Authors: Meg Howrey
I put my arms around her, she curled into them, and Clive jumped off her lap.
“See?” she sobbed. “Even Clive doesn’t want to be around me anymore.”
“I’ll try harder too,” I told her. “We’ll do better together.”
Later that day, I called Andrew and told him that my sister was going through a difficult time, and that I needed to spend a little more time with her.
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s just … she’s feeling a little lonely, I think. She’s used to me being around more.”
“Is this about your sister or is this about us?” he asked.
I wasn’t going to plead with Andrew. The minute he heard the coldness in my voice he switched tactics.
“Maybe we could include her more,” he offered. “Saturday? I’ll take you both to the Hamptons. It’s the last weekend we have the house. You won’t have to do anything, just lie in deck chairs and eat barbecue. Tiny amounts of barbecue. Low fat-barbecue.”
“Thank you,” I said into the phone. “Thank you for being such a great guy.”
“Everything will be okay,” Andrew promised.
Because of my whole separate-box program, Andrew and Gwen hadn’t spent much time together at that point. On the car ride out to the Hamptons, I let Gwen ride in the front seat, knowing how carsick she got. I had warned Andrew that my sister was a little “depressed” and to be kind. Totally unnecessary, of course. Andrew took one look at Gwen’s wan little face and switched into hero mode. By Sunday, she had worked her magic. She lay on her deck chair and accepted the things Andrew brought her: a blanket, a gin and tonic, a sun hat, the Style section of the
Times
, grilled asparagus. Gwen made fun of herself, of her incompetence, always pointing out how stable and capable and competent I was by contrast. I saw her put her hand on Andrew’s forearm. Her fingers trembled. I thought I might actually throw up. That night we drove back to New York and I insisted on dropping Gwen off at our place and continuing on to Andrew’s.
I knew I had to move fast. I also knew I couldn’t out-Gwen Gwen. That night I climbed on top of Andrew in bed and held his wrists down with all the strength I had while we were having sex. I told him—in the most indelicate of vocabularies—how much I wanted him. Basically, if I had had access to a hot iron, I would have branded him. Afterward I coiled around him and said the three words I knew he most wanted to hear.
“I need you,” I said.
By the time we fell asleep, Andrew had asked me to move in with him.
Let me just say right now that even then I had some inkling of what I was doing. And what I was doing wasn’t securing my boyfriend against my sister. I was
stealing
my boyfriend from
my sister. Gwen and Andrew would have made a great couple. He would have taken care of her, would have taken pride in taking care of her. She would have felt protected. She might have been saved.
I told Gwen the news the next day, right before rehearsal, like a guilty boyfriend breaking up with his girl in public so she won’t cause a scene. To my surprise, Gwen threw her arms around me.
“Oh my god! I’m so excited for you!”
She was jumping around so much I had to jump too, or be knocked over.
“I can totally see it!” Gwen laughed. “You’re gonna get married to him and have a million babies. I’ll be crazy Aunt Gwen!”
“I’m just moving in with him,” I said, alarmed.
“It’s what I wanted for you,” Gwen gushed. “I was hoping this would happen. I knew it would.”
“You did?”
“Of course,” Gwen said, smugly, as if she had arranged the whole thing. “Oh my god, I’m so excited I have to pee.” She ran into the bathroom, leaving me in the hallway, slightly stunned. After a minute, I went in and found her sobbing over the sinks. There were a couple of other people in there. Someone, I forget who, was trying to pat her on the back.
“Okay,” I said, waving everyone off. “Okay. She’s okay.”
“I’m okay!” Gwen choked out. “I’m okay!”
It’s not a totally unusual thing, meltdowns in the bathroom. People carried on with their business. Gwen stopped crying. I wet a paper towel and wiped her face. I smoothed her hair.
“Oh gosh,” Gwen whispered, when everyone had left the bathroom. “I don’t know what happened! That was weird.”
We went into rehearsal. Gwen seemed totally calm. I was a wreck.
When Marius is working on something new, he frequently sounds like he’s asking for input, but he’s not really. He’s talking to himself. So if he stops and says something like “And now what should you do here?” the standard thing is to say nothing but just sort of hold yourself in readiness while he figures out the answer. There are only a few of us who will offer suggestions. I might be one of the very few. Maybe the only one, now. That day Marius was working out the bit where Juliet pleads with her mother not to have to marry Paris, and Lady Capulet totally gives her the cold shoulder. Marius had Gwen running at me and flinging herself into my arms, and me icily peeling her hands off my shoulders.
“And then you slide down her body,” Marius instructed Gwen. “Until you are at her feet. And then Kate, that makes you … what?”
I looked down at Gwen, huddled pathetically at the tips of my pointe shoes, her arms around my ankles. Several options occurred to me. One was to reach down and embrace her, set her on her feet, tell her I would do whatever it took to protect her. Another option was to kick her in the face.
“Can you sort of step out of her arms?” Marius sketched a movement in front of me. I elaborated on this, letting one foot trail behind me.
“Yes!” Marius nodded. “Right. And so then Gwen, can you grab that leg? No, higher up. Yes, that’s right. You’re still pleading with her. And Kate, you …”
I looked down at Gwen’s hand on my leg. Then at Gwen’s face. I wondered how she could look so composed, so businesslike. I myself was shaking.
“Perfect,” Marius said. “That’s exactly the right feeling. And so, having your mother look at you like that, Gwen, that’s what makes you let go. You know she’s not going to help you.”
Marius came today to watch David and me rehearse the Titania/Oberon pas de deux. We got about thirty-two bars into it before Marius stopped us, waving a hand at Dmitri to stop playing and jumping up from his chair.
“This love is autumn, not spring,” he said, pushing his giant gold watch up his forearm, intent, electrified. “This isn’t young love. Young love is given. Mature love is earned. This is mature love.”
How do you dance mature love? I wondered. What would that look like? I pictured Titania coming onstage with a hot water bottle, inquiring about Oberon’s sciatica. Usually I enjoy it when Marius goes all arty and talks about abstract notions or character development, but today I just wanted to dance and get it over with.
“Young lovers grab at each other,” Marius continued, looking at David. “You can’t wait to get your hands all over her, it’s greedy and loud.” Marius turned to me, and for an extremely
bizarre moment I thought he was actually going to demonstrate this with me. I was totally unprepared and it sent a wave of heat through my body. I haven’t felt that in a while. I’ve been under the impression that my sexuality is in deep freeze.
“But mature love …” Marius took my hand, looked me in the eyes, and smiled. Brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. I wasn’t sure what to do, how to respond. I couldn’t think of a gesture that signified mature love as differentiated from the other kinds of love.
“So, less passionate?” David asked.
Marius started humming a phrase and marking through the choreography. I followed along. When we got to the first lift he got a good grip on my hips and said, “Do,” so I pliéd and up I went. Marius was always a good partner. He wrapped an arm around my legs, securing me against his torso, and started walking backward. Some lifts you have to be supporting some of your weight with your arms, or working hard to keep your center or make a platform for the guy’s hands with your back or thigh or whatever, but this one was one of those nice floaty lifts that Marius is good at choreographing and where you feel quite beautiful doing it. Does mature love include the almost childlike pleasure in being picked up and carried? Marius slid me down close against his chest. I was supposed to fall back then, and I started the movement, arching my upper body, but Marius stopped me, keeping me upright and facing him, pressed against his chest, hands flat against my scapula. I could feel his heart beating under his soft T-shirt. I felt almost sleepy. Marius softened his hands and I arched back, Marius lunged with me, then brought us both back to standing.
“See?” Marius said, over my shoulder to David. “Still passion,
but passion with authority. Titania and Oberon know each other very well. They’ve been fighting and now they’ve been reconciled so there’s a relief. A deeper harmony. Acceptance. Titania has given in to Oberon’s demands with the full knowledge that next time it will be him giving in, but it really doesn’t matter all that much. There’s almost a sense of humor here—a kind of ‘Yes, darling, you are a piece of work and I’m a pompous old windbag, but we’re a pair, you and I, and life is better when we stick together.’ ”
Marius turned back to me. “I’m speaking of the characters,” he said with a smile. “Of course.”
Marius walked back to his chair. David and I studied each other for a moment. It’s hard to translate these kinds of notes immediately into the body. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. We are neither poetry nor prose, exactly. We have gestures for tenderness, and sincerity. Denial. Rage. Passion. A gesture for true love. A gesture for betrayal. But it’s a limited emotional vocabulary. You can think of metaphors before and after you dance, but it’s hard to dance a metaphor in real time. Between my neck and my fatigue and my nerves and my fear, I wasn’t sure if I was even capable of an adjective.
“It’s the mood,” Marius said. “Just be human with each other.”
We began the pas de deux again, and this time Marius didn’t stop us. Something must have seeped into both of us, because it did feel quite different. David and I kept sort of smiling at each other, and everything went much more securely. It felt great, actually. So real. Like we were human beings. I wished I had danced more like this from the beginning of my career, when I wasn’t so beat up. We finished and separated, catching
our breath, looking up to nod at each other, then turning to Marius, who was squinting.
“It doesn’t … quite … work,” he said.
David snorted. I looked down at my feet. They seemed very far away. And so sad. The veins stood out in vivid blue relief to the pale skin. I shifted my weight to the backs of my heels to give my toes a little breathing room inside my pointe shoes. I wondered how much longer I could remain standing. It didn’t seem like that much longer.
“It’s not you,” Marius said, jumping out of his chair and pacing. “That was lovely, actually. It was lovely, but it wasn’t Titania and Oberon. I don’t know … hmmmm …”
When Marius goes to this phase you just let him pace and talk to himself and wait it out, stay ready for instructions. David caught my eye and blew me a silent kiss, then bent over to stretch his hamstring. I calculated that I had about five more minutes of dancing left in my body before I started disintegrating. Less, if I just had to stand around.
“I think,” I started, not having any real thought formed but out of desperation to keep upright, “I think that was valuable though, in terms of how we are relating to each other? It just needs to be, maybe, it just needs to be more formal.”
Marius stopped pacing and considered me.
“You know how after you’ve had a fight,” I continued babbling, “you’re all polite and really respectful and considerate? Well, not me—after I fight I just get sullen and resentful until enough time has passed or I get bored with myself or whatever—but I think that’s how people
should
behave. You know, in a better …” I waved a hand around the studio. The bare floors, the box of yellow rosin in the corner, Dmitri yawning at the
piano, the grime of New York City on the windows too high to see out of, the fluorescent lights blotted with occasional shadows of dead insects, David’s and my dance bags under the barre spewing towels and water bottles and sweatpants and Advil and time. And despair. And fatigue. And desire.
“In a better world,” I said. “A better world than this one.”
“A better world,” Marius said.
“And a better me,” I added. “Obviously.”
Marius nodded. I looked down at my feet again. This time they appeared to be quite close, almost under my chin.
Stand up
, I told myself.
Stand up
.
“Let’s try it,” Marius said. “From the beginning.”
Dress rehearsal today for Program One of our mixed repertoire evenings. In the morning we were all called to company class onstage.
Swan Lake
had disappeared, back into storage. New backdrops had been lowered in. The front of the stage was freshly taped with the markers that help us form properly spaced lines. Portable barres had been brought in, along with a rosin box in the corner. It’s always a bit weird, taking class onstage since you don’t have mirrors. On the other hand, it has sort of a dramatic feel to it.
A few house lights were on, and you could see the entire theater. Usually all you can see are the green EXIT signs and the shadow thumb shapes that are people’s heads. The orchestra pit was empty, except for Dmitri, at the piano. It’s disorienting to take class without a mirror. And to be onstage without an audience.
We had an audience today, though. An assortment of elegantly dressed people, sitting in the center orchestra block.
This was one of those days, as Marius likes to say, where we were paying some bills.
Individual sponsorship of dancers has now become a normal thing for ballet companies. You pay a set fee and your name will appear next to a dancer’s name in the program. “Tina Ballerina’s performances are sponsored by Bruce and Brenda Moneybags.” It’s been proven that people will be more generous to the needy if the needy are given an individual face, a personality, a story line they can sympathize with. And it’s not like the dancers have to wear their sponsors’ names on their costumes.