When a silky sweet and drunk Indian girl sat next to me on the hard wooden bench, I realized that we had been there long enough to become part of the crowd. The room had filled up enough with preppy bodies, indistinguishable from each other except by color, that we had become anonymous like the television in the corner.
They swayed with the music, as we (me and my friend) continued to talk at the table. To and fro, drama quickly begun and as quickly ended, the dancers remained always faithful to the music. They followed the beat, one-two’ing and grinding into each other with plastic amused smiles. One-two, three-four-five, one-two.
The drunk Indian girl sat there without saying anything for a few minutes, looking at turns bashful and quizzically at us. When she continued not to say anything, my friend said hello. I waved. She looked at us quickly and then looked down. She was not shy, though, and seemed to have only stumbled into our quiet harbor out of chance, out of a need to sit down.
She finally asked my friend something, something that we could not understand. Oh, yes, we are deaf — yes. Deaf. She tried to whisper in my ear, and also prompted me to repeat what my friend was saying in her ear. In a swirl of dark presence, she left the table; only to be seen shortly after slowly dancing with an tony automaton with douche hair.
During those surreal moments where she joined our space, our table, for a time; we were connected however tenuously to the electric field of bodies around us. Not long after that, purses were deposited at our table for safekeeping, with a slurred apology/request. This was from a group of girls newly inserted into the scene, ready to dance.
In the corner stood a short man, of short stature, of short patience and short chances of getting some that night. For he was an average frustrated chump, pecking at the fringes of the dancing bodies, hoping to catch a stray connection or glance, so he could be pulled in. Pulled in the weaving mass, to be woven, touched, and wanted.
We saw him shortly after, shuffling away down the street, alone. He didn’t have that air of quiet desperation around him; worse, he had that sense of eager, alert optimism—the kind of optimism and weird confidence that imbues every creepy person out there.
Our thoughts often turned to the curves on every beautiful woman dancing and the admiring smiles on the mens’ faces, connecting the dots, following the trigonometry of desire to its natural conclusion—a dream made manifest in reality.
