Once I was making love to a girl when this song –
you are taken aback. Ah, I see! Okay.
I say “to a girl” not because she was younger than the age of consent, nor to distinguish the gender of such a supposed child, nor even because I believe that all women should be referred to in a diminutive fashion, but because I am an old man reminiscing of a time when I was younger and with a younger lover of an age, if I were to encounter her today, toward which I should feel fatherly more than randy.
I say “I was making love to” this woman – if she still lives, girl so long as she remains the youthful figment of aged memory – I say “I was making love to” her although we were not actually, at that very moment, engaged in the contortions of coitus, although that likely, in the normal sequelae – which is to say, conditioned by the western hero mythic plot arc of engagement, development, conflict, crisis-climax, denouement, and the dialectics of chivalric romance – would have developed; I use the phrase in the broader inclusive sense to say that we were there, arrayed in a state of mutual engagement and near complete déshabillés and some ardent exchange of attention, when the Russian Dance song, from Tom Waits’ opera the Black Rider – apparently a traditional dance with a drum track that sounds like boots marching – came on the stereo, and, hearing the tune she jumped up, all “what – what – what’s this?” with her bra hanging from loose loops at her elbows down in front of her panties, and, stumbling out of the jeans bunched around her ankles, began to dance: It was a high-stepping march-like dance, once her feet were free of the trousers, and she swung her arms and her body into it, throwing off the bra as readily as she had kicked her feet free, looking like she should be dressed in a dirndl and dancing in a flame-lit, dirt-floored, wooden room with twenty or thirty other stout folk in wool swinging and drinking, laughing and stomping, instead of alone and naked, stomping, jumping down from my mattress and across the carpet to turn up the song, her face flushed in the green glare of the stereo display.
“Oh my God! Do you know this song?” she cried, but, as I counted to four in Russian at the caesura before the da capo to indicate what I knew, she restarted the song and pulled me up to stomp and dance with her until, laughing, we fell again on the bed where she referred to events of her childhood in vague and general phrases that left me knowing her little better.
There is another story in which that woman did something unexpected in my bed, but in those events, about which I have testified, her waking up, sitting up and screaming was little more than backdrop to an otherwise unfolding drama, about which I merely comment that when the public defender said “Let the record reflect that the witness has identified the only black man in the room,” as he should have, I replied “Not only that, let the record reflect that he’s the only guy in the room dressed in an orange jumpsuit, who was also handcuffed in the hallway outside when I arrived.”