Adam slips magnets into his pockets, and they sway to 69 Love Songs. They are quiet for all three albums except for the click click of his jeans’ tiny metal rivets hitting hers. [Magnetic Fields, 69 Love songs]
Baxter takes off his shirt by the third song. He is tiny now, and stretch marks spread across his waist and she can see ribs under pale skin. She wonders if she can slip her fingers between the curved bones and reach to his caged heart. She can see no birds through the translucent skin, but he whistles to Tom Waits. [Tom Waits, Mule Variations]
Chuck’s favorite song is Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie. He waits in the bathroom for her to cue up the track. On the downbeat he throws open the door and enters in big snagle-puss strides, smile from ear to ear. She claps, he waves jazz hands, palms spread wide. [Ella Fitzgerald, Clap Hands, here comes Charlie]
David comes with white ladders and a handsaw. They cut a hole in the ceiling and climb onto the roof. Ziggy, the super, spilled stardust on the roof last week. It doesn’t brush off denim easily. [David Bowie, Ziggy Stardus]
Elvis doesn’t have to do much. Just thinking about shaking his hips makes her swoon. They have matching white jumpsuits. [Elvis Presley, Live at Madison Square Garden]
Frank dances with a hand extended above her head, close enough to box her ear with his elbow. There is an oyster there, tattooed on the inside of his arm. On its tongue, a tiny pearl pierces the skin. She licks its salt. [Beck Hanson, Sea Change]
Gerald wears plaid pants and has a big white beard that smells like the ocean. They dance with their shoulders mostly; his are hunched from years of metal strapped around his neck. When he is in the bathroom, she tears his obituary down from her bedroom wall. The newspapers lie, she thinks. She crumples it up, and burns it on the stove while he is flushing. [Gerry Mulligan, What is there to say?]
Harrison brings snorkel gear and they dance in the bathtub, shower on. Underwater all songs sound like vibraphones and electronic machines. [Radiohead, In Rainbows]
Ian carries a piano in his left pocket. In his right pocket, a handful of tiny oranges. He slips them between her lips while walking the bass line with his left hand, and tells her about Tin Pan Alley. It was just down the block, before the organic bar moved in [Tin Pan Alley, assorted recordings]
Jethro brings a band of horses, a panda bear, a parade of wolves, powerful mice, primates from the tundra, and half a dozen modest mice. They talk about starting a zoo for dancing animals. He wants to charge five-cent admission; she wants dimes. They start training the Monkees first. [Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary]
Kevin and Kevin come together. While one makes a drink of bourbon with booze, the other makes a theramin in the corner out of a standing lamp and a television. They play the Beach Boys on the radio and dance with fists swinging. One fist controls the pitch, the other the volume. [Beach Boys, Pet Sounds]
Lionel trained as a pilot with Iberian Air. He mostly flied from Madrid to Barcelona and to nights in Tunisia, but when he flies to America, he stops by 5B. He brings her castanetas and they dance a muted flamenco, clicking heels in their socks and drinking calimochos. [Carlos Montoya, Flamenco Fire]
Michael builds a stage from the window to the middle of the living room. On it they dance to David Byrne and she can touch the ceiling without jumping at all. It is the new best spot in the house. [Talking Heads, Speaking in Tongues]
Naftali ties neckties around their foreheads. Hers is red with white stripes, his is green with gold diamonds. When they dance to The Boss they mean business. [Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA]
Oliver dances like a sprinter. They run round the coffee table in tight ovals. He laps her three times over the course of one song. She bangs her shin and curses the stars of track and field. [Belle and Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister]
Paul pirouettes to Polly Jean. The space isn’t big enough for such fancy footwork; he clips a vase and spills tulips on the floor. She thinks about crying, then puts on shin guards. [PJ Harvey, Basquiat soundtrack]
Quincy is an old friend from Seattle. He has a bad hip but wags one finger with impeccable rhythm. She sits on the couch next to him with a hand on his thigh. With the other hand, dancing. [Quincy Jones, This is How I Feel About Jazz]
Randy describes eternity in six minutes and five seconds and then they listen to old sung stories on the fire escape. The stars look like dinosaurs on their backs. They think about dancing, but like constellations more. [Built To Spill, Ancient Melodies of the Future]
Simon comes over to dance. They dance barefoot because she broke the hell of her favorite shoes in a subway grate. When she is peeing he steals her shoes. Three days she finds a paper bag on her doorstep. Simon has put diamonds on the soles of her shoes. She puts them on, lays on her belly, and thinks about calling him again. [Paul Simon, Graceland]
Toni! Tony! Toné! pays visit but they will not dance with the lights on. So she turns off the lights and puts on a headlamp. When she spins, which she does every four measures, she looks like a lighthouse. [Spoon, Kill the Moonlight]
Ulysses dances to The Unicorns with a finger on his forehead. She tells him he takes things too literally. He says he does not take things too literally, he was thinking about narwhales. She starts dancing like an octopus. They choreograph a deep sea battle. He wins. [The Unicorns, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We are Gone?]
Victor insists on listening to Queen all night. He goes downstairs to get four D batteries, returns, puts them in her portable compact disc player, then suggest that they take a taxi cab to Times Square and back, with soundtrack. She complies, although they are not particularly dancing except on the sidewalk. [Queen, News of the World]
Winston waltzes in six eight and whispers nice things in her ear. They declare a pants holiday and smoke cigarettes inside. [Bill Evans, Waltz for Debby]
Yves stands on the coffee table and plays a guitar he made himself in the south of France. She starts playing the washboard with a wooden spoon [Django Reinhardt, assorted recordings]
Zachary asks her what she wants for her birthday and she says Love. He buys her the box set and finds an Arthur Lee autographed T-shirt on the internet. [Love, Forever Changes]
Call backs are next week.