The girls’ teeth rattling, and their laughter, giddy and confused.
All day, Dara taught, she made corrections, she issued commands.
Get that leg behind. Eyes up. Rib cage closed. Chin up, lift, lift . . .
She vowed to think about none of it, focusing instead on the rhythm of class, the unending, unbending flow of repetition. Tendu, front, side, back. The same Nutcracker movement, strings echoing jollily through the speaker. Il faut le répéter, as their mother always said, pour affiner.
Still, it sat in her brain like a spider.
Sneaking glances into Studio A. Sneaking glances at Marie, standing before her bumblebee throng of six-year-olds, their errant hands always running up and down the soft front of their leotards, their downy skin quilling beneath.
Marie, with what seemed a slight curl of her lip as though smiling to herself. A slight tremor to her hands, the way she kept touching herself discreetly, her hand on her neck, her arm across her chest, brushing against her breasts.
When Dara passed her at one point, she caught a whiff of it, of them. She covered her nose, her mouth.
Marie at the mirror, teaching the little girls. But all Dara could think of was Marie in Studio B that morning, with her red, rubbed-raw knees and her plaster-spackled palms and that sly little smile on her face that made Dara feel hot and enraged.
In Studio B, Benny and Gaspar had covered all the mirrors with some kind of protective film that looked like smoke. Like there was smoke everywhere from some kind of fire no one could see. Was that how Marie could do it? Could let her body—make her body—do those things with that man? She, who was trained, raised to make her body only do beautiful things.
If she had caught a glimpse of herself, of him, could she have possibly let herself participate in such animal horrors?
Her body crouching, his tan-mottled hands on her, his chest a big coffin, twisting and turning her, swiveling her around so roughly. Turning her inside out. Turning her out. That impeccable body—a golden hummingbird, she was called by the director of the regional ballet company they were invited to join and then, after two years of uneventful service in the corps, asked to leave—that exquisite body humiliated and grotesque. Revealing itself, laying itself so bare. Her golden throat stretched, her mouth open, begging for it.
* * *
*
Madame Durant, like this?”
Corbin Lesterio’s face pinched as he stood at the mirror, unhappy with himself, his perennial weakness a slight swayback, his pelvis tipped forward ever so little.
“Tilt that tailbone down,” she said. It was her usual correction for him. Often, he corrected himself the minute he saw her head turn.
“Can you,” he said, his voice cracking, “show me?”
Dara paused, looking at his hips, his hips pressed too far forward. It would be so easy.
“You know what to do,” Dara said. “Do it.”
That was how their mother had been with her students. Aloof, remote. A marionette does not become a dancer, she used to say. She never touched her male students, their bodies, after age seven or eight. Never touch them once they’re old enough to know better. And, most of all, Never touch the ones who want to be touched.
She stepped back to watch Corbin start again.
It was only then that she saw Derek standing in the doorway. She wondered how long he’d been there, shaking soot from his hair.
He had a look on his face she couldn’t place. Something smug, insinuating.
I like the pink, she thought suddenly.
“I need a signature,” he said, smiling a little. “For the insurance papers. Last one, I promise.”
She caught a fleeting glance of the pages, another template agreement. This time titled “Assignment of Benefits.”
“Ask Charlie,” Dara said, as firmly as she did with Corbin. “He’ll be back tomorrow. I told you to ask him.”
* * *
*
I thought you said he wouldn’t be here much,” Dara said to Charlie, calling him after cutting her final class short, the hum of the power saw thundering through Studio B, setting the nervous twelve-year-olds on edge, their teeth chattering from the vibrations.
“He’s always here,” Dara said. “Always.”
“I guess he likes to be hands on.”
Dara paused. No, she told herself. He couldn’t know. Because if he knew, he would feel like Dara felt. Except worse.
“It’s just been a long day. The girls are picking on Bailey Bloom,” Dara said, dumping Nespresso into her chipped coffee cup, her hands shaking. “Usual Nutcracker bullshit.”