Dara turned, heading toward the back office, away from his aftershave smog and the bigness of him.
But she could still see him in the mirror. Derek, tilting his head knowingly, and saying something to her in a voice so low and tawdry, she’d wonder later if she’d misheard.
“Me,” Derek said. “I like the pink.”
* * *
*
He didn’t belong in her studio, in Studio C, which was hers.
Why was he even here at all when Benny and Gaspar were doing all the work, the spectacle of the wall-demolishing now past. And yet a dozen times a day, he seemed to find an excuse to saunter through every room, clipboard clasped, his too-tight dress shirts, his dual phones, his throbbing beeper.
* * *
*
I think you should tell him,” Dara told Charlie later, “there should be some kind of divider. A barrier between Studio B and our studios. To protect the students.”
Charlie looked at her.
“A few of the parents have mentioned it,” Dara said. A white lie, she told herself. They were sure to complain soon. And didn’t Mrs. Bloom’s refusal to set foot inside count?
“I’ll say something to Derek,” Charlie said. “I’ll take care of it.”
* * *
*
In the back office, Dara sat at the desk, going through the invoices impaled on the metal bill holder. Three hundred pounds of artificial snow for The Nutcracker, wigmaster services, two replacement toy soldier uniforms, four replacement mouse heads.
“Were you talking to him earlier?”
Dara looked up. It was Marie, skin pink with heat, that white leotard now sweated through, translucent. You could see everything.
“To Derek. What were you talking about?” Marie said. “Tell me.”
Dara raised an eyebrow, a gesture inherited from their mother.
“Nothing,” she said, setting down the bill holder. “It was nothing.” There was a sneaking pleasure in this, a flash of jealousy from her sister.
Marie paused, touching her neck with an open hand.
“I could never talk to him,” she whispered.
Dara looked at her. “That’s ridiculous.”
“When he comes near me,” Marie said, her neck instantly red, “I can’t breathe.”
THE CURTAIN
The next morning, Dara woke up with a thought of Marie, that perennial swirl of her fine hair caught in the drain of their mother’s old claw-foot tub.
Marie never let you forget she was there, even when she wasn’t. Even when she didn’t live there anymore.
Marie, who’d wasted an hour or more on that cardboard sword stunt the other day, making such a spectacle of herself. In that obscenely sheer leotard, feigning the Sword Swallower, plunging the foils into her mouth as the contractor watched.
When he comes near me, I can’t breathe.
* * *
*
It didn’t make sense. Marie liked softness, gentleness, refinement in men. The ones she’d dallied with in her twenties, tousle-haired golden boys who played guitar for her and padded around her studio in bare feet so as not to scuff the maple floor. The studio dads with the wool blazers and the smooth hands who thanked her so very much for the elegance and refinement she’d given their daughters.
These were the men Marie liked.
* * *
*
I can’t feel,” Charlie said, leaning over at the kitchen table.
Dara looked down at his feet, long and marbled. Six years after he’d been forced to stop, his feet were still dancer’s feet. Hard and gnarled and hoof-like. But not half as mangled as hers, ugly like a crow’s, or Marie’s, which their father used to call the boomerangs.
Jolie-laide, their mother always insisted. To her, all dancers’ feet were beautiful, beautiful not in spite of but because of their hardness, their contortions, their battle against nature, against the body itself. What could be more beautiful, she used to say, than a will like that?
Kneeling down, Dara wrapped her hand around one of Charlie’s feet. It felt like the bedpost on her parents’ bed.
“Can you feel this?” she asked Charlie, gently squeezing his arch. After the last surgery, he was supposed to get sensation back. They always said he’d get sensation back.
“I can’t feel anything,” he said, looking down at her, at Dara on her knees before him.
* * *
*
All day, there were thunderous tremors from Studio B, leaving a haze of debris, the smell of mold, mice. The silt from decades of young girls: stray earring studs, hair elastics, dusted ribbons, Band-Aids curled with browned blood.
Charlie holed up in the back office with heating pads and ibuprofen; Dara had to manage alone. Would have to explain the way the floors shook to parents. To instruct the girls not to be distracted by the tiny earthquakes under their feet.
* * *
*
You gotta watch that. Believe me, I know.”
It was Derek’s smoke-thick voice. She could hear it the minute the last of the fourteen-year-olds filed out of class and the strains of Giselle ceased.
She followed his voice through the sooty brume of Studio B, past Benny and Gaspar, their faces covered by safety masks so large and thick that Dara wondered what she and her little students were inhaling every day.
“This is the sweet stuff,” Derek was saying. “Sweet as mom’s milk. Well, not as sweet as my mom’s, but she was neighborhood tops.”
The laugh—the cartoonish har-dee-har-har—making Dara’s teeth grind as she opened the office door to see Derek and Charlie.
Derek inexplicably lifting Charlie’s shirt up, examining him under the desk lamp. On the felt blotter were two pill bottles, penny-orange.
“You gotta get ’em to hit this spot,” he said, his Hawaiian Tropic hands splayed on Charlie’s blue-white back. “They put the needles right here. But in the meantime, try those pills.”
“Dara,” Charlie said, eyes wide with surprise. This, she thought, is what it would feel like to catch him at something. It was a funny kind of feeling.
“Comparing war wounds,” Derek said, spotting Dara.
“So you’re a doctor too,” Dara said, picking up one of the pill bottles. “I guess you fix everything.”
“Dr. Feelgood,” Derek said, smiling as ever while Charlie tugged his shirt down. “Old rotator cuff tear, high school football. Used to have nerve pain so bad I’d get tears in my eyes. My ex knew some tricks.” He stretched his shoulder, his shirt straining. So big in their small office, the wingspan of an eagle or vulture. “I try to spread the wealth. Just for friends.”
Dara handed him back the pill bottles, watched him closing his palm over them, the big lion’s paw. His hands, in that brief brushing of hers against his, felt like the bottom of those pointe shoes after sixty strokes with her X-acto.
Dara adding, finally, “We don’t have friends.”
* * *
*
Charlie’s body was a glorious wreck—his jumper’s knee, the rotator cuff tendonitis, the hip arthritis from overuse, and most of all his spine, which had never been the same since the surgeries. Since they put his spine back together with wires, plates, screws.
They didn’t even know when he’d done it, but it could have happened at any performance, any rehearsal. They wouldn’t have believed it if the X-rays hadn’t been right before them like that old Lite-Brite game their father picked up for them at a garage sale once.
They called it a hangman’s fracture because of the way your neck snapped back.
It started with a broken bone—C2, a neck bone second from the skull, a bad one to break. Typically, it was the result of a very bad fall, or a very bad car crash.
Charlie wasn’t even certain how it happened. It could have been any number of falls, collisions, a dancer aloft in his arms crashing down into him. That was how it was for a dancer.
When he himself was a boy, the doctor told them, his best friend sustained a hangman’s fracture his very first time at the high dive.
What a thing, he told them. What a thing.
The problems started with the broken bone, but it affected everything else. Nerve damage doesn’t discriminate. Sensation tentative. Arousal too. Everything was connected, you see. All the parts—each so delicate—forming a precarious whole.
* * *