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1
Maybe Antoine was right and it was my fault. It had been weeks since things had started going badly for us. Too many arguments, and always about the same thing: My attitude. I wasn’t the same person I used to be. I was cold and uninterested. Absent.
And it was true, in a way. The past six months had been torture for me. The operation, recovery in the hospital. Returning home and the weeks of rehab. My grandmother’s constant reproaches, how easily she made me feel bad for everything that’s wrong with the world. Probably the polar ice caps are melting because just once, I did something without her permission.
Just because I wanted to.
Once, and the punishment was brutal.
Deep down, I think she was happy about the accident. The satisfaction on her face every time she said I told you so or If only you’d listened to me was a cruel pleasure she liked to wallow in. Her eyes shouted You deserve it every time they caught me in their stare, and then, with a condescending smile, she would forgive me under the sole condition that I sacrifice every second of my existence to her.
No one should be responsible for making another person’s dreams come true. It’s impossible to live up to the expectations of a person who has failed to achieve her own dreams and desires.
But the hardest thing for me to bear was the uncertainty.
The wait was consuming me inside and I was incapable of thinking of anything else.
Maybe Antoine was right and I was pushing him away just as I was everyone else. Still, I would have appreciated a little empathy from him. A little more patience and compassion. I had known Antoine since I was fifteen, when his family moved from Paris to Madrid for work, and he began to take classes at the Royal Conservatory of Dance, where I was studying, and I knew he was emotionally stunted. Not just that: he didn’t even know how inept he was at trying to put himself in someone else’s shoes.
Despite that, I’d learned to love him along with his defects. As a friend at first, and something more a few years later, when we both entered the National Dance Company as soloists. At twenty-two years old, the strongest relationship I’d had, apart from with ballet, was with Antoine. That was the only unconditional love I’d allowed myself.
For that reason, I was scared of losing him. I needed his affection. And I was scared, closing my eyes and holding my breath when he curled up tight to me beneath the sheets and, still sleepy, slid his hand between my legs. He pressed his hips into my buttocks, and I could feel he was aroused. I took a breath and let it out slowly, concentrating on his fingers, how they caressed me, the warmth of his chest against my back. The way he pulled me tight.
I opened my eyes and looked at the hands of the clock.
His finger tried to work its way inside of me. I flinched and grimaced. I tried to relax, but I couldn’t––I couldn’t feel anything at all.
“I’ve got to go,” I whispered.
Face beside my neck, Antoine grunted, nibbled my shoulder.
“Come on. Look what you’re doing to me.”
He pushed into me again. I was starting to get agitated.
“I’ll be late.”
“Just a quickie,” he said, using his French accent like an aphrodisiac.
But it got on my nerves.
I jerked away and got up, glancing at the clock again and feeling anxiety in my stomach. I grabbed my dress off the chair. Still in bed, Antoine huffed and lay on his back, staring at me.
“Are you for real? Dammit, Maya. We never do it anymore, and I…I have my needs.”
I pulled my dress over my head and glared back at him. “Never? What was yesterday, then?”
“Getting it on in a bathroom with our clothes on doesn’t count.”
I rolled my eyes and sat down to tie my shoes, looking for a moment at the scars on my leg. Their color was lightening, and the swelling was starting to go down. Or at least that’s what I thought––I didn’t dare to actually touch them. I stood and grabbed my cellphone off the table.
“Are you seriously leaving?” he asked, as if it weren’t obvious from the fact that I was heading for the door.
“I can’t stay any longer, OK? I’ve got a doctor’s appointment in less than an hour.”
He jumped up, looking surprised, and I couldn’t help but eye up his nude body. A whole life devoted to ballet had transformed him into a perfectly proportioned, walking sculpture. And yet, I felt nothing.
“It’s today?” he asked, and I nodded, feeling a hint of panic at what I knew he’d say next. “Shit, I’m sorry! I completely forgot.”
“It’s fine.”
“You want me to come along?”
“No need,” I told him. “I’d almost…rather go by myself.”
He looked relieved, and that made me feel bitter as he came over, wrapped his arms around me, and kissed me on the forehead.
“Everything will be fine, you’ll see. You’ll dance again, you’ll go back to being principal, we both will, and we’ll travel the world together. They’ll talk about us the way they did about Fonteyn and Nureyev. You and me on stage, Maya––we’re something else.”
He grabbed my chin and forced me to look him in the eyes––those eyes so green it was hard to believe they were real. I smiled softly. It was true, onstage we were so in synch we moved as one body, one mind, and we trusted each other completely. Never once had I feared that he’d drop me.
If only the same was true in our personal relationship.
“I’ll let you know,” I said.
“Sure, just text me. I’ve got class and then rehearsal today, so I’ll be back late.”
“OK.”
I gave him a quick kiss on the lips and hurried into the bathroom, washing up a little and taking a look at myself in the mirror. My eyes were so dark I could hardly see my pupils. My brown eyebrows framed them, just as my brown hair framed my face, still with a few tangles in it I hadn’t managed to brush out.
I leaned in close and thought about how different I looked from the rest of my family. My grandmother, my aunts and uncles and cousins, my mother…all of them were blond with light-colored eyes, their features a reflection of my grandmother’s Ukrainian side of the family. Even on my grandfather’s side, the Spanish side, most people had pale skin and straw-colored hair.
I was the exception. And whenever I noticed those differences, I couldn’t stop thinking about how somewhere, there where similarities. Traits that resembled another person. Him. Wherever he was.
I walked off down the hall and heard voices in the living room: Matías and Rodrigo, whom I found at the breakfast table. They formed part of the corps de ballet and shared the apartment with Antoine. It’s funny how small the ballet world is, like a little army you serve in and give your all to. You work sixteen hours a day, six days a week. You eat, sleep, and breathe ballet.
Maybe that’s why we dancers rarely associate with people outside the world of leotards and point shoes. You have to be in it to understand it. We spend almost all our time together, training together, rehearsing together, touring together.
“Good morning!” I said.
“Good morning,” Matías replied.
Rodrigo stood and pulled a chair close to the table. “Want a coffee?”
“No thanks. Caffeine’s the last thing I need today.”
I looked around for my bag and found it on the sofa. Then I grabbed an apple Matías handed to me. He was always so attentive. I thanked him with a peck on the cheek.
“Today’s the big day,” he said.
“Or the worst day,” I responded.
Matías was my best friend, the only one I could tell everything to without any worry of being judged. I could share my worries with him, the loneliness that comes with that disciplined, competitive lifestyle. I could cry in front of him; I could show him all my shortcomings, even the ones I buried deep.
“It’s all I know how to do,” I told him. “I can’t lose this.”
“You won’t. Worst-case scenario, Natalia will put you with the corps de ballet until you get your rhythm and confidence back. Then you’ll be principal again.”
“You really think that?”
“Of course I do. Ever since she came on as director of the company, she’s done everything in her power to keep you in the ensemble. She’s been following you since the conservatory days.”
I nodded, wishing with all my might that he wasn’t wrong.
I started dancing when I was four, and I hadn’t done anything since. I’d given up all other studies to focus on ballet, climbing slowly to a summit everyone thought I was predestined to reach. I had what I needed to achieve it. And even if the fear of injury is something that stalks every one of us, I never thought it would happen to me, and not in such a ridiculous way.