Primitive People by Francine Prose

seen anyone here eat anything like that.
    “Knowing Geoffrey,” Rosemary said, “right at this minute he’s got the children smothered in animal fat, stuffing their faces with ten-pound sirloin steaks in one of those Mafioso beef-and-lasagna joints he always secretly liked.”
    “Villa Carnivora,” said Kenny.
    Shelly pushed her plate away, then reluctantly retrieved it, carved one last piece of sausage and popped it into her mouth. “I honestly don’t know how men do it.” She waved her knife at the remaining sausage. “Detach themselves that way. I mean, actually slice and chew these things and not let themselves make the obvious natural phallic association. Well, I suppose detachment and denial are testosterone breakdown products—”
    “Shelly,” cried Rosemary. “Please! Some of us are still eating!”
    Kenny took his time chewing, deliberately swallowed, and said, “It doesn’t bother me. The way I can get past eating this is I pretend it’s a piece of dogshit.”
    “Come on, now,” Rosemary said. “Please.”
    “Savage!” said Shelly. “I’m mortally wounded by that dagger aimed at the heart of my culinary pretensions. Perhaps it’s time for some music to soothe the savage whatever.”
    Shelly set down the phonograph needle and loud applause rasped from the speakers, long enough for Shelly to pull Kenny to his feet. Simone heard a choked-up vibrato guitar, then two men crooning a love song. Simone felt that each of the men had in mind some real woman and believed this was his only chance to say what was in his heart: Tonight we’ll meet, at the dark end of the street …
    At first Kenny was playacting, whirling and tilting Shelly. Only a practiced dancer could have overplayed it like that, and Simone knew from how Shelly moved in his arms that they were used to dancing together. Shelly was performing, too, tossing her head and shrieking when Kenny dipped her too close to the ground.
    “My mother always said,” Kenny announced to the room, “that everything interesting begins with a slow dance.”
    At first he and Shelly were entertaining themselves and in theory Rosemary and Simone, but soon the showing off stopped and Simone could feel herself drop off the edge of their visual field. She wondered which was worse, the aggressive sexual display or the moment when real desire kicked in and they were aware only of each other. Simone closed her eyes and listened to the two men pouring themselves into the song. She thought of the night she’d come home after seeing Joseph and Inez in the cafe: how she’d lain awake, hating the heat, the dark, the rub of the sheets on her skin.
    The voices paused for a tremulous, overwrought guitar break, and as if the singers had left the room, Shelly and Kenny danced closer. Simone remembered a quiet Sunday afternoon she and Joseph and Inez went for coffee. On the way they’d passed musicians singing on a corner, a melancholy slow rumba they hardly appeared to be playing but that seemed to ooze out of them while their minds were somewhere else. A couple danced in the center of a circle, a gray-haired sinewy old man and a beautiful straight-backed young woman, a haughty, disdainful half-smile on her face, her skirt bunched up in her hand.
    Simone didn’t, wouldn’t dance. Joseph had teased her about it, but kindly, as lovers make fun of one another’s quirks. But Inez danced, that was clear; you could tell from how she rolled her shoulders and shifted her feet to the beat. Only now did Simone see Joseph’s sideways glance. In Joseph’s paintings dancing couples melted and flowed into each other. But Simone had remained convinced—dancing didn’t make you happy. The best thing that could be said for it was that no song lasted forever.
    Laughing, slightly breathless, Kenny and Shelly sank down onto a couch. Kenny twisted around and burrowed his face into Shelly’s neck. He seemed unaware of the others, genuinely aroused. Simone was alarmed and