Sleight (27 page)

What I cannot decide is whether or not to remain hopeful. This art I have found all my life so astounding, so beautiful, this art I have built a life around, and West’s—it came from such misery, depravity. Is this any cause for hope? Every day I have been asking myself.

My first inclination, and my second, and my third, is to say that it is not.

I am writing to you because I want you to be well, Lark. Try to be well. You have done nothing. Maybe this is why you feel sick. I envy you for knowing so early on to be sick, to want to do more. Have you? I don’t know why you can’t feel, but I recognize it. My grandson will only hurt you. He probably already has. I can only hope it helps in some way.

Yours, Fern

Hancher Auditorium, Iowa City. A frigid day. Bluer than the second day in February has any right to be. Four are walking along the river that is not completely ice. They walk a mile, less, onto the college campus. They cross a bridge, and the bridge sings to them. Two of them decide to run back and cross it again—the song is happy, and happy is addictive. The other two laugh and frozen breath escapes them in a fine, glad mist.

A group of students pass the four just on the other side of the bridge. The students are scrubbed and shining. They have exactly the right amount of flesh to fill their skin, the right amount of blood in their cheeks; they do exactly the right amount of bouncing and walking backwards as they argue physics or football, but when they see the sleightists, something happens. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, the students are envious of another way of being on the planet. They feel young and awkward, but not as they did in puberty, not ashamed of self. They feel young and awkward now because they move like humans—they lumber and fidget, they twitch and trip, they knock teeth when they try to kiss each other drunk. They are embarrassed. Once, not long ago, their natures seemed particular, but now the students share a communal shame: they would avoid having bodies if they could. Because they can’t, they are learning to wage a prolonged war against them. All of them, against all of their bodies. The school gym is always full, laxative supplies at local drugstores quickly empty. The students’ bodies are all around them, but they don’t think to live in them any more than they would think to study at the library.

The students note the stylized walk in three of the four they pass, knees soft, heels never grounded. They unconsciously mark the posture, in which the shoulder blades are dropped and opened across the back, so that, thin as these sleightists are, they take up more space. How their faces, when animated, don’t end at the chin like masks but are integrated into movements of neck and chest—the entire torso, a speaking thing. Every movement, no matter how unconscious, is large and alive and purposive.
This is what beauty is,
one of the girls suddenly understands,
to be what is meant. And it is
—the girl is the philosopher of her group, and so follows one thought with another—
what I will never be.
The students look at the lovelies, each other, and then down at the new snow that covers everything this February morning. They want to crawl down under it. They want to leave the blue of this day to these deer, these willows, whose movements don’t give them away, whose bodies are trained to deserve it.

The talk has been all over campus. Even the few that have never seen a sleight performance are trying to get tickets. Their school has, by accident, hit platinum: an Event. The sleight, in the three weeks since it debuted in South Africa, has received more local and national media attention than this year’s bowl game—a good one, Dorito or Toshiba—which they won. Parents are coming. Alumni, and those aficionados on the coasts whose tickets have been voided, are flying into Chicago and renting cars for the three-hour trek across 80. As they pass the sleightists, the students give them a wide berth. To make room for everything that surrounds them. The tallest boy of the group thinks one of the four is not so amazing looking, not so very other. Byrne smiles at this Ichabod, waves his stone at him. Indeed, he remembers this scene from the opposite vantage point, and knows he is not so very other—although he is, a little.

HALEY: How far are we going for coffee?

T: That kid backstage said there’s a student union building a block farther up.

MARCUS: That’s never real coffee.

HALEY: Sometimes it is.

MARCUS: It never is.

T: How’d you think tech went?

HALEY: Okay I guess.

BYRNE: Is West using slides on the scrim?

MARCUS: I don’t think so. Why?

BYRNE: I thought I saw them testing stuff from up in the ropes.

T: What kind of stuff?

BYRNE: Old film stills maybe—I was too close, but it was black and white.

HALEY: I’m glad we didn’t do dress.

MARCUS: West said the lighting here is set. He can punch in all the cues digitally. Not like Europe. He’s been strange—you know, since Fern. Says he doesn’t want to hurt our skin.

HALEY: “Any more than is absolutely necessary.” What a crock.

BYRNE: So why doesn’t he get rid of Marvel?

HALEY: I guess Marvel’s absolutely necessary.

BYRNE: He’s a monster.

T: He’s your brother.

BYRNE: So? It isn’t hard to love a monster, just exhausting.

T: This I know.

The four arrive at the student union. They go in. The distinct and not unpleasing smell of popcorn fills the warm air, and cannot be disentangled from it.

³⁶
Antonia Bugliesi admired blown glass. She was aware of the precarious process by which it was made, and she modeled the apprenticeship system within the Theater of Geometry after that of certain European glass houses. She lamented her estrangement from her father for a number of reasons, not the least of which was her disenfranchisement from certain elements of his estate. He had amassed an impressive collection of Venetian pieces during his lifetime, now on permanent display in Milan.

CLOSING.

M
arvel started painting them at three in the afternoon. That morning they’d rehearsed, then broken for lunch. A deli tray in the lobby. West wouldn’t let him paint for the tech, said it wreaked havoc on the sleightists. Marvel knew that, of course—it shouldn’t matter. These freaks did plenty of nasty shit to their bodies. In fact, their bodies were agonizing to look at without the paint. He’d always thought so. No flesh, no imagination: all tendon and muscle and technique. Only his paints made them visually bearable. Not that he hadn’t fucked two or three these past weeks, but he hadn’t had much choice, had he? His junkie girlfriends may have been thin, but they weren’t so bristly, so aware at the level of their skin of other eyes on them, so in need of shellacking.

He usually started with the men. Doug’s paint job was a pinkish red. Maraschino. Marvel applied the first daubs to his torso—Doug’s pattern he’d developed in spots, almost stippling, like a rash that’s won—then moved to his legs. A minute later, when Marvel looked up, the torso was avalanched in cherry blossom. Reddish-whitish—pink. He stirred the paint jar, went back over the area, but now it was bleaching out even as the color hit the skin. Marvel let loose a string of words that turned Doug’s face red, but nothing else. By this time Manny, Marcus, Kitchen, Tomas, and Vic were looking over.

“What’s going wrong, do you think?” Kitchen tried to be calm, sensing that Marvel was perhaps not good in emergencies.

“What the fuck does it look like, man—the paint’s malfunctioning.”

“How about you try me?” Tomas offered an arm. “Maybe it’s just that one.”

“Why in shit’s name would it be the others?”

But even as he said it, Marvel was pulling another can from under the table where he was working. He opened it, stirred, and slapped some paint on Tomas. The deep, pacific teal started going pastel immediately. Marvel leaned over, searched frantically through the cans. In the next two minutes, he tried out each man’s colors on different parts of their bodies: arms, backs, legs, faces, feet. Then he put Marcus’s paint on Kitchen. Even as he attempted the transplant, the paints grew paler and paler and cracked. The men looked as if they’d been partially foiled in dead white leaf, or ash.

Doug went to get West.

By the time West arrived from the sound booth, the scene was mild chaos. Almost all the sleightists were milling around, examining the streaky ivories and eiderdowns and ashy-semen colors of the men. Marvel was pacing in the far corner, his head down. Byrne was walking beside him, talking softly. West scanned and assessed. He clapped his hands together, and the clap echoed, and they turned.

“It’s perfect.”

Kitchen walked right up into West’s face. “What are you
talking
about?”

Kitchen had had enough. Enough of West’s machinations, enough of not knowing what they were doing and not understanding why it had been successful. If it was the sensation that it seemed, why had West canceled half the tour? He’d been curious about the project from the beginning, and—unlike the sisters—he saw darkness as necessary, a part of the scrutiny, the spelunking of sleight’s potential. But he never trusted West. Now that it was done, Kitchen thought the sleight hung on the color. He was sure of it. The color and the fronting of the individual—parlor tricks, really. The links were genius, Clef’s navigation was. But it was the props, vibrant nakedness, and the opportunity to attach celebrity to the sleightists that transfixed the audience. He said as much.

“If we’re all white, we won’t be a zoo anymore—and not-a-zoo is the opposite of
[untitled],
isn’t it? It’s not what they’re coming for.”

“No.” West ceded the point. “But it’s what they’re getting.” He brushed past Kitchen—he had no time for the thinker—and made his way over to Marvel, whose agitation was sparking uncontrollably in the corner. He was scuffling and muttering like someone off his meds who shouldn’t be, ever. Byrne stepped protectively in front of his brother.

“Leave him alone.”

“Byrne, I need Marvel to do this.”

“Do what? There’s nothing for him to do.”

Lark, who had been invisible in the room, spoke then. Quietly.

“There is.”

It was the first time anyone had heard her voice in weeks. Since they’d flown back from Barcelona, she’d been at all the rehearsals in York, even stepping in when Clef’s body gave out. But she didn’t talk, and no one had thought she’d come on this last tour. They had assumed she’d be headed back to Georgia, hoped she would. Something was wrong with her. Even as the pressure of making the sleight had receded, Lark’s presence had surfaced among them as a small dread. Many of them hardly knew her. They didn’t want to deal with trauma outside their sphere, and she had the feel of trauma. She belonged elsewhere. Clef couldn’t be asked to, but weren’t there other people—Lark’s husband, for example—better equipped to deal with her?

But T, who’d once felt threatened by Lark, hadn’t since Cape Town. Lark wasn’t so odd. Everyone got quiet sometimes. So she carried a box—Byrne carried a stone. Besides, it was probably a gift from her daughter, or
for
her. T tried to draw her out during breaks. She small-talked, asked questions. And when Lark didn’t answer, she kept at it. It became important to her. The rest of her troupe, and many in Monk, shot malice in Lark’s direction. Some of it was holdover from the navigation process, anger and confusion over how Lark had—after six years outside sleight and in only two months—made herself capable of things they couldn’t. And this, after drawing the most astonishing sleight they’d ever been asked to perform. So, the typical accusations: ambition, insanity, witchery. T thought differently. She framed it safely, genetically: Clef’s got talent—why not her sister? They were maybe born that way. T noted all the wrong energies around Lark, and realized hers had been one. In recompense, she tried to act as a buffer.

In the past weeks, T had been at Lark’s side at the beginning and end of each day. She’d started bringing lunches for her and Clef. Soups, basil and balsamic and mozzarella salads, homemade breads. And talk. T had talked and talked to Lark about nothing at all: T’s most recent homework—a new loft bed and built-in bookshelves for her bedroom, her New Year’s resolutions, the dissolution of her marriage, the weather. She asked questions. Clef sometimes sat with the two of them, listening, answering for Lark when she knew the answers, but more often she’d gone off to catch a brief nap on the zebra couch. She seemed content to let T brood over Lark during the day. T, noting the space between the sisters, was disconcerted one morning—after arriving at the chambers a half hour earlier than normal—to find Lark brushing and painstakingly sectioning and braiding Clef’s hair.

T looked at Lark now, and the small jealousy ebbed. She felt a certain modest pride. Though the two things may not be related, she’d been calling her, and Lark had come back from wherever she’d been.

Byrne had been in and out of the studios during the same two weeks. He’d been unprepared to see T and Lark together. More unprepared for how it made him feel. T looked kind. She looked good and whole and solar. He found himself thinking that Lark should be home with Nene. With Drew. He found himself drawn to T, to what she was doing. Her attention was a gift, the way she talked and listened to the way Lark didn’t speak. He was beginning to pity Lark, and the pity turned his stomach, focused as it was on a woman he’d once wanted to be within. He was suddenly ashamed of conceiving of women in these terms, as homes, cars, or paper: to be inside, driving, writing on. But Byrne took comfort—he thought if he were to see T in Marvel’s paints now, they wouldn’t work. No one else could cut a woman into pieces. Women carried their own blades—sometimes, bandages.

Byrne looked at Lark now. She had come back from wherever she’d been. It all seemed too easy for her. His rock hand throbbed.
How selfish she is,
he thought,
to be broken.

Lark stood in front of Marvel.

“Just paint them like you did before.”

“It’s not my work.”

“It will be, a little of it anyway. But mostly not, no. Tell me, how did you get my jars?”

Marvel looked at her. He licked his lips. West answered.

“Drew. Drew left them at my house.”

“Drew wanted to punish me?”

“To help you.”

“And you …”

“Gave them to Marvel. Yes, yes I did that.”

Marvel grunted. “I asked where he’d gotten them. Bastard wouldn’t tell me. I needed more, but the colors were so fucking condensed, I mixed them with what I had. What the hell is this shit?”

“Mine. My Needs. They’re almost gone—this is the last?”

“I guess. Yes. They aren’t fucking working.”

“No. They are. They finally are.”

Marvel had little choice. There was no time to get other colors, and West—monitoring the process—seemed genuinely pleased with the white. Because it wasn’t white. The paints retained a vestigial tint. The sleightists’ bodies were crape myrtle trunks, green and terra-cotta hues beneath their wintering, or chalky riverbeds—russets and ochres promising a return with rain. The patterns were still there, though Marvel said the audience wouldn’t pick up on them, that he was wasting his time. He kept whipping his brushes against the wall in frustration, but he got all of them done. All but two.

Of the sleightists, Clef he usually painted last because she insisted on it. Now she came up to West and Marvel and said, “I can’t … I won’t.”

West didn’t exhibit the surprise she expected. Instead he asked, “Is this about the fetus?”

She winced, but didn’t back down. “I know where this comes from, and I’m not putting it on my skin anymore. God knows what damage I’ve already done.”

West studied her for a long moment before saying, “I understand.”

“What?” Clef tried to get her bearings. She looked around the room. Where was Kitchen, she wondered, was he already onstage?

West reiterated. “I said, okay.”

Clef was still thrown, uncomprehending. Then she saw Marvel looking over at Lark, nearly salivating. West’s eyes were there too. He asked, “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

Lark avoided her sister’s face. “Yes.”

Clef tried to not be angry—she didn’t want to perform. Not this. Anymore. She was hurt anyway, and so couldn’t stay backstage. She thought about walking along the river, but the temperature had dropped below the afternoon’s eighteen degrees. This was her sleight. This was also her weakness—not being able to extricate herself. Except for Kitchen. With Kitchen, she was winning. She dressed slowly. She concentrated on that—dressing. She had nothing appropriate, and her jeans were just beginning to stop gapping the way she liked, even after a day on the bus. She found a red sweater among her things that might be passable. Then she made herself up—offstage, she didn’t often. Eyes. Lips. At the last possible moment, Clef decided gaudy was better than meek and threw her scarf around her neck before heading to the lobby. It was there she saw, about to herd her family to a waiting usher, her old friend Bea.

Bea squealed.

“Clef! I was going to surprise you. Why aren’t you performing? Is it your ankle?” Two of Bea’s three children were weaving in and out of her legs. The third, Jay, was standing, in very adult embarrassment, next to his father.

Clef kissed and hugged them all. The two men bravely but barely endured it. It was the last thing—their reticence—and it crippled her. She put on her gala face and lied.

“No. Everything’s fine. Lark’s performing—I needed a break. She’s back, at least for this project. But Bea, I don’t have a seat and this thing is sold out.”

“I know, I know. I’m so glad we got ours so early, though I’m sorry we won’t get to see your ‘unparalleled whatever.’ I can’t believe that your names are out there. I have no proof … the kids don’t believe I used to do this. Lark’s back? My god. You’ll sit with us, of course. Emmy’ll be in my lap the whole time, if she doesn’t make me take her out to the lobby.”

“Thank you.”

Bea’s hair was longer, and down. A soft curl nearly covered her serpentine tattoo—she’d styled it that way. The effort sickened the already lying and pregnant Clef, but she kept her tongue in her mouth.