadn’t thought was hers. She muffled a squeal behind her hand, laughed through her tears, and gave Mr. Collins a hug.

Four little pairs of dark eyes looked warily at her through the wire cage; four heads bobbed as the snowy white birds ruffled and sidestepped on their perch, checking her out. Newbies, she could tell. Everything was unfamiliar to them.

“I remember you told me you raised doves,” said Mr. Collins. “Well, I just got these in and they’re going to need taming and training. I thought you might be interested.”

She leaned close to the cage and the timid faces just inside the wire. She cooed at them, spoke gently, and they watched her, not afraid but not so sure either. They were four little angels, a visitation from that beloved dream—the return, in their own way, of her first loss.

“Two girls, two boys,” she said. Just like Mandy’s prizewinners.

“They’ll need names,” said Mr. Collins.

“Names …” Looking into those attentive little eyes, she didn’t care if Mandy Whitacre’s life was delusional, it was still hers. She reached into the memory, grabbed this one small corner of it, and hauled it into this room, where it could be real. She studied each dove and got to know its markings, the shape of its head, the curve of its beak, and then announced its name. “This little fella, his name is Bonkers. And this little girl, she’s Lily. And you—yeah, cutie, I’m talking to you!—you’re Maybelle, aren’t you? And that means youmust be Carson. Glad to meet you.” She added only in her thoughts, again,then looked away to dab her eyes.

She heard, then saw Mr. Collins sink into an old plastic patio chair, his hand over his mouth as if he’d seen the Red Sea part down the middle. He looked as if hewould cry.

“Mr. Collins?”

He smiled away the emotion and wagged his head at a thought he didn’t share. “Call me Dane,” he said.

chapter

28

Eloise dubbed them the Gleesome Threesome—herself, Shirley, and Dane—a crew bent on a goal and getting a good old feeling getting there. Lifting, rolling, dragging, and hand-trucking tires, wheels, a ringer-washer, a couch, an old desk, and other rusted, mouse-chewed, bent, and seized-up junk out of the barn and carting it all to the dump was dusty, dirty, and difficult, but it was a pleasant kind of misery. Daddy always said hard work was good for the soul, and each evening, as Eloise zonked out on her bed, her soul felt better.

Working alongside Dane—and being able to call him that—sure added a shiny side to it. Handing to, getting from, struggling, lifting, hauling, cracking jokes, and having laughs with that man were healing, as if a big, lost chunk of her life was finding its way back. Sitting on a stool beside him at his drafting table, studying his drawings of the stage he had in mind, and making out a materials list for the lumber store was a sweet flashback. She’d done the very same thing with Daddy when they built the aviary for her doves, the raised bed garden behind the house, the coop for the chickens. That day, not only did her soul feel better, she also went home feeling special, and that night she fell asleep with little movies of her second daddy playing through her head.

Wednesday morning they moved the tiller, box scraper, tank sprayer, brush hog, and backhoe out of the shop and into the barn, which cleared floor space in the shop for a stage. By midmorning, the materials arrived. Eloise wore Dane’s nail apron and wielded his hammer, Dane did the cutting and layout, Shirley ran the power nailer and drill, and by quitting time on Thursday the Gleesome Threesome had completed a rough, unpainted stage, fourteen by fourteen, in portable sections bolted together. No lights, no curtain or backdrop, just a big frame and plywood box about three feet high with steps at either end.

“That’ll do for the immediate future,” Dane said, snapping a picture. He’d snapped a lot of pictures during the process. Eloise was always smiling for the camera. “We’ll dress it up as we go along, but tomorrow we have to get you up there and start filling out a show.”

The thought made her tingle. She climbed the steps and pranced onto the stage, imagining the shop as a theater, Dane, Shirley, and the Kubota tractor as her audience. She did a pirouette into a ta-da pose, arms outstretched.

“How’s it feel?” Dane asked, looking up at her.

She said, “Real good,” but that didn’t come near the feeling. She wasn’t just on this stage; she was also on this stage in this shop on this ranch with that man sitting down there in front of her, watching and caring about her. She added, “Like where I belong,” and that was more like it.

Joy bubbled up and burst out in a squeal as she did another spin, flinging out her hand as if materializing something.

A microphone flew from her hand across the stage. There was a gasp from the audience of at least five hundred—especially from the sound crew. The mike slowed, then stopped in midair. Eloise flashed a bedazzled look at the audience, stared at the mike as if she hadn’t a clue how it did that, and then, as if getting an idea, struck a dancing pose and drew it back toward herself with a beckoning wave of her hand. It floated toward her then, obeying her fluid gestures, halted just beyond her reach, tumbled end over end, then spun laterally like a bottle. Eloise was loving it and so was the audience.

She was dressed in her best, a silk blouse and gold cravat, black slacks, black vest with gold embroidery, hair done perfect and shining in the lights. Her audience was dressed in jeans, sweatpants, sweatshirts, snow boots, camouflage pants and shirts, beer logo T-shirts, and billed caps. It was the annual Community Christmas Show at the Wallace High School auditorium in Wallace, Idaho.

The gig came up suddenly. A barbershop quartet had to bow out, leaving an open twenty-minute slot between the combined Kellogg and Wallace High School concert bands and the Christmas Carol Collection Community Choir. Someone telephoned Roger Calhoun, who telephoned Eloise, and Dane thought it was a great idea, a perfect way to test new material on a big stage.

With a fluid, pulling gesture, she made the mike float past her and sang a note into it as it went by. It kept on singing the note as it circled behind and around her like a moon around a planet. When it came back around, she let it pass behind her hand, and as it did, it split into two microphones, exact duplicates. The first continued orbiting while Eloise sang a second note into the second mike, which set it in motion, and now two mikes were orbiting about her head singing a continuous chord in her voice. Mike One came around and passed behind her hand again. Presto, Mike Three! Eloise sang a third note, Mike Three carried it into orbit. A fourth mike joined the others and they sang a four-note chord that became the opening bars of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” a bow to the barbershop quartet that couldn’t make it. The folks got it right away. They laughed, she milked it.

Dane and Eloise had six days to put a twenty-minute show together, six days of eye-to-eye, mind-to-mind brainstorming, discussing and arguing, trying this and then that to see how it looked, working out the dance moves, the props, the appearance of everything for a bigger crowd and bigger stage. They worked all day, talked and debriefed through lunch and dinner, kept at it until nine each night, when she drove home to sleep. It was intense, grueling, focused.

She loved it. She never felt so alive.

The microphones held the last chord of the song as they orbited faster, approaching blurring speed. Abruptly, Eloise put out her hand, caught Mike One as it came around, did a graceful spin, flung her hand outward …

The mike became a dove that flew out over the audience in a wide arc.

Eloise caught Mike Two, did a spin, flung out her hand …

Another dove flashed into view and followed the first in a wide circle over the heads of the audience.

Another catch, another fling, another dove. Three doves fluttered along the same trajectory like white-feathered boomerangs. Another spin, another fling …

The fourth dove set out to fly the big circle just as the first was finishing.

Ooooh! Ahhhh! Laughter. Astonishment. Applause.

Dove One flew in close to Eloise, but she waved it on. It circled the room again, the others followed, and then they came home, one, two on Eloise’s right hand, one, two on her left. She brought her hands together in front of her, bowed with the birds to receive the applause, then straightened, threw her hands upward …

The doves became a flurry of snowflakes sparkling in the lights, settling ever so slowly to the stage floor.

Backstage, Dane gently put Carson the dove back in his cage. “Good work, little buddy!”

Then he watched her work the crowd with wonder in her eyes, her childlike expression reaching the back row and saying, Wow! Did you see that? How did I do that?

So alive. So free.

On the left side of the auditorium, sitting on the very top row of the bleachers toward the back, a man in his thirties, wearing a crisp, new Cabela’s camouflage jacket and a billed cap, was honestly enjoying the show while he watched the screen of his laptop computer. In a small window in the corner of the screen was a video stream of Eloise’s performance, captured through the tiny camera mounted atop the screen and time-coded. On the main screen, locked into the same time code, columns of numbers rolled faster than the eye could follow, wave patterns rose and fell, blue shapes like time-lapse clouds formed and dissolved against the vertical and horizontal axes of a graph, and all in concert with every stunt and illusion produced by the girl onstage.

The data were streaming in faster than he could study and analyze in real time, but it was easy to see the trends and appraise the situation. The readings from the coffeehouse were confirmatory and alarming.

These readings were worse.

The lights in the living room dimmed except for the multicolored lights on the Christmas tree and the glow from the fireplace. “And can you turn off that lamp?”

Dane reached over and switched off the table lamp, then settled back on the couch.

“Ta-daaa!”

Eloise made her grand entrance into the living room, face glowing and eyes sparkling in the light of six candles atop a fancy chocolate cake. She didn’t just walk into the room, she made a procession of it, bearing the tea tray out in front of her as if conveying the crown jewels into the presence of the king. “Merry Christmas to you, and happy birthday to you …” When she came to his name in the song she sang it for several counts, grinning at the privilege, then set the tray with the cake, two plates, and two forks on the coffee table. She sat on the love seat opposite, elbows on her knees, chin propped on her knuckles, eyes giddy. “Make a wish!”

All he could do was gaze at her while the candles burned. Make a wish?

His birthday was on the sixteenth, but Christmas on Saturday was the ideal opportunity to celebrate both, and Eloise leaped at it. She prepared a dinner, Chicken Kiev, and baked the cake in his kitchen, accepting help from him only with questions that began with “Where do you keep the … ?” and “Do you have any more of … ?” She set the table in the dining room with his best silverware and dishes and brought some candles for the centerpiece in case he didn’t have any, which he didn’t. Dinner was at six o’clock, and at her request, he wore a jacket and tie. She made all the meal preparations wearing her jeans, blouse, and running shoes, but then, with a magical flair, she vanished into the guest bedroom and reappeared for dinner in a dress. It was black, cute, and tasteful, conforming to her waist and draping from her hips to a teasing hem above her knees. The diamond earrings twinkled just below her haircut, and the diamond necklace adorned her neck. She sat with her ankles crossed, and around her right ankle was another surprise: a silver anklet.

The candles kept burning, and her eyes softened from giddy to serene. She eased back, folded her hands in her lap, and said nothing more about the wish. She just returned his gaze, then playfully shrugged a shoulder, her smile closing the distance between them, her hair a sunrise in the glow of the fireplace.

What he thought, he couldn’t share: he was sitting across from a perky, take-on-the-world, blue-eyed kid, but in the eyes of this girl were the depth, the spirit of a woman—the woman he would make his own and share his life with for the next forty years—forty years ago.

Oh, he could make a lotof wishes.

“What?” she finally asked.

All he could tell her was as much truth as his best wisdom would allow. “Ellie, I am compelled to say that you look absolutely lovely tonight, and you have made my Christmas a manifold and uncontainable blessing. Thank you so very much.”

And without a wish, he blew out the candles.

Eloise stared at the candle wicks as they smoked and smoldered down to a cold, black nothing. There was a dead space. No words.

Oh, and she wasn’t smiling. She put her smile back on and gave a little clap. “Yay!” Then she stepped to the wall and eased the lights up about half.

Was he happy? Was he having a good time? She hurried back to her seat and met his eyes, looking for … well, just the look he had a moment ago. It was sort of there, but now … well, the candles weren’t lighting up his face anymore, the lights were half on, the wishing was over.

The cake was a little crooked, but it came out great otherwise; all he had to do was taste it. The Chicken Kiev could have been a little more crumbed and maybe a little lighter on the pepper, but he loved it, he really talked about it, he ate a bunch of it.

She just had to know, “Are you having a good time?”

“Very much. You’ve no idea.”

She cut a slice of cake for him—he wanted only a little one—and one for herself, just a little smaller. “So, how does it feel being sixty? Is it … I mean, I can’t imagine being that old …” Her hand went over her mouth, and she laughed at the gaffe.

But so did he. “Don’t worry, you’ll get your chance, Lord willing. I kind of like it. I get a big kick out of asking people where they were when they first heard Kennedy was shot. Used to be you could ask anybody and they’d know.”

She took a bite of cake instead of telling him: seventh-grade music appreciation class with Mr. McFaden. “I guess you’ve lived through a lot of history.”

“So will you. Someday you’ll be the only one who remembers where you were when you heard about 9/11.”

“I … I suppose you remember the Beatles.”

Big, oh-yes nod. “Grew my hair out long, bought all their records, got a lot of flak in church about it. I can remember standing in line outside the Paramount Theater in Seattle waiting to see A Hard Day’s Night.”

She went with Joanie at the Wilma in Coeur d’Alene. She screamed because Joanie did.

“I lived through Vietnam and Watergate. I remember Mandy and me sitting in a motel room in Elko, Nevada, watching the Watergate hearings on a black-and-white TV.” He laughed. “Oh, wow, that old Sam Ervin! You should have seen him. What a character!”

Missed that one, too.

“I remember Neil Armstrong first setting foot on the moon: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’”

With Walter Cronkite on CBS. Daddy and she had made popcorn. Right?

She was such a liar … She had been there, but she was pretending she hadn’t because, come on, how would it sound to say, guess what, I remember that stuff, too?

“You okay?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, great. I’m just checking out this cake. How is it?”

“It’s great. It’s perfect.”

That was one stabilizing influence: the birthday cake.

Sixty. The Big Six, the Big Oh. The numbers embedded in the top of the cake were curly, festive, oversize, loud, obvious, made of sugar, but, in Dane’s thinking, cast in concrete: inflexible, unflinching, altogether true, the only thing in the room right now that smacked of reality. They poked and prodded him with it, waking him up with every glimpse.

“Sorry it was a little lopsided.”

“Ellie, it was beautiful. The whole evening’s been beautiful. Thank you so much.”

“I like being called Ellie.” Oh, that was dumb! “Eloise is … it’s kind of formal between friends.”

“So is Mr. Collins.”

Maybe she shouldn’t have worn this dress. Maybe it was saying too much. Her anklet was showing.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Umm … I’m thinking … this is all about that day in October, out on the sidewalk in Coeur d’Alene. The Gypsy meets the big guy in the cowboy hat and her life changes, maybe forever.”

“I’ve thought of that day often.”

You have?“It was a God thing. Don’t you think it was a God thing?”

Six and zero.

“I think … I think it sure seemed like it. Of course, when you trust God with your life, most everything is a God thing, so, sure. It was a God thing.”

Oh, she really loved that answer. “And then, how we met again at McCaffee’s!”

And how you became an inescapable, inseparable part of my life; how you ruled my thoughts; how I didn’t want to see you again because I wanted to so badly.“Well, we’re both magicians. It was bound to happen.”

True. But where was the magic in an answer like that? “Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. For everything.”

“Thank you.”

He took his last bite of cake.

She shoved her last bite around the plate with her fork.

The fireplace cast a warm glow on the whole room, and the only sound was the lilting, jazzy ballad coming from the entertainment system.

“Did your wife ever dance?”

He didn’t seem to mind the question; he even smiled faintly and far away at the memory. “A lot like you. Graceful, elegant, very natural. She was born to dance.”

“Did you ever dance with her?”

Wow.She could see him watching the memory, and it must have been a great one. “Boy, did I. She didn’t want to dance onstage by herself and look like a typical magician’s female assistant—you know, just adding pizzazz, filler, misdirection—so we danced together to set up the illusions. It was very classy, a lot of fun.”

“What style?”

That made him laugh. “Whatever Mandy was into at that particular second. Actually, we based everything on West Coast Swing because it was showy, it was fun to watch, and it gave Mandy so much freedom to improvise. I guess you’d call it West Coast Swing for a Family Show.”

“Can you show me?”

“Show you … ?”

“I’ve never danced with anybody, not like that.”

“Have you ever done any swing dancing?”

She stood and offered him her hand. “Show me.”

And she couldn’t believe it: he stood up, took her hand, and led her to the warmly lit floor space in front of the fire.

Speaking of God things, maybe this was another one. It was one of the wishes he didn’t think he could wish and didn’t wish and now here it came true anyway. So to speak. Teachingher to dance was a safe and practical way to have his wish but not really, and in any case it would serve her professional interests and widen her creativity.

She was facing him, still holding his hand, filling his vision and his mind, pushing aside the thoughts he was tryingto have. “Well, getting really basic here, it’s slotted.”

“Uh-huh.” She seemed to know what he meant. She was scoping out the floor.

“So we could run the slot this way, parallel to the fireplace.”

“Okay.” She repositioned herself so they stood facing each other, parallel to the fireplace.

“The show and the dancing shifted all over the stage so we were constantly moving the slot around, but we always knew where it was. So, uh …” Now he had to touch her. He slipped his right hand under her left arm and cupped her shoulder blade. “We start with a swing closed position.” She placed her left hand on his right biceps. “Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Now your right hand rests in my left hand, my palm up, yours down—our hands are lower, down here, swing position. Good! Tone in the body, tone in the arms, good frame, good connection.”