The Art of Falling (16 page)

My soles squeaked against the hospital floor as I walked down the hall to Angela’s room. I didn’t realize I had been holding my breath until I saw her name still written on the placard outside the door, albeit in dry-erase marker that could be removed with nothing more than a tissue.

I found her with her eyes closed, breath raspy, Kandelbaum holding her hand to his lips. Her mouth and nose were covered by a new kind of oxygen mask.

“Has she woken up yet?”

Kandelbaum shook his head. “They told me she would come around any time now, but that was five hours ago.”

Feeling helpless, I set down the box of belated birthday cards and started taping them to the wall.

A nurse sorted out Angela’s tangle of tubes. “I’m adding morphine to her drip,” she said. “Her breathing should quiet down in a bit.”

“So soon?” I said. “I mean, isn’t morphine a one-way trip?”

The nurse raised the bed rail and clicked it into place. “All of life is a one-way trip. Can’t go back, no matter how hard you try. This makes the final ride a little easier.”

How long did she have? Days? Hours? Minutes? Would her mother have time to get here? I stood behind Kandelbaum and slipped my arms around his shoulders.

“Her doctor put her on the transplant list,” he said. I pressed my cheek to his. “I’m about to read to her.” He produced a folded copy of the
Philadelphia
Sentinel’s
entertainment section and read aloud, “‘Dance Aerobics Dawns at the Fitness Evolution.’”

“Don’t read that drivel here.” I tried to grab the paper, but he yanked it away.

“Miss MacArthur quotes Angela. Joey told her how long Angela had been a member, and she called Angela for an interview before…well. She had a bit more pep then. Right, Angela?”

Breath in, breath out.

Kandelbaum turned to me and whispered. “I want her to know she was in the paper.” His lip quivered.

I rubbed his shoulder. “It’s okay. Sorry. She didn’t tell me she’d been interviewed.”

Kandelbaum took a steadying breath and began, while I read over his shoulder.

“The sun hasn’t yet risen over the streets of Philadelphia. Indeed, many are still curled in their sheets, sound asleep. But a burgeoning group of fitness buffs is already gathering downstairs at the Fitness Evolution on Twelfth Street, awaiting the start of what used to be one of the town’s best kept secrets—a dance aerobics class taught by professional dancer Penelope Sparrow, formerly rehearsal mistress of Dance DeLaval.”

“Best kept secret,” I said. “That’s a good one.”

“Most members see the class as an alternative way to get the heart pumping and the metabolism cranked up. But what they are really getting is an introduction to choreography and its building blocks—rhythm, effort, motion, and floor patterns.”

“I can just hear Mrs. Weinstein at her next bridge tournament,” I said. “‘Ladies, if you sense a change in me today, it’s because I have recently experienced the most fabulous rhythm…’”

He collapsed the paper so I could no longer see. “Are you going to let me read this, or not?”

“Sorry.” I circled the bed to sit across from him.

“I’ll skip to the part where Angela is quoted, since you aren’t appreciative.” He ran his finger down the page. “Here is a quote: ‘With Penny’s class to wake you up, your day starts singing,’ said member Angela Reed in a telephone interview from Presbyterian Hospital, where she is currently hospitalized with complications from cystic fibrosis. Because of her fragile health, working out is vital for this ten-year Fitness Evolution veteran. ‘To stick with a fitness program,’ she says, ‘you have to understand the link between the energy you expend now and the energy you’ll gain later.’”

He looked up at Angela, lying so still. His eyes sought comfort from mine, for a moment, before returning to the article.

“‘Penny’s passion for movement creates that link. A lot of people have joined the gym just to take her class.’”

I took Angela’s hand, pressing her lifeline to mine. When I’d had no clue how to rebuild some semblance of life, she was the one who gave me a home. Inspired me to help others. She put my muscles back to work, one foot following the other. Slowly, at first. Now I was doing so at tempo, to a variety of rhythms, and in floor patterns, no less—while she was lying here, drained of that precious energy she’d been hoping to bank. It wasn’t fair. I never would have crossed the threshold of that gym if it weren’t for her.

I squeezed her hand. Though she had to reach across the border of consciousness and through a morphine cloud to do so, I felt certain she squeezed back.

“It was a lovely article.” Kandelbaum stood. “But now I have to get back to the bakery.” After I assured him I planned to stay for a while, he leaned over, combed his fingers through the kinks in Angela’s hair, and pressed his lips to her forehead. I remembered when Angela called that kind of attention “loving-kindness.” But this time, when he left the room, I believe he left half of himself behind.

• • •

If I thought about it too long, I would chicken out. I shut the door behind Kandelbaum and returned to the chair beside Angela’s bed. As the October sun sought its tired zenith over my shoulder, I dove into the story about the night that ended my delusions about my role in Dance DeLaval.

Dmitri and I had been working for twelve weeks on a new work for the company, I told Angela, a multimedia extravaganza titled
No
Brainer
. We planned to juxtapose live dancing with videotaped segments projected onto screens of various shapes, positioned either upon or suspended above the stage. The live dance would evolve; the taped dance would loop over and over. We wanted to make you wonder which was more real: what was unfolding, or what was captured? Events, or your perceptions of them?

While working on the piece, our days fell into a pattern: Dmitri and I would get up for company classes at the college in the morning, teach the new material to the others in afternoon rehearsal, work late into the night at the studio, then crash when we got home. He was going through some artistic flamboozlement, but once the concept solidified, ideas flew out of me, and as he watched the piece take shape, Dmitri got more and more excited. His happiness was my happiness. I felt like part of the company again, because my role in the dance was as large as anyone else’s. I was in a good place.

One day after rehearsal, he asked me to speak with him in the office off the dance studio. Dmitri sat in the desk chair and dropped his head onto his hands.

“Penny. You are driving me mad.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You keep stepping out of the dance while we rehearse the movement!”

“I have to, to see the big picture.”

“We must learn the steps.”

“I know the steps. I made them up.”

“Others do not know the steps. They do not know where you stand, what your body is doing, how much space you take up.”

“Unless I step back, we can’t figure it out, either.” I pulled an extra chair in front of him and stroked his arm. It was tense. “It’s going to be fine—”

He shrugged my hand away. “You disrespect me in front of others.”

I put my hands on his chest and shoved him so hard his chair rolled back a few inches. “Maybe it just feels that way because you don’t bother thinking things through. How do you plan to pack the tour bus?”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone needs to think about it, you know. Touring this piece will be a logistical nightmare. Each theater has different lighting and sound capabilities, not to mention different stage sizes and proscenium openings. We may not be able to use all the set pieces at each location—have you thought about that? Our spacing will have to remain fluid, so we might as well get used to it now.”

The silence in the room underscored the volume and edge my words had taken on.

“I’m trying to support you every way I can,” I said. “If you loved me, maybe you’d see that.”

• • •

In sharing this memory with Angela, I noticed it didn’t spring from my muscles. I could no longer feel the anger rising through my gut or taste it on my tongue. It was just something that happened last year that I wanted to tell my friend about.

I looked up at Angela. She lay still, her beautiful face sucking for air. Here I was, again, seeking connection with someone incapable of responding. But she did seem to be comforting me, in a way, through the hiss of oxygen and the rhythm of her breathing:
Shh…shh…everything is fine
. I pressed each of the fingernails on her cool hand, taking heart that after each nail turned white, it flooded pink again.
Where
there
is
life
there
is
hope
, Kandelbaum once said.
L’chaim
.

• • •

“I do love you, Penny,” Dmitri had said. “You do much for me, I see this. I show you too many of my nerves. This is not good.” He took my hand. “This will be a big piece for me.”

“And me,” I said, allowing him to pull me onto his lap. I felt the heat transfer from his hand to the small of my back. I’d been on my feet all day, sewing stretchy fabric over metal frames to make the projection screens for the set. We had liked the effect, and had ordered enough material to complete the project. We were waiting now for the store to deliver it.

“Exhausted?” Dmitri said.

“I can handle anything when you let me dance.” I rubbed my nose lightly against his. It took me a moment to realize he was shaking his head no.

“You aren’t just another body. You are smarter. Many can dance. Who else can do what you do?”

I put my arms around his neck and gave his ponytail a tug. “There are many roles in your life I wouldn’t want to lose.” I kissed him, and within moments exhaustion was the furthest thing from my mind. My passion for dance and my passion for Dmitri could no longer be separated; I didn’t know where one ended and the other began.

A knock on the door—Mitch. “Delivery truck arrived. With the bolts of fabric? Penny wanted me to let her know.”

“Ignore it,” Dmitri whispered. He slipped his hand beneath the stretchy tee shirt I was wearing and brushed my nipple; it had been too long since we’d been intimate. Since he’d told me, body to body, that I was a perfect fit. He playfully bit the inside of my arm. “Come home with me.”

It took all I had to pull away. “You know as well as I do we need to get the material cut tonight. The New York premiere is Friday—as in this coming Friday? Six days from now.”

“I need lover, not mother.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t need to worry so much. Already some things are coming together—”

“We need to simulate a full tech here in the studio before we leave. With this many variables, we can’t rely on good luck. You won’t return to Russia the homeland hero with quotes like, ‘Although the movement was scintillating, the sparks weren’t enough to illuminate the work after the lights went out.’”

“Sin-lating?” he said.

“Scin-til-lating. Lively, sparkly,” I said, miming small fireworks by flicking my fingers in the air.

“Ah, like you.”

He reached for my breast again, but I grabbed his hand and tugged it. “We’ll have time for this soon enough, Romeo. Say, Friday night? At the hotel? I’ll share a room with you if you ask nicely. Now let’s get to work.”

He sank back into the chair. “I have no more work in me tonight,” he said. What energy the promise of sex had temporarily revived in him now receded beyond my reach. “Too tired. I will not watch even Letterman.”

“If I have to do this alone, I’ll be here for hours.” Yet when I saw how exhaustion weighed on his features, I felt bad for whining. “Never mind. Go on home. Maybe I can get one of the others to stay.”

He stood and gave me one last hug. “What would I do without you?”

We went out into the studio, but I had no heart to ask for volunteers. Lars had already left. Karly shouldered her dance bag and shuffled her feet to the end of the studio. She’d thought she had her shin splints licked, but they flared up again with the running involved in this piece. After fetching the bolts of fabric from the truck and depositing them in the studio, Dmitri, Tina, and Mitch left together, talking and laughing as they headed down the stairs.

Their receding footsteps left behind a hollow silence. I put the music for the new piece on the stereo, a quirky mix of classical strings and incidental noise, and got to work.

I had one frame traced and cut when Mitch returned. I smiled up at him, glad for the momentary company. “Forget something?”

“I felt too guilty leaving you here alone. I’m here to help. And this is from Evan.”

“That’s so sweet.” He handed me a wrapped tuna fish sandwich. “No mayo, I hope?”

“Just pickle relish,” he answered. I tossed the top of the sandwich and ate the salad off the bread.

“He’s a good husband. And thanks so much for coming back. This’ll go a lot faster with two of us working.”

“About twice as fast, I’d say.”

We laughed at the math. Inside of two hours, we’d completed the task.

On the way home, my muscles ached with every step. I couldn’t wait to get home and slip into a bath.

• • •

“You get to know someone’s habits when you live together,” I told Angela. Now that the story was flowing, I’d quit poking at her nails, but I appealed to her consciousness by squeezing her hand every now and again. “I know you like a morning shower, because it loosens up your lungs and refreshes the wave in your hair. Shower gel with juniper scent instead of soap. But Dmitri, after a day at the studio, loved to soak in a bath. He was like a kid that way—he even loved the bubbles—and he wouldn’t come out until his hands and feet were all puckered.”

• • •

By the time I got home, my dance bag felt so heavy I suspected a stowaway, but the contents I emptied were only rumpled, smelly dance clothes. I dumped them on top of Dmitri’s in the corner and headed for the bedroom.

I heard the television—at least I thought I did, but the way sounds bounced around in that building, you could never be sure—and was greeted by its bluish glow when I opened the bedroom door. I slipped out of my shoes and cushioned each step in case Dmitri was already asleep. The people at the party below us weren’t as considerate—occasional bursts of laughter rose up through the floor. The bed was still made, making the strip of light from beneath the bathroom door a welcoming beacon. I quickly slipped out of my clothes to join him in the tub. I could already feel his lathered hands slipping over my body. I remember thinking that sometimes the diligent
are
rewarded.