Girl Through Glass Page 17

  CHAPTER 27

  PRESENT

  After I say good-bye to Rob, I wander for a while until I end up in a café packed by tourists and decorated with cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. I pick up a turkey wrap and sit at a table to eat it. This food is just right—unobtrusive, barely food. I didn’t manage any soup and my head is pounding from the coffee.

  I finish half the wrap and toss the rest away. My cell buzzes. A number I don’t recognize snakes across the screen. I turn off my phone and let it go to voice mail. Probably a wrong number.

  I have to get out of here. I have to move because I have to think. I start walking east, toward Central Park.

  Yes, there is a part of me that wants to believe I am blameless—like Rob suggested. I was only a child. I was not responsible for our relationship.

  But some lines from the letter run through my head: I am one of the dead. I do not deserve to have commerce with the living. I wanted to tell you, my dear, because you too are one of the dead. Do you know that yet? Something hardens inside of me. This is Maurice. Maurice of the exotic fish, of the too-salty capers and arugula, the Cordon Bleu, of the Indonesian silk ties and New Zealand wool scarves. Not an old man in a convalescent home. In a relationship like ours that was based on aesthetics, perception is everything. If he saw himself as dead, did I in fact not kill him?

  My assault on him caused him to become an invalid for the rest of his days. I did not kill his body, but did I kill his spirit? Perhaps. But maybe even as I destroyed one Maurice, I gave birth to another?

  Because he destroyed me that night. That girl always searching for the spotlight. And gave birth to another girl. This girl became the woman I am now.

  That girl took her mother’s last name. Symbolic? Yes, of course. But it made paperwork easier. Our insurance was through the small law office off Market Street where my mother worked part-time, later full-time, still doing her art in the evenings and on weekends, and having the same last name made everything easier.

  Kate Randell is one who, instead of seeking out the spotlight—hungry for eyes to fill her up with their gaze—looks for the dark. Her eyes go to the peripheries where she can hide, her mind moves away from bright conversation—laughter, gaiety—to the murmured subterfuge among discontents. She seeks the cubbyhole at the library in the back away from the window, books with black-and-white photographs, creaky microfiche machines in the basements where she watches tiny decades-old dancers in black and white skitter and jump, and then, under the weight of her heavy spirit, she rears herself into battle for some words to put on the page. Each sentence, each page, each article, each lecture, a dim victory against him and what he has wrought.

  I became a child who could sink into the blue sky, bottlebrush trees, Point Reyes, who knew what parasailing was. I watched my mother struggle from one artistic obsession to the next. I stopped dancing for a time, became a punk girl hanging out in video stores, on stoops, at Fillmore District clubs. A new sense of self bloomed: the watcher. I could watch. Others would do. Clearly, it was safer to watch than be watched. And out of the watching, grew the thinking, and out of that grew writing.

  But I didn’t stop dancing forever. My body didn’t let me. By my senior year of high school, I had begun to dance again. Not ballet, though. I took modern and contact improv classes, which were held in raw spaces where there were raves at night and contact jams during the day. This was a dance world inverse to SAB’s, whose stars had not started dancing until college, whose bones had not been bred to turn out, whose ribs did not rise automatically at the opening bars of a familiar classical piece. Their feet were flat, their hamstrings tight, their torsos too thin or too thick, but they had vision. They didn’t care about beauty, but about art.

  I went to some of their performances. They were held in cavernous lofts that smelled of ketchup and alcohol, and lights burning through cheap filters. These dancers moved in the half-darkness, across a bed of Styrofoam nails. They stood on their heads and stacked their bodies one on top of the other until the bottom person emerged gasping and red-faced. Sometimes someone onstage spoke a string of words. A grainy video popped up overhead and dancers moved in front of it as if it weren’t there. I looked around the room at all the people who sat there watching these shows and thought: they like this; they choose to see this; it is something. But what? What would Mr. B think? What would Tumkovsky think? What would Maurice think? They would hate it, of course—it wasn’t beautiful and it wasn’t tragic. There was nothing about it that made you want to cry, or leap with joy, or dance for a stranger in a dark apartment, or put on a swan’s costume and pas de bourrée in the moonlight. Nevertheless, it held a power, and it fascinated me.

  For the next five years, I drifted in and out of small modern troupes and contact improv groups. It was the 1990s in San Francisco. The dance scene was dispersed, experimental, allergic to hierarchy. The watchword was “experimental.” This meant everything that ballet was not: release technique, contact improv, choreography collectives, multimedia, performance-based, “personality.” Dancers were praised for their quirks, their clothes (or lack of them). In my first post-ballet piece, I came onstage topless in leather pasties. My mom applauded loudest of all.

  During these years, I worked many jobs just to get by. I tried catering, bookkeeping, waitressing, all demanding. The life of the struggling dancer is like that of an addict. Classes are like dope: life is driven by the need to get enough cash to take class. Even then classes were twelve dollars a pop. Food work is good because, though it doesn’t pay a lot, you get free meals and the free meals add up. Tossed onto my own resources, living with a roommate in a Tenderloin apartment (by twenty, at last on my own, no longer with my mother), I could not afford not to eat. The stuff of my life then: my earplugs next to my bed (from my roommate’s midnight visitors), my scale, my laundry rack of drying tights and leotard, my crumpled Ex-Lax packages at the bottom of my bag, my split ends (couldn’t afford a haircut), the card from the man who offered me free cocaine to sleep with him, which I hadn’t thrown away. My fingertips permanently smelled of the garlic from the hummus that I mixed in batches for the catering company, so that when I fell asleep, I felt like I was still mixing great tubs of it.

  One night in rehearsal a choreographer named Elso, who was from Norway, asked me to Ace-bandage two miniflashlights to my chest, above my breasts. They reflected beams on the ceiling as I danced and flickered as I moved my arms in the way Elso showed me. He said, “Your breasts are like the stop lights.” I realized then that no matter how long I danced now, I would never again get back to the place where I was a princess who gazed at the prince’s face in the mirror and he smiled a secret smile at me.

  But then I remembered: when I fell, Christopher did not catch me. Maurice did. Who was the real prince of my childhood?

  The mirror lies. We know this. Its secret smiles are the images that match our own dreams. But it persists, categorical and seductive. How often have I learned this? Still, the desire to trust the image persists. And persists.

  It was during my period of being a poor modern dancer that I saw Christopher again. I’d heard he was with the San Francisco Ballet, partnering the sensation of that year, some soloist whose name I can’t remember. Then I heard he’d left the company, that he was “sick”—which in dancer lingo was a euphemism for something terrible, if it was bad enough to keep you offstage. Soon after, I heard that he was strung out, living in the Tenderloin too. Someone had seen him panhandling on BART, this prince of my youth. I heard from another dancer friend who’d danced with him at ABT—he was a junior soloist there in the late 1980s—that Christopher was in the hospital. She said we could visit him—that he’d opened up his room to anyone who wanted to come.

  He lay in a very white bed. He had tubes sticking out of every part of the body. His head looked enormous on his shrunken limbs. His lips and fingertips were blue. His hair scanty, his skin mottled, a web of veins rising to the surface like some flourishing underwater growth.
The body! The dancer’s crucible. Giant purple circles bloomed under his eyes; the scars from Kaposi’s sarcoma dotted his yellow skin; his clavicles and knees protruded. Even in the hospital bed, his legs rotated outward at the hips, and his feet lay in a perfect fifth position. Such a bunhead thing to notice.

  In the corner, by the window, some ridiculously young ballerina was doing her short nails. The smell of nail polish was thick in the room. By now, I had cut my hair off. I no longer considered myself a bunhead. Still, how well I knew their scornful stares, their crazy-long hair, their Cleopatra eyeliner, their too-proud duck walks. Ballerina girl didn’t even look up when we came in.

  My friend kissed Christopher on the cheek and hugged him gingerly. He winced at the contact. Then he looked at me. “Hey, it’s Flower Girl,” he said. I couldn’t believe he recognized me. “Thanks for coming to my wake.”

  “How’s it going?” I said. “It’s been a while.” It’d actually been years since I’d seen him, since our Little Kirov duet. At SAB, we’d rarely crossed paths, he was an apprentice and in company classes while I was only in intermediate classes. When we did, he’d only acknowledge me with the briefest nod. I’m not even sure why I decided to go see him, except out of some morbid curiosity, I guess.

  He started laughing. I remembered that laugh: it always made me think he knew more than I did. “You were such a serious girl,” he said. Then he started to cough.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I meant it.

  “It’s been better.” Then he looked right at me and didn’t pretend. I saw how bad it was. I saw he was going to die. I put my hand out and he took it. My friend looked at us. I felt time close in on us. The demise. “Well, I won’t miss this,” he said, waving his hand vaguely around. “But I’ll miss—”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  I nodded. I understood. He meant dancing. I felt a terrible wave of sadness. What happens when I feel compassion is that it opens something in me so wide it hurts. It lets so much life in that I don’t know what to do. I am flooded, I shut down. I get angry. I’ve never known what else to do in the face of beautiful, monstrous life baring its teeth, death in its mouth. I’m not proud of it, but I turn my face away.

  I gently pulled my hand back.

  “My last will and testament, you know, was to go to my own wake,” he said. He turned his face to the wall. When he turned back, he was smiling. “Thanks for coming.” It wasn’t till I was in college, a few years later, that I heard he died.

  At the old age of twenty-four, I went back to school to get my college degree. I strung classes together from community colleges, and when I had enough credits, I transferred to San Francisco State. Did I fall under the spell of school in the same way I had with ballet? The rigor of it, the logic of it, the step-by-step of it? The specter of a greater good hovering over all of it. The promise—in the form of degrees—of mastery. It was like crack to me, to my burned and buried ego. The illusion of getting ever closer to a perfect. The illusion of mastering a subject through knowledge, of going so deeply into something that it opens up and spreads its secrets wide.

  This was another happy, dark period of my life when my quest for knowledge colored everything. The walls of my cubicle at the library were my home. I spent hours in bed with books and wine. With my notebooks and books, I could move through time now. Becoming an historian, I believed I could master the people who had schooled me as a child, used me, taught me, possessed me.

  At one point, I saw a therapist. All my friends were seeing therapists. But my therapist’s patient listening, her books, her entreaties, her couch were not enough. There was something wild about my pain that I couldn’t put into words and that, finally, I couldn’t part with. Maybe at the bottom I knew that if I went too deeply into it, I would be admitting something terrifying.

  The day has turned sallow. I’ve been walking along the border of the park.

  Suddenly, I just want to sleep, nothing more, nothing less. I only want to lie down in Felicia’s hermetically sealed apartment across from another sunset of fire. I don’t want to think anymore. I don’t want to remember. I want to sink into a deep sleep, an empty forgetting sleep. A boy. A young man.

  I remember Maurice’s eyes burning into me, as if he owned me. I remember the inside of his car, its plush silence, like the inside of a theater before a show. My broken wrist, his broken legs. Two broken things. But I had wanted that too, to be owned by him.

  I turn around and head away from the park, back toward Felicia’s apartment.

  CHAPTER 28

  FALL 1978

  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.