He came around into our circle and smiled. It was too loud to make any chitchat. I returned his smile and nodded. It wasn’t clear what we were supposed to do next. In some clubs you could wait until a break in the music, but not in this one. Not in this apartment. The music kept pounding forward and people danced everywhere, and Jack appeared a little out of his element. He was not the dancer type, I didn’t think.
“This is Raef!” Jack yelled to all of us, cupping his mouth with his hands.
He yelled at the top of his voice, and I barely heard him, but everyone nodded, anyway.
“He’s the sheepherder from Australia,” Jack went on with a second breath. “He’s a great guy. We’ve been traveling together for a while.”
“Hi, ladies,” Raef said, his voice sharper and easier to hear through the music.
I looked at Raef. He was a handsome guy, though slightly husky and not as tall as Jack, with sandy-colored hair and a bright, happy smile. His accent—even in the two words he had spoken—sounded delightful. He wore some sort of Australian fleece-lined jacket, and it looked like it should be too hot to wear in a crowd like this, but it also looked like he always wore it. He had a big can of beer in his hand. He smiled and toasted us.
And it took me a second, and I’m not even sure I understood it at first, but his eyes were not on Amy, as we had come to expect in all our time together, but on Constance. And her eyes were glued onto his. Even Amy saw it, and she flashed a quick look at me, her eyebrows up again, as if to ask, Really? It was hard to imagine Constance with a less likely guy than an Australian sheepherder from the outback.
“Our grandkids are going to love this story,” Jack said into my ear.
“Is that so?”
“Absolutely. Raef will have to be best man at our wedding. In fact, the entire wedding party is right here.”
“Does this line ever work? This whole marriage thing?”
“It’s working now, isn’t it?”
I shook my head, but my stomach said something else.
“Time for a drink,” I said, then yelled loud enough to the other three. “Hey, Jack Vermont is buying the next round!”
We headed back to the bar. We had crossed halfway across the dance floor when suddenly a bunch of people started yelling and scattering from something happening in their midst. It was all herd behavior; a girl slipped in her heels and went to one knee, and no one helped her up. Then someone else shot by, and I couldn’t understand what he said, but he was laughing and shaking his head and saying something in Dutch. Jack grabbed me to make sure no one bowled me over, and I had a quick flash of Raef grabbing Constance. I had lost Amy, though I suspected she was just behind us, and I knew, whatever happened, she could take care of herself. I started to turn to look for her when I saw the cause of the disturbance.
Two guys, both horribly drunk, both skinheads, danced in the middle of the floor with their dicks out. They peed wherever they liked, their penises flapping, their hands up in exaltation. It felt good to pee, they seemed to say, and they danced with no self-consciousness at all. They wobbled on their feet, then occasionally seemed to get their balance. When they appeared steady, they wiggled their johnnies again and peed. Whenever they approached the surrounding circle, the crowd surged back, yelling and squealing, while the two guys high-fived and generally made jackasses of themselves. It was the worst kind of assholish frat party behavior, and I hadn’t expected to see anything like it in Europe.
“Gross,” Amy said from behind me. “Just fucking gross.”
Then the guys danced toward us.
Everyone pushed back, but we didn’t have anywhere to go. The bar blocked one end and the jam of people had made it impossible to move. I had a brief glimpse of the dancers’ dumb, stupid faces as they gyrated forward. They appeared smug and happy, oblivious to almost everything around them except the beat of the music and their floppy joints. A glistening stream of urine looped out from their dicks every few steps, and the crowd pushed back and away, disgusted and mesmerized at the same time.
“Here they come!” Constance yelled, trying her best to melt into the people behind her. “Oh, God!”
“It’s disgusting!” Amy shouted.
A few guys tried to dart forward and grab the dancers, but the dancers always managed to turn and threaten with their penises before the guys could seize them. The dancers had the sort of dumb, funny luck that sometimes happens to boozers. They laughed and kept drifting toward us, their hands on their wankers whenever they felt threatened.
They were the proverbial skunks at the garden party, and they were damn good at what they were doing.
*
Maybe he didn’t step out of a moonbeam, or climb off the back of a white charger, but Jack stepped forward. Somehow he had gotten hold of a rubber trash can lid and managed to fit it to his forearm like a shield. As soon as people got an inkling of his strategy, they began to laugh and cheer. Raef called him over and handed him a shoe. It took me a second, but I realized eventually that it was Constance’s heeled sandal. Jack needed it as a second weapon, one that he could use to whack their penises if they came too close. He held it by the toe and practiced twanging it down. The dancers didn’t seem to care what Jack had planned. They drank from two enormous cans of beer, and you could all but see the liquid passing through them to their bladders.
I looked over at Constance and Amy. They both watched, their mouths open with surprise and delight. Raef had his arm hooked through Constance’s arm.
Here’s another thing: the situation was weird, inevitably thuggish, with the guys being skinheads and everything, but Jack, by playing to the crowd, defused it. He walked slowly around the perimeter of the circle, a Roman gladiator greeting the crowd, and the people began hooting and laughing. Twice he feinted toward the dancers, pretending to rush them, but they crabbed backward, their johnnies propped in their hands. Then, as if dumbly coming up with a strategy of their own, they began circling Jack in different directions, one trying to sneak behind him while he was occupied with the other.
I watched Jack, and I thought about our kiss and the way his arm felt around the small of my back.