Bunheads (16 page)

Matt calls me the next morning as I’m getting ready to leave for the theater.

“I’m back!” he says. “I was in France. Paris, then Normandy.”

“Don’t you ever work?” I ask, trying to get my coat and scarf on without dropping the phone.

Matt laughs, but it has sort of a hollow ring to it. “For your information, I was scoping out companies for my dad’s investment sideline. So, yes, I work.”

“Well, welcome home. I hope it was fun.” The other line beeps—it’s Zoe, no doubt reminding me to bring her the leotard I borrowed—but I let it go to voice mail. “I missed your lunch deliveries.”

“Have you read Proust?” Matt asks.

I laugh as I slip on my boots. Proust is on my reading list, but I don’t exactly have time for a 650-page novel these days. “No,” I tell him. “I haven’t even had time to buy groceries.”

“Well, don’t consider it a character flaw; very few people have.
Remembrance of Things Past
is a masterpiece, though, and it basically killed Proust to write it. But that’s not my point. My point is that, in
Swann’s Way
, which is the first volume, the narrator falls in love with a woman simply because one night he can’t
find her and doesn’t know where she is. It’s the oldest trick in the book.”

“Oh, really?” I say. I’m not sure where Matt is going with this, so as I fumble for my keys, I wait for him to continue.

“I figured that if I made myself scarce, my charms would only come to seem more charming.” His tone is slightly self-deprecating, but not
that
self-deprecating.

“Interesting strategy,” I say, laughing a little. It hadn’t exactly worked, but I’d heard worse theories about romance. For instance, Jonathan’s belief that he could win over cute, blond Tommy Hatfield by feigning complete indifference to him. (I kept telling him he had to at
least
say hi to Tommy, but he wouldn’t do it, and now Tommy’s dating Jude Forrester, who, if you ask me, dances as though he’s constipated.)

“And did I tell you about dinner?” Matt asks.

I give myself one last glance in the mirror before I step into the hall. I have a bad case of bedhead, but since I’ll be putting my hair in a bun the moment I get to the theater, I suppose it doesn’t matter much. “What about dinner?” I ask.

“I’m taking you,” he says. “Tomorrow night.”

“Really?” I say, taken aback. “Did you want to check with me about that first?”

He laughs. “I know what you need, and that’s a break. I’ll meet you outside the theater at eleven.”

“I don’t think I can—”

“If you try to tell me that you can’t, I’ll simply kidnap you.”

I can hear that dazzling smile of his in his voice. He’s just so certain I’ll say yes.

And I surprise myself when I do. My reasons for accepting aren’t entirely clear to me, and honestly I don’t feel like figuring them out. Sometimes you just want to say yes. As Otto always says, “Don’t think, just do.”

So that’s how I’ve ended up at Per Se, which is one of the most expensive restaurants in Manhattan, decked out in my black vintage Marni dress with my patent-leather wedge Mary Janes. Across the table from me, Matt is pouring wine into my glass and telling me that I would love this couple he’s friends with in France because I am a free spirit like them. He says he can see me racing down the highway in a Jaguar with a scarf trailing behind me, the ocean on one side and the French hills on the other.

While I don’t want to be rude, I’m forced to point out that this is a ridiculous cliché. “I’ve seen that in about six movies,” I tell him, taking a sip of the wine. It tastes like pears and honey, and I decide to drain my glass as quickly as possible. Maybe it’ll make me feel less jittery.

He laughs. “All right, so you’re saying I need to try a little harder to impress you.”

I nod, hoping to project the confidence I don’t entirely feel. “Probably. Although this salad is impressing me.” Which it had better, I think, considering it cost
forty dollars
. According to the menu, it has ramp top “subric,” Oregon morel mushrooms, and “émincée” of green almonds and roquette. I don’t know what most of that means, but it’s delicious.

“I like that you’re one of the dancers who isn’t afraid of food,” Matt says as he spreads a slice of thick-crusted bread with
French butter. The white button-down he’s wearing accentuates his tan, which he probably acquired on some gorgeous Ibiza beach.

I give him a stern look. “Do you take a lot of dancers out to dinner?”

He clears his throat and for a moment looks slightly uncomfortable. “Well, I do go to a lot of holiday parties,” he says. “You know, for the ballet.”

“I’m only kidding you,” I say. “You should take as many dancers out to dinner as possible. We poor girls live on Bugles and tuna fish.”

He laughs. “Oh, but I only want to take
you
,” he says.

He watches me consume my salad as he plays the part of the gracious host: pouring me wine as fast as I can drink it, asking me if I want more bread or another bottle of San Pellegrino. And it feels nice to have someone taking care of me for a little while. Matt makes lighthearted conversation as he slices into his entrée, which is squab or game hen or some other small, helpless bird. I try not to look at its sad little carcass on his sparkling china plate.

“You’d also love this little town down in the south of France,” he says. “It has the most incredible view of…”

In a way, what he’s saying hardly matters, and he knows it. It’s as if he can tell that I’m exhausted from the performance and that I don’t have much juice left for conversation. I’d like to give him points for being perceptive, but if he’s really dated as many dancers as Daisy says he has, then he’d have to know how we feel at the end of a night.

He’s funnier than I thought, though, and he likes books, too. He’s on an Ernest Hemingway kick, he tells me. He read
The Sun Also Rises
last week and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
the week before. On weekends he reads P. G. Wodehouse, whom he swears is a comedic genius. I write this down in my notebook so I can remember the name the next time I’m at a bookstore, which probably won’t be until summer break.

“What’s the last good book you read?” he asks.

I poke at a piece of brightly colored radicchio. “Well, I’ve been working on
Frankenstein
since, like, August. Does
People
magazine count?” I say wryly. (I don’t mention that I just ordered
Moby-Dick
from Amazon.)

“Well, it’s not like you’re some illiterate. You like to scribble in that notebook,” Matt says, eyeing it. “What do you write? I’ll bet there are lots of juicy secrets in there.” He makes a move as if to take it from me, and I snatch it away.

“Over my dead body,” I say. I’d stab him with my butter knife before I’d let him touch it.

He laughs. “But I just want to get to know you better.” His dark eyes flash with amusement.

I shrug. “I’m sure you’ll come up with other ways.”

He’s still chuckling as he shakes his head. “Yeah, I suppose I could. Maybe next week we could check out Marea. I heard it’s awesome.”

As I eat my ridiculously expensive salad, I wonder if it makes sense for me to be with someone like Matt. There’d be no need for awkward explanations about why I have to cancel plans. I’d be able to complain about Jason Pite’s obsession with pelvic
release or Otto’s epic adagio combinations without having to explain the dance terms. And I’d get a lot of nice dinners, lots of very elegant salads, out of it.

But maybe I shouldn’t worry about Matt
or
Jacob. Being alone might be easiest. Annabelle Hayes would certainly say so.

I picture her narrow, pinched face, her small, unforgiving mouth.
Your job is not to live. Your job is to dance.

Two weeks pass in a blur of rehearsals, performances, and extra yoga classes. I push myself all day long, and then at night I lie in bed and visualize myself dancing solos. And I know I’m getting stronger: I used to be nearly dead after the third movement of
Prelude
, and now I can dance the whole thing and barely break a sweat.

But then in early March, when I go to check the new casting sheet, I hardly see my name at all. My breath catches in my throat. I’m not called to learn any of the solos in
Sleeping Beauty
or
The Fawn
, Otto’s new ballet. In fact, my parts are even worse than last year.

But Zoe got a solo in
The Fawn
.

I walk the hallways in a fog of disillusionment, my legs still wobbly from the morning’s rehearsal. “Earth to Hannah,” Jonathan says, waving his hand in front of my face. I notice that he’s
painted his nails a barely perceptible pink. “Hannah, I said do you want to go to the deli with us?” But I duck my head and keep walking.

“Wonder what her problem is,” I hear Luke say.

“God knows,” Adriana leans into Luke and gives him a little kiss with her thin red lips.

I guess that means they’re dating now.

Jonathan giggles as he wraps a cashmere scarf around his neck. “She’s got PMS. We’re on the same cycle, you know.”

And I can’t even smile.

For a while I sit by the laundry machines, listening to the sound of the dryers. A few people come up to get Cokes, but no one says anything to me. No one even seems to look my way.

When I first became a corps member, Otto regularly had me demonstrate during company class, and once he told me that he admired my work ethic. He never
promised
me anything, but I always thought that he saw potential in me. And I’ve tried so hard to impress him—always, but these last months especially. Night after night, after a full day of rehearsal and then performances at night, I’d collapse into bed, exhausted but incredibly happy, because I knew that I had lived that day.

But today the very same routine makes me feel invisible and expendable.

“I wish they’d just put me out of my misery,” I mutter as I walk into the empty dressing room.

Leni pops up from her mat on the floor, blinking as if startled. She’s wearing navy sweatpants and a delicate cream camisole, and her blond hair is mussed and sticking up on one side.
“You shouldn’t say things like that, Hannah,” she says, brushing the tangled strands out of her eyes.

“Where did you come from?” I ask dully.

“I fell asleep doing my spinal series on the floor. They’re so relaxing.” Her cheek has the imprint of her rubber mat on it.

I put my head in my hands.

“What?” she asks.

“Casting,” I say dully.

She sighs. “Right.”

“It all just feels utterly
pointless.
Why do we work so hard to get strong, to improve, if no one cares or notices?”
I even lost weight
, I think,
just as Annabelle wanted!

Leni comes over to put her hand on my shoulder. She rubs the hard, tight muscles there for a while before she speaks. “I know it’s tough, I know. But you have to enjoy the moment. You must embrace the process of dance. How do you think I kept with this for fifteen years?”

The process of dance.
She sounds like my hippie-dippie mother, with her whole “journey of creativity” trip. I push my fists into my eyeballs because I think it might help me not cry. “I thought that I loved all of it—the grueling rehearsals, the intensity, and the long hours and everything. But if I’m still doing the same parts that I did as an apprentice…” I trail off. I can feel my eyes fill with tears despite the knuckles I’ve wedged into them.

“I know how it feels. I did the Garland Dance in
Sleeping Beauty
for five years,” Leni says.

I look up at her. “Are you serious?”

She nods as she digs her thumb into a sore spot near my neck. “And I did Snow and Flowers in
The Nutcracker
for eight.”

“You’re a better person than I am,” I say.

She pats my shoulder and moves back toward her mat. “I don’t know what else I would do if I didn’t dance.”

“I don’t either,” I cry, “but there are other possibilities out there! I mean, this theater is
not
the entire world, contrary to what most people around here seem to think. There are museums and restaurants… and rock shows, or so I hear.”

Leni sits down, stretches her legs out in front of her, and reaches down to cup the balls of her feet in her hands. “The point is to love dancing. And once you stop loving it, it’s time to do something else. It’s just too hard otherwise.”

“I love being onstage. But it’s so painful feeling invisible,” I tell her.

“I see you,
Balletttänzerin
,” she says softly. “You are not invisible.”

But I must be—how else can I explain the way I was overlooked?

“It’s just too much,” Zoe says, twisting her pale gold hair around her fingers. She’s barefoot, wearing pink cutoff tights and a soft blue T-shirt, and she’s sitting in my chair with her feet up against my mirror, talking to Daisy, who looks both awed and jealous. “After the pas de deux, my calves feel like they are going to rip. Then I go straight into the solo with no break. I mean, the solo itself is nearly impossible. It’s like Otto’s testing me or something.”