Chapter Four
David answers after only a few minutes.
Sorry hon, I’m already back in NY. Text Arabella she will help you, one hundred percent. Kisses.
He gives me her number.
I hesitate for a long time before deciding what to do. I hardly know this girl. She’s essentially a stranger to me.
And yet, in a weird way I feel I know her better than Jane or Artie, who I am now categorizing as Jordan’s friends.
She’s from my world; they are from Jordan’s.
I take a deep breath. Maybe it’s time I return to my world.
I grab a few pairs of pointe shoes, some ballet things, and a few other essentials and throw them in my old Longchamp backpack. I don’t want to bring too much and invite the old what are you doing, moving in? joke.
I decide not to take a car and instead walk to her place. It’s freezing and wet outside. I feel like a sponge soaking up icy water as I walk through the streets.
What have I done? Why am I ruining things with Jordan? Why can’t I control myself?
It’s almost a half-hour walk, and in that time I sober up considerably and feel even worse and weirder than I did before. Part of me wants to turn around already, go back to Jordan and apologize. But a bigger part of me is urging me onward. To Arabella. Back to ballet. Away from being just someone’s girlfriend. Away from being some man’s pretty little thing .
I text her when I arrive and she comes out of her own window and hangs over the railing. “You beautiful fucking thing, it’s frigid out there, come on up here where it’s warm, darling!”
There really are certain things you can only say and sound cool when you do so in a sexy accent. If I had said exactly that, with my own American accent—which is the kind of neutral you only get when you’re covering up a poor southern twang—I would have sounded like a complete idiot.
I climb the three flights of steps to get to her floor and find her holding the door open with her body at a forty-five-degree angle. Her toe is balancing the door to keep it open, and her attention is inside the flat, where she is screaming at someone in Spanish.
At first, I think I’ve made a mistake in coming. If she’s having a fight with her own boyfriend or something, I certainly don’t need to come in reeling from my own and add fuel to their fire. As I don’t know Arabella all that well, I don’t even know if she has a boyfriend, but if I had to guess, I’d guess she has several.
She turns to me, smiling big. “Welcome, cari?o .”
“Thanks so much for helping me out,” I say. “My boyfriend and I had a fight, and—”
“You don’t even need to tell me,” she says. “My place is open for you anytime you want.” She uses her toes to lift up the mat in front of the door, where there is a key hidden. “This is always here. Always, all my friends know, it’s an open-door policy.”
“That’s so nice,” I say. Something in me doesn’t quite trust it, but I know I’m probably just being paranoid.
“So come in, vamos , come!”
“Thanks so much for answering so late, too,” I say, walking through the door and leaning to give her a hug when I see her arm open to me. In her other hand is a dirty martini.
“Don’t even worry!” She grabs me by the chin and plants a plump kiss on my lips. “We only got back from dinner an hour ago. Sorry I didn’t hang around the club the other night—I always seem to have drama to deal with.” She laughs.
Once in her apartment, I see that there are several girls in the living room lying around like cats. They’re all pretty and petite, their ages hard to tell, but they look like they’re all around twenty to twenty-three. They all look like ballerinas.
A sexy, warm, slinky song hums from the record player.
“Martini?” asks Arabella.
I really shouldn’t. What I should do is go home and make things better with Jordan. What I should do is get some sleep and wake up tomorrow clearheaded to make some decisions about my future. What I should do is stop smoking and drinking and eating fried fish drenched in malt vinegar, and start reaching out about auditions.
“Sure,” I say anyway, as usual lately, completely ignoring my internal compass. “I like the music.”
“Manu Chao,” she says, swinging her hips. She’s kind of amazing. She has tight curves and moves her body with the sex appeal of an erotic dancer, but I’ve seen her in class and I know she also has perfect ballerina form. It might seem like a given, but not every ballet dancer can go out to a club and dance and still look hot.
Arabella certainly can.
“Twist or dirty?” she asks.
“Dirty,” I say.
“Good girl,” she says with a wink, but then she frowns when she sees my expression.
“Sorry to hear about you and your man. But don’t all men just seem to either cause heartache or headaches?” She stirs my martini in a mixing glass with a long, twirly spoon.
“I guess so,” I say. “Actually, no. I don’t think they all seem like that.”
“Well, those are the ones I like, I guess,” she laughs.
She finishes making the martini and hands it to me, and I say, “Thanks. Cheers.”
Then she gestures back to the living room. “These are the girls, by the way. Anastasia”—she leans in to me—“and you must pronounce it that way, Anna-stah-jia .”
“It is correct pronunciation,” Anastasia says, her Russian accent strong. She is leaning with her elbows on her knees, with legs spread wide as she leans over the coffee table. It’s only then that I register that they’re using playing cards to cut lines of coke.
“That’s Cynthia; she’s American like you.”
“I am from Colombia!” she insists.
“Originally maybe, but you’re American, darling. You grew up in Texas.”
Cynthia laughs. “Fuck you.”
“And that’s Nadia and Nina,” she says last, pointing to two gorgeous blondes, and I realize then that they are identical twins. In the ballet world the girls so often look similar that it’s easy to overlook actual relatives. Jordan once admitted, with shame, that he couldn’t tell which one I was when he saw me dancing one time.
“Would you like some?” asks one of the blondes with a delicate English accent, gesturing at the drugs.
“Oh, no, I’m fine,” I say, starting to make an excuse before remembering I don’t need one.
“So,” says Arabella, leading me to a vintage chaise in the corner. “Come sit with me.”
Before she can talk to me, she is drawn in by another yelling match with Cynthia, and I see now that it’s all in good fun. Yelling is just their shared love language. I wonder if they’re together.
Behind the chaise is a long narrow table of pillar candles, all melted to different levels, dripping onto a silk scarf that’s been thrown over the wood surface. On the wall is an old French Lolita movie poster that says, Comment a-t-on osé faire un film de Lolita ? Which, I think, means How dare we make a film out of Lolita ?
I look around some more. I can see the kitchen from here. Copper pots and pans, a vase of fresh black dahlias, a French market bag spilling heads of garlic and shallots and onions out onto the wooden counter. I wonder if she cooks, or if it’s simply a perfectly curated show.
I want to see her bedroom. I bet it’s a gorgeous mess.
This whole apartment is like being in an Anthropologie campaign that got taken over by Alessandro Michele.
“Hello? Jocelyn?” Arabella snaps her fingers to get my attention. She pronounces my name Jozzleen .
“Oh, sorry. I was just looking around your flat. I love it.”
“My god, wait!” She sloshes her martini and doesn’t even care that it gets on the tiger skin rug beneath our feet. “You need a place to live? This breakup with your Jordan, did it leave you without a place to live?”
Well, when you put it that way. “I guess I do need to find a place. Maybe just for a while?”
“You could live here! I have another room, I never use it. It’s got the best light in the place, sometimes I just go in and lie on the floor. I’ll show you later. But tell me, when are you going back to ballet? Was it that stupid Jordan stopping you? Men can be such boors.”
“No—how did you know I—well, I want to go back to ballet. It’s on my list of things to figure out. Like, as soon as possible.”
“I could probably set up an audition? Not that you need me to. I googled you after the first class. Found you were a principal at NAB. Impresionante .”
“Wait,” I say, practically inhaling my sip of briny gin. “That’s so nice, but I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
I’m unseated by this offer. Ballerinas are a lot of things, but nice to each other isn’t famously one of them. There are so few spots to succeed, we can’t afford to boost each other up.
“Don’t be silly! You’re not asking me. I’m offering.”
“To be honest”—the truth spilling out of me after the draining evening and too much booze—“I find it kind of weird that you’d help me like that. Most ballerinas are not—”
She bursts into laughter. “I love how you say it how it is,” she says. “You can trust me or not. I understand. But listen, it’s because—well, you’ve seen me dance. I’m amazing!” She shrugs her shoulders happily. “I don’t need to be competitive. Helping a girl out who just got stomped on by some asshole is far more my style, cari?o . I don’t like to push girls down.”
There’s something so charming about her that keeps the words from seeming like blatantly off-putting narcissism. There’s something about her that I do trust. But I’m still hesitant. I stall.
“Do you all dance at the Royal National Ballet?” I ask the rest of the girls.
“ Claro , of course!” answers Arabella.
The girls have started snorting the lines, so they aren’t really listening.
“When I first saw you at open class,” I say, “I did think you were too good to just be freelancing. Why do you go? Aren’t you already busy enough?”
She lights a cigarette. These Europeans.
“I’ll tell you why,” she says. “It’s a deal I have with my donor. He lets me do whatever I want. Doesn’t matter what I eat or drink or who I fuck or don’t fuck. As long as I keep myself in pristine shape. Ariana Kingsley is the best retired ballerina and now the best coach there is, her little weekly class is a tradition in London. Any girl who wishes to advance further faster, she takes Ariana’s class. I just do it to…” She snaps her fingers, hunting for the lost word. “… supplement my other rehearsals so that everyone stays off my back.”
“Got it.”
“So what do you think?” she asks.
I think for a moment. I’m too lost to not accept help. “I would love to take you up on that offer. I should never have left New York. I should never have left ballet.”
“Oh, please, cari?o , you did it for love! You did it because you are alive on Earth and you were having some free will! What is so wrong with that?” She shrugs and makes a face like this is the most obvious thing in the world.
And once she does, it makes me realize how badly I want to think like that. To stop putting the weight of the world behind every decision. To allow myself to be young, dumb, and free.
“Let me show you the room!” she says.
And then she jumps up like a flicked potato chip and yanks me up, too.
I down the rest of my drink and follow her.
I pass the bathroom, which has a pink-orange glow from the reflection of more candles bouncing off coral wallpaper. I see her room, and it’s every bit the gauzy, dimly lit mess I thought it might be.
She pushes open the door across the hallway, showing me the spare room, and I gasp when I see it. The warm streetlights outside pour through the rippling old glass windows, casting golden rectangles onto the dusty wood floors. The walls are covered in aesthetically peeling turquoise wallpaper.
“You just let this sit empty?”
“I never wanted to let someone I didn’t like come in to live here,” she says. “But I like you. And I think you need me. You can just pay me what you can afford. Then I’ll get you a new spot at my company and I’ll know you can afford the rent.”
I laugh out loud at the frankness in her words, but I shake my head a little.
She pushes me a little too hard with her cigarette-clamping fingers. “That’s what it is! I know what your problem is, cari?o , you don’t let people take care of you! Of course! This is what your problem is, I see it all now. This Jordan, and—yes, I see it all very clearly— what? ” she shrieks out into the hall after hearing her name called from the other room. “I’ll be right back, these fucking girls, you want to talk about needing…”
Her words fade as she disappears back down the hall.
I stand there in the empty room, letting her words ring through my ears, watching the smoke she left behind as it swirls and rises in the light.
Is she right? Do I have trouble needing people?
I don’t know. I don’t feel like the trouble is that I can’t accept help so much as I never need help. I’ve always done it all myself, and—oh my god, she’s right.
This strange, explosive little Spanish girl whom I barely know and who barely knows me has completely accurately figured me out.
And what had I just been thinking earlier? I’d been thinking how much I wish I had an adult. Someone to just…fucking… figure it out with. In the past few months Mimi has been worse than usual, and I haven’t even tried to talk to her.
Tomorrow is Monday. What I’ve been dreading all weekend. I have a call with the friend of my mother’s, Joel, someone who is back home figuring things out. I don’t know why. I don’t really know him or how he knows my mother. Knew. Knew my mother.
I don’t know anything. I just don’t want to think about it.
That night, after the other girls leave, Arabella pours us each a small glass of vermut and opens a bottle of Pellegrino to bring to the bedroom.
She offers me something to sleep in, as she herself takes off her clothes completely and slips into a threadbare white T-shirt.
“You need something sexy tonight,” she says. She pulls out a silk button-down. “Vintage Versace. My last donor bought it for me. I fucking hate Versace, you can keep it if you want.”
I slip it on and am stunned by how soft the silk is on my warm skin.
I take a sip of my vermouth and get into the bed. “Oh my god ,” I say. “This bed!”
“It’s the Palais from Kluft,” she says. “Another gift from my donor.” She sits down on her knees on the bed and puts on a pouty, baby-girl face. “?‘Arabella needs her best sleep if she wants to dance well for everybody, doesn’t she?’?”
I have no idea what Kluft or a Palais is, but I smile anyway. “Well, you can’t really deny that. When I was in school for dance, we would sleep as much as possible so that we wouldn’t eat too much or do anything else that could be bad for us. It would have been a lot easier with something like this.”
“A few hours of sleep in this bed is like a full night’s sleep anywhere else.”
I’m feeling drowsy already. She dims the lights by shouting in Spanish at an unseen robot, and then gets into the king-sized bed with me.
She looks pretty even with all the makeup gone. There’s still a smudging of black eyeliner rimming her eyes, but it looks intentional. Unlike how, on me, it would look like I was just released from the hospital.
“I don’t know what happened to you in your past,” says Arabella as she shuts her eyes, “but you’re going to be okay, Jocelyn Banks.”
Jozzleen Bonx.
And she drifts off to sleep. I should feel too awkward to sleep lying next to this woman I’ve just met, but it’s the most relaxed I’ve been all week. The chaos is more soothing than the comfort.
It’s not long before I’m asleep, too, my dreams coming as a dark montage of things I’ve tried to forget.