Tours of the Black Clock

97

SHE WASN’T TO BE in London more than ten months. The city in its victory was indistinguishable in its destruction from Vienna in its defeat. Joaquin Young greeted her arrival with the same astonishment he’d shown the afternoon she appeared in Amsterdam; he’d written the letter without any idea it would even reach her. More than this she was quite grown up, the years between fifteen and twenty-five even more profound than his between twenty-two and thirty-two. She was chagrined to find herself still excited by him. She’d thought that the night she blew a hole through Dr. Reimes she exiled herself from the caprices of attraction in the same way she’d been exiled from so much of life. “I’ve no consideration in the least of loving you,” she told him; in a more insolent moment he would have laughed at her. Eleven years however he’d lived with the impotence of his one night with her on the houseboat, and the mark of her other lovers.

Between this time that she arrived in London and the morning ten months later that the Joaquin Young Dance Company sailed for New York, she met another dancer named Paul and thus slept with a man for the first time since the end of the war. Paul was innocent and fragile in the way Young was arrogant and scheming, a dark French boy two years younger than she. They walked along the collapsed tunnels of the underground and slept with their hands full of shillings next to a heater that had to be fed coins every twenty minutes. Because Joaquin didn’t think Paul warranted competition, he was somehow all the more incensed by Dania’s affair with him; Paul may have been half the charismatic figure Joaquin was but it could be presumed that with a woman at night his body was at least adequate to the task, and that his heart was true enough neither to see nor care about the traces of other men on her. “Then don’t love me,” Joaquin told Dania, “with or without consideration. Just dance the way I watched you dance before.” With this declaration, and fully intending to win her back whether she wanted it or not, he wrote a dance especially for her.