by Meg Howrey
“Is that one illustrated?” I asked, pointing to her copy.
“Yeah,” said Bryce. “But they’re not very good. I mean, they don’t make any of the people look like how I imagine them.”
“I hate that.”
“Me too.”
“Hey, I’ve got rehearsal now. I should get back.”
“Me too.”
Bryce and I walked together back to the studios. On the way, I tossed my uneaten muffin into the trash. Bryce pulled her paper bag out and threw it in too.
21.
Up way too early for the kind of day I have today, which won’t end until about midnight and involves class, two long rehearsals, the premiere of Look At Me, and then a little champagne reception at which I must make some sort of cocktail-gowned appearance. I’ll have to wear something of Gwen’s. The five minutes of actual sleep I got last night were totally corroded by one of the two recurring dance/anxiety dreams I have. The other one is standard: I’m in my dressing room, naked, no makeup, hair not done, and I can hear the music for the ballet I’m about to dance playing. I’m late, I can’t find the right pointe shoes, everything is taking forever, and I realize that I have no clue as to what the choreography is, I missed rehearsal, etc. The one I had last night is the odder but no less irritating one. I’m doing these amazing multiple pirouettes, seven, eight, nine turns, but my supporting leg is bent at the knee, so they aren’t proper pirouettes. They don’t count. I keep telling myself to PULL UP, PULL UP, STRAIGHTEN YOUR KNEE, but I can’t. I can’t … quite … straighten it. It’s a really horrible dream.
No coffee and so I threw on yesterday’s sweatpants and T-shirt, Gwen’s rain boots, and a bulky coat I found in her closet that probably belongs to Neil. On the way out the door I grabbed my iPod so I could block out all the shit that’s in my head with really loud rock.
Outside of Zabar’s I ran into Andrew.
The whole thing was terribly awkward. For one thing, I was exiting and he was coming in, and there was that homeless guy who likes to pretend that opening the door at Zabar’s is his real job and who shakes his cup at you and shouts, “God bless you, ma’am, and have a beautiful day,” in this highly antagonistic manner when you glare at him and insist on opening the door for yourself. So I was balancing my extra-large coffee and packets of Sweet’N Low and stuffing my wallet in my purse and lurching after the door in a fruitless attempt to preempt Homeless Guy, and Homeless Guy was mid-blessing/rebuke, and there, suddenly, was Andrew, resplendent in a business suit and looking perfectly composed.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Wow. Huh. Hi.” It just could not have been worse. I hadn’t washed my face before coming out. I hadn’t even brushed my teeth. Or combed my hair. Someone behind me said, “Excuse me,” and I stepped back into Zabar’s, knocking the Sweet’N Low off my cup and banging my elbow on the door.
“Careful,” said Andrew mildly. God, I hate it when people say that after you do something clumsy. “Careful.” How fucking smug is that? And what was he doing on this side of town in the morning? He must have had a sleepover with Miss New Thing. I guess I should count myself lucky she wasn’t with him, in some deluxe New York girl getup.
“So …” Andrew smiled. “What are you listening to?”
“What? Oh.” I pulled my iPod earbuds out and looked blindly at the device. “You know. That song. By that band. You know, with the name I can never remember. It’s got like, a number in it? And a verb? And something else? Four Dyspeptic Giraffes? Six Lugubrious Pencils? Ha-ha. Hahahaha.”
One Garrulous Spinster.
“Ah,” said Andrew.
“So what’s up?” I tried to inhale while talking so my morning breath didn’t waft out. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought I might get some coffee,” Andrew said, in this new bland and slightly sarcastic tone. There was not a trace of feeling for me in his face. Even his sarcasm sounded indifferent. He looked incredibly handsome.
“Yeah, good.” I nodded. “There’s coffee to be had. Here. You’ve come to the correct …”
I seemed to have lost the ability to form nouns. I had no name for where we were. Andrew waited, raising his eyebrows slightly.
“Okay, see ya,” I said, trying to move my hideous bulk around him.
“See ya,” Andrew said, as if that was all the conversation he wanted to have with me. As if he had never loved me at all. Homeless Guy threw open the door for me.
“God bless you, ma’am, and have a joyous morning,” he accused.
Back in Gwen’s apartment I headed straight for the bathroom mirror. It was even worse than I had thought. Oily skin. My hair hanging lank from a center part. Gray smudges under my eyes. Chapped lips. Plain. Very plain.
And I had forgotten to get more Sweet’N Low, so I had to drink coffee as bitter as I am.
After some ferocious cleansing, I stomped around the apartment trying to get everything I needed into a bag. I rifled through Gwen’s closet, looking for something to wear tonight. This took time, as all her nicest things are covered with their own individual dress bags, so I had to unzip and peel back the second layer of dry-cleaning plastic to see what was what.
But this activity calmed me down. All of Gwen’s hangers go in the same direction. All the clothes are arranged by color. Everything is hooked or buttoned or zipped and perfectly pressed. It’s hypnotizing. It soothes the nerves. I get it, Gwen.
If I stayed there long enough, would I start to see the point of the masking-tape Xs too? Maybe I would make some of my own. What number did she say was like a rocking chair? Five.
555555555555.
Rehearsal today for the Titania/Bottom sections of Dream. Yesterday I watched Anne-Marie and Tyler go through it, and I marked along in the back by myself because Roger had to be in another rehearsal. But it was good. It gave me an opportunity to really see what Marius was going for.
It’s a moment of hilarity: Oberon and Titania have been fighting and Oberon decides to teach Titania a lesson. So he gets Puck to sprinkle love juice in her eyes and then he makes sure that the first person she sees upon waking is Bottom. Bottom is a local yokel who has wandered into the forest with his yokel posse and whom Oberon has naughtily transformed so that his head is now the head of a donkey. So, how funny.
Except when has it ever really been funny, watching a woman throw herself at an ass?
Love in ballet is as codified as everything else, so there are certain gestures, characteristic movements, that generally travel from one ballet to another. For example, a woman in love will almost always do the thing where her feelings of love overcome her and she has to run a few steps away from her partner and be in love all by herself for a few counts.
Anne-Marie, by the way, is really good at all this. She’s the resident Beauty of our company. Physical beauty doesn’t mean the same thing to us as it does to the rest of the world. Here, someone can have a hook nose, a sty in one eye, and half a head of hair, but if she’s an incredible dancer we will all say, “Oh, she is gorgeous.” But Anne-Marie is beautiful even by normal-person standards. She has a bouncy cascade of strawberry-blond hair and big brown cow eyes and adorable freckles on her chest and arms. No one can look demurely out from under false eyelashes like Anne-Marie, with the possible exception of Sesame Street’s Mr. Snuffleupagus. She doesn’t walk around like that, though. She’s a totally normal person and has kind of a crass sense of humor. She can be chatting away, chomping on some gum, “Oh my gawd, that’s so funny I think I just peed!” and then—poof!—the music starts and she’s more lyrical than lyricism, trembling with romance, goddess divine.
These two sides of Anne-Marie are perfect for Titania and I can see why Marius cast her. I would have too. And Marius made good use of all the classic ballet clichés in the Titania/Bottom pas de deux so it’s almost a little satire of love.
If love weren’t already a satire of itself.
“Is everyone just pretending to be in love?” I asked Roger, before we started rehearsal.
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br /> “I never pretend,” he said, loftily, before donning his giant donkey head.
Claudette came in and we worked for an hour. By the end, I was enjoying myself very much, in a kind of grim, vengeful way. Claudette, who is normally all about steps, steps, steps, actually offered up some artistic advice. She told me, very gently, not to overdo it.
“I think it is more … it should be sincere, no? Otherwise, it might seem like Titania is being …”
“Sarcastic?” I offered.
“Yes,” Claudette said, relieved. “Yes, it is looking, maybe, a little sarcastic.”
“It’s funnier if she really means it,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Or you could say it’s more tragic if she really means it.”
“Well …”
“I’ll work on it,” I assured her.
After “notes and fixes” rehearsal for Leaves I took a nap in my dressing room, which left me groggy and hungry, but by then it was too close to performance time to eat anything real. I went to the corps girls’ dressing room and scrounged for candy. Someone offered me almonds. Someone else had dried prunes. “What’s happened to all of you?” I joked. “This is pathetic. Who has M&M’S?”
I had better luck in the boys’ dressing room.
I took a hot shower to warm up. I coiled my wet hair into a series of mini pancakes all over my head so it would be nice and flat for the Celebrity wig. Josie brought me the wig and skewered about four thousand pins into my scalp to make it secure. She did my makeup too, since I’m meant to look ultra glamorous and fabulous, and while she was shellacking away at my face, I thought through every step of my choreography.
It was a pleasant moment, preparing for a role I was about to dance, feeling excited and a little nervous. If only it could always be like this, I thought. And then, Wait. It is always like this. This is how it is.
A very nervous James stopped by to wish me merde. He also had a gift for me, a small and very beautiful antique silver hand mirror.
“You’ve been such a joy to work with,” he said. “You’re going to be just stunning.”
We joked about the fake boobs, which got cut after yesterday’s dress rehearsal. This would be a big night for him, and I realized that it was potentially a very good night for me too.
James left. I tried to imagine what the evening would be like if Gwen hadn’t gone over the edge and everything got so twisted up. I tried to imagine what it would be like if none of the events of the past few months had happened and I were still living with Andrew and it was all going along like normal.
Strangely, none of these imaginings were appealing. I wished my neck didn’t hurt and I wasn’t a quasi drug addict, but wherever I’m going I don’t really want to go back.
So where, then?
• • •
It’s a funny thing, when everybody leaves the stage but you. Look At Me. Look at me? There’s nothing else for anyone to look at.
I’m alone, but not really. There’s a whole audience in front of me, witnessing my privacy, watching. It’s meant to be terrifying for me—for my character, The Celebrity. Whoever she is.
Whoever she is, she is not a real woman, with a real history. She is not a replica of a real celebrity. She is not an assemblage of character traits: lost, insecure, vulnerable. She is not this red dress, these heels, this blond hair.
This is who she is. She is this movement here, these steps, this turn, this raising of this arm. It’s a waste of time to think of oneself in any other terms. For what of us, what of reality, cannot implode, evaporate, contort, evade, disappear? But the body doesn’t lie. At a certain point it’s impossible to dance loneliness without feeling genuinely lonely.
For another minute it will all be mine. There is no other place in the world, no better way, no more powerful aphrodisiac than being gorgeously, achingly, perfectly lonely in front of two thousand people.
22.
Karine opened the door to Wendy Griston Hedges’s apartment. She was wearing nurse’s pants and a brightly colored blouse. I had only seen her sitting down. Standing up she was imposingly tall. She had to duck slightly to make it under the Venetian glass chandelier in the foyer.
I was expecting to go to the library, but Karine took me through the living room down the hallway to Wendy’s bedroom. I snooped in there once or twice when I was her house-guest. There was a massive jewelry box filled with things I never saw her wear. I tried on a few rings before I got nervous.
Other than the library, I don’t think Wendy was terribly comfortable in her own home either. Every time she turned on a lamp she would have to peer under the shade and inspect the mechanism. Her apartment is decorated with that waxy, shiny reproduction Louis XVI furniture you see in antique stores and wonder, Who buys that crap? Actually, some of it might be real Louis XVI. The only comfortable chairs are in the library, where we always had our tea on an elaborate Minton service.
Wendy’s bedroom door was closed and Karine knocked softly on it. It was not until that moment—until Karine called out, “Meeses Hedges, I’m here with your friend, a’ come to see you now”—that I took in the fact that something was definitely wrong, and that nurse’s pants are usually worn by … nurses.
Wendy was propped up in bed.
When I had snuck into Wendy’s bedroom years ago, it was decorated in the same marbled and filigreed style as the rest of the house. It was all still there, including a large oil painting, ornately framed, hanging across from the bed. But what was once a massive four-poster had been replaced with a single metal-railed hospital bed and there was a plastic upright tray next to it. And there was a … smell.
“Here you find me, lazing about in bed,” said Wendy, faintly, struggling to sit up. “Karine, will you bring the porter’s chair over for Kate?”
I helped Karine drag over this giant ridiculous canopied chair, upholstered in yellow silk. The seat was too low, and Wendy in her hospital bed hovered above me. Karine left to find some cushions.
“I did manage to get my wig on.” Wendy patted her little brown cloche hairstyle. “Karine and I have a joke that she’s going to get me some dreadlocks like she has. She’s from Haiti, did she tell you? It helps me a great deal, knowing that. I complain much less. She lost her whole family.”
“How are you … how, I mean … what …” I couldn’t sit in the chair. I stood up and leaned against the metal bed rails, but Wendy shrank back a little into her pillow.
“I am not contagious,” she said, as if I were the one recoiling from contact. “It’s ovarian cancer. Or it began that way. It’s spread, so now I suppose it is everything cancer. Like everything bagels, you know? Sesame, onion, poppy seed, cinnamon-raisin. I never liked those. Did you like them? You never ate anything when you lived here. I did notice that. You probably think I never noticed anything.”
The sharp, distracted way she said this was so unlike Wendy’s usual shy professorial manner of speaking that it took me a minute to understand what was going on. Wendy tapped out a staccato rhythm with her ring finger against the bed frame.
“You should sit down,” she said.
Obediently, I sat on the edge of the yellow silk chair. Karine came in with an armful of sofa cushions.
“Maybe you should bring a phone book,” Wendy ghost-giggled. “Poor Kate.”
“I start the kettle for tea now,” said Karine, peacefully. “I’ll bring some nice tea for you and your friend.”
“Oh, wonderful. Thank you, dear. I think when it comes we should go out on the terrace. Don’t you think that would be nice?” Wendy asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Um. If you feel up to it?”
“It’s actually very tiring, being in bed. It makes you feel as if you should be rested, and you’re not, so that is fatiguing.”
We watched Karine leave and then turned back to each other, nervously. Wendy tapped her ring against the bed again. I adjusted the slippery pillows underneath me.
“How long have you known?�
� I asked. This came out in the adult woman talking about issues voice, and I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand that I too was buzzing on pharmaceuticals and couldn’t focus, take in the moment properly. Time zigzagged.
“December,” Wendy said. “I didn’t go to my sister’s in January, like I told you. I was here. Being excavated, as it were. I apologize for the subterfuge. But it was already stage four, so you see they do things, but it’s only because they have to do something. It seems almost disproportionate, the things they do, but you’re meant to let them do it all. And one does sort of hope. Well.”
“Wendy.” I tried to find my normal voice. “I am so sorry.”
Wendy looked down at her lap, as if someone had just placed an amusing and slightly inappropriate gift there.
“I don’t have very long,” she said. “I’m sorry to say that to you. I wish there were another way of saying it, without saying it, if you know what I mean. I keep thinking of phrases. Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris. ‘I sing of arms and a man, who first from the shores of Troy …’ But of course that doesn’t relate to my situation.”
“Are you in pain?” I asked. “What can I do for you?”
Wendy brushed away the ribbons of the invisible gift in her lap and looked at me. Yes, I thought, recognizing it. Yes, you are in pain.
“That’s a very ridiculous chair, isn’t it,” said Wendy. “I have to make arrangements for things, where everything should go. But they’ll sell all of this together. You don’t want that chair, do you?”
I looked down at the yellow silk arms of the chair which I did seem to be clutching with some force.
“We’ll talk about that another time,” said Wendy. “There’s a little bit of time. I will see you again.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll come, I’ll come every day if you like.”
“Oh, no, dear. Not every day. You have so much to dance. And you said you were injured too.”