“D’you wanna dance?”
“What?” I’m whispering.
Jules says: “Do you wanna dance,” in her regular voice.
“While they’re reading?”
Jules may have been kidding—and it may have been me who asked her, I don’t remember. So I don’t really know who stood up first and who asked who, at this point, but I do know that there were some angry poets in that art show after Jules and I started dancing.
They were reading poetry—this really intellectual stuff that neither Jules or I could follow..and that it looked to us like not too many people were interested in—and we got up in the middle of the room and started dancing. It was one of those things—you know where you’re in love and you feel like no one and nothing, in the entire world, matters..except the two of you? It was that feeling—that feeling where you look into your other’s eyes and nothing around you (not police, not any distraction, not house rules..nothing) matters except that you’re looking in her eyes and she’s looking in yours. It was that validation you get from being loved, in that way, by another person, that makes you unafraid..makes you no longer need the validation of any other! You don’t need anyone to tell you that you’re right..and it doesn’t matter if anyone tells you that you’re wrong. You don’t believe them—and you do not care! Because you’re being validated, held-up, loved—or whatever you want to call it—by the only person in the world who matters..who matters to you.
I’m not an expert on love—I’ve only been in love that once—but I at least know this: that if we weren’t in love, we wouldn’t have danced. That if we weren’t in love, we would have sat there staring straight forward in our seats, listening to that intellectual poetry. They would have finished that poetry reading, and not Jules, and not I, and and not anyone in that place would have danced all night.
But that’s not what happened.