He leans back against the doorframe. He’s got this really serious look, but then he points toward his room. “No matter what happens. No matter what—” He puts in a dramatic pause, then, “No matter what state you may get into.” He points at his room, shaking his head ominously.
My jaw nearly drops to the floor. He is teasing me! “Whatever you say, Billionaire Bluebeard!”
He gives me an unreadable look and right there I’m thinking about it—I go in and surprise him in the middle of the night. He’s sleepy and awkward and instantly consumed with passion, and he pulls me to him, unable to restrain himself, kissing me with those rough-and-tumble lips. His light brown hair is all messy like it used to be. And he maybe says something quintessentially nerdy and Benny-ish, like how entirely vexed he’s been with me stuck in my own room, and he 100.5% needs me now.
I shake the thoughts from my mind and I walk past him into my wife quarters.
I see that my suitcases are already deposited in the corner. “How did these get here? What, do you have a butler or something?” I ask.
“He’s a butler-slash-personal assistant. Mac’s his name. He’s out right now, but he’ll be back.” He pulls out his phone.
“Hold on. So you literally have a butler.”
“I literally have a butler-slash-personal assistant,” he says.
I grin. Is he a little sensitive about that? Yes! So of course I push it. “Literally a butler!”
“A butler is more focused on household management whereas a personal assistant is more focused on bills and calendars and administrative-type things. It makes sense for some people to combine them. I’m texting you his number. If you need specific food items or toiletries or if you have questions about the operation of things like Wi-Fi and AV stuff, he’ll deal with it.”
“Gloss over it all you want, Poshface. You. Have a butler.” I feel like the old Benny in the courtyard would be horrified by something like this. “A limo, a butler. Give you a little hair gel and you’d be one of those guys who used to pick me up for dates in Vegas.”
Benny regards me with the unreadable expression that is beginning to drive me a little batty, though his jaw looks a bit tighter than normal.
“Well?” I say.
“Are you done?” he asks.
“For now,” I say.
He says, “You’ll want to give Alverson your schedule of dance practices and things so he knows when and where to pick you up. He won’t hold you to it, but he likes the general schedule, and then you can text him when it gets closer to the time and adjust accordingly.”
“Okay.” I walk around touching stuff. Naturally, the lowliest guest room that Benny can find is far grander than my bedroom at home. “I can’t believe you live in this building! You know it’s one of the places that I point out to visitors.” I go to the window, feeling his eyes on me. “I can’t believe you live here!”
When I spin around, this morose darkness has come over his tawny personhood.
“What?”
“We good?” he says in the manner of somebody really, really wanting to end the conversation.
The humorous connection between us is gone now. “So you do boxing?” I ask, wanting to talk some more.
“Why else would I have a heavy bag?”
“Yeah, right,” I say. “Okay.”
“You’ll be free to use the kitchen as much as you want, of course.”
“Are you sure there’s no danger of running into me? The annoying wifely employee?”
“I typically take my meals at my desk at work. In fact, I’m heading to the office.” With that he turns and leaves, sneezing as soon as he’s out the door.
I stand there feeling hurt and dismissed. I hate when people shut me out. I hate being kept in the dark. As the youngest of seven children, I was always the last to know everything, always the clueless one. And then not going to a normal high school. Missing so much because of constant rehearsals.
“Suddenly remembering why billionaires suck,” I mumble, closing the door after him.
I put away my stuff, and then I text Mac to get instructions to the house, which happens to include the password to the sound system and his precious Pandora account.
Score! I put it on and skip over a bunch of songs until I find a Dave Matthews Band song.
Ten
Francine
* * *
I’m sitting at the corner of the studio after company class among scattered piles of wraps and sweatpants and water bottles.
It was a good class today—my barre buddies and I give the dudes such shit about their push-up contest during barre. Then we changed into pointe shoes and began center work; people were on fire. We ended with grand allegro exercises. Watching my peeps, it gave me shivers. I feel like I’m in the best company in the world. Technically we’re not the best company in the world—that would be the Paris Opera Ballet if you ask me—but in terms of heart, we absolutely are.
I’m wrapping my knee, fueled for a day of rehearsal. My friend Annie is next to me, slathering her legs with arnica gel.
Sometimes I wonder if my amazing resilience could be the undoing of me. The pain I can handle, but am I taking it too far? What happens in ten years? Will I still be able to dance? To do yoga?
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of night with this image of me steering a ship, and I’ve been sailing in this one direction all my life, but am I actually steering the ship into a bunch of rocks? Do I even know how to steer at all?
Then again, the human body has amazing recuperative properties.
Annie nudges me, and I look up to see Rosemary beelining over to me looking determined, reminding me that I have bigger problems than this knee; namely, rules and regulations and entry visa red tape.
I stand up in one fluid motion. No serious injuries here!
“You really brought in the big guns,” Rosemary says, amazed.
“What do you mean?”
“We have an assurance from Piper and Pearson, one of the biggest law firms in the city, that you’ll have a work visa in every destination on our itinerary by the deadline. We’re pulling Daneen off of rehearsing your part. She’ll still be your understudy, but clearly your papers aren’t going to be a problem.”
“Great!” I say.
Annie clutches my arm and squeezes. “Paris, here we come!”
“Do you have some rich uncle we should know about?” Rosemary asks.
“It’s just a friend helping out with a bit more firepower than needed,” I say.
“Nice friend to have,” she says and heads off.
Friend is a definite stretch. Friend suggests a person who likes you and doesn’t use you as a prop against your will while finding you annoying.
And you don’t moon over his lips and want so bad to kiss him. And you don’t inappropriately fantasize about artless yet passionate sex with him.
I sit back down and go back to fussing with my knee wrap.
The billionaire brings a gold-plated sledgehammer to kill a mosquito, I think reflexively, but a second later I’m thinking how Benny always was good for his word; he always did follow through on things. Back at Beau Cirque, the director sometimes asked for things that seemed impossible, and Benny would receive the request in his sullen and antisocial way, and the next thing you knew, he would have created some little robotic wonder of ingenuity. People would compliment him on it, and he would just be all grumbly.
Now here he is, pulling out the lawyer big guns.
It’s amazing to see Benny in this incarnation. Yes, he’s become harder and more wolfish and conventionally hot where he was more nerdishly hot, but it doesn’t surprise me that he’s become so effective in the world. Like the end of a story that you finally get to read and you kind of knew what would happen, but it’s satisfying all the same.
Another dancer, Shasta, settles in next to Annie and me. “How is it?” she asks. We’re all really aware of each other’s ailments, and mine is one of the company’s worst, though pe
ople don’t realize how much worse.
“I think it’s better,” I say hopefully.
A few other dancers wander in from lunch, depositing phones and water bottles around the edges of the rehearsal space.
Sevigny comes out in his usual outfit, which is a really tight black shirt and black workout pants that have white lines down the sides. He claps twice to let us know that there is to be an announcement before practice begins.
Phones get shut down. Snacks get put aside.
He tells us that ticket sales have been exceedingly strong and we’re nearly sold out in Berlin and getting there in Paris. There’s also been some amazing pre-tour press coverage. He tells us where to find links. Annie grips my arm. Shasta does a little dance from where she’s sitting. We are all incredibly excited.
Even so, I feel this twinge in the pit of my stomach. The responsible thing to do would be to let people know the direness of my knee injury, and that it’s not getting better. If only so that Daneen can really apply herself to rehearsing my part. I love my company so much. I don’t want to let them down, but I don’t want to screw myself out of this role of a lifetime.
“Now…” He delivers a couple more swift claps and lays out the schedule for the day, starting with the crazypants allegro the dudes had trouble with yesterday. We go through that and other trouble spots, cheering each other on.
An hour later I’m back in Hell’s Kitchen, gearing up to teach the girls’ class, the 42nd Street Twirlers. I rush up three flights of steps and in through the door and the screams erupt as a dozen little girls all run toward me jumping and punching in the air. “Miss Francine!”
Kelsey eyes me darkly from across the room where she’s setting up the iPhone speaker, but she’s just kidding. It’s a big joke with us that the kids like me the best, but one thing’s for sure: I’m crazy about them. Especially this ten-to-twelve age group.
“Okay, slackers, circle up!” I clap my hands and extend them out to either side. A flurry of girls in colorful leotards gather around, holding hands in a circle. I wait for them all to hush and stop fidgeting. I start them on warm-ups, painting a picture of the amazing class we’re gonna have. One of my favorite things is to connect with the girls this way, on the level of the magic of ballet.
We watch the kids go through their paces to the music, hanging back.
“How goes it at posh central?” she asks, because of course I texted the full photo array to our girl-gang-plus-Antonio text loop.
“Kind of weird,” I say under my breath. “I just don’t know what he wants from me.”
“Do you need a hint?” Kelsey asks. “I can give you a hint.”
“No, it’s not what you think. It’s almost like he’s angry at me, or like he’s punishing me or something, but then we’ll have a fun or sexy exchange and I feel connected with him, but then he does something to shove me away…”
“Interesting,” Kelsey says. “If he can’t have your love, he’ll flex his power over you.”
I roll my eyes.
“I’m just working with what you give me,” Kelsey says. “You really do need to have that party. We need to evaluate this guy as a group.”
“Not happening. It’s enough that I’m playing wife to Billionaire Bluebeard; I’m not going to be adding socialite hostess.”
“Fine,” she says. “But you wanna know what’s so ironic? You do sometimes date people that are like how Benny sounds. Nerdy techie creative types. Or at least, pre-billionaire-status Benny.”
“I wouldn’t say the guys I date are like Benny at all.”
“The orchestra sound guy?” Kelsey suggests. “Socially challenged techie in the arts? And that one Canadian who did all those little inventions? He was also a little bit gruff, as I recall. Without grace but fun—remember how you said that?”
I dismiss her assertions with a wave of my hand and catch her up on company news.
“Honestly, I was kind of glad they had Daneen rehearsing in parallel to me. That way I knew that, even if my knee blew out, somebody would be able to hit the ground running. I kind of wanted to tell them to keep her on my part, but I don’t want to alarm them and get booted from the tour. I also don’t want to let people down. I mean everybody understates their injuries but…” I look over at her to see what she’s thinking.
She shakes her head. “I can’t tell you what to do.”
The kids are flagging and I run out onto the floor as hyena teacher, which means I scream and claw the air as I run toward them, and they all scream and step it up.
“I don’t have to decide now,” I say when I rejoin Kelsey. “About the knee.”
“You don’t,” she says. “You’ll know when you know.”
I focus on the class, and that lifts my spirits. Nothing gets me down when I’m teaching with Kelsey. She and I sometimes talk about opening our own little school because there’s not a lot of money in teaching for somebody else.
Class goes on. We start in on some barre work.
We have a big recital planned and we’re not ready at all. Kelsey and I sometimes discuss working with the group in a park, just to try to catch up, but park rehearsals suck—you always get people watching and commenting, and random kids race into the middle of things and sometimes they even try to dance along. I’d do anything to be able to bring the girls to Benny’s home gym to practice—even not moving the boxes, it would be workable.
If only.
Eleven
Benny
* * *
Spencer rides in the back of the limo with me to the dog daycare, a vast dog playground that occupies the upper floor of warehouse space on Tenth Ave. I’m saying excited dog things to him.
My eyes are itchy and my head feels wrapped in gauze, but somehow it doesn’t bother me; I feel this strange sense of optimism about life that I haven’t felt in a long time. My thoughts drift back to the exercise room yesterday, to the way Francine’s breath quickened when I teased her; to the sensation of her challenging gaze. The clever taunts directed at me.
It was strangely…enlivening.
Not that I’m looking at this situation with rose-colored glasses. She’s here to get what she needs—nothing more, nothing less. Once she gets it, she’ll be gone in a flash, just the way she was before.
Still, it’s interesting. The way she jars me out of the malaise I’ve felt. The way she looks at life.
“Hey, buddy,” I say, scratching Spencer’s ears. He licks my wrist.
If James were here, he’d confront me to no end about this thing with Francine. What the fuck are you doing?
James was brutally direct, which suited me after a lifetime of people delicately dancing around me, misreading my expressions and my silences.
James and I got each other. It meant a lot. I’d never had such a good friend, and I know I never will again.
We were opposites in many ways—I was a small-picture thinker and James was big picture. I’d tease him about being a hippie, but he had incredible business savvy and he was loyal as the day is long. With his Patagonia clothes and Mediterranean good looks, James attracted women left and right. He was a massive serial monogamist—he’d fall hard and get bored two years in.
I wasn’t particularly interested in dating, especially not in that first year after Vegas when I was so ridiculously emotional about it all. Plus, I was technically married, even if it was a fake bureaucratic paperwork marriage where we’d never had sex and it was only a drunken farce for Francine.
My paperwork non-marriage became a handy “keep-out” sign. I liked getting naked well enough, and even went through a phase where I worked on my moves rather diligently, hell-bent on replacing my old romantic technique, which I might describe as “hungry, out-of-control nerd,” with a more cool and dominating style. But I liked that nothing could come of any romantic relationship—no strings, no emotions.
The Swiss chalet thing actually started as a joke that I made to a reporter. It took on a life of its own, that’s for sure, and d
efinitely reinforced my “keep-out” sign.
That was fine with me; I actually thought it was funny, but James didn’t. He felt strongly that I should get a divorce and find a true mate. He didn’t believe that I liked things the way they were.
It was one of the few things we didn’t see eye to eye on.
I check Spencer in at the front desk. This is something that Mac should be doing, but it’s important to me that I do it, at least for a while longer. Spencer is excited, wagging his tail with the force of a jackhammer. They told me that he’s made friends here. I’m glad about that, because that first month after James died was as rough on him as it was on me. He still looks for James when we go out onto the sidewalk and it fucking breaks my heart.
I head back down, sneaking in a few shots of nasal spray. My allergies go crazy when I ride with him.
Alverson has the backseat dog blanket stowed away in the trunk by the time I’m back at the limo. Between the nasal spray and weekly dog washings, I’ve been able to make it work, allergies be damned.
I drop my stuff off in my office and handle a few quick fires before heading down to the lab. I put on shoe covers, a head covering, gloves, and a sterile gown and I go in, resisting my impulse to walk quickly, to put all the confusion and mayhem behind me; some of these instruments and projects are so tiny and sensitive, even air currents disturb them.
I stop by to see how some of my people are faring with the project that we’re working on, which involves enabling the microrobots to scavenge power from surrounding vibrations in a novel way.
I’ll miss this team. They’ll be taken off this thing and reassigned. I don’t like abandoning this project, but that’s how it has to be.
I set up at my workstation, complete with vibration-isolation surfaces where sensitive instruments and projects are held up by air currents, or, as Francine would put it, literally held up by air currents, to guard against the ambient vibration of a city full of active subways and jackhammers.
Just Not That Into Billionaires Page 10
