by Meg Howrey
I had my first rehearsal with Klaus for Dream today, so I decided to take company class and get a proper look at my new partner. He is ridiculously good-looking, but a bit short. I am going to end up towering over him when I’m on pointe. I suppose Marius thought of this, no doubt with hilarious intent. Klaus is almost barrel-chested, which is unusual in a ballet guy. Klaus and I are going to look like Popeye and Olive Oyl.
Yumi came up to me during class.
“Rawlence is so mad,” she said. “He say it bullshit Klaus be your partner now. Rawlence is more senior dancer than Klaus.”
“Oh, well, Marius probably just wants to keep you and Lawrence together as a couple,” I said, because one of the ways I decided to be this week was diplomatic. “You guys work well together, right?” I asked.
Yumi nodded vigorously, but what she said was, “Oh no, he is crazy maybe.”
Roger told me after class that Marianne told Hilel that she didn’t consider Titania important enough to risk hurting her ankle on, and that’s why she pulled out. Mara told me that Maya, who was Klaus’s Plague Cast partner, was crying in the dressing room. She and Klaus are dating, or fucking, or are Facebook friends with benefits, or something. Seems Maya saw me talking to Marius in the hallway, and thinks that I asked for Klaus to be my partner because I want him for myself.
“It’s just drama,” said Mara. “Don’t worry.”
Little flares like this happen, from time to time. We’re not a bunch of cutthroats (who has the energy?), but it’s understandable that bad feelings—resentment, jealousy, frustration—occasionally arise. There are only a certain amount of performances, and our days are numbered.
I did notice some tension, to say the least, in the studio for rehearsal today. I was feeling a little cautious because of my neck, and suggested that we start with working out the more straightforward Act II pas de deux. The Act I sections, where Demetrius first spurns Helena and then, under the influence of fairy juice, falls grotesquely in love with her, seemed a little complicated for a first date.
“Yeah, cool, whatever you need,” said Klaus.
Klaus’s solution to our height difference involved muscling me around. I wouldn’t have minded that but he kept rushing ahead of the music, so it was all very fumbly. Yumi and Lawrence took to repeating perfectly whatever thing Klaus and I were bumbling through. At first they did this right behind us. Then they moved up next to us, forcing Klaus and me to move over. When a lift went poorly, Klaus summoned Maya, forlornly stretching in the back corner, to demonstrate how they do it.
“See?” said Klaus, looking at me while he flipped all forty pounds of Maya over his head. Maya simpered at me from atop Klaus’s shoulder.
“Yes, I see,” I replied. “That’s very nice.”
Lawrence bounded forward and started telling Klaus how to change his grip.
“Do,” said Lawrence to me, yanking me up on his shoulder.
“See?” he said to Klaus, plopping me down flat-footed.
I looked over at Yumi, who looked at Lawrence’s back and rolled her eyes. Lawrence patted me on the shoulder and looked at Klaus’s back and rolled his eyes. I looked around for someone to roll my eyes at, and found no one but a harassed version of myself, red-faced and sweaty in the mirror, in Gwen’s green leotard. It didn’t seem worth it to roll my eyes at myself.
All of this could have been defused, or controlled, anyway, if Nina had run the rehearsal properly. But she was saying very little. Nina has never liked me, possibly because I’ve never bothered much to conceal my loathing for her. She piped up eventually in classic form.
“You’ll have to make adjustments, Klaus,” she trilled, “when working with a taller girl. You won’t always have a little wisp like Maya.” Nina turned to me. “And you’ll have to adjust too. I know you’re used to Justin doing everything. You’re going to have to pull your weight a little more.”
And with that masterstroke Klaus was no longer the lucky kid from the corps who gets to dance with the first cast soloist. He became the poor wunderkind who has to haul the spoiled fatty around. Klaus looked at me from under a blond wing of his hair.
So I spent the rest of the rehearsal partnering my own resentment, barely opening my mouth to say yes or no. Klaus became overly deferential, treating me as if I were some sort of dowager royalty. Lawrence and Yumi moved from working beside us to working slightly in front of us. Nina turned her attention to them, which made Klaus summon little Maya again, in order to show Nina how good he could be. Maya started giving Klaus these very sympathetic looks.
I was working up the nerve to storm out of the rehearsal studio when Nina said, “We’ll pick up here on Thursday,” and Klaus dropped my hand without a word and went over to his bag. I watched him throw a towel over his head and slump against the mirror, pull a tennis ball out of his bag and lie down on top of it, rolling it under his shoulder blade.
Of course, I would never have stormed out of the rehearsal room. Other people do that kind of thing and get away with it.
Gwen actually threw a chair at the mirror once.
After rehearsal, Nina called me over to the piano.
“So Marius told me that we’re going to start rehearsing you for Titania,” she said. “And I’m a little concerned that it’s going to be too much for you.”
You can always tell when people don’t like you because their voices will sound like they’re acting when they talk to you. That’s how you know that they spend a certain amount of time rehearsing in private the biting and cutting things they wish they could say to you in person.
“I’m not worried,” I said to her. “But I think Klaus and I should work on our own for a few days. Just the two of us. It’s hard when the room is like … crowded.”
“Well, you can sort that out yourself,” said Nina, walking away before I had a chance to say, “Great,” or “I’ll do that,” or “Eat me.”
I spent the dinner break with Mara, and she was congratulating me about Titania and I felt weird about that and I still don’t actually believe it’s going to happen, so I told her about rehearsal and how stressed out I am, even though one of the ways I was going to be this week was completely cool and positive and calm. Mara was very sympathetic and it was only when we were paying the bill did I realize that, of course, Mara would love a chance to do Helena with anybody, instead of dancing one of Titania’s attendant fairies—one of my attendant fairies, actually. There was no way to rectify my tactlessness without making it worse, so I had to just leave it alone.
Back at the theater, the next day’s rehearsal schedule was posted, and there my name was with David’s for Titania/Oberon rehearsal. Roger was waiting in my dressing room.
“DIVA!” he said. “Do you know what this means? It means I’m going to be your Bottom. We are going to tear it up.”
“What’s the word on the street?” I asked, indicating the hallway outside. “Are people like, ‘Has Marius lost his mind?’ ”
“Since when do you care what other people think?” he sniffed. “People are like, ‘That’s so great.’ What are they going to say? You scare the shit out of everybody.”
“I do? What? No, I don’t.”
“Whatever.” Roger kissed me on the cheek. “Just try not to fuck it up. See you later.”
I stopped by Mara’s dressing room before the performance. She shares it with five other girls, so I pulled her into the hallway.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry I went off about Klaus and Dream and all that stuff earlier. I don’t know why I was complaining. You should just smack me when I start talking like that.”
“What are you talking about?” Mara asked.
I was apologizing for apologizing when the half-hour call was announced. Sometimes it’s just better to suck up the fact that you are an asshole and decide that tomorrow is the day you will start being the person you intend to be.
I was dancing the pas de trois tonight with Roger and Yumi. Roger was waiting for me in the wings with a leg w
armer stuffed in his dance belt.
“Hey, if that’s what you’re packing,” I said, “I’ll be your Bottom.”
Roger pulled the leg warmer out and Yumi joined us. She gave me a sweet little hug.
“Conglaturations,” she said. “You be awesome Titania. This good time for you.”
“Ask my dance belt
What it understands
About time”
Roger said as the Prelude finished and we got ready for our entrance.
“You haiku suck,” said Yumi, plastering a bright smile on her face.
My neck is still bad. I felt very restless onstage, although I was glad that ballet is a silent art and I was temporarily safe from yet another unsatisfying conversation. I danced okay, but I had that nervous energy that comes over you when you are in a small shop filled with breakable objects and it’s too quiet and some little chime is tinkling and you think you might suddenly go “Yaaaargggh!” and smash things.
As I was leaving the theater, I saw Klaus having a smoke outside.
“In the name of all that is holy,” I said, “give me a cigarette.”
He laughed and gave me the cigarette he was smoking. Lit a new one for himself.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t think we got off to the right start today.”
“What do you mean?” He leaned against the wall, all black leather jacket and cowboy boots, holding his cigarette with his thumb and first finger like he’s in a gangster movie.
“You seemed a little pissed off at the end there.”
“Nah, it’s cool,” he said. “You shouldn’t take things so personally.”
The only thing worse than taking things personally is being told you take things personally. And how am I supposed to take things, if you please? Why bother talking to anyone at all if you are not supposed to consider anything that is said to be at all personal? What would Gwen do in this situation? She might cry. She’s sort of a crier. It’s very effective. If people think you are sensitive, they are very careful. If you scare the shit out of people, then they are automatically defensive.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I am just going through … kind of a tough time right now. It’s not you. It’s me.” I took a feminine puff and waited.
“Hey,” Klaus said, reaching out and rubbing my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m here for you, you know? Whatever you need.”
Jesus god, is it really that easy?
I gave Klaus one of Gwen’s fragile smiles, and by gum he actually hugged me and said that he was glad we were going to get some separate rehearsal time and he was really psyched to dance with me, I was so fantastic, blah, blah, blah.
I decided to walk the twenty blocks home instead of taking the subway. It’s a nice walk, especially if I detour a bit and take Central Park West, and I had my iPod for company. In truth, I was not quite ready to be home, to be alone. I wish it were safe to go in the park at night. When you go through it in a cab the trees look so secretive and sexy.
As I pulled my iPod out of my bag, the earphones got caught around a tangle of warm-up clothes, and in the struggle to get them free everything went flying out to the concrete. Lurching after stuff, my neck sent an atrocious dart of pain down my shoulder. I stood absolutely still and realized how little I can afford to cry. I still had to come here and be alone. I must not take things too personally. I wasn’t in the room when Gwen threw the chair, but of course I heard about it instantly. People were laughing about it. Gwen was laughing about it.
She said it wasn’t like she had actually lifted a chair over her head and hurled it. And she hadn’t hit anyone, or broken anything.
“Yeah, but Gwenny, honey,” I said. “You can’t do stuff like that.”
But she told me that was where I was wrong. She could do stuff like that.
I saw that she had gone to the place inside her head where the rules were entirely her own. The place that separates people like Gwen from people like the rest of us. Furniture might get broken in these places, but who cares about that?
I will never be so talented that I have the right to break more than a toothpick. I’m not allowed to throw a chair, or a fit, or even the towel in.
“You can’t do stuff like that,” I said again, miserably, failing her.
She stood there slowly beating her thigh with her fist and glittering her eyes at me. Glitter, glitter, thump. Glitter, glitter, thump. Harder and harder. A diamond-encrusted wrecking crane. It wasn’t the first time I had seen her hit herself. I watched her fist descend over and over again, smacking against the side of her leg, sending the muscles rippling across her thigh. There would be a bruise later. There would be more to come.
“Please stop doing that,” I said.
Make me, her eyes glittered. In defiance? In appeal?
Make me.
Make me.
make.
me.
12.
Big relief that Claudette was running rehearsal today, and not Nina and her deedles. Claudette, like many French dancers I have known, has a deeply philosophical approach to ballet. To her there is no greater art, and no greater artists. It’s an approach born in a country where ballet companies are subsidized by the government, where the performing arts are considered important, and where the public is educated about them. France does not want more Josh, merci beaucoup. It’s a thing to envy.
Today, as always, Claudette was neat as a pin in her trim little blouse and kitten heels.
David is the David that I once did homework for when we were at the school. He’s now the only American male principal dancer in the company. All the others are these wunderkinds from South America or Russia. What David lacks in virtuosity, he makes up for in elegance, height, and perfect partnering. He’s still the guy all the girls want to dance with. He married a girl in the corps, Catherine, about five years ago, and she immediately quit and got pregnant. They just had their second kid. David is the guy who hangs out with the stagehands and talks about playing Halo. He and Catherine have a house in New Jersey. I think he might even know how to use a grill.
I gave extra thought to costuming today and arrived in pink and black, less severe than my usual gear, and with my hair piled up in twists. Perfume, of course, and earrings. Rings on four of my fingers. A perfectly timed Vicodin flowing through my bloodstream.
David was on the floor, stretching out his Achilles with a towel. I went and sat down next to him, looped my arm through his.
“David,” I said.
“Kate,” he said.
“We are going to dance together.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Tell me how you feel about this,” I asked. “Honestly. And when I say honestly, I mean let’s get our cards on the table right now and work from there.”
“Honestly,” David said, after a moment, “I haven’t really thought about it. I think it will be good. I’m more worried about how I’m going to look next to Manny.”
Manuel Ortega is dancing Puck. He trained as a gymnast in Cuba, but then the Commies shifted him over to ballet. I’ve seen him do fourteen pirouettes. On a bad day. As Puck he will be wearing pretty much nothing but a dance belt and his skin is a shade of copper that only exists in $800 cookware. You could probably sauté something on him. Still, I was surprised that David admitted to feeling insecure about him, because at a certain point nobody does that. It’s too risky.
“Yeah, but he’s Puck,” I said. “He’s your henchman. You’re King of the Fairies, big guy.”
“Exactly,” David said. “I’ll be standing there in green eye shadow with my dick in my hands while the audience goes ape shit every time Manny’s onstage.”
“If we could get back to the subject of me for a moment …”
“Sorry, hon.” David laughed. “I haven’t slept more than a few hours in six weeks. I’m not even sure I’m a man anymore. I’m just a large person that moves toys and tries to prevent infant death and wipes up spit and poop and sticky things. And even though that’s all I do, Cat
hy is still doing more, so I can’t complain. Everything in my house is sticky. If you don’t throw up on me or cry or run face first into a wall, we’re basically cool.”
“I can wipe my own ass,” I said.
David kissed me on the cheek.
“Also, I’m horny as hell,” he said. “If I get wood, don’t take it personally.”
“Okay, mes enfants,” Claudette said, placing a binder on the piano and flipping it open. “Let’s begin. Kate, we’ll teach you the Act II pas de deux and then if we have time, I’ll go over the beginning with you.”
Marius choreographed Dream months ago, so I saw Gwen dance it with David in rehearsal a couple of times. Things were very tense between us then, and it was difficult to watch her. I was so anxious about her state of mind that I didn’t watch her dancing the way I usually do. Anne-Marie is dancing Titania too, but I can already visualize her performance because she does everything the same way. She will be lyrical, she will be pretty, she will make the face she makes when she’s not making that other face. Butter will do as it has always done with Anne-Marie, and refuse to melt in her mouth. Or a soy-based butter-like substitute, anyway. I’ve always thought she was dull to watch, but she has a big following.
Gwen’s in a class by herself, so I can’t make direct comparisons between us as dancers. It’s not … unreasonable that we are sisters, to look at us. I’m a little taller. Less than an inch, but it seems like more, probably because my shoulders are wider. From the waist down we are nearly identical, although we’ve different scars now.
Nothing is ever too hard for Gwen, too fast, too slow, or too tiring. Her technique is complete, like a mathematical theory for everything. When Gwen makes mistakes, they seem to come from some external source: seismic tremors, cosmic vibrations, the wobble in the axis of the earth. Her worst day is nearly as good as her best.