Читать книгу Dare Collection October 2019 - Margot Radcliffe - Страница 19

Darcy

BACK HOME, I told myself that everything was exactly the same.

New York was as noisy and exhilarating, anonymous and comfortable as I’d left it. I had the same life, the same responsibilities, the same routine. Morning class and endless, intense rehearsals as we geared up for the new season.

I was the same person who had left for a weekend in Paris.

I was fine.

“You’re welcome,” Annabelle had purred when I walked into our apartment after my long flight home. “I told you that you needed this and I was right. Think how much fun we’re going to have here now that you—”

“I’m not doing it again.” I dropped my bag on the floor and wanted to frown at her. Sternly. But I made myself smile instead, because I didn’t want her to know that I was…rocked. I wanted her to think I was like her and completely at my ease. “I wanted to do it once. And I did, so I’m done.”

Then, no matter how much she begged, I didn’t tell her a single thing about Sebastian. I told her about the performance. I commiserated with the fact she’d stayed here to understudy when, of course, Claudia hadn’t had so much as a stray sniffle and likely wouldn’t. I talked about the thrill of the burlesque, the unwieldy costume, and how different it had all been. I told her every detail I could recall about the club she’d been dying to see for years—at least, all the ones I could share under the conditions of the NDA.

But I kept Sebastian to myself.

Sebastian, who had been absolutely true to his word. Sebastian, who had kissed me and fucked me, made me cry his name, made me sob, and made me laugh. Over and over again.

We hadn’t gotten any sleep. After that meal and my refusal to extend our arrangement, he had applied himself to the task as if bent on leaving his mark on every square inch of my skin.

And he did.

But the fantasy was over. I’d walked out of that club into a sullen, wet Parisian morning—and the rest of my life—and I hadn’t looked back. I’d forced myself to stay awake and reasonably alert, and had marched through a few museums before whiling away a couple of hours at a café. I’d checked my bank balance and had just about fainted.

Then, finally, I’d gone to the airport a far richer woman than I’d been when I arrived, and slept all the way home on the plane.

I’d left the fantasy where it belonged. In a club I couldn’t access, across an ocean from me. I told myself that in time all that sensation would fade. My memories of it would become less vivid. That intense longing in me would dissipate.

I could comfort myself with the money I’d earned, and I did.

But one week passed, then another, and I kept waiting for my body to feel like…mine again.

Because, try as I might, I felt…different. And I knew it was me, because life in the corps was as it always had been and always would be. We danced. We obsessed over a wrist here, an ankle there. We practiced our steps, mastered our timing. As the weather grew colder, Annabelle and I spent less time running in Central Park and more time on elliptical machines. Sometimes we swam. It didn’t matter what I did, I didn’t feel right. I looked fine. As close to perfect as I could get, as required.

But I didn’t feel like me anymore.

I could feel that night in Paris in the way I danced. In every step and every tired muscle in my body. And maybe, I thought as yet another week passed and I still couldn’t quite inhabit my own body the way I used to so easily, it wasn’t Sebastian at all. He had touched something in me I hadn’t known was there, that was true. I didn’t try to deny that even to myself.

But I was beginning to wonder if the burlesque had changed my dancing for good.

Or not the dancing, not really. I could perform at the same capacity and did, because if I didn’t I’d get cut. I was fine. But my drive had shifted.

Before I’d gone to Paris, my life had revolved around a certain grim acceptance that this was the way it was and nothing could change it. I would dance until I was cut from the corps. I would never ascend to a higher level as a soloist—always a bridesmaid and never a bride, my friend Winston used to say—and I would call that a career. I would be grateful for it, and someday I feared I would miss these days.

If I had any future plans, they were dim and insubstantial. There were those who parlayed their time in the company into teaching for the Knickerbocker. But that, too, was a political quagmire, and I already knew that I would have to be far better than I was—far better, yet still not good enough to bloom into a prima ballerina role—to shift over to company staff, much less become a ballet master in my own right. I’d once seen a TV show about a former ballerina who went off to some picturesque village somewhere and opened her own ballet school, and when I imagined anything at all after these years of the corps, I imagined that.

Late at night, while Annabelle and her lovers made their typical ruckus, I didn’t lie in bed with my hands between my legs any longer, getting myself off on my fantasies. Sebastian had far outstripped any fantasy I might have had. And I didn’t really see the point of pretending my fingers were him when I knew better. Instead, I lay awake and tried to imagine myself as one of my early ballet teachers. I tried to imagine myself patiently molding little girls without crushing their dreams. Or attempting to see the beauty in their waddling, ghastly attempts at ballet’s contradictory willowy crispness. Trying all the while to pretend I wasn’t desolate for the life I’d been forced to leave behind.

But no matter how I tried to imagine it, I couldn’t quite see myself in that role.

The next time I took the train north from the city, using my day off for one of my command performance dinners with my parents, I tried to imagine that this was my commute home. That I’d come down into the city to see Annabelle, perhaps, and was now returning to my small little suburban life. Back to the Darcy James Ballet School, where ambitious mamas would bully their little girls into tutus, bully me into pretending they could dance, and calling all that failure and imperfection ballet.

It made me feel hollow.

I took a taxi from the train station when I arrived, the better not to inconvenience my parents, and stared out at the Connecticut countryside that I knew so well. I had grown up here. I didn’t dislike it, or go to great lengths to separate myself from its suburban grasp the way I knew Annabelle did. But by the same token, when all was said and done, I had never imagined myself here.

I had always imagined myself onstage.

I tried to snap myself out of it when the car turned into the long drive that led to my childhood home. I made myself breathe properly as the stone house, fashioned like an opulent farmhouse, came into view. It was lit up bright and cheery against the autumn night, and I told myself that I was, too.

But no visit to my parents was ever without tension.

I was a grown, independent woman, but I still dressed for them instead of myself. A smart pair of flats instead of the comfortable boots I preferred. Black leggings, but not worn as pants, as I knew that was one of my mother’s pet peeves. I wore a little A-line shift dress over the leggings, and it wasn’t until I glanced at myself in the hall mirror in the foyer that I realized I already looked like the suburban ballet mistress who haunted my future.

I’d draped myself in several scarves to break up the relentless black and pulled my hair back into the ubiquitous ballet bun, but that didn’t change the facts. I had never seen a woman either in the ballet or adjacent to the ballet—of any age—who didn’t dress…exactly like this. As if we spent our lives in corps whether we were dancing or not.

Welcome to your life, I told myself sharply. Better get used to it now.

I wandered farther into the house, following the sound of my parents’ favorite classical music station into the back of the house. Evenings were always conducted in the chic, sophisticated kitchen complete with sofas arranged around a cozy fireplace and the sort of dramatic flower arrangements that could only be maintained by twice-weekly visits from the florist. Sure enough, my mother stood at the counter, putting the finishing touches on a meal I knew she hadn’t cooked. That was the province of the housekeeper. While she added her own little flourishes to the dinner she needed only to warm, my father sat near the fire, lost behind The New York Times.

I hovered in the wide archway a moment, not sure why it had never occurred to me before that I had first learned the rules of performance here. In this house, where the appearance of perfection had always been valued far above any kind of honesty or emotion. This was where I’d learned to dance long before I’d learned the basics of the five positions that were the foundation of ballet.

But maybe that was straying too far into the cynicism I had so boldly told Sebastian I didn’t possess.

My mother was slim, her hair more silver than black these days. Even though this was a dinner at home, she was dressed elegantly. She was always dressed elegantly. Dark, exquisitely tailored pants over flats that gleamed. And above, the sort of fitted, understated jacket that was undoubtedly sourced from some designer recognizable by a single name. She wore pearls at her ears, a simple gold chain at her neck. On her left hand, she wore one exquisite diamond that my father had placed there some thirty years ago. She was the kind of woman other people, who didn’t dance professionally, always claimed looked like a dancer. They meant she stood tall, was thin, and carried herself with a certain air of purpose.

I really was a professional dancer, but I’d never come close to my mother’s elegance. And looking at her now, I felt a familiar ache inside me that reminded me I never would. I could dance myself silly, and I had. And would, as long as I could. But it was my mother who commanded rooms with an arch of one brow.

If she’d taken to the stage, I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that my mother would have easily become a prima ballerina. Sometimes I suspected she knew it, too.

Maybe that was the sharp little thing beneath my heart that always pulsed so painfully when I was near her.

“Do come inside, Darcy,” she said then, her voice a cool reproach. “I’m not sure why you’re lurking in the doorway like that.”

“Hi, Mom,” I replied, fighting to keep from sounding like a petulant child. “It’s nice to see you, too.”

Dinner wasn’t strained, because my mother was always the consummate hostess. My father, who had been exactly this stout and stern and mustached as long as I could remember, told carefully curated stories that gave the appearance of joviality. My mother steered the conversation from his stories to topics of general interest, then back again. She always asked questions, then pretended to be interested in the answers. He always pretended to be as entertained as he was entertaining.

I sat there dutifully and pretended to be perfect.

It was like every dinner I could remember in this house. We sat stiffly in the sophisticated dining room with its gleaming mahogany table, the hand-polished chandelier, and my grandmother’s silver.

“You must be excited about the new ballet season,” my mother said. Her formidable gaze met mine. “Is there any hope that this is your year at last?”

She meant, When can I tell our friends that you’re dancing a solo instead of merely leaping around in the back?

“It’s been almost a decade,” my father chimed in, as if I’d missed that. “You deserve a promotion.”

“It doesn’t really work like that.”

“Have you tried, dear?” my mother asked.

She didn’t ask it snidely. There was no edge to her voice at all. She sounded as cool, composed, and carefully neutral as she always did.

There was no reason whatsoever that I should feel this…thing erupt inside of me.

I wanted it to be a cleansing sort of rage, but it was far more frightening than that. It was emotion. Thick and ugly and everywhere.

And I knew why. I could see Sebastian’s bright blue gaze as if he sat there across from me at this excruciatingly polite dinner. I had kept myself in little boxes my whole life. Perfect daughter. Straight-A student. And the best ballet dancer that I could be, which was never good enough.

“It’s actually extremely hard to make it into the corps at all,” I heard myself say, all that emotion making my voice too thick. “Much less stay there, dancing perfectly day in and day out, for years.”

My mother did not express disappointment in my words. Instead, it was in the angle of her head. The faint lift of one brow. “No one is prouder of you than we are, Darcy. Was that in doubt?”

And just like that, I felt like a bull in a china shop. I set down my heavy silver fork and fought to compose myself. For some reason I thought of Sebastian again, somehow handling a drunken, broken mother. Maybe we were all reduced to this, no matter our accomplishments. Maybe we all acted like children when faced with the only people on earth who still saw us that way.

But telling myself it was normal didn’t make it feel any better. It didn’t make me feel any better. And all I ended up wanting to do was…rebel. Somehow. When the most rebellious thing I’d ever done was talk back a few times as a child, right here at this same table. Or fail to disclose every detail of my whereabouts when asked. Small-fry stuff, if that. Mostly I’d spent my childhood in ballet studios and boarding schools.

Maybe that was why what I said then felt like such a bombshell.

“Ballet is only one kind of dancing,” I heard myself say. “It’s just a style. There are other styles.”

Sacrilege.

My parents looked appalled, as if I’d started shooting up heroin at the dinner table.

“Such as?” my mother asked, frostily.

“Please don’t tell me you’re planning to run off and join one of those Cirque du Soleil troops,” my father muttered, no longer the least bit jovial. “Dress it up anyway you like, it’s still the circus.”

“Cirque du Soleil performers are acrobats of the highest level,” I replied. Possibly through my teeth. “And no, I would not be running off to join them, because I’m not an acrobat. It’s a completely different form of bodywork.”

“I don’t recall anyone using the term bodywork in your ballet classes, Darcy,” my mother said in repressive tones.

“That’s because they use French names so they can sound fancier,” I replied in much the same tone, as if we were fighting. When I knew very well we were not. Because my parents didn’t fight. They exhibited their reactions through the use of temperature. Cold or frigid, generally. Right now there was a wintry wind blowing in this dining room, but for some reason, it wasn’t having the effect on me it normally did.

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to be perfect,” I heard myself say, though no one had asked. My parents looked glacial. “That’s what ballet is. It’s rigid. Exact. And I love it, I do. I always will. But every now and again I wonder if it might not be a whole lot more fun to just…dance.”

My heart was pounding. My ears were ringing. My head felt thick and fuzzy.

I had never said something like that out loud before. I wasn’t sure I’d ever dared think it.

“Just dance,” my mother echoed. She and my father exchanged a chilly look. “I’m not sure I understand what that means, Darcy. As far as I was aware, that is what you do. As a profession—one you worked very hard to achieve.”

“There’s more to dancing than just classic ballet, that’s all I’m saying. Modern dance. Contemporary dance. Folk dancing. Postmodern dance. Personal dancing in clubs. Burlesque dancing.”

“Burlesque dancing.” This time, the way my mother repeated the words dripped icicles. “Do you really think a…cabaret show is an appropriate use of all the years you’ve spent studying proper dance?”

She said cabaret show as if it was a filthy curse word more commonly employed in truck stops.

“Is ‘cabaret’ how you say ‘stripper’ in Connecticut, Mom?”

I shouldn’t have asked that.

My father’s face turned red. My mother’s hand rose to her neck, and if she’d been wearing a strand of pearls I was sure she’d have clung to them. Not because I’d said something so distasteful, I knew. They read grittier things on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. But because it wasn’t appropriate dinner conversation.

“I’m not saying I want to be a stripper—not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I hurried to say. “I’m just pointing out that there are other forms of dance.”

My mother seemed to take an ice age or two to lower her hand back to her lap.

“Your father and I have season tickets to the New York Philharmonic,” she said evenly. “The Metropolitan Opera. And the Knickerbocker Ballet. We do not have season tickets, or any tickets at all, to a burlesque revue. Why do you think that is?”

I wanted to say, because you’re snobs. But that would be drastically upping the intensity of the bomb I’d already thrown into the middle of the dinner table. I wasn’t sure I really needed to up the ante with the nuclear option.

Or you’re too afraid, said a voice inside me that sounded entirely too much like a very dangerous Englishman I needed to forget. Too much of a coward.

So instead, I fumed about it all the way back to the city on the train. And when the fuming wore itself out, I wondered why I’d lost my temper in the first place. I didn’t fight with my parents, as a governing policy. There was no point to it. I didn’t fight with anyone, for that matter, because there were so few areas of my life that allowed for any conflict. Not when what was required to survive my schedule was discipline, endless discipline.

And yet since I had returned from Paris, I’d felt constantly this close to an explosion. At my parents. In rehearsals. Even at Annabelle.

People liked to claim artists were temperamental. In my experience, temperamental was an act. An indulgence. When it was time to work, the professionals got down to business and left the dramatic carrying-on to the amateurs. There were no divas in the corps. There was no room for any theatrics but the ones we were being paid to perform.

And yet there was too much inside me these days. Too much wildness and recklessness. As if I was seconds away from snapping back every time the ballet master corrected me, which would not be good.

As the train charged through the night, I faced the inescapable fact that I was different now, whether I wanted that to be true or not. I’d lost something in Paris a month ago, even as I’d gained the sheer joy of actually living out my wildest, most insane, most delicious fantasy. I’d lost the single-minded focus and drive that had fueled my life and my discipline for all these years, and I couldn’t seem to get it back.

There had always been a pleasure in surrendering to the tough little march of my days. I loved what I did, especially when I let go of my ambition and lost myself in the sheer, fierce joy of dancing. But there was so much pain that went with it. You had to be some kind of masochist to build your life around it. I’d accepted that a long time ago, and I’d surrendered.

Because every once in a while, the suffering disappeared, and there was only the breath inside me and flying. Without wings, light and free.

And as the train pulled into Grand Central Station, it hit me. I wasn’t sure that having made myself an object devoted entirely to pleasure for one long night in Paris, and having loved it as much as I had, that I could give myself back to the pain again. Not even for the gift of flight.

That tore me wide open, like an earthquake.

Maybe it was the aftershocks from that that made me get on the subway instead of walking home the way I had planned. I didn’t question what I was doing. I headed to Chelsea and found myself walking quickly toward a theater tucked away on a side street. I bought a ticket at the box office in front, then ducked into the back.

The show had already started, but I didn’t mind. I felt vulnerable and exposed already, even there in the darkness of the audience, and I was glad there were no house lights on to expose me.

Because this was the contemporary dance company my friend Winston had joined two years ago, and at which he had become a principal. And Winston himself was there on stage, barefoot and beautiful as he danced to the kind of throbbing music that would give our Tchaikovsky-loving audiences the vapors.

He looked happier than he ever had in the corps.

More than that, he looked…free.

That was the word that pounded through me, in time to the hypnotic beat. Free.

There wasn’t a hint of ballet on that stage. And I loved it.

When the curtain lowered, I was shaken. Tears poured down my face, but not because I was sad. I wasn’t. I was electrified. I had seen sheer joy on that stage. Art and beauty. And I knew that if I hadn’t gone to Paris, if I hadn’t given myself over to that one night of burlesque and fantasy, I would have failed to see what was happening here. I would have judged it through the lens of the Knickerbocker and found it sadly lacking.

Because if you didn’t know what you were missing, you couldn’t see it. You would never see it. You could flap your wings all you liked, make all the right noises about flight, but you stayed in the same cage.

But I knew better, now. I’d stepped outside the cage, and maybe it had been silly to imagine I could ever go back. That I could ever pretend I didn’t know the difference when I was back behind the bars.

When I made my way backstage, Winston took one look at my face and let out a deep, joyful belly laugh.

“I know that look,” he said, catching me in a hug. “Welcome to the dark side, Darcy. Anytime you want a place out here dancing for the fun of it, you let me know.”

“The corps is life,” I replied lightly, as if it was all a joke.

“That’s the marines, sweetie.” Winston rolled his eyes. “And don’t listen to those grim old sadists at the Knickerbocker. It’s not the same thing.”

Maybe it was as simple as having options and choices instead of the same well-documented decline that made me feel so drunk all the way home. It was a cold night, but I walked anyway, because I wanted my feet on the ground. I wanted to feel the world the best way I knew how: by moving through it and in it, breath in my lungs and my toes against the earth.

Nothing had changed, and yet everything was different.

I had changed, and that made everything different.

I thought of bright blue eyes, cruel lips, and his hands in fists in my hair.

Right on cue, I melted. I went breathless and slippery, here in a different city a world away, with no hope of ever repeating that one glorious night. I thought of him, and I melted the way I expected I always would.

And then everything changed again.

Because when I turned the corner and started down the street to my building, the door to a sleek, low black car opened right in front of me.

And then he was there.

Sebastian. My Sebastian.

Not a fantasy this time, lost somewhere in Paris with angel wings and the magic of the burlesque.

Big and real and right here, in my real life.