by JJ Knight
He sketched in the lines of her body, the taut muscled calf, the elegant turn of her neck. Sometimes he paused, a prickle flowing through him like a current as she appeared on his page.
He looked up at the real woman, who moved to the barre with its mirrored wall. The little girls under her instruction mimicked her movements, tapping their tiny ballet slippers on the worn floor, out of time with the rhythm of the song playing through the speakers.
The woman stretched out her arm. Samuel’s pencil flew across the sketch, sweeping along the bend of her elbow and delineating each poised finger.
Mothers sat along the wall on hard benches, cell phones upraised. Their devices indicated their recording with beeps and chimes alongside the cadence of his long, even strokes.
Samuel switched colors to capture the warm tones of the teacher’s face where the sun from the high windows kissed her skin. The sensual slide of the tip of the pencil on the rough paper vibrated through his fingertips as if he were touching her.
His own daughter paused, snatching his attention to her end of the studio. Cassandra hitched up the back of her tights and jiggled out of step with the other girls. He watched her for a moment, wondering if she needed to visit the bathroom and if so, would he need to interrupt the class. After a moment she stuck her toe out again and turned in a slow circle, dropping back into the motions of her classmates.
Samuel should be drawing her instead. And he often did, images of her gazing out the front window at home, as if she could summon her mother’s return. Cassandra was only four, and almost a year had passed since she had last seen the woman who gave birth to her.
Samuel spent months trying to find his wife. The note she left made it clear she was not dead or lost, but needed to be free. Motherhood and marriage were not what she had expected. She wanted to photograph the lions in Africa, the capybaras in South America. She was anxious to go behind enemy lines to capture images of war and famine and danger. To live.
Still, he searched for her, expecting the tether that bound a mother to a child would hold. He would send her news, draw her back.
But she had slipped away from them, snapping the tie. He couldn’t find her. Then six months later, the papers had come. Divorce. She wanted nothing, just to be let go. He signed them and sent them back to some law firm in New York.
The music changed to a bouncy happy nursery tune. The little girls followed their teacher, elbows out, skipping in a circle. Samuel abandoned the sensitive drawing with its wistful, aching lines and flipped back to one he’d started at last week’s lesson. This image matched the current mood, the teacher smiling, dressed in a black leotard and jagged sheer skirt.
“That’s lovely,” a woman said, leaning in to look at his sketch pad. “Do you draw professionally?”
He shook his head, working hard to suppress his urge to turn the page away from her critical eye. “I work for the newspaper.”
“You must get to draw for them, then,” she said brightly.
Samuel merely nodded. There was no point in trying to express the heaviness he felt at work, arranging lines of crowded type into too-small boxes for the advertisers who could not afford their own graphic designers. His was a life of clip art and stock photos and font weights.
He did not do his job particularly well, and his lack of creativity plagued him. At night he often dreamed that the words he shoved into tight spaces broke free, letters bursting out of their sharp alignments.
Perhaps that was how his wife had felt.
The woman tugged a cell phone from her purse to snap pictures of the ballerinas, and Samuel sighed in relief. But he felt too near this other person, her proximity stifling his ability to fluidly create the lines of the teacher.
His drawings were his love affair, and he felt naked when they were viewed. Anyone could surely see his infatuation with the circle of her arms, his obsession with the tender arch of her foot as she pointed her toe on the barre.
The gentle slope of her back and the curve of her waist were visions that pushed away the demons that imprisoned him at night. The dance lessons were a hardship, both in their expense and in his time from work to bring Cassandra midday. He gladly paid the price, not just for his daughter, whose schedule he endeavored to keep. But for himself.
These moments brought him back to his center, his love of drawing for the art itself. He captured this woman on paper. His adoration of her was pure and unbroken and infallible.
She could not walk away from his page. She would never disappear from the reality of his pencil strokes.
He had no courage to take her from this world of drawing and unrequited love into the next one, of dates and awkwardness and devastation in the end. So he pined. He watched. And he let it be enough.
Chapter 2: Aurora
The class always seemed over too soon. Aurora drew the girls into a tight circle and kneeled with them, among their tiny feet and sparkling tutus. She placed her palm in the center of their squirming huddle.
The girls placed their pudgy warm hands on hers, small arms reaching to belong, to join in with the others.
“Ready?” Aurora asked. She lifted her palm with each count of “One, two, three,” and together they chorused her dance motto.
“Graceful, happy, and kind, a dancer all the time!”
With that, they were released. The girls dispersed, running with awkward gaits to their mothers. One hesitated, Cassandra, a wiggle in her step.
“Do you need to use the bathroom?” Aurora asked her.
The little girl nodded.
Aurora glanced up at the departing parents. The lone father of the crew, Samuel, sat waiting on the benches, a sketch pad balanced on his knees. He was busily packing colored pencils into a bag.
“Let your daddy know,” Aurora said. “There’s a bathroom in the corner.” She pointed at the far wall.
Cassandra dashed over to her father. Aurora watched her go, making sure the girl communicated her need. She was a shy one, unsure and sometimes lost. Aurora knew the mother had stopped bringing the girl a year ago, and the father came in her stead. The sorrowful demeanor of the child told Aurora that something tragic had happened, but she hadn’t pried.
Aurora was not accustomed to fathers entering her studio. Sometimes when she faced the mirror, she caught him watching her with a quiet awe.
The little girl tugged on her father’s hand, unwilling to go to the bathroom alone, as was normal for her tender age. He set his sketchbook and pencil bag on the bench and walked with her across the room.
His body was lean and strong, but his carriage was uncertain, as if he didn’t quite know why he was still standing.
Cassandra was a beautiful child, pale with raven hair and dark soulful eyes. After a year, Aurora was hard pressed to remember the mother well, although she seemed to recall she closely resembled her daughter.
The room emptied. Aurora headed to the wall to pick up the ribbon sticks they had used early in class. As she passed the benches, her eyes wandered to the sketchbook.
Her curiosity was strong. The way this father watched her dance with such intensity, his hand ever moving, filling his page.
What did he draw? His daughter? Or her?
Aurora paused by the sketchpad.
She shouldn’t look.
She picked up a ribbon stick and began to wind the curling fabric in a coil. She set the stick on the bench and bent for another. Still, the sketchbook called to her. She wanted to know. Had to know.
Aurora sat next to it, a stick in her lap. Just one small glance.
Her fingers grazed the corner and flipped back the cover.
She inhaled sharply.
It was her.
She wore her lemon yellow leotard. He had drawn her with the sun flowing from the high windows in the studio, lighting her ebony hair until it shone almost blue. She was en pointe, which she rarely did since her injury, but she remembered that day, showing the girls what a ballerina could work toward.
She was be
autiful. More beautiful than in real life.
Aurora flipped the page, sucking in another breath. His work was sensuous, breathtaking. He honored every part of her and directed your gaze where he wanted you to look. This one focused on her hands, cupped elegantly near her face as she landed a petit jeté.
She turned the pages faster, wanting to take in everything he had done. Image after image of her, each leotard she owned, every step she taught the girls.
Then she paused on one that was unlike all the others. In this sketch, she was not in dance attire at all. Samuel had drawn her sitting on the wall of the Riverwalk downtown. Behind her, strings of light glowed softly. She looked out of the image, her eyes warm and welcoming. She extended a hand as if to say, “Please, take me with you.”
The handle of the bathroom door rattled, and Aurora leaped to her feet. The ribbon stick clattered to the floor. She slammed the sketchbook closed and left it on the bench.
Samuel and Cassandra came out as she bent to scoop up the errant stick, its pastel ribbon unrolling onto the floor.
“Can I help?” Cassandra called, hurrying across the room.
Aurora smiled at her, glancing anxiously up at Samuel. Cassandra seemed happy and relaxed now that the other girls were gone. Or perhaps the other mothers.
“Of course,” Aurora said and passed her the stick. “Just roll up the ribbons.”
Cassandra took the stick from her teacher and clumsily began to coil the fabric around the wood dowel.
Samuel looked anxiously at his sketchbook, and Aurora flushed with heat. Had he noticed it had moved?
But he did not speak, just bent down to pick up a handful of sticks. He rolled them up with dexterity and speed, and Aurora caught herself staring at his nimble fingers, shocked when she realized she pictured them on her body. She tore herself away and busied herself with one of the ribbons. He must know her intimately to have drawn her with such accuracy. Perhaps he knew her better than she knew herself.
When the sticks were all organized in a neat pile, Cassandra stepped awkwardly back against her father’s legs. “Goodbye, Miss Aury,” she said shyly.
“Thank you for your help,” Aurora said to the girl, bending to squeeze her shoulder.
When she straightened, Samuel was looking right at her, his somber eyes hot and penetrating. A lock of dark hair fell over his brow, softening the intensity of his expression.
“Thank you, Mr. Lee,” she said.
His gaze skittered away. “You’re welcome.” He gathered his sketchpad. “You ready, Cassandra?”
The pair left the studio. In their wake, it seemed empty and cold, as if all the heat had left the room with them.
Chapter 3: Samuel
Something had changed. Samuel tucked Cassandra into bed that night, plagued with thoughts that he’d pushed aside through the afternoon and dinner. When his daughter was asleep, he sat at his kitchen table, the sketchbook angled toward him like an accusation.
Had she seen?
The dance teacher seemed flustered when he returned with Cassandra. He knew her every expression, her serene and happy gaze for the girls.
But not this one. Her eyes stayed downcast, and her fingers awkwardly struggled to tame the ribbons on their sticks.
She had definitely seen.
Samuel flipped through the book, viewing his images through her eyes. They seemed tawdry, obsessive, an invasion of her privacy. He wanted to tear them from the book. Burn the pages. His heart hammered as if she were next to him, chastising him for his work.
But he could not afford to overreact. He had to take Cassandra to class next week. He had changed nothing, not a single element of their lives, since her mother’s departure. They ate the same meals. Kept the same schedule. Played the same games and watched the same television programs.
Samuel felt this was the only thing holding them together. And so he did not destroy the sketches. He closed the book and lifted it high to safely rest on top of the refrigerator. He would not look at them again. In fact, he would purchase an identical pad and resume his drawings of his daughter.
He slept restlessly that night, the whirl of dance skirts coloring his dreams. Ballet slippers tapped and turned, spinning against a tilting floor. He woke with a start, the street lamp streaming through the window, his body aching and his heart forlorn. He tiptoed back to the kitchen and examined the drawings in the dark, only the heaviest strokes visible on the white pages.
It did not matter that this dance teacher knew. If she did not ask him about the sketches after seeing them the first time, then she never would.
~*´`*~
Samuel dropped Cassandra off at her day care the next morning, groggy from lack of sleep, heavy with loss. He arrived at his desk promptly at nine and scrolled through his emails to find the specifications for today’s advertisements. There were none. His smattering of lackluster assignments had finally dwindled to nothing.
Behind him, a man cleared his throat. Samuel turned to the carefully masked face of his boss. “Let’s take a walk to my office,” he said.
This never happened. Samuel’s hair prickled on his neck. He glanced back at his desk as if it might give him a hint at what was to come.
The two of them had no more sat down when his boss spoke in rapid bursts, like a rock skipping across water. “Downturn. Too little work. Expenses.”
Samuel was let go. The poker-faced boss tugged on his wide-striped tie and said he would provide a reference if Samuel needed it. He would be escorted out in two hours, once his desk was clear, but he still would be paid for another two weeks.
He held out his hand for Samuel’s badge. “You understand,” he said, eyes looking beyond the office door. “Security reasons.”
Later, as Samuel placed his photographs of Cassandra in the proffered box, he thought of his schedule, changed. His work, gone. Their lives, disrupted. He could not afford to keep her in day care without work. The puzzle pieces of their carefully arranged days began to split apart, fragmenting the whole.
He left the building and sat in his car, staring out the windshield and into this new future. Oddly, he thought of the dance teacher, whose day was going on normally, another leotard, another set of little girls at her barre. He wished it were Wednesday, and he could sit on her benches and watch her arabesque.
Instead, he dropped the gearshift into drive and headed to his empty house.
Chapter 4: Aurora
Aurora bent over her knee, leg up on the barre. Her friend Jacob’s concerned face disappeared from the mirror as her forehead touched the cool smoothness of her tights.
“I think it’s romantic as hell,” Jacob said, his deep voice echoing in the empty studio. “You don’t know anything about the situation with the mother?”
Aurora felt the tug of her muscle where it had never fully recovered from her fall. Her stretch didn’t quite go as deep as it once did, and her endurance and accuracy had definitely suffered. She lifted her torso, her eyes meeting Jacob’s once more.
He cut quite a figure in a fiery red mesh top and black tights. He was one of her oldest friends in San Antonio, where she’d fled after the disastrous night of her accident on stage and the rehabilitation that didn’t quite get her back to professional dance level.
When her career ended at the age of twenty-five, Jacob had rescued her. He had steered her toward this dance academy, which housed four studios. Jacob taught hip hop and modern dance between auditions for stage work. He had great aspirations and the talent to make them happen. His career was still out in front, whereas Aurora’s was effectively over.
“I don’t snoop,” she said. “I just know that when he started bringing his daughter, the mother never came back.”
Jacob leaned against the barre. His skin was as dark as hers was light. They sometimes danced together for a community theater, and the reviews always spoke of their opposites. Coloring. Size. Style. Jacob’s moves were as bold as Aurora’s were delicate. The critics here were easy to please. They
found no fault with her form or her range.
She had to let it be enough.
“Could just be a schedule thing, then,” Jacob said. He leaped into the air, scissoring his ankles, warming up. They worked out together each morning before classes began.
Aurora lowered her leg to the floor and lifted the other. It stretched with even smoothness, deep and hard, as if to remind her of the deficiency of the injured one. “I don’t think so,” she said, exhaling into the pose, forehead to knee. “The girl is so sad now. Nothing like she was before.”
Jacob spun in fast, dizzying circles. Aurora lifted her head and watched his powerful body defy the laws of motion. He was a wonder to behold. Their mutual admiration meant parents entering the academy assumed they were a couple. They let the misunderstanding stand, finding it easier than explaining that Aurora felt too tender after her dance partner and lover dumped her once the extent of her injury was confirmed.
For two years now she’d taught little girls, barely able to do more than the five basic positions herself when she began, post surgery and in constant pain. Even now, when she could do passable ballet, Aurora found her heart wasn’t in it anymore, as if the dance itself had been the one to jilt her.
She pirouetted around Jacob, her gentle turns a quiet contrast to his bold leaping spins. But somehow this made her think of Samuel. She had nothing to prove on the pages where he drew her. And his gift could not be as easily snatched from him as hers had been.
Jacob dropped to one knee, back arched, head down, a dramatic move. Aurora tested her leg, found it strong enough today, and turned in slow, agonizing circles en pointe.
Jacob walked to her, holding her wrist and leading her around. He held fast as she bent backwards, one leg lifting, until she was split, high and low, strong and injured, both balanced and falling.
She held the pose, picturing the image Samuel would draw if he were there.