Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Mira goes to the bathroom in Middle Studio. While in there, she peers at herself in the mirror: a pale girl with a long face and a blast of freckles across her cheeks. They usually fade in the winter, but they haven’t this year. A nimbus of hair has escaped from her bun, as usual, and floats in frizzy wisps above her head. Her hair looks burned, the color of embers at the end of a fire. She turns on the tap and drinks thirstily. She closes her eyes and imagines the little man’s black eyes on her — burning through her like a sun. Slowly, the tickle in her throat recedes.

“We try again,” says Ms. Clement, when she returns. This time Mira is ready. She stands in front of Christopher, her hands on his shoulders. “Plié, then jump. Do not wait to feel him lift. Then it will be too late. You must trust, then jump. Trust, jump.” Ms. Clement counts out the three-four time. Mira pliés, then jumps blindly into the air. She closes her eyes as if jumping off a diving board. This time she feels a response halfway up. Christopher propels her farther into the air, pivots, and slowly returns her to the ground. As he is lowering her, he grimaces. Then his face returns to normal — a mask, staring but not seeing.

“Good, children,” says Ms. Clement. “Mira, you are anticipating your partner.” She pats the back of her untidy knot of hair and walks over to Christopher. “Christopher, dear, don’t let her get away from you. Keep her straight above you. Then gravity will help you.”

They repeat the lift again several more times. Now Mira concentrates only on the timing. Each time she leaps, she finds herself moving through the air with greater force than her jump should allow. She lifts her arms into a fifth position, high above her head. At the highest point of one of the lifts, she catches sight of herself in the mirror. A girl in a black leotard high in the air. For a moment, she forgets about how she got there; there is only — air, motion, height. Behind her is the face of the little man in the mirror, watching.

After rehearsal, Mira dresses quickly and leaves the studio. Clouds left over from a morning rain scuttle across the sky. She passes the pizza place, the restaurant with the fried clams, the corner bookstore. This part of Manhattan was hardly touched by the blackout. No boarded shop windows, no burned lots.

A small man in a suit exits a camera store and joins the flow down the street. It’s him . Maurice. She knows it. He turns right onto Fifty-seventh. She is supposed to turn left toward the Columbus Circle subway station, but instead she follows him.

She pulls the strap on her bag tighter. She can easily keep pace because he walks in an odd, flapping way, as if his joints are too loose. Like a marionette who’s not properly controlled.

The clouds break and a bank of lighter sky appears. It’s a luminous, spooky white. Fifty-seventh Street’s handsome facades briefly light up as she trails his coat down the middle of the sidewalk. Now the city comes alive around her. Shoes click by: high heels, loafers with tassels, some made of the shiny skin of an alligator. Legs in pants: checkered, bell-bottomed, brushing the concrete as they go. Skirts: denim and sleek leather. Shopping bags swing. Folded umbrellas tick by. Faces covered by sunglasses. Eyes drip with makeup, mouths open in laughter. A cup wrapped in folded cardboard jumps in front of her. It’s attached to a man whose eyes are raised upward, an unseeing blue. She feels a new calmness settle over her: the power of her anonymity. She pushes past the cardboard cup, past this broken man.

The little man rounds the corner at Bergdorf’s and she follows him up Fifth Avenue to the pillared gates of Central Park. There she loses sight of him in the crowd.

She pauses, but not for long. He’s there, standing right in front of her. He holds an oversize black umbrella above his head despite the fact that it’s not raining anymore.

He smiles broadly, as if he has just said “Bingo!” or “Lotto” or “Connect Four” or any of those words that mean I win, you lose. Only she doesn’t feel like she has lost. She feels like she, too, has won a prize. She doesn’t have time to be embarrassed.

“Are you following me?” he says.

She looks down.

“Can I ask you something, Mira? Do you want to be a ballerina?”

She blushes. “I take ballet.”

“Hah!” he says. “And how long have you been doing that?”

“Five years.”

“How many days a week?”

“Every day but Wednesday and Sunday.”

He smiles. “And why do you do this?”

She doesn’t have an answer.

“To become a dancer. You have to say what you want.” She looks up. There are lines on the side of his mouth that she hasn’t noticed before. They make him look even more puppetlike.

“Yes,” she says, for suddenly she does know what she wants: to dance with the Russians. To dance with Baryshnikov as her partner. To dance with giant spotlight-like-eyes on her. She is giddy with anticipation. All the attention she will get, each piece given to her, each unwrapped to reveal a pair of eyes like his.

“I want to show you something, Mira,” he says.

He raises his arm and a horse and carriage stops. She climbs in underneath the rain shield.

She isn’t afraid. He’s nothing like the “perverts” she’s heard about — dirty men in trench coats who stalk playgrounds. She likes his neatness: his folded handkerchief, his trimmed mustache. She likes his gaze, which assesses her with some kind of special knowledge. He knows about dance — she can see it in his eyes, the way he looks at her. Christopher himself had said he was connected to David Howard’s studio, and everyone knew David Howard’s is like an annex to ABT. His gaze brings her closer to the city’s glittering center of professional ballet.

The inside of the carriage smells like wet metal. As they ride through the park, she looks through the rain-splattered plastic at blurry forms — trees with dripping foliage and boulders in the shape of mythic animals. The carriage lets them out up by the museum with the dinosaurs, the polar bears, and the space rocks. Here the little man hails a yellow cab. They pass restaurants, shoe repair shops, a pet store. They are in another neighborhood now, one that she doesn’t recognize. There are some big apartment buildings, but there are also smaller buildings with gloomy entryways. They get out in the middle of a block, in front of a squat brick apartment building. She follows him into the lobby, past a doorman’s desk, which is vacant, and into an ammonia-smelling elevator.

Inside his apartment, he tosses his gloves on a side table and, without removing his coat, says, “This way, please.” His apartment smells of old-lady perfume and the inside of a new car. As she walks through the dim rooms, the city recedes and is replaced with the soft clicks of invisible clocks and the eerie glances of tropical fish from a large tank in one of the room’s corners. He leads her into yet another room and stops in front of a tiny, shriveled pinkish thing hovering inside a cube of glass.

“There,” he says. At first Mira thinks it’s someone’s cut-off ear. She’s heard about serial killers. Those who cut off body parts after they kill you. For the first time since she decided to follow him, she is afraid.

Then she sees that it is a shoe. A pointe shoe.

“Pavlova’s,” he says.

Pavlova. The tiny, beloved dancer who famously bled through her shoes. “Pavlova’s, from her final performance. Do you see the blood?” He taps on the glass. “I saved it from them. There are some who would have cooked and eaten it! They would make soup out of it! Barbarians!”