Sleight (13 page)

Clef and Kitchen looked at each other. West was certainly adept. Their director was adrift in self-congratulation. Disconcerting—to watch him twitch like a glue-sniffing schoolgirl. West must have convinced him that he could be part of a singularity simply by surrendering control. Clef suppressed a smirk. But Kitchen, embarrassed for the man, looked away and down at the floor. At the long, taut tendons of his bare feet.

Kitchen and Clef were the only couple in Monk. A few of the other girls had boyfriends or fiancés, but these alliances wouldn’t last, or the girls would quit. Elisa, Latisha, and Joan were dating brokers. Gretchen was about to marry a man named Hollis who had never seen her perform. Mikaela and Yael had split up years before and were now devoted friends. Haley was always happily severing from some man, attaching herself to another. Montserrat was a virgin.

Kitchen and Clef, a sleight couple, weren’t typical of the art form. And Kitchen, because of his long meander toward sleight, and because he wasn’t a graduate of the academy, qualified as curiosity solo.

Doug Terry’s story was the more usual. Of Monk’s men, he had begun sleight earliest because of four older, profoundly untalented sisters. Doug had talent, and even if he hadn’t, he had been a boy and therefore would’ve been told that he had until he developed a certain self-confidence, enough to substitute for true aptitude. Manny—Emmanuel Vega—was the other of Monk’s men. His case was also not abnormal. He’d started sleight as a teenager because his best girl friend was a serious but shy student who brought him along for comfort. She never made it—not with Manny, and not into a troupe. But Manny had.

Kitchen’s experience didn’t correlate. As a consequence, he spent little time with Doug or Manny, aside from drinking. He was older than them, knew more, was angrier. Drinking, he found he could stand them, and during tour each spring they watched the college basketball playoffs together. They were all American males enough to have been provided with that comfort.

Kitchen had come to sleight after butoh. Un-dance. To have un-danced he had trained in ballet for years—his mother had taught dance in San Francisco, his grandmother as well—first in San Francisco, then at the internment camp at Tule Lake. Kitchen had excelled, and ballet grew quickly intolerable. He abandoned it for postmodern modern. The German expressionist Mary Wigman, before embracing fascism, had taught—among others—a small cadre of Asian dancers at the commune at Monte Verità. Kitchen moved to Japan to study under not them but their disciples. During the late fifties a few dancers of this generation had moved beyond both Eastern and Western roots to create butoh, and in the late eighties, under their aging tutelage, Kitchen was carefully led to discover the correct questions: What is a dancer? What is it to dance? In his improvisational solo,
Pitted,
he spent time with each question—snaking vines of one around his calf, tight-fisting another inside his pelvis, dragging them along the floor like dead chickens guided by twine. This is where Kitchen got into trouble. “Butoh,” Masaka had said to him one day after a particularly compelling performance, “is not dada.” Kitchen knew then to stop. He wasn’t interested in these particular questions, just in his own body’s ability to ask. In fact, the less correct the question, the further his body could travel to it—the more and more various the dead animals he could pull along the floor. He could explore their weight, the quality of feather or scale as it pertained to drag. Kitchen crossed over to sleight and never once attributed a mechanical nature to the architectures. They were, for him, skeletal.

Since converting, Kitchen had come to understand that most male sleightists, although their physical skill might be comparable to his own, weren’t dedicated to their craft. Male, they didn’t have to be. They ate and drank sleight, but they didn’t think it. That, originally, was how Kitchen had fallen in with the Scrye sisters, who also tended recklessly toward thought—an odd, unfruitful preoccupation for a sleightist.

Kitchen was in love with Clef, how Clef’s mind worked. Once, he had wanted to be in love with Lark, and years ago had tried that. But Lark’s thoughts were excruciating. Huge thorns. And cactuses, un-animal, would go unloved by Kitchen. He guessed he had been afraid of her, though it wasn’t true. Now he lived with Clef’s convolutions, no pale imitations of her sister’s. The way Clef thought was feelable. She was angry like Kitchen, difficult, a bit of a crazy. She asked more of him than Lark had. Lark had asked for nothing but had been a chasm. Still, it would be a mistake to say that Clef these past years had been easier. Kitchen and she were together working and away from work. They kept separate apartments for this reason and because they didn’t want commitment. Commitment murdered: this tenet they shared. But lately commitment had been in the room. Since Lark had shown up. No. Since the accident—no, call it a pregnancy, Kitchen. Since that.

Kitchen thought he must love her more now, and wanted to go away. She kept pretending. Clef’s body, like her face, was a bad liar. In bed, that was when—or just after. The last time they’d made love she left the room the moment they—he—was done. She’d given a reason: wanted water or forgot her vitamins. Maybe she’d said she needed a shower. Whatever it had been, it had been a lie. She left the room to keep from breaking. When they had first gotten together, often after sex she’d collapse into his chest, crying. Her tears were quiet and thicket-like, and his torso those nights—above and below—had been slick with her. Now, with these new architectures, something was being channeled. Grief? Love? Kitchen wondered why he’d never known women with other hobbies. He wanted her to say it: that she wanted the child they hadn’t. Lately, Kitchen couldn’t keep himself from thinking about the rain. How good it could sometimes feel. How it felt all the other times.

And now, Monk’s director had informed him that he’d bartered Kitchen’s energies, his sweat and inquiry, to West—someone Kitchen didn’t know, didn’t trust, someone who had ideas about what things meant. Clef, invested as she was in private loss, seemed to find the maneuver unimportant, even droll. Kitchen, however, was beginning to feel a bit dragged. A bit along the floor.

Clef walked into chamber one. All of Kepler was there—and all of Monk filed in behind her. Regally she moved her diminutive frame through the loose gathering of sleightists, sleightists about to welcome her troupe into their space. She headed toward West, his back up against a mirror. As she got close, she said his name. And because he had already been looking in her direction—her red braid swinging angrily between the shoulders of the crowd—all he could do was say, “Clef?” At which point she kneed him in the groin with considerable force, having not, during the approach, slowed her imperial pace.

Gasps, and West doubled over. Kitchen ran up to grab her arm, but Clef was done. She pivoted and on her way out parted the silenced company. There was nowhere to go but back to the bus or toward town. She chose the walk. She left Kitchen there to speak with West. She had thought maybe her director would chase her down, beg her to apologize. Damage control. But his cowardice had predictably won out over appeasement—he wasn’t after her. She turned down a residential street: brick ranch houses with carports and not much landscaping. She wanted to be alone for a while. Some shrubbery was all.

In the office, West nursed his testicles with a bag of frozen peas kept in the troupe refrigerator for muscle and joint injuries. Kitchen was with him. After the blindside, West had limped over to the office to speak quietly with an intern, who took a book of accounts and vacated. Kitchen had followed West and pointed through the open doorway. West let him in. But when Monk’s director made a similar gesture from a few feet back, West offered only a puzzled stare and closed the door behind them.

“So. Your woman is insane.”

“More furious. She thinks you’re about to hurt her sister.”

“Why? Because I’ve … well, not me personally … but because Lark’s coming here?” West coughed, and grimaced. “I thought Clef would be pleased. No, ecstatic. In fact isn’t that precisely what she asked me to do?”

“Yes.” Kitchen saw how, for someone unacquainted with the sisters, Clef’s actions might need interpreting. “Yes, she asked you to do that. Bring Lark back to sleight.”

“So what’s the problem?”

West’s levity irritated Kitchen. Kitchen followed Clef’s logic, but he didn’t relish having to explain it to this near-stranger who, though puppetmaster, played at clown.

“As a hand. You’re bringing her back as a hand. Clef thought that you’d make Lark what she’d been before.”

“But the book, you were there—Clef gave me the book. And I
told
her I was looking for a hand.”

“I know. You did. But this is where she has gaps. She never imagined. She doesn’t see Lark’s talent as …”

“Genius?”

“Just so. She doesn’t see it that way. Her older sister was out of step. Problematic. Clef thought you’d bring her back and she’d quietly finish what she couldn’t before.”

“You’re telling me Clef thinks Lark …”

“Failed, yes. Where Clef succeeded. And the book—proof that Lark regrets having left. Clef never imagined the sleights would pan out, or even that what Lark draws are sleights at all.” Kitchen was shaking his head. He’d seen the book. He’d known what West would do, could kick himself for not trying to make Clef see it. He made an apology with his hands as he spoke. “So she sees this as a betrayal.”

“But your director …” West was still unbelieving. “He told me Clef has been working on architectures based on Lark’s work.” West grunted, shifted the peas. He looked toward the door where he’d left the fidgeting man. “What a fucking idiot.”

“No. I mean, yes. But he happens to be right. Clef has created over a dozen new architectures from Lark’s sketches.
²³
We’ve brought them. She’s been obsessed, and the designs are—they’re fantastic.”

“So. I don’t … I don’t get it.”

“Clef, she has her … gaps. I
do
get them. Eventually, they work out—or into—a sort of pattern.”

When Clef came back around six, Kepler was packing up the bus for the motel. She headed to the restroom, where T cornered her. Clef’s back was pressed against the wet sink as T apologized.

“We shouldn’t have done that and I’m sorry we did.”

“What?” asked Clef, a little taken aback by the moon-faced woman who stood so close.

“Once West heard you’d brought them, he made your director bring them in. We worked with them all day blind—your architectures. I wouldn’t blame you for being upset, but I have to tell you, they’re wonderful.” And then T extended her hand. Simply that. And an invitation to dinner at her place. “Please bring Kitchen.” Clef didn’t refuse.

Though T hadn’t said, Clef assumed West would be there. T had the sway of a negotiator, the fluid wrists, open face. Even the cold water on the small of Clef’s back worked to T’s advantage—Clef felt rigid: the woman in front of her was a move toward warmth, flexibility. And Clef, having spent the bitter afternoon wandering through suburban decay, was ready for wine, bread, a yielding. Her first fury was ebbing. She would offer West an opportunity to explain.