to mortal souls. You must bleed. Bleed now!
You’ve heard it so many times it doesn’t matter if you believe it yourself. The body is aching, but you don’t feel it now. You’ll feel it later when you can barely lift a hand to turn the faucet on to fill the bathtub with water, and you can barely lift the box of Epsom salts and pour it into the tub. Whatever gender you are sleeping with at the time brought home the Epsom salts. Special treat. You dump the whole box into the bath and the carton falls in, too, because you’re so tired you didn’t hold it tightly enough. There is only tomorrow in the world of dance because goals are too far out of reach, so use up everything now.
Somehow you lift your leg over the rim of the tub, and though earlier in the day you could fall to the floor in one count, now it takes you eight counts to get your body lowered into the water. You sit holding your knees crunched up to your chest in a little huddle. It hurts too much to lean back, so you just sit there in a little ball in the water. If you are lucky, your sexual partner comes into the bathroom and clucks a little and picks up a washcloth and washes your back. Gently. Ever so gently.
After the bath, you don’t have sex; you never have sex. You are too tired to have sex, and too sore to have sex and who the hell wants to explore the body at night when you’ve been exploring the body all day and you know where every little muscle is that isn’t doing what it should? Those piriformis muscles would be great for sex because they are so strong, but you can feel your sciatic nerve ever so slightly. The last thing you want is for someone to touch you and make the nerve go on fire.
The words of the raunchier Graham teachers yelling at you reverberate in your brain all night as you lie there and stare at the ceiling: “Have an orgasm! Then you’ll know life. None of you know life! Where is your contraction? Where is your orgasm? You’re all frigid!”
Only the lucky ones have sex, the chosen ones, as Martha would say, “the athletes of the gods.” These are the true purveyors of Martha’s House—the House of Pelvic Truth. It isn’t called that for nothing. Somehow the athletes of the gods are able to make all the little muscles work in their body and fall to the floor and breathe while they contract and then run and leap and look as if they do nothing but live life fully and completely in their bodies and in the dance. They have orgasms at night with a lover from a country foreign to their own. The rest just open the legs. That isn’t even sex.
There is no question the will is always there—even in your bed at night, even if you just open your legs—the will to move with power and force and beauty. Martha says she never sought beauty, even though the grotesque is beautiful. When the teacher walks into Martha’s studio all the students stand, quickly, and pull the feet together and squeeze the buttocks together and keep the arms long, palms in against the thighs, hopefully the thighs are not feeling or looking too big this morning, the hair should already be pulled tightly back and away from the face—it is okay if it’s in a ponytail, no bun-heads here, though you might act like one.
One! You’re up, standing, for the teacher. “Please sit,” Pearl says, sometimes offering a little bow. Two! You sit. “And,” she says. The pianist begins banging out whatever he’s banging out this morning, and you are bouncing up and down, pushing your head to your feet: bounce, bounce, bounce. “Breathings!” yells Pearl. You breathe. Then stop breathing. This is how you start every day. For blood. For art. For Martha.
Act Two
“You put a man and woman on a stage together, and already it’s a story.”
—George Balanchine,
Quoted in Robert Greskovic’s
Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning & Loving the Ballet
Attending a Wedding: NYC
At the start of the ceremony, when the music paused, I turned off the fluorescent lights in the bathroom and opened the door. Through the crack between the door and the wall, I had a full view of the main room. My scholarship at Graham only covered tuition. I had to work to cover living expenses.
The groom wore a tuxedo not unlike my own. Short, he had blonde hair and brown eyes. He looked similar to the men I saw standing on the subway platform at the Fulton Street stop when I came to work: He lacked natural color, his eyes had bags of blue underneath, and his complexion was well manicured with money. He looked harried, as if he were worried about getting a spot on the Number 6 Train uptown, and his hands looked as if they were better occupied holding the Wall Street Journal than waiting for the palm of his future wife.
The string quartet started playing “Here Comes the Bride.” The groom adjusted his bow tie and turned to watch the bride. His best man, equally well manicured but taller, put his hand on the groom’s shoulder.
The cummerbund felt loose around my waist. It did not fit properly, so I had tied the narrow ends of the cummerbund around a belt loop at the back of the black pants. The shirt, also too big, bagged around my waist. I let the bathroom door close slowly, softly, and reached around to tighten the cummerbund. The shirt came from the Velvet Underground, a secondhand store. The tuxedo itself came from Tuxedo and Sons Wholesale.
“I’ve been in the Tux industry a long time, and they don’t come small enough for you,” said the man who fit me. There were three men sitting in the back of the tux place when I walked in on a Saturday morning to buy the outfit. They looked like a retired group from the Mafia.
“Catering job?” asked the one with a bald head. He didn’t ask it unkindly, but it was clear he’d seen a line of people coming through his store to buy tuxes for work—not marriage.
My whole tuxedo outfit was makeshift, making me feel disheveled, inefficient and small. Small and fat. Not small and perky. A self-loathing of my body ran through everything I did: dance, work, sex. No, sometimes I lost myself when I opened my legs. Rarely. But sometimes.
Before beginning work, the freelance staff of South Street Seaport Catering had gathered for the nightly meeting. Probably none of the two dozen or more people assembled for their paying jobs as food servers, bartenders, coat check attendants, or doormen had enough money to consider being married at the Seaport. The lights across the Brooklyn Bridge shone into the room, making the whole wedding setting magical.
Still, South Street Seaport definitely would not be my first choice for a wedding location even if marriage looked like a promising part of my future, which it didn’t, and even if I could afford it, which I couldn’t. I wanted to say I probably couldn’t ever afford it, but that wasn’t part of my current emphasis on positive thinking. I’d been reading Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain and visualizing myself on the dance stage: perfect balance, no wobbles, perfect leg extension to my ear, perfect body, one-hundred pounds.
I found out about the catering company, which preferred employees who were actors, dancers, painters, or writers, through my friend Heather, who also studied at Graham. During my interview, as soon as I said I was a dancer, the manager Tom said, “You got the job. Get yourself a tux.”
Tom placed me in the bathroom. A bathroom attendant girl, I thought. My positive future had not included such jobs.
On my way to the bathroom earlier in the evening, I had run directly into the bride. I had quickly inclined my head downward the way English maids do on Masterpiece Theatre. Pretending to relay a message to the very thin and very petite bride, I used the third-person: “The bride will find the bridal changing room down this hall and to the right.”
A bridesmaid in a skin-tight peach-colored silk dress, showing bones, no curves, and no breasts waited as the bridal entourage, including four other flat-chested women wearing peach dresses, moved away down the hallway.