The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(113)

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 their 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 f*cking 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.