Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

“Trefilova was so athletic that she could do fifty fouettés before her first coffee,” I say.

He laughs again. “Karsavina was a great pantomime artist.”

“Ulanova was the greatest actress of them all,” I say.

“Markova’s powerful classical lines,” he says.

“Taglioni—” I say.

“The pointe shoe of course.”

We smile, an old cripple in common.

I am sitting, he’s standing, we’re just a few feet apart. “I just wanted to hear the stories about his life — and you. But he had to talk about his ballerinas.”

Despite myself, I nod.

“Gradually, I got curious. I began to go to the ballet. He couldn’t leave his bed, but I went and described what I’d seen to him and he closed his eyes and drank it in. I fed him ballet and he grew stronger.”

I’m envious of all these words Kevin has to describe his relationship with Maurice. I have so few. My own self when I first met Maurice — an anxious wide-eyed girl.

Kevin’s gazing out at the gathering dark in the East. He turns back to look at me. His glasses are off again. His eyes looks smaller and deeper-set. Actually, there is a lot of Maurice in him. The small stature. And the coiled energy, an intensity of gaze, a precision of expression. The way his eyes can settle into a pinprick of attention like his father’s.

“One day he said, ‘your mother was the greatest dancer of all’ and I said ‘who was she?’ And then he told me. He told me everything. He told me how you followed him home and stood there in his living room as if you owned him. He said he fell in love with you then. He said you were the bravest girl he knew. He said, ‘she could have been famous, but because of me she was not.’ He told me how I was conceived. By then, he was very sick, he was dying. It was very difficult for me to hear.”

“Ha!” I shake my head.

“He had a picture of you. He showed me. Here, I saved it for you.” He goes back to his desk and pulls a photo from his drawer and hands it to me. It’s browned around the edges, and small. Against the dim stage set of a castle, a blurry figure in yellow leaps high off the ground. An off-kilter figure in blue — a boy in a prince’s tunic — stands with arm raised like in a strange salute. It’s a strange, spooky picture, a moment in a play, not quite real. “It looks like you’re flying.”

“I was falling,” I say. “I fractured my wrist that day.” I hold it up to show him.

My son moves toward me. “I’m glad I sent Maurice’s letter to you. I’m glad you found me.” He’s so close I can smell him, old coffee and the sweet smell of new photocopies. “I wasn’t sure after what Maurice — my father — told me that you’d want to see me. Or how you’d react.”

Secrets can make more secrets. My affair with Sioban, for instance. But I stopped that one. And Sioban, I remember, has reported me. No more secrets. Staring at this young man behind his enormous desk who was trying to stop the secrets by sending me the letter. A sneaky, imperfect way, I know.

“You need some time.” He hands me a business card, writes something on the back. His hand is shaking. “It’s my cell, my personal number.”

“What do you want from me?” I say, taking the card.

The night sky is settling over the city and the room grows dimmer. Kevin makes an unsure noise. He stretches one hand out at me uncertainly. Then he drops it. He says, “Just to know you.” But he looks unsure. His gaze has shifted, has become something else. Desperate? Angry?

The office has become unbearable, claustrophobic. It is pressing around me, smothering me in its fertile, deep stink, the pressing darkness, his too-bright eyes, his outstretched hand offering the card.

I grab his card, turn abruptly, push the door, and then am out. I am in the brightly lit hallway and then at the bank of elevators. When the elevator arrives, I step into it, and, for a moment as I watch the little numbers light up in descending order—27, 26, 25, 24—I hang in the balance, falling, suspended.

It’s the morning of Mira’s fourteenth birthday. She wakes feeling strong, her body taut. She is one of the chosen girls, gathering from all around the city, waking on a Saturday and preparing themselves before their sleeping families even stir. These families rise at ten or later and, still in bathrobes, eat bagels and fish and cheese and fruit salad. They just sit and eat . It is astonishing. They begin their day as she is finishing her first class. Sometimes — as she launches into her second barre for the day, she imagines her dad, Judy, and Sam in robes and cloth napkins sitting before all that food on the little patio with a view of the East River, and she smiles to herself. Her virtue in counterpoint to their sloth.

In the new bathroom — Judy just had it redone — Mira pulls her washed, wrinkled tights down from where they hang on the shower stall from when she rinsed them out the night before. Over her tights and leotard, she pulls on a pair of tight jeans and her favorite boatneck shirt.

She marches by her dad and Judy’s room, then Sam’s room, with her duffel bag loaded, shoulders squared against the weight.

It is eight fifteen. She enters the diner across from Lincoln Center and orders her regular: blueberry muffin, toasted, no butter. She will eat half the muffin before Technique, then a quarter between Variations and Pointe, the rest after her classes are over. And coffee — black. She has recently begun, like the other SAB girls her age, to drink coffee. They actually don’t drink much, but they bring it to the dressing room, the hallway, and take tiny sips, leaving the blue and white cups floating around them like little buoys, marking their territory.

Mira stands in front of the bulletin board. More than two years have gone by since she became an SAB student. She shifts her dance bag onto the other shoulder. It’s now a big girl’s dance bag — filled with all the equipment required of pointe shoe maintenance: lamb’s wool, first-aid tape and gauze, rags, hairspray (to stiffen the toe box), four pairs of pointe shoes from different classes — new ones to break in during floor, a worn-in pair for Variations, and a medium pair for Wednesday Technique class.

She scours the bulletin board while sipping her coffee. The coffee is sludge. It scorches her throat.

Her eyes move over the notices for rehearsal space, past Alexander Technique teachers advertising discounted lessons, to the Xeroxed green and pink notices from last week’s audition calls. The notices specify age groups. “Ages fourteen and up.” Fourteen. The magical divide between trainee and professional. She’s fourteen today!

It might have been different if it were in the old days — begin performing at thirteen, travel the trains like gypsies, and disembark every night in a new town. But now, soon, at fifteen or sixteen, it will happen for them — or not. Boys have more leeway. For Advanced girls, especially those who reach D and who are not taken into the company, there are real questions: If they are not accepted into the New York City Ballet — and few are (only one girl last year made it in) — where will they go? Will they be accepted to a regional dance company? Say, in Phoenix? In Tampa? They will have to buy their own pointe shoes on a corps dancer’s stingy salary. They are beautiful, rare specimens, but is there a place for them? Are they just to be placed on a shelf like Pavlova’s pointe shoe and stared at? Will they become princesses with no kingdoms, concubines with no masters?

She takes her time, as befits one of the best girls in her division. A girl with Mr. B’s imprimatur. A former Marie.