The Cranes Dance (10 page)

“Great class, as always,” I said. “Sorry to bail. Rehearsal.”

“Seriously, Katie dear,” Gareth said, grabbing my hands. “Last night? Brilliant. Marius needs to promote you. It’s time.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” I half laughed, shouldering my bag and trying not to wince. “There always seems to be some Russian or Argentinian diva to hire next.”

“You have to fight,” Gareth said, very intently. “Fight now while you still have something left to fight with.”

And then he turned back to the earnest students, the talented jobless, the ones who plow through eight shows a week on Broadway, and the ones who just don’t, and never will, have it. The freak with the enormous bun and rainbow-striped leg warmers on her arms launched herself from the diagonal into the grande allegro, scattering enraged dancers in her wake. Having the time of her life in a way that I don’t think I ever have.

Something to fight
with
? How about something to fight for?

IN, IN, IN, and OUT.

I really wanted to get through today without drugs so I booked a half-hour session with Irina before rehearsal.

Irina, our massage therapist, is worth her weight in gold. More, since she can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. We have physical therapists on staff as well, who patch and tape and ice and invariably give you some sort of gentle exercise to do that doesn’t feel effective. Iri pummels the shit out of you. She doesn’t bother with scented candles or CDs of falling-rain music or what have you. Nor do you slip discreetly under a sheet on the massage table. You go in, strip off whatever clothes are near the affected area, and get to it. Roger tells a great story of his first visit to Iri, where she shoved his cock and balls to one side in order to get to his psoas muscle.

“Just full-on moved my junk,” he said, “with her forearm.”

Iri has a tiny cubicle at our studios. She greeted me with a kiss and asked, “What did Gwen do to knee?”

Iri manages to roll her
r
s even in words with no
r
s. Although
she must be at least fifty, she shops at those stores for trendy teens and is always in some complicated getup: painted jeans that lace up the back and shirts with plunging sequined necklines. Her skin is alabaster white and clear, which she will tell you can only happen if you rub real butter on your face every day. I love Russians.

“Tore her ACL but she’s okay,” I said. “She wants to be careful and not rush things.”

“What is it with this ACL?” Irina demanded. “We never have ACL before. Now it’s oh, my ACL, my ACL. I think this made-up thing by doctors. Like ADD. We don’t have anybody in Russia with ADD. Nobody have ACL. Don’t tell me you have ACL because this is not real thing.”

“I rotate vertebrae,” I say, because after two seconds in her presence, I too start dropping my pronouns and articles.

“Of course, shit, no,” she says. “Lie down.”

I’m not entirely certain Iri is really a licensed massage therapist. Her cousin Dmitri is one of our rehearsal pianists, and he got her the job. Over the past six years I’ve heard most of her life history and she’s never mentioned any kind of massage school. Iri was a gymnast in Russia back when it was the Soviet Union and had one of those incredible childhoods like you hear about when they profile Eastern European athletes during the Olympics: the two-room apartment shared with parents and grandparents; the mother mopping floors; the hours spent searching for a store that carried milk. Iri tore her Achilles tendon and missed the Olympics, but she ended up marrying her coach and “everybody life get better.” Her husband, Yuri, managed to get visas to come to the U.S. and now he runs a fancy gymnastic training facility in New Jersey. Iri helps out
at the gym, but Yuri “makes me so crazy, I don’t even know,” so she prefers to work at the ballet. I assume the kind of massage technique she uses on us is what was used on her in 1980s Moscow: a mixture of extreme stretching and what can only be described as thumping. It’s terrifically painful and fabulous. Like most Russian women she is full of practical relationship advice that only works if you are dealing with another Russian: “Of course, when I want something, like new refrigerator, I tell my husband, ‘I think your idea is good and we should get new refrigerator,’ and he say, ‘Eh?’ and I say, ‘Yes, yes, at first I think you were wrong and we not need this thing, but now I see you were right and so maybe yes,’ and even though he never say these things about refrigerator now he say, ‘I told you this was right thing,’ and ‘You should listen to me, Iri,’ and I say, ‘Yes, yes, you were right,’ and he go to store and bring me refrigerator next day.”

I’m not sure “passive aggressive” translates into Russian. They are too credulous and too crafty for such noodling about. A direct appeal to the ego is totally fair play. Masking your strength is just good politics. If you get what you want in the end, who cares who was right?

“So,” said Irina, pressing a thumb forged with Soviet steel into my neck, “how is Mr. Boyfriend?”

“Oh, I didn’t tell you?” I mumbled, wondering if it’s possible for cervical vertebrae to be ejected out of your eyeball. “We broke up.”

“Whaaaaat?” Irina moved her thumb slightly and I visualized the yam in my neck breaking in two. “How this happen?”

I was emotionally withholding. I made him insecure because I wasn’t needy. I rewarded his efforts to “be there” for
me with sullen hauteur. I reacted to intimations of marriage/children with disdain. I didn’t try to kill myself. I demystified sex in the splits.

“He cheated on me,” I said to Irina.

Her hands paused.

“He tell you, or you find out?”

“He tell me.”

“And you do what? Leave?”

“Um … yeah.”

Iri sighed and resumed her Vulcan death grip on my neck.

“He wants to be with her,” I explained, through my teeth.

“He don’t know what he want,” Iri snorted. “But you don’t know what you want either, so it’s better little time away. Just remember. Nobody dance forever.”

Irina has an eleven-year-old daughter, Alisa, who is, of course, a gymnast, and on track to get on the U.S. Olympic team. Iri has a corkboard nailed up in her cubicle covered with pictures of her daughter coiled around a variety of apparatuses, each rib sharply etched through her Lycra leotard as she arches toward … what? A gold medal? Her father’s approval? Her mother’s love?

A gymnast’s career is even shorter than ours. You can have the whole business wrapped up and done with by the time you are twenty and ready to go to college and deal with the fact that your body now resembles that of a very muscular gnome. I think athletes operate under the same basic motivating principles as us. You may start off dashing toward the vault and wanting to stick that triple twist double flip so Daddy will say “Good job” or so you will win or so your double flip will be better than little Susie’s, your rival with the swinging blond ponytail and a better
leotard than yours, but at some point, maybe even mid-twist, as it were, none of that matters. At some point you did something perfectly and now your whole life is a search to re-create that. This is your doom, your bloody pact with the devil. Because while all other motivating factors are either attainable or surmountable, BEING PERFECT will never—not ever—happen for any length of time that will prove satisfying.

My brother is lucky. He at least gets moments where he knows he won. Also, he’s a freaking millionaire.

After leaving Iri and her magic rs, I had to go down to the third floor to pick up my shoe order, and I passed the studio where the school kids were rehearsing
Dream
.

Marius’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
will close the season for us, and it’s a world premiere, so there will be much fanfare, for the handful of people still interested in these things. I think he’s done a fantastic job with it, but there are a host of problems with turning complicated stories into ballets. (
Romeo and Juliet
would be an exception. I would argue that the ballet is better than the play. If you disagree, it’s only because you’ve never seen the balcony scene pas de deux or you are made of igneous rock.)

There are some obvious things that shouldn’t be made into ballets, like the life of Louis B. Pasteur or shark attacks. But a tale of warring fairies and love potions gone awry seems like it would be an easy match. Unfortunately, any story ballet is going to need pantomime and require acting, and here’s where we run into trouble. You try coming up with a very clear and specific gesture that indicates “Hey, why don’t you sprinkle
the juice of that flower into the eyeballs of these characters” or “I’m really attached to this changeling child and you can’t have him” and you will see what I mean.

Also there is the problem of Mendelssohn’s score. For Felix, fairies translated musically into extremely fast twittering tempi, and it’s hard to dance to without looking as if you’re on crack. Like Balanchine, Marius has incorporated some other Mendelssohn works to flesh out a full-length ballet, but I find most of his music sort of academic and perfunctory.

Marius was smart, though, because he also borrowed Balanchine’s idea of using young students to fill out the ranks of the fairies, and they are very touching to watch. The school rehearses the crap out of them and they are totally psyched to be onstage with us.

The girls are ten and eleven years old, so for many of them
Dream
is the last time dancing onstage will be so pure—dancing at all, really. Round about next year the competition will start getting fiercer, their bodies will start changing, and the simple delight in just whipping around as fast as you can and wearing your hair in a pretty way will be over. Little girls are romantic. We learn quickly though, how to suffer, how to endure suffering. By the time a little girl has become a young woman she has learned how dangerous a thing it is to Dream.

I watched them through the studio window for a little bit. There is a girl in this class, Bryce, who during
Nutcracker
last season shyly waited outside my dressing room and asked me to sign a pair of pointe shoes for her. Lots of girls do this, but Bryce told me I was her favorite dancer in the company. Mostly the kids only look up to the big stars around here, so I was inordinately pleased by this.

Bryce’s face lit up when she saw me and I waved at her and she looked proudly at her friends to make sure they saw her being singled out by a company member. I don’t know whether to hope she is incredibly talented or not.

In the rehearsal studio, Bryce ran to her spot. She raised up her arms and fluttered her fingers as she has been taught to do. She turned in place as fast as she could, as fast as any little girl can turn. You could see her counting the beats in the music under her breath. Her hair came loose from a pin and whipped up into the air, but she kept her balance. She already knows how to turn. You must pick one spot to focus on and look at it while your body is turning until the last possible second, and then whip your head around to find the spot again.

Bryce has never had a neck injury, or an injury of any kind. If she has been in love already it will be remembered fondly, if at all, when other greater loves have come and gone. She has not thought about the middle or the end of her life. She is not as tall now as she will be, nor as beautiful. She has not thought her first cynical thought. She does not appear to have a sister.

I grabbed my shoe order and hustled myself to
Dream
rehearsal, only to find out that Justin, who is my Demetrius, was at the doctor’s having his knee looked at. Partnerless, I sat in the front of the studio and watched Nina, one of our ballet mistresses, rehearse Lawrence and Yumi, who are Cast B for Helena/Demetrius. Behind them, moving less fully so as not to take up studio space, were two new kids in the company, Klaus and Maya, who are learning the roles in case everybody else is struck down. Unofficially, we call this the “Plague Cast.” Nina was counting the music aloud using her preferred form of musical interpretation: the deedle. “And a-deedle-deedle
FOUR and a-deedle-deedle SIX.” It’s enough to make one insane. I’m no fan of Mendelssohn’s score, but Nina and her deedles are even worse.

Nina stopped the rehearsal to harp on Yumi’s turn-out. “Yes, but it’s not modern, dear. We still have to turn out. The supporting leg too. It’s not just about being cute. We still have to dance with at least a little technique.”

Yumi has been told she needs to work on her turn-out her whole life. I’m sure she did all kinds of torturous things to herself in school to try to improve it. She is a gorgeous dancer; she has great feet and legs. They just don’t turn out naturally, and Nina being so condescending about it completely shut down anything free or spontaneous in Yumi’s dancing and she got all strained and stiff looking. You can see these things really clearly from the front of the room. While this was going on, I sewed ribbons on my shoes. When someone is getting berated in rehearsal, the polite thing to do is to look like you aren’t seeing or hearing it. What I wanted to do was take over the rehearsal. Nina has that old-school break-you-down approach, and that doesn’t work with everyone. I could get Yumi to turn out without making her feel like crap.

I coached Gwen a lot. Right from the beginning, even when she was in the school. I’ve coached Gwen all through her career. Not on her technique, necessarily. Gwen is a phenom. It’s not really possible to dance as well as she dances. On my best day ever I am really, really good, but I’m
never
that good.

But I could be helpful to Gwen in some ways. I could say, “Let your head fall back there,” or “Stay looking at him for two more steps back and then turn away, but let your left hand trail behind you, no, break the wrist, that’s it, more, better, good.”

And I could talk and talk and talk to her about Giselle, and Juliet, and Sleeping Beauty, and while I was talking I could tell I had her, you know, I was filling her up, making it real. Because even if I couldn’t do it myself, I knew how it could be done. I could see it so clearly in my mind. And then I could see it right in front of me, because there would always be a moment when Gwen would see what I was seeing and she could make it happen.