The Cranes Dance (15 page)

And she was. She seemed to take it for granted that I was wonderful, that I did well, that life in the company was easy for me and that I was happy.

What needed work, what needed discussion and prevention and codes and rules and effort, was securing Gwen’s happiness. That Gwen needed to be made happy seemed obvious. Her talent was too extraordinary. And I, the stronger one, the outgoing one, the one quicker to laugh, had been given this task. What was I going to do, let her fall apart? The only reason not to help Gwen would have been that I was jealous of her and wanted her to fail.

I couldn’t see the future. I didn’t know that little waves might become a tsunami. How could I have possibly known that my puny canoe wouldn’t be enough for Gwen? That I would have to lash myself to a lamppost in order to survive the storms to come?

Being in this apartment again has brought back all those early-years feelings. But I see them differently now. If this place is a crime scene, then everything in it is a clue. No wonder I have trouble falling asleep.

I can’t sleep, and I can’t sleep in. I wake up exactly three minutes before the alarm, and the anxiety of the sound the alarm is going to make propels me out of bed and across the room to the dresser.

A hot shower, normally one of my favorite places to be, seems to have become yet another thing to endure. There’s just so much … work to be done in there. Because of all the crap I have to put in my hair to get it up in performance-worthy smoothness, I have to shampoo every day. And then condition. And then there’s facial cleanser. And then scrubbing of various body parts with exfoliant. And then shaving, because I’m not a
fan of waxing. Actually, the shaving is the best part, because in order to shave my nether regions properly I must hike one leg up high on the shower wall and it’s kind of a nice hip opener. After I’ve finished with one side I rotate on the ball of my foot and bend forward slightly and get the first deep, satisfying crack of the day, right where the femur attaches to the pelvis.
THWONK
. So funny: when I did that in front of Andrew he would wince; if I do it at work, people say, “Oh, good one.”

And then more work. Toweling. Combing. Scooping up hair that comes out when I comb. Deodorant. Moisturizer for body. Moisturizer for face. Ear cleaning. Skin examining. Eyebrow tweezing. Nail trimming. Tooth cleaning. It’s just fucking exhausting and then there’s doing my hair and attempting some sort of makeup and then clothes. If I hadn’t reinstituted my invisible audience/judges for this whole segment of the day I just wouldn’t be able to get through it. Gwen’s wardrobe helps too. It’s very well organized, by color and within color, by season. She doesn’t have a ton of random things that she never wears, like I do.

All of Gwen’s apartment is very well edited. Which is not to say that it’s barren or cold. She has very good taste.

It was a thing we enjoyed, those first years of living together. Shopping, choosing, fixing up our apartment just so. Even something like getting a corkscrew was special, because we would hunt around until we felt like we had found the absolute
best
corkscrew. And we were just making corps salary, which doesn’t go very far in New York City, so everything had to be very carefully thought out. Lots of things we did without until we could afford exactly what we wanted.

It was like a game. I thought it was all about the aesthetics
of our life. Were we not artists, after all, tuned in to the finer details and existing on a somewhat more elevated plane than the common folk?

But Gwen has a way of multiplying the rules of any game. And things snuck up on me. I would lose focus, get involved in some drama of my own, and not pay attention to what Gwen was doing until it was already there, a fact of our life together, something I had been colluding with for months without really being aware of it.

Like the switch from extremely neat to obsessively neat. Emptying the wastepaper basket every time I left anything in it, like a lipstick-imprinted tissue or a hank of floss. Washing the dishes and then drying them and putting them away and then washing and drying the sink and then the kitchen floor and then taking pots and pans that we hadn’t even used out of the cupboards and washing them too. Vacuuming. Oh god, the vacuuming. She’d vacuum and then empty the bag out onto newspaper and comb through all the detritus. And then do it again and again. Examining. Like an archaeologist with short-term memory loss. There’s always something, she’d say. Until there wasn’t, but that didn’t always bring the relief she needed.

Sometimes she would refer to objects like floss or bobby pins sucked up from the rug, with gender pronouns.

“Look at her,” Gwen might say, holding up a miniature bird’s nest of hair plucked from the bathroom wastepaper bucket. At first I thought she was being whimsical.

“Here he is,” she said, seizing upon two or three crescent slivers of toenails.

“Um, that was probably me,” I would say. “Sorry.”

She would smile her sibylline smile.

No. I knew it wasn’t right. That it wasn’t just eccentricity. Her face, as she organized, scrubbed, aligned objects at right angles, hung and re-hung and re-hung towels, was eerily blank of expression. She was there and she wasn’t there. If I interrupted her, she might cower, or yell, or even cry. If I left her alone she would eventually either exhaust or satisfy herself and things would continue on. It was all very private. And at work she began to blossom. Her dancing got more confident. She worked hard. I know this because these were the very things I was supposed to be doing, but my results didn’t look like Gwen’s.

If I joined in the cleaning, and did it with her, it would often wear itself out and abate more quickly. Sometimes not. Sometimes it would lead to her doing other, stranger things. I guess the paper dolls were an early typical example. Things would start … appearing. Like, keys were a big thing for a year or two. Not her own apartment keys, but ones she had picked up from god knows where. Keys to nothing. She collected dozens of them and hid them all over the place. They would be sewn inside curtains, placed in a Chinese takeout box, and stored in the freezer. I’d find keys in Clive’s cat litter.

“Hey, Gwen,” I would say, going for casual and curious instead of slightly freaked out. “What’s with all the keys?”

“Oh, I just like them.”

“Okay, why are they taped to the side of the oven?”

“Why is anything anyplace?” she might ask. And since this was both funny and true, I usually let it go at that point. I started removing the keys from wherever strange place I found them and dumping them in an unused glass flower vase. Gwen didn’t mind. She put the vase on the kitchen table like a centerpiece
and it was almost like an Easter egg hunt for me. When the vase got full, it would disappear.

Well, look, it’s not like Gwen staggered around in a constant state of looniness, thinking she was the ghost of Napoleon or doing big Jekyll-and-Hyde mood shifts. I probably did some weird stuff too.

This morning, after the interminable five-act opera that is basic hygiene, I dismissed my viewing audience so I could smoke a cigarette with my morning coffee. This is terribly sloppy of me—I’ve trained myself to only have one or two cigarettes a week and then only after a performance—but I’ve slipped into this new habit and now it’s hard to break.

In all other ways though, I’m basically living by Gwen’s house rules. The only thing I haven’t been able to avoid is collecting a pile of mail on her desk. Gwen hates piles like that. She keeps a paper shredder on her desk so that after she opens and deals with everything, she can utterly destroy it. (For someone with such a shaky sense of her own identity, she’s really paranoid about identity theft.) I’ve been paying her Con Ed bills, etc., but I don’t know what to do with the catalogs and various other things. Gwen has a very particular system for everything.

The New York City postal service has been forwarding my own mail in little rubber-banded caches. This morning, after the cigarette, I finally sat down to go through a few. It was still early, too early. Hours before morning class and I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Amid all the junk—the usual stalking from Bed Bath & Beyond—I found the familiar envelope from Wendy Griston Hedges.

I didn’t need to open this to know what it contains.

During my first years in the company, I would see Wendy at all the donor events, and we would talk, but she never initiated anything more, and it did not occur to me to suggest it. I was always happy to see her. She felt mine, in a particular way. My own private thing. She didn’t seem especially interested in Gwen. It was always about what
I
was dancing,
my
performance, how
I
was feeling about things.

When did she invite me to tea, that first time?

Oh, of course I remember. Gwen had just been made soloist. Ahead of me. And the whole thing with Hilel had just gone down. I guess I was feeling kind of low. Anyway, there was something—an invited dress rehearsal, I think—and a few days later I got a formal invitation in the mail from Wendy to have tea at her house. A little bemused, I responded in kind, by mail.

My arrival at her apartment coincided with the hanging in her foyer of an enormous glass chandelier, recently purchased in Venice, comprised of enormous glass fruits and vegetables. Pink grapefruits. Red pomegranates. Green peppers. Purple eggplants. Something that might have been butternut squash. Wendy ushered me in and we stood watching together as this monstrosity was hoisted overhead by an electrician.

“That is really something,” I said.

“I think it should be lower,” Wendy said, fretfully, to me.

“Um … Mrs. Hedges would like you to lower it,” I addressed the electrician.

The giant thing sank a few inches.

“Too low, and it’ll bang on someone’s head,” the electrician counseled.

“I want to see it, though,” Wendy said to me. “So I can enjoy it.”

“A bit lower,” I instructed.

He lowered it another few inches.

Wendy stepped directly under the chandelier. The electrician, freaked out, grabbed the chain with both hands and nearly fell off his ladder.

“Lady,” he squeaked.

“There,” said Wendy, smiling. The fruits and vegetables sparkled a foot above her head, like a celestial produce tiara.

“Okay, good!” I shouted, hauling her out of the way. “Lock it down there, please.”

“I’ll get the tea,” said Wendy, happily.

And so it went on. The first Monday of every month, Wendy and I would have tea. A week or two before the Monday a formal invitation would appear, and I would send a reply. Of course there were gaps. Tour. Vacation. Wendy occasionally took a cruise, or spent a month or two in Greece. But it’s been a kind of staple in my life. I’ve pieced together bits of her history over the years, although she’s not one for talking about herself. I’ve gotten used to her shyness, which hasn’t really abated with time. It’s not a lonely shyness, though. As happy as she is to see me, I think she’s equally happy when I go and leave her to her books and her occupations. Considering the shyness and her extreme privacy, I wondered what made her take in a student ballerina. When I got up the nerve to ask, she took a moment to reply and then said, “Henry couldn’t have children. He told me that when he asked me to marry him. I think it’s why he asked me, actually. He thought I wouldn’t mind. Oh, and I didn’t. I didn’t want children. But I did wonder from time to time. How
do you know you won’t like something if you’ve never tried it? So when the company asked if I would consider hosting a student I thought, Well, here is my chance to experiment. And Henry was already dead, you see, so it couldn’t hurt his feelings.”

“I guess you realized you really didn’t like it!” I laughed. “Since I was the only one you let stay here.”

“That wasn’t you.” She patted my knee. “I liked you very much. Very much. But oh, my dear, it made me so nervous and uncomfortable.” She shuddered. “They say it’s different if it’s your own child, but what a risk! What if it’s not different? No, I satisfied my curiosity.”

Our teas have been mostly instructional. Wendy usually has some book ready for me. She reads Latin and Greek. She knows a lot about ancient civilizations, mythology, classical drama, and poetry.

“The life of the mind,” she told me once. “That’s what I really wanted. My fairy tales were filled with ivory towers. And then I met Henry. So that was a different life.”

“Well, it’s sort of an ivory tower,” I said, gesturing around the Park Avenue living room. “Ivory-colored upholstery, anyway.”

“Yes. That’s why I never sit in here unless you come. I’m afraid of spilling things.”

“We can sit somewhere else.”

“Do you think?”

After that, we always had tea in her library, which had moss-green corduroy armchairs.

Occasionally, I went with Wendy to “pay calls” on some of her favorite art around the city. She didn’t believe in prolonged museum visits; she preferred to visit one or two favorite pieces and leave it at that. Since her apartment wasn’t far from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, she liked to check in fairly regularly with Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s
Ugolino and His Sons
in the sculpture garden.

Ugolino, a Pisan traitor, was imprisoned with his sons in a tower and condemned to starvation. The sculpture is sensuous and grisly and disturbing all at once. Ugolino is depicted gnawing at his own fingers. One child is perhaps already dead, collapsed against Ugolino’s left leg. Two other sons are coiled around him, the eldest digging his fingers into his father’s calf in a way that makes your teeth hurt. Wendy explained to me the history of Ugolino, which led to a mini lecture on thirteenth-century Italian politics, the differences between Guelphs and Ghibellines.

“According to Dante,” Wendy told me, “the sons pleaded with their father to satisfy his hunger by eating them.”