Various Positions (18 page)

“See, right now—” Roderick was walking into the studio, moving downstage toward the mirror. The soles of his shoes made light clacks against the wood. “Right now you’re doing a
first arabesque
. And that’s fine. Your body’s aligned, the shape is nice, there’s great extension behind.” He had reached the mirror and now changed direction with a military sharpness. “But the difference between the kind of
arabesque
that gets you a position in a
corps de ballet
and leaves you floundering there for the rest of your career, and the kind of
arabesque
that casts you as Giselle or Juliet on the finest stages of Europe—London, Paris, St. Petersburg—well, that difference isn’t something you’ll attain by admiring yourself in the mirror.”

The heat across my cheeks was immediate. Roderick had stopped now, was standing in front of the mirror just at the spot that blocked my reflection. Moisture gathered in the nook of my lower back and I wondered how long I had before it would show through my leotard.

He raised the toe of his shoe and lowered it with a clap. “I’ll be the first to harp on the importance of strong technique. It’s our craft. It’s what sets the standard for what we do, what makes this a skilled and complex art form and not, say, modern dance.” He chuckled. “Of course there are still some ballet schools in the world that graduate students with flapping wrists and overextended
à la secondes
. But if you ever want to be promoted past the
corps
in a good company, your technique needs to be so basic, so second nature, that it’s there to be taken for granted. Dancing is not
doing
an
arabesque
.” I could see him shift his weight. “You have to let the
arabesque
do
you
.”

This sounded funny. It sounded like sex. He had a look on his face like he knew all the secrets of the world. It made me feel transparent. If I danced perfectly, the sex part would evaporate. I pictured an
arabesque
in its most real terms, no longer a position that could be assumed by human limbs, but an entity in and of itself, a thing, a creature.

“You’re thinking too hard,” Roderick said. “And god only knows what about.” He began to walk toward me. He moved behind me and tapped the curving end of my foot. “From here. Extend from here.”

I kept my face fixed determinedly forward and tried to stretch from my toe. I heard him shuffle in a little closer. Then I felt the warmth of his hand underneath my calf.

“From here.”

He was touching me. His hand was in one place, stationary, but I could feel it everywhere, the way sunlight hits you all at once. I tried to extend from my calf as he had instructed, and the muscular effort made me push into his hand even more.

He chuckled. “There you are.”

He let go of my calf. I felt a shiver of relief as I strained to maintain the height of my leg. But then his fingers were back. They moved in single, spidery steps along the underside of my leg.

“Now continue to extend all along here. That’s right.”

His fingers reached my knee, paused, and then stepped onto my inner thigh. The feeling was magnified now, the intensity of his touch on this sensitive part of my leg. It became more acute with every finger step, until he was halfway up my thigh. Was I supposed to tell him to stop? The sensation throbbed in both directions, upward from the point of contact and downward from my groin. Still his fingers climbed, approached the junction with my body. I held my breath. Then, in an instant, his hand was gone.

“See. You just can’t think about these things. It makes them sound ridiculous.” He walked away from me and leaned against the mirror again. “You have to actually
do
them.”

“Yeah.” My leg dropped to the floor.

“You think it sounds ridiculous?”

“What?”

He gave me a strange look. It was sly, almost accusatory. He turned away from me and walked toward the corner of the room. I pretended to practice the new
arabesque
positioning but my body was numb. When Roderick got to the corner, he whipped abruptly back around.

“I know these last few weeks haven’t been fun for you girls—trust me, it’s been no picnic for the faculty either.”

I didn’t understand for a minute, and then my brain sort of woke up again. He was referring to the other girls, the ones who were in trouble.

“There’s nothing really more depressing than having to dash young people’s dreams.” He shook his head as though disapproving of himself. “But it’ll be a miserable awakening for them otherwise. A harsh blow now has that much longer to heal. Of course, that doesn’t make any of it any easier to do. But I just keep telling myself that if I can’t, hand on heart, see the student getting into a company upon graduation, well, it isn’t in anyone’s best interest, and least of all theirs, to let them stay on at the academy.” He paused, rubbed the back of his neck. “Right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So then it really just becomes a question of trusting what you believe in.”

He started to walk toward me. My nipples hardened against my bodysuit. Something in his manner scared me. I imagined him reaching out and grabbing me from the front.

“What do you believe in, Georgia?”

“What do I…”

“Tell me what you believe.”

“Um, lots of things. I guess.”

“Really?” He was about a meter from me now and he stopped. “Just a moment ago, when I told you that you had to
be
the
arabesque
, what did you think about that?”

“Uh, I—”

“Did you think it was a useful image? A useful way of thinking your way through the movement? Or did you think … if you’ll pardon my French for a second … did you think it was bullshit?”

“Um—”

“Go on. Be honest. Tell me what you thought.”

“I thought it was a useful image.”

He gave this a firm nod, looked me straight in the eye. “Okay. Now tell me the truth.”

“What?”

“Tell me what you really thought.”

My spit felt gluey in my mouth. I waited for his expression to change again, for him to guide me toward what he wanted me to say. But a grin was carved deep into his face. If anything it was broadening.

“I … um, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

I shook my head. I had an idiot face just then, twitchy and self-hating.

“You’re worried, aren’t you? Hey, it’s understandable. It’s a nervous place to be. What with lists going up and us having to let a student go.” He paused. “You have nothing to worry about.” The words arrived slowly, significantly, his eyes fixed on mine.

I must have moved my head in a way that betrayed my confusion, or at least the need for clarification, because he lifted a hand to silence me.

“You’re not going anywhere. So let’s not worry about that. What you need to focus on is your application. You need to start approaching your work with a fullness, an openness, that I haven’t seen yet. It’ll take an incredible amount of courage.” He stepped toward the studio door. “You know we decide casting for Junior Showcase at the end of the term. Somehow I imagine you as a particularly beautiful Manon in Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet.” He glanced at me over his shoulder and walked out of the room.

*   *   *

When I saw Sixty that afternoon, she pulled me into the girls’ second-floor bathroom.

“What happened?”

I looked into her penny-colored eyes. I wanted to tell her everything. She’d remind me how ballet teachers were supposed to touch us, how it didn’t mean anything at all. But I backed away from her, bumped into the lip of the sink.

“He just wanted to check in.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, basically. I don’t know—it’s hard to explain.”

“I’m really good at understanding things.”

Her eyes were big with worry, and again a part of me wanted to throw my arms around her neck. What was stopping me? Something about what had happened felt too private, a weird mix of bad and good.

“We talked about technique class. He gave me some corrections for my turns.”

It sounded like a lie. I could hear the weakness in my own voice, a decibel away from cracking.

“Oh.” She held the door open for me. “That’s good, I guess.”

*   *   *

On the subway ride home I thought about Roderick and it made a strange buzz through my body that I didn’t like. I wanted to cross my legs, knot my intestines, force the irritation out of me. The warmth of his fingers was just a frequency away; I had only to fine-tune the dial, and my memory came through sharply. I imagined it over and over, reprocessing the sensation even when I wanted it to stop. It felt awful, but something satisfied in the awfulness, like pulling hairs from your leg one by one. Mostly I remembered the pressure, the push of his skin through my tights. His fingers had come so close. I couldn’t decide whether that was okay, and this is what made me furious, my inability to make sense of it all.

My dad wasn’t home, so my mom and I had to have dinner alone. We sat across from each other on stools at the kitchen island and ate the packaged lamb curry she’d bought at the organic shop around the block. She stared at her plate and bounced her leg under the table. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

“I’m sorry I was rude,” I said.

She nodded slowly. We were quiet for a while. Then she said, “I’ve only met her a handful of times, you know.”

“Met who?”

She rolled her eyes as though her meaning was obvious. When I didn’t respond she said, “You know who. It’s only human that I’m curious. Did she…” She paused, one eye narrowed in deliberation. “Can you tell me what they’re like together?”

“What are you talking about, Mom?”

“Your dad and”—she dabbed her mouth with her napkin, then let her hand drop to the counter with a thud—“Pilar. How did they greet each other? Did they hug?”

“I … I don’t remember.”

“Did she ask after me?”

“Why do you care?” I whined.

She held my eye sharply. “You could be a little understanding, Georgia. That’s all. It’s complicated when marriages end … abruptly.”

“Nothing ended abruptly!”

“If you say so.”

This was the most infuriating response imaginable. “Of course I
say so
! It’s the truth! It’s what you’ve told me a thousand times!”

I stormed out of the kitchen and ran up to my room. Why had I apologized at all? Any effort with my mom was useless because she was determined to see things the way she wanted to, let herself stay miserable forever. I turned on my computer and stared at the screen. My thoughts swam in the neon light. I couldn’t let my mom bug me now. If I wanted to figure out anything about Roderick I needed to get hold of myself. I clicked on the academy’s Web site and went straight to Roderick’s headshot. What was it that I was afraid of? I traced the pad of my finger over my lips, leaned in toward the keyboard. I typed “Do older men like teenage girls” into the search bubble, pressed
ENTER
, and sat back.

The screen loaded 1,340,000 hits. I read the first page. WikiAnswers informed me that such men were “immature predators” and that a preference for young women was indicative of “low self-esteem, lack of ambition, emotional confusion and creepiness.” Another site explained that it was a natural biological phenomenon, that men were programmed to be attracted to girls at their most fertile, which occurred somewhere between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two. On the second page was an advice forum for teenage girls where a sixteen-year-old who signed off as “Lovelorn Lolita” asked how to break the news of her thirty-five-year-old boyfriend to her parents. A Dr. Marcus Sternberger, child and adolescent psychologist, informed her she was the victim of statutory rape and that she should seek help immediately. On the third page, I found a study conducted by a group of professors at Duke University in North Carolina. The study surveyed 650 high school teachers across twenty-five states and concluded that “being surrounded by beautiful young women put male teachers at risk of growing dissatisfied with their wives, which often resulted in marriage breakdown.” And on the sixth page I found an article called “Doing the Prof” written by a former English lecturer at an unidentified university. He relayed stories of dodging the advances of various wide-eyed undergrads who stalked him during office hours, until he finally succumbed to the efforts of one particular raven-haired beauty, a twenty-year-old philosophy major who would become his future wife.

I pictured this dark-haired girl visiting her male teacher, his designs growing in barely perceptible increments, one day enjoying a shared smile, the next day imagining a kiss. These things didn’t happen in big bangs. They didn’t inflict upon reality like a horrible accident or an unforeseeable flash flood. They progressed directly out of the ordinary. There was little chance of a surprise attack; the consequences were too big. Roderick would never grab my boob or ask me to have sex with him; it was just too risky. If he actually did have the hots for me, he would try things so slowly that I almost wouldn’t notice at all. It would start just the way it had started, Roderick’s fingers moving in a perfectly appropriate way, leaving just enough space for him to bail at any moment, for both of us to pretend that nothing weird was going on.

I sucked air deep into my lungs. All I had to do to protect myself was watch Roderick closely. If I was always a step ahead of his designs, nothing could happen to me. I rubbed my hands up and down my thighs, felt strength in my palms again. The more that I knew, the better. It reminded me of something I’d heard about Napoleon, that military genius lies in knowing your enemy’s next move. I needed to know as much as possible. I changed into my pajamas and came back to my computer. I reopened the Google window and typed “Teen sex older man” into the search bubble.

The hits loaded. I looked over my shoulder to double-check that my door was shut tight. I moved in closer to the screen and clicked on the first site. Hot pink saturated the screen. Then “Girls Getting Fucked Good” loaded in across the top of the new page, with “Watch Them Get Fucked Good!” in a puffier font on the left. Spanning below it was a girl, a girl who looked Isabel’s age, with stringy brown hair that hung in her face, although her face was not the first place my eye went. The girl was glisteningly naked and her body stretched all the way across the frame. She was lying on her stomach but pressing her bum high up toward the camera. Her bum was amazing, two smooth cushions taut over the bulge of rounded bone. Then, between them, a tiny orb of darkened skin was thrust into the spotlight. I stared at it, amazed that she was letting me stare at it. I moved in closer to the screen, tried to see more of it, tried to make out the tiny folds of skin around it. But the image was dizzying up close. I looked at her back. It swooped into a catlike arch, a delicate ridge of vertebrae just barely visible down its center. Her skin had a twinkle to it, like she was covered in a very fine layer of craft sparkles. By her arm was the shadow of a breast, dipping in a pointy globe toward the floor. She looked backward into the camera with a sleepy look in her eye, as though she wasn’t quite sure whether she was meant to be awake. Her lips loosened like a kid who can’t breathe properly through her nose.
Mandi
was written in an elaborate red cursive underneath her, then:
A young slut named Mandi teaches you to get an older man’s attention. Download video here.