Dancers at Rest

Monday, the dancer’s day of rest. Frankie got out of bed late, flipping the sheet back, and stood naked in the small space of the bedroom, divided from the rest of the loft by a couple of illegally constructed walls that reached only eight feet high and then broke off. The room had always had a makeshift feel, and he and Lucia had not bothered to do much with it—mattress, dresser, tin clock on the dresser—or with the loft as a whole. The gray afternoon light fell in sheaths over the partition and over his body as he shook out his arms, flexed his legs, put on his robe. The girl Frankie had slept with last night, a young soloist with the company, had left before dawn, and he was glad she had not lingered here. On the stage, she was a riveting thing to watch, but in this realm, the realm of bed sheets, sunlight, coffee, she was certain to be somewhat less riveting, as, he was sure, was he. To the girl, he was a blur of fame and talent and beauty, all of which were attributes of his, true enough, but they were not the whole truth of him, and the only truth that mattered at all for him now was that of aging. His arthritis had gotten so bad he sometimes had to crawl from the bed across the polished concrete floor directly into a hot shower, and he was grateful that he would not have to do this in front of the girl.

Her youth and supple elasticity had made Frankie almost ill last night—he was that envious. She had gotten wet so quickly there was no need for the accessories and lubricants that had become necessary with his wife, and the skin of the girl’s labia had shone a delicate pink, not yet discolored and darkened by age. Making love with Lucia had once been like that, and Lucia had once looked like that, too, but gradually the thin layer of fat that lay between skin and muscle had vanished from her entirely; she was all sinew and hollows now, as if she’d been mummified, and though she dyed the hair on her head the same rigorous black it had always been, her pubic hair had become stippled with gray, the labia narrowed and flaccid. Lucia was his age, but the girl was only twenty-two. Frankie wanted her next twenty years for himself, but no matter what he did to her with his body, she would keep those twenty years, and he would be forty-three, time to retire. In rehearsal he could feel his hip rubbing bone against bone when he lifted a leg above forty-five degrees, and if he couldn’t lift his leg above forty-five degrees, he basically couldn’t dance. Yet still, he did not want to give it up. He was a serious artist, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet for two decades. His final performance was scheduled for later this season, after the company closed its interminable run of Nutcrackers.

He went out into the loft, first to the coffeemaker where he filled one of his giant mugs with the black joe he counted on to get through each day, then to the long table to sit and drink. He would have some trouble now paying the note. His salary as a teacher would not be much, but there was nothing else for old dancers to do but teach. The spindly Christmas tree he and his son, Adam, had decorated last month stood centered in the big windows, the giant outdoor bulbs they’d used huddled large and dark and unlit amidst the needles and wires. In another day or so Frankie would strip the tree, and with Adam’s help drag it to the elevator and toss it into the dumpster behind the building. Christmas Day, they had eaten before this lit strip of forest their precooked turkey with all the fixings, the big TV tuned to an endless series of sentimental holiday movies...