The Cranes Dance (27 page)

“I love you, Katie. I want you to be strong.”

“I love you too. Okay.”

“I’m going to give the phone back to your mother now. Are you able to speak calmly to her?”

“Yeah. Yes. I’m sorry.”

“We’ll talk to you soon.”

“Okay. Bye, Daddy. I’m sorry.”

“Bye, sweetheart.”

The line went quiet again, and I scrubbed my cheeks with one hand and took a deep shaky breath. I’m such a bad breather.

“It’s me.” My mom’s voice, sounding tentative. I could picture her: a canary-yellow polo shirt, maybe with a sleeveless fleece over it. She gets her hair cut at a Supercuts and colors it herself with L’Oréal. She wears a visor when she plays tennis. Gwen and I always give her a hard time about her visor. We have a jingle that we sing at odd moments—“VI-sor JU-deeee!”—meant to convey in four syllables the totality of steel-jawed perky obliviousness that is the birthright of the Midwestern Mom.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. “I didn’t mean to shout at you.”

“Oh, it’s okay, honey. I know you’re worried. Where are you?”

“I’m on the street. We’re at dinner break.”

“Are you with your friends? Is Mara there?”

“Roger. Bunch of other people. Not right now. They’re in the café.”

“Well, I think you better go back and get some food in you!”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s going to be just fine, honey. Take deep breaths.”

“I am.”

“We’re all just taking deep breaths. And you know your sister loves you. She just needs a little more time.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” I repeated, trying to sound like I meant it. I made the gesture for calm, which helped slightly.

“Guess what your daddy and I did today?” she asked—or rather, begged.

“Uh-huh. What did you do?”

“We went to yoga! We got a free pass in the mail for some new place that opened and I said, ‘Bill, I think we should check this out.’ And your father did very well! He didn’t think he would like it but he
did
.”

“That’s … that’s great!” My exclamation point was faint, but I got it in there.

“Did you talk to your brother?”

We spent a few minutes regaling each other with the same information we both had about Keith, who had won the final in Morocco in straight sets and was now headed to Italy. By the time this was done, we were speaking normally to each other, and my nose was no longer running, although I could feel the cakiness under my eyes where mascara had pooled and dried. We said good-bye and I checked out my reflection in the window of a dry cleaner’s, licking my fingertips and repairing the damage. My phone beeped. A text from Roger:

When I got back to the café, I was informed that Klaus had figured out a way to suck on a straw while still looking sexy. He demonstrated this for me and I laughed along with everyone else.

“You better hit that,” Roger whispered to me, nodding at Klaus.

“Ha-ha,” I said. “Ha-ha.”

Back at the theater, dress rehearsal dragged on. Our sponsors had departed, and free from adult supervision, Marius grabbed
a microphone and commenced shouting with something less than the afternoon’s geniality. My brain felt hot and uncomfortable, like the way you feel bulky and irritable inside your winter coat when you’re slogging through a department store in January. I swallowed another Vicodin, more for my guilt than for my neck, and it did bring me a certain amount of mental ventilation. In the wings before my first entrance for
Leaves
I was champing at the bit, so badly did I want to get onstage and just dance. Every time Marius stopped us to correct the lighting, or confer with the orchestra director, or yell about our spacing, I wanted to scream.

Marius announced that we were running the whole ballet again from the beginning. Everyone nodded obediently and bitched in the wings. “Are we in overtime?” “He doesn’t expect us to do it full out, does he?” There were many complaints about our costumes for this ballet, which is an old one from our repertoire, and it must be admitted that there is a faint reek of mildew coming off the chiffon.

“I think the last guy who wore this is dead now,” Roger said to me. “I’m wearing a dead man’s blouse.”

“That’s very poetic,” I told him. He nodded.

Roger said.

I laughed, and it felt like the sound broke something free in my head.

It’s not my problem anymore
, I told myself.

When you exhaust every possible emotion, you make space for the unexpected. For the rest of the hour I loved everything. I loved standing in the wings and looking upward into the fathoms of the theater: the flies, the iron catwalk, the lighting grids and scrims. I loved that the sound of Dvorak was so comprehensible to my muscles that the phrases seemed to be emitting from my own bloodstream. I loved the drama of running into the wings and dashing around the narrow crossover backstage that is set up for us with glow tape. I loved that I’m able to turn on one foot, run, run, run, glissade, and then jump into the air, half turning, so that Adam is able to lean down and catch me, one arm circling my legs, and I loved knowing in a hundred tiny indescribable ways that it was done perfectly and that Adam was glad that I have a good jump and make it easy for him. I loved the sight of my own hand in front of my face. I lifted my arms and felt the muscles undulating down my back, and this too I loved.

And then it was over and Marius said, “Better. Thank you, company. Go home. Get some sleep.” And we all filed offstage and Fiona shouted out a reminder for everyone to
please
hang up their costumes in the dressing rooms,
do not
leave them on the floor, and people crowded into the elevator or pulled themselves up the stairs, and I told myself that this night would be fine.

This night I would end the evening perfectly, ride the subway home quietly, put my things away neatly when I got back
to the apartment. Not smoke or watch something stupid on TV, or stare bleakly at Gwen’s masking-tape Xs on the walls and construct grim fantasies in my head to work out all my resentments. I would perform nightly ablutions methodically and peacefully and perhaps spend an hour reading Peter Holland’s essay on
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. I would do this all for me, and not for the benefit of an invisible audience.

But back in my dressing room I was afraid. I was afraid that with the removal of each layer I would slowly be reduced, like a series of glittering, mildewed, sweat-stained Russian nesting dolls, until there was just one tiny feeble me, so easy to knock over, so easy to lose.

I told Mara I would meet her at the Russian Baths downtown this morning. Two Vicodin and my iPod meant I could get on the subway and down to lower Manhattan with artificially induced cheer. I wanted to cancel on Mara. Usually I love having a good long sweat in the steam room, but I was afraid that under intense heat the backlog of Vicodin in my pores was going to waft out in a noxious cloud, and I wanted it in me. I have this idea that my toxins are acting as a kind of force field.

The Russian Baths are coed, so you wear bathing suits. The saunas are mostly populated by extremely large Central European men who watch us impassively and speak to each other in thick wooden-block sentences. From time to time an attendant, wearing a special peaked cap that seems to serve no purpose other than the ludicrous and ceremonial, will appear and offer to whack you with special branches. There are buckets in the corners and chests with ice water. You can also step outside the sauna and stand in a shower cubicle while the peaked-cap
guy throws buckets of ice water at you. I never do that though, because I hate the feeling of cold water.

Mara and I arrived at the baths at the same time, changed into suits, and took our usual benches in the sauna. It was early enough that it wasn’t too crowded. Most of the dancers in town come to this place, even though there’s a fancier one in the East Village where the attendants don’t scowl at you. Eventually we’ll all switch over to that one, I suppose. When there’s a signal from the herd.

Mara and I spent a few minutes gossiping about the week. Mara seemed distracted, which suited me just fine. I wasn’t up for any big talk. I asked her about Mike.

“Yes, so, actually, kind of big news,” she said. “Mike surprised me last night. We’ve been talking about doing a little trip, after the season is over, but I was thinking maybe a long weekend at a B and B in Vermont or something. He’s got all this vacation accrued. Anyway, last night I came home and the kitchen table was covered in this red-and-white-checked tablecloth and he had music playing, and a bottle of red wine, and cheese and prosciutto and this whole itinerary printed out. A week in Venice!”

“Ohhhh,” I said, squeezing her sweaty knee. “Mara, that’s fantastic. How sweet. He set it all up for you?”

“Can you believe it?”

“With prosciutto and everything waiting?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s the best,” I said. “And you deserve the best, but I mean … when do we get what we deserve? So it’s even more the best that he’s the best.”

“He is the best.”

“It’s just what you need,” I said. “And Mike too. I love that he’s so romantic.”

“So I got a little carried away.” Mara bent over her legs and looked up at me sheepishly. “Because later, in bed, I asked him what he thought about us trying to get pregnant.”

“Wow.” I laughed. “That must have been some cheese.”

“Sort of starting in Venice, because it’s better if you’re off the pill for a cycle or two before you start trying. So I thought, well, I could go off the pill now, and then we could start when we’re on vacation. To make it even more special.”

“Oh my gosh. You’re serious?”

“We were both sort of crying and laughing too. I mean he was laughing at me for having this whole logistical plan, but he was also really, really excited. He said that he’s been thinking about having a baby a lot lately, but he didn’t want to say anything and make me feel pressured, and he thought we were still a few years away from me wanting to do that.”

“Right, right.” I tried to breathe shallowly because the heat was hitting me faster than it usually does, and I was dehydrating rapidly. “I thought you were too. You said something about it, a few weeks ago, but also you were talking about taking some classes, so I just assumed it was all very hypothetical and—”

“And you know, after I said it,” Mara continued. “To Mike? I just felt so happy and I thought, if I get pregnant in Venice then I won’t come back next season. And then I thought, well, maybe I’ll just retire altogether.”

“Wait. What? Retire?”

“Yup.” Mara extended a leg out in front of her. Three of her
toes were taped up, there was a bruise on her knee, and clusters of lavender spider veins traced their way down her shin. But this is how we look. These are the signs of our commitment.

“I thought,” I said. “I thought you were feeling good about things. The other day, you were talking about
Symphony
and saying how great it felt to be dancing that. And I mean, you look great, you’re not injured …”

“In a way, that’s sort of a reason to quit now,” Mara said. “Finish with dance before dance finishes with me, you know?”

I breathed in nausea.

“This isn’t about what happened in
Swan Lake
?” I asked. “When you fell? Because that happens to everybody, and you were dancing beautifully. It was a total freak accident.”

I looked at the topography of Mara’s bent-over back. Stone footpaths of vertebrae. Cresting ribs like sand dunes. Shoulder-blade cliffs. When she pulled at the tape around her big toe, the muscles of her back volcanoed new islands into the valley. It’s not the terrain of a retirement village. Or a nursery.

“No,” Mara said, straightening up. “Of course not. I’m not that egotistical. It’s just that when I think about all the things I want now from life, they’re more like, life things, you know?”

“You can have life things and still dance, though,” I said, blinking sweat out of my eyes. “It’s not either/or. People have babies. People take classes, get degrees. Sometimes it’s better, right? You have more to give onstage when you have a full life.”

“Okay, why are you being like this?” Mara asked. “Are you seriously trying to talk me into more dancing? When I’m actually feeling happy about the thought of doing something new with my life?”

“No, I know, it’s just that it seems really sudden,” I said. “Are you sure you didn’t get carried away, like you said, in the heat of the moment? He pulls out the whole spread, he’s booked this great vacation, you’re feeling the postcoital glow … you were in a chemical rush.”

“
I’m
in a chemical rush?” Mara asked pointedly.

I waved that away.

“Guess I just feel like I missed a chapter in a book,” I said. “We haven’t really talked about any of this.”

“That’s not my fault.”

And just like that, we were in a fight. Neither one of us is a yeller or screamer and since we were both physically exhausted and in a public sweat lodge, there was no arm waving or extra energy being expended. We basically sat very still, perspired, and spoke sedately of betrayal.

“You know, Mara, I’ve had a few things of my own going on.”

“And you shut me down every single time I try to talk to you about Gwen.”

“Because I don’t want to talk about her. Sorry. I know I should. But I don’t want to right now. How hard is that to understand? I’m not like, obligated to talk about it.”

“I don’t think you realize how difficult it is to be friends with you.”

“Because I don’t dump my problems on everybody?”

“Because you’re sad and you won’t talk about it.”

“I’m not sad all the time.”

“No, lately you’re high all the time.”

“It’s Vicodin. It’s not heroin.”

“It actually does affect your personality. I know you don’t want to believe that, but it does.”

“Well, according to you I have a bad personality anyway.”