Colum McCann - Dancer

— We’ll try the airport, said Monsieur.

He put the car in gear and just then Tom appeared. He saw us, stopped, hesitated, then buried his hands in his jacket pockets and proceeded to the hotel entrance.

Monsieur shoved something down in the pocket of his bathrobe, jumped from the car and, at the bottom of the hotel steps, caught Tom’s arm. A porter came out of the hotel to hold an umbrella above Monsieur’s head.

Tom’s eyes darted away from Monsieur. He cleared his throat as if about to say something, but Monsieur shook his head emphatically before Tom could say a word. From the bathrobe pocket Monsieur produced a pair of old dancing slippers. He flourished them in the air.

— Fix these, he said to Tom.

Tom’s eyes locked with Monsieur’s.

— Fix them, said Monsieur.

— Pardon me? said Tom.

— I want you to fix them. Since when do you not understand English?

Tom stood fidgeting, his face raw and red.

— Yes sir, he finally stammered, taking the shoes from Monsieur’s hands. He held them a moment, and then said: You must forgive my foolishness of last night.

Monsieur hesitated: If you ever resign again I will kick you in the ass! Do you understand me?

— Sir?

— Nobody resigns on me! I fire them!

Tom bowed again, not a full bow, more a deep nod of the head. When he was upright he peered at me, his spectacles halfway down his nose.

She had practiced her smile all through the years, her stage smile, the perfect smile, the smile that said, I am in control, I am regal, I am ballet. And she was smiling it now, Margot, across the table at Rudi. Indeed, everywhere the wedding guests were smiling. Still, Margot could sense there was something wrong with the day, mismatched, out of sync, she just couldn’t put her finger on it.

Rudi, directly facing her, had his head thrown back in laughter, creased lines on his face, wrinkles around his eyes. Beside him was his friend, Victor, with his dumb mustache and a multicolored cummerbund. Margot wished she could seize Rudi’s arm and shake him, say something to him, but what would she say? There was a thought at the back of her mind that she desperately wanted to communicate, yet she was only aware of its existence, not its content. So many days felt like this now. She had retired. Tito had passed on. She brought flowers to his gravestone in Panama City like a character from some nineteenth-century novel. She often stood at the edge of the field near the graveyard and found herself watching the wind move the grass. Or she found herself caught at a traffic light in London wondering just what sorts of lives were being carried in the cars that passed her. Or she would read a book and suddenly forget what it was all about. As a child, nobody had told her how the life of a dancer would be, and even had she known she never would have understood, how it could be so full and empty at the same time, seen in one manner from the outside but experienced differently on the inside, so that two completely dissimilar ways of living had to be held in unison, juggled, acknowledged.

Rudi had once told her they were hand in glove. She had wondered who was what, was she hand or glove, and now was she neither? Rudi was forty-three, maybe forty-four now, she couldn’t remember. Yet he was still performing. And why not? She had gone on until she was sixty.

She watched the bride and groom begin their first dance. Tom with his old stiff body. Odile in her white shoes made especially for the occasion by her new husband. White satin rimmed with lace, no heels. Her thin legs. Her small hands. Tom lifted the train of Odile’s veil and draped it over his forearm. Surely that must be the key, Margot thought, to live your life freely and honestly and with love. Her love had been dance. Rudi’s also. It wasn’t that they had been denied access to the other kind of love, no, that wasn’t it at all, not at all — but theirs was a love of a different thing, bruising and public. Love had never quite happened to her in the way it happened to others. Tito, yes. But Tito was an impossible person until he became an impossible body. Tito saw her as an elegant armpiece. Tito had warmed other beds. And then Tito had been shot and became everything he had never been before, useless and good-hearted. Oh, she had loved him, yes, but not love in the sense that it hollowed her out whenever she saw him. Margot often wondered if she were naïve, but she had caught glimpses of real love and was catching one now, she was sure of it, Tom and Odile, the awkward way they handled each other’s bodies, their shy courtesy, the sheer beauty of their homeliness.

Rudi had a champagne glass at his mouth. She had heard that he’d paid for the wedding ceremony, yet had not told anyone. His hidden generosity. Still, he seemed distant as the couple dragged themselves across the floor. People spoke of it as loneliness but Margot knew it was not loneliness. Loneliness, she thought, caused a certain madness. It was more a search for that thing beyond dance, a desire for the human. But what could be better, what could top the never-ending ovations, was there anything in life that had ever crested them? And then she knew. The thought had never struck her quite so clearly. She had danced until her body gave out and now she was loveless. The doctor had told her she had cancer. She would probably last quite a few years but it was cancer, yes, cancer, that was the full stop toward which her life was heading. She had not told anyone. She would not even tell Rudi for a while. But, still, there was something else she had to tell him, and she was searching her mind for the words. Dance. Cures. Pills. Sleeping pills and diet pills and pain pills and pills for life itself, pills for every illness, jealousy to bronchitis, pills in the drafty hallways where young girls sweated and wept for the roles they never got, pills for ruptured bank accounts, pills for backstabbings, pills for betrayals, pills for the broken way in which you walked, pills for the pills themselves. Margot herself had never taken the pills, but she often swept little white imaginary tablets through her mind to cure the pain. And now ovarian cancer. No pills to cure that. She felt the room closing in. She watched dancers on either side of her, tucking into their food, as they always did. Later the girls would throw up in the bathrooms. And the shoemakers were raucous at the other end of the room. Beer glasses swaying in the air. Toasts. Later Rudi would sing his Vladivostok love song, his party piece. She could feel the evening creeping to its end, the inevitable farewell to the newly married couple, the envy she might feel. It was nothing she would ever make public. If anything, she was diplomacy itself. She had always been. And she was happy for Tom, happy he had found something beyond his craft. But what had she found, what had she discovered? A dark tumor in her body. She was not bitter, it wasn’t that, she was just shocked to have been dealt such a hand. Surely she deserved more. Or perhaps not. Her life had been fuller than any other she had known. Death would probably arrive in a yacht, or a drawing room, or on a sandy beach.

What was it that she needed to tell Rudi? What was it in his grin, in his laughter, in his leaning towards Victor, in his consumption of the world that she needed to arrest, if only for a moment? What an exquisite life. They had, she knew, enjoyed the greatest years dancers could have. People thought they had slept together but they had not. They were too close for that. Yet they had thought of it, contemplated an attachment beyond dance. To make love to him. It would have destroyed them. Dancing was more intimate, anyway. It was a mitosis, they became one. They had seldom argued. If anything she had been a mother to him, increasingly so over the years. But what Margot wanted to say had nothing to do with mothers or countries or other manifold myths. It had nothing to do with love or its attendant despairs. Nothing to do with dance. Or did it? Did it? She could feel her fingers trembling. Soon the bridal dance would be over and she would be forced to talk pleasantries, to bring out the Margot in her, to hold her chin high, to clap politely, perhaps even stand as if the married couple were to take an encore. She watched Victor whisper something in Rudi’s ear. And then, with a wave of relief, Margot knew what it was. She knew she had to interrupt, she had to say this before she let it go, that it was the most important thing she could tell Rudi, the greatest piece of advice he would receive. She hesitated, laid her fork politely at the side of her plate, and reached for a glass of water to quench her thirst. She tried to catch Rudi’s eye, but he was in another world. She would have to say this. She would have to tell him to give it up. It was that simple. He should pack it in and concentrate on his other gifts, choreography, teaching. Before he grew too old. She needed so desperately to say this to him. Retire. Retire. Retire. Before it’s too late. She picked up the fork again. How to get his attention? She reached across and gently touched his outstretched fingers with the silver prongs of the fork. He felt the tapping and looked at her and smiled. Victor also smiled, but then Victor again whispered something to Rudi, and Rudi held up his hand to Margot as if to say: Wait. She leaned back in her chair and waited and the song ended, and she rose from the table to share her applause for Tom and Odile, and in the middle of the clapping, Rudi reached across the table to take her hand and say: Yes? She hesitated and grinned and then said simply: Aren’t they beautiful, Tom and Odile? Aren’t they a wonderful couple?