“Do you miss them?” she asked.
I paused to fortify my response with a gulp of Regab. “I’m not sure.”
“Fiona… That’s an unusual name for a Midwesterner,” Robert said.
“My mom loves musical theater. She was going through her Brigadoon phase.”
“I heard you say you used to perform.”
“Yes. Ballet.”
“Did you know the training compound has an auditorium with a stage?”
“You’re kidding!”
Robert grinned at my open-mouthed reaction. “Nope. It’s behind the other buildings, near the grove of palm trees. Nothing dramatic, just a big room with a stage.”
“Can anyone use it?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s not locked or anything. The only time I’ve seen it in use is on Wednesday afternoons for the staff meeting.”
“So you think I could slip in there and use it on Saturday afternoons?”
“Give it a try.”
On Saturday afternoon, I changed into a leotard and sweatpants, and grabbed my ballet slippers and cassette player. I’d brought none of my pointe shoes to Africa. They had short life spans under the best of circumstances, and within a dozen sessions in this hot, humid environment, they would have been as soft as my infinitely more comfortable leather slippers. I hurried through the courtyard, dried leaves scudding in my wake, until I found the auditorium. The door was indeed unlocked. I trembled with excitement. Once inside, I opened a few of the shutters that doubled as windows, letting light pour in. I surveyed the room, the size of an elementary school assembly hall. The stage, a narrow wooden platform rising three feet high, was hopeless. The floor, however, once cleared of chairs, made a perfect dance space.
Using the backs of three folding chairs as my barre, I placed my leg on one and stretched over, hand around my calf, face against my shin. As the tightness in my hamstrings eased, a sense of unexpected happiness welled up in me. My chattering thoughts slowed. To the lilting strains of Chopin, I began barre with pliés, tendus and dégagés, just like back home, in every ballet class I’d ever taken. Right side first, swiveling around to repeat the exercise on the left. I could almost hear the teacher’s soothing voice, leading me onward, through ronds de jamb, frappés, développés. Muscles I hadn’t used in six weeks reawakened. The burn in my quads, my calves, felt good. I even welcomed the cramping in my feet as I arched and pointed, pausing afterward to massage the knot, flex and re-arch the toes, holding the position in a relevé balance.
Once I’d completed barre, I switched out cassettes. I’d made a compilation tape of favorite ballets and pieces I’d performed over the past few years. I would start, I decided, with Interludes, a ballet set to symphonic music by Saint-Saëns, with a mix of both energetic and lushly romantic variations.
The moment I heard the opening notes, the hard shell inside me dissolved, and I slipped right back into performing mode. Two counts of eight, near stillness, except for a pulse of the arms. Another, bigger pulse. Then movement, a sauté-chassé run, sweeping the perimeter of the performing space, heading to its center for a lunge with a full port de bras for my arms. Deprived of my practice for so many weeks, the energy poured out of me. The moves flowed, one into the other, polished and precise. My développé and arabesque extensions were absurdly high for someone who hadn’t danced for six weeks. Pirouettes were rock-solid, doubles and triples, with clean landings, another unexpected gift from the dance gods.
I’m home again. I’m safe.
For the next several minutes I danced, utterly absorbed, spirits rising ever higher. The brisk first movement ended and the second movement, the adagio, began. The music here was heart-stoppingly beautiful, the melody supported by the low, sonorous chords of an organ played so softly, you could feel more than hear it. The choreography was equally sublime: a romantic pas de trois, myself the lone female interacting with two males, who supported me in promenades, turns and lifts, even as I remained elusive. I could almost feel my partners’ presence, the brooding drama, the longing and desire the adagio and its music stirred up. Dancing it alone didn’t feel wrong. Instead, the mood it created became even more dreamy and haunting. Almost like a sacred experience, one touched with mysticism, as I moved alone-but-not, practically fibrillating with the power a good performance always produced.
The movement ended with another deep lunge that gradually brought me down to sitting, legs at right angles. To the adagio’s final notes, I shut my eyes, arched back and slowly lifted my arms to the sky.
Pure magic. My throat tightened. Prickles passed over my arms, my back, like a shimmering wave of heat. Power, indeed. But as the music wafted away, so did the safety. The mystical feeling hovered in the air for a moment longer, just out of reach, before disappearing.
The third movement commenced, brisk and propulsive, relentlessly forward.
My hands dropped down to my side. Gone, that other world. Replaced by sweaty, magic-less, inescapable reality. I shifted, pulled my legs close, rested my forehead on my knees and began to cry, choked sobs that shook my body.
The music played on. I didn’t move. But when a creak by the door drew my attention, it dawned on me I had a visitor in the back of the room. Someone well dressed, regal in his posture, in his authority. A hint of expensive-smelling citrus cologne dispelled any doubts as to his identity.
I couldn’t believe my bad luck. Then anger replaced disbelief. This was my space. Here, Christophe was the foreigner, the intruder. And even though the magic had disappeared, the power still hovered in the air. It was my power, and he knew it.
I rose and strode over to the cassette player, which had moved on to the cheery finale. I snapped off the music and in the newfound silence, I turned and regarded him, unsmiling.
He, too, was unsmiling. He looked almost stricken.
“I’m sorry.” He gestured to the door. “But it was unlocked…”
“Yes,” I conceded.
He began to walk toward me. “How long have you danced?” he asked. His voice held a note of respect that, I would have argued, was impossible for someone like him to produce.
“Since I was seven.”
“Why did you stop?”
“To come here.”
“Were you a professional dancer?”
I shook my head. “Just a college student, performing in a local company.”
“You’re very good.”
It felt odd to hear him compliment me. “Thank you,” I said, searching for my towel to mop my sweaty face. “How long were you watching?”
“When I heard the Saint-Saëns from the courtyard, I came over here.”
At this, I regarded him with surprise. “How did you know that was Saint-Saëns?”
He frowned. “Do you mean, oh, how could an African possibly be familiar with classical music?” He relaxed, waved away my stuttered defense. “An educated guess, in truth. I’m thinking his Symphony No. 3? The Organ Symphony?”
Impressive. I nodded.
“It’s quite distinctive,” he said.
“It is.”
“My mother taught me to enjoy classical music,” he said. “She’s half French. She grew up in Paris and had a lot of exposure to it. During the years we lived there, we attended the symphony, but it’s the Paris Opera Ballet, of course, that’s the big draw there.”
He was right; the Paris Opera Ballet was as big as it got, right up next to the Kirov, the Bolshoi, The Royal Ballet.
“It’s nothing I expected to see in the Peace Corps,” Christophe said.
“No. Me neither. They don’t blend too well, do they?”
“Maybe not. But I see you didn’t let that stop you.” He smiled, which transformed his face, his whole persona, into something dazzling. A mock-stern expression followed. “This certainly explains that habit you have of performing in the classroom.”
This time, I could only laugh. As I tried to wipe the sweat off my face with my arm, he pulled a neatly folded, monogrammed handker
chief from his pocket and tossed it to me. I caught it with a grin. I knew at that moment—the way you know about a good pair of pointe shoes—that a friendship had just begun.
Chapter 3
Henry, a construction trainee, carefully balanced an empty Regab bottle on the two beneath it. The ten of us watching held our breath as Henry released his hold and slowly stepped back. “Done!” he crowed. “The third row of my pyramid creation is now complete. Gimme a beer to celebrate.”
“Another empty or a full one?” asked Buzz, a construction trainee and Henry’s assistant.
“A full one, of course! Actually, give me an empty, too, for row four.”
It was Friday night, six weeks into our training, and all the action centered here, in the refectoire, the compound’s enormous dining area. In addition to our group, others were doing their own thing: playing cards, gossiping, flirting. With the lights partially dimmed and African music playing from somebody’s boom box, the atmosphere in the refectoire felt like a cross between a nightclub and a junior-high dance.
We all sized up Henry’s efforts. He’d used two dozen bottles, and another half-dozen empties were clustered adjacent to the pyramid on the cafeteria table. “Dude, stop while you’re ahead,” one of the other trainees told Henry.
“Shhh.” Henry unsteadily approached the pyramid again, a full beer in one hand, an empty in the other. “I need silence for my art.”
Henry was the unofficial leader of the construction trainees. He looked just like what I’d expect a guy from Minnesota to look like—a burly, blond lumberjack, like the man on the Brawny paper towel packaging. He roared more than talked, his speech liberally sprinkled with obscenities. I had a hunch his gruffness was an act.
The construction trainees comprised over a third of our group of trainees, but they seemed like a different breed, filling a room with their boisterous energy. Although everyone ate meals together in the refectoire, the constructors trained for their jobs off-site. From the English-teaching classroom, I’d hear them laughing and shouting as they hopped in and out of the dusty Peace Corps Toyota pickups.
Buzz eyed my bottle. “You’re almost empty,” he said. He popped open two beers and handed one to me. As Henry began on the fourth row, Buzz bumped the cafeteria table. The pyramid trembled and an instant later, all the bottles came tumbling down. “Oops,” Buzz said.
“You bum,” Henry shouted, and gave the downed empties a swipe with his arm. A dozen of them fell to the floor where they clattered and rolled. Buzz dropped to the floor and began crawling around, retrieving the bottles and arranging them like bowling pins. Someone found an unhusked coconut to use as a bowling ball. Another construction trainee burst into song, a boozy country number, but his efforts were cut short when Henry grabbed a sweatshirt and threw it at his face.
“Hey, careful, that’s my best sweatshirt,” Buzz complained. He nudged a trainee named William, who was sitting in the corner. “William, we need more beer.”
William, whose thick golden hair always seemed to defy gravity, was the quiet one of the group. He had a medium build, a neutral, even-featured face, and was tall in that “perfect size for partnering me” way that every tall female ballet dancer notices in men. Clearly William wasn’t a ballet guy or a performing arts guy. You looked at him and thought, “exceptionally serious and intelligent guy.” He reminded me of those university students who would stand with a clipboard in front of the Student Union all day long, soliciting signatures for a petition to help save the whales. He didn’t smile much, certainly not in the easy way Henry did. He was the only one in our training group who’d worn African attire prior to leaving the U.S.
“Buzz,” William said without moving, “go get that beer.”
“But you’re drinking the most.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh hell, I’ll get more beer,” the singing trainee said, struggling to his feet.
Carmen and I exchanged grins. “Now, isn’t this better than hiding in your room, reading?” she asked. “Aren’t you glad I dragged you out?”
“I am.” I took a sip of beer and glanced around until my eyes settled on the trainers, congregating across the room. Keisha, a perpetually frowning, heavyset, African-American volunteer, was talking with Christophe and several of the French-language teachers. I studied the Africans’ animated faces, the way their tapering fingers fluttered to illustrate their stories and how their bodies moved and swayed as if involved in a never-ending dance. Christophe’s skin, I decided, wasn’t the color of milk chocolate at all, but more like coffee with a dollop of heavy cream added, giving it a luscious toffee hue. In contrast, Toussaint, from Senegal, had ebony-colored skin. When later I returned from a trip to the bathroom, I took a detour in order to pass by them. Toussaint had just put on new dance music and beckoned to me.
“Viens, Fiona. Come dance with us.”
“Merci, non,” I replied with a laugh. “I don’t dance African.”
“But she does dance,” Christophe offered with a lazy smile, and for a moment, it was as if we were sharing some delicious secret. When I looked away, I noticed Keisha scrutinizing me with a greater frown than usual.
Christophe and I had established a routine. He knew I’d be in the auditorium on Saturday afternoons, practicing ballet, performing various vignettes or choreographing my own. He’d show up, feigning surprise, and stay to watch, offer his opinion on the new choreography, or inquire about ballet terms or etiquette he didn’t understand. What was meant by a dancer’s “lines,” and was a second cast equivalent to an understudy? How long did a pair of pointe shoes last, and why didn’t they make them stronger? Why did dancers wish each other merde—French for shit—before a performance? Did all ballet classes worldwide use the French terminology? He was always polite, deferential, which was like catnip to me.
Sometimes, as if to test this unexpected slant to our relationship, I’d switch the conversation to more personal, potentially controversial fodder. In some odd way, I still felt the need to argue with him, disagree, elicit a reaction. I sensed too few people challenged him in that way. “Tell me, how does it feel to be rich and privileged in a poor country?” I asked him the day after the Regab pyramid party.
His chin jutted forward, a sure sign that my provocation had hit its mark. But he kept his tone light. “I could ask you the same question.”
“My family is far from rich,” I protested. “Middle class, at best.”
“Did you grow up in a home with electricity and running water? New clothes every year? Shoes? Food? Did your family have a car, a television, a washing machine?”
“Well, yes.”
“And so your argument seems to be that because I was born in this country, it is wrong for me to have the same things.” Scorn crept into his voice. “And as for you—you have no idea of the privilege your white skin and your Western status grant you, do you?”
As he railed on me, I analyzed him in an attempt to decipher what made African men seem so different from American men. Was it the vibrancy that seemed to lurk just beneath their skin? Or was it the graceful way they moved, making them appear so at ease in their bodies? And Christophe’s eyes—who would have thought an African could have green eyes?
When he noticed I wasn’t paying attention, he stopped speaking. Flustered, I fumbled for a diversion.
“Okay, I apologize for bringing it up. Clearly I didn’t anticipate how defensive you’d get.”
His face grew tight, his lips compressed, before his irritation dissolved into a relaxed, practiced smile. “Tell me, do you always speak this way to men?”
“No. Sometimes I’m rude.”
His smile widened and he burst out laughing, an infectious sound that made me join in. “You are an unusual woman, Fiona Garvey,” he said, and we grinned at each other. The moment lasted longer than it should have. Something in his eyes changed, making a bolt of heat flash through my body and settle deep in my pelvis.
Oh no. Not this. I scramble
d up and busied myself, turning off the tape player and slipping my sandals back on. Christophe stayed where he was. I could feel him watching me. Finally, he spoke.
“Why are you afraid of me?”
I turned and forced myself to meet his gaze. “I’m not afraid of you. I’m just a private person. And I’m not a chatty, flirty type. Sorry to disappoint you.”
He ignored my words. “You’re afraid of men. You challenge them even as you run from them. The only one you trust is that clown, Robert.” His tone grew softer, infinitely more dangerous. “Are you a virgin, Fiona?”
Was this acceptable African conversation, I wondered, or his attempt to challenge my composure? Heat crept up my neck and flooded my face. “No, of course I’m not,” I sputtered, furious at how easily he’d flustered me.
Lane.
The memory shot through me, unbidden, unwelcome.
Lane Chatham, my one and only love. No, not a grand love, but the only person for whom I would have been willing to change, even give up ballet. A fraternity guy, more my sister Alison’s social group than mine. I’d met him on campus through a chance encounter at the Student Union. He and his frat buddies, all of them good-looking jock types, had stopped to study a poster nearby, advertising my company’s fall concert. Featured was my photographed self, in makeup and costume, en pointe, holding a dramatic pose. Lane and his friends had been divided on whether the elegant creature was me. I recreated the pose, right there in the Student Union, and watched Lane’s eyes go soft with infatuation.
He was the most impressive guy I’d ever gone out with, classic good looks with glossy black hair and sexy, heavy-lidded brown eyes. He drove a Jaguar, wore oxford button-down shirts to class, and had the silken voice of a radio announcer, with just a hint of Savannah, Georgia in his accent. Against reason, he remained intrigued by me even after our awkward (to me) first date. He told his friends he thought I was gorgeous, exotic. I couldn’t reconcile this information with my high school loser past. I was still gawky, taller than Alison, with frizzy hair that went everywhere. But Lane continued to pursue me, especially once I’d admitted I was still a virgin.
A Dancer's Guide to Africa Page 3
