The Man I Love (3 page)

“He’s good,” he said to David.

“Right? The thing with Will is when he’s not in the dance studio, he’s in martial arts class. And it shows.”

Erik put a palm to his forehead. “That’s what I’ve been seeing,” he said.

“Yeah, you don’t want to fuck with him. He’ll double pirouette and break your nose.”

“Where’s he from, how does he speak fluent French?”

“He’s a Canuck,” David said. “Born in Montreal or something.”

Kees turned around. “Will’s from New Brunswick, dumbass. He went to school in Montreal.”

“Excusez-moi. Why in hell they speak French in a place called New Brunswick is beyond me.”

“Well, you’re in college, David,” Kees said. “Four libraries on campus, why don’t you go look it up? Learn something?”

David responded in Dutch and Kees turned back to face the stage. Erik wanted to know how Daisy was fluent in French but decided he’d ask someone other than David.

The boys’ quintet was finished. Kathy Curran and Matt Lombardi, the senior graduating couple, returned to the stage for the Siciliano.

Erik looked back at his notes and the question mark he had put down. Shyly he leaned forward to tap Kees’s shoulder. “What do you call a duet like this, pah de something?”

“Pas de deux. It’s French, means dance for two.” He took Erik’s clipboard and wrote the words down. “You should come to my class.”

Erik swallowed a slight panic. He wasn’t sure if it was an order or an invitation, but no way in hell was he going to dance class.

But David laughed. “Kees’s most popular course is called ‘Dance Appreciation for the Modern Neanderthal.’”

“There’s a waiting list,” Kees said.

Erik wrote it down.

Interestingly, while the seniors rehearsed front and center, Daisy and Will were upstage, dancing the same choreography. David explained they were understudying, and would get to dance one matinee performance.

The arrangement was for strings, flute and oboe, and against the slightly mournful melody, the pas de deux was decidedly romantic, full of longing. The partnering was difficult—even to Erik’s unpracticed eye. Yet Will didn’t seem to give much thought to what his hands were doing. They lifted, threw and caught Daisy with unconscious confidence, allowing his touch to be both supportive and tender. His fingers lingered on her limbs. He crushed her against his chest as if he loved her. At times, he seemed to be whispering to her. Daisy trusted him implicitly, jumping backwards or turning blind without hesitation, her hand reaching for a precise spot where she knew he would be.

At an especially emotional swell in the music, Daisy fell backwards in the circle of Will’s arms and he laid his head down at the base of her throat. His lips parted. Erik’s eyes narrowed in fascinated jealousy. Will wasn’t kissing her neck, he was just inhaling there, resting, and Daisy’s hand came up behind his head. Downstage, Kathy made the same exact gesture to Matt’s head. Clearly it was part of the choreography, but Kathy’s motion seemed a throwaway while Daisy’s was a definitive human caress. The hair at the back of Erik’s own neck stirred.

When Will brought Daisy back up, the look they exchanged was smoldering. Their faces seemed to twitch with the suppressed laughter of a private joke. As Daisy moved forward into the next phrase, her smile back over her shoulder at Will was laced with affection. Erik felt a crushing despair sweep through his bones.

Beside him, David was chuckling low in his chest. “I swear sometimes I hate the man’s guts,” he said.

“Are they together?”

“Depends. What day is it, Sunday? Yeah, Sunday is Will’s straight day, they could be together.”

Kees looked around, chuckling. “You still think he walks both sides of the line?”

David held up a defensive hand. “I know what I know.”

“Get out of here,” Kees said, snorting.

Erik was starting to feel slightly overwhelmed. He was more than a little sure Will and Daisy were together offstage. Dancing the way they did, looking at each other the way they did, how could they not?

And yet, throughout the rest of the rehearsal, whenever she wasn’t dancing, Daisy kept coming back to their rows of seats. Coming, it seemed, to sit somewhere in Erik’s general vicinity.

“Well, now, Keesja,” David said after one such visit. “We know Daisy never comes to sit with me.”

“We know she’s not after me,” Kees said, grinning. “Sunday’s my gay day.”

In unison, they turned eyes to Erik.

“She must like you,” David said with a sigh.

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” David said to Erik as they arrived at the theater Monday afternoon.

Leo gathered his crew for a short meeting. “What do you see before you?” he asked Erik and Allison Pierce, the two freshmen. They exchanged confused glances, looking for a trick question within the obvious.

“A stage?” Allison said.

“Wrong. David?”

“A fish tank,” David said, sighing and cleaning his fingernails with the tip of a screw.

“Exactly. Dancers live in light as fish live in water. Jean Rosenthal,
The Magic of Light.
If you haven’t read it, read it, and if you’ve already read it, read it again. Erik, stop writing things on your hand. Learn to trust your memory.”

Erik sheepishly put his pen and his hand down.

The normally laid-back Leo was pacing briskly. “If you’ve never lit a dance concert before, forget everything you thought you knew. This is all different. It will take us half an hour to hang all the instruments on the booms. To focus them? If we’re lucky, we’ll get out of here at midnight. In fact, if you have pressing business at the DMV or a root canal scheduled, I’d go now and have a better time. This will be tedious, boring work and the dancers are going to be grouchy. Stay out of their way because they kick high, they kick fast and they kick hard. Any questions?”

None. The stage techs rose. Unless perching on a bar or crawling on your stomach on the catwalk qualified as sitting, nobody sat again for three hours.

“On a lighting boom,” Leo said, working with Erik and Allison, “the lantern lowest to the floor is called the shin buster. Which is self-explanatory. An inexperienced dancer will bump into them. And they will blame you when they do. We just knock them back into line.”

“The dancers?” Allison asked, wide-eyed.

“The lanterns,” Erik murmured.

“Booms can have a low- and mid-shin buster,” Leo said. “As you can see we’re wiring a mid-lantern for all eight.” He went on explaining how these two lowest fixtures were the most crucial. They kept the light on the moving bodies without reflecting off the floor, allowing the dancers to appear floating in space, not unlike fish in an aquarium.

True to Leo’s prediction, the booms were hung in no time and hoisted to attention in the wings when the dancers arrived. They were all somewhat sloppily dressed. None of the girls had their pointe shoes on and a lot of them wore their hair down.

“Business casual,” David said.

Indeed, the company exuded more the air of a pajama party than a rehearsal. As the lights were being designed and focused and the cues recorded, the dancers had little to do but stand in the generalized areas of each piece’s choreography and be bored.

Erik quickly learned dancers hated nothing more than standing still and being bored.

Meanwhile, eight boom stands divvied among six techs and two ladders meant a constant do-si-do backstage and across the stage. The potential to trip over something or someone was a constant threat. Multiplied by the seven Bach Variations over two hours, and Erik began to wish he’d eaten a more substantial lunch.

He was paired up with Allison, who had a maddening habit of saying “okey-dokey” to everything and a tendency to zone out when she was holding the ladder. Plus they always seemed to end up with the ladder with the uneven feet.

Up the ladder, down the ladder, move the ladder. Wait for the dancers to move. Wait while Leo brought lights up, brought lights down. Wait for Marie to make an agonizing decision and for Leo to translate her decision into focus. Swivel the lights into place. Wait for Marie to look and decide if she liked it. Shutter the lenses, bolt everything down. Keep the lights off the floor. Keep the lights off the curtains. Erik swore if he heard “Move it a quarter inch” one more time, he would stick a screwdriver in his eye.

“You’re on the floor, move it a quarter inch up. Now you’re on the curtain, take it quarter inch down. No, too much. Back it up. Just a hair. A tad. A smidgen. Just kiss it to the left. No, come back. Now hold it. Don’t move. Perfect. No, you moved it.”

They toiled and trudged on through each of the variations. Through it all, the dancers stood around. Most of them talked. Incessantly. If they had nothing of substance to say, they went for volume. One boy’s braying laugh made Erik wince and suppress a desire to throw a wrench in his general direction. He was getting decidedly punchy.

The non-talkers read books—Daisy was in this group—or sat and stretched, retreating into private universes. One girl was knitting, deftly stuffing needles and yarn down her shirt whenever she needed to move. A few kids actually looked like they were sleeping in five-minute increments, magically coming back to life whenever it was time to migrate. Will simply sat still, staring, in a Zen-like trance. Any moment Erik expected him to levitate right off the stage floor, but then Will would break out and stand on his head or do one-armed push-ups or something equally enviable.

As the lights were focused for the Siciliano pas de deux, Will and Daisy sat around together. Several times Erik walked by them, lugging the ladder and grudging their companionable chatter in French. At one point Will knelt beside Daisy, one arm curved around her chest, supporting her slumped weight, while with the other hand he pressed and kneaded all up and down the length of her spine. Daisy’s head lolled, eyes closed, a faint smile around her lips. Then Erik wanted to throw a slightly larger, considerably heavier object.

Like Allison.

Finally the ordeal wound down and Marie gave her flock twenty minutes. No such privilege was awarded the techs. They stayed up on the boom stands, tightening C-clamps, threading safety cables through the instrument yokes and securing them around the bar. A soft hand settled on Erik’s calf as he was working. He nearly flicked it off, thinking it was Allison. It was Daisy.

“Do you want me to bring you something to eat?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” he said automatically, and then felt the growling bite of his stomach. “Actually, yes, that would be great.”

“A sandwich all right?”

“Perfect. Anything.” Juggling wrench and cables he reached for his wallet but she waved him off.

“We can square up later.” She turned to go and smacked into David.

“Can I get a cheese steak, Marge?” he said. He said it sweetly but something in his manner was challenging. Erik had heard him refer to Daisy as Marge several times, but didn’t know why.

Daisy held out her hand, calmly locking eyes with David until he took out his wallet and gave her a twenty.

“Bring back the change this time,” he called after her, and then tossed a roll of gaffer tape up to Erik. “Chick thinks I’m made of money,” he said.

They hit the deck, dealing with the cables. Five snaked down from every boom stand and they had to be precisely lined up at the base and thoroughly taped to the Marley floor. “If a dancer trips on a loose cable,” Leo said, “I will blame you.”

Threatened, hungry and manic, Erik and David got progressively obsessive about the job, arguing about the best and least circuitous routes from the bases to the circuit panel. Yet for all their grouchiness, they worked well together. They chatted as they taped, about music, basketball and theater. Will passed by and pretended to peel up an edge of their sweated-over labors. David leapt up and gave ferocious chase through the wings, threatening to strangle Will with a safety cable.

And Daisy brought Erik the world’s most perfect turkey sandwich, a bag of potato chips and a brownie.

* * *

“Look how Tamar does this phrase,” Kees spoke lowly, leaning on the back of the seat beside Erik’s.

“All right,” Erik said, his eyes on the stage, one ear on Kees and the other taking notes from Leo.

“See how she comes out of the turn. Now look how Daisy does it. Watch. Did you see?”

“I think so. It looked smoother? I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry if you can’t say what it was. I just care if you noticed something different.”

They were watching the girls’ quintet. Daisy was good, no question, but Erik hadn’t the means to articulate why. Like a benevolent Svengali, Kees was giving Erik a crash course in dance appreciation. Erik might have resisted had Kees not been such an excellent teacher, and had Daisy not been so relentlessly compelling. He needed help if he was going to speak this girl’s language.

During the alternating runs of the Siciliano pas de deux, Erik strove to take apart the mechanics of partnering and peppered Kees with questions. “How much is the girl balancing and how much is the guy holding her? How does he spin her? Or is she spinning herself?”

Kees was delighted. “He supports her. Watch their hands. She nearly always takes his, not the other way around. He’ll throw her off balance if he grabs her. No, she’s turning herself. He’s there to make the turn come to an attractive finish and possibly coax another revolution out. If he’s any good, that is.”

Then the lifts fascinated Erik, provoking more questions about how much these girls weighed and if the male dancers did any weight training.

“All of them do,” Kees said. “Mandatory.”

“Still, how much is lift and how much is the girl jumping?” Erik asked. “They are jumping, right? They can’t just give dead weight to be hoisted.”

“The trick is all in the plié, how she bends her knees before the lift. It’s the springboard.”

“But they’re dancing slow,” Erik said, a corner of his mouth twisting up in doubt. “How do you get spring without speed?”

“You just do,” Kees said. “Lot of power in a plié if you do it right. And anyway, with lifts it’s not the going up that’s so hard. It’s the coming down.”

On a break, Daisy came and sat down in the aisle by Erik’s seat. She took off her pointe shoes to rest her feet. Erik picked one up.

“Careful, those are pretty gross,” she said.

“I just want to see how they work. Is there wood in here?”

Just as patiently as Kees, she showed him how the shoes were made, with layers of canvas, satin and glue. More terms for him to absorb: box, shank, vamp and binding. He watched her re-tape the toes on her right foot. Most girls wore full-footed tights or socks, but Daisy went barefoot in her shoes, saying she could feel the floor better. She did put a gel spacer between her big and first toes to take the pressure off the bunion joint. Re-shod now, she stood up and rolled through her strong, bare feet, onto her pointes. He watched, mechanical curiosity satisfied.

The more dire interest in her legs, however, had yet to be assuaged.