We started joking then and drank more champagne until we couldn’t stop laughing, just the three of us, laughing at nothing much at all. Then Phillip excused himself for bed. That was odd. And early, too. Abdul stayed to talk some more. Something else was fishy, I thought. Like another signal understood by everyone but me. By this time Abdul and I were sitting on the couch. We had another glassful. I tried to keep from noticing how really handsome he was, how strong his hands were, holding mine.

He asked if he could be my boyfriend.

I said nothing. Then I smiled. “You got to promise that I can keep on dancing,” I said.

Abdul watched me carefully, too carefully. I couldn’t get enough of his eyes. “You got to promise you’re never going to stop.” He grinned, showing all his teeth. I closed his lips with mine and didn’t even think about taking another breath.

The next night was opening night. I wasn’t nervous one bit. Truth is, I wasn’t dancing solo any more.

Jesse

Jesse

I tried to tell Rooms about the dance and the Ellington music I was working with. She kept telling me to call her Ruella, her right name, as if I didn’t know it or couldn’t let it go. I wanted to tell her about fast travel underground, about taking the A train. She said she’d been there before as Ruella, not Rooms. I had to remember to call her that. So I stopped talking about the A train and told her she was wrong thinking about me and Metro that way. It wasn’t like that between us at all. Then what was it?

My dance was about the A train, how close it ran between darkness and light. It wasn’t about Metro dying or wanting to die at all. And it wasn’t, as she said, about the only kind of travel I knew.

The A train got me to dance class in the first place. It ran along Eighth Avenue and all the way to Harlem and beyond. Once, riding with Metro, we missed the stop at 59th Street and realized our error too late. The next stop wasn’t until 125th Street. Harlem. The car shuttled nonstop on uneven tracks until it finally screeched into the station where Metro was an instant foreigner. I was cautious, more cautious than I had to be. I was still new to New York, and I thought about all the rumors I’d heard about Harlem more as a deadly place than the home it actually was for thousands of people as black as me. With Metro, I was afraid. People watched us suspiciously. They were wondering, perhaps, who I was with this frail man with glasses looking curious and lost. I tried to find the platform for the downtown train, and Metro kept staring at the people around us.