Dancing In The Kitchen

copyright@2021 will maguire

Late one night in Little Italy, I was 2 six packs in and stumbling home up the stairs. Passing an open door I saw this old Italian man all of about 50. 

His wife had been hit by a bus on Fordham Road that summer. Killed. 

When he got the call he just dropped the phone. Never said a word. He went silent the way some men do, trying to make himself deaf to grief by ignoring it, by vowing to never speak it and never listen to its roar... like the sound of the el train each night. 

So he stopped answering the phone and and then his door. Tried to make himself unreachable to grief.  

And he went to work each day, praying with his sweat that the ache in his back might someday quiet the ache in his heart. 

That night he had the radio on some oldies station, standing at the stove, the smell of onion and sausage and peppers in the air. 

As I passed it started to play The Very Thought of You. 

‘The mere idea of you...the longing here for you....the very thought of you’

He stopped then stepped away toward the sound, sweet and sharp and impossible to unhear.

His back was turned to me but he began to sway and slowly raised his arms, wrapping them around her memory.

And I could see he was dancing…reaching for something unreachable in the sound, like she was suddenly caught for just a moment in the airwaves. 

The song swelled and rose, elegant and intimate. 

It was like watching someone pray. 

As the last notes faded he reached out trying to hold on. When he could not, the dying sound slipping away, he put his face on the radio like he was trying to follow her down into the circuits and up into the air. 

But she dissolved into the static. Gone forever again. 

And suddenly alone again he picked the radio up, held it close for a moment then turned and threw it against the wall.

It split open, the light fading from the dial.

I was young and stupid and drunk. I stood there gawking certain that I was seeing something beautiful and awful. I felt like falling to my knees…out of a kind of reverence. For the pain of it.

I cleared my throat. He turned and saw me there in the hall... saw me peering at his remembering and dancing with his grief. 

He let out a stifled embarrassed cry, then shuffled toward me. 

“I’m sorry,” I said. 

He stared wordlessly at the linoleum then finally glanced up at me, his eyes full of  abandoned airwaves. Then very slowly he closed the door.

Dance with a woman in her kitchen and she will love you forever. 

Sometimes forever lasts longer than a man can bear. 

The next morning from the window I saw him carefully stacking the broken radio and his silenced memory in the alley, leaving it with all the other unwanted remains. 

And later a junk man, searching for spare parts, gathered it up to add to his collection of the broken promising to  someday make it sing once again.

WLM