by Meg Howrey
And then more work. Toweling. Combing. Scooping up hair that comes out when I comb. Deodorant. Moisturizer for body. Moisturizer for face. Ear cleaning. Skin examining. Eyebrow tweezing. Nail trimming. Tooth cleaning. It’s just fucking exhausting and then there’s doing my hair and attempting some sort of makeup and then clothes. If I hadn’t reinstituted my invisible audience/judges for this whole segment of the day I just wouldn’t be able to get through it. Gwen’s wardrobe helps too. It’s very well organized, by color and within color, by season. She doesn’t have a ton of random things that she never wears, like I do.
All of Gwen’s apartment is very well edited. Which is not to say that it’s barren or cold. She has very good taste.
It was a thing we enjoyed, those first years of living together. Shopping, choosing, fixing up our apartment just so. Even something like getting a corkscrew was special, because we would hunt around until we felt like we had found the absolute best corkscrew. And we were just making corps salary, which doesn’t go very far in New York City, so everything had to be very carefully thought out. Lots of things we did without until we could afford exactly what we wanted.
It was like a game. I thought it was all about the aesthetics of our life. Were we not artists, after all, tuned in to the finer details and existing on a somewhat more elevated plane than the common folk?
But Gwen has a way of multiplying the rules of any game. And things snuck up on me. I would lose focus, get involved in some drama of my own, and not pay attention to what Gwen was doing until it was already there, a fact of our life together, something I had been colluding with for months without really being aware of it.
Like the switch from extremely neat to obsessively neat. Emptying the wastepaper basket every time I left anything in it, like a lipstick-imprinted tissue or a hank of floss. Washing the dishes and then drying them and putting them away and then washing and drying the sink and then the kitchen floor and then taking pots and pans that we hadn’t even used out of the cupboards and washing them too. Vacuuming. Oh god, the vacuuming. She’d vacuum and then empty the bag out onto newspaper and comb through all the detritus. And then do it again and again. Examining. Like an archaeologist with short-term memory loss. There’s always something, she’d say. Until there wasn’t, but that didn’t always bring the relief she needed.
Sometimes she would refer to objects like floss or bobby pins sucked up from the rug, with gender pronouns.
“Look at her,” Gwen might say, holding up a miniature bird’s nest of hair plucked from the bathroom wastepaper bucket. At first I thought she was being whimsical.
“Here he is,” she said, seizing upon two or three crescent slivers of toenails.
“Um, that was probably me,” I would say. “Sorry.”
She would smile her sibylline smile.
No. I knew it wasn’t right. That it wasn’t just eccentricity. Her face, as she organized, scrubbed, aligned objects at right angles, hung and re-hung and re-hung towels, was eerily blank of expression. She was there and she wasn’t there. If I interrupted her, she might cower, or yell, or even cry. If I left her alone she would eventually either exhaust or satisfy herself and things would continue on. It was all very private. And at work she began to blossom. Her dancing got more confident. She worked hard. I know this because these were the very things I was supposed to be doing, but my results didn’t look like Gwen’s.
If I joined in the cleaning, and did it with her, it would often wear itself out and abate more quickly. Sometimes not. Sometimes it would lead to her doing other, stranger things. I guess the paper dolls were an early typical example. Things would start … appearing. Like, keys were a big thing for a year or two. Not her own apartment keys, but ones she had picked up from god knows where. Keys to nothing. She collected dozens of them and hid them all over the place. They would be sewn inside curtains, placed in a Chinese takeout box, and stored in the freezer. I’d find keys in Clive’s cat litter.
“Hey, Gwen,” I would say, going for casual and curious instead of slightly freaked out. “What’s with all the keys?”
“Oh, I just like them.”
“Okay, why are they taped to the side of the oven?”
“Why is anything anyplace?” she might ask. And since this was both funny and true, I usually let it go at that point. I started removing the keys from wherever strange place I found them and dumping them in an unused glass flower vase. Gwen didn’t mind. She put the vase on the kitchen table like a centerpiece and it was almost like an Easter egg hunt for me. When the vase got full, it would disappear.
Well, look, it’s not like Gwen staggered around in a constant state of looniness, thinking she was the ghost of Napoleon or doing big Jekyll-and-Hyde mood shifts. I probably did some weird stuff too.
This morning, after the interminable five-act opera that is basic hygiene, I dismissed my viewing audience so I could smoke a cigarette with my morning coffee. This is terribly sloppy of me—I’ve trained myself to only have one or two cigarettes a week and then only after a performance—but I’ve slipped into this new habit and now it’s hard to break.
In all other ways though, I’m basically living by Gwen’s house rules. The only thing I haven’t been able to avoid is collecting a pile of mail on her desk. Gwen hates piles like that. She keeps a paper shredder on her desk so that after she opens and deals with everything, she can utterly destroy it. (For someone with such a shaky sense of her own identity, she’s really paranoid about identity theft.) I’ve been paying her Con Ed bills, etc., but I don’t know what to do with the catalogs and various other things. Gwen has a very particular system for everything.
The New York City postal service has been forwarding my own mail in little rubber-banded caches. This morning, after the cigarette, I finally sat down to go through a few. It was still early, too early. Hours before morning class and I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Amid all the junk—the usual stalking from Bed Bath & Beyond—I found the familiar envelope from Wendy Griston Hedges.
I didn’t need to open this to know what it contains.
During my first years in the company, I would see Wendy at all the donor events, and we would talk, but she never initiated anything more, and it did not occur to me to suggest it. I was always happy to see her. She felt mine, in a particular way. My own private thing. She didn’t seem especially interested in Gwen. It was always about what I was dancing, my performance, how I was feeling about things.
When did she invite me to tea, that first time?
Oh, of course I remember. Gwen had just been made soloist. Ahead of me. And the whole thing with Hilel had just gone down. I guess I was feeling kind of low. Anyway, there was something—an invited dress rehearsal, I think—and a few days later I got a formal invitation in the mail from Wendy to have tea at her house. A little bemused, I responded in kind, by mail.
My arrival at her apartment coincided with the hanging in her foyer of an enormous glass chandelier, recently purchased in Venice, comprised of enormous glass fruits and vegetables. Pink grapefruits. Red pomegranates. Green peppers. Purple eggplants. Something that might have been butternut squash. Wendy ushered me in and we stood watching together as this monstrosity was hoisted overhead by an electrician.
“That is really something,” I said.
“I think it should be lower,” Wendy said, fretfully, to me.
“Um … Mrs. Hedges would like you to lower it,” I addressed the electrician.
The giant thing sank a few inches.
“Too low, and it’ll bang on someone’s head,” the electrician counseled.
“I want to see it, though,” Wendy said to me. “So I can enjoy it.”
“A bit lower,” I instructed.
He lowered it another few inches.
Wendy stepped directly under the chandelier. The electrician, freaked out, grabbed the chain with both hands and nearly fell off his ladder.
“Lady,” he squeaked.
“There,” said Wendy, smil
ing. The fruits and vegetables sparkled a foot above her head, like a celestial produce tiara.
“Okay, good!” I shouted, hauling her out of the way. “Lock it down there, please.”
“I’ll get the tea,” said Wendy, happily.
And so it went on. The first Monday of every month, Wendy and I would have tea. A week or two before the Monday a formal invitation would appear, and I would send a reply. Of course there were gaps. Tour. Vacation. Wendy occasionally took a cruise, or spent a month or two in Greece. But it’s been a kind of staple in my life. I’ve pieced together bits of her history over the years, although she’s not one for talking about herself. I’ve gotten used to her shyness, which hasn’t really abated with time. It’s not a lonely shyness, though. As happy as she is to see me, I think she’s equally happy when I go and leave her to her books and her occupations. Considering the shyness and her extreme privacy, I wondered what made her take in a student ballerina. When I got up the nerve to ask, she took a moment to reply and then said, “Henry couldn’t have children. He told me that when he asked me to marry him. I think it’s why he asked me, actually. He thought I wouldn’t mind. Oh, and I didn’t. I didn’t want children. But I did wonder from time to time. How do you know you won’t like something if you’ve never tried it? So when the company asked if I would consider hosting a student I thought, Well, here is my chance to experiment. And Henry was already dead, you see, so it couldn’t hurt his feelings.”
“I guess you realized you really didn’t like it!” I laughed. “Since I was the only one you let stay here.”
“That wasn’t you.” She patted my knee. “I liked you very much. Very much. But oh, my dear, it made me so nervous and uncomfortable.” She shuddered. “They say it’s different if it’s your own child, but what a risk! What if it’s not different? No, I satisfied my curiosity.”
Our teas have been mostly instructional. Wendy usually has some book ready for me. She reads Latin and Greek. She knows a lot about ancient civilizations, mythology, classical drama, and poetry.
“The life of the mind,” she told me once. “That’s what I really wanted. My fairy tales were filled with ivory towers. And then I met Henry. So that was a different life.”
“Well, it’s sort of an ivory tower,” I said, gesturing around the Park Avenue living room. “Ivory-colored upholstery, anyway.”
“Yes. That’s why I never sit in here unless you come. I’m afraid of spilling things.”
“We can sit somewhere else.”
“Do you think?”
After that, we always had tea in her library, which had moss-green corduroy armchairs.
Occasionally, I went with Wendy to “pay calls” on some of her favorite art around the city. She didn’t believe in prolonged museum visits; she preferred to visit one or two favorite pieces and leave it at that. Since her apartment wasn’t far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she liked to check in fairly regularly with Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Ugolino and His Sons in the sculpture garden.
Ugolino, a Pisan traitor, was imprisoned with his sons in a tower and condemned to starvation. The sculpture is sensuous and grisly and disturbing all at once. Ugolino is depicted gnawing at his own fingers. One child is perhaps already dead, collapsed against Ugolino’s left leg. Two other sons are coiled around him, the eldest digging his fingers into his father’s calf in a way that makes your teeth hurt. Wendy explained to me the history of Ugolino, which led to a mini lecture on thirteenth-century Italian politics, the differences between Guelphs and Ghibellines.
“According to Dante,” Wendy told me, “the sons pleaded with their father to satisfy his hunger by eating them.”
“Father, our pain,” they said,
“Will lessen if you eat us—you are the one
Who clothed us with this wretched flesh: we plead
For you to be the one who strips it away.”
“It would be really horrible to look at,” I said, “if it were in color. But it’s so … white. And their bodies are so beautiful.”
Wendy nodded and we walked slowly around the sculpture, examining it from every angle. Her face, so quick to paper-crease itself with mild anxiety, was utterly serene, and her manner oddly confident.
“You would have made a great teacher,” I said, as we left the museum.
“A good researcher,” she corrected. And then added, with one of her oddly girlish giggles, “I’m very selfish. I never wanted to teach. I just liked knowing things. You would be a good teacher, Kate.”
“Only I don’t actually know anything,” I said, which made her giggle again.
I was selfish too. I never brought Gwen to Wendy’s. Nor, when Gwen questioned me about her, did I reveal how much I enjoyed going there. Disloyally, I made it sound like a drag, something I felt obligated to do. Gwen, sympathetic, would sometimes try to talk me out of going.
“I mean, she volunteered to have you in her house. It was only a year. You don’t have to keep thanking her!”
“She donates to the company,” I would say. “It’s polite.”
“Yeah, I guess. Well, it’s really nice of you.”
This morning I pulled the envelope from Wendy out of the packet and walked to the fridge so I could post it up and remind myself to send a reply. But of course Gwen doesn’t have refrigerator magnets.
I went back in the bedroom to make the bed—tricky, since I’ve stashed so much crap in there with me. And yes, I did break something last night when I was doing Roger’s angel wings. A glass.
Sweeping up the remnants of this, I found a piece of paper under the bed. It was taped to the floor. I pried it up.
3333333333.
My neck hurt. I sat down on the floor, in between the dustbin of glass and the bed.
Gwen and her numbers.
And this one she told me about, didn’t she? I can say, “Oh, it crept up on me,” and “She wasn’t stark raving mad,” and “I was focused on my career too,” but Gwen actually told me about the numbers. So I have no excuse.
We were doing laundry and I was going through her jeans pockets before I threw them in the wash. I thought they were my jeans and I had a bad habit of leaving books of matches in my jeans and then washing them. I pulled out a piece of paper with “55533555” written on it.
“Do you need this?” I asked, holding it out to Gwen. She paused, her arms full of sheets, and leaned over.
“No, that’s old,” she said. “You can throw it away.” Which I did without comment because it wasn’t particularly interesting or striking. Maybe my disinterest irked her, or maybe she genuinely wanted to share something with me, but after a moment she said, “Fives and threes are my favorite numbers. They’re like, similar but they do different things in different ways.”
“Huh?”
“Well, they’re both really comforting, right?”
“What do you mean? You mean like, the numbers themselves are comforting?”
“Yeah. Threes are like anchors. Fives are like rocking chairs.”
“What they look like, you mean? The shape?” I drew a 3 in the air between us.
“Not really that. Threes are more protective, and fives are more soothing.”
“Okay, so in what way is the number five soothing?”
“I can’t explain it.”
“Is this a numerology thing?”
Those were the only kinds of books Gwen would read. Crystals and tarot cards and astrology stuff.
“It’s my own thing. If I feel anxious I might just repeat the number five to myself, or count to five for a while. Or if I feel scared I might say ‘33333.’ It makes me feel better.”
“Huh.”
And that’s all I ever said about it.
And even now I’m tempted to just stick the piece of paper back where I found it. Except that I’d have to sleep over it knowing it’s there, and I’m already not sleeping.
Maybe it’s not really that bad.
How different is this from touching a strip of tape on yo
ur dressing-room door? Or believing that you have a better class when your nails are done? Or maintaining an invisible audience in order to inspire more perfect behavior?
Who is to say that these things aren’t the mark of the extraordinary? Nobody says about a genius, “Well, they were really boring and normal.”
3333333333.
I threw the number in the trash, along with the glass.
Sometimes, when the cleaning and the numbers failed to do their job, Gwen would take pieces of masking tape and make Xs on the wall. This wasn’t something I could reasonably ignore. It was too strange. It was frightening.
“Talk to me,” I would plead. “If you talk to me, I might be able to help you.”
“You wouldn’t understand. You don’t believe.”
“What? What don’t I believe?” I would try to stay calm. I would make the gestures for sympathy, for calm, for understanding. But the body doesn’t lie. Gwen knew I was just pretending to be patient and kind. I didn’t feel those things. I wanted to run. I wanted to run away from her.
“Just leave me alone,” she would say. “Just pretend you don’t see. It’s worse if I feel like you’re watching.”
And so that’s what I did. I pretended I didn’t see.
I was never there when the tape came off the walls. But by their absence I knew that things were okay again. I could unclench my jaw, sleep through the night, stop trying to act like I wasn’t watching her, stop waiting for the thing to come around the corner and stab me in the eye.
When Gwen comes back, things will be different. I won’t let it all happen again. I will take better care of her.
I’m not ready for her to come back.
I don’t want her to come back.
3333333333.
It’s not a code. It’s an accusation.
9.
I dragged myself through company class. I dragged myself through Look At Me rehearsal. I dragged myself through the rain across the street to get some sushi before dragging myself back to the theater for another round of Swan Lake.
At the theater: high drama. Marianna, who was supposed to be dancing Odette/Odile tonight, canceled. Her ankle. Gia, who was supposed to make her debut as Odette/Odile on Sunday, now had to go on. Four other people had called out in addition to people who were already on the injured list. The call-board was full of cross-outs and big red arrows and circled names. I read that Mara was going on for Big Swan/Hungarian Princess. She’s third cast for that and hasn’t performed it this season.