Pointe of Pride

Chapter 6

The next morning, Nick met Marcus at the beach early again, but this time he had no intention of going in the water. As Marcus carried his board down the sand and paddled out into the waves, Nick opened his camera bag and pulled out his Canon 70D and a wide-angle lens. It had been the first camera he’d bought, before he’d officially retired but long after he knew the end of his dancing career was approaching. He’d started bringing it to the ballet studios every day, and whenever he had a free hour between classes and rehearsals, he’d stick his head into a rehearsal studio and ask whoever was dancing in there if they minded him taking a few photos. Before he knew it, he’d taken hundreds and hundreds of shots of his colleagues, capturing them in blurry mid-flight and laid out flat on the floor in exhaustion. Of those hundreds of shots, he’d actually managed to take a few he loved.

It had been months now since he’d taken a photo he loved. Or maybe it was that it was harder to love them when he knew almost no one else would. Still, yesterday, when he and Marcus had been out on the water, he’d been struck almost breathless by how beautiful this place was, and by how much he’d missed it without even realizing it. He raised the camera and took a few warm-up shots of the cliffs that hugged the south side of the beach, where an ever-growing number of luxury homes hung precariously over the water. Then he turned and faced straight out to the ocean, adjusting his focus to try to capture a single surfer with the vast Pacific stretching out behind her and the long horizon on either side of her board. He’d had plenty of practice photographing around the Seine, but a roiling surf beach was more challenging to capture than a river.

He kept an eye on Marcus’s bright green board as he walked this way and that along the sand at the water’s edge, trying to capture each surfer as they clambered onto their boards. They were strong and graceful, not unlike dancers, and it seemed to him that the only way they stayed upright on their boards was by attuning their bodies to the waves, the way a dancer in a pas de deux learned to read their partner’s body. When they became unattuned, out of sync with the wave, they toppled off their boards and crashed into the surf. Unlike Marcus, he’d never learned to do more than bodysurf, but he made a mental note to ask his friend about his theory on the similarities between dancing and surfing.

After about fifteen minutes, he checked the screen and scrolled through the photos he’d taken so far, then sighed and turned the camera off. They were shit shots. Utter shit. For perhaps the hundredth time, he heard Delphine’s exasperated sigh echo in his head. Putain, Nick, on n’est pas photographe simplement parce qu’on achète un appareil photo et se declare photographe!

He shook his head and put the camera back in its bag, and, slinging the case over his shoulder, strode back up the beach. His plan to spend the morning taking photos seemed stupid now.

He thought of the confidence he’d feigned for the hotel waitress the other day, how easy it had been to pretend that he was steady and successful and turning down jobs left and right. He could keep doing that. Fake it til you make it, right? As far as anyone here was concerned, as far as Marcus, Heather, and any random waitresses had to know, he was a professionally successful photographer. As far as Carly had to know, he was the Annie Liebovitz of dance photography.

Carly. She’d thoroughly shamed him at the printer’s office yesterday. He’d seen her angry before—several times, in fact, and they’d barely known each other a few days. But it turned out that Carly angry on her own behalf was nothing compared to Carly angry on someone else’s. The look on her face when she’d reprimanded him for being rude to the receptionist was something to behold. Before, when she’d been angry about something he’d said to her, she’d been indignant and loud and her anger had flared quick and hot, like a match catching and burning out a few seconds later.

But when she’d demanded an apology on the other woman’s behalf, he was reminded of the blue flames at the very base of a fire, the hottest and longest-burning ones. Her voice had gone quiet and threatening, and her face had become eerily calm and still. As if she already knew that she was going to extract an apology from him and the only question was how well he was going to grovel. If she was a brat, he’d thought grudgingly at that moment, she’d also figured out how to use her brattiness for good. What would it be like, he’d wondered, to have someone that fierce willing to demand justice on your behalf? Not someone like Carly, obviously; she’d burn down an entire city block just to avenge him if another car cut him off in traffic. But, someone. And just as he had when they’d been staring each other down across the beach, he’d felt something long-dead stir to life in his chest. A flash of colour in the vast grey expanse that had been his life lately. So he’d apologised, and she’d seemed mollified—and then she’d turned around and embarrassed him in front of that woman for no good reason. Tragically born without a personality? Better than way too much personality.

And he had to spend today with her, again. Their task today was to pick up the wedding bands from the jeweller, a job Carly didn’t want to miss and that Nick didn’t trust her to complete alone. So later that morning, he presented himself outside her apartment building, showered and shaved, fed and caffeinated, and ready to drive into the city. When he pulled up, he saw Carly sitting on the front steps of the building in a short, sleeveless khaki-green dress and sneakers. He honked the horn, and she glanced up and then made a show of reluctantly standing and walking to the car.

“Good morning to you, too,” he said, after she had thrown herself into the seat, slammed the door, and crossed her arms tight across her chest. She said nothing.

“Can you buckle your seatbelt, please?”

“Just drive, okay? We’ve got errands to run.” Her voice was scratchy and she sounded exhausted.

“I’m not going to drive until you buckle your seatbelt,” he said. “Come on. Click clack, front and back.”

She rolled her eyes and pulled the belt across her body, and he heard the sharp metallic snap over the sound of her sigh.

“Happy now? Drive.” She leaned back in the seat and glowered out the window. He turned the radio back on and drove them towards the main drag and then towards the Spit Bridge.

“Ah, shit,” he said under his breath, as they drove down the hill towards the bridge. Traffic was backed up on their side of the road, and the other side was empty. “It’s about to open.”

“What’s about to open?” she asked, frowning. It was the first time she’d spoken in fifteen minutes.

“The bridge. It opens a few times a day to let boats through, and cars have to stop and wait. It only takes a few minutes, but we must have just caught it.”

“So I get to spend extra time with you. Delightful.”

Nick looked over at her as he stopped the car and turned off the engine. She looked paler than she had yesterday, and her eyes were puffy and pink lined.

“You look tired,” he said.

“Gee, thanks,” she replied sarcastically. “No need for euphemisms, Nick. You can just tell me I look like shit next time.”

“You look like shit this time,” he said, matter-of-factly. She scowled across the console, but she didn’t fire back at him. She looked like she barely had the energy to play this game. “What, no snappy comeback? You’re not going to make up a new medical condition for me?”

Carly said nothing. She turned and stared straight ahead at the unmoving cars, and he watched her profile for a long moment as she tucked her bottom lip under one of her teeth and worried it. He was about to resign himself to sitting here for another fifteen minutes in prickling silence when she spoke.

“What’s retirement like?” She said it tentatively, quietly. Without snark or heat, like she was genuinely curious.

It’s shit, Nick thought. I don’t know who I am anymore. Or where I belong. Or what’s going to happen next.

“It’s fine,” he said, doing his best to sound confident. “I was lucky that I got to choose to retire, rather than having it thrust on me by injury or something. And the French are generous about their pensions for dancers, which helped the transition.” What hadn’t helped was withdrawing that pension early and blowing through most of it, leaving him with a dwindling bank account and no idea where his next paycheck was coming from.

“Do you miss dancing?” Carly asked, still looking straight ahead. He turned in his seat and copied her.

“All the time,” he said to the license plate of the car in front of him. “I miss the adrenaline rush of performing. And the feeling of working on something for hours in the studio and worrying right up until the moment you do it on stage that it’s not gonna work, but then your body just does it, and it’s perfect, and all the work was worth it.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her nodding.

“I love that feeling,” she said quietly. “Like your body knew the whole time what it was doing, and you just had to let it.”

Exactly, he thought. Like he could trust his own limbs, his own ligaments, to do what he needed them to do. He didn’t trust his body now, didn’t trust that he could take what he saw and translate it onto film. He used to be able to see a shape in his mind and make his body mimic it. Now, that connection felt broken.

“I miss the music, too. There aren’t a lot of jobs where you can hear a world-class orchestra play five nights a week for free.”

Carly scoffed. “Free, except for all the broken bones and messed up muscles, and the lack of a social life outside of work, and the hundred-dollar shoes.”

“Okay, it’s not totally free. But is there anything better than a full orchestra playing Swan Lake five metres away from you?”

“Ugh, I hate Swan Lake.”

“What?”

“I hate,” she repeated, enunciating every consonant, “Swan Lake.”

“I heard you. Why?”

“Boy meets girl, boy promises to love girl forever, boy gets distracted by random enchanted hot chick and decides to marry her instead? And we’re supposed to think this is some great love story? It’s basically Hinge but with feathers.”

Nick frowned. “Well, he does die at the end.”

“They both die! And she dies first! You ever notice how all the women in ballet end up dead? Giselle, Juliet, Odette, La Sylphide, they all die at the end.”

“Not true, Giselle dies at the end of act one.”

Carly groaned and rolled her eyes dramatically. “God, you’re a pedant. I knew you wouldn’t get it.”

“I get it. Ballet’s not exactly a bastion of feminism. But you can’t deny the Swan Lake score is spectacular.”

“The violin solo is okay,” Carly allowed quietly.

“What’s that?” he said, putting his hand up to his ear. In front of them, the stopped cars had started to roll slowly down the hill. The bridge must be reopening.

“I said the violin solo is fine.”

“It’s better than fine, but we can agree to disagree.” That was basically all they did. But at least this disagreement hadn’t resulted in bodily harm or property theft.

“Do you think it gets better? The missing it?” She turned her head against the seat, and he turned, too. She looked him full in the face for the first time since she got in the car. Her face was pinched and pallid, but the sun found gold threads in her orange-red curls and turned her eyes a liquid, maple syrup brown.

Nick sighed. Fuck if I know. “I hope so. But, you know,” he added quickly, feigning confidence again, “I landed on my feet. There’s life after ballet, if you know where to look.”

She rolled her eyes again, with more disdain than drama this time, and looked like she was about to retort when the car behind them honked. Nick and Carly both jumped and turned back to face the road, and Nick hurried to put the car in drive. Next to him, Carly slumped back into her seat as they rolled down towards the water. Whatever rejoinder she’d had ready for him never materialized.

Twenty silent minutes later, they pulled into an underground parking lot in Sydney’s central business district, just over the other side of the Harbour Bridge. The Bridge, at least, looked exactly as it had when he had left Australia. Still a smooth slate-grey curve flanked by four stout sandstone pylons. Still a dizzying geometric kaleidoscope of shapes formed by the criss-crossing steel bars at the sides and over the top. The lanes were still narrow, designed as they were for cars from the 1930s, and over the left-hand side, the sleek white sails of Opera House still sliced into the sky, odd and elegant as ever.

When they came aboveground, they found the city buzzing with pedestrians in business and business casual clothing, hurrying from high rise office buildings to cafés and back again. He led Carly along the crowded footpaths, past clothing stores and upscale restaurants.

“Once again, we walk on the left here,” he said, the second time her body listed away from his and towards the right-hand side of the footpath.

“I know, I know,” she sighed, stepping quickly out of the way of a young man who was scurrying down the street balancing a tray of takeaway coffee in one hand and holding out his phone in the other.

“Oh, and I know where I’m going this time,” he told her. He didn’t add that he’d looked the shop up three times until he could visualize the map and could be assured he wouldn’t get them lost again.

“What a nice change,” she said, through a wide yawn.

He looked down the block to the corner where he knew they’d find the jeweller. “This shouldn’t take long. Then you can go home and take a nap.”

“I don’t need a nap,” she grumbled, sounding a lot like a tired child who needed a nap.

“Uh-huh,” he said, injecting as much skepticism as he could into the two syllables.

“Fine, I need a nap, but I can’t take one. It’ll mess with my jetlag adjustment.” She yawned again, bringing a hand to her mouth and squeezing her eyes shut. Was it possible for a yawn to be stubborn? Because if it was, Carly had just yawned stubbornly. With her whole body, too, her shoulders lifting and rolling and her ribcage expanding as she yawned dramatically into her hand. Carly Montgomery never did anything by half measures, he thought, even yawning.

The jeweller had the rings boxed up and ready to go and informed them that there was still plenty of time to have them resized if for some reason they didn’t fit. To Nick’s relief, no one mistook them for the happy couple this time, although that might have been because Carly made a point of introducing herself to the jeweller by name before asking for Marcus and Heather’s rings.

“Are you in a rush to get back?” he asked her as they left the air-conditioned cool of the shop and reemerged onto the baking footpath. Something had just occurred to him. “There’s a shop I want to visit. It won’t take long, and then you can go home and not take a nap.”

In response, she simply yawned and shrugged, which he took as a yes. He steered them down the street for a few blocks, reminding her periodically to keep to the left, until they came to a narrow laneway he remembered from all those years ago.

“Excuse me, but I generally avoid going into dark alleys with strange men,” she said, after rounding the corner and peering past him down the lane.

“A good policy, but this alley isn’t dark, and I’m not strange,” he replied, and barreled on before she could come up with a snarky retort. “Stay here if you want, I won’t be long.”

She sighed but followed him down the laneway anyway, staying a few paces behind him as it twisted behind the hulking office building, just as he’d remembered it. Only, when he arrived at the little hole-in-the-wall shop front he’d remembered, it wasn’t a camera shop anymore. It was a café.

“You wanted to visit the Piccolo café?” Carly asked, drawing even with him and frowning up at the white neon sign over the tiny door. “What’s so special about this place?”

Nick watched as a woman in a white button down and a sleek office skirt hustled out of the shop, a takeaway coffee cup in each hand.

“Euh, no, it wasn’t a café before,” he muttered, running a distracted hand over his head.

He’d only visited it a few times, but the memory of the place was still crisp in his mind. A grey-haired Greek man had sat at the counter, and shelves of cameras and film and photography books had extended up to the ceiling and all the way to the back of the narrow store. The place was fluorescent lit and smelled a little musty, but the inventory and displays were spotless, not a speck of dust or grime in sight. The man, who he’d assumed was the proprietor, let him leaf carefully through the huge, heavy art photography books, after making him leave his drink at the cash register and checking that his fingers were clean. It was quiet in there, and to a teenage Nick, who was still getting accustomed to the bustle and speed of city life, it felt like a refuge. He’d been excited to return and talk about cameras with the man behind the counter, now that he was a man and a photographer himself.

And now it was just another café churning out flat whites and macchiatos for office workers. When had that happened? What had happened to the proprietor? Had he moved the shop elsewhere? Had he sold up? Died?

“What was it?” Carly asked.

Nick said nothing. He stared, a little disoriented, at the shopfront.

“Nick? Hello?”

“It was a camera shop,” Nick said quietly. “I guess that was a long time ago.”

“Did you want to buy a new camera?” Carly asked through another yawn. “There have to be other camera stores in Sydney, right?”

“No, it’s not that,” he muttered. “It’s—Never mind. Not important.” He’d missed so much in the fifteen years he’d been gone. This city’s secret places had changed and vanished, and he hadn’t even been here to notice it happening.

“Tell me,” Carly said. She said it as though she was curious, and as though she resented that curiosity. She was looking up at him expectantly, the way she had when she’d been awaiting his apology at the printer’s the other day. Like she was going to get this information out of him as a matter of principle.

“I came here a lot as a kid, is all. And when I was trying to figure out what to do after I stopped dancing, I kept having dreams about this place.” Nick didn’t believe in the universe sending him signs, but those dreams had felt like a compass pointing him in the right direction. Of course, it turned out to be a disastrous direction. Even if the old man had still been here, Nick probably would have been too ashamed to go inside and lie to him about his new career. His stomach twisted with the familiar anxiety that had haunted him for months now, coupled with a new guilt at lying to Marcus, to Heather, to everyone around him.

“I’m going to go in and get a coffee,” Carly said suddenly. “You stay here.” It was as though she had intuited that he didn’t want to go inside and see the place gutted and renovated, unrecognizable to anyone who remembered what it had once been. The ride here had created some kind of fragile peace between them, he thought, which she confirmed when she stopped a few feet from the shop door and turned to him. “What do you want?”

After she’d gone inside, Nick leaned against the rough concrete wall of the office block, staring across the laneway at the storefront. Based on the steady trickle of customers in and out, the place seemed to be doing all right. He thought back to the quiet hours he’d spent in the photography shop, when he was often the only customer. Not even a customer, as he’d never had the money to purchase anything. But the proprietor had let him wander and browse as though he did, showing him lenses and film like he had money to burn. In truth, Nick realized now, the man was probably happy to have someone to talk to, a little company in his quiet, tucked away shop. And Nick had been happy to spend a few hours away from the ballet school and the dorms, relieved to think about something that wasn’t ballet.

He glanced down the alley, thinking about all the times he’d snuck back here and felt like he’d unlocked one of the city’s secrets. It felt so strange now, to be a tourist in the place that had been home. Eventually, he supposed, he would feel that way about Munich, and about Paris, too. He’d be a tourist everywhere and a local nowhere.

A few minutes later, Carly reappeared with a coffee in each hand. She handed him a hot cup with “SK C +1”—a skim cappuccino with one sugar—scrawled on the lid, and he thanked her, making a mental note that the next round of coffees would be on him. Carly held her own plastic cup up to show him, a victorious smile on her face. Like everything else about her, Carly’s smile was a lot. She smiled with her entire face, and every crinkle and freckle lifted and lit up as she showed a dozen white teeth, gleaming to match her brown eyes. Like him, she’d spent her life performing in heavy stage makeup, probably false eyelashes and deep red lipstick. But he had a feeling her smile would reach the cheap seats without any help from L’Oréal.

“Finally, I found iced coffee in this town. I’ve been dying for a bodega iced coffee for days, but it’s not on any menu here. These guys had it and I’m so excited.”

He was about to warn her when she lifted the straw to her lips and took a sip. Her eyes widened in surprise and she swallowed quickly, then gave a spluttery cough.

“What the hell is in this thing?” she exclaimed, peeling the lid off the cup and peering in at its contents.

“Ah, Australian iced coffee is a bit of a different animal,” he said, suppressing a smile. “It’s more like a coffee-flavoured dessert. There’s probably ice cream and chocolate syrup in there. Maybe whipped cream, too.” He looked down into the sweating plastic cup and nodded. “Yep, whipped cream. I used to love a good iced coffee when I was little.”

Carly raised her eyebrows at him. “So is there any actual coffee in here? Or is it just a milkshake pretending to be caffeine?”

“Probably the latter,” he shrugged, and she groaned with her whole body, throwing her head back and letting the sound bounce off the walls of the laneway. It was petulant and ridiculous, and some people might have found it endearing.

“What does a girl have to do to get a plain, unadulterated, nuclear-strength iced coffee with half and half around here? I’m not drinking this. It might as well be a sundae.”

“I’m sure we can find you one somewhere in Freshwater. In the meantime, drink your milkshake.”

On the drive home, Carly sipped at her iced coffee until she was making quiet slurping sounds and moving the straw around to catch the final drops of it.

“I see you hated your milkshake,” he said drily, as they sat in traffic on Military Road.

“Shut up,” she grumbled, stashing the empty cup in the car door. She leaned back in her seat and sighed, and when he glanced over he saw that she was once again slumping dejectedly and worrying her bottom lip again, all traces of her sparkling megawatt smile gone.

“What’s wrong?” Because something did look really wrong.

“Nothing,” Carly said, too quickly. Nick didn’t bother telling her he didn’t believe her. Subtle she was not, and her body language was a dead giveaway. “Fine,” she said mulishly after a long silence, and Nick suppressed a triumphant smile. She couldn’t win every round.

“I need to get promoted this season.”

“Okay,” Nick said, not following.

She ran her hand through her hair and exhaled a sharp, exasperated sigh.

“Like, before the season starts, which is in a few weeks. But I’m here, and as long as I’m here, I can’t make a good impression on the AD before she makes her decision.”

“And you won’t go back any earlier.” It was a statement, not a question. He knew a few things about Carly Montgomery now, including a few rather intimate things he suspected she’d rather he didn’t know. And he knew that she wouldn’t even consider leaving Heather in the lurch on her wedding day.

“Of course not,” she muttered, confirming his assumption.

“Why the sudden urgency?”

She groaned and beat the back of her head against the headrest a few times. “Okay, look, you know how this works. I’m thirty-one. I’ve been in the company since I was eighteen. I’ve done my time in the corps, and I’m one of the oldest girls there now. Women. I hate when they call us ‘girls.’ And I love dancing. I even loved it under Mr. K, and he ran the place like a dictator. But I’m tired. My body’s a bowl of Rice Krispies.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You know, snap, crackle, and pop? I’m getting old, and I’ll have to retire soon. I’ve got maybe two, three years left in me, if I don’t get injured. And I don’t want to retire as a corps member. I want to get promoted and dance a few great roles before I’m too busted and broken to get out of bed in the morning. You know?”

Nick nodded. Yeah, he knew. He felt busted and broken, inside and out, and retirement had only made it worse.

“You know why I hate Swan Lake so much? It’s not just because Odette dies at the end. It’s because I’ve danced it basically every season for thirteen years and all I ever get to be is a random swan and a random villager. Do you know how tiring it is to stand there in a straight line and keep perfectly still for five minutes while Odette and Siegfried dance their pas de deux? Or to spend most of act one flitting around in the background holding a broom while everyone watches the principals they actually came to see? I could walk off the stage in the middle of the performance and no one would notice that one of the peasants was missing. I might as well be part of the set.”

It had been years since Nick had danced in the corps, but he didn’t remember it being that bad.

“So, that’s what’s wrong,” she sighed, sounding defeated. “Either I get promoted soon, or I finish my career as Peasant Maiden #4 and no one even remembers I was there at all.”

Nick shifted a little in his seat and kept his eyes on the road. So that’s why she’d asked about retirement. He couldn’t blame her for being afraid of it. He should have been more afraid than he was, but he’d been so cocky about photography, so sure that he could make the transition seamlessly. It turned out that even with his connections in the dance world, he didn’t have the talent for that.

“Retirement’s not that bad,” he lied, his stomach twisting again.

“So you said.”

“Really,” he insisted. “And just because we never get to see Peasant Maiden #4 do much besides wave a garland back and forth doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a rich inner life. It just happens off stage. And at least she lives to the end.”

Carly didn’t dignify that with more than a scoff. Okay, so it wasn’t his strongest argument.

“I know dancing in the corps can be repetitive and unrewarding at times, but the corps is really important,” he tried again.

“Easy for a former soloist to say.”

“But it’s true. There’s no ballet company without a corps. Imagine La Bayadère without all the Shades, or even something modern like Rite of Spring without a corps. You hate Swan Lake, but imagine how much worse it would be without the swans. It would just be … Lake.” He glanced over at her, hoping she’d crack a smile, but she looked unmoved. “The corps is what makes those ballets as impressive as they are. Principals are great, but the corps is what really fills the stage.”

“Oh, so we’re filler?” she retorted hotly. “Like I said, I don’t want to spend my entire career as a glorified set.”

“That’s not what I said,” he said quickly. It wasn’t what he’d meant, either. But he could feel the fragile truce that had developed between them starting to crack. He could sense another Carly Montgomery Shit Fit coming on.

“I just mean that the corps is essential. And it’s where some dancers do their best work.”

Carly turned to him, and even without looking at her, he could feel dislike rolling off her, filling the entire front seat. “Some of us are just destined to live on the bottom rung forever, while the special ones are destined for bigger things? Do you know what an asshole you sound like right now?”

“I—That’s not what I’m saying!” God, she was impossible. “I’m just saying that lots of talented people spend their lives in the corps because the corps needs talented dancers.”

“Oh, I get it,” Carly said, suddenly baring her teeth in the wide, sickly fake smile she’d been using with him whenever Heather or Marcus was around. “I should be grateful? I’ve spent a decade as one of thirty-two interchangeable Shades, and never getting to dance Sugarplum, because I’m so talented and fortunate?”

“Yes! Getting to dance that long is a privilege! Just ask Marcus, or anyone else whose career ended early because of an injury. Or are you too much of a brat to see how lucky you are?”

Carly inhaled sharply. Nick kept his eyes on the road, ignoring the stab of guilt in his gut at the sound. They were over the Spit Bridge now and not far from Freshwater. She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and the silence swirled around him, thick and uncomfortable. Nick heard her take three slow, deep breaths in and out.

When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet and lethal, that blue-hot rage again, and it shook slightly. “How convenient for you that you were one of the chosen ones, Nick. But being stuck in the corps means no one notices when you retire, and no one cares when you get fired on a whim, either. You are dispensable.”

“I—”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Especially not with you.”

Fine, he thought. You win. But a few minutes later, when he pulled the car up in front of her building and she shoved the door open and climbed out without so much as a see you later, nose pink and eyes watering, she didn’t look like she was relishing the victory at all.