Then, finally, I’d gone to the airport a far richer woman than I’d been when I arrived, and slept all the way home on the plane.
I’d left the fantasy where it belonged. In a club I couldn’t access, across an ocean from me. I told myself that in time all that sensation would fade. My memories of it would become less vivid. That intense longing in me would dissipate.
I could comfort myself with the money I’d earned, and I did.
But one week passed, then another, and I kept waiting for my body to feel like…mine again.
Because, try as I might, I felt…different. And I knew it was me, because life in the corps was as it always had been and always would be. We danced. We obsessed over a wrist here, an ankle there. We practiced our steps, mastered our timing. As the weather grew colder, Annabelle and I spent less time running in Central Park and more time on elliptical machines. Sometimes we swam. It didn’t matter what I did, I didn’t feel right. I looked fine. As close to perfect as I could get, as required.
But I didn’t feel like me anymore.
I could feel that night in Paris in the way I danced. In every step and every tired muscle in my body. And maybe, I thought as yet another week passed and I still couldn’t quite inhabit my own body the way I used to so easily, it wasn’t Sebastian at all. He had touched something in me I hadn’t known was there, that was true. I didn’t try to deny that even to myself.
But I was beginning to wonder if the burlesque had changed my dancing for good.
Or not the dancing, not really. I could perform at the same capacity and did, because if I didn’t I’d get cut. I was fine. But my drive had shifted.
Before I’d gone to Paris, my life had revolved around a certain grim acceptance that this was the way it was and nothing could change it. I would dance until I was cut from the corps. I would never ascend to a higher level as a soloist—always a bridesmaid and never a bride, my friend Winston used to say—and I would call that a career. I would be grateful for it, and someday I feared I would miss these days.
If I had any future plans, they were dim and insubstantial. There were those who parlayed their time in the company into teaching for the Knickerbocker. But that, too, was a political quagmire, and I already knew that I would have to be far better than I was—far better, yet still not good enough to bloom into a prima ballerina role—to shift over to company staff, much less become a ballet master in my own right. I’d once seen a TV show about a former ballerina who went off to some picturesque village somewhere and opened her own ballet school, and when I imagined anything at all after these years of the corps, I imagined that.
Late at night, while Annabelle and her lovers made their typical ruckus, I didn’t lie in bed with my hands between my legs any longer, getting myself off on my fantasies. Sebastian had far outstripped any fantasy I might have had. And I didn’t really see the point of pretending my fingers were him when I knew better. Instead, I lay awake and tried to imagine myself as one of my early ballet teachers. I tried to imagine myself patiently molding little girls without crushing their dreams. Or attempting to see the beauty in their waddling, ghastly attempts at ballet’s contradictory willowy crispness. Trying all the while to pretend I wasn’t desolate for the life I’d been forced to leave behind.
But no matter how I tried to imagine it, I couldn’t quite see myself in that role.
The next time I took the train north from the city, using my day off for one of my command performance dinners with my parents, I tried to imagine that this was my commute home. That I’d come down into the city to see Annabelle, perhaps, and was now returning to my small little suburban life. Back to the Darcy James Ballet School, where ambitious mamas would bully their little girls into tutus, bully me into pretending they could dance, and calling all that failure and imperfection ballet.
It made me feel hollow.
I took a taxi from the train station when I arrived, the better not to inconvenience my parents, and stared out at the Connecticut countryside that I knew so well. I had grown up here. I didn’t dislike it, or go to great lengths to separate myself from its suburban grasp the way I knew Annabelle did. But by the same token, when all was said and done, I had never imagined myself here.
I had always imagined myself onstage.
I tried to snap myself out of it when the car turned into the long drive that led to my childhood home. I made myself breathe properly as the stone house, fashioned like an opulent farmhouse, came into view. It was lit up bright and cheery against the autumn night, and I told myself that I was, too.
But no visit to my parents was ever without tension.
I was a grown, independent woman, but I still dressed for them instead of myself. A smart pair of flats instead of the comfortable boots I preferred. Black leggings, but not worn as pants, as I knew that was one of my mother’s pet peeves. I wore a little A-line shift dress over the leggings, and it wasn’t until I glanced at myself in the hall mirror in the foyer that I realized I already looked like the suburban ballet mistress who haunted my future.
I’d draped myself in several scarves to break up the relentless black and pulled my hair back into the ubiquitous ballet bun, but that didn’t change the facts. I had never seen a woman either in the ballet or adjacent to the ballet—of any age—who didn’t dress…exactly like this. As if we spent our lives in corps whether we were dancing or not.
Welcome to your life, I told myself sharply. Better get used to it now.
I wandered farther into the house, following the sound of my parents’ favorite classical music station into the back of the house. Evenings were always conducted in the chic, sophisticated kitchen complete with sofas arranged around a cozy fireplace and the sort of dramatic flower arrangements that could only be maintained by twice-weekly visits from the florist. Sure enough, my mother stood at the counter, putting the finishing touches on a meal I knew she hadn’t cooked. That was the province of the housekeeper. While she added her own little flourishes to the dinner she needed only to warm, my father sat near the fire, lost behind The New York Times.
I hovered in the wide archway a moment, not sure why it had never occurred to me before that I had first learned the rules of performance here. In this house, where the appearance of perfection had always been valued far above any kind of honesty or emotion. This was where I’d learned to dance long before I’d learned the basics of the five positions that were the foundation of ballet.
But maybe that was straying too far into the cynicism I had so boldly told Sebastian I didn’t possess.
My mother was slim, her hair more silver than black these days. Even though this was a dinner at home, she was dressed elegantly. She was always dressed elegantly. Dark, exquisitely tailored pants over flats that gleamed. And above, the sort of fitted, understated jacket that was undoubtedly sourced from some designer recognizable by a single name. She wore pearls at her ears, a simple gold chain at her neck. On her left hand, she wore one exquisite diamond that my father had placed there some thirty years ago. She was the kind of woman other people, who didn’t dance professionally, always claimed looked like a dancer. They meant she stood tall, was thin, and carried herself with a certain air of purpose.
I really was a professional dancer, but I’d never come close to my mother’s elegance. And looking at her now, I felt a familiar ache inside me that reminded me I never would. I could dance myself silly, and I had. And would, as long as I could. But it was my mother who commanded rooms with an arch of one brow.
If she’d taken to the stage, I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that my mother would have easily become a prima ballerina. Sometimes I suspected she knew it, too.
Maybe