Various Positions (13 page)

“Margot Fonteyn.” Roderick raised a single eyebrow. “1957. The Sadler’s Wells Ballet. Some critic asked for a comment on her performance and, boy, did she put him in his place.” He looked over my head for a minute as if this scene were playing out above me. “Are you a quote person?”

“Oh yeah,” I lied. “Completely.”

“Me too.” He leaned an elbow on his desk and seemed to consider me more carefully. “I’m actually a little obsessed with them.”

In my head, I saw the July page of my Gelsey Kirkland calendar. It was early in her career, when she was still with the New York City Ballet. The photo was from Balanchine’s
Apollo
and Gelsey wore the crisp white frock associated with the ballet, more tennis than tutu. Her arms were splayed akimbo and her back curved in a giant arc, ribs open to the ceiling. There was a quotation beneath it.

I spoke slowly, remembering it word by word. “
In my ballets, women come first
.
Men are consorts.
”

“Whoa.” He sat back in his chair, his face alive with new thought. “Someone knows her Balanchine.”

Again a blush rose from my chest. I gripped the muscles in my neck to stifle it.

“Balanchine,” he repeated, smiling. “Quite the man, I’d say.
The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.
Now that’s a choreographer I can respect.” He made a funny face, flaring his nostrils and holding my gaze hard. I laughed faintly and he seemed to enjoy that. “But these days people are so quick to write off that kind of thing as objectification. Personally, I think it’s crazy.” He sighed. “So let me get this straight—you recite Balanchine and you practice between classes? Not bad for a grade-nine student.”

I stared downward as though what he was saying was unpleasant.

“That kind of dedication is vital. It’s something I really respect.”

My body felt light.
Respect
. I tried to control the rush of pleasure.

“But be careful.” He folded a hand over his chin so that his index finger tapped his nose. “Do you remember what I said in class the other day? About being more than a good student?” He paused. “Do you know what I mean by that?”

I nodded.

“Good. Because what we’re doing here is so much more complex than ticking the right boxes. You need to approach the training with an availability that involves less thinking and more … trusting.” He paused again, considered me carefully. “Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. “Yes, I can.”

*   *   *

My relief was enormous, intoxicating. It followed me all through afternoon academics and accompanied me on the subway ride home. Not only had Roderick been nice to me, not only had I impressed him with my knowledge of quotations, he had expressed his respect.
Respect
. I let the fullness of the word hit me as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom. I had never considered the possibility of earning the high opinion of a grown-up man. What would my dad say if he knew? I pictured the surprise loosening his jaw, the way he’d lift his eyebrows and turn away from me, take a moment to believe his own ears. A wicked thrill shot up my spine.

I walked down the hallway. My parents’ bedroom door was open and my mom stood in front of the closet, the mirrored doors pushed to the left to reveal my dad’s side, suit jackets in gloomy colors and two rows of dress shoes beneath. Before I had a chance to say hello, she burrowed in between the hangers and her head disappeared inside a blazer. For a moment I watched her pull it down, stuff her hands inside the outer pockets, and then skim the interior lining. Then I kept walking to my bedroom. I didn’t know what she was doing but it gave me a feeling I couldn’t stand, like watching someone trip on an escalator when you’re a thousand steps above. It made my temples pound and I rubbed my thumbs against them and sat down at my desk. I didn’t have time to worry about my mom now.

I typed “Roderick Allen” into the Google bubble on the top left corner of my computer screen. I didn’t know what I was looking for but I knew I was looking for something: information, clues. Why had Roderick become a choreographer and what did he really think of dancers? Did he hate women, as Sixty had told me on the first day of school, or did he notice their bodies like Veronica had said? Was there some complicated history that could make both things true at the same time? The monitor hesitated for a moment, then loaded 1,730,000 hits. I scanned the first page; they were mostly from the academy. I double-clicked on the top one and was redirected to the faculty bios. Roderick’s was first. I read it slowly and repeated aloud the various European cities he’d worked in: Paris, Stuttgart, Bratislava. What was I doing in 1996 when Roderick was awarded the Prix Pavlova in St. Petersburg? I was in kindergarten.

I moved on to the next page. Here there were hits from the companies where he’d worked as a choreographer. There were links to newspaper articles too, reviews of his original ballets and announcements of new appointments. I clicked on one from France’s
Le Monde
. It was an article about the premiere of a commissioned piece for the Ballet National de Marseille and at the top was a photograph from the opening-night gala. Roderick wore a tuxedo and stood next to a dark-haired woman in a strapless dress. Her eyes flashed with a feeling I recognized, the exhilaration of having been onstage. I read the caption and confirmed what I’d suspected; she was the leading ballerina. I moved in toward the screen, studied Roderick’s position. How did he feel about this woman? One hand held a champagne flute, the other hand disappeared behind the dancer’s lithe, silky waist.

My bedroom door creaked open.

“George?”

I sat up a little, startled, looked over my shoulder. My mom came into the room. I hit the backspace key once, twice, without thinking, turned to meet her eye. She was wearing the oversized T-shirt she sometimes slept in. The cotton was so worn it looked gossamer in places, stretched softly into evaporated patches. She belly flopped lightly onto my bed.

“Who’s that?” She motioned to the computer screen.

It had returned to the headshot of Roderick next to his bio.

“My teacher. Well, the head of the school.”

“Oh.” My mom swiveled her legs around so that she sat on the edge of the bed and leaned toward the computer. “He’s very handsome.”

I examined the photo, felt my mom next to me doing the same. It was mainly of Roderick’s head and shoulders but his knees folded into the frame as if he was sitting on the floor. His torso was a shadow, a black shirt enveloped by an even blacker jacket. A bare forearm crossed over his knee. There was something soft about his gaze, something urgent at the same time.

“How old is he?” my mom asked.

“I don’t know. Your age.”

“No. He’s older than me.” She leaned in closer. I could smell her jasmine body cream. I looked down at her bare legs, the pear-shaped beauty mark above her left knee. “What are the dates in his bio?”

“Huh?”

“Does it say when he finished his first degree or joined his first company or something?”

“Oh.” I looked back at the text. “He graduated from the English National Ballet School in 1979.”

“Is he married?”

“I don’t know.”

She nodded. Then she went quiet, seemed lost in thought. “Do you like him?” she finally asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Is he a good teacher? Do you learn a lot in his classes?”

“Yeah.” I squirmed in my chair a little. “He’s really famous. Well, pretty famous.”

“Does he flirt with you girls?”

“Mom.”

“No, I’m curious.” She laughed. “I’m just curious about how it works in ballet school. Is he stern with you girls? He looks … so charming.”

“It’s not like that.” I spoke quickly and turned my head away. I didn’t want her to see me go red. “It’s just normal.”

“Does he touch you when he gives corrections?”

“Mom.”

“I just thought that, I don’t know, maybe the male teachers stopped putting their hands on you once you reached a certain age.”

“Nobody thinks that way.” I sank lower in my chair, frustration curdling inside me.

“Oh.” She got up, moved behind my chair. She lifted a piece of my hair, stroked it softly with the pads of her fingers. This irritated my scalp in a tiny, gentle way. “Your friend Laura is very pretty.”

I watched the screen.

“She seems a little older than you, doesn’t she? A little more grown-up.” She leaned over, hooked an arm around me. “Does he like her?”

“Who?”

“Your teacher.” She read off the screen. “Roderick Allen.”

I shrugged, tried to push off her hug.

“Men are always men, sweetie. Even when they’re teachers.” The phrase had a heaviness to it, not sad but exhausted, like she’d been lugging it around for years. “Just take a look at your father.”

I bit my lip because I wanted to scream. “That’s not true.”

“It doesn’t matter how many degrees they have or how principled they are about other things. They’re really all the same in the end. It’s probably just biology.”

I swiveled in my chair to look at her and recognized the danger in her eyes, like a glass teetering on the edge of a table. If she was trying to say something, I wished she’d just spit it out. “Do you mean that they’re all perverted?”

The question woke her up. She took a step away from me, tripped over a pair of my pointe shoes that I’d left on the carpet, and laughed.

“No, George. I’m exaggerating, you’re absolutely right.”

“So what do you mean?”

She couldn’t stop laughing now, and this was more annoying than anything she’d said, her ability to jump from one extreme to another and make everything feel meaningless along the way.

“Don’t stay up too late.” She kissed me on the forehead and shut my door as she left.

EIGHT

I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head.
Men are always men
. Why had my mom even bothered to say it when she instantly retracted her words? It was probably a game like all her other games, but I needed to be sure. So I watched for it, wondered whether it might reveal itself in the ordinary. Men parked their cars, raked leaves off their lawns, shopped with their kids at the supermarket. I wondered if it really applied to all of them, even the ones who looked 100 percent nice. I stared as though staring would uncover it, this nameless sexual thing they all possessed. The feeling it gave me was disgusting but addictive, sort of like cracking your knuckles. I performed it like a duty, waited patiently for the thing to expose itself. Would it be just a glint in their eye? Would I catch them ogling pretty women and scratching the lumps in their crotches? I doubted that’s what my mom meant. She was hinting at something tougher, darker, like meat you can never chew through.

The subway was a good opportunity for people-watching. There were so many men and they couldn’t go anywhere. I tried to pick a different type with every journey. One day it was a big thug of a guy in a quilted ski jacket. He had a hard plastic case beside him that I assumed was a box of tools. I tried to see things in the harsh light of my mom’s implications. I searched the train for the kind of woman he would have sex with. I found her; she was standing beneath a cell phone network ad, holding a vertical pole for balance. She had dark roots that gave way to brassy hair, skin that looked like it had been through the washing machine and dryer. She was wearing a bulky winter coat but it stopped above her knees, revealing legs in semitransparent tights. The legs weren’t thin by ballet standards, but they weren’t fat either, and I imagined him wanting to touch them with his callused hands, rip off her tights.

Another day it was a tall man just a little bit older than Isabel; in fact, I figured he was the kind of guy Isabel would describe as hot. He sat across from me in a wool coat and a turtleneck, had a shadow of stubble around his mouth. There was something gentle about him—it may have been the feminine slope of his shoulders—but I wondered whether this gentleness was a façade. The right girl was sitting directly to my left; she looked sixteen, seventeen maybe, and was really no bigger than me. I stared at her nails, half-moons of blue chewed to the nub, and imagined him on top of her, smothering her body with his weight.

The biggest challenge was the most normal ones. I studied the men who could’ve been my dad’s friends. They had expensive coats and leather briefcases, that serious look of dignity in their eyes. I tried to get inside their heads, imagine dirty images on the screens of their brains. Did they just think about the female exterior, the plumpness of a bum, the perkiness of a boob? Or was this somehow the wrong track? I tried to think in anatomical detail, imagine a dark, territorial kind of lust that involved the female insides. I thought of pink wet flesh and the need to split it open, to capture something even pinker, even wetter, up inside.

My imaginings grew more convincing with every effort—or at least I got better at concocting details that could keep me occupied for entire subway rides at a time. One evening, heading home from a late rehearsal, I found my subject sitting directly across from me, reading a
Metro
newspaper on his lap. He looked to be my mom’s age and wore a tidy suit, although something about its shape and color made me sure it wasn’t as expensive as the suits in my dad’s closet. He had pale skin for a man, and soft hair parted deeply to the side so that it made a heavy slope across his forehead. The subway car wasn’t crowded and I was the only girl in easy visibility. The reality was unavoidable: if this man was a man in the men-are-always-men way, and by deductive logic he would have to be, then I was the woman he was thinking about. The idea sent a wave of disgust to my chest, but there was another feeling too. A curiosity.

I couldn’t see the man’s eyes, so I focused on his brow and got to work. My brain stumbled over the first image, but I willed myself over it like a hurdle. I had to go on. He was pretending to read the headlines but he was really thinking about squeezing his thumb inside the waist of my jeans so that he could slide the button through its hole with his index finger. He’d pinch the zipper of my fly, then drag it downward tooth by tooth. With one hand on each hip, he’d yank my jeans down to my ankles. I hesitated over my underwear, but it would have to go too. I felt his hand, big, warm, strange, through the thin layer of cotton, then the shock of skin on skin as he dipped his fingers beneath the underwear, pulled it to the floor. He leaned me against the see-through subway divide, my bum white, my back arched, and pounded his body into me.