Love Saves the Day

Josh’s magazine had taken over SOB’s, a Brazilian nightclub in the West Village, and hired a live salsa band. The swoop and swirl of strobes overhead transformed the women’s dresses and flowing blouses into shimmering beacons of iridescent light. Laura felt like an undertaker in the black pantsuit she’d worn to work that day. Trays of mojitos crossed the floor and she drank three in quick succession near the bar, then felt so light-headed she had to sit down. Gratefully accepting an empanada from a passing waiter, she looked around the room for Josh.

He was in a corner near the back, conferring with underlings in headsets. Laura hadn’t remembered, perhaps hadn’t realized, how good-looking he was. His hands gestured as he spoke, his long fingers blunt at the tips. Laura ran her own fingers through her hair, trying to remember if she’d styled it that morning or simply let it hang loose to air-dry. She thought, What am I doing here? Josh looked up then and saw her. She watched him give a final instruction to the people wearing headsets, then lope across the room toward her. “You made it!” He smiled warmly and lightly bussed her cheek, the crowd behind Laura preventing her from backing up and offering her hand instead for a more decorous handshake. Shouting to be heard over the band, Josh asked, “Do you dance? Latin dancing is easier than it looks—promise!”

Perhaps it was the implied assumption that somebody who looked like her, an island of suit in a sea of business casual, wouldn’t know how to dance that propelled her onto the floor when normally she would have refused. At nearly five foot ten Laura was taller than a lot of men, but Josh was just tall enough to make her feel feminine. She found herself acutely aware of the smooth skin of his palm pressed against her own, of his breath on the top of her head whenever he twirled her in before releasing her. It had been fifteen years and at least six inches of height since Laura had last danced like this. She was pleasantly surprised to discover that her hips still remembered how to find the rhythm, that her movements still felt as fluid as if she’d done this only last week. The only difference was that she didn’t remember feeling quite this dizzy or short of breath dancing when she was younger. It’s the mojitos, Laura thought, and then she stopped thinking.

They danced through four straight numbers, Josh’s questioning look at the end of each (did she need a rest?) met with a reassuring squeeze of her hand (no, no she didn’t). She was surprised at what a strong partner he was. Laura knew her own dancing must look as good as it felt, because people were actually standing back to watch the two of them bevel their way across the dance floor.

Maybe if she hadn’t already been doing so many things that felt unlike her regular self (and yet, conversely, more like her genuine self than any other self she’d allowed herself to be in years), maybe then the rest of the night would have turned out differently. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so quick to tell Josh things she worked to keep hidden from her colleagues who, when they heard she’d been raised in Manhattan, assumed she meant one of the wealthier uptown enclaves around Park Avenue. Maybe she wouldn’t even be married to Josh now. Could a life truly turn on such things? On the electricity of fingertips on the small of her back, or a moment of swift elation that came from knowing a crowd of strangers admired her on a dance floor?

When they eventually collapsed, breathless, into a banquette, Josh’s blue eyes glowed. “You’re amazing. Where’d you learn to dance like that?”

“I grew up on the Lower East Side, and there was a huge Puerto Rican community,” she answered. “There’d be these enormous block parties with music and food. My mother says the first time she brought me to one, I was three years old and I slipped away from her in the crowd. It was an hour before she found me, in the middle of a group of older kids teaching me the steps. Everybody would dance, from little kids to grandmothers.” She smiled. “It was nice, seeing different generations dancing the same dances and enjoying the same music like that.”

Josh had been impressed. “When I was a kid, I would’ve given anything to grow up in the city,” he told her. “Living here was all I ever wanted. I had it all planned out. I was going to write music reviews for an alt-weekly and live in one of those shabby old downtown tenements with a futon on the floor and milk crates for furniture.”

His self-deprecation had made her laugh. “Somehow it doesn’t seem like that’s how things turned out for you.”

“No,” Josh agreed, in a way that struck Laura as a touch rueful. “I don’t even know if those ratty little apartments I was so excited to live in still existed by the time I got here.”

“I grew up in one of those ratty little tenement apartments. Believe me, there’s nothing romantic about poverty. Or bad plumbing, for that matter.”