Chapter One: Lucy and Mr. Norris
The floor was hard and cold against my shoulders, under my ass. He couldn’t get a carpet?
At least an area rug?
I guess this is what he paid me for, this discomfort and chill. My muscles started to ache from lying still and holding the demanding pose. If I didn’t love him so much I would never submit to this, but I completely adored him, so here I was. And yes, he paid me quite well for my services and regularly asked me back, which I found both flattering and reassuring.
I looked up at him from under my eyelashes but I doubt he even noticed my gaze. His eyes were fixed, as always, on my supple dancer’s body offered before him. I watched his powerful strokes, vigorous and intense. He was actually quite robust for a man of seventy-five. His name was Pietro and he was an artist. And me? My name was Lucy, and unfortunately I wasn’t quite sure from day to day who or what I really was. I guess if I had to choose I would say I was a dancer first, who just happened to fall into nude modeling on the side. It was high art stuff, not porn, although I knew plenty of dancers who took the porn route to make ends meet. Like most dancers, I wasn’t precious about my body. I knew it was nice and I used it when it suited me. But porn wasn’t really my thing. It seemed so squalid, so I was glad for this gig, being painted by a real artist.
The broad strokes Pietro made scratched loudly in the silence, that abrasive sound of pencil on textured canvas that I knew so well by now. Sometimes it irritated me, but sometimes it relaxed me and I floated off into daydreams listening to it go on. Sometimes, instead, I pictured the lines of my own body as he put them to canvas with his hands. Pietro made large works, sprawling and spare, all shading and lines, although my body and face were definitely there. No abstract, amorphous, unrecognizable figure. It was definitely me and part of me got off on that fact. He thought I was beautiful. He’d told me so when he hired me. “I need your beauty,” he’d rasped to me outside the theater like a desperate man. The very next day, I’d knocked on the door of his studio. He’d guided me inside, coaxed me out of my clothes and said, “Beautiful girl.” Then he turned me so my back was to him and started to sketch my curvy little ass.
But it wasn’t about sex, not even for a second. Believe me, no sex was ever involved. Even though Pietro undressed me like the most solicitous of lovers every time I came over, we were not lovers. We were nothing more than friends. Not even friends really. He was more like a mentor. Or maybe a grandfather, a nice grandfather who gave me advice. I loved Pietro with my whole heart, loved him like the father I’d never had, and Pietro was always kind to me the many hours we spent together at work.
He scratched at a line with his finger, adjusting the shading with a frown. When I thought that my back would break from the strain of the pose, he smiled at me and sighed.
“It is time for a break, I think.”
“How did you know?”
“The little lines in your forehead, they draw together like this.” He made a funny face, an exaggerated imitation of my discomfort. I laughed, shrugging on the robe he handed me.
I looked at the canvas while we chatted and rested. It was almost done, I guessed. The last two works of me had been standing poses, which was much more relaxing. I could stand for an eternity not moving a muscle, piece of cake. But this pose had me on my back with my arms up over my head, and my legs curled loosely at my side. It was a lovely pose, I could see that on the canvas, but it hurt to hold it for such a long time.
Luckily, Pietro was conscientious about giving me breaks. He only refused to let me up when he was in the throes of “the muse.” When I did take a break I felt guilty, because it always took time for him to get back into that same space he’d been. It always took five minutes or more just to return my arms and legs to that perfect angle he craved. I would let him manipulate me into position, loose and compliant. It was sort of like sex, only Pietro wasn’t my lover.
No, my lover had left me last week. Did I say he was my lover? He was my fiancé, actually.
The operative word being was. He was my fiancé, until he left me at the altar. He was my fiancé until he realized he was in love with someone else. He had never loved me even though he’d said he did, and I hadn’t loved him, and that was the worst thing of all.
But I preferred not to talk about Joe. I’d finally reached a point where I could conjure his face without bursting into tears. And around the time I reached that point, I decided not to conjure his face anymore at all. I was a practical person in matters of the heart. I had never been in love. I realized that now, after the wretchedness of last week, that I had never been in love and probably never would be, because there was something wrong with me. I couldn’t feel things right, or maybe I just didn’t want to.
Not feeling things came in handy in many ways. As a modern dancer, you’re grappled and grasped pretty regularly. You spend hours punishing your body at the barre, at rehearsals, at choreography, at nightly performances. As an art model, you’re manipulated and posed. When you make your life by your body, it’s actually better not to feel too much. To feel only what matters. Stretch. Breathe. Turn. Soar. I felt my body move in space and that was enough.
This would be the third work I’d done for Pietro. The first two had sold as a set to an anonymous buyer for an obscene amount. After they sold, Pietro had given me five thousand dollars and said he felt it wasn’t enough. I tried to refuse it because he already paid me an hourly wage that was more than fair, but he insisted, telling me it would assuage his guilt.
“What did you sell them for?” I had pressed.
“A lot. A bidding war. Two buyers.” Then he’d told me the amount and my mouth dropped open. I pocketed his check without another word.
But Pietro was deserving of every success. He worked hard at his art and his vision was original and striking. I wondered as we worked what this one would sell for. To me, it was even more beautiful and provocative than the others. I wondered if he thought the same thing, if it mattered to him. What will this bring me? How much money will I make? I wondered if he looked at me differently now. When he looked at me, what did he see? Beauty, as he claimed, or something else? A naked, compelling body to sell for money? Lots of money, it seemed. But I was more than happy to be a vessel for his success.
I left Pietro’s at four o’clock to go to the theater. We had no rehearsals on Tuesday, just a nightly performance at eight. I was meeting Grégoire for dinner beforehand. Grégoire, my dance partner, and my best friend.
Grégoire was a couple years older than me, thirty years old to my twenty eight. He had cried on my shoulder the day of his birthday. “Thir
ty?” he’d mourned. “It’s too awful to be true.” And it was awful, because we were dancers. Our performance life spans were miserably short, especially with the kind of punishing dance we did. I already nursed aches and twinges that worsened by the week. I hoped to make it to thirty five, but even that seemed an unlikely event.
So I held Grégoire in total empathy that night, stroking his soft black hair and crying along with him. Life after dance was something I never thought of, something I hadn’t planned for, at least not yet.
“Lucy!” He waved to me as I neared the stage door. He was leaning against the wall jabbering on the phone. Talking to his boyfriend no doubt, who he claimed to love desperately, but who was rarely around. “He works,” he explained. “He’s not in the arts.” The sugar daddy, who had a real job. Every dancer needed one, just as I’d had, only I hadn’t been able to hold onto mine.
I waved back to him and crossed the cracked pavement. The ground outside the theater was littered with cigarette butts and plastic water bottle caps. Disgusting dancers, I thought to myself.
I went inside to drop off my bag in my dressing room, my eyes adjusting to the darkness from the blinding light outside. I was so sun-struck I almost collided with someone in the corridor. He steadied me and I looked up at him with an embarrassed grin.
“Sorry, I’m blind.”
He answered with a smile and left his hand on my elbow just a little longer than seemed right. And I can’t explain it, but the way he held my arm felt...well...almost inappropriate in some way. When he finally let go I scurried down the hall, fighting the urge to look back.
But it was hard not to, because even in my blindness I noticed he was an extremely attractive man. Even sun blind, he’d made me feel hot and agitated with nothing more than the strange firmness of his touch. Sandy blond hair, a broad face and mouth, and blue eyes that couldn’t possibly have been as light as they looked. It was just the sun, I thought, that made them so singular. It was only the sun that made me feel so unglued.
I pushed into my dressing room and found Elinor there. I dropped my bag, and I normally would have walked right back out. But he might still be back there by the stage door, and for some reason I didn’t feel up to facing him again. Instead I resigned myself to small talk with Ellie. Elinor was a dyed-in-the-wool dancer, artistic and pure. Talking to her was like driving wood chips under my fingernails. After five minutes of her prattle, I figured I’d rather face the elbow grabber in the hall.
But he was gone. I burst from the stage door and gestured impatiently for Grégoire to hang up. Grégoire, the blessed antidote to Elinor. Grégoire was as far from precious as they come, especially considering he was a gorgeous, gay euro-boy come over from Paris to the delight of us all. He spoke English like it was his bitch. I wished often that I was a man because I loved him so much.
“How are you, gorgeous?” he asked, ruffling my hair.
“I’m fine.”
“How’s Pietro? You posed today, huh?”
“Yeah, he’s fine. He’s good.”
Grégoire was both fascinated and jealous of my art modeling. When I’d first begun as Pietro’s model, he’d demanded blow by blow accounts of every boring session. Now he seemed to finally be getting over it. “How’s Georges?” I asked.
“He’s out of town for the week. I miss him already. He gave me quite the send off last night.”
I braced, hoping he wouldn’t go into details, but of course he did. I listened, half aroused and half aghast. Georges and Grégoire shared a pretty intense sex life, more intense than anything I’d ever had. I guessed it was a sugar daddy gay thing but yeah, it turned me on. I found my mind returning to the man in the corridor, the man of the insistent elbow grasp, and I wondered what his sex life was like. A garden of delights, like Georges and Grégoire enjoyed, or the bland but satisfying niceness that Joe and I endured? And yes, I had only endured it.
Outwardly, I guess most would have been happy. He made love to me with such care and attention, it would have made any woman pleased, but I faked ninety-nine percent of my orgasms. He made love to me with such careful attention that it crossed the line from erotic to clinical. Nothing was worse than when he went down on me. I shuddered just thinking of it, how considerate and solicitous he’d been. When I shuddered, Grégoire thought I was cold and pulled me closer.
“Let’s pretend we’re married,” he said.
“Again? We pretend that every day.”
He put his big hand on my ass and squeezed it. “This time, pretend like you mean it, Lu.” The sway of his hips matched mine as we walked together. Grégoire was not a swishy gay man, although he could be if he wanted to. He was actually quite proud of his straight act, which he honed and perfected. His lover, Georges, was not completely out of the closet. When he took Grégoire out around town, he was expected to act straight. And of course as a dancer, Grégoire had to be masculine and he was. Actually, people assumed we were lovers because he was so absolutely masculine when we danced together. And I suppose in a way we were lovers. There’s really no other way to express that dynamic between devoted partners who really know each other. Who know each other’s center, each other’s lines and planes and joints. Grégoire knew me like a ball player knows his ball, like a musician knows his instrument, like a carpenter knows his tools. He was attuned to every single thing about me and my body, and when he danced with me everyone could tell.
Of course, I had other partners. I danced with many partners in the company who were very good and skilled and knew me very well. But Grégoire was my partner, my best match, and I was his. It was a wonderful relationship, one I felt blessed to have.
* * *
Later that night, I woke up at three A.M. from a nightmare. It was the same nightmare I had several nights a week, the feeling of having a hand clamped over my mouth so I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t scream. I had the same unbearable feeling on waking, the desperate need to cry, to weep. I knew that if I could only cry, things might start to get better. The need for me to cry was so acute that it was painful. I screwed up my face, tried to force those wet droplets from the corners of my eyes. But nothing, no tears came. They never did.
These nightmares had been happening for months, long before my recent breakup with Joe.
That dry tense feeling when the tears wouldn’t come, it drove me to desperation. In the beginning I used to actually scream trying to bring the tears to my eyes, but all my screams brought were the police, yelling and banging on the door to see if I was all right. I assured them that I was fine, that’d I just had a nightmare. Thank you, officers. Sorry. Good night.
If you saw me from the outside, you would never suspect that I was a person who woke up regularly with the excruciating need to scream. That I was a person who couldn’t bring tears to my wide green eyes no matter how hard I willed it. That I was a person who was dead inside.
The truth hurts, but that’s what I was. My body was the only thing that made me alive.
On the outside, I just looked like a normal person. A dancer with a healthy body, muscular and lithe. I had very pale skin, the result of a life inside theaters and studios, hours at the barre.
My hair was red, longish length, and waved into curls when I didn’t have it up. And my dark green eyes, they were nothing spectacular either...not like his, I found myself thinking. No, I looked totally typical and normal from the outside. Not to say I was a depressed, unhappy person either. I don’t know how to describe what I was. I guess I was someone who was waiting to become someone. Which was unfortunate, since I was pushing twenty-nine.
* * *
On Wednesdays my company had a traditional class before rehearsals. I came in the stage door almost hoping to collide with the blue-eyed man again, but he wasn’t there. Why couldn’t I get him out of my mind? We had exchanged one touch, been in each other’s space five seconds at most.
What had he been doing backstage anyway? I knew he wasn’t a dancer. He was too old, and had been wearing b
usiness clothes. I didn’t recognize him as any of the administrative suits. He certainly wasn’t the type of man who organized and ran small dance companies. What type of man was he, then? What did he do? Something very powerful, I thought, and I don’t know why I was so certain of that. Had he ever seen me dance? And why should I care? I went into the rehearsal room and threw down my dance bag in frustration. I started to stretch next to Grégoire at the barre. Reach. Bend. Breathe. Point. I flexed my feet, went up on my toes, felt the strength in my muscles along with that faint but ever present twinge of ache. My mind emptied as the rehearsal captain began and I soon lost myself to the push and pull, the straining and agony, the soothe and sweep of modern dance.
Our company was considered avant-garde, although we used classical technique and even sometimes danced en pointe. We used new and buzz-worthy choreographers and non-traditional music, and performed acrobatics that made people marvel, bringing more and more fans to our shows. We were a relatively small company, twenty four dancers, but we were growing and had just moved into a larger theater space earlier in the year.
And my place in this scrappy little company? I suppose I was one of the stars, although when you dance for a small company and don’t make much money, you don’t feel like a star.
Nor did I have much of an ego. I didn’t dance for the ovation. I danced because I had to dance, because it was who I was. But I was able to do the more spectacular tricks of the choreography, which earned me respect and made the roses fall at my feet. It was a good life, and now, since my breakup with Joe, it had become my whole life for better or worse.
These exercises were bone memory, a meditation. I could cycle through them half asleep.
Point. Reach. Turn. Bend. It was so simple and precise. It was comfortable absentia, a mantra for the body that I couldn’t live without. I leaned back into a graceful, languorous stretch. I smiled, catching Grégoire’s eyes over my shoulder. Then my smile froze and I almost fell off balance, because there, over Grégoire’s shoulder, my eyes found him.