Bunheads (18 page)

Zoe still looks haughty and slightly on edge, and she shakes her head as I tug on her hand. I pause for a second, and then grab a bottle of bright pink paint and squirt out streams over the dancers. They rub it all over one another with their open palms, and the paint oozes through their fingers and drips down their arms.

As I watch them writhe and leap, it occurs to me that I have the entire East River between myself and the Manhattan Ballet. The feeling is thrilling.

For a moment I think of all my classmates back in Weston, Massachusetts, kids who spent the last four years going to parties and hooking up and laughing while I was sweating and rehearsing and dedicating myself, body and soul, to dance. I don’t suppose I can really make up for lost time tonight, but I can at least join in the fun.

I kick off my ankle boots and squeeze my way into the center of the mob. The closer I get to the center, the more paint I accumulate: orange, green, blue, violet. My James jeans will never be the same, and thank goodness I’m only wearing a wifebeater for a shirt. I have streaks on my arms, splotches on my
stomach—I look like a rainbow on drugs. I beckon to Zoe, who shakes her head as she nurses her vodka against the wall.
No way
, she mouths.

“Oh, relax,” I yell. “It’s your birthday!” Then I run over and take her by the hand and pull her toward the mob of painted dancers. I grin slyly. “It’s not like you can’t afford another dress like that!”

“Oh, fine, you win!” she yells, smiling back. She grabs a bottle of yellow paint and squirts it onto my chest. I respond by pouring a cup of hot pink onto her. And we dance wildly, crazily, covered in paint. There’s nothing graceful about the way we move at all. People step on my feet and crash into me; a girl stumbles and falls into a puddle of green. I’m not counting the beats or worrying about what steps come next—I’m just flinging myself into the dance. My heart pounds, and my rib cage rattles from the bass.

From out of the crowd, a striking, dark-skinned guy with dreads almost down to his waist materializes. Wearing only boxers and a paint-splattered gray T-shirt, he bounces over to Zoe. He touches her arm, and she whirls around.

“Oh, hi! Where did you come from?” she yells, looking longingly at his muscular chest. He responds by pulling her to him.

“Um, excuse me?” I tap him on his enormous shoulder. I don’t want to shout at him, but there’s no other way to be heard. “Hi, uh, do you know Jacob Cohen?”

Dreadlocks Guy nods. “Yeah, you missed him,” he says, voice booming. “He ducked out, like, twenty minutes ago.” Then
he turns back to Zoe, who has an expression on her face like she’s just opened a truly fantastic present.

“Happy birthday to me!” she screams, grinning wildly. “Happy fucking birthday to
me
!” Then she lifts up her arms and yells, “Bombs away,” and the paint comes pouring down on us, coloring us, making us indistinguishable from everyone else.

“That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” hollers Dreadlocks Guy.

“
Vive les
pedestrians!” Zoe shrieks.

The following morning I awake with the worst headache of my life. I consider skipping company class to spend another hour sleeping, but I know I shouldn’t, so I drag myself out of bed. I put on dark sunglasses and have the deli guy fix me a coffee the size of my head just to get myself to the theater. My ears are still ringing and I feel dizzy, not to mention a little nauseated. During barre I think I’m going to be sick, so I run into the hallway to get a sip of water. On my way back into the studio, I see Mr. Edmunds gazing straight at me. It’s the first time he’s noticed me in weeks.

“You will show now,” he says, making a flicking gesture with his fingers. “You.”

My heart sinks. He knows perfectly well that I don’t know the combination, because I’ve just stepped in from the hallway. He raises an eyebrow and coolly motions to the pianist. The music begins, a simple Chopin étude. I just stand there with my eyes cast down, trying to make myself as small as possible. I can
feel every single person in the room staring at me. After a moment the music fades out awkwardly.

“What’s wrong?” Mr. Edmunds demands.

“I don’t know the combination,” I whisper.

Behind me a person coughs, and someone giggles. I wish I could turn into a puff of smoke and disappear.

“
I
know it.”

The voice is, of course, completely familiar. I turn to see Zoe stepping up, a deferential smile on her face.

“Excellent,” Mr. Edmunds says, and turns his attention to her.

I go back to my place, humiliated.

And angry. I wish Zoe was able to keep herself, just once, from being a total suck-up. And how she seems to feel so good after all that vodka, I don’t know. I only know that my first impulse of the morning was the right one: I should have stayed in bed.

Because the day goes on, and it gets even worse.

That afternoon in the final run-through for
Stormy Melody
, Otto claps his hands and brings the rehearsal to a halt. The music stops, and everyone steps out of position as he marches over to me.

“What is this?” he demands. He flings his arms around as he marks the brisé volé.

I can feel everyone looking at me, and my cheeks burn. I show him the step again; it’s one of the most difficult petit allégro steps.

He does not look pleased. “What is the matter with you? Cross them!”

I jump again, crossing my ankles in the air as much as I can.

“Again!” Otto says.

I do what he says, but he only frowns.

“Again.”

This time my legs are becoming fatigued, and I stumble.

“Again!” he shouts.

By now he isn’t even looking at me anymore; he has turned his back and is walking away. I can’t get enough air, and I feel the tears coming, although I will them not to.

“Again.”

A dozen other corps members are watching me struggle. I can feel their eyes on me. Otto finally turns around as I gasp for air.

“From the top!”

This is a command to all of us. The other dancers groan in unison and return to their original formation. We’d been three-quarters of the way through the run, and now, thanks to me, we have to do it all again.

“Jesus Christ,” I hear someone say.

My chest is heaving, and my calves feel like they’re about to rip. But my body is not nearly as depleted as my ego. In the privacy of the wing, I bite my lip to keep the tears at bay. One escapes, though, and I dab at it with my sleeve before anyone can see it.

“Otto wasn’t even looking at me,” I moan to Bea. “He kept saying ‘again,’ but his back was turned.”

“He’s a sadist,” she says, tilting her black beret just so. “There’s just no getting around it.”

I nod. “It’s like he feels the need to break people so they’re more obedient.”

Bea laughs. “Totally. He can’t have free spirits running rampant around the theater. Too hard to control. You know that last year he told Mai she was fat?
Mai!
That girl is a stick!”

“That’s sick,” I say. But then I shake my head. “I didn’t mean to bring this up. Let’s pretend we’re regular people. What do regular people talk about?”

Bea glances around the NYU auditorium I’ve brought her to, which is slowly filling up with college students. “I don’t know—movies? Homework? All the dates they went on?”

“Yeah, maybe they just talk about how fun their lives are.” I smile. “But we’re having fun, right?”

In an attempt to redeem myself from the debauchery of the paint party—and to further investigate the mysterious life of a pedestrian, as well as to engage in yet another thing Otto wouldn’t approve of—I persuaded Bea to come with me to a poetry reading on our night off. I even put on a dress for it: a navy short-sleeve mini that I paired with tights and my second-favorite pair of ankle boots. (My favorite ones now look like a Jackson Pollock painting, even though I kicked them off before joining the paint-splattered dance mob.)

Okay, I also wanted to see what Jacob’s college life might be like. And maybe I had this tiny idea that I might even run into him.

“Fun? I don’t know yet,” Bea says, prompting me to poke her in the arm. “All right, yes,” she says, “this is fun. You just have to promise to leave if any of the poems involve car crashes or bodily fluids.”

“Okay, I know you’re squeamish.”

Bea shifts in her seat and wraps her flowered scarf tighter around her neck; like me, she probably feels out of place and slightly nervous. I look around at the NYU students, studying them as I would a foreign species.

“She gave me a C,” I hear someone say. “She said I hadn’t effectively articulated Derrida’s theory of logocentrism and its relationship to Lacan’s theory of consciousness as a semiotic system.”

“Bummer,” her friend says. “But that whole structuralism/
deconstruction/post-structuralism thing is really hard. I mean, I can hardly remember what’s the signifier and what’s the signified.”

I don’t have
any
idea what they’re talking about. But still, I could be one of these girls, couldn’t I? Maybe even here: NYU is my dad’s alma mater.

“Do you ever imagine what it would be like to be in college?” I ask Bea.

“Huh?” She furrows her freckled brow.

“Like, you know, back in school—”

Just as Bea’s about to answer, a professorial-looking woman in a flowing red caftan steps up to the podium and clears her throat. “Welcome to the tenth annual student showcase of the NYU MFA program,” she says.

Immediately Bea turns to me, without waiting for her to finish. “You brought me to a
student
reading?” she whispers. “I thought we’d see a famous poet or something.”

“Sorry,” I whisper as the first reader sets herself up at the front of the room. “Slim pickings on a Monday night. It was this or amateur comedy night at the Dew Drop Inn.” Truthfully, I hadn’t looked very far in the listings section of the
Village Voice
—I just saw that there was an event at NYU and decided that’s where we should go. Because maybe, just maybe, we’d run into Jacob.

I write down
Signifier? Signified? Derrida?

“Are you taking notes?” Bea demands. “Because I don’t think there’s going to be a quiz.”

“No. But I like to be prepared. Maybe poetic inspiration will strike.”

In my notebook is a line from Rimbaud (we read his work during my senior year at School of the Arts): “
I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.
” I don’t know what it means, exactly, but I’ve always liked the image. It makes dance sound like something that exists in the larger world and not just in a dark theater.

Also in my journal—for contrast—is a line from the ballet movie
The Red Shoes.
“
Sorrow will pass, believe me
,” says the ruthless director to his most gifted dancer, whose heart has just been broken.
“Life is so unimportant. And from now onwards, you will dance like nobody ever before.”

Which is the more accurate take on dance, Rimbaud or
The Red Shoes
? It’s hard to say.

Once the readings are over, I look at Bea and see that she has nodded off.

Before I wake her up, I sit and think about Jacob, who is very possibly studying in the library five hundred yards away from me. When I get home, I send him an e-mail.

I debate for a long time how to sign it:
xo, Hannah
?
xH
?
Later, HW
? In the end, I don’t sign it at all. I just send off the e-mail with my fingers crossed.

Jacob calls me a day later. His voice is friendly but slightly cool. “So you’re coming up for air,” he says.