Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus

happen, but not till they were well into their thirties.One, a tall, blond, curly-haired administrator at the insurance company, spoke of money; he believed a man should not marry until paying bills was no longer a struggle, until he was investing money that would grow and grow, and LuAnn saw money growing like trees, tulips, wild grass and vines. When she loved this man, she deceived herself and believed him. When she no longer loved him, she knew he was lying to her and to himself as well. Money had become a lie to justify his compromise of the tenderness and joy in his soul; these came forth when he was with her. At work he was ambitious and cold, spoke of precedent and the bottom line, and sometimes in the office she had to see him naked in her mind in order to see him at all.
    One man she briefly loved, a sound engineer who wrote poems, regarded children as spiteful ingrates, fatherhood as bad for blood pressure, and monogamy as absurd. The other men she loved talked about marriage as a young and untried soldier might talk of war: sometimes they believed they could do it, and survive as well; sometimes they were afraid they could not; but it remained an abstraction that would only become concrete with the call to arms, the sound of drums and horns and marching feet. She knew with each man that the drumroll of pregnancy would terrify him; that even the gentlest—the vegetarian math teacher who would not kill the mice that shared his apartment—would gratefully drive her to an abortion clinic and tenderly hold her hand while she opened her legs. She knew this so deeply in her heart that it was hidden from her; it lay in the dark, along with her knowledge that she would die.
    But her flesh knew the truth, and told her that timeand love were in her body, not in a man’s brain. In her body a man ejaculated, and the plastic in her uterus allowed him to see time as a line rising into his future, a line his lovemaking would not bend toward the curve of her body, the circle of love and time that was her womb and heart. So she loved from one day to the next, blinded herself to the years ahead, until hope was tired legs climbing a steep hill, until hope could no longer move upward or even stand aching in one flat and solid place. Then words came to her, and she said them to men, with derision, with anger, and with pain so deep that soon she could not say them at all, but only weep and, through the blur of tears, look at her lover’s angry and chastened eyes. The last of her lovers before she met her final one was a carpenter with Greek blood, with dark skin she loved to see and touch; one night while they ate dinner in his kitchen, he called commitment “the
c
word.” LuAnn was twenty-eight then. She rose from her chair, set down her glass of wine, and contained a scream while she pointed at him and said in a low voice: “You’re not a man. You’re a boy. You all are. You’re all getting milk through the fence. You’re a thief. But you don’t have balls enough to take the cow.”
    This was in late winter, and she entered a period of abstinence, which meant that she stopped dating. When men asked her out, she said she needed to be alone for a while, that she was not ready for a relationship. It was not the truth. She wanted love, but she did not want her search for it to begin in someone’s bed. She had been reared by both parents to know that concupiscence was at the center of male attention; she learned it soon enough anyway in the arms of frenziedboys. In high school she also learned that her passion was not engendered by a boy, but was part of her, as her blood and spirit were, and then she knew the words and actions she used to keep boys out of her body were also containing her own fire, so it would not spread through her flesh until its time. Knowing its time was not simple, and that is why she stopped dating after leaving the carpenter sitting at his table, glaring at her, his breath fast, his chest puffed with