Dan Deacon was playing the Logan Square Auditorium but I wasn’t feelin’ the dance floor. Instead, I was hunched over the bar, sipping on water, elbows propped on the U-shaped countertop. Concert-goers pushed past, shouting out drinks and moving on. Behind me, what seemed like hundreds of people drank, danced, and flirted to Deacon’s set, lost in his dense electro suites.
“Hey!” My friend Jeff materialized out of the crowd. “It’s crazy out there!”
With him was Ellen, his girlfriend. He was one of the finest bartenders in the city, she had a master’s in public policy, and they’d been together a half decade. I was a burn-out server and wasn’t sure I could keep anything afloat.
“Hi!” Ellen said, slightly tipsy, leaning close. “You wanna shot? We’re gonna do a shot!”
“Malort,” Jeff confirmed, and Ellen perched over the bar to get the bartender’s attention.
I watched sweat drop off them. They were in party mode. Normally, at a concert, especially with Jeff and Ellen, I’d be right alongside them, drunk and sweaty and ready to dance. But that night? I was just trying to hide.
“No thanks,” I said, holding up my water and hoping they’d see a cocktail.
“Come on,” Jeff said, grinning. “You know you want to.”
“Does Karen want a shot too?” Ellen asked over her shoulder. “Wait: where is Karen?”
***
That day, a Sunday in August, had begun quietly, sunlight pouring in to my Northside apartment. After a decadent breakfast Karen and I sat on the couch, her shoulder resting against my chest. I kissed her cheek. She turned to face me, black hair hanging over ears. “I don’t want to break up,” I said. Outside I heard kids giggling, an ambulance flying past, the sounds of the neighborhood.
We’d met a year and a half prior to that, at the first rehearsal of a play. She’d waltzed into the theatre, thrown her bag down, and unraveled layers of winter clothing while I stood there, entranced. At the final cast party, two months later, I had told Karen she was lovely and asked her out.
We fell into a life together, immediately jumping from the When-Do-I-Get-To-See-You-Again? dance to meeting each others’ families at Thanksgiving. I was coming off a string of tumultuous relationships: a whispered goodbye over the phone with Leslie, a public break-up at a coffee shop with Leah, a shouting match outside in December with Lindsay. Looking back on it, I can see I needed a place to settle in to. Karen was that place.
But now, 18 months later in my apartment that Sunday morning, we’d be really talking about our relationship for the first time, and I was dreading it. Karen wrapped a hand gently around my neck and said, “Is that what you think is going to happen? Us breaking up?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
We’d been having a hard time actually seeing each other, with work and plays and social functions and doctors’ appointments and fucking laundry. From Karen’s perspective, I was consistently choosing not to spend time with her. From mine, she was overreacting. Finding time was always going to be difficult, right?
“I need to know that you’re in this,” Karen said, hugging her legs to her chest.
“Of course I’m in this!” I stood up and paced. “I’m right here, standing in front of you, having this conversation.”
“No, Nick,” she said, and I watched her eyes mist over, those rich dark eyes. “I am IN this okay? I have invested, I have built this, I am in it to win it. Do you know what that means?”
I nodded.
I knew exactly what that meant.
***
“So,” Ellen asked, her mouth close to my ear so I could hear over the pulsing beat and loud drunks, “How did you leave it?” We were on shot number two.
“Tumultuously,” I said, trying to make a joke.
“Well,” Ellen started, trying to figure out how to respond. “That’s. . .good?”
Jeff put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”
I glanced at him. “I don’t know, man.”
But I knew exactly.
***
Karen was always asking why I went to this party or picked up that extra shift when those choices came in the way of me making time for her. That morning in my apartment, when she brought it up again, I lost my cool.
“Well, Karen,” I shot. “It really pisses me off how much you’re questioning my love for you.”
That’s when she lost her cool. “Well, Nick,” she said, sitting up sharply. “It really pisses me off how you constantly put other things before us. You can’t even see how that hurts me, how that makes me feel worthless. Can you possibly deny that’s true?”
I felt my face go flush. I should have told her the truth. But in the moment her question felt so unreasonable that I stormed out of the apartment, into the side alley, the steamy August heat hitting me full on.
I thought of the first night we kissed, after that final cast party, clutching each other in my kitchen.
I thought of a vicious fight we had when I went to Michigan for two days and didn’t call her.
I thought of how I looked in the mirror sometimes, her asleep in my bed, and wasn’t sure who that person was staring back.
***
“Everyone settle down!” Dan Deacon bellowed in the microphone, his thumping music coming to a halt. From across the Auditorium, on the other side entirely of where my friends and I still stood, he addressed the crowd, a slightly overweight hipster with a bushy red beard and soda can spectacles.
“Get into a big circle,” he instructed. “We’ll need a dance floor right here in front of my set-up.”
I smiled at Jeff and Ellen. We hoisted and shot Malort number three.
“Let’s do this.” We had come to party, after all.
We pushed through the crowd and emerged at the mouth of the circle where, in the center, stood one guy in a black polo shirt and jeans. Dan Deacon was across the circle from us, behind a tower of electronics.
“Hello!” he shouted gleefully and the whole place erupted. “This is my friend Kevin,” he said. The guy in the polo and jeans waved.
Deacon explained the rules. “So when the music starts, Kevin will start dancing and you are all gonna follow him. When he lifts his leg, you lift yours, when he raises his arms, you do the same, and so on. I’ll take care of the rest.”
I looked at my friends, watching Ellen hook her arm into Jeff’s elbow, fingers dancing along his skin, the most intimate of gestures.
***
I paced outside, up and down the alley for an hour and then came back, trudging up the steps of my building. Karen was in bed, curled under the sheets despite the heat. I sat down beside her, placing a hand on her back.
“I’m. . .” the words caught in my throat.
She shifted her pillow to lay on it and still look at me. “Please never do that again,” she said. “If you love me, you’ll stay and talk to me. If you love me, you’ll answer me at least. If you love me–”
I wish I had ended it there.
I knew then, even if I couldn’t speak it out loud.
I wasn’t in it the way that she was.
But I would have missed giving her apology flowers the next day; moving in together a year later; our fall trip to Bordeaux, watching the sun come up in an empty carnival; clinking champagne flutes together on New Year’s Eve; bouncing down our street the morning after Snowpocalypse. None of that would have happened if, on that faraway Sunday in my apartment, I hadn’t groveled, told jokes, and tickled her into laughing. If we hadn’t kissed, dramatically, as if we had resolved something together, even though we hadn’t. If I hadn’t looked her in the eyes and said, “You’re right, I’m sorry. I love you.”
We weren’t forever; just a little longer.
***
The music began, a dense hum. Kevin lifted his right foot slowly and we followed. High-pitched notes crawled out of the speakers. Kevin threw his arms upward and we did too. Hard-charging drums dropped in and Kevin hunched over, moving faster. We tried to keep pace but we all inched closer to the center of the circle, swallowing up the dance floor. Pretty soon we were one big mass, sweaty and euphoric, nobody following anyone. Inexplicably, maybe a pitch in the music changed, but we all started jumping. Together, in perfect unison, loud thumps on the parquet floor.
“This is awesome,” I shouted to Jeff and Ellen, but they weren’t next to me anymore. I turned around in a circle but I couldn’t see them anywhere. I pushed my way through the crowd to search for them. I tried the bathrooms, the bar, sliced back to our spot on the dance floor. Hundreds of people circled me completely but my friends were gone, as if they had never been there at all.
Nick Ward is a storyteller and producer with 2nd Story, and a company member with Theatre Seven of Chicago. He works at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where he is the Casting and School at Steppenwolf Associate.