Authors: Meg Howrey
“Yeah, but he’s
Puck
,” I said. “He’s your henchman. You’re King of the Fairies, big guy.”
“Exactly,” David said. “I’ll be standing there in green eye shadow with my dick in my hands while the audience goes ape shit every time Manny’s onstage.”
“If we could get back to the subject of
me
for a moment …”
“Sorry, hon.” David laughed. “I haven’t slept more than a few hours in six weeks. I’m not even sure I’m a man anymore. I’m just a large person that moves toys and tries to prevent infant death and wipes up spit and poop and sticky things. And even though that’s all I do, Cathy is still doing more, so I can’t complain. Everything in my house is sticky. If you don’t throw up on me or cry or run face first into a wall, we’re basically cool.”
“I can wipe my own ass,” I said.
David kissed me on the cheek.
“Also, I’m horny as hell,” he said. “If I get wood, don’t take it personally.”
“Okay,
mes enfants
,” Claudette said, placing a binder on the piano and flipping it open. “Let’s begin. Kate, we’ll teach you the Act II pas de deux and then if we have time, I’ll go over the beginning with you.”
Marius choreographed
Dream
months ago, so I saw Gwen dance it with David in rehearsal a couple of times. Things were very tense between us then, and it was difficult to watch her. I was so anxious about her state of mind that I didn’t watch her dancing the way I usually do. Anne-Marie is dancing Titania too, but I can already visualize her performance because she does everything the same way. She will be lyrical, she will be
pretty, she will make the face she makes when she’s not making that other face. Butter will do as it has always done with Anne-Marie, and refuse to melt in her mouth. Or a soy-based butter-like substitute, anyway. I’ve always thought she was dull to watch, but she has a big following.
Gwen’s in a class by herself, so I can’t make direct comparisons between us as dancers. It’s not … unreasonable that we are sisters, to look at us. I’m a little taller. Less than an inch, but it seems like more, probably because my shoulders are wider. From the waist down we are nearly identical, although we’ve different scars now.
Nothing is ever too hard for Gwen, too fast, too slow, or too tiring. Her technique is complete, like a mathematical theory for everything. When Gwen makes mistakes, they seem to come from some external source: seismic tremors, cosmic vibrations, the wobble in the axis of the earth. Her worst day is nearly as good as her best.
If ballet didn’t exist, they would have to invent it just to give a name to what Gwen can do. So yes, there’s something a little frightening about that. Ballet is such an unnatural act, so a body that looks made to do it must therefore be an unnatural body. Not really …
human
. Which again is perfect for ballet, because it’s not like there are ballets about Sheila, a registered nurse from Hoboken, or Janet, realtor and mother of two. No, it’s all somnambulistic princesses and tortured birds and dead virgins who have been Betrayed. Even in ballets without plots, you’re embodying music or an ideal or some notion like Regret or Hope.
Take a thing like the second act pas de deux for Titania and Oberon. After all their jealous feuding in Act I they are
reconciled, and they demonstrate this by dancing perfectly with each other. So, Harmony. That’s basically it. Be beautiful together.
When you represent Man and Woman Together, as opposed to actually being them, you can approach the sublime. The classical pas de deux is a nice example of this.
In classical pas de deux, the man controls everything. He picks up the girl. He puts her down. He turns her, takes her weight, stops her, and she must always go where he leads. The woman submits to all of this completely. But her submission is not feeble. In fact, the only reason she can submit so utterly is because she is very strong in herself. In her center. She does not collapse, or cave, or stutter-step, or flop. No, she holds herself very consciously, very confidently. She is centered within her own weight. So the man always knows where she is. He can feel her. He can absorb her strength.
This is good partnering. It’s really the only way partnering can work.
Of course it doesn’t always happen.
Sometimes the man isn’t strong, or he doesn’t care about partnering, he just wants to solo. Then the girl collects bruises and jammed ankles and feels abandoned. The woman goes back to the dressing room and says to the other women, “I have to do everything!” and “I can’t trust him!”
Sometimes the girl tries to control everything herself. Or doesn’t hold her own weight. The man tires because he’s having to fight with her on every step. Or muscle the girl around because he can’t get a good grip. The man goes back to the dressing room and says to the other men, “I don’t know what she wants from me!” or “Fuck, it’s like hauling bricks!”
But in the ideal situation it’s perfectly balanced. The woman is strong enough to give everything; the man is sensitive enough to take it all. And because they are listening to the same music, they are always in rhythm. Not just on the same page, but the same note. There is no past to regret or future to fear, everything is present tense. There is no talking, no “What did you mean by that?” Nothing mundane or trivial. What everybody needs is absolutely clear.
There is no actual sex, only the infinite promise of it.
You think actual sex achieves this sort of sublimity? Do you really? And have you ever had that sex? With another person, I mean. Because I’ve had perfect sex in my head, but with another person it’s only ever been great.
We worked for two hours today. Marius’s choreography is good. It’s more than good. And from the first touch, David and I danced well together. Our musicality is the same. I felt something stir in me. That feeling dancing well can give you. I was almost scared to take in that drug. It’s so easy to get hooked.
“
Très bien
,” Claudette said at the end of rehearsal. “
Très, très bien
. But, yes. Lovely.”
“I like the way you look at me,” David said. “You really
look
at me.”
After rehearsal, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to go to the movies, or do laundry, or steam vegetables. I didn’t want anything to intrude upon this clear space where I felt sort of safe from myself.
Cast B was on tonight, so I decided to do a thing that I rarely do anymore. I decided to go to the ballet.
Carlotta got me a seat in the first balcony, toward the back. Luckily I sort of dressed up today. People still dress up for the ballet, and this is kind of them. A party of four took their seats in front of me. Two older couples. The women’s figures were pear shaped past the point where evening dresses look elegant, and they were sensibly clad in tunic-style silk blouses and pants. Their hands and wrists were laden with enormous chunky jewelry, which rattled against the gold chains on their handbags. Their men, one with hair, one without, wore identical sports coats.
“Howard, you go in first. I know Heime will want the aisle.”
“Alice, are you sure you don’t want to check your jacket? You won’t be warm?”
“Loretta, I have your program here.”
“Alice, where are my glasses?”
Alice had an Aladdin’s cave of a handbag and handed out mints and tissues and Howard’s glasses. I was filled with tremendous love for all four of them, for their willingness to come and watch. The number of people who will accept being an audience to anything is getting smaller and smaller. Mostly people seem to want to be the person looked at, even if they don’t know what they are doing, even if what they are doing is horribly embarrassing.
Is there a better sound than when the house lights are brought down and a lowering murmur takes hold of the audience? Alice, wedged in by her coat and handbag, wiggled forward when the overture began. God! Strings! Oboes! Timpani! Are you fucking kidding me? Why, when we know what
human beings are capable of doing, do we not turn our collective heads in shame at the sight of rich housewives screaming at each other on television?
The curtain rose, but I was still looking at the orchestra, swaying gently over their instruments. From them I moved to the first rows of the audience, row after row of dark heads. I could see people in my section pretty distinctly, so I watched them watch us. People’s faces become so smooth in the dark, so innocent. So trusting. They know what they are seeing but they must know a little too of what they are not seeing. They know the jewels are fakes. They know the moon is painted. They know it is not easy to turn and jump and they know that a great deal of effort and perhaps pain is being hidden. They do not linger on this. They let themselves be told, be led. They are grateful for being told, being led, being tricked. Our tricks will never hurt them. We will never say the wrong thing, because we never speak. They are never as happy as when we make them cry.
They got babysitters and picked out shoes and turned off cell phones. The woman sitting next to me pressed a hand to her rib cage when the rows of the corps de ballet began their hops in arabesque. A man two rows in front of me craned his head around the man in front of him: not wanting to miss a step.
I was so absorbed that when the first intermission came I hadn’t given more than a cursory glance at the stage. Alice turned to Loretta and patted her hand.
“Glorious,” said Loretta.
“Happy birthday,” said Alice.
“Wonderful,” said Heime, thumping his program against his knee. “Just marvelous.”
I decided that I didn’t want to hear anybody say anything more than that. I wondered if it was possible to get home, brush my teeth, ice my neck, and fall asleep without anything else entering my head. Threading my way through the lobby, I ran into Marius. We stood for a moment together by the bar, and I felt my euphoria cocoon splinter as people passed us, talking about ordinary things, checking their phones.
“What do you think?” Marius asked.
“It’s scary to see them all like this,” I said to Marius. “In the light, I mean. They look more interesting in the dark.”
Marius smiled his inscrutable smile.
“I meant about the ballet you’re watching.”
“Oh that,” I said. My second Vicodin was wearing off and I was beginning to crash. “I’ve been thinking that you should restage the whole thing actually. Less artifice, more humanity. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe it’s better to be remote.”
“Remote?”
“Well, we’re nothing if we’re not inaccessible,” I said. “People can’t judge us when they barely understand what they’re seeing. I was just sitting behind people … they aren’t here because they want to relate to us, to what we’re doing, what we’re telling. They’re here because they want to be awed.”
“I was thinking,” Marius said, “the opposite. That it’s wrong for us to be so inaccessible. What does this story have to do with anything anyone has experienced? There’s something … something at the heart of it …”
“Yes,” I said. “But everything is up for interpretation. David
said he felt like I was really
seeing
him when I looked at him in rehearsal. But I think what he meant was that the way I was looking at him was the way he wanted to be seen. Is that him? I don’t know. What does he see when he looks at me?”
“No one will ever judge you the way you do yourself,” said Marius. “Nor will they love you properly either.”
“Are you talking about an audience or a lover?” I asked. Marius is the sort of man you can say the word “lover” to without sounding pretentious. But he gave me this very penetrating look and “lover” seemed to hang awkwardly in the air, inflating, like a vulgarly shaped balloon.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know we’re talking about different things, but I
am
hearing what you’re saying. If you followed the trajectory of what I’m talking about it would eventually get to what you’re talking about.”
“Sometimes I think you are the only person in the room who understands what I’m saying,” Marius said. “It’s why I keep you around, you know. As hard as it’s been to watch you diminish yourself.”
He put a little space before the word “diminish,” and then served it. An unreturnable shot, directly into the body.
A couple of our donors approached, claiming his attention. I watched Marius smile and shake hands, kiss cheeks: so smooth and confident, knowing just what to say, and how to say it. I said a few words to the donors too, because I’m not bad at these things. I can make the gestures for charming and gracious. I can walk away from Marius and what he said to me and I can come here to the crime scene and take off Gwen’s makeup and Gwen’s scarf and crawl into Gwen’s bed while back at the
Lake
another swan kills herself and the audience rises to their feet, applauding.
When you are asleep you can’t tell whether or not you are alone, or diminished, or whatever.
I have nothing
, I thought. But that’s not true. I have her absence. You can see it clearly. Look for the edges of my existence that surround it.
I read on the schedule this morning that Klaus and I had a two-hour private rehearsal today to work on Helena/Demetrius for
Dream
. I was a little indignant until I realized that this was something I had requested. I meditated on the problem of what to do with Klaus all through class. I was tired, my neck was hurting, I was feeling cruel and angry. I was in a dangerous mood, and I was wearing a lot of lipstick just in case I needed to leave an imprint on anything. Try diminishing Chanel Shanghai Red, motherfuckers!
In the end, I decided to take Klaus through some of the “acting” bits. Nothing shakes up a dancer more than having to emote.
The lovers in
Dream
have a rough time. Hermia and Lysander are in love, but Hermia’s father wants her to marry Demetrius. Helena is in love with Demetrius, but he utterly rejects her and wants to be with Hermia. All four go tearing into the forest, Hermia and Lysander to elope, Demetrius to follow Hermia, Helena to follow Demetrius. Oberon
takes pity on poor Helena, and arranges with Puck to pour a little love juice in Demetrius’s eyes when he is asleep. This will cause him to fall in love with the first person he sees when he awakes, which Puck will arrange to be Helena. Of course Puck gets confused, puts the love juice in Lysander’s eyes, and leads Helena to him. So then Lysander falls in love with Helena and Hermia is distraught, and more than a little pissed off at Helena. Puck tries to fix things by squeezing love juice into Demetrius’s eyes, and getting Helena over to him, but then both guys are in love with her and want to kill each other. And Helena is dismayed because she thinks they are just punking her. And Hermia is very much WTF. Oh, it all gets sorted out, with Puck removing Lysander’s spell, and it ends with everyone getting married, which is how you know it’s a comedy. The tragedies are what happen
after
everybody gets married.