Dancing with Rembrandt

ONE The grizzled seamen huddled together at the round table in the center of the room, protecting their drinks with weathered hands like the Club Dardanelles sheltered them from the raging storm outside. The club was a dark place, smelling like stale beer, fried food, body odor and broken promises, yet it offered these seasoned men a comforting place of sanctuary. Smoke hung heavy in the air. The music punctuated the room with horns and bass, keeping time for the rhythmic movement of a young woman dancing upon the small stage. Her body was illuminated by searing light, exposing a translucent veneer upon her toned flesh. Clothed only in fantasy, the young woman danced elegantly upon the stage. Black heels met the wooden floor in a hypnotizing cadence. A black bow tie adorned a slender neck, a black ribbon clung to her blonde locks. With each practiced step, the dancer intended to bring the audience tantalizingly close to an imaginary bond with her. An imperceptible movement, or a broad smile, or a seductive wink of the eye hinted a chimerical attachment, if only for a fleeting moment, for she mesmerized her audience into believing the possibility of more than an illusory connection. “No way anything moves out tonight,” grunted an aging man, hypnotized by the dancer above. He held a pint of ale uneasily in front of his face, struggling to find his parched mouth without taking his eyes off the dancing woman. “Ain’t nothing leaving for awhile,” said another, “the Bar is just too dangerous with this storm.” “Where did she learn to dance like that?” inquired another man, enraptured by the twin illusion of unrequited desire and considerate reverence toward the dancer's exhibition of technical precision upon the stage. “Why would a girl like her ever come to a place like this?” expressed another man, gazing at the young woman tease upon the stage. “Hannah’s the only reason I come to this dump,” remarked another aging man, watching the dancer. “None of the other gals comes anywhere close.” “She don’t even use the pole,” remarked the sixth man. “She just glides along, like she’s dancing on the clouds.” The men occupied the best table in the club, on a platform elevated four inches from the floor, reserved solely for the Columbia River pilots. The Columbia River Bar, just to the west of Astoria, where the Columbia River propels its current against the tumultuous tide of the Pacific Ocean, has been the graveyard of ships and seamen for well over a century. The sheer volume of the cold waters of the Columbia flowing into the Pacific creates a hellish vortex into which ships venture at their peril, especially during winter storms. The river pilots, whose orders to guide the ships into the river or out into the Pacific, rule the mouth of the Columbia, meeting unquestioned obedience from shippers who depend upon their expertise to guide cargo through the treacherous waters to safety upon the docks. “Turn that crap off!” yelled a man at the bar, jolting the men clustered around the pilots’ table. “I’m tired of hearing about Superstorm Sandy.” The man quaffed his drink, slammed his pint on the bar and pointed to the bartender. “When is CNN going to tell the nation about our storm of the century?” “Shut the hell up, Raymond!” barked one of the river pilots. The longshoremen and the river pilots formed an uneasy alliance on the docks of Astoria. The pilots occupied the superior position, entitling them to deference. Raymond Tigness, the disgruntled man, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and nodded with his head toward the bartender, calling for another draught. A dockworker since his youth, he had seen many storms strike the Pacific Coast, but nothing like this one. Now retired, widowed, and increasingly lonely, he hauled his withered body nightly to the Club Dardanelles, seeking some measure of comfort for the emptiness within his aching soul. “Raymond the Regular will never get it,” whispered one of the pilots to the group. “We don’t matter.” The men smiled at each other, recognizing the truth of both statements. A man dressed in a fashionable suit, with a red tie pulled askew, wore dark eyeglasses to conceal his presence. He smirked from a corner table. Sitting alone, with a tumbler of seltzer water positioned between an iPhone and a tablet, he had an unobstructed view of the room cluttered with men and women seated at wooden tables arranged so that each patron had a view of the stage. The mysterious man inhaled deeply on his cigarette, watching the young woman dance. He observed the dancer’s unique performance with an eye trained for discipline. ‘Demi-plié,…soutenu en tournant,…piqué turn,…demi-plié,…chaîné turn,’ narrated the man as he watched the young woman effortlessly perform. ‘Toes perfectly pointed, porte-a-bras across the chest, fingers rigid in position,’ he critiqued dispassionately. The elegant synchronicity of the woman’s dance clashed with the stark surroundings of the club. ‘Classical dancer,’ he mused, alone with his thoughts. ‘What kind of tragedy brought her to this place?’ Explosions of laughter and errant chatter burst the imaginings of the mysterious man. At a table to his right sat four young men, dressed in a contemporary urban style who engaged in unrestrained talking. They sent sleazy comments toward the dancer on the stage, accompanied with frenetic, obscene gestures. The men were singular opposites of the river pilots, seated quietly on the elevated position of reverence, silently watching the young woman perform. The younger men pointed in a frenzy, fueled by intoxication, toward the dancer in a manner that signaled to the mysterious observer that these younger men, accustomed to entitlement from the club, were regulars, too. Suddenly, the iPhone vibrated upon the wooden table in front of the secretive man. He clutched the phone as he arose from his seat. The mysterious man stepped gingerly past the elevated table, evading the younger men, and made his way to quieter surroundings outside. “As-salaam-alaikum,” he whispered into the device. The dancer finished her performance to an acknowledgment of polite applause from the pilots at the elevated table, and an eruption of raucous approval from the cadre of young men swarming the corner table. The dancer smiled at the men at the elevated table, avoiding the catcalls of the younger men as she reached for her dressing robe. She glided off-stage, as if she were still in her performance, relieved that her last dance of the night had come to a close. Soon she would cleanse the filth of the Club Dardanelles from her physically and emotionally exhausted body. “Hannah,” barked a heavy-set woman in her fifties. “I booked you in a VIP room for Mr. Ischii.” Hannah Morgan caught her breath. Blonde, in her early twenties, with blue eye shadow and powdered face, masking her self-identity with cosmetic artistry, she paraded in the hallway with a robe she quickly pulled around her nakedness. “Not tonight,” she said to the woman, almost begging. Virginia Hamilton, the capricious owner of the club for nearly three decades, had seen a fair number of dancers of varying degree of ability, and hundreds of dancers with a measure of inability. But Hannah was unique. Hannah quickly became the franchise performer of her establishment, filling the tables on her scheduled performance nights. Virginia recognized from Hannah’s audition that she was a very different performer. Perhaps it was her technical dance training, or her limitless eye contact combined with a seductive smile. Exotic dancers carried wounds and painful experiences, submerging their hurts beneath the flesh they exhibited to paying customers. Somewhere in her past, Hannah had experienced profound anguish, but unlike the other dancers, Hannah subsumed her host of hurts to a distant place where Virginia could not reach. The other dancers had no relationship with Hannah, considering her aloof, superior, or snobbish. And Virginia exploited that detachment to distinguish her reluctant star, Hannah, from the other dancers for pure marketing strategy. Chief among her capitalistic practices were invitations to a VIP Room, a place limited only by imagination. Virginia spoke harshly to the young woman. “You get in there and entertain Mr. Ischii and his associates!” “But the storm…” The older woman grasped the younger one by the arm. “I don’t care about no storm, Hannah.” She squeezed tightly around the arm of the young dancer. “Mr. Ischii and his associates don’t care about no f*****g storm, either, Hannah.” “But…,” Hannah implored Virginia Hamilton interrupted her dancer. Stepping chest to chest with Hannah, she shouted, “Mr. Ischii is a regular patron, Hannah, and he specifically requested you to entertain him and his associates.” Hannah bit her lip nervously while twisting out of the firm grip of her supervisor. She reached up to pull a bobby pin attaching the black ribbon in her blonde hair, and pleaded, “I have to go now. Allie is waiting for me. The storm outside…” Virginia Hamilton approached her, menacingly. “You get one thing straight right now, Hannah Morgan. You work for me!” “I know,” pleaded Hannah. “The storm…” The other dancers crowded close to their boss and the reluctant star as the older woman snarled toward her dancer. “You have two choices, honey. You can get in that room and entertain Mr. Ischii, or you can get the hell out of my bar and don’t ever think about coming back!” Hannah Morgan sighed, resigning herself to the demeaning tasks that awaited her behind the red door. With a trembling lip, she reached for the handle and stepped inside. Her life was never supposed to be this way. She was born into a solidly middle-class family in Portland. Her father, George, handled the railroad schedules and shipping dockets at Swan Island. Her mother, Helen, taught art and composition at the local high school. Her brother, Tim, seven years older, mostly ignored her, even before departing the stable family home for college. Hannah was a prodigy. She possessed an insatiable appetite for learning. She advanced through school rapidly, owing to a tenacious work ethic and exceptional scholastic abilities. She had advanced several grades due to superior language, comprehension and composition. However, the shy girl had difficulty relating to classroom peers who were a bit older than she. Hannah studied ballet from the time she was three until a fractured ankle performing the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy ended a promising dance career in her senior year of high school. While recuperating from her injury, Hannah delved into her advanced placement classes with vigor. Under her mother’s guidance, Hannah submitted her senior honors thesis detailing the works of the Dutch painters Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt van Rijn, which earned her a scholarship to Reed College. For her graduation present, her mother planned a trip to Boston, to a gallery where Helen had once seen a Vermeer and several pieces from Rembrandt. A diagnosis of advanced uterine cancer robbed Helen of the joy she anticipated in sharing the remaining pieces of Rembrandt with her daughter. Hannah went across town to college beneath the tall oaks at Reed, grateful that only a few miles separated her from Helen. Her youth, relative to the students in her classes, combined with her uneasiness with her mother’s delicate condition, caused Hannah to question her decision to attend college during the first weeks of school. Her measure of uncertainty took a turn for the worse when her parents died in a car accident on Cornelius Pass Road in October. While mired deeply within her profound grief, Hannah watched helplessly as her brother faced disbarment from a prestigious law firm. Those proceedings became a contentious public spectacle, culminating before Christmas Break. A professor whom she admired for his intelligence, demeanor, and charming disposition, comforted her during the tumultuous period; but he tossed her aside when circumstances changed. While her peers enjoyed themselves in Cabo San Lucas during Spring Break, Hannah slipped away from Reed, searching for a way to make peace in her world. Almost alone, broken in spirit, her esteem shattered despite a significant impersonal negotiable instrument, she went as far west as she could on a tank of gas before reaching Astoria, a community on a peninsula bracketed by the Pacific Ocean, Young’s Bay and the Columbia River. She settled in to the rough town born on the banks of the uncompromising river. She identified with the juxtaposing mixture of grit, beauty, tenacity, splendor, ruggedness, and calm. It was a place where Hannah could make some peace with herself and her choice.