“Can I help you with something?” Dara said. His ingratiation worse, somehow, than his thoughtlessness, his careless swings with his drill, his sledgehammer.
“Your John Hancock,” he said, handing her a sheaf of papers. Their construction contract, barely more than a computer template, something called “Contractor Services,” its corners bent, a copy of a copy.
“I thought we were done with the paperwork,” Dara said.
“Bureaucrats,” Derek said. An answer that wasn’t an answer.
“I’ll show these to my husband,” Dara said. “He handles the administration.”
Derek nodded and tipped his head. He did a funny little backward dance like a courtier bidding adieu to the queen.
Dara turned, heading toward the back office, away from his aftershave smog and the bigness of him.
But she could still see him in the mirror. Derek, tilting his head knowingly, and saying something to her in a voice so low and tawdry, she’d wonder later if she’d misheard.
“Me,” Derek said. “I like the pink.”
* * *
*
He didn’t belong in her studio, in Studio C, which was hers.
Why was he even here at all when Benny and Gaspar were doing all the work, the spectacle of the wall-demolishing now past. And yet a dozen times a day, he seemed to find an excuse to saunter through every room, clipboard clasped, his too-tight dress shirts, his dual phones, his throbbing beeper.
* * *
*
I think you should tell him,” Dara told Charlie later, “there should be some kind of divider. A barrier between Studio B and our studios. To protect the students.”
Charlie looked at her.
“A few of the parents have mentioned it,” Dara said. A white lie, she told herself. They were sure to complain soon. And didn’t Mrs. Bloom’s refusal to set foot inside count?
“I’ll say something to Derek,” Charlie said. “I’ll take care of it.”
* * *
*
In the back office, Dara sat at the desk, going through the invoices impaled on the metal bill holder. Three hundred pounds of artificial snow for The Nutcracker, wigmaster services, two replacement toy soldier uniforms, four replacement mouse heads.
“Were you talking to him earlier?”
Dara looked up. It was Marie, skin pink with heat, that white leotard now sweated through, translucent. You could see everything.
“To Derek. What were you talking about?” Marie said. “Tell me.”
Dara raised an eyebrow, a gesture inherited from their mother.
“Nothing,” she said, setting down the bill holder. “It was nothing.” There was a sneaking pleasure in this, a flash of jealousy from her sister.
Marie paused, touching her neck with an open hand.
“I could never talk to him,” she whispered.
Dara looked at her. “That’s ridiculous.”
“When he comes near me,” Marie said, her neck instantly red, “I can’t breathe.”
THE CURTAIN
The next morning, Dara woke up with a thought of Marie, that perennial swirl of her fine hair caught in the drain of their mother’s old claw-foot tub.
Marie never let you forget she was there, even when she wasn’t. Even when she didn’t live there anymore.
Marie, who’d wasted an hour or more on that cardboard sword stunt the other day, making such a spectacle of herself. In that obscenely sheer leotard, feigning the Sword Swallower, plunging the foils into her mouth as the contractor watched.
When he comes near me, I can’t breathe.
* * *
*
It didn’t make sense. Marie liked softness, gentleness, refinement in men. The ones she’d dallied with in her twenties, tousle-haired golden boys who played guitar for her and padded around her studio in bare feet so as not to scuff the maple floor. The studio dads with the wool blazers and the smooth hands who thanked her so very much for the elegance and refinement she’d given their daughters.
These were the men Marie liked.
* * *
*
I can’t feel,” Charlie said, leaning over at the kitchen table.
Dara looked down at his feet, long and marbled. Six years after he’d been forced to stop, his feet were still dancer’s feet. Hard and gnarled and hoof-like. But not half as mangled as hers, ugly like a crow’s, or Marie’s, which their father used to call the boomerangs.
Jolie-laide, their mother always insisted. To her, all dancers’ feet were beautiful, beautiful not in spite of but because of their hardness, their contortions, their battle against nature, against the body itself. What could be more beautiful, she used to say, than a will like that?