Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

The last time we saw each other was at an L.A. costume party. I was dating a sound technician whom I’d first met years earlier during one of my modern dance performances, and then later at a café I was working at while getting my BA. The sound technician still thought of me as a dancer, though it had been several years since I’d actually danced professionally. I was keeping him company on one of his business trips. Felicia was on the arm of a slim man with an earring in each ear who introduced himself as “Madame Tussauds’ boy-toy.” She was singing then. I’d seen her name up on some Fillmore clubs. I asked her about it. She laughed wildly. She wasn’t cute anymore, but she was still beautiful. Her lips were red and perfectly outlined. When we were young, I could see the effort it involved, but now it was invisible; it had seeped into her pores. Maurice had hated the young Felicia’s beauty, her mother’s hand still obvious, but would he have hated this one? Her beauty was now so vibrant, so integrated. It wasn’t a face on top of a face.

Felicia wore a black-and-white-striped jumpsuit with a cape thrown around her shoulders, high-heeled boots, a giant silver bangle, her dark hair in a blunt pixie cut. She was carelessly, languidly, unavoidably gorgeous. I felt like an ink-stained wretch.

I thought about that time her mother did our hair, having to sit still while her mother held a steaming hot curling iron to my scalp, how if I moved too much I would get burned. “Scalded ,” her mother had said. “ Don’t wiggle or you’ll get scalded .”

“What are you?” I said.

“A crook.” Felicia laughed.

The man with her laughed, too. “She’s a jailbird, can’t you see?” He held up two feathers attached to her sleeve.

My date — Ryan was his name, I think — was a Plague of Locusts. He wore a lamp shade with paper cutouts of locusts we’d made together. I was Alice in Wonderland with a forty-ounce bottle of Colt.45 malt liquor (really apple juice). We were stoned; they were drunk. When I realized Felicia was drunk, some of her beauty wore off. But a lot was still left.

“Still dancing?” She poked my chest.

“No,” I said. It was the first time my heart didn’t sink when I said it. I just said it and then felt relief. After all, it was true. I was twenty-eight years old, a nothing career as a modern dancer in San Francisco behind me, but a BA finally under my belt, and just starting a master’s in performance studies at Berkeley. I was newly focused on the life of the mind, this bright space before me; I wanted to move into that.

“No shit? I thought you’d ride that train till the very end.”

“Well—” I said. I would have said I did, but Ryan didn’t like negativity. “I’m at school. Berkeley.”

“School?” She said this with genuine surprise.

“Going for a PhD in dance studies.”

“Wow,” she said, straightening up a bit and trying to hold herself in check. “Good luck,” she said, and fell languidly against the man.

Now it’s with a kind of anthropological interest that I cross Seventh heading west on Fifty-eighth. Past Eighth Avenue, I don’t recognize this as New York. I feel like I’m in Cincinnati. A parking garage. Blocks of condos unmarked by graffiti. A chain drugstore, a garage, a sparsely populated outdoor plaza jutting out from one of the recessed condo buildings. As I walk, I clench and unclench my hand. It’s finally healing. In the airport bathroom, I took off the big gauze bandage and substituted for it a flexible oversize Band-Aid. The gash has faded to a reddened line with a not-terrible-looking cut at its center. The innocuous-looking Band-Aid takes a lot of drama away. It’s drama that I don’t need on this trip. It’s important that I can at least sustain the appearance of normality.

At Tenth Avenue, the street begins to slope down toward the Hudson. In my high (too high? I’ve forgotten this is a walking city) boots, I pass the bones of scrawny trees, some of them not more than saplings. It’s unseasonably warm. This weather is predicted to last the whole five days I’m here. I’ve left frostbitten Ohio and come to a place that is trying to be spring. My body, inside my coat, expands a little. My heels click on the hard, new concrete.

Felicia’s apartment is in one of the new condo buildings. Sparkling, cavernous lobby. The doorman calls upstairs and announces me. “Miss Kate,” he says into the speaker. The bronze-plated elevator doors slide open, and the elevator silently speeds me up to the fourteenth floor, where hotel carpeting pads my footsteps. I squint to read the tiny gold numbers on the identical beige doors lining the hallway.

Felicia holds the door open for me. We stand there, me gripping my little black conference suitcase, in my black travel outfit, my coat over my arm. My closed hand hiding the Band-Aid. She looks at me — takes it all in — with a smile on her face. What is she thinking? She wears a sparkling turquoise blue dress, high strappy heels of the same color, and bright red lipstick. Her hair is cut pageboy style and her body is toned in an I-have-a-rooftop-gym kind of way. I make a series of unkind judgments: she’s trying too hard, she’s lonely, she’s putting a good face on it. Too old to be “done up” like this. The fact is, though — and this comes to me incrementally — she is still beautiful. Her skin is clear, her cheeks taut and pleasing, her eyes inviting. In her large, bright eyes, swathed in blue eye shadow, there is something vulnerable, even innocent. There is still the little girl with big eyes who always looked on the verge of speaking but didn’t.

“Isn’t Facebook amazing?” she says. She’d contacted me when I first signed up. We’d had a few brief exchanges but, really, my request to stay with her had come out of the blue.

I wheel my suitcase into her large living room. Floor-to-ceiling windows look westward toward the Hudson. The carpet has the marks of having been recently vacuumed.

My eye catches on a few sparsely placed, expensive-looking knickknacks — one of an elephant in sleek black granite and the other a silver orb sitting on a polished wooden chest.

“It’s been forever and a year,” she says. This brings me back. Felicia always loved phrases, quotes, sayings, clichés. I turn.

“Do you still like horses?” I say suddenly. “And pearls?”

She stares at me. “Horses?” Then she smiles. “Yeah, I saw some amazing racing in Europe last year. . ” Her voice changes, grows softer, fumbles. “And pearls? Pearls? God, no.”

Her hands flutter toward the kitchen. The kitchen: Williams Sonoma apron and chef’s hat, unused, and some kitchen appliances — weighty and purposeful. “Coffee’s in the freezer. Espresso machine on the counter — you know how, right? Eat anything you can find,” she says. “Except my secret stash of Lucky Charms — just kidding — those too. . Please.” She gestures to her waistline.

“You look fabulous,” I say.

She smiles and looks at ease for the first time.

“Tell me,” she says. “Why are you in town — I didn’t get it, exactly?”

I’d been vague — a professional trip, I’d said. “A paper,” I say. “Have you ever heard of Bronislava Nijinska? Nijinsky’s sister, a choreographer, editor of her brother’s papers, collaborator, mother. A woman in a man’s world. Her professional journey coincided with the birth of modernism and feminism. She’s been largely sidelined because she didn’t fit into any movement.”

She’s leading me down a hallway. We pass a bedroom — spartan, elegant — a black duvet that glints like onyx in the track lighting of the hallways, shiny green decorative pillows, and a hanging tapestry, a bold design of black and white shapes intermingled.