It was a warm early fall night. He rode through the sleeping suburbs, his racing bicycle going tzik-tzik past all the people safely in bed. He passed only a few lighted windows and these he pedaled by slowly, but he was rarely able to see anything. He was glad he didn't have a light; it made his journey more secretive. In town he held to the sidewalks; in the country, he could hear and see the occasional cars coming and simply get off the road. That first night he rode for miles - all around the campus, out of town and back in. It was almost dawn when he unlocked the gym and carried his bike into the locker room. He slipped into a wrestling robe, went up to the wrestling room, lay down on the great warm mat and slept until the sun through the skylight woke him. He took a sauna, swam and rode home in time to bring Edith her breakfast in bed.
'It was marvelous!' he told her. 'Just what I needed.'
But that didn't take care of it. A few nights later he was up pacing the house again. Outside, lurking near the garden shed, his white racing bicycle glowed in the moonlight like a ghostly thin dog. 'It's waiting for me,' he told Edith. Soon he was out riding three or four nights a week. At first, like a lot of things with Sev
erin, he turned his habit into an endurance feat. He tested himself for distance, striking out for the farthest towns and making it back before first light. Then he timed himself for forty-mile jaunts. But always, before dawn, he would catch an hour's deep sleep in the wrestling room.
Edith didn't object. He made love to her before setting out and was back in the house before she was awake; fresh from a sauna and a swim, he'd often wake her nicely by making love to her again. One night a week his loss of sleep would crash down on him and he'd fall into a stupor after supper and drowse about the house until the middle of the next day. But that was merely his body knowing what it needed.
To hear him tell it, nothing was wrong until the first night he rode past the old cage, after midnight, and saw the light on in the wrestling room. At first he thought it was the watchman's error, even though he saw an unfamiliar car. Severin Winter was on his way to another county and thought he'd see about the light when he visited the wrestling room later for his dawn nap. But he hadn't ridden much further when the light began to bother him and he turned back. Whoever was in the wrestling room after midnight would certainly be up to something nonathletic. He imagined the fun of catching a judo couple copulating on the mat, their stupid pajamalike costumes wildly abandoned.
He was going to go straight to the room, but then he thought he might have more authority if he dressed for the part he was about to play, so he suited up in full wrestling gear. As he made his stealthy way to the tunnel, he reminded himself to give the watchman a piece of his mind. Not even faculty had permission to be in the gym after 10 p.m., and since Severin was the only person in the Athletic Department who ever used the facilities at such odd hours, he probably felt his monopoly was threatened.
He stalked around the old board track like a predator, and at the closed door to the wrestling room, his suspicions seemed to be confirmed: music was playing in there. Severin was a Viennese with an education; he recognized Schumann's 'Papillons'. At least the invaders had taste, he thought. He could not conceive what lewd karate act awaited him, what weird rite was in progress within! Silently he slipped the key in the lock. Suddenly anxious, he wondered what anyone could be doing to the accompaniment of Schumann.
All alone, a small, dark woman was dancing in sleek black leotards. She was tiny, sinewy, tense; her movements as graceful and nervous as an antelope's. She did not notice him slip in and slide the door closed behind him. She was working very hard to an insistent, staccato passage. Sweat drenched her elastic body; her breathing was hard but deep. A portable tape recorder was responsible for the Schumann; it sat neatly out of the way on a stack of towels in the corner as she ranged the room in an athletic interpretation that was close to gymnastics. Severin leaned against the padded wall of the wrestling room as if his spine were sensitive to Schumann.
He knew who she was, but something wasn't right; he also knew she was crippled. Her name was Audrey Cannon; she was an assistant professor of Dance and Theater Arts, and something of a metaphor for everything that was ironic and unlikely. She was a former dancer who taught dance, but she was a tragically graceless, even awkward person whose career had been ruined by some mysterious accident which was never discussed. She limped - in fact, she clomped her way around campus. The way she was used as a metaphor was cruel; of a ridiculous plan, say, someone might joke, 'That makes about as much sense as Audrey Cannon teaching me how to dance.'
She was a single woman, pretty and small but so shy and self-conscious and seemingly scarred that no one knew much about her. She declined invitations to parties and went to the city every weekend; she was thought to have a lover there. Edith claimed that the best story about Audrey Cannon had been invented by Severin. It was not malicious; it was pure speculation. Severin used to say that the woman's past 'shone on her face like a fresh sin'; that her accident was no doubt a wound of love; that in her mid-thirties she had lived more than any of them; that the accident probably happened on stage as she was dancing with her leading lover, and that a jealous woman in the audience (who had been taking rifle lessons for months, for just this occasion) precisely shot off her left foot so that she would never be graceful again. She was still a beautiful woman, Severin claimed, but her awkwardness made her feel ugly. 'Dancers are concerned with grace,' Severin said. That he thought her beautiful was a surprise to almost everyone; no one else thought she was even very attractive (Edith described her as 'neurasthenic'). But Severin claimed that her beauty was in her grace, which was in her past. He claimed that he could love a person's past. We historical novelists are rarely as sentimental.
When Severin Winter saw Audrey Cannon dancing, he must have imagined that some hypnotic power had possessed her. It was no cripple who was dancing on his wrestling mats. But when the tape recording ended, he was treated to another shock: she collapsed into a neat bundle in the center of the mat, breathing hard and deep, and when she'd recovered herself enough to stand, she limped toward the recorder in the corner like the crippled woman she'd previously been.
She was a very private woman in the midst of a very private moment, and when she saw Severin frozen against the padded wall she screamed. But Severin bounced out on the mat, calling, 'It's all right, it's all right, it's just me - Severin Winter. Miss Cannon? Miss Cannon?' as she huddled, cringing on the mat, wondering, no doubt, what her dance had inspired.
They talked a long time. He'd caught her with all her defenses down and she had to tell him about her whole life; she felt as if he'd seen her whole life. He would never tell Edith or me what that 'whole life' was. He remained faithful to that intimacy. 'I think when a private person tells you everything, you're bound to each other in a way no one really planned,' he said. But Edith reminded him bitterly that he'd always thought Audrey Cannon was beautiful; he'd had feelings for her even before their dramatic meeting. I never heard him deny it.
Audrey Cannon could dance on wrestling mats because they were soft; they gave under her slight weight and didn't distort her balance the way a normal surface would. It was an illusion, of course. I think she was able to dance on wrestling mats because of the trance she put herself in; it's my opinion that Severin Winter's wrestling room inspired trances. She said she had relearned dancing there. Harvey, the watchman, had made an exception for her.
'But we just talked!' Severin insisted. 'That first night she just talked to me. We talked all night.' No sauna, no swimming? 'No! Just talk--'
'Which is the worst kind of infidelity,' Edith said. Of course; it's what bothered Severin the most about Edith's relationship with me.
That first night, then, there was nothing more intimate than storytelling - except that she showed Severin her crippled foot, the muscular, highly arched remnant missing the ball of the foot and the three biggest toes. Jesus, what a sick story! A dancer with a maimed foot!
And he told her the history he'd imagined about her. And did he tell her he'd always thought she was beautiful? 'No!' he cried. 'It wasn't like that. I was just available ... to listen.' Well, it was no jealous woman who shot off her toes. Audrey Cannon had squared off her left foot years ago when mowing her lawn in a pair of sandals; she pulled a rotary-blade power mower over her own foot. It cut the first three toes off clean, chewed the next-to-last one and took all but a bit of the ball of her foot. There was so much blood she didn't know anything was missing. When they told her in the hospital she was convinced that some over-eager doctor had amputated everything too hastily.
I think I know the part of the story which must have touched Severin to his curious core. When she came home from the hospital, there was her lawnmower out in the yard where she'd left it, with a severed sandal-thong nearby. And when she looked under the lawnmower, there were her toes and the ball of her foot, looking like a halved peach. 'Her old toes!' Severin said. 'And do you know what? They were covered with ants.'
My God, what a love story.
'But if you just talked, that first night,' I said, 'why didn't you tell Edith when you went home? You never said a word.'
It discomforts Severin Winter to believe in his own premeditation. But he must have known that later there would be more than talk. I think he knew back when he knew nothing about her, except that to him she was beautiful.
We always know.
Still, he likes to stress the fact that he went back to riding his bicycle after that first meeting. Knowing she was in his wrestling room, riding by and seeing the light, he would ride on, reaching ever more faraway towns, pedaling furiously and not allowing himself to reach the wrestling room until his customary pre-dawn hour when Audrey Cannon would have long since limped home. No harm, was there, in his habit of looking for traces of her? Small, warm dents in the mat. Her dark hair in the sauna. A ripple not yet vanished from the surface of the swimming pool.
In the morning, bicycling home to Edith, he'd take the route by Audrey Cannon's small apartment. Just to see if her car was legally parked? To see if her window shade was properly down?
What a fool. I am familiar with the ways we talk ourselves into things. One way is by pretending we are talking ourselves out of them. Severin can tell me all day that he's not like me. ('I was falling in love with her!' he has cried. 'I wasn't out to grab a quick piece and get my rocks off any old way like you do!') But a part of him knew what he was getting into. He can use any euphemism he likes.
The fact remains that one night he rode by the gym and couldn't keep the pedals going. He felt faint of heart at the notion of yet another faraway town. He circled the old cage, he stood in the dark trees, he crouched by the softly blowing rows of tennis nets, he scuffed up dirt on the baseball diamond, but he kept ending up back where he began. Suddenly he was tired of bicycling, of course; also - pure coincidence, of c
ourse - he had not made love to Edith before starting out that night.
And did he shower in the locker room before he slipped into a clean robe? I'll bet he did. And was it simply neglect which made him dress lightly under the robe? When he slid the door closed behind him, he saw that Audrey Cannon wasn't dancing. Schumann was playing, but she was resting. Or meditating? Or waiting for Severin Winter to make up his mind? And did he say, 'Ah, um, I came to ask you if I could watch you dance?' And did Audrey Cannon stumble up on her foot and a half?