MEN DANCING

by Cherry Radford

  ‘Too bad, she’d have a ringside seat,’ he said, looking over at the oak. ‘Why don’t you work at home today? You’re going to spend half the day on the train.’

  It was tempting, and could have been therapeutic. ‘Can’t. Got a meeting later and... Shit,’ I said, looking at my watch, ‘gotta go.’

  ***

  I went back to work and saw myself through Alejandro’s eyes: a 38-year-old with a bit of a tummy, hunched over a computer database. Aburr-ida. Bo- ring. It was one of those days when research didn’t seem to have anything going for it other than being able to wear denim to work. Research – or re-search, as those with a glamorous view of it tend to call it – conjures up images of test tubes, suffering volunteers and eurekas. People are less impressed when they hear that you stuff questionnaire responses into a computer, and then, after a statistical wash and rinse programme, pull the bundle out and iron it into a paper to submit to a journal. So you can list it in your next grant application and start the whole sorry business off again. There are moments that you could almost call creative: the fine-tuning of a questionnaire, a cogent argument in the discussion section of a paper. But the rest, even if you have the funding and nerve to delegate, is mindless – but imperatively accurate – drudgery. Or at least this was how I started to see it.

  Trouble is we make these career decisions too young. When my mother died, my father took a whole month off from the practice. And there we were, moping around the house glancing at her empty armchair, unable to communicate without her linking. Realising we never had. And away from those families in his care I think he found what was left of his own decidedly wanting: a maddeningly irresponsible 17-year-old who’d inherited his scientific ability but her mother’s hectic pursuit of the arts. He and the school encouraged me to apply for medicine; after all, I was hardly going to be a concert pianist, and I could always join the theatrical society at uni. It seemed to make sense.

  But there were distractions: a flirtation with the flute, a scantily-clad production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and an unsettling liaison with Lysander. I wasn’t offered a place at any of the medical schools, and found myself having to choose between eyes and teeth. No contest. Vision: this was a science that surely had to have an artistic, magical element. Windows to the soul and all that. Parts of the subject did entrance me for a while. But it turned out that I wasn’t cut out for testing eyes: I’ve no fluency with practical things. So I did an MSc in Epidemiology and a PhD, which ensured a career largely free of instrumentation and patients. I think my father was proud, but by then he was involved with his second marriage – to a widowed fellow GP with a trio of high-achieving young sons.

  Of course I told myself that anybody, on a bad day, could feel uninspired by their vocation, feel it was a calling that they’d misheard, resent the routine. Even dancers: constant niggles and aches, all that preparing of their shoes, the repetitive warming up at the barre. But then I recalled a documentary in which they described their art as more than love, more than an addiction. A religion. Dancing: the sublime coming together of the visual, musical, emotional, physical and sensual. At its best, no other experience could possibly be as complete. I ached for it. And yes, I ached for him: his warmth, gracefulness, power. I was simultaneously elated and distraught. I wanted a different mark on the timeline. Reincarnation.

  The days rolled on. I became ultra efficient at work: it was amazing how much time I could save with my new perspective. Jez was delighted when I shifted my working hours on three of my days, going in and coming back later so I could drop Kenny at school before I went to London. I couldn’t think why I hadn’t pushed for this before.

  And of course, the hours were essential to my plan: after 5.30, alone in my office, I was working on research of a very different kind.

  2.

  Surfing. How perfectly the word describes my exhilaration, my peaks and troughs. There was a seemingly endless amount of information. Reviews became repetitive in their breathless admiration of his brilliance, his charisma, and – tantalizingly – his strong and sensitive partnering of his ballerinas. I rewatched excerpts of performances and the television documentary. But it was the numerous interviews that entranced me: such an intoxicating mix of arrogance, warmth and vulnerability.

  I liked the little things, the contradictions. He bought hats but didn’t wear them; he ate light meals but craved Yorkshire pudding; he liked art but couldn’t draw; he couldn’t bear temperamental people but the documentary showed him in the throes of a few massive moodies of his own. I learnt that he hated clothes shopping, wearing a tie, rain, broccoli, wasps and getting up in the morning. He loved guavas, Italian food, mojitos, orchids, the colour red, double-decker buses, a second-hand leather jacket, women (unspecified), salsa, and, like every good Hispanic boy, his mother. Sources varied on his height (five foot ten or eleven); his siblings (two or four); one of his brothers (disabled or just troubled); his ambitions to learn music (guitar or singing) and write a book (autobiography or novel); and a past relationship with a Cuban ballerina (engaged or not). He was thirty years old and always went home for his August birthday. And one day he would go home for good and start a family.

  Inevitably, although after a surprisingly long time, I found what I suppose I must have been looking for: that he lived with his girlfriend Jessie, a non-dancer and former nurse, for heaven’s sake, in North London. With further searching, I conjured an image of them at a Covent Garden function. Blonde, of course. What is it with this Latin attraction to blondes? In my own family, two generations have effectively rinsed out my Hispanic heritage with their compulsion to breed with the pallid: my half-Spanish mother with an attentive, freckled Scotsman, and my grandfather – an exquisitely dark sevillano for God’s sake – with the milky daughter of a Dutch businessman.

  I maximized the picture. Pretty, of course, but not flawless. Perhaps he loved this sweet little thing. But... former nurse? Had she given up her career – her vocation – to sew elastics on his ballet shoes, wash his practice clothes and cook his light meals? Nureyev had a stream of women prepared to give up their lives to do such things.

  I sat there for some while, baffled and ashamed of the punched-in, queasy feeling in my stomach, the absurd palpitations, the intensity of my misery. I became annoyed with myself – and with him.

  My research entered a new phase. I started to savour the uncomplimentary reviews that I’d previously passed over. It was impossible to believe that Nikiya would fall in love with Cortés’ shallow, narcissistic Solor. Exactly. He lacks classical line and takes liberties with the choreography. I wouldn’t know, but it seemed likely. Cortés was all showmanship and machismo. Quite. I reconsidered the interview photographs of him: ecstatic self-absorption alternating with darkly sexual glowering. A particularly nasty one of him leaning moodily against the barre; a man you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night. Had he not had a say in which images were chosen? Of course he had. I overwrote my own impressions of him with this selection of negative data. Or at least I tried. The pleasure of our encounter had been a chronic ache and was now an infection: complete severance seemed the only answer.

  So I researched other male dancers, looking for an antidote: a coolly handsome, intellectual étoile in the Paris Opera Ballet; an engagingly unassuming young black dancer who’d taken up dance to improve his football and ended up in the New York City Ballet; a number from Denmark – a country that seemed to have produced more sublimely beautiful male dancers than the rest of the world put together. I even, in a kind of homeopathic belief that I could be cured by a little of what ailed me, researched other Cuban dancers. I saw fearlessness, masculinity, grace and charisma - but not, so devastatingly, all in one dancer.

  I tried to interest Emma in a nervous new English Royal Ballet principal with blonde, boy-band good looks who’d been paired with our favourite ballerina – and Alejandro’s – to dance his first Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake. We booked to see them, astonished to get front row tickets just
a week or so in advance, only to find that he’d been injured and was being replaced – much to the audience’s delight – by the magnificent Alejandro Cortés. Emma was one of many ladies in the foyer excitedly tapping her programme cast list insert and exclaiming her good fortune; I was sorry for the already diffident young Englishman and as anxious as a recovering alcoholic before a hen night.

  We liked to take our seats early, read the programme and study the pictures.

  ‘Oh my God, are we going to enjoy this,’ said Emma, running her finger down the navy-clad Alejandro embracing his swan.

  ‘You do realise this is his least favourite ballet?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well I mean, the arrogance, saying that he doesn’t want to fall in love with a swan again, when some of us have paid eighty quid to see him do just that.’

  Emma smiled and shook her head. ‘Don’t worry – he won’t let you down.’

  Unfortunately, that was exactly what I wanted him to do. Besides, I was going to add that he doesn’t have much to do in this ballet anyway, spending almost the entire first act sitting on his arse for God’s sake. But the overture had started, full of plaintive oboe melodies reminding us that this was ballet and we were in for some yearning, betrayal and premature death.

  He made his entrance to the usual burst of applause: all handsome Russian prince and swirling overcoat, looking mightily pleased with himself. Accepting gifts from the girls and offering drinks all round: a nineteenth-century royal Jack-the-lad. And then he came towards us with that male ballet dancer walk that’s always both courtly elegance and potent, crotch-displaying swagger. He took his seat: legs politely arranged – unlike in the train – but at an angle that drew my eye up from the gracefully arched feet to the shapely calves, to those sculpted thighs, to the irresistibly slim, belted waist and then, uncontrollably, back down to the mystery of that bulge, where on occasion – and this was one of them – one could pick out a provocative bit of outline behind the padding.

  There was a nudge from Emma, who was pulling a box of Maltesers from her bag, the crackly cellophane already thoughtfully removed. Cruel, but then it was my fault for not telling her about what had happened. I took a handful – siete, ocho – and tried to concentrate on the pas de trois featuring three of our favourite soloists. But I was drawn back to him: this, now, was the closest I would get, I thought, unless I ever found the courage to go to the stage door and wait with, presumably, a flock of other fantasising women. Suppose he didn’t remember me, or did but was just wearily gracious? No. I had my treasured perfect memory clamped – albeit painfully – to my heart; I couldn’t risk spoiling it. To be sure of that, it would have to stay a secret.

  Then the prince was looking disturbed: mother had arrived and was doing ring-on-finger mime about how he had to choose a bride. But he wasn’t ready to marry, and nor was the spoilt ballet prince inside of course – perhaps never would be – but at least his mother had managed to instil a sense of family. He didn’t want to miss playing baseball with his kids while he was flying around the world performing, he’d said in an interview, so he’d wait until he retired and then go back home and have several. I bit a Malteser in half and joined the two halves together in my mouth, imagining a curly-haired little boy with his father’s wide grin, perhaps rejecting dance and displaying neat footwork on the football field instead. This was Alejandro’s future, and one he would share with some very lovely young thing – perhaps Jessie, if nobody better came along. Around the time I’d be contemplating the menopause.

  Then the prince beamed as he prepared for his solo, defying the mothers’ plans, living for the moment, the party guests dispersing to give him centre stage. There was the pure joy of following his elegant side steps to the sweeping music of the waltz, the effortless jumps and turns, the ecstatic extension of his legs in flight, and the balancing on one foot, the rest of his powerful but seemingly weightless limbs lifted into an exquisite statue – perfection right to the twist of his wrist and sensitive hands. A ravishing fusion of athleticism and art, of virility and gentleness.

  I realised I’d been holding my breath, and by Emma’s sinking into her seat I guessed she had too. I squeezed her arm and exchanged a smile. It was okay, I was still blissfully transported by his dancing: nothing could change that.

  But in the second act I realised I’d forgotten the tenderness with which he folds Tara’s wing-arms and rests her white-feathered head on his shoulder, encircles her waist as she turns and dips, and lifts her high as if catching her from the air. The trust with which she slowly falls backwards from en pointe into his arms...

  ‘Rosie? Come on, back to earth. Ice cream time.’ But I didn’t want one. I went off to join the ladies’ queue, wanting to block my ears so I didn’t have to listen to rapturous comments about Alejandro’s partnering.

  Then we were at the ball, the prince being asked to choose a bride from six princesses. This must be Alejandro’s daily life, I thought, ballerinas constantly parading before him, hoping to be selected. And then hurting and wishing they hadn’t been; he’d probably cut a fair swathe through these poor little romantic swan-girls. The national dancers were a merciful distraction, with their lively dancing and deliciously colourful costumes. But it was soon time for Tara Lopez’s black-swan temptress to lure the prince into betrayal, the unavoidably sexual balletic fireworks – her famous thirty-two whipping turns and his high leaps – seeming to express their genuine excitement. Tara: a woman who could match his talent, charisma and beauty. We’d speculated endlessly about the nature of their off-stage relationship, wanting them to be a couple; I felt deceitful withholding what I knew, and still struggled to believe it. How could he not be in love with Tara? I could have coped with that. Anyway, amid the usual hand-on-heart curtain call etiquette you could see them exchange a look and know that, if there was or ever had been any sexual intimacy between them, it was a mere detail compared to the exhilaration they’d shared so many times on stage.

  I too felt exhilaration, but painfully and on my own. He was too addictive: severance wasn’t possible. I would just have to learn to live with these feelings, let time heal me as much as it could.

  ***

  So I kept my new working hours, but once I was alone, the computer was out of bounds. I started helping more with the garden, and went along with Jez to have tea with Elizabeth Leonard, the frightening National Garden Scheme county organiser, politely feigning interest as we viewed the collection of Cretan urns they imported. I was doing so well that I rewarded myself with a course of Cuban salsa classes. But Jez always seemed to be out with recently-separated John, so I often had to take Kenny with me. I’d sit him down in the corner with his Nintendo, but he’d stand there scrutinising me with a mixture of glee and shame.

  Afterwards, he would amuse my new dancing friends by loudly informing me that I had made mistakes in four of the five songs, was definitely the third worst in the group, but would improve with practice.

  But I was doing my best. Unlike the rest of the family: Kenny was pinching things again; Seb was suspended yet again after being caught smoking just the day after he went back to school; and Jez was absenting himself from the art shop with increasingly flimsy excuses and escalating tension between him and Bill. I resented the way these mundane concerns impinged on my recovery, the way they forced me into an escapist daydreaming state for days at a time. I told myself that it was harmless: the daydreams would fade, in the absence of further inspiration. Perhaps they would have.

  3.

  It was a Friday: the day I deal with the weekly catch, matching up the medical notes with the questionnaires from all the contact lens users that have come through Casualty.

  Moaner Lisa was pacing the office, complaining about her research proposal’s bumpy progress through the ethical committee, the delayed arrival of her conference expenses, or the repeated disappearance of her stapler. Anything, in fact, other than the decreasing number of unmarried doctors and child-bearing years at th
e root of her chronic discontent. I gave her a few minutes then made my apologies and plugged myself into my iPod, switched on the wobbly fan, and made a start on the pile of pink-for-girl and blue-for-boy hospital files.

  Hayfever conjunctivitis. Stye. Migraine. Hayfever conjunctivitis. Minor abrasion. I pulled out a couple of thicker folders. Steven Atkins: retinal detachment after alleged assault, occasional user of disposable lenses. Melanie Brownlow: corneal ulcer, having worn her boyfriend’s old contact lenses. That was a new one. It wasn’t clear whether she’d slept in them or not – with them as well as him, as it were. Sex, I mused, was probably at the heart of a lot of these risk factors for infection: the sleeping in lenses when unexpectedly staying the night away from home; the omission of passion-stalling night-time disinfection procedures; the reluctance of the short-sighted girl to wear frog-like goggles in the sea in front of her new Greek boyfriend. I pinged open a cold can of Coke – essential to surviving the equatorial climate of an NHS office – and grinned to myself. ‘Sexual Intercourse as a Risk Factor for Contact Lens Related Corneal Infections’: now that would be a paper and a half. I imagined discussing it in the monthly journal club to a row of perplexed, earnest faces and had to stifle a manic laugh.

  Listening to Mozart is supposed to increase concentration, but it wasn’t working. On the contrary, his puerile sense of humour had transmitted itself through the centuries, the wires, into my ears and straight to my limbic system. I switched to Eternal Light, the modern requiem to which the Rambert Company had danced.

  Back to business. Jasper Washington – a barrister for heaven’s sake – couldn’t see well because he’d put his lenses in the wrong eyes. Couldn’t he have worked that out? Susan Coles, a teacher, had deserted her class to spend the entire Monday morning in Casualty because she couldn’t remove hers. Jake Brown, recently returned from India, had irritable red eyes with an uncertain diagnosis. Jessica Linley, recently returned from Cuba, had a red, sore, watery eye, to be treated as infective.