The Art of Falling (20 page)

The princess-seamed camisole in aquamarine, or my black cap-sleeve leotard with the low-cut back? I glanced at the clock—I had hoped to arrive early, but it was only fifteen minutes until Bebe’s Saturday morning class. I laughed at my reflection in the mirror. It had been a while since I cared what the hell I wore. When I stripped down at the studio, it was to a raspberry tank and my gray knit warm-up pants.

Center floor, stretching and chatting, were Jeannie and some of the other dancers I recognized from André’s. They’d invited me out for coffee after the Thursday class, and I was struck that most of them knew of me, whether from rumor or reputation. I had enjoyed their easy camaraderie, but I’d lived in a world where dancers climbed on the injured and aging bodies of their friends to get noticed. Instead of joining them, I gave a noncommittal wave and took a place at the barre to warm up.

During the class, I had trouble concentrating. It wasn’t fear for Angela—according to her doctors she was “as stable as could be expected,” which was code for “unstable,” but I also knew I couldn’t do a blessed thing about it.

The problem was my overactive mind. My love for Angela and the push-and-pull of her duet with Kandelbaum had awoken within me a new sensibility; I now saw relationships everywhere. Jeannie was the embodiment of Bebe’s earthy fluidity, while the short jock from André’s—was his name Luke?—translated the same into a language with harsher edges. Made it look male and athletic. They’d make interesting partners.

A woman named Rhonda had on enough makeup to perform at the Met: pancake, fashion model eyes, rouged cheeks, painted lips. It seemed to conceal massive reconstruction on the left side of her face. But she also put extra detail into every movement—a flexed foot here, a cocked head there—as if carefully embroidering her name onto every square of a patchwork quilt. The approach was quiet and patient. Her soft middle made me think of inner conflict—what was going on inside of her?

The guy next to me, Vincent. He wore a sleeveless Villanova sweatshirt, but the black footless tights beneath had me checking out his legs. After we’d cycled into the front row, our bodies displayed their similarity, side by side, in the mirror. We were the same height, had the same sturdy thighs, and he matched me “powerful glute” to “mambo hip” in the butt department. Why had I never seen my hips as the product of powerful glutes?

Each dancer offered something different. Our class became a skyline of heads, lowering and raising with each plié. One of those heads stood out as if lit by a spotlight: her hair was pure white. Bebe called her Stella.

Stella was narrow-shouldered, with a pouchy abdomen. Sagging breasts cushioned her rib cage. Despite her age, she could really dance, with movements as delicate and classy as fine bone china. She used everything her body was still capable of doing to draw attention to the way she moved through space.

Bebe taught a pretty intricate sequence. Stella kept her eyes on Bebe, yet didn’t mark along with her the way some others did. Instead she internalized the movement through small nods and wiggles of her head. The rest of the class was still struggling to nail it when Bebe said, “Now reverse to the left. Penny, demonstrate.”

The request was at once commonplace and shocking. How could she single me out this way, when she knew I only had a few classes under my belt? “I’m sorry, my head was somewhere else…”

When she looked at me and cocked her head, I started to laugh. Bebe smiled. I got it—I didn’t need my mind. My body knew what to do. It always had. I tapped into the beat of my heart and the flow of my blood and listened for the movement. I performed Bebe’s sequence to the right in my head, and then trusted my muscles to reverse it to the left. I thought I heard Vincent say, “Wow.”

“Did I get it?” I asked Bebe.

“As if it were yours,” she answered.

She broke us into small groups to perform. My group included diminutive Jeannie and a buxom redhead named Gayle whose height was a step between ours. We performed the movement almost identically at our different levels of atmosphere.
Triplets
—a title?

• • •

Outside, after class, I thought I’d lost Stella until I caught a tuft of white escaping from beneath a black knit hat up ahead. She stood at the corner of Tenth and Lombard with a small group waiting for traffic.

“Excuse me.” I touched her sleeve.

“Yes?”

Out here she looked like any aging woman. Only the erectness of the spine housed within her camel coat suggested her dance habit. “I couldn’t take my eyes off you in class today.”

I felt powerful and alive and in the moment, for once trusting my instincts to lead me exactly where I needed to go. She smiled as if strangers came up to her blathering such drivel all the time. “Will you walk along with me then? Penelope, isn’t it?”

“Penelope Sparrow,” I said, offering her my hand. “I’m a friend of Bebe’s. And you’re Stella…?”

“Just Stella. At this point I’ve had too many last names to believe they illuminate my identity in any way.”

I laughed and fell in beside her. “You’ve been dancing for a long time.”

She nodded. “I once danced with Twyla.”

“
Tharp?
”

She smiled at the reverence in my response. “Back in the late sixties. I was only with her a few months, but it’s still fun to say.”

“Why on earth did you stop?”

“I got pregnant. Then married…Each day I drifted further from the life of a dancer. After a point, I forgot to tend to my own needs altogether.” She turned left onto Spruce; I followed. In a voice I could hardly hear above the rumble of a bus accelerating beside us, she said, “Time slips away.”

“You’re still a pleasure to watch.”

The corners of her mouth turned up. “The dancers in this city would love a critic like you.”

“Do you take class anywhere else?”

“Just at Bebe’s, every morning. I take the yoga first, and then Bebe’s class after. At my age it takes longer to warm up.”

“So when did you get back to dancing?”

“Not until my late forties. It was like my body reawakened after a long hibernation. Now I’m sixty-six,” she said, with the frank enthusiasm of a child claiming she is six-and-a-half. “Who knows how much longer I’ll have to dance?”

The notion of still dancing in my sixties had never occurred to me. Not so long ago, I feared I might grind to a halt this side of thirty. “Who knows anything? Maybe you’ll perform again.”

She laughed. “The odds are against it.”

“I fell fourteen stories and lived. The odds were against that, too.”

She stopped walking and looked at me with an expression so queer it could only have matched my own. The moment passed, and when she resumed walking, she said, “I wouldn’t count on that again.”

• • •

Stella stopped outside the Independence Suites. “This is it for me.”

“You’re kidding. I used to live here, too.”

“Oh no, I have a studio over at the Versailles. But this is the best bakery in town. I always stop in for a little something on my way home. Would you like to join me? His new health breads aren’t too much of an indulgence.”

Kandelbaum looked up from behind the counter when the bell dangling from the door announced our entrance. “Hello, Penny. Look at your bright eyes and pink cheeks—the picture of health. And Stella, sit anywhere you please. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Stella and I looked at each other. She said, “You know the baker?” I burst out laughing.

“And how do you two know each other?” Kandelbaum said.

“We met today,” said Stella. “In dance class.”

“Dance class.” Kandelbaum’s unspoken questions pushed his eyebrows higher on his forehead. I removed my coat and hung it over the back of a chair.

“That’s why I couldn’t get to Presby this morning. How was Angela?”

“Resting comfortably, they say. Although I heard her tell an intern that if he pressed his stethoscope to her chest one more time she’d wring his neck with it.” His smile was skewed with the uncertainty of whether she just might do it.

“That’s our Angie.” I squeezed his hand. “I’ll be spending the afternoon with her. Can we get coffees?”

When Kandelbaum brought the coffee, Stella ordered us each an applesauce pumpkin muffin, then captivated me with stories of dancing with Twyla Tharp, her retirement to raise children, her string of husbands, and the teachers that influenced her path back to dance. Each story pulled me further from my money worries and whetted my parched creative mind. When I asked if she had missed dance horribly when she left, she nodded. “But when I missed it enough, I went back. And found Bebe.”

I laughed. She made life sound so easy. And perhaps it was: I, too, had gone back. I felt giddy with inspiration. If I needed money badly enough, I’d get a better job! If I wanted to create, I’d give birth to the ideas starting to kick within me! And I had an advantage over Stella: I’d had Bebe all along. I should never have left her all those years ago. At this instant, through a mist of joy, I could even allow that my return to dance was sweeter for the career hardships I’d faced. To dance, to feel the power of muscular contraction as it propelled me through space—it was all so elemental. Everything that had happened since I’d auditioned for Bebe at Muhlenberg College had led me toward this amazing day, and I couldn’t wait to share my appreciation with her. Bebe had always been the one sane voice in my world.

“You mentioned you were taking yoga at Bebe’s? I’m surprised to hear she’s offering it.”

“We need it.”

“We?”

Stella nodded while swallowing a bite of muffin. “Bebe takes the class with me.”

I thought of the food poster, where Bebe wrote that dance was all we’d ever need. “Back when I first started class, Bebe ran a modern dance studio. Period.”

“Hard to argue with her success, though, with the way she’s been able to put off surgery. Of course I’d just as soon take a rod down my throat as one up my spine.”

I nodded somewhat blankly, unwilling to acknowledge the fact I had no idea what she was talking about. Was this why Bebe was moving awkwardly? Losing spinal strength and mobility would be devastating for a dancer. I’d faced the possibility myself, not too long ago. And here I was chatting over coffee while the woman who shaped me—mostly by telling me not to eat the kind of crap sitting before me—was in crisis.

“I’ve got to run, Stella. This has been fun.”

“But you haven’t touched your muffin,” she said as I pushed back my chair.

“I’m not hungry. You want it?”

Stella sucked in a breath and put her hand to her mouth. “How thoughtless of me. I forgot about your problem.”

“What problem?”

“You don’t need to be defensive. An eating disorder is a disease.”

How did these words spring from this delightful conversation, with a woman I’d just met? “Where would you pick up such a notion?”

“Well, let’s see. We were talking. During intermission, I believe. At the Pennsylvania Ballet, last month. And—I’m sorry, I can’t remember how we got on the topic. But I thought it was bulimia.”

“Who was there?”

“Bebe. And me, of course. And Margaret MacArthur.”

I stood and put on my jacket.

“I didn’t mean to make you angry. Eating disorders are more common than you might imagine. A dancer’s need to limit calories can become a dangerous obsession. Any dancer could relate.”

I wrapped my long scarf several times around my neck, then said, “I am not just any dancer.”

The wind hit my face full on as I rounded the corner. I leaned into it. My calf muscles burned from that morning’s workout. I thought of Bebe’s blond frizzle, that brown tooth of honest imperfection I almost missed in her smile. That spine I could always count on for its sturdiness, now breaking down.

Was her mind going as well? Why would Bebe tell anyone I had bulimia? I tried to think if we’d ever shared a meal. And why would she want to hurt me? This was Bebe. My dance teacher. The woman who’d taught me about balance on the dance floor and balance on the plate and the balance between the two—and I’d adhered to her teachings with religious fervor. Why would she spread rumors about me? MacArthur was probably behind this, trying to stir things up so I’d get angry enough to blurt something she could print.

Classes were over for the day, so I used my key to let myself in. Mounting the worn treads, I chastised myself for thinking ill of my mentor. If I was willing to believe Bebe would betray me—someone who’d always had my best interests at heart—what dark intentions might I have had toward myself while up on that balcony? I felt a blackness rise like bile in my throat and swallowed hard against it.

Bebe met me at the top of the stairs. “Oh, it’s you, darling.” She put her hand to her heart. “Did you forget something?”

Everything in that moment—the sound of Bebe’s voice calling me “darling,” the sight of her caftan and bare feet, the air still thick with sweat—grounded me. “Yes. I didn’t realize it, though, until I sat down for a cup of coffee with Stella.”

“Oh?” Bebe smiled, but the effervescence I’d always admired was missing. Her pale blue eyes looked distant and sad.

“I fear I haven’t been the best friend after all you’ve done for me. Stella told me about your back problems. I’m so sorry.”

Despite her odd deer-in-the-headlights look, I reached for her. I needed to pull her to me, and show her how much she’d meant to me.

Bebe flinched as my arms encircled her. “I’ll be gentle,” I whispered.

I felt what I hadn't been able to see: beneath her thin caftan a hard exoskeleton offered the support once provided by a healthy spine. The buckles on the front of the brace pressed against my own ridiculously resilient rib cage. I couldn’t help myself—I wondered what other secrets she was keeping. She patted me stiffly on the back and pulled away.

I walked over to the rack and filed copies of
Dance
Spirit
and
Dance
Magazine
strewn on the coffee table. Tidying the waiting area and cleaning the mirrors were the first responsibilities she’d given me as a teen. “So what put you and Stella and MacArthur together at the Pennsylvania Ballet last month?”

“Balanchine’s
Slaughter
on
Tenth
Avenue
. Can’t get enough of it. Maggie was reviewing, of course.”

“Maggie? You mean Margaret MacArthur?”

“Sorry. I’m too tired to keep her names straight—my back’s been deviling me today. I had to take a pill.”

“You two are friends?” The floor beneath me seemed to thin, as if I should tread lightly. “Professionally, you mean. Like colleagues.”

“I used to take the same ballet class as Maggie and her sister Laura.”

It shocked me, the number of people who actually found MacArthur likable. If Bebe’s relationship with MacArthur predated her relationship with me, where did her allegiance lie?

I worked to maintain a conversational tone. “Forgive me if this sounds absurd, but you didn’t tell MacArthur I had an eating disorder, did you?”

During a noticeable pause, I tried to fit the last three magazines onto a rack already full.

“I may have posed the possibility.”

I slapped the magazines back onto the table. “Why?”

“I was trying to figure out why you’d jumped from a building, and why you didn’t call once you felt well enough to dance again. It seemed a logical conclusion.”

“I meant why the hell would you pose the possibility to the
dance
critic
?”

“It was the first time I’d seen her since I returned from South America, and she had more information about you than anyone else did. You may not know, but she’s close to someone with an eating disorder. But that’s not my story to tell.”

“And mine is?”

“Your jump was hardly a quiet statement. It was news, darling. And anything I added was off the record. Maggie knew that.”

Maggie, Maggie—the name ate at me. “How could you think so little of me, Bebe? The only thing I’ve binged on in my life is your advice. You taught me the food mesa. At its base was dance, the only thing I’d ever need. I gave up a job I loved and moved to New York because you pushed me to. And now you make up stories?”

“Your defensiveness speaks for itself, darling. Denial is part of the disease. I’ve seen it too—”

“You know why I kept trying all those years in New York, when I was so poor I could barely eat? Because you told me I would make it one day. And I didn’t want to let you down.” I wound the studio key from the ring that had been its home for thirteen years and broke a nail doing so. When I’d first crossed Bebe’s threshold, I thought I’d found my place in the world. Among people who recognized my talents and sensibilities. But the dance world was an exclusive club, and it was clear I would never be thin enough, double-jointed enough, or thick-skinned enough to squeeze back in through its gates without also being labeled as mentally ill.

I slapped the key into her palm. “You and Dmitri are quite a pair. I hope you had fun, trying to shape me. I’m done.”

Bebe’s rattled voice trailed me: “If you walk away, Penny, you’ll regret it.”

I paused at the top of the stairs. My entire body was steeped in regret. Couldn’t she see that? I had just reconnected with movement; the blush of love was still fresh on my skin. But I knew I wasn’t strong enough to take on the entire dance world—I hadn’t even managed proper relationships with the icons on my mother’s wall, let alone my faulty memory of my father and Dmitri’s overinflated ego.

I turned my back on that harsh world and walked back out into the real one.

• • •

For a few minutes, back at our apartment, I suffered a horrible sense of déjà vu: that same paralysis I’d experienced when Dance DeLaval left for Europe without me. But this time no stripped-down penthouse imprisoned me. Dry desert might stretch around me on every side, but I stood in an oasis filled with spirit. Beneath that desert, only thinly disguised, still stood a rich jungle. I could almost hear its birds still calling.

No one had stolen my dance life from under me—this time I’d surrendered it. I’d never felt more present in the world than when expressing myself through movement. Yet somehow, in trying to live up to everyone else’s expectations, I’d lost myself.

I couldn’t let that happen again. For this second chance at life to be worth anything at all, it had to be more meaningful.

To celebrate the fact that movement itself had not betrayed me, I wound my arm over my head, then pushed it through space like the paddle of a windmill, sending the trinkets on Angela’s Tree of Life into a satisfying swirl.

I needed a new plan. I sat at the glass table on one of the floor pillows and lit the votives to help me think. As the scent of eucalyptus hit the air, I remembered Angela’s defeat when she pushed that hospital bill toward me on her birthday. It was the lowest I’d ever seen her. I had to keep paying her rent—but how? If only my decision-making was as simple as Stella made hers seem. Or if my destiny had been woven into my genes, like Dmitri’s.

Then again, maybe it was. If I needed money, I’d get another job. That’s it—I blew out the candles.

I stuffed a few outfits into my dance bag; I’d come back for the rest. While I was happy enough to put some distance between Bebe and me, I hated to abandon Angela while she was so sick. I’d have to leave the bedside attentions to Kandelbaum for now, and figure out later how I could get back to visit. I’d call the Fitness Evolution and leave a message for Joey. They’d be fine. As MacArthur had so kindly pointed out, I’d never fit in there, either.

I rushed over to Suburban Station, my long strides energized by a purpose that made what I was about to do more palatable. I could do this, for love.

I bought a one-way SEPTA ticket, boarded at Suburban Station, and took the train to the end of the line.