Chapter 18 #2
There was just the music and my body, which had always understood each other at a cellular level, and somewhere between one note and the next, I stopped dancing with them and simply started dancing.
I don’t know exactly when it happened. I became aware of it gradually—the space around me widening, the others stepping back, the crowd shifting.
The old man was still there, a step away, watching me with that same bright expression, and he gave me a single nod that said, Yes, go. This is what it’s for.
“Go, Alice! Show ’em what you’ve got!” Marge whooped, clapping to the song.
So I did.
Since I could walk, I had danced. Music lived in my muscles the way language lived in the tongue—automatic, instinctive, summoned without effort.
My arms knew where to go. My hips knew what the trumpet was asking for.
My feet found the rhythm and stayed there, and the rest of me built something on top of it that I hadn’t planned and couldn’t have planned, and that was, I realized, the point.
The crowd circled me.
I was aware of it without looking—that gathering attention, that collective held breath that meant people had stopped doing whatever they were doing because something was happening here. I had felt it countless times on stages: the intoxicating electricity of being truly admired.
I gave it everything I had, but for once, I wasn’t dancing in public as a performance. I wasn’t performing a routine. I wasn’t Gammy the Vegas showgirl. Tonight, I was just me. Just Alice. I was letting the music breathe through my body, and the more I danced, the louder the crowd around me roared.
My body had always obeyed me; my control over every single inch of every single muscle had been innate since I could walk.
It was part of what felt like such a betrayal—this body of mine now choosing to attack me rather than move with me.
It infuriated me, and in turn, I danced my way through the rage, through the hurt, through the fear, and I controlled the only thing I could in those moments by letting myself go.
When the trumpet blew its final notes, the crowd erupted.
I let it wash over me and gave the crowd one final turn, one final reach of the arms, one final moment of… me—and then I stopped. Poised. Breathing.
Cheering, clapping, people pressing forward to see, phones going up, shouts from a balcony above where someone had been watching.
The noise of it hit me the way applause always hit me—not in my ears but in my chest, warm and immediate and deeply, fundamentally nourishing in a way I could never adequately explain to anyone who hadn’t stood in it themselves.
The old man in the purple suit clapped with his white-gloved hands above his head, grinning that gold-toothed grin, and I grinned back at him and bowed.
Marge crashed into me from the side, practically tackling me. “THAT’S MY FRIEND!” she bellowed at the crowd, pointing at me. “THAT IS MY ACTUAL FRIEND! Isn’t she amazing?”
Doris had tears on her face, smiling so wide it looked like it hurt. Sylvie was laughing and pressing both hands to her cheeks and shaking her head.
You are incredible, she mouthed.
The old man stepped forward and lifted off his flower-pot hat, took my hand, and bowed over it. “Magnificent” was all he said. Then he straightened, touched the brim of his top hat, and melted back into the crowd, dancing away as though he’d been born to dance, just like me.
We stood there while the crowd reclosed around the space, the band moving into something new, the night carrying on around us. But I could still feel the music in my feet. The applause in my chest.
I touched my collarbone. Breathed.
I was still here. Still this. Still entirely, completely myself.
We continued dancing to the music. Song after song we danced and laughed until we struggled to breathe. As we drifted from the crowd to a nearby bench, we collapsed in a heap.
“Wow. That was so fun!” Doris fanned her face. “I don’t think I’ve ever danced so hard in my life.”
Marge was still tapping her foot. “These musicians are the real deal. Man, I wanna come back every year!”
“This really is amazing.” Sylvie struggled to catch her breath. “I would definitely come back.”
“Me too,” I said, and that small pang in my chest twinged as my mind whispered, If you survive to return.
I shoved down that voice again, and my eyes moved from the loud, colorful crowd to a man sitting on a folding stool at the corner of the street, slightly apart from the chaos, as if he’d found a pocket of stillness inside it.
He was young. Twenty-five, perhaps. Shaggy dark hair covering one of his eyes, his head bent down as his hand moved effortlessly over his pad of paper.
He looked up at me, then back down to the paper. As the widows talked, I watched him.
Head up, look at me, head down.
Over and over again.
Then he stood up and walked over, holding his sketch pad.
“Who’s this? Why is he approaching us?” Marge stood, her posture defensive.
“Hey. I, uh… I drew you, if you want it,” he said, his gaze fixed to the ground like he was too shy to look at me.
He ripped off a piece of paper from the pad and extended it to me.
Marge took it first like she was a poison tester for royalty making sure it was safe, but as she looked at it, her face softened. “Oh, wow. This is… incredible.”
She spun it toward me, and my breath caught when I saw it.
Charcoal sketched in such detail I could hardly believe he hadn’t traced it from a photograph. But done in such a beautiful, unique way that it wasn’t just my likeness in a mid-dance pose that made tears sting behind my eyes, it was… me.
Somewhere in that sketch, with my eyes closed, hands raised above my head, he had managed to capture the essence of what I felt when I danced.
I rose slowly and took the sketch. “This is remarkable. You are… wow. So talented. I can’t believe you just sketched this right here in the street.”
He shifted nervously on his feet. “You were quite inspiring. I just thought maybe you’d want it.”
“How much?” I asked, already reaching for my wallet.
“No charge. I don’t do art for the money.”
I scoffed. “Darling, with talent like this, you could make a lot of it.”
He peeked up from beneath his dark bangs. “Really? It’s good?”
Sylvie looked over my shoulder, nodding. “It’s exceptional. She’s right. You have a rare talent.”
“God gave you a wonderful gift. This is beautiful.” Doris pressed a hand to my arm. “It’s you, Alice. All of you.”
“I insist on paying you.” I pulled out a one-hundred-dollar bill, and his eyes bulged.
“Really?”
I looked at the sketch again, then pulled back the hundred. “Actually, I will pay you for this, but I have another idea.” I paused, then straightened up. “I want you to sketch me. I want a nude.”
“What?” Doris, Marge, and Sylvie all echoed.
Marge spun to me. “Cripes, Alice! I know you’re comfortable in your own skin, but you can’t get naked in the street!”
“I didn’t mean here,” I said with a soft shake of my head.
I looked back at him and said my truth. “I have breast cancer and will be getting surgery soon, and perhaps even a double mastectomy. I would love to have the honor of you using that talent to capture me in this body exactly as I am right now. Will you do it? I’ll give you a thousand dollars to draw me. ”
He looked shocked for a moment at the sum of money, but then he nodded. “I’ll do it, though you don’t have to pay me. It would be my greatest honor to capture someone of your beauty, your power, before you go on such a transformative journey.”
“Wonderful. What’s your name?”
“Lawrence. Lawrence Marchant.”
“Well, Lawrence Marchant, are you ready now?”
“You want to go now?” His dark eyebrows shot up to his hairline.
“Yes. Right now. Find somewhere private and do this. I have limited time in New Orleans. So will you, Lawrence?”
“Alice, what are you doing?” Marge whispered from the corner of her mouth. “We can’t wander off with this guy. He could be a serial killer.”
“It’s fine, Marge,” I assured her, then waited for Lawrence’s answer.
“I, uh… I guess we can go back to my studio,” he said. “It’s just a few blocks from here.”
“Lead the way,” I said, more sure of this decision than anything I’d been sure about since I’d heard my diagnosis sitting alone in an uncomfortable chair in my doctor’s office.
I didn’t know how much longer I would be this version of myself, but tonight, I would have something to always remember her by.