Girl Through Glass Page 4

  I force myself to keep reading:

  You killed me and I must thank you. 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? You will always be—no way to avoid it. When you kill, you become one of the dead yourself.

  I’m sure of it, suddenly! He is still alive. How raw, how familiar is his penchant for melodrama, for vitriol even. No one can hate like him—except me, perhaps. I have hated him with a passion that burns my scalp and palms, and stifles my voice. I have struggled with this hate, suffered it, abided it. At times it’s been overpowering, at times it’s ebbed; it’s always been there, my whole adult life.

  My legs are ready now; I stand; a burst of energy carries me into the bedroom and toward the closet. But I’m not heading to the closet anymore. Instead I’m reaching under the bed. Here, now, on the bed in front of me is an inlaid wood and enamel box. It was a long time ago, the last time I opened it. I open the box and take out one tiny pointe shoe that looks like it would only fit a child. It is the brownish color of a bruised nectarine. Barely larger than one of my hands—and worth at least twenty thousand dollars. Worn by Anna Pavlova in the second half of a performance of Giselle, in which the great ballerina had a rare tumble as she threw herself at the dying Albrecht. (Only one camp of balletomanes agrees that this was actually a fall. Another thinks it was a kind of seizure, a harbinger of the pneumonia that would eventually kill her.) At least, this was one of the several stories Maurice told me about the shoe over the years. You can no longer discern the bloodstain that Maurice pointed out to me. The fabric is worn away at the tip of the toe box, exposing the layers of binding underneath. The ribbons are brownish and shredded at the end but have held up better than the rest of the shoe.

  I take out a tangled mess of grimy pink pointe shoe ribbons. Something a cat might have played with and discarded. Sometime after college, I found a giant tub of my old pointe shoes in the basement of my father’s Connecticut house, where he and Judy were living before they finally divorced. I cut off all the satin ribbons, leaving the shoes, denuded, cracked, and bent but still startlingly pink in their satin skins. A childish gesture. Like cutting the hair off an old favorite doll. I threw the heap of limp ribbons in the garbage. Then on second thought, I went back and picked them out of the garbage can, balled them up, and put them at the bottom of my suitcase. Back in San Francisco, where I was getting my MFA, I stuffed them in this box. It was a maudlin gesture. Hyperridiculous. Bathetic, even.

  Next, I finger a bent graying business card with NEW YORK LIBRARY OF THE PERFORMING ARTS on it. Not sure this one gets “exhibit” status. I put that aside and remove a perfume decanter top. Exhibit C. I never had the bottle. It has the telltale Victorian flourishes. The body of a swan is etched in the glass. The wings are open behind the swan so that it looks like it is exploding out of the glass in a Victorian fantasy of flight. I hold the top in my hand, roll it back and forth. When I was younger, when he gave me this, I thought it was huge. It still seems uncommonly heavy, from another era when beautification rituals required a different kind of attention and commitment. One’s perfume. Like another limb. It’s a perfume bottle stopper. I sniff it. It smells of some kind of adhesive and musk.

  Then I pull out a little book with a curled black leather cover. The pages inside undulate. They are yellowed and brittle. Still, you can make out the writing. Even black cursive with uneven line breaks, punctuated by dates.

  One entry:

  10/15 Bella chosen for Angel—next year will it be Polichinelle? I want to see her as a Polichinelle.

  She must work on adagio. Développé and ronde de jambe en l’air. The shaking in her thigh. I have seen it. The problem is core strength. Will it come with time?

  The Polichinelle variation will require work on her jumps. I must watch carefully how she lands. She must stop that birdlike flutter of her hands. Annoying. I don’t care what B. says to her.

  There are a couple of other things in the box—odds and ends whose significance I don’t try to recall because his face—the very last time I saw it—comes back to me. Maurice’s face. He woke up before I left the room. I see him now as he lay on the floor looking up at me and laughed. Bravo, bravo, my dear, your finest performance. His face is gray, his hair yellowish white against the stain of dark red that grows from the side of his head, his grin monstrous. He wears his old smile that shows his teeth lined up. It is full of brilliance.

  “Stop making fun of me,” I say.

  His smile fades. He looks stricken. “I have never made fun of you.” Then the wild, bewildered look. Then he closes his eyes. I leave. I run out of the room.

  CHAPTER 8

  OCTOBER 1977

  In the middle of October, Mira comes home from school to find her mother and a strange man sitting on the living room cushions. Her mother has finally changed her clothes. She wears a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck, and her hair is tied back in a frizzy bunch with a bandanna. The man sits across from her, cross-legged. The bottoms of his jeans are frayed. He has taken his shoes off; his socks are all wrong—shiny and too new for the rest of him. Though he is a big man, his hands are bony. Mira dislikes them immediately. They are attached to bony wrists that stick out of the sleeves of a blue worker’s jacket like the kind that men working at the gas pumps wear. Although he is inside, he wears the jacket zipped all the way up. When he takes a sip of tea, Mira wants to shout a “No!” that will make this man disappear from her living room. His eyes, under his taxi driver’s cap, are bright and watchful. He reminds her of the men her mother draws and paints from her Court Street studio window—those lurking outside Club Wild Fyre, the strip club, who push things along the curb with the top of their broken-soled shoes. She has invited them into their house now.

  Mira looks straight at him. He takes a sip and places the cup on the carpeted ottoman that serves as their makeshift table.

  “This is Gary Rosen. He is going to rent a room upstairs for a studio. He’s a writer.”

  He takes off his hat and looks down at his cup. Mira regards him with suspicion. Someone who sits in a room and puts words on a page. But for what? And whom for? And why would one need a special room to do it in?

  “What room?” Mira says. She does not drop her backpack. She does not say “hi.”

  “The extra room,” says her mother.

  “The junk room?”

  Her mother smiles sheepishly at the man. “We used to call it that because that’s where we kept all the extra furniture and stuff.”

  “Extra furniture?” he says. “Wow, man. What a concept.”

  Her mother’s cheeks grow red. “It’s not like we bought it. It was here, it came with the house.” Mira looks at her mother, for she has used her Manhattan voice in their house, in Brooklyn, with this raggedy stranger.

  “Sure thing,” he says, looking around. “This is a far-out place.”

  “You’re going to live here?” Mira says.

  “Mira!” says her mother. “Don’t be rude!”

  He shakes his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll be out of your hair. I’ll mostly be here during the day when you’re in school.”

  Mira turns and walks out of the room, up the creaky steps.

  “Mira! Come back here!” But her mother’s voice breaks into the beginning of laughter.

  She hears the man say, “Well, I should be going.”

  She hears her mother laughing again—high-pitched, energetic—as if her daughter’s rudeness has fueled something in her. “Red hair,” she hears him say. She hears him say: takes after her mother.

  Soon after, a boy from their neighborhood is kidnapped. He is, it is said, kidnapped in broad daylight, while waiting for the school bus. It happens down below Squibb Hill, where Mira and her friends never go. There is nothing there—only old deserted factories. But this boy lived down there. The thought of a boy living down there makes her squirm inside. It is like imagining livin
g on the moon. His sticking-out ears and cloud of curly hair appear on posters everywhere, under the headline MISSING. The graininess of the photocopied paper makes it look like he is staring out from behind layers of static, of white noise. So the world has grown less safe, not just for her, but also for everyone. Missing. One might go missing, one’s face staring out from telephone booths and street signs, covered by a static blanket. Sometimes she has to pinch herself just to be sure she is here—that she can be seen.

  After school, on the way home, Mira stops at one of the MISSING posters. She rips down the faded and watermarked paper and takes it home. She carries it to her room and hangs it on the back of her closet door. Sometimes she will talk to this boy, sometimes she won’t. She will tell him about her father. She will tell him she hopes he is okay. Just to hang in there. She will feel better looking at him, knowing that someone always leaves something behind, even if it is just a static-y smile.

  The temperature drops again and the rats hide in garbage cans and make nests under the grease-stained hamburger. The leaves fall from the trees. The hanging sneakers blacken with soot. Sirens comb the streets, the lights raking across her ceiling. Her mother thinks they are still looking for the looters, the people who broke in stores and stole. Bulky men in blue loiter on street corners giving the stink eye to passersby. She knows they are looking for the boy. But they won’t find the boy. He has disappeared, just like her father.

  The cops wrap yellow tape around trees on Squibb Hill. It says DO NOT CROSS. No one ever removes it, though bottles and Band-Aids and Newport cigarette packs gather around so that by next spring, when Mira has moved to Manhattan, it looks like there’s been a party.

  Ms. Clement waves her hand in the air to start the class, slips a Chopin record out of its sleeve, and puts it on the turntable. The scratching needle starts up the tinkling piano tune and the girls begin the movements that by now are rote.

  Mira holds the barre, the smooth, round wooden pole that draws a line around the room. She points her foot in a tendu. The air is bright with afternoon light, an elbow of shadow rests on the floor. Ms. Clement walks slowly along the barre, surveying her girls. Mira feels Ms. Clement’s half-lidded eyes on her and then her dry, pointy fingertips rest gently on the small of Mira’s back. “String through the top of the head,” she says. Her other hand massages the air in time to the Chopin waltz.

  Ms. Clement runs The Little Kirov. She’s a dancer in her fifties with a vague past—a “European touring career” is how she puts it. Ms. Clement wears too much of the wrong kind of jewelry and chiffon to have really been a Russian dancer, even in her assumed prime. Mira thinks about something her mother said to her once—that Ms. Clement looks like something out of an Ingmar Bergman movie. She doesn’t know who Ingmar Bergman is, but she pictures him like someone small and stooped with bright eyes. “A woman,” Rachel said, “standing by the window, with the light a certain way. Not miserable, not happy, just there.” What Mira knows is that Ms. Clement belongs with them more than in the world of adults. Mira has seen her talking to the parents after the recitals—her big eyes wandering around the room and her fingertips drumming restlessly on top of the piano. Unlike her classroom teachers, who stand in front of the blackboard in their starchy pantsuits and winged hair and gaze at them with malevolence, Ms. Clement looks at them with a gentle fatigue, like someone who has just drunk a glass of milk before bed.

  Today Ms. Clement wears a knee-length black chiffon skirt and a long-sleeve black leotard gathered with an iridescent pin at the nadir of her sloping breasts. She moves on to Val, whose elbow has dropped again. “Arms round as a beach ball, Valerie,” she says. She puts a hand on the back of Haijuan’s head. “Don’t forget,” she says, and they know how she will finish: “A little magnet on the chin. Chin to collarbone.”

  In Ms. Clement’s class, something secret blooms in her. Mira doesn’t get this feeling anywhere else. She is learning that ballet makes a science out of the movements of living. She is learning how to walk in that special dancer way—like a bright, fearful bird. She is learning how to hold her fingers as if she has just let go of a dainty teacup, still feeling the pressure between her thumb and middle finger. She is learning how to smile and lift her chin as she pliés. She is learning that to be a girl is to be strong and tireless. She smiles and lifts her sternum, moves her arm from a first, to a second, to a fourth position, gathering up the air and redelivering it. She will be reborn, transformed. She can feel it.

  Yes, she is a girl in pink tights and ballet slippers, a girl with a heart beating. Her body will move; it will take care of itself. Plié, plié, grande plié. Open her arms, close her arms. As if relearning the very rhythms of breathing. Outside, above the rusted fire escapes, the birds circle high above Seventh Avenue’s canyon of buildings. Relevé, turn to the other side.

  “Movement,” her mother once said as she watched Mira practice, “is the thing that interests me now. How one thing changes into another.”

  Tendu, dégagé, tendu, dégagé. Passé. She rises on her standing leg, bends her other knee, and points her toes into the crook of her standing leg.

  Ms. Clement, in her breathy monotone, says, “Lovely, Mira. Nice long legs. Yes, little ones.”

  As the girls are leaving the room, Ms. Clement calls out to Mira to stay behind. She drapes her long arm over the girl’s shoulders, then dips her head and looks at Mira over her bifocals. The glasses are red and overly large. In them she looks like a regal fly, the dotage queen of some insect tribe. Mira stares at the nicely scuffed toes of her Capezio slippers. She has done her elastics in an X, the way she has seen the SAB dancers do in photographs in the books her father has given her.

  “Please accompany me to my office,” Ms. Clement says.

  The small, cluttered office has a faded carpet and a gingery smell. A steady peck peck of a typewriter comes from one side of the room, where the office manager, Mr. Feltzer, a hunchbacked man in black-framed glasses, works on bills.

  Ms. Clement positions herself on a battered office chair and covers her shoulders with a shawl. Mira sits on the hardwood school chair facing her teacher. Mira had never thought of Ms. Clement as old, but next to the piles of papers on her desk, flanked by two towering filing cabinets, Ms. Clement looks tiny and ancient.

  “Dear,” starts Ms. Clement. “We think you are doing very well here. You have good line and, even more, you have the je ne sais quoi.”

  The sound of the typewriter stops briefly. “For this year’s Little Prince, we would like you to be the Flower Princess.”

  “But Robin is the Flower Princess,” says Mira.

  Ms. Clement laughs—a strange sound—like music from a rusty toy.

  “The Flower Princess is a part, dear, a role, for each girl to step into as she will. Robin, yes, she is a lovely Flower Princess, but so will you be, and so will the girl after you. It is a part. . . .” Here she trails off, adjusting some papers.

  Mira sits on the scratchy wood of the chair. She feels suddenly very hungry, a deep ache that comes not pleading and insistent as hunger from her stomach, but general and complete, from the farthest reaches of her body: her ears ache with this hunger, and her buttocks, and ankles, and toes. She sees herself as the Flower Princess, onstage, healing the Prince. But the image fades, leaving a darkness as if the sun blinked and never opened its eyes again.

  CHAPTER 9

  PRESENT

  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?