Peter Beagle - The Line Between

When I went backstage, he was sitting alone on a bench in his sweat–blackened leotard, head bowed into his hands. He didn't look up until I said, «Boy, that was something else. You are something else.» The phrase was fairly new then, in our circles at least.

He looked old when he raised his head. I don't mean older; I mean old. The glass–clear skin was gray, pebbled with beard stubble — I hadn't thought he shaved — and the dark eyes appeared too heavy for his face to bear. He said slowly, «Sometimes I'm good, Jake. Sometimes I really think I might make it.»

I said something I hadn't at all thought to say. «You have to make it. I don't think there's a damn thing else you're fit for.»

Sam laughed. Really laughed, so that some color came back into his face and his eyes became his age again. «Good night, let's just hope I never have to find out.» He got dressed and we went out front to meet Mike and Sarah.

He didn't have to find out for some time. We graduated, and I went off to Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh on a genuine theater scholarship, while Sam stayed home, attending CCNY to please his parents, and literally spending all the rest of his time at Garrett–Klieman, a dance school whose top prospects seemed to be funneled directly into the New York City Ballet. I'd see him on holidays and over the summer, and we'd do everything we'd always done together: going to plays and baseball games, hitting the secondhand bookstores on Fourth Avenue, drinking beer and debating whether the internal rhymes in the songs we were always trying to write were as clever and crackling as Noel Coward's. On Friday nights, we usually played poker with a mixed bag of other would be actors and dancers. As far as either of us was willing to acknowledge, nothing at all had changed.

But while I talked about plays I'd been in, about Artaud, Brecht, the Living Theatre, the Method, improv workshops and sense memories, Sam avoided almost all mention of his own career. If he danced in any of the Garrett–Klieman showcases, he never told me — it was all I could do to persuade him to let me sit in on a couple of his choreography classes. As before, I couldn't look away from him for a moment; but I was already beginning to learn that some dancers, actors, musicians simply have that. It doesn't have a thing to do with talent or craft — it just is, like blue eyes or

being able to touch your nose with your tongue. I don't have it.

We were eating lunch at the Automat on Forty–second and Sixth the day he told me abruptly, «They haven't recommended me. Not to City Ballet, not to anybody. It's over.»

I gaped at him over my crusty brown cup of baked beans. I said, «What over ? This is crazy. You're the best dancer I ever knew.»

«You don't know any dancers," Sam said. Which was perfectly true — I still don't know many; I'm not in a lot of musicals — but irritating under the circumstances. Sam went on, «They didn't tell me it was over. I knew. I'm not good enough.»

I was properly outraged, not only at Garrett–Klieman, but also at him, for acceding so docilely to their decision. I said, «Well, the hell with them. What the hell do they know?»

Sam shook his head. «Jake, I'm not good enough. It's that simple.»

«Nothing's that simple. You've been dancing all your life, you've been the best everywhere you've gone — "

«I was never the best!» The Noel Coward accent had dropped away for the first time in my memory, and Sam's voice was all aching Brooklyn. «You remember that story you told me about Queen Elizabeth — the real one — that thing she said when she was old. 'No, I was never beautiful, but I had the name for it.' It was like that with me. I can be dazzling — I worked on it, I about killed myself learning to be dazzling — but there isn't a move in me that I didn't copy from d'Arnboise or Bruhn or Eddie Villella or someone. And these people aren't fools, Jake. They know the difference between dazzling and dancing. So do I.»

I didn't know how to answer him; not because of what he had said, but because of the utter nakedness of his voice. He stared at me in silence for a long time, and then suddenly he looked away, the break so sharp that it felt physical, painful. He said, «Anyway, I'm too short.»

I laughed. I remember that. «What are you talking about? Even I know ballet dancers can't be tall — Villella's practically a midget, for God's sake — "

«No, he's not. And he's strong as a horse; he can lift his partners all day and not break a sweat. I can't do that.» All these years, and I can still see the absolute, unarguable shame in his face. «My upper body's never going to be strong enough to do what it has to do. And I look wrong onstage, Jake. My legs are stubby, they spoil the line. It is that bloody simple, and I'm very glad someone finally laid it out for me. Now all I have to do is figure out what exactly to do with the rest of my life.»

He stood up and walked out of the Automat, and by the time I got outside, he was gone. We didn't see each other for the rest of the summer, although we talked on the phone a couple of times. By then, thanks to sending out ninety–four sets of resumes,

I actually had a job waiting for me after graduation, building sets and doing walkons for a rep company in Seattle. Over the next five years I worked my way down to the Bay Area, by way of theaters in Eugene and Portland and stock jobs all over Northern California. I've been here in Avicenna ever since.

But we did stay in contact, Sam and I. I broke the ice, sending light postcards from the summer tours, and then a real letter from my first real address—South Parnell Street, that was. Two rooms and a ficus plant.

He didn't answer for some while, long enough that I began to believe he never would. But when it did come, the letter began with typical abruptness, asking whether I remembered The Body Snatcher, an old Val Lewton movie we'd loved and seen half a dozen times.

Remember that splendid, chilling moment when Karloff says through his teeth, «And I have done some things that I did not want to do…»? Me these last several years. I'll tell you the worst straight off, and leave the rest to your imagination. No, not the year spent teaching folk–dancing in Junior High School 80—much worse than that. I am become an Arts Cricket! Pray for me…

We'd been using Gully Jimson's term for a critic ever since reading The Horse's Mouth in high school. Sam's letter went on to say that he was writing regularly for a brand–new Manhattan arts magazine, now and then for a couple of upstate papers, and lately even filing occasional dis–patches to Japan:

I mostly review music, sometimes theater, sometimes movies, if the first–stringer's off at Sundance or Cannes. No, Jake, I don't ever cover dance. I don't dare write about dance, because I couldn't possibly be fair to people who are up there doing what I want to do more than I want anything in the world. Music, yes. I can manage music…

We wrote, and sometimes called, for another three years before we met again. I hope my letters weren't as full of myself as I'm sure they were: entirely concerned with what plays I'd auditioned for, what roles I should have gotten, what actors I scorned or admired; what celebrated direc–tor had seemed very impressed but never called back. Sam, on the other hand, recounted the astonishing success of Ceilidh, the new magazine, described every editor and photographer he worked with; detailed, with solemn hilarity, the kind of performance he was most often sent to cover. «Most of them are so far avant that they lap the field and become the derriere–garde. Try to imagine the Three Stooges on downers.»

But of his own feelings and dreams, of his world beyond work, of how he lived without dancing—nothing, not ever. And there we left it until I came to New York for a smallish part in a goodish play that survived barely a month. It was to be my Broadway break, that one—to be in it I turned down a tv movie, which later spun off into a syndicated series that's probably still running somewhere. I have an infallible gift for pick–ing the losing side.