Now, there is Aimee, on Tracey’s wall—clear as day. She shared the space with Michael and Janet Jackson, Prince, Madonna, James Brown. Over the course of the summer she made her room into a kind of shrine to these people, her favorite dancers, decorated with many huge, glossy posters of them, all caught in mid-movement, so that her walls read like hieroglyphics, indecipherable to me but still clearly some form of message, constructed from gestures, bent elbows and legs, splayed fingers, pelvic thrusts. Disliking publicity shots, she chose stills from concerts we couldn’t afford to attend, the kind in which you could see the sweat on a dancer’s face. These, she argued, were “real.” My room was likewise a shrine to dance but I was stuck in fantasy, I went to the library and took out old seventies biographies of the great MGM and RKO idols, ripped out their corny headshots and stuck them up on my walls with Blu-tack. In this way I discovered the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold: a photo of them in mid-air, doing the splits, marked the entrance to my room, they were leaping over the doorway. I learned that they were self-taught, and though they danced like gods had no formal training at all. I took a kind of proprietorial pride in them, as if they were my brothers, as if we were family. I tried hard to interest Tracey—which of my brothers would she marry? which would she kiss?—but she couldn’t sit through even the briefest clip of black-and-white film any longer, everything about it bored her. It wasn’t “real”—too much had been subtracted, too much artificially shaped. She wanted to see a dancer on stage, sweating, real, not done up in top hat and tails. But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.
One night I dreamed of the Cotton Club: Cab Calloway was there, and Harold and Fayard, and I stood on a podium with a lily behind my ear. In my dream we were all elegant and none of us knew pain, we had never graced the sad pages of the history books my mother bought for me, never been called ugly or stupid, never entered theaters by the back door, drunk from separate water fountains or taken our seats at the back of any bus. None of our people ever swung by their necks from a tree, or found themselves suddenly thrown overboard, shackled, in dark water—no, in my dream we were golden! No one was more beautiful or elegant than us, we were a blessed people, wherever you happened to find us, in Nairobi, Paris, Berlin, London, or tonight, in Harlem. But when the orchestra started up, and as my audience sat at their little tables with drinks in their hands, happy in themselves, waiting for me, their sister, to sing, I opened my mouth and no sound came out. I woke up to find I had wet the bed. I was eleven.
My mother tried to help, in her way. Look closer at that Cotton Club, she said, there is the Harlem Renaissance. Look: here are Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. Look closer at Gone with the Wind: here is the NAACP. But at the time my mother’s political and literary ideas did not interest me as much as arms and legs, as rhythm and song, as the red silk of Mammy’s underskirt or the unhinged pitch of Prissy’s voice. The kind of information I was looking for, which I felt I needed to shore myself up, I dug out instead from an old, stolen library book—The History of Dance. I read about steps passed down over centuries, through generations. A different kind of history from my mother’s, the kind that is barely written down—that is felt. And it seemed very important, at the time, that Tracey should feel it too, all that I was feeling, and at the same moment that I felt it, even if it no longer interested her. I ran all the way to her house, burst into her room and said, you know when you jump down into the splits (she was the only girl in Miss Isabel’s dance class who could do this), you know how you jump into a split and you said your dad can do it, too, and you got it from your dad, and he got it from Michael Jackson, and Jackson got it from Prince and maybe James Brown, well, they all got it from the Nicholas Brothers, the Nicholas Brothers are the originals, they’re the very first, and so even if you don’t know it or say you don’t care, you’re still dancing like them, you’re still getting it from them. She was smoking one of her mother’s cigarettes out of her bedroom window. She looked much older than me doing that, more like forty-five than eleven, she could even blow smoke out of those flaring nostrils, and as I spoke aloud this supposedly momentous thing I had come to tell her I felt the words turning to ash in my mouth. I didn’t even know what I was saying or what I meant by it, really. To stop the smoke from filling the room, she kept her back to me, but when I had finished making my point, if that’s what it was, she turned to me and said, very coolly, as if we were perfect strangers, “Don’t you ever talk about my father again.”
Five
“This isn’t working.”
It was only about a month after I’d started working for her—for Aimee—and as soon as it was said aloud I saw she was right, it wasn’t working, and the problem lay with me. I was young and inexperienced, and didn’t seem able to find my way back to that impression I’d had, on the very first day we’d met, that she might be a human woman like any other. Instead my gut reaction had been overlaid by the reactions of others—ex-colleagues, old schoolfriends, my own parents—and each had their effect, every gasp or incredulous laugh, so that now each morning when I arrived at Aimee’s house in Knightsbridge or her Chelsea offices I had to battle a very powerful sense of the surreal. What was I doing here? I often stuttered as I spoke, or forgot basic facts she’d told me. I would lose the thread of conversations during conference calls, too distracted by another voice inside me that never stopped saying: she’s not real, none of this is real, it’s all your childish fantasy. It was a surprise at the end of a day to close the heavy black door of her Georgian townhouse and find myself not in a dream city after all but in London and only a few steps from the Piccadilly Line. I sat down next to all the other commuters as they read their city paper, often picking one up myself, but with the sense of having traveled further: not just from the center back to the suburbs but from another world back into theirs, the world that seemed to me, aged twenty-two, to exist at the center of the center—the one they were all so busy reading about.
“It’s not working because you’re not comfortable,” Aimee informed me, from a big, gray couch that sat opposite an identical couch on which I sat. “You need to be comfortable in yourself to work for me. You’re not.”