Various Positions (24 page)

“What if Dad sees?”

Her eyes followed my finger as if she had forgotten what she was holding.

“Oh.” She pushed herself off the floor. “Don’t worry about that, sweetie. He won’t be home till late.” She walked past me and took her coat from where she’d left it on the banister.

“You’re going to get caught,” I said. “Dad’s going to catch you eventually, you know.”

She stared at me as she fitted her arms into her coat sleeves. I expected her to be pissed off, but she wasn’t. Instead, compassion warmed her eyes and she sighed very slowly, like I was the one who had done something wrong. “Fine, Georgia. Let me get caught.”

Her tone could have driven me crazy. When she’d gone out to smoke, I noticed a cardboard box by the bookshelf. I walked over to it and saw that it was half full of books. Her books. I waited until she came back inside and listened to her plod up the staircase, the sound of her closing her bedroom door. I lifted out the first book, a collection of modern poetry in a dust jacket that was turning yellow. Beneath it was a travel book on the forests of Germany, and beneath that a novel with the image of a cloudy bottle on the front, a turned-over glass beside it. She’d written her name on the first page of each. I packed them back exactly as I’d found them and sat down beside the box, let my head rest on a flap of cardboard.

Where was she taking her books? The spines in front of me, the ones left on the bottom shelf, were her old textbooks,
Cognitive Psychology
,
Abnormal Psychology
,
The Principles of Developmental Psychology.
Beside that was a leather-bound book with embossed writing down the side. Her Ph.D. thesis. I pulled it off the shelf. I hadn’t looked at it in ages, but when I was a kid, probably before I could even read, I used to sit with it on my lap for hours and pretend that I understood everything and could expand upon her theories. My mom would laugh miserably and tell me I could explain the whole damn thing to her. I ran my thumb over the gold text, let it tickle the grooves of my fingertip, and stopped at the date: 1996. I would have been five years old then. I swung my head sideways, caught the mock-Tudor ceiling beams in a dizzy line of sight. Why didn’t that sound right? I was sure my parents hadn’t married until my mom had finished her Ph.D., and then I was born after that. Could they have made a mistake at the printer? I rubbed my finger into the
6
as though it might change.

I tried to think clearly, dig up a memory of my mom as a student. She had been around a lot when I was small; I could see us in the kitchen together, me coloring on a scrap of newsprint and her perched on a stool by the phone, one foot up on the wall so that its hind legs rocked back precariously. I could hear her more than see her in this scene, her voice the same except for its volume, which was exuberant then, seemed to fill up the whole room. If the date was right, if my mom had finished her Ph.D. in 1996, and Ph.D.s took, say, five years to finish, then she would have started it in 1991, the year I was born. Maybe that was the weirdest part of anything. Who would start a Ph.D. the same year they were having a baby? I counted out the months backward on my fingers. I was born in July of 1991, which meant my mom had gotten pregnant in November of 1990. If she’d started her Ph.D. that September, then she would have been at the university for only two months when she’d become pregnant. Two months wasn’t a very long time. If she’d met my dad because he was her teacher, then he would still have been her teacher, her
married
teacher, when they made me.

I fell back onto the carpet. My head felt light. Was this a possibility? The thought was too awful for words. I didn’t know where to start. It couldn’t be as creepy as it sounded. It couldn’t be like that pervy story in “Doing the Prof.” It was different when you did a Ph.D. You were an adult and school was like a job. I tried to figure out how old my mom would have been to prove that, at the very least, she’d been properly grown-up. I went into the kitchen and did the math on the erasable message board. She was thirty-eight now, so fourteen years ago, when I was born, she would have been twenty-four. That meant she’d have been twenty-three when she got pregnant. Oh god! Isabel would be twenty-three this year.

My heart beat harder. How could it have happened? I imagined my mom as I’d seen her in pictures, with black hair and gold hoop earrings, but I dressed her in Isabel’s clothes now, pencil skirts that went up to her rib cage. She smiled at my dad because he was an important professor. She smiled because she wanted him to like her and she wanted to do well in his course. What had my dad thought? He wasn’t like those men who leered at girls on the subway. He didn’t think about girls that way at all! Maybe my mom had instigated everything. Maybe she’d been just like Veronica, the kind of girl who walked around with loops in her hips and her long hair everywhere, forcing people to do what she wanted them to.

I went up to my room and dialed Isabel’s number. Luckily, she answered the phone herself.

“I have some important questions to ask you,” I said.

“Okay, boss.”

“Don’t laugh. This is serious.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“And it’s going to sound weird.”

“Consider me warned.”

I took a deep breath. “If you were to have sex with one of your professors, would that be illegal?”

“Jesus, Georgia!” She laughed. “Where did that come from?”

“Please, just answer the question.”

“I guess, no, it wouldn’t be
illegal
.” She laughed again and paused. “But it would definitely be against the university statute.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that if anyone found out, the professor would lose his job.”

“And you’d get kicked out of school?”

“Uh, no.” She paused. “No, I don’t think the student would be held accountable.”

“But what if you were just as responsible. What if it was the girl who seduced the professor?”

“Even so,” she said. “Things are complicated when a figure of authority’s involved. A relationship like that, one that’s so … fraught with status, well, it can be traumatizing for the weaker party. The rules are there to protect the student, so it falls upon the professor, the one with power, the one
employed
by the university, to do the right thing.” She paused. “What’s all this about, G.? Where did it come from?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “Just curious.”

“Come on, Georgia. Let’s hear it.”

“It’s nothing. I just—I saw something on TV.”

We said goodbye and I curled onto my side and stared at the wall opposite. I heard Sixty’s voice again. Had something
bad
happened? I said the word aloud—
teacher
—and it sent a shiver down my back. My dad had been my mom’s teacher and they had had sex. I imagined a teacher trying to have sex with Isabel and it made me so mad that I punched the mattress. I got under the covers, squeezed my knees to my chest. I wanted to fall asleep immediately, just like that in my jeans and sweater. But the image of my mom dressed in Isabel’s clothes was like a headlight shining on my eyelids. I saw an adult hand, a male hand, wide knuckles over squiggles of hair, approaching her. What had she done? Her black eyes were paralyzed and the bigness of them, deadened by fear, kept me awake for ages.

*   *   *

Roderick was standing in front of the bulletin board, head thrown back, when I stepped into the lobby the next morning. I stopped on the spot and watched him. I felt different than I ever had. My anger made me solid because that’s exactly what it was, something clear, hard, factual. Roderick was in the wrong. He had told me he’d be somewhere and then he just hadn’t shown up. The clarity of this gave me confidence as I stepped toward him.

“Georgia.” He glanced over his shoulder when I got to the bulletin board. “Good morning.”

I shot him a look and half shrugged, waited for him to apologize. But he turned back to what he was reading. It made my blood hot. He untacked a schedule from the board and nodded a wordless goodbye. I couldn’t believe he was just leaving. “Where were you yesterday?” My voice was quiet but all rage, a scream with the volume low.

Roderick paused. The skin between his eyebrows made a W. Then it came, the light on his face, like his memory had been plugged back in.

“Oh jeez. Our rehearsal.” He shook his head at himself. “Did you wait long?”

“Yeah.” I looked at the floor. I suddenly felt overwhelmingly sorry for myself and the pity clogged my throat.

“Oh dear. I had a meeting and then—” He brought two fingers up to his temple, moved them away from his head in one piece. “It just must have slipped my mind. I am really sorry about that, Georgia.”

I pressed my lips into my mouth, tried to push my feelings down. It was good that he felt bad.

“Really I … There’s no excuse for that kind of forgetfulness. I’d want to kick the shit out of a teacher who did that to me.” A smile crept into his voice. “Do you want to kick the shit out of me?”

“No,” I mumbled.

“Are you sure? Here”—he stuck his face out on an angle—“one blow across the nose and we’ll call it even.”

“It’s okay.”

He smiled at me for another moment. “Well, I’ll be on my guard. You might change your mind. Listen”—he looked at his wristwatch—“six o’clock, Studio C. You have my word.”

“Do you want me to tell Nathaniel?” I asked.

“No,” he answered slowly, like he was making up his mind as he spoke. “No. Let’s make it just the two of us. There are some tricky technical things I’d like to nip in the bud.”

*   *   *

At ten to six, I was at the barre in Studio C with my pointe shoes on. I was excited beyond words, but I wouldn’t let the feeling take control of me. I wasn’t going to be disappointed this time. Roderick’s intentions were what counted. He wanted to rehearse with me alone; this is what he had told me. If something got in his way again, if he was distracted by the Chantal fiasco or had to meet with one of his lawyers, I wouldn’t take it personally. I would shrug it off and do my best to get him back on track the next time I saw him, remind him of everything he wanted from me.

But five minutes later he stepped into the studio. I was practicing a balance in
retiré
, and he waved a hand at me, telling me to continue. I focused on my placement and wondered whether his eyes were climbing up and down my body. I was certain they were.

“You don’t have a…” He motioned toward his thighs while he stared at mine. “A practice slip?”

“No.” I looked down at my uncovered legs, embarrassed. “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

He walked across the room to the TV and CD player, where he fiddled with the pile of CDs. I hoped he wasn’t annoyed.

“Let’s start at the top. Have you had a chance to watch it?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you need a refresher?” He pointed at the TV.

“No.” I shook my head. “I know it.”

He looked somewhere between skeptical and impressed, then he came toward me with a chair, set it down in front of the mirror.

“The bed,” he said. He cued the CD with the remote.

“Can I … can I have a minute?”

“Of course.” He smiled. “Take all the time you need.”

I sat on the chair, facing away from him. I needed to focus because so much hinged on this rehearsal. I imagined the intensity of Manon’s happiness, let the feeling course through my body to put me in the right mood. I signaled to Roderick to start the music.

Something about the first strains of the
pas de deux
reminded me of crystal chandeliers clinking in the wind. Manon’s joy was so powerful it could smash into itself and shatter on the floor. I pushed myself off the chair and stepped into the first position. This was the key to her movement, the doom that floated behind her like a scarf she’d tied around her neck. I moved across the room. My feet were doing what they were supposed to do and I imagined that my arms had been injected with helium. When I got to the spot where Nathaniel should have been, I mimed our interaction as well as I could. In a phrase of music the actual
pas de deux
would start and I wouldn’t be able to continue without a partner.

“Good, Georgia.” Roderick pointed the remote at the CD player and paused the music. He turned to face me. “That was
good
.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Now I want you to try it again and see if you can find a little more space in here.” He brought his hand to his sternum and spread his fingers over the top of his rib cage.

I danced the segment again, careful not to collapse in my chest. It felt different this time. I was twice as conscious of him watching me. You would think that would make me less focused but it did the opposite. I took the feel of his eyes on me and let it put fire into every step. I understood something new now, that he could see me as Mandi and Manon at the same time. His eyes could rove up and down me in two ways, admiring my dancing while still wanting something else. The discovery did something wonderful to me, like I was finally free of an embarrassment that had weighed down my whole personality.

When I got close to the
pas de deux
part, I assumed that Roderick would just stop the music again, but instead he stood up and positioned himself where Nathaniel would be. He held out his hand. I took it and lifted my leg in the first partnered
arabesque
. I kept going even though I couldn’t believe what was happening. Roderick was dancing with me. I stepped in toward him. The next bit of choreography was a supported sequence of turns. Would he put his hands on my waist like my partner was supposed to? I waited for the impact. He seemed to hesitate and I wondered whether he was going to stop. Maybe the situation had suddenly struck him as inappropriate. But then, in an instant, his hands were on my waist. The feeling reverberated through my entire body. I
pliéd
in fifth position. His hands took control of me as I turned and turned and turned.

“Ignore the music,” he said. “You’re helping me too much and the extra effort is sending you off balance. Try it again and
trust
me.”