Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

The last time I was in the city, I didn’t go uptown or to Brooklyn. I didn’t see, and didn’t look for, the overflowing gutters, or the stone carvings of angels outside stately mansions. I kept my briefcase close and trod a narrow path to sushi restaurants with my colleagues. There was one late evening at a wine bar in the West Village. I told no one that I had lived in New York as a child. Even still, as the strange twilight hung over the buildings, I felt something buried rise to the surface, and I had to keep going to the bathroom to stare at my flushed, absent face in the mirror.

That evening I cook myself a rare steak and eat it in the dark. I read the letter over again and this time it seems oddly threatening. It’s really a short letter, just a paragraph. It feels purposefully mysterious, even provocative. The style is ornate, his particular Old World way of talking. It offers no solid details, just evocative ones: “Not Hades, a city that befits me,” “early bird specials and other sad people,” “banished to a city with no reason for existing.” But the letter also reveals anger and self-pity. Neither of these emotions fits with the Maurice I knew. The questions barrel toward me: Is it him? Is he alive? If he’s alive, where is he? Is he still at his old apartment? Why now? Why try to contact me now?

His face drifts back to me again. This time it’s from the beginning, the first time I ever saw him. We never discussed it. Did he too remember that we had met before, when I was just a child — a few years before he appeared in the doorway of the studio?

But the image that comes to me now is not of the end, but of the very beginning. A chance encounter before anything had happened that could be called secret. The images are raw and bright and fill up my mind.

Inside the opera house, the air was thick with light and heat, the buzz of excitement. The ballet was over — it was during curtain calls — I would have been nine or ten then, not eleven yet, the age when my father moved out, and so much changed — and I had run down the carpeted stairs, through the deserted lobby, and into a packed and thundering proscenium of carpeted walls blaring with lights. I had fought my way through the black stockinged legs and gold-clasped purses to within sight of the stage. But then it was too crowded. I couldn’t move anymore — and I couldn’t see more than a sliver of the stage. A face in the crowd turned toward me, a slight man — it was him. He reached down, said something like, “Poor thing. You can’t see, can you?” He helped me up on the armrest of a seat and held me there while I balanced over the crowd. I remember the small face, the thin mustache, the oddness of his smell, like apples and something sour. I remember his face was bright with rapture, with reflected stage lights. With his help, I balanced feet away from the stage. The male dancer’s face was orange with makeup, the female dancer’s muscles stretched like rubber bands over bone. I shouted my Bravos at the dancers until I was hoarse.

A girl and a man meet. A girl and a man, too old for her, meet and are changed, though they don’t know it yet.

Something is hardening in me — and something else is softening. I put on my running shoes and, despite the ice, take the path back across campus. I head to Baker. No one is usually using these studios now, what with the new Art Center. The Baker studios were never converted to a state-of-the-art facility. The floors are wood, the windows rattle, the rafters are strewn with old bits of rope and old props. But I like them, these old Baker studios. There’s a dreaminess to them, like a stage set from long ago, and the air above you is vast.

I don’t turn the lights on. It’s easier to dance in the dark tonight. If I move, I keep my thoughts at bay. They are unproductive, tangled. They lead me back only to questions and an old pain. Coming through the high windows is a still, bright moon that casts long blue shadows across the floor.

I shuck off my coat. I skip a warm-up and just start moving. The shapes my body makes are interesting. At first I don’t recognize them. My upper body is doing one thing and my lower body is doing another. My arms are beating a rhythm. Then the rhythm changes — I’m following it — and it becomes faster and more violent. In the midst of a series of contract and releases — a release fall to the floor, a roll, a pitch upward with a side extension — I realize I am actually threading ballet steps in. God love me, it’s been years but my body remembers: pas de bourrée, glissade, jeté, the first sequence I learned as a girl and which we would do at the end of class and it would feel like we were flying. It’s been ages since I’ve choreographed something original, but there is something interesting in these sequences. Now I’m close to the floor, locking in a plié, my arms shoot out, I tumble, I roll.

I’m not dancing for anyone. I’m just following the patterns. Then I am good and sweaty and everything is less precious, everything is flowing. My body is cooking. I am moving in space. There is the vastness of this once-gym, its 1920s bones, all you have to do is look up and see the steel poles and nets made of a kind of string no one uses anymore.

I’m moving in and out of the shadows, circling: fall, roll, jeté.

I am dancing .

And then the lights turn on. They thunder on across the rafters and the landscape of blue shadow is replaced by a false yellow sunshine that shows every decade of scuff and bang to the floors.

I’m left blinking, gasping for breath.

“Oh my God! Professor Randell! You scared me!” says a voice. And I look and then I see — I can’t believe it, what are the chances — it’s Sioban. Her hands, one of those on my wrist, the same hands, the color of ash in this light, flutter to her face and then drop at her side.

I open my mouth and close it again.

Then she laughs. “OMG, I didn’t know you still did ballet!”

“I don’t — that was just—” And I am deeply embarrassed.

“You still have mad skills! You were killing it!” Has she been watching me dance before she turned the lights on?

I stand, blinking in the harsh light. I finally have discovered my voice, remember who I am. “Sioban, did you sign this studio out?”

She nods. “I have it starting at eight, but I can take A. No one is in here.”

“No, I’ll move over to A,” I say, walking over to get my things.

“Or—” she says. “We could share it. I’ve been working on my contact”—she drops and does a sudden roll and then springs up—“the act of trusting, like you said, or letting go —.” She flushes. “Would you — could you — do some contact with me before you go?” Her face is deeply red now. She moves toward me.

I don’t know why, but — and this is really inexcusable — I nod my head.

I think I’m grateful for the lack of speech between us. Our movements together are surprisingly seamless. But her body is too rigid and moves in parts, from the center outward. It avoids its own mass. For all her skill, she doesn’t know how to flow and release into another body. She’s using too much muscle and not enough bone. “It’s not like partnering,” I say. I bend again and she lays her spine along my spine. “Good,” I say. Now she’s allowing herself the help of gravity. “Follow the point of contact,” I say. “Very good!” How grateful I am to be the teacher again.

“Oh!” she says, and I see that she has the feeling of doing less, how liberating this can be for bunheads. I’m pivoting and taking her weight and then she goes stiff again. “It’s okay,” I say. “Let yourself be heavy. Don’t worry. I can take it.”