Mercy (2 page)

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 business 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
.

It was all I could do not to whip my head around, turn back to take a longer look at him leaning against the wall. He stood casually, his arms crossed over his chest, but his eyes had been fixed on me.

I swallowed hard, tried to keep my mind on my work. A flush rose in my cheeks as I realized I’d flubbed a
tendu
.
Somehow I knew without a doubt that he noticed. In fact, I pictured him smiling that same amused smile he’d given me in the hall. I fixed my eyes on some point across the room and kept them there. I refused to look at him even when I turned to work his way. I was so tired of thinking of this man and now he here he was, in class, the one place I could usually relax. The whole time I fought with myself to put him from my mind, all I could think was that his eyes were really that blue.

When we finished at the
barre
, I turned to
Grégoire
.“
Who is that?” I asked, nodding over my shoulder.

Grégoire
looked in his direction. “That, my dear, is a new patron of our company. Smile nicely for the very rich man.” He gazed over at him with a broad, fake smile. I pinched his arm hard.

“Stop it, G! What is he doing here?”

“I don’t know what he’s doing here. Seeing where all his hard earned dollars go.
Watching class.
Watching you, right now.”

“Stop looking at him.” I felt like I was back in middle school, in the cafeteria checking out boys.

“He’s still looking at you,” breathed
Grégoire
.

I looked over at the man finally, and his eyes met mine and held them until I flinched first and looked away.

“What is he, some kind of businessman?”

“Yes.”

“He dresses like one. Is he gay?”

“He’s a very rich and very straight developer,”
Grégoire
chirped back. “His name is Matthew Norris.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I met him yesterday.
We were all drooling over him. He was meeting with Maureen.”

Maureen, the business manager of the company.
I glared at
Grégoire
as he shot another admiring glance Mr. Norris’s way. “I thought you had a boyfriend that you just
adored
.”

“I do. I can look. He’s looking at you again.”

“So what?”
I feigned disinterest but
Grégoire
saw right through me.

“You’re not attached anymore,” he said with an all-too-knowing grin. “He’s still looking at you.”

To my relief, the rehearsal master called us to attention and continued the class.

* * *

After the show that night I went back to
Georges’s
place with
Grégoire
. He’d begged me to come since Georges was out of town, but as soon as we got there, I figured out what he was up to. He immediately booted up his boyfriend’s computer.

We searched using the keywords
Matthew Norris, developer, New York
, and I was amazed at how many results came up. I browsed over the pages for a while until I started to feel like a stalker, and then left with a show of boredom and went into the other room. But
Grégoire
kept at it, dug through articles and postings to turn up facts on him. He called out them out to me while I pretended disinterest in front of the TV.

“He’s divorced,” he yelled out.
“Years ago.
And you wouldn’t believe what he had to pay her to get out of it.”