The Man I Love (5 page)

Later in the evening, during the run-through, Erik was in the balcony changing the lenses on the follow spotlights. The house lights were down, taking the concert one step closer to production. Things were starting to gel.

Kees came loping down the wide stairs and slid into a seat. “Nice to have all these vantage points, right?”

Erik finished his chore just as the Siciliano began. From the balcony’s front row, they watched together.

“Wat denk je, mijn vriend?” Such was Kees's customary opening remark, and the one thing Erik now understood in Dutch: “What do you think, my friend?”

Under Kees's brief but vigorous tutelage, Erik was far more comfortable with formulating observations and articulating them than just three days ago. “I like this part,” he said.

Kathy Curran was up in the air, her pliant back draped over Matt Lombardi’s shoulder, legs unfolding in an upside-down split. Matt brought her down a few steps and turned her under his arm. She turned him under hers and they revolved around each other. Then, out of nowhere, Kathy was back over his shoulder, going up and the sequence repeated. Three times in all.

Upstage, Daisy and Will mirrored.

“Theirs is so much smoother,” Erik said, trying hard to be objective. “Not the steps but how the steps connect.”

“Steps are words and the choreography is sentences. The sentences have to flow with the music.”

“Right. And I see what you mean about the coming down being harder than going up.”

“Most difficult thing about lifts. Up in the air Kathy is beautiful. Beautiful line.”

“What’s line?”

“The picture the body makes in the air, the shape. The lift is gorgeous but now watch as he puts her down. See how the flow breaks as she gets her feet on the ground? She doesn’t quite have the knack of sustaining the flow. Now watch Daisy. She goes up. Beautiful line, look how she uses her head, there’s a little modulation in the music and she turns her head against his arm, did you see it?”

“No.”

“Watch next time. Now he’s bringing her down, down, down but her head is still back, her head is the last thing to come up which sustains the downward flow. And right into the next phrase without a break. Gorgeous.”

“They make long sentences.”

“One more time, watch her head against his arm. Right now. I love how she tells a whole story with just a little turn of her head. And the way she keeps it thrown back tells a story, too.”

“She doesn’t want to come down.”

“Exactly.”

Erik twisted his mouth, debating how to phrase a question. “Can I just throw something out there and you can call me an idiot if it’s warranted?”

“Fire away.”

“Does the difference in how they partner women have anything to do with Matt being gay and Will being straight?”

Kees laughed, low and deep in his chest, his teeth flashing in the dark.

Erik felt slightly foolish. “Never mind,” he said.

“No, no, man, it’s a fair question.”

“But does it hold any weight?”

“Look, no gay man is oblivious to a beautiful woman. I’m gay, I’ve partnered women and believe me, you feel it going on. Beauty is beauty. And straight or gay, you are immersed in this intense, artistic chemistry which is both sensual and sensory. Chemistry is chemistry. It just isn’t rooted in sexual attraction.”

“But still, it seems Matt and Kathy dance out here.” Erik gestured around them. “They’re looking out here to the audience, breaking the fourth wall.”

Kees reared back, corners of his mouth turned down in mock surprise. “Fourth wall, check out the theater fag.”

“Tuesday’s my gay day,” Erik said, smiling, which got him a swat upside the head. “But their focus is out here while Will and Daisy only look at each other. They’re not dancing for us. It’s like we’re not even here. It’s more their private moment and we’re just invited into it. Or we stumbled on it. Matt and Kathy are performing but Will and Daisy tell a story.”

“Exactly. And it tends to give all their dancing a romantic feel. Which is fine for a program like this. Be interesting to see them dance something a little more abstract and edgier. Something angry.”

“Is that how you’d choreograph for them?”

“It would certainly be a challenge,” Kees said, with some relish. “Daisy’s adagio is so mesmerizing. I’m itching to see what kind of speed she has. Take that sleek race car out on the straightaway and open it up, make her dance fast.”

Sitting in the first row of the balcony, arms crossed on the ledge, Erik was indeed mesmerized. He looked at Kees. “Do you think she’s good?”

Kees nodded slowly. “She’s unquestionably talented in her own right. Her technique is superb. But what she has with Will is extraordinary.”

“Why? What makes it extraordinary?”

Kees was quiet a while, watching. “One thing I notice is Daisy seems more interested in making something beautiful together with Will than being adored as the prima ballerina. She is a much more forgiving partner than Kathy.”

“Forgiving.”

“You have to understand in ballet, there’s an unspoken code of chivalry for the danseur noble.”

“What’s that?”

“The male dancer. Same way you’d use prima ballerina for a woman. Anyway, he’s expected to always present the woman in the best light. So you can see this little flicker of annoyance on Kathy’s face if Matt bobbles something. But Daisy, she’s conscious of Will as a dancer, not just someone propping her up. She doesn’t betray his mistakes.”

Squinting at the couple on the stage, Erik made a quantum leap. “She partners him. As much as he does her.”

“Exactly. If he’s not where she needs him to be, she covers and she moves on. She doesn’t stop and blame. She incorporates the rough spots into the whole. Strikes me as interesting.”

“Why?”

“She’s a generous dancer. Makes me wonder if she treats all the people she loves the same way.”

“Oh.”

Kees smiled. “You like her?”

Erik glanced at him, then back to the stage. “I do.”

“She’s a lovely girl.”

“It’s weird, Kees, at first I just liked how she looked. Now I’m starting to like who she is. And a lot of it, maybe even all of it, is coming from watching her dance.”

“Like I said, my friend, she seems the type who likes to make something beautiful with her partner, rather than just be carried around and adored in the spotlight.” He patted Erik’ shoulder and got up. “So I imagine she’s generous and forgiving in the dark.”

He left then, and Erik looked back at the stage, rolling the words “in the dark” around his mouth like hard candies. He watched Daisy dance, illuminated and suspended in the sidelight coming from the booms.

In the dark.

What are you like in the dark?

Wednesday afternoon, they came to the theater together again, communing in the quiet of the empty auditorium. Daisy sewed her shoes and Erik played the piano. He played more confidently today, and when his hands coaxed from the keys a competent version of the F minor Prelude, Daisy had begun to dance parts of it.

“Do the last part of your solo, with all the turns.” He stopped playing as she first circled the stage, then headed down the diagonal in a blur of turns, moving fast, foot-to-foot, up on her toes, into a double pirouette to end the phrase.

“Keesja dared me to do a triple here.”

“Can you?”

Daisy backed up a few feet, moved into the chain of quick turns, then into the final spin, one revolution, then two and a third. She finished soft, her arms the last to melt down, a small smile on her face.

“Nice,” Erik said.

She did it again and flubbed, falling off balance after the second turn. “See, I’m turning to the right, and it’s not my strong side. My natural spin is to the left.”

“Can’t you just change it, then?”

She smiled at him, shaking her head. “I have to do it the way it’s choreographed.” She tried another, again wobbling off the final revolution. “I don’t trust myself. If I’m turning right then a triple happens by luck, rather than me controlling it. Two and a half turns with a fudged ending looks like shit. I’d rather just do the double.”

It was the first dress rehearsal, so after warming up she disappeared into the depths of the backstage world: down in the dressing rooms beneath the stage and into the strict governance of wardrobe and makeup. Starting tonight, it was performance mode and the dancers weren’t allowed out in the auditorium during the run-through.

David and Erik were going into their world as well. The cues designed on the temporary board were now programmed into the main boards in the lighting booth. They would be running lights from there, David in charge, in direct contact with the stage manager, and Erik second-in-command. They had their own dress orders, anything as long as it was black.

Last-minute adjustments and tweaks were needed all around the theater, including backstage. Passing through the controlled chaos in the wings, Erik made the interesting discovery that the contemporary girls had to be taped into their short little trunks. Intrigued, he stopped, drew back behind a curtain and stared as the wardrobe techs worked with double-sided tape to secure the edges along all those nether regions. And the dancers, either bent over double, or lying on the floor with their legs thrown over their heads, just chatted away, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

Naturally he couldn’t ogle in peace—David came along and whacked him between the shoulder blades, breaking the trance.

“Dude, close your mouth.”

“Sorry,” Erik muttered.

“What are you, twelve?”

“No, it’s just my first time walking through a troupe of girls with their cooches waving in the breeze.”

“Yeah, well don’t ruin it for the rest of us, all right?”

Now holding the ladder for David, Erik glanced more covertly at Daisy being secured into her dance dress. The wardrobe tech was kneeling, working from the bottom up with a more civilized needle and thread. The entire back of the dress was open and Erik could see the top of Daisy’s tights and the whole, smooth expanse of her skin, the bumps of her spine and the wings of her shoulder blades. In full stage makeup she was like a porcelain figurine, pale and ethereal, her eyes extended and exaggerated, her lips dark and chiseled.

Over his head, David was singing softly. “Fishy, fishy in the brook, will she ever turn and look?”

As if on cue, Daisy looked over at them. She smiled at Erik, and those amplified features softened back into the face he knew better. The wardrobe tech made a cut with her scissors, then sat back on her knees to inspect. Daisy went up onto her toes, her hands reaching over her head. Out of the flowing skirt her waist rose up, tight and slender. The soft grey material hugged her small breasts, draped her back. Her neck was long and sleek, framed by the curves of her arms.

She is,
Erik thought,
the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.

David came down the ladder, jumping the last few rungs. He retrieved the cup of soda he’d left at the base and took a long, sucking slurp from its straw. “You can fold it up,” he said to Erik, indicating the ladder, and walked off.

“Say please,” Erik said under his breath, peeved. He watched as David passed the free-standing barres where Daisy was up on one foot, deep in concentration as she held a balance. Without breaking stride, David’s hand darted out and back. Daisy let out a yell and came off her pointes.

“David, you little shit,” she cried, seizing a towel and lobbing it as he stepped up his pace and disappeared further backstage. Shaking her head, she reached her hand down between her shoulder blades, worrying at the back of her dress.

Erik walked over to her. “What did he do?”

“Dropped a fucking ice cube down my back,” she said, twisting and reaching.

He could see the lump and the spreading dark spot where the ice was starting to melt. “Hold still,” he said. He pulled the material away, just enough for him to get his fingers in and retrieve the cube, and trying not to linger longer than was necessary.

“How bad does it look?” she asked, peering back over her shoulder.

“It’ll dry, don’t worry.” And entirely without his brain’s permission, he blurted out, “You look beautiful.”

Her eyes lifted up to his. “Thank you.”

“Do a triple,” he said.

She laughed then, and shook her head. “Not to the right.”

He watched her walk away, then popped the ice cube into his mouth.

The cogs and gears of the concert were turning ever more smoothly and faster. Two run-throughs seemed to take no time at all. Notes were given swiftly. Leo had only minor changes to make. With some ceremony he blessed the final cue sheets and gave them to David and Erik to transpose. “Lock it down, boys. And make copies.”

“Let’s go kick back, hookers,” Will said. And the five of them—Will, Erik, David, Lucky and Daisy—headed over to the campus center to eat.

They unloaded jackets and clobber at a large booth, then dispersed in search of their dinners. After dealing with long lines at the deli counter, Erik arrived back at the table in the middle of a conversation, sitting down just as David was saying, “Oh yeah, Madame Virgo von Intacta over here.”

Daisy blew her straw wrapper at him. “Bite me,” she said.

“Hey, Fish,” David said. “Remember I told you Daisy’s old man owns an orchard out in Amish land? Guess what the name of the town is.”

“Bird-In-Hand,” Daisy and Will said, their voices unified in abject boredom.

“I thought you were from Gladwyne?” Erik said to Daisy.

“I am. But after I graduated my parents moved full time out to the country.”

“To Bird-In-Hand,” David said, nudging Erik’s side. “It’s just southwest of Intercourse.”

“Gee, I haven’t heard this joke in an hour,” Will muttered.

“Don’t forget you have to go through Intercourse to get to Paradise,” Daisy said as she tore open a salad dressing packet with her teeth. Erik’s eyes followed the banter like a tennis match.

“And stop by Mount Joy,” Will said.

“I’ve only been to Blue Ball,” David said, looking intently at Daisy.

“How frustrating.” Daisy got up, leaving just the men at the table.

“Why are you such an ass to her, Dave,” Will said around a mouthful.

“What?”

“For starters, you have this weird fascination with Daisy being a virgin. It’s just southwest of perverted.”

Chewing his sandwich, Erik looked off as if his thoughts were elsewhere. Daisy was a virgin. And how exactly was this common knowledge? He took another bite, recalling what Will had said:
He just wanted to bust her cherry for the experience.

Bust her cherry. It was a crass expression.

So why was it turning him on?

This was weird. He crossed one leg over the other and kept eating, lost in horny thoughtfulness.

“It’s hot being the first,” David said, squeezing ketchup on his fries. “You belong to a girl’s history forever.”

“Technical penetration doesn’t mean shit,” Will said, snorting. “Half the time it sucks for her. I’d rather be the guy who makes her come the first time. That’s the better pantheon. He’s the one she’ll remember forever.”

Erik crunched a few potato chips, nibbling on the image of Daisy under him, her hair spread out on a pillow. Her eyes full of blue-green fire. Opening her knees to him. Raising her hips up and letting him slide into her warm, wet…

He squirmed and casually hitched closer to the table. Great. He was stuck here now. Served him right.

“Hey, Lucia,” David said as Lucky arrived at the table and sat next to Will. “When were you deflowered? Wait, let me guess. Fifteen. Sixteen, tops.”

“You know, Dave, you’re really unattractive when you’re coked up,” Lucky said.

Erik had been mentally reciting states and capitals—a trick which usually deflected blood away from an unwanted erection back to his brain. He lifted his head at Lucky’s remark. He glanced at Will, who rolled his eyes as he bit into his burger.

David was unperturbed. “Willy, you had to have been what, twelve?”

Will chewed and swallowed, took a sip of his drink and replied, “Male or female?”

Lucky gave a little catcall under her breath.

“I always knew you batted for both sides,” David said.

“Sure,” Will said, looking around the table. “I’ll fuck any one of you.”

“Not in front of the children,” David said, as Daisy returned to the table.

“Not what in front of the children,” she said, sliding in next to Lucky, across from Erik.

“Talking about Will’s bisexual tendencies.”

“He’s double the lay,” Daisy said.

“Thank you, darling.” Will kissed the air at her.

David laughed. “Look at Fish’s face, he’s about to shit.”

Fighting the heat rising up his neck, Erik looked coolly around the table. “Clearly I’m not in Kansas anymore.”

“So,” David said. “Marge is the only one keeping herself pure for marriage.”

“Dave, give it a rest,” Will said.

“I’m not waiting for marriage,” Daisy said, chewing a french fry. Both her body language and her expression were smolderingly serene. She was calm and gorgeous. And a virgin. It was an effort for Erik to look away from her, a struggle not to imagine her beautiful stillness in his arms. To turn it wild. Could he do it?

“What are you waiting for then? True love?” David’s tone took on an edge of cruelness. This teasing was just short of nasty. It actually seemed irrational. Erik caught Will’s eye, silently asking if this was what he meant yesterday. Will lifted his chin in confirmation.

Daisy wasn’t taking any of his bait. “I’m just waiting for the one.”

“The one?”

“The One,” she said again, and then slowly began to sing, “singular sensation…every little step he—”

The table erupted in moans and fries being pelted at Daisy.

“Let me know how that goes, honey,” David said.

“For that, honey, you’ll be the first,” Daisy said. She looked over at Will, who was offering her his pack of cigarettes. She reached for one, glanced quickly at Erik, then took her hand back. “No, I’m good.”

“You have a girlfriend, Erik?” Lucky asked casually, shaking the ice cubes in her cup.

He looked up, shook his head.

“Fishy, fishy, in the brook,” David said, “at what young age were you took?”

Silence at the table. Unnerved, Erik looked sideways at David, then across the table. “Ask Will.”

They all laughed and threw more fries. Will held his palm out to Erik, who smacked his against it.

Thankfully the subject then turned to the concert and shop talk. After another ten minutes, David departed, leaving his tray of trash on the table and the cue sheets for Erik to transpose. Daisy had gotten herself a cup of tea and taken a book out of her bag.

His pup-tent safely dismantled, Erik went and got a cup of his own. Back at the table, he worked slowly, harboring the hope Daisy was hanging around because of him, and the greater hope Will and Lucky might take off soon and give him a few minutes alone with her.

Miracle of miracles, they did. “You’ll see my partner home?” Will said, shrugging on his jacket. Erik glanced at Daisy who smiled. Erik looked back at Will and nodded.

Lucky was pulling on her gloves. She bent and put her cheek next to Daisy’s. “Don’t wait up, dear,” she said.

Daisy kissed the air. “I never do, dear.” She watched them walk away, then looked back to Erik, giving him a quick smile before returning to her book.

Erik looked left and right before speaking. “Was David coked up?”

Daisy looked up. Her eyes flared bright blue for a split second, then mellowed. “Probably,” she said slowly. “I know he does it. But I’m not good at detecting that kind of thing. Lucky knows better.”

“She was the one who said.”

“Then he probably was. Poor David.”

“Poor?”

“Sometimes I think he’s homesick,” she said. “For Belgium, I mean.”

Erik knew the story. David’s parents had died in a car accident when he was eleven, leaving him with only elderly grandparents who could not care for him. His mother’s sister, Helen, had flown from the States to Brussels and collected her nephew, bringing him to her home in New York and becoming his legal guardian.

“He wears his father’s wedding band,” she said. “On his index finger. Funny. It just occurred to me you’re both fatherless.”

And we both want you,
Erik thought. He flipped his pencil around a few times, and then tried to sound nonchalant as he asked, “Is Will really bisexual?”

Daisy put her tea down and leaned toward him a little. “I don’t know,” she mouthed, as if confessing.

“You don’t know?” he mouthed back with exaggeration.

Her smile was infectious. “I certainly couldn’t go to court with anything on him but it would not surprise me. At all.”

“Huh,” Erik said thoughtfully, staring at the faint lipstick mark on the rim of Daisy’s cup. She was staring at his cup as well, which was bothersome because he already took a lot of shit for drinking tea. Apparently it wasn’t the manly thing to do. But he had never liked coffee and tea had sentimental roots in his heart. His mother brewed tea every night, making cups for her sons while they did homework. Erik’s first independent act in the kitchen was learning to light the burner under the kettle. And he liked how it tasted, especially when it was brewed strong. He used two bags and barely any sugar.

Daisy said nothing about his beverage of choice, though, and opened her book again. Erik went back to work, and a pleasant interlude passed where he was busy and she was reading, yet the space they shared was companionable. The silence between them shimmered warm and inviting, like a campfire. He settled into it contentedly. A cat on the hearth.

“I like your necklace,” she said.

“This?”

“Can I see?”

He put his pencil down, reached behind his neck and unclasped it. He put it in a coiled heap in her waiting palm. She stretched it carefully across her long fingers. It was a gold chain with squared, faceted links. The squares gave it a unique, masculine silhouette, heavy but streamlined. Off the chain hung three small charms. Erik watched as Daisy examined each one: a boat, a fish and a saint’s medal, which was also square.

“Who is this?”

“Birgitta. She’s the patron saint of Sweden.”

Her fingers, with their unpolished oval nails, played with the charms which, like the chain, were old gold, weathered. They had a dull, wise brightness. Many fingers had rubbed, contemplated and worried over them.

“This is beautiful,” Daisy said. “Actually it’s handsome. I don’t want to say macho, but it’s strong-looking.”

“I like the weight of it,” he said. “It’s solid.”

“Is it old?”

He reached and turned the medal over, to show her the engraving on the back:
B.K.E.F. 1865.

“Bjorn Kennet Erik Fiskare. My great-great-great-grandfather.”

“Wow. This is like your history right here.”

“I’m told the boat and the fish are even older but nobody knows really. See. Here.” Erik turned the boat over and showed her
Fiskare
engraved into its bottom. “Fiskare means fisherman in Swedish.”

She looked at him sheepishly. “I thought it meant scissors. You know, the ones with the orange handles.”

He laughed. “I get that all the time.”

“Do you know the word for scissors?”

“No idea.”

“You’re Swedish but your eyes are brown,” she said, gazing intently at him.

“You’re French but your eyes are impossible.”

“I get that all the time.”

He looked away. “My mother’s Italian. So I get blond hair and brown eyes. Makes for a weird combination.”

“Not weird at all. I like it.” She studied the necklace again, holding it up. “So this has come down through the generations?”

He nodded. She wasn’t the first girl to ask him questions about his father’s side of the family. But other girls’ questions always felt like birds pecking at him, wearing him down or tearing him open. Daisy’s curiosity was soft on his skin. She was a beautiful china cup on a table, quietly asking to be filled. And little by little, Erik was tipping over and pouring out.

“Do you remember your father wearing this?”

“Sure. All the time. If I was sitting on his lap I’d like, you know, play with it. I had a little story in my head, this is the pretty lady and this is her boat and she goes sailing in the boat and catches this beautiful fish…”

She held the chain back out to him and he took it, their fingertips touching. “When did he give it to you? You said you were eight when he left.”

He fastened the chain behind his neck again. “The story I know,” he said, “is my mom saw him one more time after he left. To sign divorce papers.”

He glanced down. Daisy had put her hand out, palm up on the table between them. “And sometime during the meeting—” he put his hand on hers. “—he gave this to her. To give to me. And she didn’t for a long time, she kept it put away. I was too young.” His other hand joined the first, holding Daisy’s, rolling it between his palms, running his fingertips along the edges of her nails. “Then when I was about sixteen, she gave it to me.”

“Did you want it?”