Shoot the Moon

Chapter Two - My Wife The Artistic Genius

Joe Allen's bar and restaurant is a good place. It's in the theater district and attracts all sorts. Echo seldom goes there on her own but to her credit she understands that not everyone is a toothpaste heiress and so she's a good sport about not dining at Per Se after every show, where a light supper could set you back three hundred bucks .

The Echo Dalton Dance Company was performing in a small theatre on Forty-Second Street. The show ended at 10:15. I watched the door.

At 11:00 sharp she entered with her company in tow.

Echo is the star, of course, but not just because she is the choreographer and signs the checks; although she's ten years older than the kids in the company she is the Charles Darwin Best Bet to leave them all laying in the ditch. She has uber charisma, a way of saying that she is an alien with powers far beyond those of mortal men.

Echo is tall, with dark, almost black hair cut in a fashion that emphasizes her cheekbones, large green eyes and full red mouth. She was all in black - black silk turtle neck, black skirt and stockings - and wearing a long black Armani coat that swept the floor. The stiletto heels she wore added another four inches to her height. The contrast between all this and the shortness of her skirt made her long legs appear to go on forever.

This is how you tell if you're a star: Do they look when you make your entrance? Everybody turns to look when Echo enters a room.

The thing of it is, the rest of the company are a glamorous lot in their own right and Echo is made even more imposing by the beauty she surrounds herself with - because no one noticed them. Not at all. Robert Markovic is a powerful movie-star-good-looking guy. Robert is the guy that catches all the girls when they jump on him (which in Echo's post modern anti-gravity choreography, they often do. People in Echo's dances also frequently hang upside down and in clusters.) When Robert's on stage he doesn't communicate even in the slightest that his dream of young love is a willowy little sous chef named Barry - and I think that's beautiful. Otherwise, I might have to worry, as he and Echo spend the greater part of each evening wrapped around each other half naked.

The girls are wonderful. They're tall, and they're healthy; they eat things that are bad for them and chain-smoke. They all carry large leather shoulder bags filled with cosmetics, sweaty rehearsal clothes, and Absorbine Jr. linament  They all try to copy Echo's style and can't. They also have funny names like Rima and Calliope and... well, Echo. Echo refuses to tell me her birth name. She legally changed her name to Echo years before I met her. I only knew that it too began with an 'E': she had an autograph book from her childhood (filled with the autographs of the likes of Pavarotti, Domingo, Twyla Tharp, and Suzanne Farrell.) Echo's initials were stamped in gold on this artifact. I once mentioned that it was a valuable little item with so many immortal signatures and whatnot. She's get a nice chunk for it on eBay. Echo didn't want to hear it.

"Jackson, sometimes you're such a Philistine," she said tossing it back into the cardboard box with other frayed reminders of a precocious childhood including a bacteria trap of an old stuffed bear that had all the fur rubbed off it.

As soon as I spotted them coming through the door, I opened The Woman Inside You and made a face of pained concentration. I looked up, realistically portrayed surprise, and closed the book putting it out of sight. Echo smiled. Echo's stare is penetrating, frank, even alarming. She seems to see through you all the way to the nasty little bastard you were in fourth grade. She attributes this to being born under the sign of Scorpio. The past six months have only deepened this trait.

"Studying hard, Jack?"

"Uh-huh."

"I'm glad to see it." Echo kissed the air near my cheek. Half of the company lined up at the bar and the rest took a table nearby. Having met me before didn't stop them from asking again if I was "The Husband."