The Man I Love

by Suanne Laqueur

  Alto: You were incredible, Luck. Come on. People would have died if you hadn’t been there.

  Jones: David Alto, now 32, is in remission from kidney cancer. He’s watching today’s rehearsal from the auditorium, wearing a black wool cap over his bald head. Lucky Dare sits next to him, holding his hand as they relive those difficult memories

  Alto: I was trying to help Daisy but Lucky pushed me aside. “Get out of the way.” And she was just yelling things at Fish. I mean, Erik Fiskare. We called him Fish.

  Dare: I was calm with Will but I nearly broke down when I saw Daisy’s wound. And Erik [laughter]—oh my God—he was leaning on her femoral pressure point and with his other elbow he just whacks me in the side. You know, like you’d slap a hysterical person. “Get it together.” Or something. It worked. My hands just took over and then I was a robot. Like I could feel my brain severing the emotional connections I had to these people. Crazy what happens to you in a crisis.

  Alto: The blood was everywhere. Jesus. For a long time afterward I had a really, really hard time with blood. Like if I was flossing my teeth and spit blood in the sink?

  Dare: You flossed? I didn’t floss for a year.

  Alto: Post Traumatic Floss Disorder … [Laughter]

  Jones: Despite their joking, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, was no laughing matter. For many of those in the theater on April 19th, the psychological wounds of the ordeal took longer to heal than the physical ones.

  Bianco: Oh, I was a mess.

  Jones: Wrapped in a black shawl, Daisy Bianco sits in one of the orchestra seats. She’s joined by John Quillis, who is also performing at tomorrow’s ceremony. He was a sophomore in 1992, and watched the shootings from the stage right wing. He and Daisy were good friends at school, and then started dating a few years after graduation.

  John Quillis: I ran into her randomly in New York. We were both going to a master class or something. I didn’t recognize her at first.

  Bianco: I looked like crap. I think I weighed 90 pounds.

  Quillis: If that. I knew right away she was still haunted by it all. I think I knew because… Well, look, I’m the son of two psychologists. They had me immediately in therapy after the shooting. I think I was one of the few who went to counseling.

  Bianco: You were.

  Quillis: But even so, it was a long process. When I met up with Daisy I was coming out the other side. She looked like she was just heading into the tunnel.

  Bianco: Avoiding the tunnel. I knew I was mentally unraveling after the shooting, but having the goal of physical recovery kept me slightly distracted. Not to say the physical injuries weren’t devastating.

  Quillis: Her scars are crazy.

  Bianco: Being shot nearly destroyed me. Destroyed the essence of me. I’m a dancer. This is all I’ve done, all I’ve been since I was five. And then I wake up in a hospital bed with my leg shot up and sliced open and I had no idea what had happened. The randomness, the senselessness of it… I truly became two people afterward. There was the me who worked like hell, trained and fought and never looked back. And then there was this other me who was just…dark. Angry and depressed and constantly anxious. Things I had never been before. Feelings I had never entertained, let alone been consumed by. I didn’t know how to express them. A lot of times I didn’t even have words for what I was experiencing.

  Jones: What got you through it?

  Bianco: I don’t…

  Quillis: Take your time. You all right?

  Bianco: John was the one who got me into therapy and got me on track to…back to myself, I guess. I got through it.

  Quillis: It’s all right.

  Bianco: I got through it but I don’t think I ever got over it. I can’t… I lost things I’ll never get back… Sorry, this is hard. It’s… In a lot of ways I’m still two people. Part of me has moved on and evolved yet part of me is still haunted. The shooting changed me. It changed who I was and for a long time I didn’t like…her.

  Quillis: It’s all right. Come on, let’s take a break. Get some water.

  Jones: Quillis comforts Bianco, leading her down by the side of the stage where they stretch together. They are in their thirties now. Quillis is a principal dancer with the Boston Ballet. Daisy Bianco danced two years with the Pennsylvania Ballet. She did a season with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in New York City and then went on tour with The Phantom of the Opera, in the role of Meg Giry. In 1999 she received an invitation from her former partner, Will Kaeger, to join the ballet company he was now heading in his home city of Saint John, New Brunswick.

  Bianco: Once he was my partner, now he’s my boss.

  Kaeger: We are always partners. I don’t dance with anyone the way I dance with Dais. Right from the start, when we were put together her freshman year, we had something special. It’s hard to explain. She’s calm, poised and cerebral. I’m an impulsive lunatic. But somehow those two things meshed into…us.

  Bianco: We always partnered by pure instinct. So it was frustrating after the shooting. We had to relearn so much because of our injuries. All this thinking was required.

  Kaeger: But we partner now in totally unique ways, and those came out of our injuries. But you’re right, I remember the first time we went into supported adagio class after the shooting. I didn’t think two fingers were going to make much of a difference but it was a disaster.

  Bianco: We left in tears.

  Kaeger: Tears. I’d lost sensation in this hand so I couldn’t hold onto her, couldn’t feel her weight when I was lifting her. We were falling all over the place, it was really discouraging. I was actually really freaked out by it. But little by little it became instinctive again. Dais knew how to work around my bad hand and I knew how she was going to compensate for her leg. This whole other dimension of our partnership emerged. And we had the bond of experience, too.

  Bianco: War mates.

  Jones: Apart from the emotional memories, was it difficult to stage this piece after not performing together for so long?

  Kaeger: No. Piece of cake. I can partner her in my sleep.

  Bianco: And I love this pas de deux so much.

  Kaeger: It’s from the George Balanchine ballet Who Cares? set to the song “The Man I Love.” I’ve never danced it anywhere but this theater. And never with anyone but Dais.

  Bianco: I’m grateful the music holds no memory of the shooting for me. I can hear it and not be reminded.

  Kaeger: It reminds me of Marie though.

  Bianco: It does. Her death was a bitter loss to the conservatory. In the aftermath of the shooting and trying to recover and come back and dance again, it was devastating not having her. Something was just missing from this building. I never stopped looking for her. I’m looking for her right now, yelling notes from the orchestra.

  Kaeger: She was crazy. She had an energy like… If you couldn’t keep up, then you best just get the hell out of the way. She wanted one hundred and ten percent from you all the time. But you couldn’t help but want to give it to her. She drove you to do better. She made you want to do better.

  Bianco: She made you believe in yourself. She said, ‘You dance well. You must dance well.’ And she was so fun, you hardly realized she was running you ragged. I try to channel her when I teach now. All her humor and motivation and energy.

  Kaeger: Her Italian curses.

  Bianco: I just remember how important it was to me, what it instilled in me. And I try to emulate Marie for my students and my dancers.

  Unidentified female voice: Are we ready to run this? Places, please.

  Jones: Bianco and Kaeger take to the stage. Twenty or thirty dancers and stagehands settle down to watch.

  [Music clip: George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love”]

  Jones: A hush descends as the couple reaches the part in the choreography where Bianco runs to Kaeger and languidly leaps onto his back in a split arabesque. This was the moment they were shot ten years ago. There is no hesitation, no fear today. Their timing is flawless, and th
eir colleagues burst into spontaneous appreciation.

  [Sound of applause and whistles]

  Jones: After an instant of stillness, Bianco slides off Kaeger’s shoulders, her toe finding the floor, still in deep arabesque. Her torso melts down on her leg as he turns her, she revolves around and through and then she is off to the far corner, turning again, running, leaping onto his shoulder.

  [Applause]

  Jones: I sit with Cornelis Justi while the dancers take a break and ask him what this week has been like.

  Justi: Surreal. Emotional. Brings everything back. Yet it’s gratifying to see Will and Daisy together, to see they’ve remained such close friends and now are professional colleagues. And to see they still dance so brilliantly together. Truly they are extraordinary. They still have their magic and it makes me happy. It makes me feel young. And it helps keep Marie alive for me.

  Jones: For NPR’s Moments in Time, this is Camberley Jones in Philadelphia.

  Short, Curt and Moody

  Erik was driving home when he heard the story on NPR. He had to pull over. He could not possibly drive and listen at the same time. Heart pounding, he pulled into the parking lot of the library and sat with the engine running, his mouth a little open.

  They were alive.

  Of course, he knew they were alive, out there somewhere in the world. But now they were here. In his fucking car.

  He listened, sitting motionless, falling down a wormhole in time, into an alternate universe and onto the planes of a past he worked hard to forget.

  That music.

  Those voices.

  Daisy.

  He gripped the steering wheel tight as he listened to her, leaning in toward the dashboard, wanting to crawl clear into the speakers and…

  And what? Be there?

  “He’s not here today?” the reporter asked.

  “No, he couldn’t make it,” David said.

  David of all people, making excuses for him. What a magnanimous gesture. And his little pause beforehand. If you were in the know on the situation, his pause spoke volumes. The pause broadcasted.

  But they had talked about him. They had made him part of the story, still included him. Kees told what happened in the aisle. “It was the most courageous thing I had ever seen,” he said. And Erik almost broke down. Kees never told him.

  Both David and Lucky brought up Erik’s name, clarifying he was Daisy’s boyfriend at the time. David watching the shit go down in the aisle. And Lucky giving her little detail about Erik whacking her in the side. He’d forgotten.

  What more could they have said about him?

  Daisy didn’t say my name.

  She said “my boyfriend.” But she remembered being in the booth with him. He wondered if she had ever discovered a link between the night before the shooting and the anxiety of their lovemaking. She had touched a little on the subject of therapy and her recovery.

  And how John had saved her.

  Will and Lucky were married. No big shock, but nice to hear anyway. And they were all in Canada, apparently. Together. But not John though. He was in Boston. Were he and Daisy long-distance lovers? Or were they not together at all?

  And David had cancer, his mind piped up, did you get that part?

  Erik turned off the radio and drove out of the parking lot. He kept his eyes on the road, steered, braked, signaled. Somehow he got home, but he had no recollection of the route. In his head, the refrain of “The Man I Love” echoed, swelling violins and woodwind arpeggios. Instead of the road, he could only see the pas de deux. Daisy in a poppy pink dress, running half the length of the stage and leaping onto Will’s back, transforming momentum into crystal immobility.

  He couldn’t be here.

  “No shit,” Erik said to the windshield.

  Other than, “I was in the lighting booth with my boyfriend,” Daisy hadn’t a thing to say about him.

  Not even his name.

  It hurt.

  But her voice. Out of the past, through the speakers of his car, he heard her talking. It seemed incredible she was out there, real, flesh and bone, with a voice sounding exactly as he remembered. Amazing how all of them were still out there and real. Will and Lucky, Kees. John. Even David. All of them there in Lancaster, just last week, while Erik was here in New York, safe beyond the charred and smoking struts and beams of his bridge.

  Daisy’s voice. At one point it had fractured into little slivers of pain.

  “The shooting changed me,” she said. “It changed who I was and I didn’t like her.”

  She described part of herself as haunted. Spoken of things she lost she would never get back.

  Me, Erik thought when he heard it, leaning forward, his head practically touching the dash. Fingers reaching to caress the radio in a transfixed wonder. The tiniest thawing in his heart. A shift in his atoms he could not prevent.

  She means me.

  But she didn’t say his name.

  Melanie was waiting for him at the steps to the kitchen door. She had left Brockport State, landing a plum job as a music teacher at a private school. She had to commute to East Rochester every day, but the money was good and she loved the work.

  “Were you listening to NPR?” she called out before he was out of the car.

  “I was.”

  “Did you hear it? The thing about Lancaster?”

  “I heard it,” he said. He kissed her and went inside, crouched down to be greeted by Harry.

  “They barely mentioned you,” she said.

  “You think so?” he said, scratching the dog’s ears and neck. “No, they talked about me.”

  “Not much, though.” Melanie had pulled two beers from the fridge. She popped one and gave it to him. “Cheers, baby.”

  “Skål.”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  He sat down. “Go where?”

  “To Lancaster. To the ceremony.”

  “I didn’t know there was one.” Erik took a long drink and let the day fall away from him. Harry put his head on Erik’s knee.

  “What do you mean you didn’t know?”

  “I didn’t know.” He drank again, running his hand along the dome of Harry’s head, lost in thought. Finally he looked up again. “What?” he said to Melanie’s incredulous expression.

  “It’s the ten-year anniversary and nobody called you?”

  He shook his head.

  She took a pull of her own beer, looking expansive. “How many questions do I get here?”

  He smiled at her. She was getting better at respecting the sore spots of his past, not probing. It had been her idea to set limits on how many questions she could ask in a given situation. “Two,” he said. “For a blow job, you can ask three.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Have you been back to Lancaster? Ever?”

  “No.”

  “In ten years, you have never gone back and you’re not in touch with anybody?”

  “Mel, those are questions you already know the answers to. I told you what happened and why I had to leave. Nothing’s changed.”

  “It’s… I’m sorry, I’m not invalidating what you felt at the time, but it just seems so extreme.”

  “It was an extreme situation.”

  She tapped her nails on the table, finishing her beer. “Well. I blew my quota. I will now go and let you brood in peace.”

  He laughed against the mouth of the beer bottle. “I’m not brooding. I feel incredibly surreal right now. I’m in a little bit of a time warp and—”

  “And possibly you will be short, curt and moody the rest of the night,” she said, putting up her palm. “It’s all right, as long as I know in advance.”

  She got up from the table and, as she passed, Erik caught her hand. “Are you sure you don’t have a third question?”

  “You’re adorable,” she said. “And no further questions. Oh, this came for you. Registered mail, I had to sign for it.”

  From the counter she handed him a padded envelope. She kissed his head and lef
t the kitchen. Erik drank the last of his beer, eyebrows wrinkled at the envelope. A return address in the corner, but no name. Slowly he set the empty beer bottle down as he realized the address, postage and postmark were Canadian.

  Canada.

  Daisy.

  “Shit,” he whispered, his heart breaking into a gallop. First the radio segment, now this knockout punch.

  Breathing deeply, he broke the seal on the envelope and drew out a typed letter. He unfolded it, glanced just at the first line—What’s up, asshole?

  He knew immediately.

  Not Daisy.

  Will.

  Waiting To Be Found

  25 April 2002

  Saint John, New Brunswick

  What’s up, asshole? I know what you’re thinking: how the hell did he find me? Well, I know you’re isolated out there in East Bumfuck but there’s this nifty new invention called the internet. It makes it really difficult for your enemies to hide from you. Especially when they work for a State University with a website. And let their pretty faces get captured in college newsletter articles. What an amateur move. Honestly, are you even trying anymore?

  Well anyway, you’re still a handsome little fucker. And congratulations on your recent accolade. A national award from the United States Institute for Theater Technology. Aren’t we doing nicely?