THE ENGLISH GARDENS
235
deepened. And the others, as they always do, began talking agam.
Nicolas pursued his course.
"You wanna dance with Nicolas? We dance fine, right?
Come on!"
He leapt up and did a few steps, holding out
his
hands,
smiling.
All those eyes on her were too much for Mary Jane. She
wavered, she laughed, falsely, shook her head; reaching for
Meredith's hand she tried to re-establish her identity. He cried,
"Come on, Nicolas, you give us a dance!" Which Nicolas, at last
in his element, did.
It
was a dance mainly of rotating hips, crotch out, accom–
panied by cries to the ceiling, "Gimmie mewsik! Mew-ew-ew–
zik!"
The Germans loved it. In spite of himself, Meredith
laughed, half embarrassed, half delighted. And at the end-it
had been
Georgia Brown,
again-Nicolas fell back in his chair.
They all went on applauding. He mopped his brow, black hair
fell forward. At this point his modesty appeared, .as it did when
he knew indisputably
all
attention was
his.
He drank off
his
beer and cried, "Gimme time, hey, gimme time!" He had cap–
tured them all. Clapping her hands, smiling, Mary Jane stared
at him; all the while realizing that she was indeed up against
something she had better tum her mind to. "Next time you
dance, too, O.K.?" Nicolas asked, in the easiest way rubbing his
head against her shoulder and looking up to smile, then extend–
ing his smile all around.
"Oh, no, Nicolas, I could never do that!" she said, while
asking herself, 'There must be something I
can
do, now what is
it?'
Nicolas began talking across her to Meredith, explaining
how you had to get
with
it,
with
music,
with everything. "You
gotta know what
now
is!" he cried, excited by his own words.
Mary
Jane could see that Meredith was taking
it
all in-she had
henlelf, once. Watching Nicolas manage to make an exclusive
thing of experience, a unique, patented item, she reacted as
if
