Tuesdays, Halloween costume parties, and formal black and white New Year’s Eve bashes, most of which descended into something approaching a garage band bacchanal.
The ballroom was thirty feet end to end, sixteen wide, with a pitched ceiling that met the spine of the roof some fourteen feet above the floor. At the time of closing, everything in between had been a shambles. The plaster walls were crumbling, there were holes in the bar and the crown molding curled like strips of flaking skin. Some shameless resident from 1976 had installed hideous vinyl over the original wood floor. I tore the bubbling vinyl out and refinished the wood; Stacey tiled the sunken center, making a checkerboard of brushed Italian marble that still had chips in it from wedding dancers one hundred years ago. Her uncle Steve was a restoration pirate in New Jersey. He had crow-barred one hundred and sixty marble tiles from some wannabe gangster’s home in Newark and paid a guy to truck them out as a wedding present to us. Stacey had set them one at a time until her knees bled. She couldn’t walk right for two days after, and I’m pretty sure there are still drops of my wife’s blood in the grout.
At the far end, opposite the entrance, was the long mahogany bar with a brass foot rail and a massive mirror behind it. The mirror was a single pane some twelve feet wide and four feet tall. The gilt-stenciled glass was smoke-gray with age and all the more charming for it, so we left it as is.
Hitting the estate sale circuit, Stacey spent the better part of a year and almost ten thousand dollars picking out the benches, fainting couches, glassware and other set pieces. I hired a guy to rewire the Art Deco shell sconces and another to install the antique turntable, which delivered Dory Previn, Glen Miller, Edith Piaf and, occasionally, Neil Diamond or the Chili Peppers, and sometimes Ghost to the B&W tower speakers. We had danced there with as many as fifty friends, and sometimes alone.
On our fifth wedding anniversary, Stacey called me up to the ballroom and greeted me wearing nothing more than black heels and a pair of silver satin elbow gloves, the ballroom lit with candles. As I had moved to her and she to me, both of us playing out roles in some romance channel movie of the week, she twisted her ankle and fell down. I burst out laughing, she started crying, and after slapping me for laughing, she laughed too. I ended up carrying her to the bedroom where I packed her ankle with ice, which in turn made her shiver and more or less killed the sex. Somehow the whole catastrophe of her seduction being thwarted by her clumsiness made me happier than any sex would have, or maybe it just touched me somewhere deeper. This is so Stacey , I remember thinking. Innocent, not cut out for the dark side, but willing to try. Always trying to make me happy.
I hated the ballroom now.
It was windowless, hot and musty - no matter how many times I asked Olivia to clean and air it out. The last time I had stood in the ballroom in the middle of the night, I experienced an undercurrent of longing and anger so deep it seemed almost limitless. It was a hot flare, feminine, not from me. It crawled over my shoulders and scratched my skin. I might have been in a bad mood, but the last time I had been in the ballroom, I fainted. It was last Thanksgiving, after the Lions lost another one by three touchdowns. I went in to look for a shot glass behind the bar and just blacked out. I came to in the garage, sitting in the Audi with the keys in the ignition. I did not remember exiting the ballroom, walking down the stairs, stepping out the back door. Something in me just snapped, a circuit overloaded, and there I was. The garage doors open, the alley beckoning.
I hadn’t been back to the ballroom since.
Until the night of her death anniversary, when I was disturbed from my drunken sleep on the couch by the familiar cold sensation at my feet. Time
The ballroom was thirty feet end to end, sixteen wide, with a pitched ceiling that met the spine of the roof some fourteen feet above the floor. At the time of closing, everything in between had been a shambles. The plaster walls were crumbling, there were holes in the bar and the crown molding curled like strips of flaking skin. Some shameless resident from 1976 had installed hideous vinyl over the original wood floor. I tore the bubbling vinyl out and refinished the wood; Stacey tiled the sunken center, making a checkerboard of brushed Italian marble that still had chips in it from wedding dancers one hundred years ago. Her uncle Steve was a restoration pirate in New Jersey. He had crow-barred one hundred and sixty marble tiles from some wannabe gangster’s home in Newark and paid a guy to truck them out as a wedding present to us. Stacey had set them one at a time until her knees bled. She couldn’t walk right for two days after, and I’m pretty sure there are still drops of my wife’s blood in the grout.
At the far end, opposite the entrance, was the long mahogany bar with a brass foot rail and a massive mirror behind it. The mirror was a single pane some twelve feet wide and four feet tall. The gilt-stenciled glass was smoke-gray with age and all the more charming for it, so we left it as is.
Hitting the estate sale circuit, Stacey spent the better part of a year and almost ten thousand dollars picking out the benches, fainting couches, glassware and other set pieces. I hired a guy to rewire the Art Deco shell sconces and another to install the antique turntable, which delivered Dory Previn, Glen Miller, Edith Piaf and, occasionally, Neil Diamond or the Chili Peppers, and sometimes Ghost to the B&W tower speakers. We had danced there with as many as fifty friends, and sometimes alone.
On our fifth wedding anniversary, Stacey called me up to the ballroom and greeted me wearing nothing more than black heels and a pair of silver satin elbow gloves, the ballroom lit with candles. As I had moved to her and she to me, both of us playing out roles in some romance channel movie of the week, she twisted her ankle and fell down. I burst out laughing, she started crying, and after slapping me for laughing, she laughed too. I ended up carrying her to the bedroom where I packed her ankle with ice, which in turn made her shiver and more or less killed the sex. Somehow the whole catastrophe of her seduction being thwarted by her clumsiness made me happier than any sex would have, or maybe it just touched me somewhere deeper. This is so Stacey , I remember thinking. Innocent, not cut out for the dark side, but willing to try. Always trying to make me happy.
I hated the ballroom now.
It was windowless, hot and musty - no matter how many times I asked Olivia to clean and air it out. The last time I had stood in the ballroom in the middle of the night, I experienced an undercurrent of longing and anger so deep it seemed almost limitless. It was a hot flare, feminine, not from me. It crawled over my shoulders and scratched my skin. I might have been in a bad mood, but the last time I had been in the ballroom, I fainted. It was last Thanksgiving, after the Lions lost another one by three touchdowns. I went in to look for a shot glass behind the bar and just blacked out. I came to in the garage, sitting in the Audi with the keys in the ignition. I did not remember exiting the ballroom, walking down the stairs, stepping out the back door. Something in me just snapped, a circuit overloaded, and there I was. The garage doors open, the alley beckoning.
I hadn’t been back to the ballroom since.
Until the night of her death anniversary, when I was disturbed from my drunken sleep on the couch by the familiar cold sensation at my feet. Time
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