Last One Standing
by Maura Greene
It was the warmest day so far, seventy-two degrees on March 31st, and as Jack Eugene Bishop Jr. drove through Cambridge, men and women lingered on street corners chatting in the still-lush evening air, college students assembled their charcoal barbecue in a side-yard and a squat man hunched inside a short white jacket practiced his golf swing in the park. In every car Jack passed, the windows were rolled down. A small black dog stuck his furry head out the window of a pick-up truck, his nose tilted up, and his eyes wide open as the warm air streamed past the ears on the top of his head. It reminded him of the day he moved to Cambridge from the town of Millbury, years after the Vietnam War had ended. College students wore shorts and sleeveless shirts and even though he had just turned forty, he felt like a fussy old man in his windbreaker, long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans.
When he reached Huron Ave., both sides of the street were lined with cars. The parking lot behind the VFW was full and in the golf course lot across the street he found every spot taken, cars wedged in the corners and swung up on the thin strip of grass along the chain link fence. He drove the quiet side streets until he found a length of empty curb behind a red-painted corner store. He parked, locked the car and started walking. He broke into a jog far behind a group of young girls who seemed headed the same way, and he slowed as he approached, rather than pass them. At the VFW he was surprised to see a line of dancers waiting at the door, for in the six and a half years he’d danced at Swing City he’d never waited; he would walk straight up to the table in the lobby, pay his ten dollars, and dance. He took his place at the back of the line. He ran his hand through his hair, which was streaked with silver now. He pulled a Marlboro from the pack and lit it. He had just taken his first drag when Robin bounded up the steps, wearing a short sleeve fitted black blouse and jeans.
“I drove around forever – couldn’t find a space,” she said. As she spoke the music thumped from inside the building. He knew it was the Love Dogs playing, and he was anxious to see the band on stage and to dance. “I had to be here for Swing City’s last night,” she said.
“This wasn’t even my favorite place, you know – I like nightclubs with a good bar,” he said. “We used to go to the Upstairs Lounge, and they played rockabilly and swing, and at the end of the night even the people from next door at Man Ray would show up. You’d never been to the Upstairs Lounge.”
“Never.”
“You missed something there.”
One of the usual ticket-takers, a man with a wrinkled burnt orange T-Shirt and black hair that wanted cutting, had turned bouncer for the evening. He counted the heads of eight people, including Jack and Robin. Jack stubbed out his cigarette on the side of the concrete steps and followed Robin, whom he had waved into his place in line. He handed the fresh-faced young man at the folding table a twenty and neatly placed the ten he received back in his wallet. Dancers milled about by the bowls of pretzels and mints and the water bubbler. It was hot in the lobby and he wished he’d worn a short sleeved shirt. He felt slightly confused. He’d taken a nap earlier in the afternoon, and it always threw him off, sleeping early in the day. He’d woken up sweaty and shaking. He’d dreamt of Sully, a buddy of his in Vietnam who’d died. It still surprised him, Sully, dying at only 19. He had other friends who died, but it was Sully, who whooped when letters arrived from home and whose tender Irish skin burned in the sun, whose death had really got to him. He’d thought about calling Sully’s parents, or his sister, Tara, when he got back to Millbury. By the time Jack arrived home, though, no one wanted to hear about the war – shame on him that he got drafted - and he never made the call. He kept the few photographs Sully had taken of all of them in a shoebox. Only Sully, the photographer, was missing. Jack was shirtless in one picture, thin and tanned with his dog tags glinting in the sun. He stood in the back row because he was one of the tallest.
Robin chatted with Beau near the entrance to the dance floor, her right hand in her pocket, a serious expression on her face. Jack moved past them into the dance hall. The Love Dogs were swinging, high up on the stage. The singer wore a purple suit, and his hair was styled in a pompadour. The dance floor was packed and everyone, of necessity, danced small and tight. The crowd at the bar was four people deep, and he wanted a gin and tonic to celebrate the first real day of spring so he pressed through it. As he waited for the bartender, he swept his gaze over the dancers and it seemed to him a different place altogether than the spot where he had spent nearly every Friday night. He recognized the regulars; the women he paid attention to the most, because they were his dance partners, but he knew the men too: the short gray-haired man with the Lithuanian accent who danced too close, the heavy set guy who always wore shorts and white socks – the postman, he’d nicknamed him – and the thin bald one who danced only with the youngest girls, impressing them with his elegant turns. Jack had seen the bald one’s face on an Internet dating site, and he had that quick shock of recognition, as though it was his own face he saw there. He paid for his drink and tossed a dollar bill into the tip basket, and jostled for a spot where he could see the dance floor, but still keep his elbow on the bar.
Robin was lindy-hopping with one of the boys who stayed in that corner by the stage. When he danced with Robin it was never lindy-hop, but single time and triple time swing, straight and tall and in time to the music. He favored the slower songs; “Come Fly with Me” was a favorite and Robin knew it, and sometimes asked him to dance when she heard it. “Dance with me, it’s a Jack song,” she’d say, and he’d take the lead and dance her to the center of the floor.
“Hey Jack.” Calvin moved in closer, his hair long and tousled. He smacked Jack on the arm. “What do you think? Will you go to Newton when Swing City moves?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been to the new spot. There’s no bar there, you know, and it’s like a high school gymnasium - not that this is charming - but I’ve grown used to it.” There were folding chairs against the walls, and a worn wood floor, and a few scattered framed prints Matt had hung for atmosphere. It reminded him of his third floor apartment, a short walk from Porter Square. When he moved there in the mid-eighties he’d bought a new couch and kitchen table with wings that folded in case he had company. He thought it was a temporary move, but he’d been there twenty years. There was a worn look to his furnishings: the oval braided rug in his bedroom had unraveled, three handles were missing from his dresser and the white cloth napkins were frayed and slightly stained. Jack rarely had visitors, and he told himself that it was comfort, not appearances, that counted.
Jack and Calvin watched as the band rocked and the dancers pressed open a circle in the corner by the stage to watch the lindy hoppers jam, the boys sliding the girls right through their legs, and then flipping them over their shoulders. Robin in the opposite corner had a new partner now, a newbie who had just learned the swing basic, and she smiled and followed his one move, chatting really, instead of dancing, because that’s what you did when someone couldn’t dance. You had to encourage them, even if they were shuffling and glancing down at their feet; otherwise they’d never show up again. When he first went to the Upstairs Lounge he was a newbie himself, watching the other dancers and copying their moves. Now he had his routine, the turns he liked, and it didn’t bother him that he didn’t try to learn new ones: he wasn’t that ambitious – he just liked to dance with a pretty girl in time to the music and flirt with her. The dance floor was so large, there was usually space to move, and it was what he enjoyed, the room to swing the girl out, only to have her swing back to him again, and then he would turn her, and her hair would fly from her shoulders. Robin was a good dancer, much better than when they’d first met. She’d had a boyfriend at the time, and he showed up once in a while. They’d even been engaged, but that didn’t last, as he knew it wouldn’t. Most of the people he knew who danced every Friday night were unmarried, because marriage usually meant giving up the dancing. Even the ones who were married sometimes brought their spouses and they flirted and danced with others, and it was hardly like they were married at all.
The crowd moved into a swing line dance, the shim sham. They shuffled a double tap step and then a cross-over and he sang along to the lyrics he knew well: and it’s easy, breezy - and that’s what love is for! He’d never seen the shim-sham danced with such abandon and at the end of the song when the dancers broke out of the line and swung into place as couples, he felt moved.
Calvin left to ask a woman in a short black halter top dress to dance. Jack pushed his half-full drink to the end of the bar, saving it.
“Dance?” Jack asked Margaret. She was tall, so he could look her straight in the eyes, and she had short full blonde hair and she moved well, not awkward like you might think a tall girl would. She nodded and he took her hand. He saw a small opening on the floor and he moved toward it with Margaret following. He turned to face her.
“It’s the last night,” she said. “I feel so sad.”
“Not me. Everything has to end. That’s just the way it is.”
“I know,” she said. He pressed his hand into her waist and sent her into a tight turn. Other dancers brushed past him. “Still,” she said. “You never think it will. And when it does, it takes you by surprise.” She was a big girl, but she had a small waist, and she always wore skirts. He liked skirts, though most women these days wore jeans. Nothing wrong with jeans; it was just that skirts unfolded when the girls danced, and bare legs and flipping skirts made him think of the possibilities.
“This never was my favorite place,” Jack said. “Even Ryles, with the small dance floor, is a better place to dance. And they have a nice bar and tables where you can sit and chat.”
“I’ve been to Ryles once or twice, but this is my default spot. I’m on auto pilot when I drive here on Friday nights; I don’t know what I’ll do when it closes.” Jack felt slightly annoyed. The place wasn’t closing – it was just moving. She could drive to Newton the same as driving to Cambridge. Now he remembered what it was he didn’t like about Margaret. When they’d first met, they’d had some laughs and some good dances on the floor. She was angling though, for more of an invitation and he finally took her up on it, taking her to dinner at that Italian spot in Teele Square. They’d had a nice time, but there was something off-putting about her pursuing him, and she was sentimental in a way he wasn’t and they never went out again.
“Thank you for the dance,” he said when the song ended, and he glanced up at the band, and the singer was talking in between songs, but he didn’t listen to the words. After he escorted Margaret off the dance floor he had to turn sideways, with an excuse me, excuse me to negotiate his way through the crowd back to the bar. People whom he hardly recognized were here tonight; how had he overlooked them he wondered, or perhaps they never really came at all and were here just to find out what they had missed. He glanced at the clock behind the bar. He’d arrived late, and now it was nearly midnight. When the place closed he could still make last call at the Cantab.
Robin squeezed through the crowd and joined him at the bar.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Why don’t you try me and find out?” She laughed, and it was a stupid old line he’d used dozens of times before, but if he pulled it off quickly he’d still get a reaction. “How about a dance, then? I’m dancing with everyone I know because it’s the last hurrah, and I know you, and we haven’t danced tonight.”
“Let’s go, then,” he said, and he smiled, because it always pleased him when Robin asked him to dance.
He’d already finished his gin and tonic so he pushed the plastic glass filled with ice cubes to the center of the bar where the busy bartender would find it and throw it in the trash. He liked Robin because she was pretty and always in a good mood. She followed effortlessly, and it made him feel like a better dancer, that she would turn with the slightest pressure from his hand on her waist or when he raised his hand and she knew the signal was coming but waited until he gave it. He stood in starting position, his right hand in hers.
“A man kissed my chest tonight.”
“He what?”
“You heard me. He kissed my chest. Right here,” she said, retrieving her hand and pointing to the area directly above her breasts. People are crazy tonight.”
“What would your boyfriend think?”
“Oh that. It didn’t work out.”
“I saw my first love this week for the first time in almost forty years,” he said, feeling in a rush to speak of it. He pictured Joan when she was a girl with straight brown hair parted down the middle and long legs, longer than his. She had perfect, cream-colored skin, without a mark or a mole on it.
“You’re kidding. What was it like?”
“I was glad I didn’t marry her. We were planning to when I went off to the war. But she’s boring now. I saved myself from making a big mistake.” He laughed.
“Why was she boring?
“Oh, I shouldn’t say that she was boring. Maybe she wasn’t. I still remember the letter she sent me, a “Dear John letter,” when she found someone else. She married him; she’s still with him today, but I have that letter.”
“You kept it!”
“I have a box of cards, love letters, photographs. If you write me a letter, I’ll keep it there too.” He had never told anyone, but in those first few weeks in Vietnam he had felt terribly homesick. He was nineteen years old and with the exception of a field trip to the Old North Church in Boston and one Red Sox game at Fenway Park, he’d never left Millbury. He and Joan had graduated from high school together and she worked as a bookkeeper for an accountant in town, and they had a regular Friday night date. She was steady and pretty and thinking about how she would be waiting for him sustained him, particularly in the first few hard weeks after he left. Sometimes at night before he slept he thought of her and told her what frightened him and what they’d endured and it was like praying, he later realized, asking her to help keep him safe.
“I have a box just like that, in my closet. Letters from boyfriends. I almost threw it out, this winter, but in the end I couldn’t. I should get rid of it. I haven’t seen my first boyfriend in person for years.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s famous. He’s a weekend news anchor with NBC.”
“Famous?” Jack laughed. “That’s just barely famous, these days.”
“Still. I should have married him and I didn’t.” Jack quickly shifted his gaze away from the expression on her face. “Don’t you ever think about lives you could have lived?” she asked.
“Well I have no regrets. I have enjoyed every single day. Really. Every single one,” Jack said, with a sudden intensity. They were dancing, but it was in the old familiar patterns, and he wasn’t distracted from his thoughts. He swept her into the cuddle, a side by side move into his arms and then released her. He thought of how he’d dated Joan and how they planned to spend their lives together. Jack remembered how he’d never called Sully’s family, or the families of his other buddies who’d died. He thought of how he never gave Margaret a chance – how he still wouldn’t give her a chance. Jack sometimes wondered what he’d done with those years after the war. He’d found a job through a political friend in the clerk’s office at the Middlesex Superior Court. He answered the same questions every day at the counter from the familiar mix of small time attorneys wearing rumpled suits and plaintiffs whose hot stale breath from an anxious breakfast of coffee and pastry purchased from the blind man at the lobby kiosk assaulted him. “I lied,” he said. “I do have regrets. Everyone does, I guess.”
“Do you remember that time the lights went out and the DJ couldn’t play the music and everyone stomped their feet and still danced?” she asked.
“The tree fell on the power lines, and everyone stayed for the next hour, dancing without music, because they didn’t want to leave.” He remembered how he felt that night – bereft – because he didn’t know where to go when the crowds thinned. He’d reluctantly started his car in the golf course parking lot and drove home to bed.
The song ended, and they came to a quick stop together on the last note. He escorted Robin off the dance floor. She gave him a little wave and swooped off to the left. Jack saw Margaret, alone, near the lobby entrance. He dashed to where she stood, stopping abruptly before her. She smiled at his approach.
“One more dance?”
“Let’s.”
He held her hand and took her to the center of the floor. It was a slow number because it was the end of the evening. He turned her and she followed well. She was a good dancer, he thought. He’d always known it. She was an attractive woman, Margaret was.
“You’ve always danced great, Margaret.”
“I love to dance, and I’ll miss dancing here.”
Margaret wore a white lace top, and her skin looked warm beneath it. Her hair was off her neck, and he’d always found that enticing, the length of a bare neck. As they danced, Jack noticed another couple slightly to his left. The man dipped the girl, as though he meant to kiss her. It reminded him of those photographs of the end of World War II, when the soldiers and sailors came home and the girls kissed them in the streets. It was ridiculous, really, how the idea of that welcome now filled his eyes with tears. Jack swiped at his right eye with the side of his index finger. He’d arrived home alone at South Station, and as soon as he could change into civilian clothes, he did. It didn’t matter, though: he woke up at night dreaming he was still there, on the edge of the jungle. The VA sent him to a program to help him transition; but when he turned off the light, he was there in the heat with his buddies, feeling the warmth of his body on his dog tags.
Jack glanced at Margaret’s eyes, half-closed as she followed his lead. She had the barest smudge of coral lipstick clinging to her lips. Jack suddenly wanted that feeling of the girl kissing him, an acknowledgement of what he’d done and what he’d sacrificed. The song would end soon. He thought this was it - the moment in the photograph, and in a second it would be gone, and Margaret would go home and the night would end. Jack bent his knee and dipped her. She smiled a slight sweet smile, which he read as her pleasure in being securely held. Her perfume smelled like the petals of a white gardenia unfolding. He hesitated for a second, and then leaned in and gently kissed her. She kissed him back and he felt joy rising, shaking him, as though waking him from an unrestful sleep. As he swept her upright dancers tilted about them and the colors of their clothes swirled and the music beat forward.
When the song ended, he escorted her off the floor.
“Would you have dinner with me again?”
“I’d like that.” Margaret waved to a woman who stood with her purse in her hand near the exit. “Barbara’s waiting, and I’ve got to take her home, but I’d love to get together.”
“I’ll call you at the beginning of the week, then, to make plans.”
Margaret grasped his hand and her palm felt soft and warm. He felt a rush of feeling for Margaret and for this night, and he gave her a brief hug. He watched as she greeted her friend and they left together through the lobby.
It was late, and the bar area was almost empty and he felt relieved that most of the crowd had gone home. The band left the stage and clusters of dancers milled about. A strong man in a blue bowling shirt lifted a petite athletic-looking girl over his shoulder and set her gently back on the floor. They practiced the move again as their friends watched.
“Last call,” the bartender said, and Jack ordered a gin and tonic.
Jack held his drink, realizing it was the last he’d ever have at the bar. Matt stood quietly a few feet away.
“I guess I’ve officially closed the place down,” Jack said.
“You have.” Matt looked tired, and although he usually smiled, this time he didn’t.
“I can feel good about that. The last one standing, as it were.” Jack glanced about. There were empty plastic glasses and water bottles on top of the huge speakers, at the edge of the stage, and beneath the folding chairs.
“I’ll see you in Newton,” Matt said.
“I’ll see you there,” Jack said, although he wasn’t so sure. He pushed his still-full plastic cup to the center of the bar. Robin had already left. Calvin was gone, too. Jack glanced at the empty stage, at the expanse of the wooden dance floor. He took one last turn, spinning on the ball of his foot, and strolled out through the carpeted lobby.