Nina shaded her eyes with her hand.
“That’s Bobby DeNucci playing piano,” she said. “Nick Weiland. Abby Hunter on violin. Joey Anthonsen and his brother Mark. You’ve heard these guys.”
“I have.”
“Most of them have played my place at one time or another. Played jazz. Tonight, though, they seem to be playing a primitive kind of music that’s popular with young people today. I think they call it rock ‘n’ roll.”
“Philistines.”
“Barbarians.”
“Maybe they’ll let you sit in.”
“Puhleez.”
“Why not?”
“It’s one thing to let me play with them when they’re in my club—it’s my customers we’re driving away. Not here.” Nina shook her head. “Let’s dance.”
I draped my arm over her shoulder and gazed demurely into her eyes.
“How ’bout I buy you a drink, sweetheart.”
“You never dance with me anymore.”
“I’ll dance with you. I just thought a drink first . . .”
“Fine. But we are going to dance.”
“Of course,” I told her while wondering how I could get out of it. I don’t like to dance. The way I dance is sort of like potatoes falling out of a sack.
I selected the bar that seemed least crowded and went toward it. The orchestra swung into a cover of the B-52’s “Love Shack” with Abby Hunter and Mark Anthonsen supplying vocals. Unfortunately, an opera of loud chatter and laughter rose up around me in opposition to the music, and midway through the song I gave it up.
As Murphy’s Law would have it, the line I picked moved slowest. I engaged in some people watching while I waited my turn. It wasn’t nearly as interesting as it was at, say, the Minnesota State Fair. Too many women wore black, and while some of their hairstyles demonstrated boldness and imagination, most did not. Women enthusiastically greeted other women whose names they couldn’t recall while men nodded stoically and offered perfunctory handshakes during introductions that were quickly forgotten. Small groups formed, swelled with importance, dissolved, and reformed at the next table. Alliances were forged and broken, plans were made and abandoned, and suggestions on how to squeeze even more fun out of the evening were proposed, debated, and rejected. Meanwhile, a handful of wanderers drifted from group to group in search of a familiar face.
Something caught my eye and I turned toward it.
A small hurricane of people swirled and grew larger as it tracked slowly along the atrium opposite where I was standing. At the eye of the hurricane was a man I recognized immediately. John Allen Barrett. Governor of the state of Minnesota. He was part of the crowd, yet seemed to stand apart from it at the same time, as though some trick of light brightened the area immediately around him while casting everyone else in shadow. It was a wondrous trick, and I tried to determine how he managed it. He certainly had the size to have once played college basketball, and instead of the pale cast of most Minnesotans in winter, his skin had the glow of good health. I could see the blue in his eyes all the way across the room, and his smile, which never seemed to leave him, threw off sparks like a welding torch you’re not supposed to view with the naked eye. Yet it was more than physical appearance that attracted. It was attitude. Barrett had the look of victory about him.
Standing next to him, Lindsey seemed both young and not so young. Her face was as flawless and smooth as when it was new, yet I detected in her eyes an intelligence and thoughtfulness that came only with time and hard lessons learned. She wore a simple black silk sheath with a high, square neck, low back, and long skirt and no ornament save the star that sparkled on her left hand, yet she seemed to shimmer like moonlight on dark water. For a moment I was alone with her in the living room of her parent’s home, the house empty except for us, Miles Davis on the stereo, Lindsey smiling her lovely smile and saying, “Can I get you anything?”
I didn’t become a man because of Lindsey, I reminded myself. But she did make it a lot easier.
Barrett exchanged greetings easily with the people who gathered around him, shaking hands with his right while his left circled his wife’s waist and held her in a protective embrace. Occasionally, she would slip free and drift away from him as the hurricane surged forward. When that happened, Barrett would reach back for her, refusing to acknowledge anyone until she was once more safely at his side.
That’s what love looks like, my inner voice told me.