and not to society--vestiges specifically interpreted, disciplined or repressed by the individual in your arms. The woman's dancing says, This is what the world has done to me--or hasn't. And it is the same for men--which is why women, who live closer to their instincts, like to dance.
This circumstance, alas, has for so long been repudiated by our forebears that the dancing of most American males is rude and boorish and clumsy, at once self-assertive and self-conscious, unimaginative, disrhythmic, unsubtle--paranoid. It is what the world has done to them.
You can talk to a woman all night and persuade her of nothing. You can hold her hand and a chemical change will take place in her. You can kiss her in certain ways and the Old Memories will do what rhetoric cannot.
And you can dance with her.
If you can dance.
You can dance by fox trot, the American way, the integration of surfaces. We know the same steps, the same skills, the same beat. We look well together. We make a matched pair. The thresholds of our sentiments mesh, dovetail, tongue-and-groove. We are, indeed, in the groove.
You can use the dance of conquest and gradual assent, the tango.
Or the rumba.
Which is African. Studied teleology, stylized candor, libido embedded in the music, suspended in cadences, arrested, sustained--beyond intellect, this side of ecstasy.
It is a sophistication that northern countries never knew of--a primitive deliberation, a hot-blooded coolness. For not knowing, they are punished by going without--and in other, obscure fashions. Very few northern women and fewer men, excepting among the young, are able to discover the essence.
They rumba--they say.
They wave their tails like pennants, the oscillating flesh corrupt in Christian purity.
Yvonne was one of the few.
She came honestly by the name, I thought.
"Huguenots," she said when we sat down. "On mother's side."
How can the Americans ever cleanse themselves?
I ordered our dinner.
Again, she tried to lead--to change her mind--to demur--to say she wasn't hungry-
-then to consider the cold roast beef.
"You'll like it," I said. If she had insisted, I'd have let her order for herself. But she didn't want anything in particular to eat. She wanted to see what happened to her slight, vain whims. So I ignored them.
"You can have another Martini."
"I guess I must?"
"Sure. Must. Dinner will take a few minutes and we won't dance again till after."
"You're terribly positive."
"Nonsense," I said. "You're used to men who have been beaten to death by women before you got hold of them."
Her eyes fixed on me, dilated, and she laughed. "Rol."
"Among all the others. Maleness has just about disappeared in your native land, sister. The boys are all brought up by women, and taught by women in school, and then they go to work to support women by manufacturing and distributing the things women think they want. It's called civilization--and actually it's only the highest form barbarism has yet reached. Trinket-and-gadget society. Domestic convenience society. A society that holds a handkerchief to one end and sets the other on a flush toilet--a society that aims to make the linen germicidal and the toilet silent, colored, and perfumed."
"And men? What do they do? Use fingers and squat?"
"You're learning too fast. Live outdoors, avoid neurosis, and so escape the common cold. I think they could stand for the flush toilet--but they would be more concerned in getting the nitrogen back to the topsoil than they would in the orchid rims.
First things first and a conscious sense of responsibility for the future--that's us boys."
"Phooie!"
"Who do you like--to go on from lunch? Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, George Raft, Rudolph Valentino, Gregory Peck, or some of the new boy friends of the bobby-soxers I'm too old to remember the names of?"
"None of them. And I never saw Valentino in a picture."
"Meaning him."
"At least--he acted as if he had manners."
"On the
This circumstance, alas, has for so long been repudiated by our forebears that the dancing of most American males is rude and boorish and clumsy, at once self-assertive and self-conscious, unimaginative, disrhythmic, unsubtle--paranoid. It is what the world has done to them.
You can talk to a woman all night and persuade her of nothing. You can hold her hand and a chemical change will take place in her. You can kiss her in certain ways and the Old Memories will do what rhetoric cannot.
And you can dance with her.
If you can dance.
You can dance by fox trot, the American way, the integration of surfaces. We know the same steps, the same skills, the same beat. We look well together. We make a matched pair. The thresholds of our sentiments mesh, dovetail, tongue-and-groove. We are, indeed, in the groove.
You can use the dance of conquest and gradual assent, the tango.
Or the rumba.
Which is African. Studied teleology, stylized candor, libido embedded in the music, suspended in cadences, arrested, sustained--beyond intellect, this side of ecstasy.
It is a sophistication that northern countries never knew of--a primitive deliberation, a hot-blooded coolness. For not knowing, they are punished by going without--and in other, obscure fashions. Very few northern women and fewer men, excepting among the young, are able to discover the essence.
They rumba--they say.
They wave their tails like pennants, the oscillating flesh corrupt in Christian purity.
Yvonne was one of the few.
She came honestly by the name, I thought.
"Huguenots," she said when we sat down. "On mother's side."
How can the Americans ever cleanse themselves?
I ordered our dinner.
Again, she tried to lead--to change her mind--to demur--to say she wasn't hungry-
-then to consider the cold roast beef.
"You'll like it," I said. If she had insisted, I'd have let her order for herself. But she didn't want anything in particular to eat. She wanted to see what happened to her slight, vain whims. So I ignored them.
"You can have another Martini."
"I guess I must?"
"Sure. Must. Dinner will take a few minutes and we won't dance again till after."
"You're terribly positive."
"Nonsense," I said. "You're used to men who have been beaten to death by women before you got hold of them."
Her eyes fixed on me, dilated, and she laughed. "Rol."
"Among all the others. Maleness has just about disappeared in your native land, sister. The boys are all brought up by women, and taught by women in school, and then they go to work to support women by manufacturing and distributing the things women think they want. It's called civilization--and actually it's only the highest form barbarism has yet reached. Trinket-and-gadget society. Domestic convenience society. A society that holds a handkerchief to one end and sets the other on a flush toilet--a society that aims to make the linen germicidal and the toilet silent, colored, and perfumed."
"And men? What do they do? Use fingers and squat?"
"You're learning too fast. Live outdoors, avoid neurosis, and so escape the common cold. I think they could stand for the flush toilet--but they would be more concerned in getting the nitrogen back to the topsoil than they would in the orchid rims.
First things first and a conscious sense of responsibility for the future--that's us boys."
"Phooie!"
"Who do you like--to go on from lunch? Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, George Raft, Rudolph Valentino, Gregory Peck, or some of the new boy friends of the bobby-soxers I'm too old to remember the names of?"
"None of them. And I never saw Valentino in a picture."
"Meaning him."
"At least--he acted as if he had manners."
"On the
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