Page 407 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 377

heads, but the lure of Face remains.
Ryan’s was an open book. I could not hold my eyes on his face. He was
at that moment too open, too real, too vulnerable. He had been insomniac
for a month. His features were the wreckage of reality.
I never wanted that lovelorn Look in my eyes. For that reason, I’ve
always avoided romantic relationships. I’ve generally lived alone. I prefer
to confront faces only on celluloid in wide-screen color, with the two-
dimensional plane of eyes and nose and mouth spread twenty-feet across
the silver screen. Face to face in the flesh is almost more that I can tolerate.
I fear the fatal lure of Face.
Ryan had fallen through the looking glass of Kick’s face.
“So. Ryan.” Kweenie took up imperious residence on Solly’s sofa.
“How do you like it?”
“Like what?” he said.
“The treatment you’re getting.”
“What treatment?”
“Men,” she said. “The way men are treating you. Maybe now you
understand why women act the way we do. We’re tired of reaching out to
men.” She had the direct drive of a sister who felt she could say anything.
She was angry with the anger of what Kick’s seed had planted in her
body, but she had too much compassion to tell Ryan the truth of how
Kick had betrayed him more than he knew when she herself had caused
the betrayal. “Because of a man, I had to have an abortion. I had to do
violence to my body.”
“To say nothing of the child,” Ryan said.
“To say nothing of the father.” Kweenie corrected him. “What did
that jerk suffer?”
“You never told him?”
“Told him what?”
“That you were pregnant?”
“No.”
“That you carried his child?”
“No.”
“That you killed his child?”
“His child? His? What’s this his? What’s this killed?”
“His. Yes. Yours too. You murdered your own child.”
“I murdered nothing but something hateful he left inside me.”
Kweenie had taken advantage of Charley-Pop’s long illness. She had hit
Annie Laurie at a weak moment and extricated herself in the sixth grade
from Catholic school. She knew little about the moral theology that drove

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