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The landscape of Jotaro’s apartment had shifted over the past two weeks. Starting with the small stuff. A few boxes of books here, a couple of coffee tables there. He stopped buying groceries, scoured the fridge clean, sold off the furniture he knew wouldn’t be going with him (most). It was a tricky thing, moving. Like trying to repair a car while it was in motion; you couldn’t stop eating or wearing clothes and you couldn’t take the engine out of a car while it was engaged, but he figured if you ate take out for a week you could get the dishes packed and if you let a car coast downhill you didn’t need to keep the engine running. By end of week two he was living out of a suitcase and working out of the coffee shop next door, while everything else he owned sat packed up in a house he’d only seen two or three times in passing and always decorated with another family’s belongings, not yet able to see his own life through the drawings on the fridge or the floral patterns on the curtains. Meanwhile his own apartment was picked down to the bones, empty echoing rooms he’d forgotten looked like that, gleaming floors, three years and nothing to mark he’d been there except the single nail in the wall where his diploma had hung over his desk.
Tonight was different. The apartment looked like one of those old guys Jotaro saw pushing shopping carts of refundables around the Miami Beach boardwalk had broken in and dumped the contents of his cart across the floor. An enormous cardboard box lay ripped open in the corner; bits of shrink wrap and styrofoam debris littered the room. In the midst of the mess, Jotaro sat hunched over by the one lamp left in the apartment. The book open in his lap was due back at the library a week ago.
She told him: you can’t learn to slow dance. Jotaro took a different view.
There were two issues in his approach:
One, he’d come to find out that ‘slow dancing’ meant dancing to music of a certain tempo. In the world of dance there was no such category as the slow dance, so the page from the library book he was intent on studying was actually a basic waltz box step.
Two, was the matter of the song. ‘Stand by Me’.
As in the movie where they find a dead kid? he asked her.
As in the Ben E. King song, she said.
She played it back for him and he recognized it, but by the time he got down to the music shop Ben E. King had slipped from his mind.
The movie where they find a dead kid? the cashier asked when Jotaro gave her the title.
The song, he said.
Who sings it?
But he couldn’t remember so she had to excavate it from his quiet, atonal humming.
They had it in stock, she told him, but only on CD.
No cassette?
CD, she affirmed.
He thought about it and asked: So how much for a CD Player?
That depends, she said, do you want it with or without speakers? He asked her what the hell was he supposed to do with a CD Player without speakers and she said: exactly.
Now he kicked the plastic bags and cardboard inserts up against the wall to make a space on the floor and now he slipped the CD into his new CD player. The machine gave a whir as the disk began to spin. As he waited for the music to kick in he stared down at the open book on the floor, clawing after that last chance to commit those six numbered steps to memory.
For a few seconds there was nothing but the alternating tingle of a triangle and scratch of a gourd and he stood there waiting for the music to kick in and wondered: was he supposed to dance to this part too? Because it didn’t sound a whole lot like music to him but it was still part of the song. While he was trying to decide, Ben E. King’s raw throaty voice cut in all at once with In the night and Jotaro, a beat late, stumbled into step one with his left foot and followed up with step two on the right.
He realized as soon as he started moving that none of the book’s counts or measures or ghostly footprints had disclosed anything about what he was supposed to do with his hands. So he tried to improvise, holding both hands out in front of his chest like he was hefting a blue-ribbon watermelon by both ends. Then, when he remembered he was marrying a woman and not state fair produce, he shifted his hands down lower, narrowed his grip. Less like hoisting a melon, more like strangling a very short man.
In the struggle of trying to get his hands right, he forgot to pay attention to what his feet were doing. At some point he glanced up and saw his shadow projected high up the wall by the lap on the floor; glanced up and saw himself duck-stepping from side to side, arms ninety degrees held stiff at his waist. He looked like a football linebacker whiffing on a drill.
He jammed down the stop button. The music cut out.
As he slid down to the floor, he found himself wishing he’d kept the fridge stocked with a beer or two.
Getting married seemed straightforward enough when it was just an idea floating around in his head or a ring on his fiancee’s finger. Not when it was a two week deadline and him finding out last minute that in an American wedding, the married couple were expected to share the first dance.
She was the only person he’d ever dated. She was a microbiology student, two years ahead of him, already finishing up her master’s; they’d met when he was in his second year and she was taking his Introduction to Aquaculture course as an elective. They happened to share a study spot in the same dim corner of the library. She’d found ways to introduce conversation to their silent homework sessions, drawing words out carefully from him with a surgeon’s hand and the same held-breath patience. He didn’t realize they were already dating until their fourth cup of coffee together and she laughed when he tried to ask her out.
She’d laugh too if she saw him with his head down staring at his feet while he stepped slow circles around his empty apartment by himself.
He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the wall. Stumped for ideas, he fell back to his usual methods of problem solving.
Somewhere in his mind was a presence like the opaque black surface of a well: though he couldn’t peer too far in he knew it ran deep and he’d felt himself flung back into it time and time before in a rush of adrenaline. Just now he let his thoughts skim over the surface and felt it follow eagerly the touch, so that when he opened his eyes again and saw Star Platinum kneeling before him, he was expecting it.
As Jotaro watched, Star slowly turned its head. He realized he hadn’t called Star Platinum out since he’d begun the process of packing. Though its eyes remained fixed centre, he could feel its attention roam over the empty apartment, lingering on the places they’d spent most of their time together. The window where the table used to be. The corner where his mattress used to sit on the floor, and the ceiling above it where Jotaro, at his stand’s insistence, stuck the glow-in-the dark moon and star decals his mother sent along in one of her care packages in his first year of university. There was nothing left of the stars except the sticker residue he hadn’t been able to scrape off.
We don’t have time for that, he said, but he felt in tandem with his stand the ache of parting, though he knew his shitty student apartment wasn’t really what he was leaving behind.
I need your help, he said. Because as humiliating as the idea of dancing with his wife-to-be in front of dozens of people was, the idea of dancing alone in his bedroom by himself was worse.
Both he and his stand stood together in contemplation over the box step diagram. He watched Star’s eyes mechanically trace over the lines and arrows, in a way that probably mimicked his own reading earlier.
He set the CD back to the start of the track. Star Platinum watched him closely, anticipating; when Jotaro approached, it held out a hand. He took it and laid his other hand flat against his stand’s broad back. The intro played out. He was so preoccupied listening for the lyrical queue he didn’t bother to notice until he felt Star’s hand squeeze around his that the proportions didn’t translate into the hundred-and-fifty odd centimetres of his fiancee. But it was too late to think about that; Ben E. King was crooning about the night again so Jotaro took a step forward at the exact same moment Star Platinum took at step forward.
Bumping into Star’s solid mass knocked the wind out of him. In all the fussing over his own footwork, he’d forgotten that the steps wouldn’t work mirrored.
He consulted the diagram once more.
I guess you’d be starting in the upper right corner, he said, on three and two.
They’d both be stepping the box at the same time. What had seemed like a simple enough manoeuvre solo was complicated by sharing one space, the careful balance of remaining in motion while making room for one another.
The music started up again. Jotaro was getting sick of the opening line but he let it play all the same. They got back in position, Star’s hand on his. He didn’t miss the way its thumb brushed over the bone of his wrist.
He stepped forward and Star stepped back, pulling him along gently with a hand guiding his shoulder. When he fell back to his starting position, Star stepped up to meet him, filling the space he’d left behind. So they moved, push and pull, and though he didn’t care much for dancing he had to admire it, the neat symmetry of the steps, the way they chased one another around the square like the moon and the tide. He could feel his stand’s concentration rising to meet his own; they were one mind now, fully focused on the task at hand. Following invisible arrows along the floor at a pace that wasn’t at the correct tempo or in time with the music but that didn’t matter because the movement felt right.
If he could make it through learning the ins and outs of the box step with anyone, Jotaro figured, it had to be with Star. They had a way of anticipating each other that ran both directions. Star protecting him and him carving out a space for Star in his own life. They were like-minded but not same-minded. He knew that Star Platinum’s experience of the world was raw and visceral and its reactions ran according. Unfiltered in a way Jotaro’s experience was not. His experience of the world was calibrated by what he’d grown up learning and the voices he listened to most, by his own configuration of flesh and blood and the way his brain was wired. They needed both at different times: Star’s animosity, Jotaro’s careful measure.
There were times too when neither seemed like enough, either separately or in combination. Star only knew as much as he did and tallying their knowledge would never change the sum of it.
He got distracted, his pacing faltered, he missed a step. When he stopped Star stopped too. It tilted its head, looking to him for a signal.
Alright, he said. I’ll leave it on loop this time. We’ll get it.
He had to. Two weeks was coming at him fast.
Now that he wasn’t focusing so much on the steps the lyrics were starting to penetrate the threshold of his conscious. Sky falling, mountains crumbling into the sea — not what he imagined from a song that was supposed to mark the start of his married life but he’d be damned if it wasn’t on point. He’d tried telling himself it was all just ceremony and that both he and she would come out the other end the same people they were before, but still, the reality was setting in that this was someone he was supposed to see himself with for the rest of his life.
Everything school and television and movies had taught him about being a man and being in a relationship focused on the physical. He knew what he was supposed to want but he wasn’t sure how being with someone was supposed to make him feel. Sometimes when he was on the phone with his father he wished he could ask — is this normal? To feel trapped? To feel like a fraud? To make a chore out of loving someone? But Sadao Kujo didn’t seem like the type of man to allow himself to feel trapped or obligated by anything and Jotaro wasn’t prepared to follow in the pattern that had shaped so much of his life when he was young and his mother was left alone to navigate a language and a culture she was still in the early stages of learning.
This time, when Jotaro stumbled and lost his footing, Star glanced down at him, mouth softening in what looked like an apology.
It’s fine, forget about it, Jotaro insisted. And when the look of concern remained, he reached up and threaded a hand through Star’s hair. You did good, okay? This one’s all on me.
The lamp on the floor looked sad and cast-off with its shade knocked askance and the naked bulb showing out the top. The low light drew a soft warm line along the cut of Star’s jaw. Jotaro’s hand slid down, tracing the same line as Star rumbled and leaned into the touch. Their shadows towered over them, stretching up the empty apartment wall and bending at a sharp angle across the ceiling.
Star’s arms wrapped around his middle. Large hands splayed flat across his back. Jotaro allowed his stand to pull him close; he leaned into its chest, arms rigid at his sides, feeling the energy pulse across Star’s skin in time to his own heartbeat.
Deep at the back of his own awareness — whatever was leftover when you took away the part of him that was conscious of assignments due and bills to be paid and how he spoke and acted and the innumerable other minor anxieties that made up the sum of a creature life — he felt the careful brush of Star’s conscious against his own. Curious, never probing.
There was hesitation in the way Star’s mind reached out for his, and in the way its hand cupped his shoulder like a question. Is everything alright? — the hand seemed to ask. Even his stand knew people didn’t drop everything and learn the box step two weeks before their wedding.
He wasn’t sure how to answer. Right about now the full breadth of his future was an empty one bedroom apartment. He’d been focused on getting through the next two weeks and getting through the wedding, because after that everything dropped off out of sight.
His life had been disrupted once before. On the road to Egypt, with his mother’s life hung around his neck, he’d thought what he was going through was a fifty day interlude from school and worrying over university applications. For fifty days nothing seemed to touch him, not fear or pain; there was just this wild rush, for him and Star both, the exhilarating way the lines between them seemed to blur when they fought together.
It was the coming home that changed him.
There were times since then when he was out driving and experienced a near miss. Maybe a car sped through an intersection in front of him or he had a close brush with a transport truck. He always shrugged it off at the time but later that night, when he lay in bed, his mind would run through the incident, over and over, imagining all the ways it could have ended that wouldn’t have ended with him driving home.
Egypt was like whose near-misses except it crept into his waking life and stuck around long after. Fifty days ended but Star Platinum didn’t go anywhere. They were both peacetime soldiers, and it was hard to go back to living when you were waiting for the next shell to drop. He’d gone from crossing multiple countries in less than a week to not being able to do anything, to letting listlessness drag him through his days until he felt like a cage-crazy wild thing.
On one of those nights where anxiety had put him in a delirium, exhaustion blending his nightmares with his waking visions of lying in bed, he’d opened his eyes to Star lying next to him, its hand on his, and there’d been a drowning desperation in that crushing grip that told Jotaro his stand was looking for the same reassurance he was. From then on every time the nocturnal panic attacks set in Star would appear to, and one day at a time they scratched together some semblance of normalcy from their routines. Like when he first got the apartment and they dragged home a dining table set with one leg missing that Star Platinum found in a curbside pile, and Jotaro started getting up early in the mornings to sit at that table with Star while he downed his first coffee over sleep-bleary eyes. Or the paths they took on weekends as an excuse to get him out of the house and away from his homework: around the pond, down by the waterfront, around the university’s sports complex, the times and routes unchanging in every season.
He’d just gotten used to his routines and the regular rhythm of his life, to the comfort of his one bedroom apartment and Star’s company. And now his life was changing again.
He’d thought about marriage before, but always as an event in the distant future. He and his fiancee-to-be hadn’t meant to rush it but circumstances hadn’t unravelled that way and where most brides would be trying to slim down for their big day and taking off to the bars for a bachelorette weekend, she was shopping for a dress with an empire waist and selecting virgin cocktail options for the reception. And he, left wondering if all life would ever be for him were the false calms between swells.
He said: I don’t dance.
And she said, that’s fine, it’s just a formality. One song. After when everyone’s dancing we can sneak off to the kitchen and set the leftover lobsters free. Make them fight like in Thunderdome, and he said, I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been.
When the frown didn’t leave his face she squeezed his arm and added, you’ll be fine. You don’t need to impress anyone. Just be yourself.
— But he wasn’t sure there was a public version of him that wasn’t some measure performance. Listening for cues in conversation and instead of in song. Being conscious of his eyes and where they were looking instead of his feet and where he was placing them. Maybe if he had any sense of tempo dancing might have come naturally to him.
Star lowered its chin to his head and rumbled. He could feel the vibrations all along the length of its throat. Giving into the warmth of his stand’s body, he leaned into Star, letting his weight rest in his toes, his arms anchoring him around its thick neck. Star held him close. A familiar pressure that slowed his heartbeat down until the sound of it wasn’t ringing in his ears anymore.
In the background, Ben E. King delivered his twentieth encore as ‘Stand by Me’ continued to play on loop. The music swelled, sentimental wailing of strings taking off in a flutter over the grating of the gourd. Caught up in the music, Star began to sway along to the beat, shuffling its feet from side to side. Jotaro let his body be carried along, swaying in time with Star, and he was surprised by the way the swaying lulled him. In his head the sky was falling and mountains were crumbling but if he held on to Star he could convince himself that maybe they’d both be alright.
They still had one another, no matter what: two wills moving as one the way their shadows joined on the wall in a dance without steps or measure.
You can’t learn to slow dance, she told him. It’s a feeling.
If that was true, he decided, then on the night of their wedding when the music came on, he was just going to hold her as tight as he could and hope it was enough.