Homesick for Another World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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“Dancing in the Moonlight”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“Dancing in the Moonlight” Summary

Nick Walden Darby-Stern is 34 and living in an unregulated building in New York City when he meets Britt Wendt, a furniture designer working at a holiday pop-up. Nick is immediately and wildly infatuated with Britt, believing he is going to marry her. Desperate to see her again, Nick lies and says that he has furniture that needs to be reupholstered; Britt says it will have to wait until after New Year’s, but she gives him a card.

Nick pays $350 in rent for an eight-by-eight room in an overcrowded and unregulated building. Although he has a part-time job, Nick is always broke because he spends his money on expensive clothes, shoes, and accessories. He has five figures of credit card debt, and only $100 to live on until his father sends him more money. Nick is convinced that a relationship with Britt is the answer to his problems. From the beginning, his attraction to her is inseparable from his attraction to financial stability, taste, and luxury he associates with her. If he marries her, he believes he’ll be able to afford the lifestyle he deserves. On Christmas Day, Nick finds a photo of an ottoman on Craigslist, edits it slightly, and emails it to Britt asking if she’d be able to upholster it. Two minutes later, he begins refreshing his email desperately, waiting for a response.

That evening, Nick visits a Polish bar in his neighborhood. The bar is completely empty, except for the old Polish woman behind the bar. She asks if he is Jewish and offers him homemade slivovitz, a kind of plum brandy. After several shots of slivovitz and a few cigarettes, he notices the woman staring intently at him and believes she is trying to read into his soul. He stares back at her, willing her to destroy him. Finally, the bartender kicks Nick out, and he goes home feeling sorry for himself. He falls asleep in front of his space heater.

The next morning, Nick awakes to a noncommittal email from Britt asking about the ottoman’s dimensions. Nick immediately leaves for Rhode Island, where the owner of the original ottoman from Craigslist has agreed to meet him at the bus depot and sell the ottoman for $50. When Nick arrives, the seller asks for more money. Having spent all his money the night before, Nick offers his scarf and jacket as payment. The seller eventually takes almost all of Nick’s clothing in exchange for the ottoman. Nick returns to New York, thrilled at the prospect of another encounter with Britt. When he gets back to his building, he learns that a fire from an unattended space heater has destroyed the building.

“Dancing in the Moonlight” Analysis

In their first encounter, Nick doesn’t speak to Britt’s face, but to her crotch, “a tender triangle swollen and divided by the thick protuberance of her zipper fly” (219). The explicitly sexual nature of this encounter highlights the intensity and immediacy of his desire for her. The image of Nick “in bed, moaning in ecstasy, over and over, each time I read the letters of her name” (221) suggests that, after only one encounter, even the idea of Britt is enough to excite him sexually. Throughout the story, Nick imagines having sex with Britt, licking her neck, and lying in bed with her. The emphasis on sexuality in these passages leads the reader to believe that Nick, like many of Moshfegh’s characters, is primarily concerned with sex. Yet it’s also clear that Nick associates Britt with the luxurious lifestyle he craves. In this way, the story links sexuality with the pressures of Life Under Capitalism. Nick has driven himself into debt in pursuit of a glamorous life that he believes should be his but that feels permanently out of reach. His immediate, intense attraction to Britt derives from the fact that, to him, she appears to inhabit that lifestyle with ease. He imagines that by linking himself to her he can escape from the prison of his insatiable desire for the material things he can’t afford.

Nick’s encounter with the Polish bartender, however, reveals that what he really wants from his relationship with Britt is “to be ruined” (237). Describing their drunken staring contest, the narrator says “there was nowhere to hide in the eyes of this woman. I could see that she was reading me” (236). Although Nick is initially embarrassed by the “scorn and disgust” (236) he knows the bartender feels while looking at him, he admits that “I wanted someone—Britt Wendt, maybe—to come and destroy me. ‘Murder me’ my eyes said to the woman” (237). As happens again and again in this collection, the disgust he sees in the eyes of this stranger is really disgust with himself. This admission repositions Britt Wendt as another of Nick’s compulsive acts of self-destruction; like his credit card debt and alcohol addiction, Britt—with her permanent “look of revulsion” (219)—is appealing to Nick because he perceives her as potentially dangerous.