Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

Mira nods.

“Ask them to inquire into it.”

Back outside, she stops in the middle of Lincoln Center. Her mother’s voice is back. What a bitch, Rachel would have said. What a total bitch .

That evening, she and Maurice dine at Café des Artistes. He wears the same black cape and a black top hat, which he removes when she arrives.

He assesses her with his special glance.

“They checked your extension?”

“Yes,” she says, remembering the woman’s strong hands pulling her leg to her ear.

He nods. “They want to make sure they are loose enough — the tendons.”

The arch? The femur? Those old, alive hands feeling through her skin for her bones. The audition studio, cold as a refrigerator. Barres against the bare walls. The gray floor, a veneer like wax paper. The old woman came around and lifted their legs one by one. Another woman followed, making marks in a ledger. Mira’s leg went up; the old woman asked her to point her foot. She said something and the other woman wrote something down. They spoke in Russian. It sounded both gravelly and fluid.

Her bones are the right size, the right length; she has been measured, vetted.

Overcome by hunger, Mira reaches for the bread and the butter knife. Her roast chicken dinner arrives as she is buttering her bread, and she cuts the flesh and the juices flow. Mira swallows, the cool taste of chicken dimming in her mouth. It is exotic, delicious, like something dug up from the earth. Yes, her mother is gone — but, like a girl in a fairy tale, she has been given a substitute. An admirer: as rich as her father, as doting and attentive as a mother should be. She gets up to go to the buffet and returns with a pile of stuffed mushrooms. How she loves stuffed mushrooms.

Mira nods. She is going to be a ballet dancer, she feels it. Her bones will knit together in new ways. Her torso will lengthen. Her hands will grow strong, her fingers blunt, and her feet rough and calloused as tree bark. You will see the tendons in her neck, and her elbows and her knees easily hyperextend. Her hip ligaments will become so loose that whenever she sits on the floor, her legs will roll outward and her heels will touch. Her breasts, when she grows them, will remain as small foothills with no real valleys. She feels Maurice’s eyes on her, pricking her skin, buttressing her. How simple it all seems! She will stay this way forever. Her head is shining, she is buzzing with light.

He says to her: “I will call you Bella. You are not Mirabelle anymore. You are Bella .”

“Does a Robert McAllister work here?” I say to a tall man wearing poodle cuff links and a badge around his neck. I’m inside the library now, at the information desk.

“Rob?” he says, and for a moment I think he will laugh at me. “He’s in Special Collections. End of the hall, turn right. Elevator to the third floor.”

I pass a photo of Mikhail Baryshnikov in his prime, and a bunch of framed Playbills from 1980s dance and theater, and a large glassed-off display of Sesame Street muppets. I get on an elevator.

On the third floor, I check my bag and coat, go through a metal detector, and enter a large, featureless room where a few people are hunched over old-looking books and sitting at AV machines. I follow signs to Special Collections, a far outpost. Here is a desk where an older man in a plaid shirt and badge sits. I take a deep breath and head toward him. He looks up from a computer. He has a close-cropped beard and dim watery eyes. He is very old.

“Excuse me,” I say. “Hello. Are you Robert McAllister?”

I can recognize little of the man I met one night thirty years ago. The chiseled line of the jaw is gone, the face is now ovalish. I think of that younger version of this man saying, “I’ll leave you two alone,” and how those words have echoed through my life. I finger the envelope in my pocket. I almost turn to go. He’s looking up at me, this old man, waiting.

“Yes,” he says. “How can I help you?”

I take a deep breath. “My name — I–I’m Kate Randell.”

He’s looking at me with confusion.

I look down. “I’m working on a paper on Nijinsky’s sister.”

“Oh, well, we have some great resources from that period.” He turns toward the computer screen.

“Wait,” I say, pressing myself against the desk. In a hurried whisper, I say, “That’s not why I’m really here. I think I met you once, a long time ago, one night, at someone’s house, his name was — is? — Maurice. I was just a girl then, really a little girl, well, not so little — fourteen — you might not have thought I was little — maybe I looked older—”

Rob looks at me. Our faces are very close. “My god,” he says. “I always wondered—” Then the deep lines in his face smooth out. He sits back in his chair. “Are you hungry?” he says.

We go to an overpriced coffee shop across the street. When we’re settled at a table with menus, he looks right at me.

“My god,” he says again. “How did you find me?”

“I have the business card you left for him that night. For this library,” I say. I hand him the card. “I actually can’t believe you’re still here.”

He laughs. “Yes,” he says, fingering the card. “They wanted us to be anonymous. But I begged to differ.” He hands the card back to me. “They never gave us business cards in those days, so I had one made for myself. That’s how much I wanted to impress him. There are very few of us left from back in the day. I’m semiretired. I’m in only two days a week these days.”

A waitress comes by. He orders a salad and I order a soup, but there’s no way I can eat.

He says, “You know, I was the one who found him.”

I try to hold his gaze but can’t. I look outside. A van drives by with a sign that reads Gum Removal Specialists!

I look back at him. “Did you get — in trouble?” In trouble? A child’s words.

“They questioned me.”

I blurt it out. “Did he die? Is he dead?”

He looks at me carefully. “Those are two separate questions. I know the answer to one, but not the other.”

He looks away for a second, then back at me. “He did not die — not that night.”

I wait for it to sink in. The pain of not knowing and the fear of knowing all wound up together have apparently made a knot under my ribs, because now I feel that knot loosen and something flow out of me. It’s physically painful. It pools out of my rib cage, down my arms.

“Are you okay?” says Rob.

I nod. “Go on. Please.”

“He was in the hospital for a while. They had to make sure. He had a seizure and there was some paralysis on his left side — which was, as you know, his bad side.”

“The polio.”

He nods, takes another bite. “But, no, he did not die. Slowly, with a lot of physical therapy, he recovered use of his arm, but not much of his leg. He never was able to get around very well after that. He had to be under supervision. Constant care.”

The pain — or whatever it was — is gone, and I feel a hollowness under my ribs. Cripple to invalid! I search my mind for legal terms that might apply: battery, assault ? But not: murderer. Into that space rises a pure sweet relief.

I look at Rob, searching for more. “I just need to — to know.”

“It’s complicated,” he says finally. “He was not a bad man. But his relationship with you was not right.”

He looks at me then, really looks at me. His once-chiseled face, sagging with age, the roots of white bristles showing, those kind blue eyes. His eyes look beneath the freckles, beneath the skin, into the deeper rivers of my being. It’s like he is seeing into what I was before Maurice came along, before so much was decided. And in looking that far, he touches on something that reminds me of what I was, what I could have been, before I knew so certainly what I wanted, before Maurice had said to me, “You have to say it, say what you want.” And in seeing me that way, seeing into me before I was me, I feel something returning, something even sweeter than relief.