Girl Through Glass (5 page)

That night I dream of New York City. It's summer and heat radiates off the concrete. The trees billow with leaves and plastic bags. Light shimmers over the jagged tops of buildings, revealing the complex geometry of the skyline. I am a girl again, wandering the streets, and there are other kids wandering with me, each of us with large pockets for our hands and blimps for our heads that keep rising toward the sky. I begin floating up. The wind is so powerful. Night falls and the city is dark and cold, now hunkered down in ice. I am myself, but a child, floating along the rooftops. I see the darkened frozen canyons stretching out below me, all sandstone and brick. The wind is frigid and I wear only a thin jacket. Above me, beyond the balloon of a water tower, a shadow speaks with
his
voice. And there is his smell, sour and sweet, and his breath like ancient paper. I reach out to him, but he crumbles to dust, like rice paper. I try to pick up this dust, to save it, but it's too late. I am already falling into the darkness, into one of the canyons.

I've been to New York City several times for conferences in the last
decade. It now has very little to do with the tumultuous, rioting city of my youth. The city I have seen as an adult, from the midtown hotels I've stayed at, is a sparkling, renovated version of my childhood city.

The last time I was in the city, I didn't go uptown or to Brooklyn. I didn't see, and didn't look for, the overflowing gutters, or the stone carvings of angels outside stately mansions. I kept my briefcase close
and trod a narrow path to sushi restaurants with my colleagues. There was one late evening at a wine bar in the West Village. I told no one that I had lived in New York as a child. Even still, as the strange twilight hung over the buildings, I felt something buried rise to the surface, and I had to keep going to the bathroom to stare at my flushed, absent face in the mirror.

That evening I cook myself a rare steak and eat it in the dark. I read
the letter over again and this time it seems oddly threatening. It's really a short letter, just a paragraph. It feels purposefully mysterious, even provocative. The style is ornate, his particular Old World way of talking. It offers no solid details, just evocative ones:
“Not Hades, a city that befits me,” “early bird specials and other sad people,” “banished to a city with no reason for existing.”
But the letter also reveals anger and self-pity. Neither of these emotions fits with the Maurice I knew. The questions barrel toward me: Is it him? Is he alive? If he's alive, where is he? Is he still at his old apartment? Why now? Why try to contact me now?

His face drifts back to me again. This time it's from the beginning,
the first time I ever saw him. We never discussed it. Did he too remember that we had met before, when I was just a child—a few years before he appeared in the doorway of the studio?

But the image that comes to me now is not of the end, but of the very beginning. A chance encounter before anything had happened that could be called secret. The images are raw and bright and fill up my mind.

Inside the opera house, the air was thick with light and heat, the buzz of excitement. The ballet was over—it was during curtain calls—I would have been nine or ten then, not eleven yet, the age when my father moved out, and so much changed—and I had run down the carpeted stairs, through the deserted lobby, and into a packed and thundering proscenium of carpeted walls blaring with lights. I had fought my way through the black stockinged legs and
gold-clasped purses to within sight of the stage. But then it was too crowded. I couldn't move anymore—and I couldn't see more than a sliver of the stage. A face in the crowd turned toward me, a slight man—it was him. He reached down, said something like, “Poor thing. You can't see, can you?” He helped me up on the armrest of a seat and held me there while I balanced over the crowd. I remember the small face, the thin mustache, the oddness of his smell, like apples and something sour. I remember his face was bright with rapture, with reflected stage lights. With his help, I balanced feet away from the stage. The male dancer's face was orange with makeup, the female dancer's muscles stretched like rubber bands over bone. I shouted my
Bravos
at the dancers until I was hoarse.

A girl and a man meet. A girl and a man, too old for her, meet and are changed, though they don't know it yet.

Something is hardening in me—and something else is softening. I
put on my running shoes and, despite the ice, take the path back across campus. I head to Baker. No one is usually using these studios now, what with the new Art Center. The Baker studios were never converted to a state-of-the-art facility. The floors are wood, the windows rattle, the rafters are strewn with old bits of rope and old props. But I like them, these old Baker studios. There's a dreaminess to them, like a stage set from long ago, and the air above you is vast.

I don't turn the lights on. It's easier to dance in the dark tonight. If I move, I keep my thoughts at bay. They are unproductive, tangled. They lead me back only to questions and an old pain. Coming through the high windows is a still, bright moon that casts long blue shadows across the floor.

I shuck off my coat. I skip a warm-up and just start moving. The shapes my body makes are interesting. At first I don't recognize them. My upper body is doing one thing and my lower body is doing another. My arms are beating a rhythm. Then the rhythm changes—I'm following it—and it becomes faster and more violent. In the midst of a series of contract and releases—a release fall to the floor,
a roll, a pitch upward with a side extension—I realize I am actually threading ballet steps in. God love me, it's been years but my body remembers: pas de bourrée, glissade, jeté, the first sequence I learned as a girl and which we would do at the end of class and it would feel like we were flying. It's been ages since I've choreographed something original, but there is something interesting in these sequences. Now I'm close to the floor, locking in a plié, my arms shoot out, I tumble, I roll.

I'm not dancing for anyone. I'm just following the patterns. Then I am good and sweaty and everything is less precious, everything is flowing. My body is cooking. I am moving in space. There is the vastness of this once-gym, its 1920s bones, all you have to do is look up and see the steel poles and nets made of a kind of string no one uses anymore.

I'm moving in and out of the shadows, circling: fall, roll, jeté.

I am
dancing
.

And then the lights turn on. They thunder on across the rafters and the landscape of blue shadow is replaced by a false yellow sunshine that shows every decade of scuff and bang to the floors.

I'm left blinking, gasping for breath.

“Oh my God! Professor Randell! You scared me!” says a voice. And I look and then I see—I can't believe it, what are the chances—it's Sioban. Her hands, one of those on my wrist, the same hands, the color of ash in this light, flutter to her face and then drop at her side.

I open my mouth and close it again.

Then she laughs. “OMG, I didn't know you still did ballet!”

“I don't—that was just—” And I am deeply embarrassed.

“You still have mad skills! You were killing it!” Has she been watching me dance before she turned the lights on?

I stand, blinking in the harsh light. I finally have discovered my voice, remember who I am. “Sioban, did you sign this studio out?”

She nods. “I have it starting at eight, but I can take A. No one is in here.”

“No, I'll move over to A,” I say, walking over to get my things.

“Or—” she says. “We could share it. I've been working on my contact”—she drops and does a sudden roll and then springs up—“the act of trusting, like you said, or
letting go
—.” She flushes. “Would you—could you—do some contact with me before you go?” Her face is deeply red now. She moves toward me.

I don't know why, but—and this is really inexcusable—I nod my head.

I think I'm grateful for the lack of speech between us. Our movements together are surprisingly seamless. But her body is too rigid and moves in parts, from the center outward. It avoids its own mass. For all her skill, she doesn't know how to flow and release into another body. She's using too much muscle and not enough bone. “It's not like partnering,” I say. I bend again and she lays her spine along my spine. “Good,” I say. Now she's allowing herself the help of gravity. “Follow the point of contact,” I say. “Very good!” How grateful I am to be the teacher again.

“Oh!” she says, and I see that she has the feeling of doing
less,
how liberating this can be for bunheads. I'm pivoting and taking her weight and then she goes stiff again. “It's okay,” I say. “Let yourself be heavy. Don't worry. I can take it.”

“I can't,” she says, and her voice catches. I turn and spiral up, still in the grip of the motion, and then I am facing her, she's breathing hard, and her face is pale. “I—” she says, and she kisses me boldly, sloppily in a rush, and I don't pull away. “Shit,” I say. She doesn't move and neither do I. We're both just breathing. Then she kisses me again with more confidence this time. It's a strange sorrowful kiss, too old for her years, and it scares me.

Rehearsals for
The Wounded Prince
begin the first week of November. On Saturday morning, Mira has her first rehearsal with the boy who plays the prince. His name is Christopher, and he comes on loan from ABT, where they have whole classes full of boys. (At The Little Kirov, boys appear and quickly disappear from classes like supermarket circulars from apartment building vestibules.) The first time Mira saw Christopher walking down the hallway, she was eight, in just her first year of taking classes. In the dressing room, she heard mounting whispers. She listened. It seemed to have to do with a boy. The boy who played
the Prince.
He was coming to rehearse with the Flower Princess.

She ran out into the front hallway with the others. They practiced splits against the walls as they waited. For once Mr. Feltzer did not shoo them away. Every time the elevator door opened, they grew still. Finally, he arrived. He exited from the elevator wearing a green scarf, a black wool blazer, and a white untucked oxford. His hair was thick and honey-blond. She had never seen a boy so beautiful. Christopher's hard blue eyes reflected back all their gazes.

Now here is Christopher, leaning in the doorway of the rehearsal
studio. A year since Christopher has last been at The Little Kirov. A year is a long time. He wears a loose sweater over corduroys, no coat, even though it's cold outside. His face is longer, his features more angular. Small red dots on his nose.
There is something wrong with him.
After all these years, this is the clearest thought she has coming face-to-face with the boy who plays the Prince.

Christopher puts on a smile that Mira has seen in kids who know how to act around grown-ups. He kisses Ms. Clement on both cheeks.

“Hey.” He nods at Mira, who is hanging back. “So you're the new Flower Princess. How old are you?”

“Eleven. I'll be twelve in April.”

Ms. Clement says, “Mira is quite good, if young. But, dear—you remember, you once were so young!”

“Ha-ha.” Christopher laughs a grown-up laugh.

Up close—she is within a few feet of him now—his neck is long and taut. As he laughs, he does so with a girl's delicacy that makes her look down.

“Okay, dear, go and get changed. We have Mira for another half an hour. Then we can go over your part. You remember it, I hope?”

Christopher picks up his shoulder bag and moves toward the boys' dressing room, in some dim corner of the studio. “I never forget it,” he says.

While Christopher changes, Mira and Ms. Clement go over the opening again.
Ronde de jambe
, port de bras,
développ
é. These are the movements from the beginning of
The Wounded Prince,
in which the prince comes upon a girl dancing in a forest clearing. She is supposed to be gathering food for her mother but has forgotten her errand. And Mira does feel someone watching her—from the studio doorway. She instinctually raises her chin and doubles her effort. When she finally peeks, she is surprised to see it is not Christopher, but a small man with a neat mustache leaning against the doorjamb. He clears his throat.

“Maurice! What a surprise!” says Ms. Clement.

“Please,” he says. He bows his head. “I heard there was a new Flower Princess. I had to come see her.”

“Well, meet Miss Mira Able. Mira, this is Maurice Dupont . . . who is a very generous man.”

The three of them in the doorway: Mira, her teacher, and the man. His suit is charcoal-colored and he wears a red folded handkerchief
in his breast pocket. Mira walks over and holds out her hand. He takes it in his tangle of bony fingers. He gives off an odor of talcum powder and spicy cologne. He stares at her with very black pupils. Her face feels like it is burning.

“I enjoyed watching you.”

“Thanks,” she says.

“You understand movement.”

Where has she seen this smile, these teeth, small and even, like little stones lined up on a ledge?

She remembers dimly, a face like this one. It comes back to her—the male dancer's feline face and the ballerina's sinewy arms. He was there that night at the ballet, when her father still lived with them. The cardboard shoulder that she leaned on, the pale face crossed with a black mustache, and the smell of something sweet and also something sour. Her mother had worn her hair long over a green dress. Her parents had held hands. That same night: holding this little man's shoulder and shouting
Bravo!
He had brought her closer to the dancers than she had ever been before.

Ms. Clement is looking at them.

“You helped me see—at
Giselle
—onto a chair—”

“Did I? Was it that most amazing performance? Kirkland and Baryshnikov? Never another like that.”

Ms. Clement is watching Maurice.

“Well, of course, I like to be useful. To help the little ones.”

Mira has no idea what is happening. She just knows she wants the little man to look at her again in that way he just did, the way that makes her feel more visible than she ever has.

Just then, Christopher brushes past the man and comes into the studio. He's in his rehearsal clothes—white T-shirt, black tights. His hair is carefully combed back off his face, and he wears a bandanna tied around his neck. In his dance clothes, he is more recognizable. As he makes his way into the studio, he stops. He says to the little man, “I've seen you at David Howard's, right?”

“You may have. I've been helping David with outreach—”

“What?” says Ms. Clement.

“Well,” says the man. “I like to be useful. . . .”

Christopher begins rehearsing his solo from Act Three. Ms. Clement claps her hands. “Come, Mira!” she says, moving to the center of the studio. Mira runs toward her teacher and Christopher. When she turns back, the little man is gone.

It is Act Two and the moody prince has taken to gazing out his window
. He spies the girl dancing in the palace garden. It is the same peasant girl he saw dancing by the river, who had so transfixed him. Their illicit dance had led to the terrible curse upon the land—and his own lameness. They perform a duet that is supposed to be his reverie.

Ms. Clement and Christopher mime the first lift. When she puts her hands on Christopher's shoulders to demonstrate, Ms. Clement lifts her chin high and her wrinkled lips pull back in a practiced stage smile.

Mira takes Ms. Clement's place. “Try, children.” Ms. Clement steps away.

Christopher rests his hands on her waist; Mira pliés. Partnering lifts are brand-new to Mira; never in her life has she been so close to a boy. Up close, his face looks distorted—as if seen through a fish-eye lens—his eyes big and staring, his pale forehead a wide plain of white. His smell is deep, like old fruit or metal shavings. His hands grip her waist tighter and she jumps, but it's too late. She's not ready. The force of his hands moves up her torso, rubbing her ribs raw. She coughs. He releases his grip.

“Shit,” he says, rubbing his forehead with the end of the bandanna. “You okay?”

“Let's break, children,” says Ms. Clement. “Let me speak to Christopher.”

Mira goes to the bathroom in Middle Studio. While in there, she peers at herself in the mirror: a pale girl with a long face and a blast of freckles across her cheeks. They usually fade in the winter, but
they haven't this year. A nimbus of hair has escaped from her bun, as usual, and floats in frizzy wisps above her head. Her hair looks burned, the color of embers at the end of a fire. She turns on the tap and drinks thirstily. She closes her eyes and imagines the little man's black eyes on her—burning through her like a sun. Slowly, the tickle in her throat recedes.

“We try again,” says Ms. Clement, when she returns. This time Mira is ready. She stands in front of Christopher, her hands on his shoulders. “Plié, then jump. Do not wait to feel him lift. Then it will be too late. You must trust, then jump. Trust, jump.” Ms. Clement counts out the three-four time. Mira pliés, then jumps blindly into the air. She closes her eyes as if jumping off a diving board. This time she feels a response halfway up. Christopher propels her farther into the air, pivots, and slowly returns her to the ground. As he is lowering her, he grimaces. Then his face returns to normal—a mask, staring but not seeing.

“Good, children,” says Ms. Clement. “Mira, you are anticipating your partner.” She pats the back of her untidy knot of hair and walks over to Christopher. “Christopher, dear, don't let her get away from you. Keep her straight above you. Then gravity will help you.”

They repeat the lift again several more times. Now Mira concentrates only on the timing. Each time she leaps, she finds herself moving through the air with greater force than her jump should allow. She lifts her arms into a fifth position, high above her head. At the highest point of one of the lifts, she catches sight of herself in the mirror. A girl in a black leotard high in the air. For a moment, she forgets about how she got there; there is only—air, motion, height. Behind her is the face of the little man in the mirror, watching.

After rehearsal, Mira dresses quickly and leaves the studio. Clouds
left over from a morning rain scuttle across the sky. She passes the pizza place, the restaurant with the fried clams, the corner bookstore. This part of Manhattan was hardly touched by the blackout. No boarded shop windows, no burned lots.

A small man in a suit exits a camera store and joins the flow down the street. It's
him
. Maurice. She knows it. He turns right onto Fifty-seventh. She is supposed to turn left toward the Columbus Circle subway station, but instead she follows him.

She pulls the strap on her bag tighter. She can easily keep pace because he walks in an odd, flapping way, as if his joints are too loose. Like a marionette who's not properly controlled.

The clouds break and a bank of lighter sky appears. It's a luminous, spooky white. Fifty-seventh Street's handsome facades briefly light up as she trails his coat down the middle of the sidewalk. Now the city comes alive around her. Shoes click by: high heels, loafers with tassels, some made of the shiny skin of an alligator. Legs in pants: checkered, bell-bottomed, brushing the concrete as they go. Skirts: denim and sleek leather. Shopping bags swing. Folded umbrellas tick by. Faces covered by sunglasses. Eyes drip with makeup, mouths open in laughter. A cup wrapped in folded cardboard jumps in front of her. It's attached to a man whose eyes are raised upward, an unseeing blue. She feels a new calmness settle over her: the power of her anonymity. She pushes past the cardboard cup, past this broken man.

The little man rounds the corner at Bergdorf's and she follows him up Fifth Avenue to the pillared gates of Central Park. There she loses sight of him in the crowd.

She pauses, but not for long. He's there, standing right in front of her. He holds an oversize black umbrella above his head despite the fact that it's not raining anymore.

He smiles broadly, as if he has just said “Bingo!” or “Lotto” or “Connect Four” or any of those words that mean
I win, you lose.
Only she doesn't feel like she has lost. She feels like she, too, has won a prize. She doesn't have time to be embarrassed.

“Are you following me?” he says.

She looks down.

“Can I ask you something, Mira? Do you want to be a ballerina?”

She blushes. “I take ballet.”

“Hah!” he says. “And how long have you been doing that?”

“Five years.”

“How many days a week?”

“Every day but Wednesday and Sunday.”

He smiles. “And
why
do you do this?”

She doesn't have an answer.

“To
become
a dancer. You have to say what you want.” She looks up. There are lines on the side of his mouth that she hasn't noticed before. They make him look even more puppetlike.

“Yes,” she says, for suddenly she does know what she wants: to dance with the Russians. To dance with Baryshnikov as her partner. To dance with giant spotlight-like-eyes on her. She is giddy with anticipation. All the attention she will get, each piece given to her, each unwrapped to reveal a pair of eyes like his.

“I want to show you something, Mira,” he says.

He raises his arm and a horse and carriage stops. She climbs in underneath the rain shield.

She isn't afraid. He's nothing like the “perverts” she's heard about—dirty men in trench coats who stalk playgrounds. She likes his neatness: his folded handkerchief, his trimmed mustache. She likes his gaze, which assesses her with some kind of special knowledge. He knows about dance—she can see it in his eyes, the way he looks at her. Christopher himself had said he was connected to David Howard's studio, and everyone knew David Howard's is like an annex to ABT. His gaze brings her closer to the city's glittering center of professional ballet.