Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

For the next five years, I drifted in and out of small modern troupes and contact improv groups. It was the 1990s in San Francisco. The dance scene was dispersed, experimental, allergic to hierarchy. The watchword was “experimental.” This meant everything that ballet was not: release technique, contact improv, choreography collectives, multimedia, performance-based, “personality.” Dancers were praised for their quirks, their clothes (or lack of them). In my first post-ballet piece, I came onstage topless in leather pasties. My mom applauded loudest of all.

During these years, I worked many jobs just to get by. I tried catering, bookkeeping, waitressing, all demanding. The life of the struggling dancer is like that of an addict. Classes are like dope: life is driven by the need to get enough cash to take class. Even then classes were twelve dollars a pop. Food work is good because, though it doesn’t pay a lot, you get free meals and the free meals add up. Tossed onto my own resources, living with a roommate in a Tenderloin apartment (by twenty, at last on my own, no longer with my mother), I could not afford not to eat. The stuff of my life then: my earplugs next to my bed (from my roommate’s midnight visitors), my scale, my laundry rack of drying tights and leotard, my crumpled Ex-Lax packages at the bottom of my bag, my split ends (couldn’t afford a haircut), the card from the man who offered me free cocaine to sleep with him, which I hadn’t thrown away. My fingertips permanently smelled of the garlic from the hummus that I mixed in batches for the catering company, so that when I fell asleep, I felt like I was still mixing great tubs of it.

One night in rehearsal a choreographer named Elso, who was from Norway, asked me to Ace-bandage two miniflashlights to my chest, above my breasts. They reflected beams on the ceiling as I danced and flickered as I moved my arms in the way Elso showed me. He said, “Your breasts are like the stop lights.” I realized then that no matter how long I danced now, I would never again get back to the place where I was a princess who gazed at the prince’s face in the mirror and he smiled a secret smile at me.

But then I remembered: when I fell, Christopher did not catch me. Maurice did. Who was the real prince of my childhood?

The mirror lies. We know this. Its secret smiles are the images that match our own dreams. But it persists, categorical and seductive. How often have I learned this? Still, the desire to trust the image persists. And persists.

It was during my period of being a poor modern dancer that I saw Christopher again. I’d heard he was with the San Francisco Ballet, partnering the sensation of that year, some soloist whose name I can’t remember. Then I heard he’d left the company, that he was “sick”—which in dancer lingo was a euphemism for something terrible, if it was bad enough to keep you offstage. Soon after, I heard that he was strung out, living in the Tenderloin too. Someone had seen him panhandling on BART, this prince of my youth. I heard from another dancer friend who’d danced with him at ABT — he was a junior soloist there in the late 1980s — that Christopher was in the hospital. She said we could visit him — that he’d opened up his room to anyone who wanted to come.

He lay in a very white bed. He had tubes sticking out of every part of the body. His head looked enormous on his shrunken limbs. His lips and fingertips were blue. His hair scanty, his skin mottled, a web of veins rising to the surface like some flourishing underwater growth. The body! The dancer’s crucible. Giant purple circles bloomed under his eyes; the scars from Kaposi’s sarcoma dotted his yellow skin; his clavicles and knees protruded. Even in the hospital bed, his legs rotated outward at the hips, and his feet lay in a perfect fifth position. Such a bunhead thing to notice.

In the corner, by the window, some ridiculously young ballerina was doing her short nails. The smell of nail polish was thick in the room. By now, I had cut my hair off. I no longer considered myself a bunhead. Still, how well I knew their scornful stares, their crazy-long hair, their Cleopatra eyeliner, their too-proud duck walks. Ballerina girl didn’t even look up when we came in.

My friend kissed Christopher on the cheek and hugged him gingerly. He winced at the contact. Then he looked at me. “Hey, it’s Flower Girl,” he said. I couldn’t believe he recognized me. “Thanks for coming to my wake.”

“How’s it going?” I said. “It’s been a while.” It’d actually been years since I’d seen him, since our Little Kirov duet. At SAB, we’d rarely crossed paths, he was an apprentice and in company classes while I was only in intermediate classes. When we did, he’d only acknowledge me with the briefest nod. I’m not even sure why I decided to go see him, except out of some morbid curiosity, I guess.

He started laughing. I remembered that laugh: it always made me think he knew more than I did. “You were such a serious girl,” he said. Then he started to cough.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I meant it.

“It’s been better.” Then he looked right at me and didn’t pretend. I saw how bad it was. I saw he was going to die. I put my hand out and he took it. My friend looked at us. I felt time close in on us. The demise . “Well, I won’t miss this,” he said, waving his hand vaguely around. “But I’ll miss—”

“What?”

“You know.”

I nodded. I understood. He meant dancing. I felt a terrible wave of sadness. What happens when I feel compassion is that it opens something in me so wide it hurts. It lets so much life in that I don’t know what to do. I am flooded, I shut down. I get angry. I’ve never known what else to do in the face of beautiful, monstrous life baring its teeth, death in its mouth. I’m not proud of it, but I turn my face away.

I gently pulled my hand back.

“My last will and testament, you know, was to go to my own wake,” he said. He turned his face to the wall. When he turned back, he was smiling. “Thanks for coming.” It wasn’t till I was in college, a few years later, that I heard he died.

At the old age of twenty-four, I went back to school to get my college degree. I strung classes together from community colleges, and when I had enough credits, I transferred to San Francisco State. Did I fall under the spell of school in the same way I had with ballet? The rigor of it, the logic of it, the step-by-step of it? The specter of a greater good hovering over all of it. The promise — in the form of degrees — of mastery. It was like crack to me, to my burned and buried ego. The illusion of getting ever closer to a perfect. The illusion of mastering a subject through knowledge, of going so deeply into something that it opens up and spreads its secrets wide.

This was another happy, dark period of my life when my quest for knowledge colored everything. The walls of my cubicle at the library were my home. I spent hours in bed with books and wine. With my notebooks and books, I could move through time now. Becoming an historian, I believed I could master the people who had schooled me as a child, used me, taught me, possessed me.

At one point, I saw a therapist. All my friends were seeing therapists. But my therapist’s patient listening, her books, her entreaties, her couch were not enough. There was something wild about my pain that I couldn’t put into words and that, finally, I couldn’t part with. Maybe at the bottom I knew that if I went too deeply into it, I would be admitting something terrifying.

The day has turned sallow. I’ve been walking along the border of the park.

Suddenly, I just want to sleep, nothing more, nothing less. I only want to lie down in Felicia’s hermetically sealed apartment across from another sunset of fire. I don’t want to think anymore. I don’t want to remember. I want to sink into a deep sleep, an empty forgetting sleep. A boy. A young man.