him. Now Anita had poured much of it into the mould of her old vaudeville act. She had taught him the difficult Russian acrobatic steps. With the occasional aid of Peter Delaney, she had taught him her soft-shoe routine. And she had taught him the waltz.
It was marvelous to execute his own high-kick specialty, his own creation, a dance he alone could perform, thanks to the unusual limberness of his legs as well as their length. That was the number that would, Delaney said, "make" him. But the waltz was a new experience.
In the beginning, when he first rehearsed the waltz with Anita, he decided he was too awkward for ball-room dancing. The long arc of their steps, the break in which she soared up and away from him, the intricacies of the ever-changing figures; and then the slow embarrassing undulation with which the dance concluded, when, body to body, they danced as one—a dance, in short, in which his dashing fiery youthfulness was forced to yield to suave and surefooted experience—this he could not do, he said.
But she made him do it. For three weeks he did nothing else. At last, when their costumes came, when she was slim and rich in cloth of gold and he was elegantly slender in his tuxedo and they danced to a Paul Whiteman recording and the late autumn afternoon light was growing dim, he knew what it was to dance—as Anita said—divinely. In that moment, twilight descending, he was comfortable again. No remote fears, no obscure problems, no rising tide of anger … instead something precious, like happiness.
That night Anita had not wanted to work. But Ken had insisted and they had danced the waltz again at Delaney's. At the door of her bungalow, she had seized his head, and
