Girl Through Glass (18 page)

The smell from the dank hallways seeps into the classroom. A rainstorm has moved overhead. Steady rain pounds on the high studio windows. Outside, the sky is green. A leak has begun near the window and has made a small puddle. An industrial rubber bucket has appeared. Every twenty minutes or so, Danilova carries the bucket herself to the doorway, where it is carried away by one of the male scholarship students, all the while calling out instructions to their class. For the minute she is gone, the water leaks onto the floor.

They are in the middle of Variations with Danilova. “Remind me of days of Russian Revolution,” Danilova says in her accented singsong voice. “No bread, no toilets, no heat! Ah, we are so lucky here to only have some small, silly leaks.” Her English is much better than Tumkovsky's. Her body is still recognizable as a dancer's. Even in her ballroom shoes—an American affectation they all forgive her for because she is Danilova—her high arches pop. Her legs are still long, muscled—a dancer's. She wears dark eyeliner. Her hair is dyed blond, short and swept back. Along with her trademark brightly colored scarf—she favors blues and greens—Danilova gives the impression that she is on a yacht in the middle of a high wind. She holds her nose up high. Her chin quivers with dignity.

“Tondue
finish, girls. Now
ronde de jambe
. Yes, girls,” Danilova is saying. “Make the body sing.”

Mira can feel the shift in the room. The air pressure drops. She turns. Mr. B is teetering into the room on the arm of Karin von Aroldingen. They all turn to stare, then try to pretend they are not
staring. She hadn't even heard he was out of the hospital. But here he is now. His turtle-like head is tilted at a strange angle, but he doesn't look sick. Though he is not a tall man, he does not seem short either. He is taller than Maurice.

“Hello, dears,” he says. “Hello!”

Mr. B lets go of Karin's arm and cocks his head to take each of them in. He walks over and looks in the bucket.

He says something to Danilova in Russian and they laugh. “Girls,” he says. “If the sky is falling, make it beautiful.”

Then he turns to the pianist. “Play nothing,” he says softly. “I want to hear them.” Since she saw him last at the Russian Tea Room his face has grown longer and his skin more papery. Maurice looks like a boy compared to him. But she recognizes the eyes that touch on each of them brightly, merrily. She remembers the question he asked Maurice:
Is she one of mine?
What had Maurice said? “No. No,” he had said. She widens her second position. Danilova has them line up in a row in back of the room. They will do their across-the-floor for Mr. B. They will parade one at a time.

He wants to hear them, he wants to see them. They do not meet one another's eyes as they unwrap their chiffon skirts and hang them from the barre. Now they stand in just their white tights and pink leotards.

“Just walk,” Mr. B says. “Just walk.”
Just walk?
The great Mr. B wants them to walk across the room?

“Like waiter at Russian Tea Room. Just walk, carrying tray. You want to do Plisetskaya head-kick? First you must be waiter.”

What Mr. B is asking from her is something no one has asked from her before in all her years of ballet. Why couldn't they do an arabesque
,
a million-dollar pose, flash a smile? Why couldn't she show him how she could be beautiful—how nicely she danced—how well she had learned?
I know how to walk. I want to learn how to be a ballerina.
She imagines saying it, the words dropping out of her mouth like heavy drops into a bucket. Would they shock everyone? No, all the girls must feel as she does.

But she does not say this. No one does. They are dancers—they do not talk, they move. Of course they do what Mr. B asks. They walk past him. One by one, Mr. B stops them as they walk across the room to correct them. He watches Felicia go, head held high, her arms in first position. “No, no,” he says. “Too pretty.” Then Bryce goes, walking too fast, skittering like a mouse, slipping on the little puddle by the bucket and, arms flailing, catching herself before she hits the ground. “Yes.” He gives a dry giggle. “Better.”

It's her turn. She feels something: cold, shivery, then hot. Her skin prickles. She feels a wildness growing in her, something like a panther about to spring.
How has a walk, just a walk, set this free in her?

“Yes,” Mr. B says. He is pointing at her. “Fast, no thinking. Don't think. Do.”

He stops Mira in the center of the room. He stands before her. “
Bourrées.
Same feeling. Very simple step, right? But very difficult. Must feel wind at back. Very fast. Never catch up to yourself.” The music has started again. She is moving, now running, her
bourrées
are too rushed but he doesn't chide her like Ms. Clement would. “Yes,” he says. Then she has forgotten him. She is moving across the floor and over the floor and cannot see him watching; she is just moving and feeling. The music has stopped but she has kept going, her eyelids at half-mast. When she finally stops, breathing hard and looking around, she sees that he is gone and everyone is looking at her, their eyes burning with hatred, and she knows without anyone telling her that she is a Mr. B girl.

After class, she rushes out to the fountain to meet Maurice. He's
there, his shimmering white lawn of hair, his black cape. Wearing a
top hat, the gentleman from the storybooks—her prince—waiting for her in the lamplights outside by the fountain, like Drosselmeyer in
The Nutcracker
, holding out something to her, this thing, a gift—the nutcracker!—but in this case the gift is his hungry, adoring eyes that alight on her, burn her into being, and now she is here:
a Mr. B girl.

“He came to our class today. He asked me to demonstrate.”

“Ah.” He takes her hands in his. “He chose you?”

The one thing in her tilting world, her scattered life, the one who held her to the side of the pool, told her to jump. She'd jumped. She looks at him. “Yes.” He smiles.

Back at Maurice's house, in his living room, he has not turned on
the overhead light, and the streetlight shines in from outside, illuminating the space in front of the couch like a spotlight. He stares at Mira. He takes a few awkward steps toward her. His face is whiter than ever before.

“Bella,” he says. He whispers: “Show me what Mr. B saw.” Behind his gold clocks, without his velvet, his chandelier, his exotic fish, his candelabras, he needs her.

She dances on pointe, which is hard on his carpet. She does an extension in
relevé
. She
bourrées
from one end of the room to the other, thinking about what Mr. B said, feeling the same wind at her back, the shivery hot-cold feeling.

When she is finished, she stands panting in the middle of the room. His eyes are shining.

He leans forward. “I see it,” he says. “It's a cold wind on a winter's night that cuts the cheek, it's that last breath in the body that does not want to leave, it is earth and sky. I have not seen that before. How did he get that?”

“He told me to walk like a waiter at the Russian Tea Room.”

He stares at her, then laughs.

She laughs too. Her laughter sounds strange to her own ears.

“If only my father could see this . . . ,” he says. His eyes are half closed.

She moves closer. Then she takes another step toward him. They are nose to nose, about the same size. When did that happen? Did he shrink? Did she grow?

“Can I see it?” She points to his bad leg.

He bends down and shimmies his pants up his leg. The leg is withered, skin over bone held in by the crisscrossing leather straps of a giant metal brace. The skin is like a baby's—raw, pink, unused but dented in furrows where the leather has cut into it.

“A ballerina's leg, it is said, is skin over steel. Mine is steel over skin.”

“I want to touch it.” She reaches out, feels tenderness—and what she calls that feeling is
love
.

Suddenly, he grabs her hand with one of his. Stops it in midair.

“You
are beautiful.
This
”—he hits his leg savagely—“is ugly.”

He lets go of her arm, bends over, and rolls down his pants.

He is backlit and she can see only his eyes gleam yellow in the glow of the streetlamp. He grips her shoulders. “Who invented the pointe shoe?” he whispers hoarsely.

“Master Taglioni,” she says. “He invented it for his daughter.” She can smell the sweet-apples and sour-cinnamon smell.

She can see him smile, even in the dimness, his white teeth lined up, rocks on the ledge.

She relaxes. She can play this game. He has told her this story already a few times. It is so important to him. “Premier of
La Sylphide
,” she says.

“Paris Opera House in 1832. He whispers in his daughter's ear, ‘If you make a noise, I will kill you.'”

“She does it. She dances silently,” she says.

“The audience gasps! How?”

“The pointe shoe,” she says.

“Yes, and the Romantic ballerina was born.”

“Whoa. Are you okay, professor?” Felicia opens the door, an orange feather duster in hand, a novelty item that she holds without any evidence of a joke. She's wearing sweats and a workout shirt.

I can no longer help it, can no longer help anything. I can't hold it in any longer. “Something has happened, Felicia,” I say.

She leads me to the living room and sits me down on the couch. There's no sign of Alain now. I take the envelope out and put it on the coffee table.

She sits across from me and lays the duster on the floor.

She looks at me quizzically. I let it all spill out. “He wrote to me. I didn't know if he was alive—didn't want to know . . . I tried to forget. But I couldn't. Then this—” I push the envelope toward her.

“Hold on,” she says. She crosses her legs. “Who wrote to you? Please explain.”

I take a deep breath. “Someone I knew a long time ago. When we were kids. At SAB. It was so long ago. But—”

“Wait—oh my god—was it that weird guy with the limp? He used to wait for you after class, by the fountain?”

“What?”

She laughs. “Oh, Kate. We
all
knew about him. Sometimes we called him ‘the creepy guy.' Bryce called you two Beauty and the Beast
.
He was a bizarre character.” She's smiling now, not at me but with a secret that she's preoccupied with. Something more in my chest drops away, and I'm overcome with tears. The room looks momentarily brighter and bigger. Felicia's pale face glints through this new light. She has no lipstick on today.

“Can I tell you a secret?” I take a deep breath. “It's like this. Imagine if you've lived all these years thinking you were someone, but now you see you were wrong.”

“Well, we all have lots of different selves.”

“No, not like
that
. It's like—you're still a
child
and everyone else is a
grown-up
.”

“But you're a
professor
.”

Attempts to describe an inner life, always doomed to fail. She wants to help, I see. I'm struck by the fact that somewhere, against the odds, she's learned kindness. My focus splits and I see both this Felicia, this adult of the mysterious jobs and fluttering hands and crystalline skin, and also
at the same time
the girl whose earnest, pleading eyes and careful ringlets I admired so much until I understood the effort involved in creating them. I remember her mother, the strange quiet of their sequestered life.

But these—I catch myself—are childish thoughts, childish categories of being: good, bad. Smart, stupid. But I can't help it, I can no longer help anything. I am becoming that child again.

It's clear, I am out of the habit of trust. As an adult, my friendships have been practical, mutable, and not lasting. There were some grad student friends, others who were popping pills to stay up all night and show off their cerebral gymnastics. We traded tips on academic journals submissions policies and grants, and then retreated to our studio apartments where we tripped over our decades-long research projects and, in lieu of camaraderie, ferociously updated our blogs. But I was drawn mostly to the troubled or crazy ones who ended up dropping out. The others were competition, and the ambiguous childhood state that allows for friendship with natural enemies had dissolved by then.

Felicia pours me a gin and tonic. A green lime that sparkles in the strange distilled light. I close my eyes. I take a sip of the drink. It's sweet and bitter at the same time. I can taste both flavors. They bloom side by side in my mouth.

When I open my eyes again, I ask her, “Do you believe in fate?”

She looks out her large windows. The sky is brushed white, cloudless, and sullen. From where we sit, you can see just the tops and sides of buildings.

Felicia examines her manicure. “I've wanted lots of things in my life—to be a dancer—a singer—an actor. I've wanted them with what I thought is the strength of desire that would deliver those things. But wanting something doesn't make it real.” She says this cleanly, without self-pity. “I never thought I would be—whatever I am.”

She stirs her drink, as if she'll unearth something at the bottom. “I don't know what you think you've done wrong, but it can't be that bad. You walked in here with that grim professor face and that chilly voice. But now I see that you're just like the rest of us. You're human. Hu-man. That means—fucked-up.”

By the time we finish our drinks, I'm completely exhausted. I tell
Felicia I'm heading to sleep early. As I get ready for bed, I try to go over what I learned from Rob. Maurice is alive—probably. Armonk. Westchester. He is—could be—close. So close.

I listen to the water run in the pipes in the walls. Felicia, flushing the toilet, or taking a shower? My face fills with blood at overhearing someone else's habits, this small intimacy,

Maurice's face drifts back to me. I want to smash it, to pulverize it, this face that has stayed with me. He is, apparently, still alive and has kept changing. This is perhaps what I am most angry about: that he has gone on changing.

As I am climbing in bed, I see there's a new voice mail on my cell. It's from this afternoon, and it's Sioban, who I gave my number to, in a moment of stupidity (or, possibly, compassion, it's hard to know
which). I listen with trepidation. Her voice is low, and soft. There is none of the anger from the last time I saw her. It's hard to make out what she's saying—her voice is garbled and there are long pauses between her words—but I catch “can't stop thinking about you,” “please call,” “I'm scared,” and, finally, “I'm sorry.” The “I'm sorry” sends a cold shiver through me. Then the line goes dead. I turn it off. Anger I can handle, but sadness really scares me.