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
