watching you and chuck dance

your ex-husband never was much for dancing. i think he thought he'd sprain an ankle or miss something on TV. but it seemed like that's all you wanted, to be good and drunk on a saturday night, dancing your face off. it didn't surprise me when the two of you split up, him on crutches and clinging to a little portable black and white TV, watching you move all that heavy shit out of the apartment by yourself, in your dancing shoes.

once you asked me to dance and i said no. it isn't that i won't do it, but dancing combines two of my weakest suits--rhythm and casual physical contact. i'm still trying to play down a 1995 incident involving language barriers, castanets, and temporary blindness for a hungarian economics major. i felt bad, though, like i'd let you down when all you wanted out of life was for it not be a boring sack of bad writing and flat white brooklyn irony.

this made me all the happier to hear you'd gotten together with chuck--a fantastic dancer--but i didn't see what sort of solid gold shit y'all were working with for myself until the other night.

chuck was wearing a sequined bodysuit and wielding 8" Dazzler-brand glow sticks like a ninja. you were dressed in a triceratops costume, your third of the night, this one a sort of maroon. T and I had been drinking "full grown men" (3 parts beer, 2 parts whiskey, 1 part jaeger, lime wedge) and talking up librarians. Then the librarians had taken off, T and I had missed our own cues to leave and there we were, you, chuck, us, and my dad, who for some reason had just arrived and was playing "Lady in Red" on an accordion.

watching you and chuck dance we saw a future spool out where each of you was always looking up to see where the other one was and the other one would always look back, eye to eye, getting each other, digging what you saw and not fucking it up.

you danced, changing leads, twirling, tipping, never spilling. it was almost 5 in the morning. T, my dad, and I took off in full possession of saturday night peace. the clock tower had all its faces back and we couldn't smell piss anywhere, no matter where we walked, and my dad at the top of his game, chord and melody everywhere, a shimmering and nimble pack of mid-sized animals on a forever plain.