Chapter 29 #3
What I’ve danced, no one can take from me.
He had a tattoo about dance as permanent record, as something that lives in your body even after the body can’t do it anymore. Whoever this man was, he understood something about what it meant to be a dancer that most people never got close to.
“I’m Benji,” I said. “I bartend. You’ll be wagging your kibbles and bits above my workspace, so we should probably be on a first-name basis.”
“Adrian.” He reached out and took my hand.
His grip was warm, the handshake of a person who understood that first contact communicated something important.
“Your workspace is a good stage. It’s a solid surface, the right height, and with enough room for a full range of movement as long as nobody puts the garnish trays too close to the edge. ”
“You assessed the bar’s dimensions during a three-minute audition?”
“I assess every surface I might dance on. Call it an occupational habit. Your bar is forty-two inches high, approximately eighteen feet long, with a slight forward cant near the beer taps that I’d want to be aware of during any lateral movement.
Also, your Modelo tap has a smear on it that looks oddly tongue shaped. ”
“That was candidate number two.”
“I don’t want to know.”
He collected his bakery box. It was empty because Rod had emerged from the kitchen at some point during the audition and consumed every pastelillo with the quiet, methodical appreciation of one who recognized quality when it arrived in a grease-spotted cardboard container.
“Your cook ate all my abuela’s pastelillos,” Adrian said, more amused than offended.
“His name is Rod, and he ate them because they were excellent. Rod doesn’t eat things that aren’t excellent.”
“Tell Rod my abuela thanks him. She judges people by how they eat her food. Fast means hungry. Slow means respectful.”
“Rod ate them very slowly,” Jacks said.
“She’ll love him. I’ll bring more Saturday.”
He headed for the door, passing Mark’s booth on the way.
Mark, who had been in his corner with his laptop throughout the entire audition process, had looked up exactly once (during the Modelo tap licking, to cite the health code violation, then immediately returned to his spreadsheet). He did not look up as Adrian passed.
But Adrian looked at Mark.
It was barely a glance, brief and curious, the automatic eye-flicker of a person who reads rooms for a living noticing someone who wasn’t reading the room at all.
Adrian’s eyes moved across Mark’s profile, taking in his laptop, the spreadsheet, and his intensity.
Something in Adrian’s expression shifted, a small recalibration, perhaps, the kind of adjustment a dancer makes when the floor isn’t quite what he expected.
But he didn’t stop. He walked out, and the door closed behind him.
“I like him,” Rod said from the pass-through, which was Rod’s version of a standing ovation.
Dante, who had been at the door for the entire audition with his book open on his knee, looked up for the first time.
“He’s good,” Dante said. “But more importantly, he’s honest. You can see it in his movement. Dishonest dancers are technically perfect. Honest dancers are technically themselves.”
Everyone stared at Dante. Even Mark looked up.
Dante looked back at everyone with mild confusion.
“That’s incredibly perceptive,” I said.
“I read a lot of Chekhov.” He shrugged. “Chekhov understood performance.”
“So,” Jacks said, after the bar had settled back into a post-audition calm.
I’d reclaimed my workspace and sanitized the surfaces that various candidates had occupied with their feet, their bodies, and in one memorable case, their tongues.
“Are we going to talk about the Peter situation, or are we going to pretend I didn’t notice that you’ve been smiling at the garnish tray for twenty minutes?
No one smiles at maraschino cherries like you do. ”
“I’m not smiling at the cherries.”
“You looked like you wanted to make out with them. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good cherry as much as the next guy.
” His face blanched, and he blinked a few times rapidly.
“That didn’t come out like I meant. Shit.
Never mind. You’ve been smiling at everything, not just cherries.
Hell, Benj, you smiled at the ice bin and a bottle of Angostura bitters. ”
“I’m in a good mood. People are allowed to be in good moods.”
“You’re not in just a good mood. You’re in a state. You’ve been in a state since Saturday, and the state has been escalating. The current iteration of the state involves you smiling at condiments and cutting limes into wedges so thin they’re basically transparent.”
I looked down at the lime I’d just cut.
It was, in fact, transparent.
I could see the grain of the cutting board through it.
It was not a functional garnish. It was a garnish that had been cut by a person whose fine motor control was being compromised by an ongoing internal highlight reel of Peter Loupier’s hands and voice and the specific sound he’d made in the dark.
“Something happened,” Jacks stated simply.
“Something happened.” I nodded.
“Peter.”
“Peter.”
Jacks set down the glass he was polishing and gave me his full attention. “Start talking.”
I blew out a sigh and ran a hand through my hair, more to buy time than anything. I’d used enough product to ensure my hair wouldn’t move until the next Ice Age.
“Saturday night, I came home from my shift early because the bar was dead. I texted him I was coming home. He texted back, ‘Door’s unlocked,’ which was weird. Peter locks everything. Jacks, I walked in and he was—”
I stopped, quickly considered how much detail the moment required, then decided on the minimum viable disclosure.
“He was . . . waiting for me,” I said. “On the couch. And he had, well, prepared.”
“Prepared?”
“Prepared himself, you know, for my arrival, in a way that was very clear about his intentions.”
Jacks studied me for a moment, sifting through the parts I wasn’t saying.
“Good for him,” Jacks said.
“Good for him?” I sputtered. “I tell you he was lying on the couch naked when I got home, and all you say is, ‘Good for him’?”
“You didn’t say he was naked,” Jacks said, his mouth quirking into a shit-eating grin.
“He was . . . shit . . . fuck off,” I snapped. “Jacks, the man folded his boxers before putting them on the chair. He folded them into a neat square with aligned edges while preparing to seduce me. He made his clothes into a display. Who does that?”
“Rewind. He was naked. We established this.” Jacks held up a palm. “The seduction is new.”
“Again, fuck off, Jacks.”
“What? He could’ve been waiting for his perfectly folded boxers to dry or something. Maybe he was out of clothes or they were in the washing machine. Ever think of that?” He chuckled and crossed his arms.
“God, I hate you. Can we please focus on the issue at hand?”
“No, you don’t. And yes, focusing on the issue, I would say it’s all very Peter.”
“It’s the most Peter thing that has ever happened. It almost killed me. I’m going to think about the folding for the rest of my life. A guy’s not supposed to get hard thinking about folding laundry, Jacks. It’s not natural.”
He snorted again.
“And then Sunday morning he offered me David’s mug, the blue one, the one nobody touches.
He said, ‘Use the blue one,’ so casually I almost collapsed.
I poured his coffee in it and gave it back to him, and told him that I didn’t need David’s mug because he’d already made room for me.
That’s when he held the mug with both hands and his voice cracked.
We drank coffee in the kitchen, and he wrote a Post-it that said, ‘The mug stays with me, but you stay, too,’ and I—”
My voice did a thing, a specific, unhelpful thing.
Jacks put his hand on my shoulder. It was a brief, firm contact, the physical vocabulary of a man who expressed support through his mere presence rather than words.
“You’re happy,” he said.
“I’m wrecked. I’m so completely wrecked. I’m emotionally compromised in every direction. I can’t cut limes. I can’t count bottles. I smiled at Dale, and Dale isn’t even working today. We’re without Dale. We’re Daleless.”
For the third time in as many minutes, Jacks snorted.
“You’re happy, Benji,” he said. “You’re allowed to be happy, especially here, with us.”
I looked at the transparent lime.
At the garnish tray.
Then at the bar, where, an hour earlier, a man with a tattoo about dance had moved with a kind of honest, full-bodied joy that I recognized from the best version of myself.
It was the version that had existed before my knee blew out and the half second Peter had named.
It was the version of me that Peter was slowly, carefully, through Post-it notes and stove lights and folded boxers, helping me find again.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m happy.”
“Good,” Jacks said, his meaty paw shifting to pat my cheek as though I was some wayward child. “Now cut the limes at a functional width. Nobody wants a transparent lime in their drink.”
“A transparent lime is an aesthetic choice.”
“A transparent lime is a cry for help. We need wedges, not wedgies.”
And just like that, I laughed, and my nerves eased, and a broad smile returned to my lips.
I re-cut the limes. Jacks restocked the well. Rod made soup.
The afternoon sun flooded through the floor-to-ceiling windows and drifted across the bar floor.
Somewhere in West Tampa, a man named Adrian Voss was probably telling his grandmother he got the job. She was probably already planning what to bake for Saturday.
The whole machinery of what was coming next was already in motion, the way it always was, long before the people inside it realized they were even moving.