Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  “They’re going to have duplicates of all this stuff.”

  My. God. Nora. Please. Don’t stop laughing.

  Christopher picked up a small framed photograph of Baby Don from Denise’s desk. He had to catch his breath before he could talk. “Well, we’ll just tell them that Williams-Sonoma made a mistake.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Nora’s voice was still happy, but calming down. “We’ll blame Williams-Sonoma.” There was a pause, a shift, then Nora asked, “Have you told your parents and your sisters that you and I won’t be together for Christmas?”

  “Of course not.” Calm down. “No. I didn’t, I just told them we were doing something different this year. I told them just you and me were going away to have a quiet time, and we weren’t having all the usual parties and dinners and stuff.”

  “Okay,” she said softly, “just so I know what to say if they call again.”

  “Nora,” Christopher said, “I love you. Do you still love me?”

  Pause. “This is a difficult time for us, Christopher.”

  “Yeah. You’re right. It’s weird.” Christopher was using his thumbnail on the photo frame to try rubbing off the glue mark from the price tag. “How’s the loft? Everything okay?”

  “Yeah, fine. By the way, why did you call? You okay?”

  “Just to say hi.”

  “Well,” she said, “I should go.”

  “Just remember that, Nora, that I love you.”

  CHAPTER 25 :

  DECEMBER

  1989

  Nora and Abe were sitting in the Beekman Theater on the Upper East Side waiting for Sweetie to begin. “How will you get all your writing materials out to Greenport?” she asked him.

  Abe wasn’t touching her yet in any way, no hand-holding—he usually did nothing until after the lights went out—but she noticed him glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was sitting in the few rows behind them.

  “Train,” Abe said. “I don’t need much stuff.”

  “And you’ll be there three or four weeks?”

  “Yeah, I was counting on it. I need to get this half a manuscript done to show this agent. The place is still available, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I told my husband and brother it’s rented. Nobody will bother you.”

  Abe knocked Nora’s knee with his knee, which thrilled her more than it should have. She’d gone to a holiday party before coming to meet him and was a little buzzed. That extra glass of Merlot she could have done without. She rarely drank red and wasn’t good at gauging it. “How about you?” Abe asked. “Are you going out for a couple days?”

  “Sure,” she said, “I’ll visit. Unless it’ll be a distraction to your work.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t be a distraction to my work.”

  She elbowed him. “Well, thank you. Thank you very much.” But she was not really angry. She couldn’t be. There was nothing in their relationship that entitled either of them entry into the other’s life beyond the limits of their once- or twice-a-week meetings (never on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday) for dinner and a movie and fooling around afterward in whatever apartment Abe was house-sitting. Nora comforted herself with the thought that maybe things between them would become clearer during their time together out at the beach house. She was renting it to him for a pittance, just enough to cover the utilities, enough to keep up the pretense.

  The movie-house lights dimmed into darkness.

  “CAN I ASK YOU SOMETHING?” Nora said to Abe after the movie. They were eating a not very good dinner in a coffee shop near Lexington Avenue, the kind of predictably mediocre place Christopher never would have set foot in. “At Time, when you take your break, where do you go?”

  “Wherever. Whatever the contessa feels like eating that night.”

  Usually when Abe mentioned Giulia, he called her the contessa. This bothered Nora more than it should have. She hadn’t told Giulia anything about all the time she was spending with Abe. Nora hadn’t talked to Giulia in weeks, actually.

  “So you just go get dinner? Then bring it back to work?”

  “I walk,” Abe said.

  “But where do you go?”

  “Around.” He signaled the waiter for another beer.

  Nora was pretty sure her hunch was right. Something about the hit-and-run nature of their relationship. Her guess was that during his hour-long break Abe went to Times Square, into those adults-only places where girls danced behind glass for men who stood in curtained booths and jerked off.

  CHAPTER 26 :

  DECEMBER

  1989

  Franklin Fields stopped Mary on the stairs after a faculty meeting and told her, “Hey, I’m hearing all kinds…just all sorts of super things from your dance students. The performance coming up, they’re excited,” and as he said “excited,” his own eyes gleamed.

  Mary had decided by now that Franklin was okay. She enjoyed the minor sexiness of his rolled-up sleeves and always loosened Brooks Brothers tie. But, no, there was no way you’d take this man to bed. Today he had a little shaving nick on his jaw. He needs somebody to tell him this stuff. “So—what are you up to down in that dance studio?”

  She made her voice all-business. “I think the kids will impress you. They’ve worked—they’re working quite hard.” Shit, now he’s got me stuttering.

  “I’m sure they are,” he said and looked deflated.

  “Yes. They’re quite focused.” At least she was learning the lingo.

  THE STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE was scheduled for just before the holiday break, a Friday night. In the afternoon there would be an opening in the campus art gallery, a group show of Hudson Valley painters, then a buffet dinner (seventy-five dollars per person) and a silent auction. Most of the parents would be there, people from the community (the rich and arty), along with members of the board of trustees, who were having their annual luncheon that day, then staying on for the festivities of Hiliard Winter Weekend.

  Ross had tried to explain to Mary how a board’s power to decide policy affected all of a school’s dealings, including the teachers’ jobs and the conditions of their jobs. “For example, your budget for the dance department,” Ross said.

  “I don’t care about my budget. Just so they pay me.”

  “Mary.” He was exasperated. “You have to care about your budget. Think long-term. Think beyond survival. Think.”

  Mary, who had never had the luxury of thinking beyond survival, did understand that whenever the board showed up the stakes were high. The upcoming student performance had the welt on the back of her neck itching constantly. Why did this job feel scarier than preparing a solo for a world premiere? Why weren’t these kids better dancers? Mary knew she could perform. Mary knew she could choreograph. It seemed, though, that she knew very little about how to teach nonprofessionals how to perform.

  “TWO WEEKS! We have only two weeks until you’re onstage.” On the studio floor in front of Mary, sixteen teenagers were collapsed and breathing hard. But not hard enough. “What you just showed me is absolutely not ready.” The kids pinched their eyebrows together and nodded agreement.

  The students adored Mary, and they embraced the idea of being worked hard, like professionals, but part of Mary’s drill had nothing to do with serious dance business, part of it was her personal anxiety and dread.

  Franklin was expecting a performance, and these just were not performance-ready dancers. The class met three times a week. The students got there on time. Charlie and Jenefer showed up early. After class, most of them lingered. They couldn’t get enough. Still, their progress was pathetic.

  The piece they were preparing was the one Mary had begun to choreograph that morning in late August after she’d spent the night staring up at the beams that crossed the cottage ceiling, wondering if maybe it was time for her finally to check out. She’d titled the dance simply “Pas de Deux.” There were eight couples—in all kinds of combinations of height and gender, just as she had planned—and the couples were always i
ntersecting with one another. The dance had changed a lot from when she’d first conceived it. There was less chasing involved; it was more close-close. The two people within each couple were always touching, one partnering the other for a turn or a lift, one leading the other in a waltz step. The partners pirouetted in and out of each other’s arms. They climbed onto each other and made shapes, they lay next to each other on the floor and coordinated the movement of their legs and arms. Mary overheard the students on the staircase one day:

  “This dance is getting pretty touchy-feely. It’s turning into a romance thing.”

  “Yeah, she must have gotten laid or something.”

  “Franklin Fields, you think?”

  “In. His. Dreams.”

  ONE MORNING, ten days before the performance, the advanced students were in the studio stretching out before class, and Charlie told Mary, suggestively, “Mr. Fields keeps asking us about you and your class and your dance that we’re working on.”

  “My dance?” Mary said. “It’s not mine.”

  “You choreographed it,” Charlie said. “Isn’t it yours?”

  “No. By now it should be yours. Every dance you perform is your dance.”

  They stopped stretching. Mary wanted to hug Charlie. He had just helped her figure out her teaching problem. “The dancer’s job is to take the choreographer’s steps and”—and what? thirty-two eyes staring at her—“and breathe into them.” Mary paused, half expecting one of Charlie’s irreverent asides, like Breathe into your own steps! But the kids continued to stare at her. Apparently the idea she had just presented was, in fact, news.

  “So, in other words,” Charlie volunteered, “you’re not Balanchine?”

  “Who’s Balanchine?” someone asked.

  A few people moaned. Charlie condescended to answer, “He’s a great Russian ballet choreographer who made the ballerinas all look exactly alike.”

  “No, I don’t want you exactly alike. A dancer…” What? How to put it into words? She had never needed to explain this before. “Well, a dancer says everything they have to say, all the important stuff—not just like ‘Excuse me, where’s the bathroom?’ or ‘Can I have a Diet Coke, please?’—Hey, wait, let’s, why don’t we try this. Charlie, center stage.”

  “Me? Now?”

  “Hurry. Yes, you. Say this with your body: Can I please have a Diet Coke?”

  Clownishly, embarrassed, he mimed praying hands, then gripped his throat to show thirst. “Oh, you!” Mary said, laughing. “Enough. You’re playing charades. Jenefer, center stage. You try.”

  “ ‘Can I please have a Diet Coke?’ ”

  “Yup. Ask the question using your body.”

  Jenefer was the right choice. An experienced acting student, she threw her arms up over her head, made her body a skinny long tube of energy. Jenefer, usually shy and modest, was meticulous about the details of every step; the whole room was rapt as she transformed her body into a slow, slinky stretch of sexiness, then, with an abdominal contraction, collapsed her torso down over her legs, drooped her head to the floor, rolled up to a flat-back position, extended her arms, slow-slow-slow, kept her palms facing downward, and then, finally, with a clipped gesture, turned one palm over in a supplication. She held the shape, breathed into it, and kept it alive. The students exploded into applause. When they quieted down, Mary asked, “So, what do you think of that?”

  “She’s Coke. The real thing,” Charlie said, forlornly. “I’m generic-brand cola.”

  They laughed. There was energy now in the room. Bridgit, a slightly overweight, stocky girl, raised her hand, “I want to try ‘Excuse me, where’s the bathroom?’ ”

  “Sure, give it a try.”

  Bridgit, usually self-consciously imitative of Jenefer, surprised Mary by doing movements Jenefer’s body would never have discovered. In a staccato version of her usual between-class frenzy, Bridgit spun all over the floor, using the space more fully than Jenefer had, circling shapes suggested by her round, squat body. Now and then, with her chunky legs solid, she stopped in a quick, surprising halt, her hands flexed in Egyptian-style early-modern-dance shapes that demanded, Stop!

  Mary whistled when Bridgit was done. As Bridgit bowed and everyone clapped and whooped for her, her confident dance-self morphed back into her day-to-day self, and Mary saw Bridgit change from the woman she would eventually become, back into the girl she was stuck being for now. Have faith.

  “Great,” Mary said. “Who can tell us what happened? What did Bridgit do that was so exciting?”

  “She…Well…” Charlie, of course, was the first to try. “She…I don’t know what she did, but it was deeply satisfying to watch.”

  “Yes!” Mary was thrilled; “satisfying” was the perfect word. “Who can say why Bridgit’s dance was satisfying to watch?”

  Stefan—a handsome, tall boy who rarely spoke, just followed everything with an intelligent watchfulness, a boy Mary had seen Natassia talking to once or twice, a boy who loved to read and who just happened to have a dancer’s body—Stefan offered this: “Bridgit’s movement was an extension of the shapes of her body, that’s why it was satisfying to watch. The movement was organic to her body.” Mary was holding her breath; she couldn’t believe how smart these kids were. Was it growing up in rich families that taught them how to talk like this? Stefan went on: “The question, about where’s the bathroom, that was there in the urgency of the quick steps.”

  “Yeah,” another guy interrupted Stefan, “and in the kind of awkwardness of those poses she made.”

  “Right,” Stefan continued, “it’s usually an artificial politeness when someone asks where’s the bathroom. They call it the gents’ or the powder room or something stupid like that, so those sort of artificial shapes said that.”

  “Holy shit,” Mary said, “you guys are so smart. How, how did you learn to talk like that?”

  They laughed at her, and she laughed with them. The kids’ energy was overheating the room. “Okay, let’s keep going here.”

  Mary next asked them to get with their partners for a new eight-count combination. It was easy; they got the steps quickly. “Do it again!” Mary said. “And five and six and—”

  Six, ten, fifteen times over, Mary had them do the combination, and they did it until it wasn’t dance anymore, it wasn’t steps, it was the body’s imperative, and after the sixteenth time, the kids’ minds were numb, their bodies nothing but that eight-count phrase of movement, and by the twentieth time, their personalities began to move into the steps. Each body was the dance, and each dance was slightly different. And perfect.

  “Something happened here today,” Mary said at the end of class. “You were in here with your bodies today. Today you danced. How did it feel?”

  “Great!”

  “How was it different from our last class?” she asked.

  “More free. More fun.”

  “Less boring.”

  “Okay, in the dorm tonight, for twenty minutes, do it again. Put on any music you like, your favorite music, and just be in your body. Move. Like animals. Yeah. Hey, listen. At eight-thirty or nine, something like that, on PBS, there’s this great animal show on TV. That’s the second part of your homework. Watch that animal show. Watch how the animals move. That’s our goal here. Not just to learn the steps but to get you moving naturally, the way animals do. They don’t think. Our goal is to get you to stop thinking and start moving.” She bowed to them. “Thank you, class.”

  They applauded and bowed, and she applauded them.

  Mary had just learned lesson number one in how to teach raw beginners to dance. Now maybe she wouldn’t lose her job.

  THE DAYS PASSED, and then there was only a week left. “Okay,” Mary said to the class at rehearsal. “It really is starting to look like something.” They were hanging on to every word. “Now that you know I love you, we’re going to work. Today’s Friday. For the next seven days, forget about the rest of your life. Besides our regular classes, all of you need to be
here every night after dinner. Seven-thirty sharp. Monday, we set lights. Tuesday, costume fittings. Wednesday and Thursday, dress rehearsals. You’ll be here at least until ten o’clock every night. Probably longer. I’ll be giving lots of notes.”

  The students cheered.

  “MOVE LIKE THE ANIMALS,” she shouted at the eight couples spilling across the floor, into and out of the narrow aisles between groupings. “Eat up the space, use all the space.” Their arabesques were now perfectly timed. “Bridgit, leg a little higher! Yes! Get it there every time.” The couples glided forward for their eight counts of lifts. “That’s it! You’re slinking, slinky, you’re leopards. Stefan, looser arms. You’re thinking too much. This isn’t algebra or chemistry. This is physics. Action, reaction. Animals know how to do this. You’re animals. Forget your brains.”

  That night, after about an hour of rehearsal, the students asked for a ten-minute break. But after fifteen minutes, no one was coming back into the studio. Mary thought she’d finally pushed them too far. Probably they’d gone to Franklin Fields to complain. Maybe they were on the phone with their parents or the board of trustees. Mary was going to lose her job; she and Natassia would be out on the street for Christmas. Mary went to the studio door and looked up and down the hallways. No one. No sounds. “Where are you?” she screamed. Even Natassia was gone. Mary stepped back into the studio, closed the door to keep the heat in. She started to pack up her CDs and tapes. She pulled out her asthma inhaler.

  And then the door burst open and the lights went out just at the moment she was inhaling, and in the darkness she almost choked. It was so dark she saw nothing, heard only a rush at the door as all the kids leaped into the studio. They were growling. And then the lights slowly came up but stayed dim, and Mary saw that all sixteen students were painted with animal stripes, their arms and legs and faces. Somebody turned on Bruce Springsteen singing “Jungleland.” “What,” Mary screamed, “are you doing? What is this?”