30. Giovanni
— ? —
Giovanni
The studio smelled like floor polish and humiliation.
Three months. That’s how long I’d been doing this, in secret, on Tuesday nights, telling my wife it was business.
The first sessions were brutal. My body fought every instruction, too trained in stillness, in control, in the particular economy of movement that keeps you alive in a room full of men who’d kill you for a shift of weight.
Tap demanded the exact opposite. Tap demanded looseness.
Release. The willingness to let a rhythm move through you instead of being held at arm’s length like everything else in my life.
“You’re thinking too much,” Janet said, watching me murder a basic shuffle for the fortieth time.
“Thinking is what I do.”
“Thinking is what’s stopping you.” She was sixty-three, had taught in that studio for thirty years, and on my first night she’d taken one look at me, handed me a pair of rental shoes, and said, “You’re here for someone. What’s her name?”
“Kylie.”
“Then,” Janet had said, “let’s make sure you’re worth watching.”
So I learned, slowly and painfully, with the same determination I’d once brought to less wholesome work.
I watched footage of Gene Kelly until I could name the steps by sound with my eyes shut.
I practiced in socks on my own hardwood at midnight until the downstairs neighbor left a note.
I bored Dante into a state of open despair.
“Why tap,” Janet asked me one night, “of all the dances a man could pick to embarrass himself with?”
“Because the first time I ever made her really laugh,” I said, glaring down at my own uncooperative feet, “was when she caught me watching Singin’ in the Rain in the dark at two in the morning, three months into a marriage we’d both been told to enter.
She looked at me like I’d handed her a secret she’d been waiting her whole life for someone to trust her with.
” I tried the flap again. Wrong again. “I want to show her I was paying attention. That every hour she thought I was absent, some part of me was memorizing her. I just never had a language she could actually hear.”
Janet was quiet a moment.
“Again,” she said, gentler. “Lead with your heel.”
***
Reopening night was a verdict, and I stood in the wings of my wife’s theater and seriously considered being sick into a prop bucket.
“You look green,” Dante observed, with the pitiless calm of a man who had watched me grow up.
“I feel green.”
“It’s a dance.”
“It’s a dance and a proposal. In front of a town. On the one stage she loves more than she’s ever, in six years, admitted to loving me.”
“So - low stakes.” He straightened my collar, the traitor, and produced the book. “You’ve rehearsed the words more times than either of us can count. The steps, more than that. Go break something. Ideally a leg, in the theatrical sense. Not an actual hip. You’re not a young man.”
The book. Our book, the first edition I’d sent her a lifetime ago, before we’d properly spoken, back when we argued in the white space of other people’s pages because neither of us knew how to argue anywhere else.
The one thing between us that had always been more honest than we were.
It had lived in my jacket for weeks. I’d written in it one last time, on the last page, in the margin, in the only place the two of us had ever reliably told the truth.
I slid it into my inside pocket, against my chest, next to the other thing I’d carried there for twelve months.
Then the quartet finished. The lights came up warm and gold across the restored stage, the stage she’d raised out of a flooded, fire-scarred ruin with her own two hands.
And Miss Dot’s voice rolled out over the house speakers, gleeful, announcing the finale that she and Janet and Rosa and, apparently, half of Georgia had known about for weeks.
I walked out onto Kylie’s stage in tap shoes.
***
I danced. Badly, earnestly, a very large man in rented taps, counting under his breath, flanked on either side by two octogenarians who were, in candor, carrying me.
The Tuesday Tappers shuffled and the taps rang off the boards like conversation, and I hit the traveling sequence I’d been slaughtering for eight weeks and, mostly, landed it, and somewhere in the front row I heard the exact sound I’d learned an entire art form to earn.
Kylie. Laughing until she cried.
I found her face and I kept it. Shock first, then delight, then something underneath both of those that I was almost too afraid to name.
The medley turned over into Singin’ in the Rain, and I did the whole joyful ridiculous nonsense of it, which is the entire point, a dangerous man choosing to look like a fool for the length of one song, and on the final bar I hit the turn Janet had beaten into my body across three months of Tuesdays and came down on one knee at the lip of the stage, exactly where I was meant to be.
The music stopped.
The theater went dead silent.
I stayed on my knee. I took the book out of my jacket, opened it to the last page, and held it up so she could read my handwriting in the margin:
Marry me twice. Once was for the families. This one’s for us. G
Kylie’s hand came up to cover her mouth.
Then I reached into my breast pocket for the other thing I’d carried there for a year, her rings.
The wedding band and the old Ferraro diamond, the ones she’d stacked on top of her father’s file the night she left me, the ones I hadn’t been able to wear and hadn’t been able to let go of, that had ridden over my heart for twelve months through therapy and letters and a thousand miles of not knowing.
And beside them, new: a slim second band, to grow the set, because the girl these were meant for would simply have been given them, and the woman standing in front of me had built everything they’d once only promised, and she’d earned more than a girl’s inheritance.
“You’re proposing in a margin,” she said, from the front row, wet-eyed and perfectly steady.
“It’s where we’ve always told the truth.”
“You’re wearing tap shoes.”
“Answer the question, amore.”
***
She let it hang.
Of course she did. She climbed up onto the apron of her own stage, my wife, my almost-wife-again, in a green dress the color of the first thing she ever wore to burn me down, and she pulled the microphone out of its stand, because if I was going to do this to her in public then she was going to make me earn every last second of it.
“He learned to tap dance,” she informed the room, conversational, like she was delivering the world’s most damning lecture.
“For three months. In secret. On Tuesdays. He told me it was business. This man has lied to federal prosecutors more comfortably than he lied to me about a beginner tap class.” The theater roared.
“He built a scale-model bounce house last month. He cannot fold a fitted sheet. He once wrote me four full paragraphs about a fish tank rather than say he loved me.” She looked down at me, still on my knee, my heart in my throat and her rings in my open hand.
“And I have it, from a reliable source, that the taps tonight were - and I quote Janet directly - only adequate.”
“Janet is a notoriously hard grader,” I said.
“Fine,” Kylie said, into the microphone, to the whole town, to me. “Fine. But I’m writing my own vows, and there is nothing - nothing - you can do about it.”
The Marlowe came apart.
Every seat, every aisle, the whole restored house I’d quietly funded and she’d loudly, gloriously built, all of it detonated at once.
Miss Dot was on her feet with two fingers in her mouth, whistling like a longshoreman.
Rosa was openly weeping into Maureen’s shoulder, and Maureen was letting her.
Nico shrieked because everyone else was and he’s never once been left out of an ovation on principle.
And Kylie came down off her stage and hauled me up off my knee by both lapels, exactly the way she had in the square a lifetime ago, the day this all turned, and slid her own rings back onto her own finger before I could do it for her, which was, I understood, the entire point.
“For the record,” she said against my mouth, “the tap dancing was considerably more than adequate.”
“Don’t tell Janet.”
“I’m telling everyone. I’m having it printed in the program.”