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Fifth is a position to begin things from. Fifth is a frequent point of return. It’s also itself. Movement. Dance, even if it is still.
He wants it all to mean something. Ballet. His life, maybe.
James watches Alex feel like a god.
Blood of my blood. Flesh of my flesh. I’m his daughter. He is my father. I close my eyes. “Of course, I will come,” I say. “Of course.”
To be a great dancer is a question of morals. He didn’t name which ones.
Isabel feels that her life is over. She’s twenty-eight.
Having to struggle doesn’t necessarily make you interesting, it might just make you tired.
The sacred thing is to feel—if only for a moment—that I am not consuming or forgetting or losing the things of this world but adding to them. That I have made something true or beautiful or both. That I might do it again.
Emotions have a way of collecting and hardening inside us, like neglected grease. We are all smoking stoves.
But I’m not that girl anymore, and her dreams are no longer my dreams. Why should I feel like I failed her? I’m not that girl anymore. Oh, she’s still there.
Every day, I look at myself in the full-length mirrors of the ballet studio and watch myself dance. There seems to be a difference between the person dancing and the person watching herself dance. Is there a man, inside me, looking at me?
What I totally get is that my father loves James best and James loves my father best and Isabel loves Yuto and Ben best and everyone I know has someone they love best. I’m no one’s best.
I’m seventeen. I feel like my life is over.
You can be angry and freaked out or you can do Baroque court dances, but you can’t do both.
In truth, James, in the summer of 1988, is a man in retreat.
It’s rather touching when you think about it, a gay father tossing a ball with his gay son, not teaching him to catch so much as teaching him to pass.”
“James, James, James,” my father says. I blush. “I know just how you feel,” he says. We look at each other. For a moment I almost feel sorry for us.
This is traditional, classical ballet. Far-away realm. Magical creature. Handsome Prince. Beautiful Princess. Bad Sorcerer. Monsters. Maidens. Conflict. Resolution. Classical ballet doesn’t traffic in your bullshit.
“I felt you move for the first time during Firebird,” she says. “Onstage.” I take my hand off my pelvis. “I thought it was a sign I should stop dancing,” she continues. “But I guess it was really just you complaining about Stravinsky.”
To think of Isabel is to pull one’s shoulders back.
Shame lets you know you’re in the wrong, which is why you should trust it. Incorrect. Shame is the bullet of judgment and anyone can wield that gun.
But the male gaze is a God’s-eye view, which is to say omnipresent and internalized. There’s still a man in the mirror, watching me look at myself.
Infuriating, to be dressing for this dying man. This dying male gaze.
I find the comparison startling at first, and then I see it. Even the language and structure carry over. Corps de ballet. Marine corps, corps of cadets. Hierarchies. Boot camps. Discipline. Then the romance, just as Betsy said. The specialized language. Sacrifice. Devotion. Costumes. The desire to serve an ideal.
What is the thing that happens in a friendship that isn’t an absence of sex? The thing added, that’s maybe only between women. Not a matter of our organs or whether we were born with them or what we do with them. It’s this: a particular kind of glory that happens when we share our suffering and are seen. There’s a rising—a cry, a rush, a beating of wings together. An exaltation. I’m loath to connect womanness with suffering, or suffering with greatness, but there it is.
“Not everything is a test,” she says gently. “Of how much you can stand on your own.”
This is where betrayal began, nineteen years ago. I suppose it’s time to think about Alex.
haven’t had more than a few days of vacation since leaving college. Because of money but also because I don’t understand exactly what I’m trying to do, or why. No rest for the baffled.
Jealousy blooms in my chest.
We might be many things to James—my father and I—but we aren’t his muse.
“You know what’s more terrible than giving up a dream?” he asks. “To discover you haven’t.
No one had ever talked to me about my dancing, my qualities, what I might bring to the work. I’d not had a James. I’d always had a James. Only I’d never been his Alex.
“He gave you his life’s work.” His voice breaks again. “He gave you his life’s work and told you to bring it to someone he loved. You could have called me. You could have said, ‘Dad, James is suffering and confused and he wants me to do this thing and I don’t know what to do.’ ” I could have done those things.
All the ordinary gestures of life. Set them to music, make them formal or abstract, lose the FedEx truck, replace it with another body, put it on a stage. Now you have a ballet.
In Europe, culture is the cathedral, the museum, the opera house. Culture in America is the baseball diamond, the church picnic, the marching band. We don’t have fairies or sylphs in our folktales. We don’t have princes and princesses. What are princes to us? Why should those be on our stages, in our ballets? Who cares about yesterday? Yesterday is dead.
“We’re all turned outward too much. We understand the representation of things more than the thing itself.”
How dare they support me, praise me, love me, in secret?
I swear to God I will set a match to Bank Street. I will watch it burn to the ground.
It’s very strange, in the midst of great emotional turmoil, to have people want to tell you a ballet anecdote.
We smile at each other the way women do when we’re signaling our gratitude that the stranger invading our space is a woman rather than a man.
I will not be able to describe to anyone in this world or the next what it feels like to dance with my mother.
Listen to this silence, where all movement is contained. Watch this dance, even if it’s still. Here it comes. Here it is. A rising, an exaltation. All this wreckage. All this gorgeous, unrepeatable wreckage. Life.
