Authors: Meg Howrey
When class was over, I grabbed my bag and caught up with Marius in the hallway. I was still playing through the YOU ARE FIRED narrative in my head. I imagined taking everything out of my locker and going to someplace horrible like McDonald’s and getting french fries and a milkshake and then going to a deli and getting those Zingers cakes that are filled with fake frosting and lard and then purchasing a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes and then staying in bed for a week. And then. And then. And …
My plans for a life after ballet didn’t seem to go much further than immediate consumption of disgusting food and sleep.
In the hallway everyone was milling around, talking, heading to rehearsal or to the lounge or down to the alley for a
smoke. Marius was standing by the call-board, speaking in French with Claudette, our ballet mistress. I rocked back and forth in my pointe shoes a few feet away. Claudette saw me waiting and every few seconds her eyes flicked over to me, but she kept chatting away. They spoke too fast for me to understand more than the beginnings of sentences. I heard:
“Next week I want to—”
And:
“Yes, it’s always good to—”
And something that sounded like:
“Your eyes are like cake.”
I edged forward and touched Marius on his wrist, to get his attention. He grabbed my hand, but continued talking to Claudette. I felt like a little girl waiting for Daddy to finish speaking with another grown-up. Marius was saying something about shoes, about how the girls’ shoes are so loud and we sound like horses running around in class. We must break our shoes in more thoroughly before we perform. Claudette shrugged her shoulders in sympathy. Yes, yes, it is terrible. The noise. The clip-clop. The new shoes these days. So loud. She will speak to the girls. So true. Like horses.
Finally they reached the “
D’accord, très bien
” stage and Claudette moved off to wage war with the clip-clop. Marius turned to me.
“Let’s go up to my office.”
Ludmilla the Bulldog is no longer with us. I miss her. She became very mellow in her old age, and I kind of bonded with her. Marius’s wife is gone too. Not dead, but they divorced. Not
amicably, people say. He’s got a little son, Oliver. There’s a picture of him on Marius’s desk, holding a tiny football. The kid has giant feet and they are flexed in demi-pointe.
“Oliver has good feet,” I said, pointing, hoping to delay the inevitable.
“Every time I play music in the apartment he dances around.” Marius sighed. “And every time he dances I give him the football and try to convince him to throw it at something. Or bang on the piano. Or play with his toy stethoscope. Possibly I’m inflicting psychological damage.”
“You’ll know in about twenty years, I guess.”
“Right. Listen, I spoke to Gwen this morning.”
This was the last thing I expected. I had no clue as to what face or gesture would be appropriate. My first thought was that I wished I were wearing clothes, which was odd, because I’m fairly naked for most of my working day and you would think that would insulate me better from the metaphorical nakedness.
“She says she’ll need six months off,” Marius said. “Well, I’m sure you know all this. Her spirits sound good though, don’t you think? I thought she should come back here and let Dr. Yates handle her rehab, but she said your dad has hooked her up with some top guy at his hospital and she wants to stick with him.”
I nodded.
“Listen, I need you to help me out,” Marius continued. “God knows, in this climate, I’m grateful that we had the tours, but Japan was cutting it close, and everybody is getting injured. Every day I come to work and Carlotta hands me a list. And we already had gaps. Tamara, Natalia, Gwen. Now Marianna.
Five years ago I had too many women and not enough men to partner them. Now I have too many men, and all my women are injured.”
This didn’t seem like a prelude to being fired. Marius seemed to have completely accepted the torn ACL story. Six months? Gwen would be gone for six months. Why was she apparently carrying on these elaborate conversations with everyone but me? What part of this latest story was true? I tried focusing on the matter at hand to calm my nerves.
“Justin is out,” Marius said heavily. “For at least three weeks, and I don’t want to risk putting him back on too soon, so that leaves you without a Demetrius for
Dream
.”
I nodded. If Justin was out, then Marius was probably going to bump me from
Dream
. Well, considering my neck, this was probably good news. My season was already packed, Helena spends a lot of time frantically throwing herself at Demetrius, and I was having problems looking both ways before crossing the street. Still, the immediate relief at not being fired was replaced with disappointment at losing out on
Dream
. And what would I do with the extra time on my hands?
“I’m replacing Justin with Klaus,” Marius said. “He knows it, and I think it’s going to be a good match. The kid is on fire, and frankly, Lawrence needs a little competition in the room. You’ll have to coach Klaus a little, but I trust you. He’s very macho, but a little stiff. Shake him up for me?”
“Okay,” I said, heart sinking. Extra rehearsal. Macho ego to overcome. Shaking up, yet. What the hell was going on with Gwen?
“Oh, and I want you to do Titania,” he said, almost casually. “David has two performances of Oberon in his contract, and
now Marianna has this issue with her ankle. She says maybe, maybe not, but I don’t have time to deal with any drama. So. I’m splitting the performances between Anne-Marie and Hilel and you and David. You’ll start rehearsing on Wednesday. It’s not a lot of time, but you’re quick. I’m not worried. David isn’t worried.”
Marius pushed a calendar in front of me. One Thursday and one Saturday at the end of the month were circled.
Marius’s phone buzzed and Carlotta’s voice announced, “Marius, I’ve got George Roffola from Chase Manhattan on line one.”
“Potential new sponsor,” Marius said, crisply. “So get out of my office. I don’t like anyone to hear me beg.”
I stood up. Sort of. It was more of a lurch. I made it a few steps to the door and then turned back. Marius was already reaching for the phone.
“Did you tell Gwen about this?” I asked.
Marius’s hand hovered over the phone.
“No,” he said. “Because this isn’t about her.”
I nodded and shut the door quietly behind me.
Was it really five years ago that Marius came up to me before class in just the same way and asked me to come to his office? I wasn’t nervous then. It had been an incredible season. Kylián’s
Black and White Ballets
. Manon in
Lady of the Camellias
. The lead in a new ballet,
Illuminata
. I had moved in with Andrew and suddenly I was in love with dancing again and there were pet names and late-night sex and a feeling that I was no longer a house divided. Even when I felt like shit—and
Illuminata
rehearsals were exacting and sort of nerve-racking because the choreographer was Czech and only spoke through an interpreter (although I soon learned Czech for “bad,” “wrong,” and “not enough”)—still, even in those moments when I felt like dance was being cut out of me with a knife, I at least felt some relationship to the knife. I knew why it was necessary, I braced myself, even leaned in to it.
Five years ago Marius called me into his office to tell me that he was promoting me to soloist. He offered it to me like an opening-night gift. I didn’t tell anyone right away. I didn’t tell Gwen. Or Mara, or Roger, or Andrew. I didn’t call my parents. I kept it all to myself and danced Manon that night with a kind of fearless abandonment. After the performance I went home. Andrew carried my roses. For some reason the hot water in our building had been shut off, and Andrew heated up pots of water on the kitchen stove and carried them into the bathroom to make me a bath. Me protesting that it was too much, he didn’t have to, and him saying that nothing was too good for me. We had just gotten to sleep—around two in the morning—when Gwen called.
“Something’s wrong,” she said, sobbing. “I can’t walk. Kate, I can’t walk.”
I couldn’t get her to calm down. I couldn’t get her to explain. I pulled on sweatpants and Andrew’s camel-hair coat. Andrew said, “I’ll go with you,” and I said, “No, no. It’s okay.”
There wasn’t anything wrong with Gwen’s legs. She could walk perfectly fine. The problem was with her floor, which she said was so dirty that she was afraid to step on it. She was sitting outside her apartment in the hallway when I arrived. I didn’t know what to expect when we opened the door, but
everything was perfectly spotless. I knew better than to explain that to Gwen, though. I gave her Andrew’s coat to hold so it wouldn’t get dirty. She waited outside while I vacuumed and mopped. When I was done I stepped out in the hallway and Gwen thanked me.
“Marius promoted me to soloist,” I said.
“He just made me a principal,” she said, handing me the coat and shutting the door.
I was still holding the Swiffer mop.
So I guess it’s time, once again, to take it up a notch.
Look, I’m not kidding myself. This isn’t some big
Star Is Born
moment. Maybe if it had happened a few years ago, and I had the sense that Marius was grooming me, and I had been cast originally for it, then yes. But it’s really just a case of all these people being injured, and Marius thinking that if he puts me on there won’t be a lot of fuss. And Titania, while definitely a principal role, isn’t Juliet, or Sleeping Beauty, or Odette/Odile.
It’s not a huge deal.
Except maybe.
Well.
Anyway, after my little convo with Marius, I had trouble sleeping last night, so I decided to open up my boxes labeled “Dance Clothes.” Costuming makes the character and I can’t go around looking like crap anymore. My sister is irreplaceable, but I am, in fact, going to have to replace her. Or save her a seat on the bus until she’s ready to get back on board. I thought it was appropriate,
considering how close we are, that she make a contribution to New Me, so in addition to the pile of my own dance clothes on the living-room floor, I added all of her dance stuff as well.
As I shifted through the collection I started thinking how cool it would be to do an installation art piece thing with them. Each piece could be hung up on its own hanger and be accompanied by a piece of prose on its own historical significance or place in my personal mythology. This is the leotard I bought when I went on the pill and my breasts got a little bigger and I was so excited about how I looked in it that I spent the entire first class I wore it looking down at my own cleavage. This pink skirt was from Gwen’s ultra-feminine phase and I told her she looked like Ballerina Barbie in it, and we got into a fight that was less about the insult and more about the fact that she had finally seen another doctor and started taking antianxiety medication but the drugs made her feel “wonky” so she was also doing a little coke. This unitard always shows the patch of sweat in between the breasts and, more unfortunately, the patch of sweat at the crotch and, moreover, retains a musty smell from being stuffed in a corner of the dressing room for most of a season, but I can’t throw it out because Charles told me how a bunch of the guys in the company once had a whole long conversation about how good my ass looks in it. (Hello, Charles, I still don’t want to be your girlfriend! We were on tour! It was Cleveland! Get over yourself!) These cut-off sweatpants are divine and blessed and I would as soon part with them as I would my soul.
I think such an exhibition would be very interesting. I could throw in some real-people clothing too. This is the sweater that was Andrew’s and now it is no longer the Boyfriend Sweater but the Ex-boyfriend Sweater, and soon I will pull it on and take it
off without thinking of him because love can die. This is the Givenchy dress Gwen wore to the opening-night gala last year, the night she told me that she was sorry for how she had been acting and that she was going to make it up to me and I told her that she had nothing to apologize for and she said, “Oh, well, then maybe you should apologize to me,” and we both had a good laugh, although … in retrospect … not so funny.
I made a giant bag of discards but didn’t throw it away. Which is silly. It’s not like I can donate this stuff. What isn’t nasty is full of holes, and what needy person wants a leotard? But you never know. There might be a starving one-legged blind peasant child in China who needs some leg warmers. Or one leg warmer, I guess.
I’m working on a blend of Gwen’s stuff and mine. Nothing too obvious.
After clothes sorting, I painted my toenails red. My pinkie toes don’t actually have nails, just disk-like calluses where the nail would be if I had a different job, but I paint the calluses red so you can’t really tell. Then I took a long bath and iced my neck and made a list of ways I am going to be this week. One is grateful, because even without Titania, this is a very good season for me, with lovely roles in good ballets. I need to cultivate more perspective. I should spend some enervating moments meditating on the crushing misery of the greater world in general, although perhaps the irrelevance of my sadness is just as sad as anything else.
I had my first rehearsal with Klaus for
Dream
today, so I decided to take company class and get a proper look at my new partner. He is ridiculously good-looking, but a bit short. I am going
to end up towering over him when I’m on pointe. I suppose Marius thought of this, no doubt with hilarious intent. Klaus is almost barrel-chested, which is unusual in a ballet guy. Klaus and I are going to look like Popeye and Olive Oyl.
Yumi came up to me during class.
“Rawlence is so mad,” she said. “He say it bullshit Klaus be your partner now. Rawlence is more senior dancer than Klaus.”
“Oh, well, Marius probably just wants to keep you and Lawrence together as a couple,” I said, because one of the ways I decided to be this week was diplomatic. “You guys work well together, right?” I asked.
Yumi nodded vigorously, but what she said was, “Oh no, he is crazy maybe.”