*
You don’t know anything about his injuries,” Dara told Derek later, finding him in the stairwell, texting with one hand, other hand on a tilting cup of takeout coffee.
“True,” he said, finishing his text before looking up. “But I know about pain. You don’t work long in my business without your fair share of that.”
“You should never touch a dancer’s body.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Only dancers get to touch dancers, that how it works?”
He gave her a look full of meaning, a meaning she couldn’t grasp.
“Pain is different for us,” Dara said. The pain threshold of ballet dancers was three times greater than that of anyone else. That was what their mother always said, told her pupils, told them. Three times greater, maybe four. Maybe ten.
“I guess you know a lot about it,” Derek said, putting his phone in his pocket as if the conversation interested him at last. “Pain. I guess you come to like it.”
“No,” Dara said, her face warm, the stairwell starting to fill with incoming students. “We just make it our friend.”
“So,” he said, as if catching her in something, “you have a friend, after all.” Students were passing, but he tried to hold her gaze, to catch it at all.
She would not give it to him but couldn’t seem to make herself move. Couldn’t seem to draw her face into a scowl, a dismissal. Couldn’t seem to, maybe, breathe.
Hearing a creak, she turned. Looking up the stairwell, she saw a shadow she knew was Marie.
* * *
*
When he comes near me, I can’t breathe.
All afternoon, the hammer-slapping, the slow drone of a hundred machines next door, Dara puzzled over it. Over Marie.
Though she herself had lost her breath with him, it was different. It was because he’d overstepped his boundaries. But to be so . . . taken with that man. That backslapper, glad-hander, noisemaker with his white teeth, like the dusty mints they used to have at nice restaurants? That smell beneath the aftershave, like crushed cigarettes and Speed Stick. The telltale white spots of a tanning booth rash, the furry forearms of a primate.
But then she remembered the way Marie looked at him, so shy, recessed even, as if his presence, the expanse of him, was overwhelming. His big, aging footballer shoulders, that heavy cologne, his stomping feet and his constant jiggling of the keys in his pocket. A lumberjack who could take down a wall, could crack anything in half with his bare hands.
They were all strong. Dara, Charlie, Marie. Everyone there was strong. Charlie, in his heyday, could lift dancers above his head as if they were mere butterflies, fluttering between his hands.
Still, looking at the contractor, Dara felt certain he could snap her in two like a wishbone.
It made her pause. It made her need to sit down a moment.
* * *
*
The next morning, Dara brought it up to Marie again. It had been bothering her.
“He’s not attractive,” Dara said.
Marie didn’t say anything.
They were sitting on the floor of Studio A, Dara helping Marie rub ointment on her legs, vibrating with old nerve pain.
“He’s really not,” Dara continued, pushing her thumbs into her sister’s narrow thighs. Pushing as hard as she could. It was the only way it worked.
“Maybe,” Marie said, “we have different ideas about attractive.”
* * *
*
Later, Dara spotted Marie contemplating Derek’s work boots, abandoned on the tarp when he disappeared for a two-hour lunch, swapped for his fancy bit loafers, shined to butterscotch. The boots were big, like Herman Munster shoes. Brown and mottled like a baked potato. Speckled with milky paint, or chemicals, thick orange laces snaking up the center.
They were so big, like another person in the room. Like a man in the room, demanding to be noticed. Assuming he would be.
Marie’s eyes stayed on them as she walked slowly around the tarp, as if circling.
They’d feel hard and crusty beneath your fingers, Dara knew that.
It looked like Marie wanted to touch them, badly, but they were too big for her small hands.
* * *
*
You always,” Dara said later, when they were hunting among the lobby chairs, searching for Brielle Katz’s lost muffler, “found Charlie handsome. You said he looked like the groom on the top of the wedding cake.”
“I did,” Marie said, reaching for something, an abandoned winter hat studded with dust motes, “say the thing about the wedding cake.”
By any objective measure, Charlie was handsome. His body so slender and beautiful, his features so delicate, his gleaming blondness, like the handsomest boy ever at the cotillion in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story.
He was handsome to everyone. Everyone.
How could anyone look at Derek, his wooly arms and spreading belly, his whitened teeth and his winking ways, and at Charlie and think they were both the same anything?
* * *
*
We don’t have to like him,” Charlie said as they prepared to leave that night, sawdust thick in the air and the thumps of Europop still galloping from the boom box in Studio B. “No one likes their contractor.”
Dara didn’t say anything.
“Besides,” Charlie said, gesturing to the clear vinyl curtain now hanging in the doorway to Studio B, “he takes orders pretty well.”
Dara walked over. She’d imagined something more discreet, a zip door or a tented partition. But it was only strips of heavy plastic, like at the car wash.
It made everything inside Studio B look a little like a funhouse.
She could see Derek, stripped to his T-shirt white as his whitened teeth. The plastic rippling, he looked enormous, a funhouse Derek, holding a large rubber mallet, swinging it like a caveman club.
“I didn’t say I didn’t like him,” Dara said.
Charlie smiled, one hand on Dara’s shoulder, lightly kneading it.
“But,” Dara said, “I don’t like him.”
“Here’s an idea,” Charlie said, hands on both her shoulders now, turning her away. “Don’t look behind the curtain.”
* * *
*
That night, Charlie’s back spasmed.
Dara had been watching him sleep, his bare, broad back, the V of his waist. She couldn’t help herself, her hand reaching out to touch his shoulder blade, to draw him close, that skin so cool and soothing to her. The instant her fingers touched his skin, it came: a violent stiffening, and immediate, urgent, violent retreat.
A terrific jolt, reminding Dara of sleeping with Marie, who resided in the bunk above her all those years. Marie and her restless legs. Ma chère Marie’s dancing in her sleep, their mother used to say.
She yanked her hand back as if she’d touched an open flame.
* * *
*
Seeing the look on her face, he apologized even as he was instantly immobile with pain.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, closing his eyes. “I knew it was coming. I tried to get in to see my PT today, but . . .”
“Let me,” Dara said. “Please.”
He paused a moment, mouth tight in a grimace. But then, surprisingly, he let her.
Gingerly, she helped him flip over on his stomach.
“I’ll be so careful,” she said.
“I know.” His voice muffled in the pillow.
And he let her, her fingers hard on his hot mangled back, the heel of her hand driving hard between his shoulder blades, white and wide like wings cresting.
She liked touching it and it was the only time she felt allowed, as if his spine were so delicate—like a slender fishbone—after the four surgeries, the halo neck brace, the rehabilitation.
She liked to run her fingertips across it, liked to dig her clenched fist into it.
She went harder that night, grinding herself into him, elbows forging downward, sharp and relentless.
She was chasing the pain, she told him sternly.
It made her dizzy, and damp between the legs.
You, he murmured finally, his feet arching with pleasure, his forehead sticky, hands reaching behind for her, finding that place between her legs. You have all the power.
* * *