Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

“Felicia’s mom.”

“This is not what a dancer wants. This is what a whore wants.”

“It looks special.”

He doesn’t seem to hear her. He grips her harder. “This is beauty you can buy for ten dollars, twenty dollars. No one can give you the beauty ballet gives you.”

“Stop,” she says again.

He grabs her by the shoulders again. Then he yanks the string of pearls from around her neck and pulls hard. “These are fake.” They snap and spill all over the floor. They roll around in the hallway outside the bathroom and clink on the tile in the bathroom like pebbles against a window.

In the living room, he takes down a photo in a silver frame from a shelf. She’s never noticed it before. It’s a black-and-white photo of a large-bellied man in shirt and tie and funny, balloon-like pants. Through his pince-nez glasses, he stares out at the camera. His eyes are far apart, giving him a broad, fierce look. He holds the photo right up to her face. “ This is the photo I’ve really wanted to show you. This is — was — my father. My mother always blamed ballet. And my father. For the polio. You know why?”

She shakes her head.

“Because I got sick right after seeing my first live ballet performance.” He leans in toward her. “I think she was just jealous because she didn’t come with us. He only had two tickets and he took me .

“It was 1947. I was eleven. My father was home from one of his maritime adventures. And he had managed to get tickets to see Toumanova dance at the Paris Opera. Dancers were coming back from all over. Balanchine was in France again. Toumanova! Toumanova — she was no longer so young, it didn’t matter. We loved her anyway. The baby Russians were now grown up. We’d seen them before the war as girls — now they were women. We loved them, too. And there were new ones. Ulanova. We could only hear stories of her. It wasn’t for ten more years that we would see her. Still, she was all the rage.

“My father took me even though there was a polio outbreak in Europe then. People were sleeping on roofs, avoiding public places. But Toumanova was dancing, so my father was going. And he took me.” Now he is grinning at her, his eyes are moist and soft.

“About half of my father’s comrades from the Balletomane Society were there, though they sat far apart. Some of them wore face masks to protect themselves. Not my father, though. And not me. I remember you could hear sounds reverberating off the empty boxes.

“I don’t know why my mother let me go. She was very protective of me. I was not allowed to swim in public pools, for instance.” He gets up and hobbles to a shelf and pulls off a little tin box, brings it over. He opens it to show some ash. “But, at intermission, Father gave me a cigar at the café. The only cigar I ever smoked. He said to me, ‘Son, you may never go to war. The only other thing that teaches the same is ballet. When I watch the dancers, I see my fallen comrades. I see blood and bullets. I get the same feeling as right before a battle. That weird quiet — like angels passing. Someone will die in a few minutes, I would think. I never thought it would be me. Isn’t that strange?’

“As we traveled home through the wet, cold streets, all I could think of was Toumanova as she did her port de bras and arabesques. She was so brave and clever, so beautiful! My mother had me soak in peroxide, put me to bed, and gave me onion soup for a week. But it didn’t matter. At the end of the week, I got sick.”

There is something new and self-mocking about his smile. “My father disappeared after that. He couldn’t deal with me, an invalid son.”

Mira has begun to tremble. Her face is sore.

“Well, that is all in the past. But you see — I cannot escape your Mr. Balanchine — it was he who choreographed the piece for Toumanova I saw that night, Palais de Cristal .” He looks at her. His face clouds over again. Now he looks strange, sad. “I am a pale shadow of him. I am a shadow of my father.”

Mira is standing right in front of him. They are so close. She can smell him. His pale face hovers before her. “No, you’re not.” She looks down, then up again. “You’re not — a shadow.”

She reaches up and kisses him. His lips are dry. He does not stop her. Later on, she will wonder if she imagined it, but at the time she knows it is true: he responds. His lips move.

He pulls away and wipes his mouth, looks up at the ceiling. In a different voice, he says, “The wise child.” Who is he speaking to? He is speaking to the ceiling? Then she knows— his father .

“I don’t regret it,” he says as she draws back, the strange feel of his dusty mouth on hers. “He only had two tickets. But, at intermission, Father gave me a cigar at the café. The only cigar I ever smoked. I got to go with him.”

They stand in the room, not talking, just breathing. What has happened? Something has changed, some line crossed. But he is quiet now. He seems calmer.

He waves his hand and smiles his little stones-on-a-ledge smile. “Do you still have that swan I gave you?” Afraid to speak, she nods. The heavy glass thing lolls about on her bedside table — it once got chewing gum on it, which left a sticky residue. It sits next to her other trophies: a fully-autographed SAB company catalog, Maurice’s calling card.

“Good,” he says. He pulls her, now more gently, through the kitchen — a clean, yellow-tiled room that smells of old oranges — into a back room that smells of the perfumed flowers she noticed when she first came into the apartment. He flicks on the lights. A bed with a white crocheted cover, a tightly shorn wool rug of jade green, and Chinese porcelain lamps on the two bedside tables, also painted with delicate flowers: the room of a lady who worked at being a lady. He flings open a mahogany box on one of the bedside tables and pulls out a string of beads. He holds them in his papery hands, an offering.

She stares at them. He shoves the string of pearls into her hand, closes her hand. “These pearls were my mother’s.” He sits on the bed. It groans. “They’re real. They’re for you.”

“They’re yellow.”

He laughs. “Each one was once a grain of sand. The oyster grinds the sand, grinds and grinds. The fake ones are white. Your Mr. B understands that.” He looks toward the window.

“Don’t worry,” she says, clasping the pearls hard in her fist. “It’ll be okay.”

He looks at her hopefully, then down again. Then more pointedly. “Really, Bella. Will it?”

Outside there are sounds: people whistle for cabs, ladies’ heels click on the pavement, horns blare then fade.

Lying in bed that night, she thinks about what has happened with Maurice. There are no words for it. Something has happened between them that can never be forgotten. She gets up and looks out her window. A tall woman in a long white coat walks her dog. The trees along the sidewalk rustle in the breeze. She stares outside for a long time.

I wake, cloudy headed, to a sweet, pungent odor. Someone has put some flowers at my bedside — lilies, harbingers of spring — mixed in with baby’s breath. Indeed Felicia has learned kindness. How to thank her?

I let the layers of consciousness come to me: they press on me — one by one: it’s Friday, the end of a work week. I need to be back by next Wednesday, so I have to make this day count. Sioban’s voice on my phone last night, austere in her sadness. I listen to her message again, noticing the way she stops and pauses between her words. The pauses make it seem like she’s creating — or at least managing — her emotional output. She lives her life as if she’s onstage . I will need to respond today, but what can I say? What can I possibly say?