Girl Through Glass (10 page)

The next morning, I know what I have to do. I find Bernadith in her office, in Birkenstocks, her feet planted firmly on the floor, and a new bobbed haircut. She seems relaxed, pleased to see me. She assumes I've come about the Pell, and after she has me sit, she reaffirms that they will not have a decision until after spring break. I decide not to mention Bill and his application.

“What happened to your hand?” she asks.

“Just a cut.” I examine my hand. My homemade bandage is already ratty-looking and stained, which gives me a strange satisfaction. “It's not as bad as it looks,” I say. My voice wants to rise into the squeaky registers. I give her what I hope is a disarming smile.

“Ah,” she says. I can't tell if her expression is bemused or concerned. “You have to take care of yourself. None of us are getting any younger.”

“Yes, I know, Bernadith.” I'm embarrassed to find myself slapping my knees a few times like Bill had done with me, a blunt-edged cudgel for a finesse moment if there ever was one. “Bernadith,” I say. “Unfortunately—there's been an indiscretion.”

She looks at me with what I can only say is—this is clear, even without my contacts—alarm. “Are you talking about yourself?”

I nod. “A student.”

“How many times?”

“Once only.”

She clicks something on her computer. Her face has grown more voluminous and is dangerously close to purple now. Something twitches near her eye. She sits back. “I know how to dig up something if it's there. There was nothing on your record. Not a smudge—”

I examine my hand. “I am disappointed in myself—beyond disappointed.” As I say this, I realize how true it is. My hand throbs. Suddenly tears well up behind my glasses.

“I know this may affect my chances for the Pell—” I add.

“Forget the Pell. This is bigger than that.” Her face has gone from beet-colored to pale. “I like you, Kate. But I don't understand you.” Some timer goes off on her computer. She clicks the mouse a few times and waddles over to her window. Her office is on the ground floor and looks out into an underused courtyard. Concrete benches no one ever sits on, patches of sparse grass, and some spidery indistinct-looking bushes around the edges. Birds flit back and forth from bush to barren bush. On one of these bushes by her window some sort of creeping berries, like pox.

I have to twist around to see her. “I'm sorry,” I say.

My vision is blurring even more. I take off my glasses. “I really, really want this job,” I say, choking on my words.
How could I have fucked up like this?
I dab at my eyes with my bandaged hand.

She turns to me, her back against the window. Her face has resumed its normal color. Somehow I can see it better now, even through my tears. Her mouth softens. It's not a smile, far from it, but something has loosened. Then the ghost of a true smile emerges. I can't tell if its source is kindness, bemusement, or irony. This is by far the most intimate time I have ever spent with her. Previously, she had been like pretty much every boss I've ever had—friendly and remote in equal degrees—concerned most of all with efficiency and bureaucratic issues.

“Kate,” she says. “I know the life of a visiting professor is not easy. I know the life of a woman alone is not easy. I know sometimes it's all just too much—the loneliness, the work, the keeping up. . . .”

“I make no excuses for my behavior.”

“Do you like teaching?” she asks suddenly.

I remember the time, after I followed him through the streets of New York City, when Maurice asked me if I
wanted to be a dancer.
I remember the energy of that moment, the knowing that I was at a crossroads. That what I answered meant something. Meant everything. Then the
yes
had rushed out of me, the force of it surprising myself. I hadn't known the force of my own desire. Now I know I will say yes again, but I tell myself to wait a beat. I think of walking through a circle of students, their faces on me, pulling ideas out of them, their faces opening at the dawning of their own knowledge.
Building castles in the air
. I let the “yes” out slowly, almost reluctantly, as if saying this truth will bring some new curse on me.

Something quizzical and sly comes into her face. She glances over at her office door, which I closed on entering. “You know, there are procedures for these things.” She looks away. “But it's a tenuous situation. As you know, this is not perhaps the best time to be telling me this—officially.”

I understand that in the midst of my truth telling, she is giving me a chance to preserve my secret. She is offering me a way out. “Your evaluations are excellent, your scholarship is the kind that I really want to support. . . .” She rubs her hands and claps suddenly. “Will he report it?”

“She,” I say.

She gives me a long look. “
She
then.”

“She hasn't been back to class.”

“Talk to her. You have the chance to—to—make it right.” Now she looks fierce and satisfied. As if we've concluded a difficult business meeting.

I try out a smile, and she returns it. “I'm hoping to go to New York for spring break,” I say. “I'm thinking of doing an article about Bronislava Nijinska.”

“By all means,” she says, and smiles more brightly. I see that she feels good, condemning me to further attempts at self-mastery.

She has gone back to her computer now, its blue radius pulling her in. “Just make sure you come back.”

I'm up now, about to open the door, when she stops me again. Her hands are on the keyboard. “Why—her? I'm curious.”

I look at the floor, stupidly say the only thing that is in my mind, which she has somehow wiped clean of artifice. “I don't know.” Then I say, “She's beautiful.”

She frowns. “Really? I know everyone has a secret—I wondered about yours—but I didn't think it would be this ordinary.”

I have to say something in my defense. “The Vikings before they jumped off the cliff? The samurais before they commit hara-kiri? What the suicide bombers say before they detonate? Their heads are all filled with visions of beauty.”

“I won't speak as director. I will speak as your friend.” She leans forward and squints at me. “What I see is a woman who is
becoming
. What you are becoming I really don't know.” She shakes her head. “And, truthfully, Kate, I don't know if you can do it here.”

Felicia Facebooks me that afternoon—a message saying she has an
extra room and that as long as I can be, as she knows I am, “discreet,” she is happy to put me up.
Discreet?
Discreet how?
Discreet
like don't leave underwear in the bathroom?
Discreet
like don't bring heroin addicts you meet in Times Square into your room to shoot up?
Discreet
like don't have sex with your students and if you do, certainly don't get caught?

I honestly don't know if I can be discreet anymore, but I don't mention that. I buy a plane ticket for Wednesday, two days from now, which gives me a good five days in New York before I need to be back.

Dance is exploding onto TV and into the movies. Baryshnikov's
Nutcracker,
with the cast of ABT, is broadcast to millions, a prime-time holiday special. In the theaters, the blockbuster movie is
Saturday Night Fever
, which celebrates the disco craze. Along with Mira, all of America has fallen under the spell of dance.

In New York City, that winter, the holidays come. Uptown, at Lincoln Center, there is New York City Ballet's
The Nutcracker
, where out-of-towners and New Yorkers alike, in a rare moment of solidarity, watch the tree grow while their daughters stare wide-eyed as Marie and Fritz enter the land of the synthetic snowflakes. Downtown, in Greenwich Village, at Judson Memorial and St. Marks, purposefully pagan performances feature dancers in cutoff sweats standing on chairs and rolling around on the floor to the sounds of an out-of-tune guitar. Even farther downtown, in the lofts of SoHo and Tribeca, glazed-eyed people gather to dance in altogether different ways into the early morning hours.

It is in the windy stretch of Seventh Avenue in the twenties in a lower midtown uncolonized by dance that The Little Kirov rents the musty basement theater of the Fashion Institute of Technology for their annual performance of
The Wounded Prince.

Mira waits backstage for her entrance. It's the opening of Act One.
The Prokofiev score dips and rises cheerily. The prince's hunting party is passing though the clearing. Between Mira and the world onstage, the motes of dust swirl like bugs on a warm spring night.
When Christopher finishes his solo, he will glide offstage with his attendant (Enrique, joyous, hair wild despite the Polish dressing ladies' best efforts, a gold-painted cardboard horn clutched in his right hand, eyes shining as if
he
were the prince). Then, it will be
her
turn,
her
cue. She must listen for the hill the music climbs, then the beginning of the fall into the valley, the long loose valley where there is sunlight and playful animals, and the flute calls back and forth from one end of the valley to the other. Her torso is itchy from the body suit she is wearing—a stiff pink thing made of mesh and a strong elastic material—under the Flower Princess's yellow calf-length dress.

Christopher plays hide-and-seek with Enrique. He wears a sleeveless hunting shirt, brown britches, and moccasins. He carries a bow and arrow. He does a series of small leaps and draws his right hand back to pluck an invisible bowstring. His face is pasty white, white-white, as white as the palest rock beneath the river water, staring up at you. But the rock has a layer of garish paint on top of it.

She remembers earlier, seeing his face and hers in the mirror, side by side. The music rises, hovers, and then begins to fall. No, not this valley, she remembers, the next one.

She and Christopher sat in front of the long greasy mirror with the plastic Christmas-size bulbs trumpeting all around it, announcing their ghost faces being made into painted marionettes. Pink for lips and cheeks. Eyelids green as the brightest Crayola.

She feels a prick of heat at her knees. Her head is tight with the bind of hairspray holding her hair back into the many braids that it took the dressing lady—the black-haired one with the mole on her chin and the cigarette-smelling hands—so long to do that her scalp began to burn and she began to feel dizzy. The lady pulled and tugged and clutched at Mira. The bobby pins the lady gripped in her teeth moved up and down like insect antennae trying to communicate something dire.

The larger woman with the stomach making a ledge for her breasts worked on Christopher. She said, “It looks like much much,
but it's not much much. Onstage, you must be seen. Onstage, lights take away, so you must put back.”

Christopher looked down at a textbook he cradled in his lap while the blond one adjusted his costume. The other one's hands worked on Mira's shoulders, smoothing and gathering material under her arms where an opaque sleeve hangs too loosely.

“You know this, Christopher? Of course, he knows. You are big star, dancing at Metropolitan Opera House.”

She stepped back and touched up something on his cheeks.

The black-haired one said of Mira, “This one is so small. Last year's was big, then bigger.” She clucked as she braided Mira's hair. The blond one laughed.

Mira stared at her pale painted face and at Christopher's in the blaring mirror. The prince of her nine-year-old self who could cause her to feel woozy. And now her own bright eleven-year-old self in a diaphanous yellow dress and a body suit made of flesh-like armor. Here are their faces side by side in the mirror.

His green tunic was being sprayed with fresh brown splotches of spray paint. He looked up from his textbook and caught her eyes in the mirror. His eyes were outlined in black and were bright and watchful. His long, narrow face was stately and remote and confident. He was important. He was the Prince. His fingers drummed softly against his green thigh. A hard, artificial smell floated out from her hair. She smiled and her hair crackled.

Now Christopher, in his green and brown tunic, has exited stage
right. Enrique, whose darker skin seems to hold the stage lights better, raises the horn to his lips and arches his back in a series of fake blasts.
This
is her cue. The music hovers again, then begins to fall. She adjusts the wooden basket she carries on her arm, lifts herself up on her toes, raises her arms, and runs forward. This is all she can think:
run forward, keep running, stop center stage, at the little blue
X
marked on the floor
.
Ronde de jambe.
She picks the mushrooms. Glissade, bend and arch, glissade, bend and arch. She puts
them in the basket that she carries on her arm. She is the flower girl. But she is also another girl. She is the girl watching the flower girl and she is judging this girl. Is she carefree enough? Is she smiling enough? Are her battements fast enough? Is her jeté high enough? She is behind the music, then in front of it. But then she is just the one girl, the carefree girl dancing, with movements so natural to her it's as if they are her own. Beyond the lights like too many suns in the sky, she can see only darkness. She relaxes and moves easily in the music as if a fish in water.

“Wonderful,” the voices say as she runs into the wings. Then back onstage for the second dance with the Lavender Girls. Val, Haijuan, and two other girls doing a pas de quatre
.
“Lovely,” says Mr. Feltzer, standing in the corner, his eyes bulging and liquid. And she knows it was lovely. Like a fisherman with a rod in the water, she feels the audience tugging on that line—and she reels it in, just a little tighter—and the line between her and the audience is taut. When she pulls, they tug; when they tug, she pulls. She imagines Maurice out there. When she rises up and can almost touch one of the suns, a girl flying high in the air, smiling, and she feels like she can touch Pavlova's shoes. She and the Prince finally gaze at each other from across the stage, and they begin running toward each other, when the Sorcerer in red, played by Hannah this year (it was the only costume she could fit into, Mira had overheard the ladies saying), moves from upstage down between them, doing her flashy cancan kicks and tossing her head back, like she does when she barrels down the hall with her loose limbs and her big bouncing chest clamped down with an ace bandage, as the music booms and grinds cacophonously. Then, sure enough, the Prince's horse (Enrique again, now sporting a canvas and papier-mâché horse's head) rears up and tumbles to the ground with Christopher's legs beneath him, and Mira too collapses (her head hits the floor dustily) under the Sorcerer's spell. Hannah in her red jumpsuit does a deep grand plié and shakes with a vengeful anger, and the curtains jerk closed.

Intermission. Fifteen minutes. Costume changes. Makeup touch-ups.
Everyone darting this way and that. Some sitting and playing cards. On her way to the changing room, she passes a group outside the stage door. Val and Haijuan are there, squatting in their Lavender Girl tutus, their faces smeared with the assembly line makeup: a crude dab of eye shadow across their lids and a smear of blush along their cheeks. The jester is sitting with them. He is a squat, muscular man in his early twenties in white face paint (black diamonds around his eyes), a shiny white unitard, black leg warmers, and a black beret. Val whispers something to the jester and he turns to look at Mira with his cool eyes. He rises from where he sits in the midst of the group and says, “Flower girl, little flower girl, I have some medicine for you.” Wearing a tiny smile on his face, he holds out his flask.

“I have to change,” she says and slips into the bunker-like makeup room to complete her costume change. Actually, she knows, and they know that she knows, that she could have stopped for a minute and laughed and drunk the sweet-smelling stuff the jester carries with him in his painted flask. (She'd tried it once and it set her throat on fire.)

Having completed her costume change, she pushes back into the wings to take her place for Act Two. In the little cubbyhole between the lighting booth and the backstage wall, underneath the scaffolding and wires, through a cloud of stage-lit dust, she sees the man in the white unitard pressing the flask to Christopher's mouth like he is feeding a baby. Christopher is in his gray tights and blue velvet tunic, opened to show a white T-shirt. As she watches (they do not notice her), Christopher drinks from the jester's hand the way the sparrows in the park eat from the fingers of decrepit old men. The man watches Christopher drink, his eyes glassy. Suddenly, he pulls the flask away and kisses Christopher hard on the mouth. Christopher does not fight him, does not sway, does not kick; in fact his whole body seems to relax.

Meanwhile, the curtains have opened, the music has started up, and the audience is swimming like hungry fish just beyond the suns that burn high in the sky and applauding, for Act Two is beginning and Mr. Feltzer is whispering, “Christopher, where are you? It is time. It is time.” Christopher's eyes are opened already, but they look like they have just opened. Mira stands, still staring at Christopher and the jester with the wet smirking lips. Her face, under its painted-white mask, feels red hot.

“You—” she says. The pink girls, the littlest girls, are coming into the wings now, and the thrumming of their feet and their quick, startled breathing is all around them. In the midst of this commotion, neither she, nor Christopher, nor the jester moves. They are locked in a complex web of stares, the reverberations of which maintain the architecture of the moment even as it has passed and she has begun to disbelieve what she just saw.

“You said—I—I could
trust
you,” she says in a hushed, spasmodic whisper (she is still trying to observe, perhaps unconsciously, the rule of silence when backstage).

Christopher laughs as he buttons up his tunic. “I said
should
, not
could
.” The jester laughs, too. Mira notices he has a red striped candy cane painted on the front of his unitard. How did she not notice this before? Had he hidden it somehow? If so, how?

“You're drunk,” she says. This word has the effect she wants.

Christopher straightens up and looks at her. “I'm fine. I can do this part in my sleep.”

“Christopher, you are late,” says Mr. Feltzer, who has appeared next to her. Christopher pushes past Mira and past Mr. Feltzer, and launches himself onto the stage, dragging one of his feet and hunching his back, for the prince is lame in the second act.

As if she is dislodging something from her throat, Mira says, “He was kissing.” She points at the jester. “Kissing.”

Then the jester comes toward her. She takes a step back. The veins are pulsing underneath his white face makeup. The black diamonds around his eyes quiver. Now there is the gathering of the music into
a rattle-like force that means it is the jester's turn. He bellows, “Do not,” he says, spitting the words in her face. “Puts your nose away from where it belongs.” The jester takes his beret and throws it on the ground. Then he screams in his other language, in which she hears the name of her country—“America.” He pushes through the crowd that has gathered around him, past Mira and Mr. Feltzer, and he leaps out into the false sunshine, where the Prince is waiting for him.

But Mira cannot let it go. She cannot let it pass. She feels this with certainty. It is a feeling, a
knowledge,
that trumps all other feelings. She has an obligation, somehow—to herself, to the Prince, to Christopher—to remember this moment. But she has no time to figure it all out as she too propels herself forward for her entrance.

She closes her eyes and leaps. The stretch in her legs, the rising feeling
under the breastbone, the white space of flame in her head. She imagines Maurice saying, “Ah, yes, this is a leap. She leaps with her whole body.”

“I
hate
her,” she hears someone whisper in the wings.

Under her sternum, the fist of her heart releases, opening up its palm.

The force of her blind leap almost knocks Christopher over. She smells his sour, ragged breath. His arms buckle. He lunges to try to gain his balance. She lists to the right. She feels a cool breeze from the empty orchestra pit below. She realizes that she will fall;
she is falling
. She hears a grunt as he pulls her over to the left and with another heave she is above him, his hands on her hip bones, her back arched, her leg suspended. He has righted himself. At that moment, she realizes her dream of becoming the Flower Princess—there is an unbearable fullness in this, and then, as soon as she is aware of it, it is gone, this fullness, and in its spot, a strange new empty spot, a death at the center, a nothingness, of a star imploding. In its absence is a falling away of the girl who cares too much, who wants too much, who hopes too much, the girl who thrums with too much life,
who needs too much. The spotlights blare down on her and she smiles,
falling falling
into the velvety darkness—victorious.