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  “You need some time.” He hands me a business card, writes something on the back. His hand is shaking. “It’s my cell, my personal number.”

  “What do you want from me?” I say, taking the card.

  The night sky is settling over the city and the room grows dimmer. Kevin makes an unsure noise. He stretches one hand out at me uncertainly. Then he drops it. He says, “Just to know you.” But he looks unsure. His gaze has shifted, has become something else. Desperate? Angry?

  The office has become unbearable, claustrophobic. It is pressing around me, smothering me in its fertile, deep stink, the pressing darkness, his too-bright eyes, his outstretched hand offering the card.

  I grab his card, turn abruptly, push the door, and then am out. I am in the brightly lit hallway and then at the bank of elevators. When the elevator arrives, I step into it, and, for a moment as I watch the little numbers light up in descending order—27, 26, 25, 24—I hang in the balance, falling, suspended.

  CHAPTER 36

  APRIL 1980

  It’s the morning of Mira’s fourteenth birthday. She wakes feeling strong, her body taut. She is one of the chosen girls, gathering from all around the city, waking on a Saturday and preparing themselves before their sleeping families even stir. These families rise at ten or later and, still in bathrobes, eat bagels and fish and cheese and fruit salad. They just sit and eat. It is astonishing. They begin their day as she is finishing her first class. Sometimes—as she launches into her second barre for the day, she imagines her dad, Judy, and Sam in robes and cloth napkins sitting before all that food on the little patio with a view of the East River, and she smiles to herself. Her virtue in counterpoint to their sloth.

  In the new bathroom—Judy just had it redone—Mira pulls her washed, wrinkled tights down from where they hang on the shower stall from when she rinsed them out the night before. Over her tights and leotard, she pulls on a pair of tight jeans and her favorite boatneck shirt.

  She marches by her dad and Judy’s room, then Sam’s room, with her duffel bag loaded, shoulders squared against the weight.

  It is eight fifteen. She enters the diner across from Lincoln Center and orders her regular: blueberry muffin, toasted, no butter. She will eat half the muffin before Technique, then a quarter between Variations and Pointe, the rest after her classes are over. And coffee—black. She has recently begun, like the other SAB girls her age, to drink coffee. They actually don’t drink much, but they bring it to the dressing room, the hallway, and take tiny sips, leaving the blue and white cups floating around them like little buoys, marking their territory.

  Mira stands in front of the bulletin board. More than two years have gone by since she became an SAB student. She shifts her dance bag onto the other shoulder. It’s now a big girl’s dance bag—filled with all the equipment required of pointe shoe maintenance: lamb’s wool, first-aid tape and gauze, rags, hairspray (to stiffen the toe box), four pairs of pointe shoes from different classes—new ones to break in during floor, a worn-in pair for Variations, and a medium pair for Wednesday Technique class.

  She scours the bulletin board while sipping her coffee. The coffee is sludge. It scorches her throat.

  Her eyes move over the notices for rehearsal space, past Alexander Technique teachers advertising discounted lessons, to the Xeroxed green and pink notices from last week’s audition calls. The notices specify age groups. “Ages fourteen and up.” Fourteen. The magical divide between trainee and professional. She’s fourteen today!

  It might have been different if it were in the old days—begin performing at thirteen, travel the trains like gypsies, and disembark every night in a new town. But now, soon, at fifteen or sixteen, it will happen for them—or not. Boys have more leeway. For Advanced girls, especially those who reach D and who are not taken into the company, there are real questions: If they are not accepted into the New York City Ballet—and few are (only one girl last year made it in)—where will they go? Will they be accepted to a regional dance company? Say, in Phoenix? In Tampa? They will have to buy their own pointe shoes on a corps dancer’s stingy salary. They are beautiful, rare specimens, but is there a place for them? Are they just to be placed on a shelf like Pavlova’s pointe shoe and stared at? Will they become princesses with no kingdoms, concubines with no masters?

  She takes her time, as befits one of the best girls in her division. A girl with Mr. B’s imprimatur. A former Marie.

  A little girl in a powder blue leotard, the youngest of those who can perform, pulls at her bag. She turns to the little girl and smiles. The girl pulls out a Nutcracker program from her bag. “Can you sign?” she says.

  Yes, when she is accepted into a professional company, wherever it is, Maurice will follow her. He must. He will come see her dance every night. Then, they can be together, in the open, no longer hidden. “What’s your name?”

  “Kate,” says the girl. She’s tiny, dark-eyed. Mira fingers her pack of cigarettes, checks her bun. She takes the pen and signs. After the girl is gone, she takes another big swig from the coffee cup, finishing it. Then she tosses it in the bin. She stops at the water fountain, gets a drink. The mysterious innards of the fountain thunk and the spurt of icy water hits her cheeks.

  The evening of her birthday, Mira and Maurice sit at a table in the back of Chez Luis. She doesn’t like this restaurant, its out-of-the-way location, the curly-haired host who smirks at them, and the wine lists longer than the menu. The place shines of lacquered wood. Maurice’s father, of the fierce predator stare, might have come here, she imagines, in his pantaloons and pince-nez, to smoke a cigar. The only thing she wants here is the hamburger, which is way too fatty for her. She ends up with couscous and vegetables.

  The waiter ejects himself from the shadows and waits to take their order. Though she orders the same every time, he never assumes. His face, blank, as she says, “The couscous.” Maurice orders the duck à l’orange with escarole. Her stomach lurches under her ribs so that she has to touch that spot with her hands, ease it open again. She smiles.

  Usually, she can feel Maurice’s eyes moving over her, taking her in, her arms as she lifts her fork, the curve of her neck, the length of her back. But today there is a wall. Because he is not seeing her, she cannot picture herself. She lights another cigarette. He waves the smoke away.

  She brushes her hand against his wrist, in that space above his cuff link.

  “Bella,” Maurice says. “You know the rules.” He sighs, his eyes on his silverware. He is wearing that new bolo tie and a shiny silk shirt. Recently his way of dressing has changed. She doesn’t like it. In addition to the bolo tie and shiny shirts, he wears black turtlenecks. And he shaved his mustache off and got a modern haircut. He looks like someone from these times rather than from the black-and-white photographs on his wall, which are now bolder to her than the colors on TV.

  “Even on my birthday?”

  “Especially on your birthday.”

  Yes, there were his rules. When they are walking in the park, hands just brushing lightly, and they see a boy and a girl, not a few years older than her, sitting with their hands up each other’s shirts or in each other’s pants, he says, “Disgusting.”

  “Why?” she says. “Kissing is nice, so why not—? Why not that?”

  “It is something,” he says, “that is not for dancers.”

  She is a Mr. B girl, in Level B at SAB, and has a rich boyfriend with a fancy apartment who loves to watch her dance, lives to watch her dance. Well, how many girls have that?

  Yet she sometimes wonders why she doesn’t feel happier. It might have to do with Mr. B, who has been absent from the school for the past month after a health crisis. No one knows what is wrong exactly. Some words are whispered—cancer, multiple sclerosis—but they are too terrifying. Mostly, they just whisper that he is sick. That is all they need to know. That the god of their universe is sick is a terrible blow. It is just not the same without the knowledge of his presence lurking somewhere in those halls a
nd classrooms, the possibility that you will turn the corner and see him coming toward you on Suzanne’s or Karin’s arm, his ascot knotted neatly, his eyes suddenly—possibly—alighting on you and seeing you, bringing you out of yourself and into a new existence. Sometimes, as she stands at her metal locker in the clean dressing room before or after yet another class, a terrible word flies into her brain: why? At these moments, she chastises herself. Maurice would say, as Mr. B himself would: don’t ask, just do. They are dancers, after all. They are vehicles, instruments.

  Maurice would scoff at the very desire to question her mission, the chance she has that he never had. Compared to transcendence, what is happiness? He is right about that. He is always right. What would she do without him to keep her on the track of the beautiful, the true dancer?

  Maurice. Dancing for Maurice. Her mother—gone, then back, then gone, with her turban and big shell earrings. Her sagging father. Judy. Sam. Only Maurice does not change. He is—must be—constant. Maurice is one of the constellations in the sky she reads about (but can never see from the city).

  The maître d’ brings the food. Mira trembles with hunger but she makes herself wait to taste it. How warm and salty it is. Fearful of the complex anatomy of the “normal” meal, she has trained herself to taste only the primary and the elemental—warm, cold, sweet, salty.

  She stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray that has appeared.

  Mira may be the shy schoolgirl in her Jackie O. wool jumpers Judy chooses for her, and her slim Fiorruci jeans and boatneck shirts and penny loafers, but Bella is more of a creature than a girl. Bella feels what it is dangerous to feel. It is Bella who slips her foot out of her loafer—she still has her tights on from class—and props her heel on the edge of Maurice’s chair and nestles it into the place where his thigh meets his hips. She moves her toes around. (Bryce calls it a snail, and when it is ready, it “swims.”)

  Now he claps his eyes to her. “What?”—he spits—“are you doing?” He pushes her foot to the ground. Hard. As quickly as the universe can expand under his gaze, it now contracts. What has she done? She is filled with a burning thought: I hate him. She lists the things she hates about him: She hates his perfectly arrayed lawn of white hair. She hates the turtlenecks and jeans he has begun wearing, hates his cream-colored snakeskin belt and the way his turtleneck looks tucked into his jeans. She hates his new calfskin fedora. She hates his twitchy pale hands with the manicured nails and signet ring.

  She shoves her foot back into her loafer.

  Studying her quarter-eaten plate of food, right then she even hates Pavlova’s dried-apricot pointe shoe waiting in the humidor for them to pay their ritual homage. She can’t stand it.

  Fine, she thinks, fine. “Then you won’t have it.” The only power she has. To take all of herself away from him. “I hate you,” she whispers, looking down.

  The book is on the table when she looks up. It’s open, its small lines of cramped handwriting filling each page. Next to the gold-edge paper of the book is a profiterole with a candle in it.

  “Happy Birthday, Bella,” says Maurice, smiling his stones-on-a-ledge smile.

  They know each other’s bodies. He knows every tendon and bone of her form and how flexible and how strong each is. She knows his curved back, his pale, well-groomed hands. His father didn’t want him, but I will take him. She looks at his legs, one white but normal—with faint muscles and man-hair. She doesn’t like this one. It is not hers. He has let her look at the polio leg without pants: it is like a baby’s, this leg, the skin very white and new-looking, knee strangely swollen, deep indentations in the skin. The white, dry skin through which you can see bones. She loves this leg. Without it, he wouldn’t be hers. This foot is a tender, warped white thing, almost bloodless in appearance, that reminds her of something on display, under glass. This foot is highly arched. It fascinates her. The “drop foot” is a friend: a foot in relevé, a foot balanced on nothing, on air. The ball of the foot pushes forward and the heel comes up, a consequence of a shortened tendon. He wears a special shoe. Thick soled with laces, a shell hard as a beetle’s, heavily laced. This shoe holds his heel down. Drop foot? Drop foot? She thinks it should be called raised foot. His leg rests in a long cradle of the brace made of metal and leather. He lets her put his shoe back on, lace it up, gently, severely.

  The more she excels at SAB, the more her own powers expand, the more she understands, in some deeper way, his physical weakness and limitations. She has a feeling of careful ownership of him.

  Their relationship, this young girl and this man, is one based on infirmities. Together they worry about the popping sound in her hip joint when she does adagio extensions. He found a trainer who worked with her on hip placement. Like many teenage dancers with grueling schedules, she experiences the ailments of the middle-aged. He knows best the medications: Tylenol for tendonitis, aspirin for shin splints, Excedrin for joint pain. Epsom salts, valerian, and vitamin B.

  So of course she wonders—the normal girl in her wonders—what it would be like to be kissed, not measured or judged, just kissed. Since Gary, she has had no physical contact with any man other than Maurice.

  She wonders how it would feel to have a boy’s hand creeping up her shirt and, not finding much there, prying at the waistband of her pants, at her zipper. She is sure that there would be something of interest for him, something even ballet had not touched. Sometimes at night, the song in her body stops long enough that she can hear, not her bright strong limbs, but other parts of her body—her stomach with hunger, and other, deeper parts. Then she grabs her pillow between her legs and squeezes hard and bites its corners, gnashing her teeth like a wild animal.

  In his apartment, she dances for him. She strips out of her street clothes, down to her leotard and tights. She does the combination from Danilova’s class. The one with the three pirouettes. And wouldn’t you know it—she does all three pirouettes out into the arabesque perfectly. There, across from her, he sits on his wraparound leather couch in the furrows of light carved by the Third Avenue streetlamps (he doesn’t turn the lights on).

  She stops and stands there in the dark, listening to his shallow, even breaths. She has gone through the whole thing—once, then twice—hearing the sounds of the accompanist, hearing Danilova’s high, warbly entreaties and commands—yes dharlinks, dharlinks, this, not this, yes this but not this—and then she has moved through a thin layer of sweat in the stuffy room. She feels strangely light-headed, probably from not eating enough. In the end, she ate almost nothing at dinner.

  She peers over Maurice. He is asleep! He has never fallen asleep before.

  Why has she begun to cry, silent tears that flatten out along her cheeks? Her face is wet, her mouth open with the silent sound. He is asleep!

  Maurice sleeps, his face tilted upward. She bends over, kisses his pale lips lightly, just grazes them. He doesn’t stir. It amazes her. His breathing doesn’t change. In her tights and leotard, she curls her body next to him and closes her own eyes. Garbage cans rattle in a breeze, sirens wail far away.

  Her eyes do not close; she doesn’t let them. She imagines her mother passing through the mountains to arrive at the Street of the Warrior. She pictures how her mother looked last time Mira saw her—before the trees lost their leaves. She looked bigger, more solid, in a broad colorful shirt, her hair wound up in a white turban, wearing heavy clanking shell earrings. Mira had not wanted to hug her. Her mother smelled of incense and something like tar, but when Mira hugged her anyway, she embarrassed herself by crying into her mother’s many necklaces.

  They lie there—the girl and the man—without moving for a long time. Outside, people whistle for cabs, high heels click on the pavement, horns blare then fade. When the sounds change to slamming car doors, rushed, barked words, the sudden curls of laughter, and the down-the-street swoosh of taxis dropping people home from parties, some alarm goes off inside her and she moves. She rubs her arms, which have fallen asleep.

  She get
s up and pulls her pants and her shirt over her ballet clothes. Then she leans over Maurice’s sleeping form and says, “It’s time.”

  He wakes suddenly, as if he just closed his eyes for a second. He opens his eyes and stares at her—startled, fearful. “What did you do to me?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “You fell asleep.”

  He rubs his eyes, pushes her away. He sits up. Grabs his cane. Takes in her appearance but does not move. “You are beautiful,” he says conclusively. His voice is unkind, full of blame.

  “I know,” she says.

  Later that night, Maurice drives her uptown—twenty blocks north—past humming streetlamps. His car after all these years still smells of new leather. She looks at him, maneuvering the lever that allows him to make up for his bad leg, the grim paleness of his face and something new about him, something that reminds her of her mother in her studio when she was much younger, a distracted quality, like he is straining to hear music from a long way off. She reaches over and turns on the radio.

  “Mozart?” she says.

  “Mendelssohn.”

  He parks the car across the street from her dad and Judy’s place. After she gets out, he rolls down his window and turns to her.

  “Bella . . .”

  “What?” she says, her heart pounding.

  He looks at her, his old face troubled, but says nothing. It’s almost spring, and a smell of something blooming wafts into the car.

  “I think . . . maybe . . .”

  “What?”

  He looks out the window. He pauses and gives her a strange look. “Do you enjoy dancing?”

  She stares at him. No one has ever asked her this question that she can remember. As a girl, she would have answered Yes! Yes! Yes! without thinking about it. But she is not a girl now. She knows that suddenly.

  He lowers the volume on the radio but the music still simmers. He hands her some bills.