“Not here, Lou—c’mon, let’s go,” she said, trying to put a look of cajoling promise on her face.
They walked over to “Dreamland,” the place where they usually danced. It was a moderately large hall, where the admission price was only two dollars for couples, and it catered to a nondescript array of patrons. Those who attended it regularly were in the main young blades with small salaries and gay ambitions, and working-girls who desired to “step out” at night, but you could spy a variety of other people who dropped in occasionally. The place hired twelve professional girl dancers, who sat on a row of green wicker chairs and waited for customers, and there was a booth wherein a lady, who looked like a middle-aged, superannuated burlesque actress, dispensed tickets, each of which entitled the bearer to a dance with one of the hired girls. Three or four professional male dancers in tuxedoes lolled opposite the girls and waited for feminine patrons. They were mostly in demand for the tango and the Charleston—more intricate dances which most of the other men present had not mastered. Prosperous, middle-aged business men frequently dropped in to dance with the girl “hostesses” and a buxom, overripe, overdressed, smirking woman—who supervised this part of the hall’s activities—went through the respectable farce of inquiring each gentleman’s name and introducing him to his “hostess” partner. Many youths, “hard up” for the evening and desiring an excellent and “swell-looking” dancer, and many out-of-town visitors, pining for deviltry during the vacation from their families, were also frequent patrons. In addition, a large number of unattached men drifted about the hall and solicited dances from single girls, who accepted or rejected them according to whether they were well-dressed and talked with the proper confident, wise-cracking inflections. The dance floor covered almost one-half of the hall’s space and was separated by a wooden railing from the remainder of the place.
With its bright green wicker armchairs, and floor of dark red plush, and varicolored electric lights hanging in bunches from the ceiling, and badly done paintings of women and cherubs and flowers on the surface of the walls, and canopied, bedecked platform at one side of the dance floor, where eight jazz players performed, the hall gave you the general effect of spurious romance putting on its best front to hide the decay of its heart. The aura of respectability that hung over the place was an amusing and desperate deception. Two guards stood on the dance floor and reprimanded couples when they shimmied, or moved with a too undulating slowness, and other attendants watched the rows of wicker chairs and censored any open “spooning” among the patrons, and yet the hall was quite patently an inception-ground for rendezvous, and assignations, and flirtations, and covert flesh-pressures. The “hostesses” took soft drinks with their steadiest partners, at one end of the hall, with much touching of knees and flitting of hands under the tables, to induce the men to spend more freely—overrouged and lip-sticked girls, with bobbed hair and plump faces where sex had become the most automatic and shallow of signals. They wore short evening gowns, sleeveless and with low necks, and they “innocently” crossed their legs to show an inch or two of bare flesh above their rolled-up, thinnest stockings, and then uncrossed them again when they perceived that some man was staring at the exposure, keeping up these back-and-forth movements as though an innuendo with springs and wheels had replaced all of the sexual spontaneity within them.
Blanche and Rosenberg danced again and again to the jerky, moaning, truculently snickering ache and dementia of the music. To Blanche, dancing was the approved, indirect way in which you could relieve your sex without compromising it, and as she was hugged tightly against Rosenberg, he became desirable to her because the music and steps transformed him and cast a rhythmical glamor upon his body. She had the same feeling with any man with whom she danced, unless he was old or inept, and when she danced with a man who was physically attractive off the dance floor as well, the sensation rose to an all-conquering and haughty semiecstasy. Then she held her head high, and closed her eyes occasionally, and wished that darkness would suddenly descend on the floor.
After their first few dances, Blanche and Rosenberg sat down, breathless, and without a thought in their heads. To Rosenberg, dances were opportunities to embrace a girl without interference or remonstrance, but beyond that the music made him feel that he was capering on the divine top of the world, where such dull and mournful things as jobs, and money worries, and alarm clocks, and family quarrels had been deliciously left behind.
In front of Blanche, a bulky, short man, in a dark suit with the latest wide-bottomed trousers, was trying “to make” a dark, barely smiling girl, slender and dressed in a clinging gray gown, who refused to answer his remarks.
“Gee, I’m as popular around here as the German measles,” he said loudly.
The girl smiled more apparently but failed to answer him.
“Listen, just try me once,” he begged. “Just one dance. I’ll pay the doctor bills if I make you sick. I’m a good sport.”
The girl smiled more widely but still remained silent.