Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus Page A

words that did not come soon enough for LuAnn to hear. She walked home on lighted sidewalks with gray snow banked on their curbs, and she did not cry. For months she went to movies and restaurants with women. On several weekends she drove to her parents’ house, where going to sleep in her room and waking in it made her see clearly the years she had lived in Boston; made her feel that, since her graduation from college, only time and the age of her body had advanced, while she had stood on one plane, repeating the words and actions she regarded as her life.
    On a Sunday morning in summer, she put on a pink dress and white high-heeled shoes and, carrying a purse, walked in warm sunlight to the ten o’clock Mass. The church was large and crowded. She did not know this yet, but she would in her thirties: the hot purity of her passion kept her in the Church. When she loved, she loved with her flesh, and to her it was fitting and right, and did not need absolving by a priest. So she had never abandoned the Eucharist; without it, she felt the Mass, and all of the Church, would be only ideas she could get at home from books; and because of it, she overlooked what was bureaucratic or picayune about the Church. Abortion was none of these; it wasin the air like war. She hoped never to conceive a child she did not want, and she could not imagine giving death to a life in her womb. At the time for Communion she stepped into the line of people going to receive the mystery she had loved since childhood. A woman with gray hair was giving the Hosts; she took a white disk from the chalice, held it before her face, and said: “The Body of Christ.” LuAnn said: “Amen,” and the woman placed it in her palms and LuAnn put it in her mouth and for perhaps six minutes then, walking back to her pew and kneeling, she felt in harmony with the entire and timeless universe. This came to her every Sunday, and never at work; sometimes she could achieve it if she drove out of the city on a sunlit day and walked alone on a trail in woods, or on the shore of a lake.
    After Mass she lingered on the church steps till she was alone. Few cars passed, and scattered people walked or jogged on the sidewalk, and a boy on a skateboard clattered by. She descended, sliding her hand down the smooth stone wall. A few paces from the steps, she turned her face up to the sun; then the heel of her left shoe snapped, and her ankle and knee gave way: she gained her balance and raised her foot and removed the broken shoe, then the other one. Her purse in one hand and her shoes in the other, she went to the steps and sat and looked at the heel hanging at an angle from one tiny nail whose mates were bent, silver in the sunlight. A shadow moved over her feet and up her legs and she looked at polished brown loafers and a wooden cane with a shining brass tip, and a man’s legs in jeans, then up at his face: he had a trimmed brown beard and blue eyes and was smiling;his hair was brown and touched the collar of his navy blue shirt. His chest was broad, his waist was thick and bulged over his belt, and his bare arms were large; he said: “I could try to fix it.”
    “With what?”
    He blushed, and said: “It was just a way of talking to you.”
    “I know.”
    “Would you like brunch?”
    “Will they let me in barefoot?”
    “When they see the shoe.”
    He held out his hand, and she took it and stood; her brow was the height of his chin. They told each other their names; he was Ted Briggs. They walked, and the concrete was warm under her bare feet. She told him he had a pretty cane, and asked him why.
    “Artillery, in the war. A place called Khe Sanh.”
    “I know about Khe Sanh.”
    He looked at her.
    “You do?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good,” he said.
    “Why?”
    “You were very young then.”
    “So were you.”
    “Nineteen.”
    “I was twelve.”
    “So how do you know about Khe Sanh?”
    “I took a couple of courses. It’s the best way to go to war.”
    He smiled,