The Turnout(20)

It was Derek’s smoke-thick voice. She could hear it the minute the last of the fourteen-year-olds filed out of class and the strains of Giselle ceased.

She followed his voice through the sooty brume of Studio B, past Benny and Gaspar, their faces covered by safety masks so large and thick that Dara wondered what she and her little students were inhaling every day.

“This is the sweet stuff,” Derek was saying. “Sweet as mom’s milk. Well, not as sweet as my mom’s, but she was neighborhood tops.”

The laugh—the cartoonish har-dee-har-har—making Dara’s teeth grind as she opened the office door to see Derek and Charlie.

Derek inexplicably lifting Charlie’s shirt up, examining him under the desk lamp. On the felt blotter were two pill bottles, penny-orange.

“You gotta get ’em to hit this spot,” he said, his Hawaiian Tropic hands splayed on Charlie’s blue-white back. “They put the needles right here. But in the meantime, try those pills.”

“Dara,” Charlie said, eyes wide with surprise. This, she thought, is what it would feel like to catch him at something. It was a funny kind of feeling.

“Comparing war wounds,” Derek said, spotting Dara.

“So you’re a doctor too,” Dara said, picking up one of the pill bottles. “I guess you fix everything.”

“Dr. Feelgood,” Derek said, smiling as ever while Charlie tugged his shirt down. “Old rotator cuff tear, high school football. Used to have nerve pain so bad I’d get tears in my eyes. My ex knew some tricks.” He stretched his shoulder, his shirt straining. So big in their small office, the wingspan of an eagle or vulture. “I try to spread the wealth. Just for friends.”

Dara handed him back the pill bottles, watched him closing his palm over them, the big lion’s paw. His hands, in that brief brushing of hers against his, felt like the bottom of those pointe shoes after sixty strokes with her X-acto.

Dara adding, finally, “We don’t have friends.”



* * *



*

Charlie’s body was a glorious wreck—his jumper’s knee, the rotator cuff tendonitis, the hip arthritis from overuse, and most of all his spine, which had never been the same since the surgeries. Since they put his spine back together with wires, plates, screws.

They didn’t even know when he’d done it, but it could have happened at any performance, any rehearsal. They wouldn’t have believed it if the X-rays hadn’t been right before them like that old Lite-Brite game their father picked up for them at a garage sale once.

They called it a hangman’s fracture because of the way your neck snapped back.

It started with a broken bone—C2, a neck bone second from the skull, a bad one to break. Typically, it was the result of a very bad fall, or a very bad car crash.

Charlie wasn’t even certain how it happened. It could have been any number of falls, collisions, a dancer aloft in his arms crashing down into him. That was how it was for a dancer.

When he himself was a boy, the doctor told them, his best friend sustained a hangman’s fracture his very first time at the high dive.

What a thing, he told them. What a thing.

The problems started with the broken bone, but it affected everything else. Nerve damage doesn’t discriminate. Sensation tentative. Arousal too. Everything was connected, you see. All the parts—each so delicate—forming a precarious whole.



* * *



*

You don’t know anything about his injuries,” Dara told Derek later, finding him in the stairwell, texting with one hand, other hand on a tilting cup of takeout coffee.

“True,” he said, finishing his text before looking up. “But I know about pain. You don’t work long in my business without your fair share of that.”

“You should never touch a dancer’s body.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Only dancers get to touch dancers, that how it works?”

He gave her a look full of meaning, a meaning she couldn’t grasp.

“Pain is different for us,” Dara said. The pain threshold of ballet dancers was three times greater than that of anyone else. That was what their mother always said, told her pupils, told them. Three times greater, maybe four. Maybe ten.

“I guess you know a lot about it,” Derek said, putting his phone in his pocket as if the conversation interested him at last. “Pain. I guess you come to like it.”

“No,” Dara said, her face warm, the stairwell starting to fill with incoming students. “We just make it our friend.”

“So,” he said, as if catching her in something, “you have a friend, after all.” Students were passing, but he tried to hold her gaze, to catch it at all.

She would not give it to him but couldn’t seem to make herself move. Couldn’t seem to draw her face into a scowl, a dismissal. Couldn’t seem to, maybe, breathe.

Hearing a creak, she turned. Looking up the stairwell, she saw a shadow she knew was Marie.



* * *



*

When he comes near me, I can’t breathe.

All afternoon, the hammer-slapping, the slow drone of a hundred machines next door, Dara puzzled over it. Over Marie.

Though she herself had lost her breath with him, it was different. It was because he’d overstepped his boundaries. But to be so . . . taken with that man. That backslapper, glad-hander, noisemaker with his white teeth, like the dusty mints they used to have at nice restaurants? That smell beneath the aftershave, like crushed cigarettes and Speed Stick. The telltale white spots of a tanning booth rash, the furry forearms of a primate.