Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
Natasha
The studio smells like rosin and old wood and the grief of rooms that have held beautiful things for too long without being used.
I found it through a Google search at midnight three weeks ago: a rehearsal space rented by the hour, third floor above a dry cleaner on Wacker, no mirrors on the west wall because a previous tenant took them when they left.
The woman at the front desk handed me the key this morning without looking up from her phone.
Nobody is watching. That is the entire point.
I change in the bathroom into black leggings, a worn tank top I have owned since my teenage years, and ballet flats I bought on a detour through a dance supply store and kept inside a paper bag under my bathroom sink for eleven days, because taking them out of the bag would constitute a decision.
I finally took them out this morning.
I stand in the center of the studio and I do not do anything for approximately four minutes.
I just breathe. The Chicago street noise filters through the high windows - trucks and cab horns and the city's indifference to personal reckoning and all I do is breathe. Take it all in. Bask in the moment.
Then I go to the barre.
It is muscle memory at this point that I move on autopilot.
My hand finds the worn wood and my body finds the position and my left knee files its usual report about sustained load, which I acknowledge and decline to act on.
The same negotiation I have been having with that joint since I was twenty-four years old and a surgeon told me my professional dance career was functionally concluded.
I begin at the beginning. Pliés. The most elementary vocabulary of the whole language. My hips sink and rise, the turnout still there, the alignment still there, everything still there - apparently waiting in the dark of my body for someone to turn the light back on.
I move through the centre work slowly at first, then less slowly.
Something in my chest loosens by a degree that has no physiological name but is unmistakable.
I know it the way I knew it at six years old in my first class: the sensation of your body doing the thing it was assembled to do.
All the noise is quiet. All the bracing dissolves.
Everything that is not this becomes irrelevant.
I don’t notice I am crying until my cheek is wet, but I don’t stop moving. I just keep dancing. I dance until my legs ache and even then I don’t stop.
When Nik texts at eleven-fifteen that he is outside, I have been in the studio for ninety minutes. My legs are shaking. My face is entirely non-functional in the professional sense, and I could not care less.
He is leaning against the building's entrance with his hands in his coat pockets when I push through the door, his dark hair pushed back, his collar turned up against the November cold.
He looks at me the way he always looks at me, and then he looks at me differently. He reads what is on my face and in my posture and in the particular way I am holding myself — the exhausted openness of a woman who has just put down something she has been hauling for a decade.
He does not say anything for a full beat. Then, quietly: "How long has it been since you last danced?"
"Eleven years," I say.
He nods once. Thankfully, the look in his eyes is not pity. It looks more like recognition. He holds the cab door open and I get in. He follows, and neither of us speaks for four blocks.
"Did you enjoy it?" he asks finally.
"No." I shake my head. "That’s the problem.”
His apartment, which he recently acquired, is on the fourteenth floor of a building six blocks from mine, which I find annoying in the way that inconvenient truths are always somewhat annoying. I step inside and stop.
Books everywhere. Not decorative books arranged for visual effect but actual books stacked on every horizontal surface, flagged with paper slips, one lying open face-down on the kitchen counter with its spine cracked from repeated reading. Three are Akhmatova. Of course they are.
The kitchen has the energy of a space that gets genuinely used: copper pots hanging from a rack, a wooden cutting board worn smooth at the center, herbs in small pots on the windowsill. A skillet on the stove with olive oil still in it from this morning's eggs.
On the far wall of the living area, framed between two windows, hangs a pair of ballet shoes. Worn leather, ivory white gone to cream, the ribbons wrapped and tucked. They sit under museum glass, lit from above by a small directional lamp.
I cross to them without being invited. I look for a long moment. "Your mother's," I say.
"From the Mariinsky," he says. "She packed them when she married Viktor. She never wore them after."
"But she kept them."
"Yeah."
I turn around. He is watching me with his coat still on and his expression open in the way he does not often permit in rooms with other people — the unguarded version, the one that surfaces in his kitchen at seven AM and in the dark at four when he thinks I have gone back to sleep.
"Play her music," I say.
He goes to his phone. A moment later the room fills with Tchaikovsky — something from Swan Lake, the melody my first teacher used to play at the barre on Tuesday mornings when she wanted us to understand that technique and feeling were not opposites but the same conversation conducted in different registers.
I extend my hand.
He takes it.
We waltz in his living room, between the stacked books and the copper pots and the framed shoes watching from the wall.
It is nothing like the Malibu gala, where we were performing in front of a room with opinions about everything.
This is entirely ours: his hand at my waist, my hand at his shoulder, our bodies finding the shared grammar they discovered three weeks ago and apparently retained without being asked to.
He leads, but I don’t make it easy for him and this seems to delight him.
"You are constitutionally incapable of following," he observes.
"I follow when the lead is worth following," I say. "The jury remains technically in session."
"Harsh."
I laugh.
He spins me, and I let him, and when I come back into his arms we are closer than the waltz requires and both of us know it. The music moves through its phrase and neither of us adjusts the distance.
I pull him down to me by the front of his shirt, and the waltz ends before either of us notices.
We move to the bedroom in the focused way of two people who are not in a hurry because they have already established that rushing is a category error.
He takes my coat. I take his. He unzips my boots with one hand while his mouth finds the curve of my jaw and I grip his shoulder and make a sound I do not bother cataloging.
"Your knee," he says, against my cheekbone. "From the studio."
"My knee is fine."
"Natasha."
"It's sore," I say, "but functional. Do not treat me like I am made of glass or I will leave."
"I was going to be careful," he says. "Not because you're fragile. Because you matter."
The sentence does something to my sternum that I have no clinical category for.
I look at him - this impossible man with his mother's ballet shoes on his wall and Akhmatova on his kitchen counter and his left hand that shakes when Viktor calls - and all I can think is that he’sare going to be so catastrophically inconvenient for every defense I have ever built.
"Okay," I say. "That’s acceptable."
He is careful in a way that has nothing to do with caution and everything to do with attention.
His hands move over me with focused intelligence, reading every response and adjusting.
He finds the sore line of my knee with his palm and traces around it, not on it, and I exhale slowly and my whole body releases something it has been holding.
"Ты боишься," he says, low against my shoulder. You are afraid.
"Yes," I say, in Russian"Ты тоже." So are you.
"Yes," he says. "Equally."
"Equally terrible for both of us."
He laughs against my collarbone and then his mouth moves lower and I stop being interested in vocabulary in any language.
He takes his time the way he always does, like he has a private grudge against efficiency that I find simultaneously maddening and extraordinary.
His hands move over me - the old surgical lines of my knee, the curve of my hip, the space between my shoulder blades that he has apparently determined is the single most effective place to press his lips when he wants my entire nervous system to stop cooperating with my brain.
It works every time.
When we come together it is slow and close and without performance, his forehead against mine, his breath uneven in a way that tells me whatever armor he arrived with is currently on the floor with his coat.
My hands are in his hair; his are at my waist. We look at each other rather than away, which is the bravest thing either of us has done tonight, and we have both danced in living rooms and cried in empty studios, so that is saying something considerable.
"Natasha," he says, into my neck.
"I know," I say.
He does not ask what I know. He already understands.
Afterward, he makes risotto.
I sit at his kitchen island in his shirt, which reaches my thighs, with a glass of water and the peaceful exhaustion of a woman whose body has been genuinely listened to, watching him cook with the focused ease he brings to everything: one hand stirring, one hand reaching for the wine, tasting from the spoon, adding something, tasting again.
“Did your mother teach you how to cook?” I ask.
"She taught me everything that matters," he says, stirring without turning.
"The eggs. The waltz. How to read when someone is carrying something they have been told not to put down.
" He adds wine to the pan. "She said cooking was just paying attention until something became what it was supposed to be. "
I look at the small pots of herbs on the windowsill. "She sounds extraordinary."
"She was," he says. "She also put too much salt in everything and refused to admit it, which was the only form of stubbornness Viktor never managed to eradicate." He plates the risotto with easy authority. "I consider it her victory condition."
He sets the bowl in front of me. I eat a spoonful. The flavors are warm and genuine - tasting like the product of deep attention applied until something became what it was supposed to be.
"This is obscenely good," I say.
"You sound personally offended."
"I am mildly affronted," I say. "I have been eating portioned chicken and rice for four years. This is a referendum on my life choices."
"Consider it a suggestion," he says, "rather than an indictment."
I eat the entire bowl. He watches with the quiet satisfaction of a man who made a thing and finds the reception worthwhile, and does not once comment on my appetite, which earns him significant standing.
He goes to the kitchen to refill my water while I lean forward and rest my chin on my folded arms at the island, utterly boneless, the studio and the waltz and the last two hours metabolizing through my system all at once.
His laptop is open on the far end of the island.
At first, I don’t look at it. Then I do. The screen has not dimmed yet and the document open on it is a legal filing. The header is visible from where I am sitting.
Sterling-Kane Records. Defendant.
A date in the header. Two weeks ago.
The words are gone before I can read further because my hand has already reached for my phone, already photographed the screen with the reflexive speed of a CFO who processes documents before she processes feelings about them.
I set the phone face down on the island.
He comes back with the water.
"You look far away," he says.
"Long day," I say. "The studio."
He accepts this. He comes around the island and kisses the top of my head - an act so casually tender that it temporarily makes the photograph on my phone feel like something that can wait until morning.
It cannot wait until morning. But I let it feel that way for a few more minutes, with his hand warm on my shoulder and the risotto bowl empty between us and Irina's ballet shoes visible through the doorway from where I sit.
I leave at five AM while he is asleep. The way I left the hotel in Chicago, except nothing about it feels the same.
I take a cab. The city is quiet and grey and unreasonably cold, just like me.