The Art of Falling (18 page)

“That was his crap. I was too damned pissed at him to do the work.”

This made me laugh. My mother joined in. When she looked up at me again it was as if she was seeing me anew. With her salad only half eaten, she set down her fork.

“I underestimated you, Penny. You didn’t need a fantasy about your parents to pull you through.” Her bottom lip quivered. “Look inside. You are…exquisite.”

My mother’s edges softened as once again tears collected in my eyes. I wanted to believe what she said. But until I knew what happened out on that ledge, I didn’t know what demons I had yet to face.

• • •

Later, while setting the final box of sports magazines at the curb, my mother tossed the wedding picture into one of the boxes. The speed with which I snatched it up surprised me.

“Why, Penny?”

“He looks so happy here. And it’s a kind of proof. At least we were two of the women he loved.” I pressed the photo to my belly. “I need that.”

As the sun set, my flesh and blood mother and the image of my father returned to the garage with me to take one last look around.

“What to do with all this space?” I said, my voice reverberating against bare concrete walls.

She slipped her arm around me. “We could dance.”

Life kept punching her down, and Angela kept rising back up. Two weeks later, Angela had begged enough doctors to autograph her medical chart to earn her discharge from the hospital. When I protested her move back to the apartment, she said, “I don’t want to die in the hospital.” How could I argue?

If she wanted to be home, then I’d make sure it was a homecoming to remember. And for that I only needed one thing: Kandelbaum.

I’d asked him to come along with me to help get her home, but he said no, he needed for her to perceive a clean break between his hospital visits and this homecoming. So I’d given him my key. Knowing what lay ahead made keeping up idle chitchat in the taxi with Angela difficult.

When we pulled up in front of the row house, I let Angela get out first. Kandelbaum was so eager to greet her, he pulled the front door open before she reached for the handle. For a moment they each took in the surprise of their new positions on opposite sides of the door—even this first embrace, Kandelbaum would not rush—then he slipped his arms around her tiny body in the gentlest possible way. The moment seemed suspended: him loving her, her allowing love, my heart swelling with the joy of beholding it. He murmured to her and kissed her cheek and smoothed her hair and kissed the top of her head, and I couldn’t pull my eyes away.

• • •

I took on the rent. Stretched myself thinner to take care of Angela’s daily needs. Ignored my exercise regimen so I could leave work early enough to fetch prescriptions, wash clothes, borrow library books, and shop for foods she hoped to eat. Waxed bags accumulated in the kitchen as each day Kandelbaum brought her a treat from the bakery. Our laughter ebbed as the coughing grew more painful—no one wanted to bring it on—but as long as Kandelbaum was sitting beside her, telling stories about everyday life at Independence Sweets or reading her a short story from one of the library books, those bright eyes radiated contentment.

I struggled with her decline. I showed up to work at the gym one day with an Adidas shoe on my left foot and a Saucony on my right.

One day in early November, Angela and I were watching one of the soaps on her little television when she started a coughing fit. I held a paper cup to her lips, but she couldn’t seem to gather up the strength to expel any mucus. Yet she hacked and hacked, as if her lungs were filling up and closing off and there was no longer much she could do about it. Finally, she spit into the cup—and when I pulled it back, the mucus was streaked with blood. She fell back against her pillow, panting. Her physical presence a mirage fading into the wall of desert behind her. I tried not to hold my breath as I waited for the reassuring hiss from the oxygen tank. An IV pole, now a fixture at the corner of her bed, fed her antibiotics through a port in her chest. Her body seemed smaller in relationship to a face now swollen with steroids.

Her struggle was getting harder to watch. I averted my focus; it fell upon the growing stack of newspapers by her bed. She had not let me recycle them or suspend the subscription while she was in the hospital. She wanted every day accounted for.
Life
goes
on
whether
I’m in the hospital or not
, she’d say.
I’ll catch up, you’ll see
. But to me the growing pile was a bar chart of her waning engagement with life.

I said, “Hopefully a new set of lungs is on the way.”

Her head jerked up.

“I know you’re on the list.”

“It’s not a cure. I’d still have CF.”

“But you could breathe again. It would buy you time.”

“I can’t risk handing myself over. It could drain my willpower.” Her gravelly voice defined the jagged pockets of air that her lungs strained to billow forth. “Most days, willpower is the only thing I can count on.”

“What do you mean, hand yourself over?”

“To the transplant team. To another person’s lungs. To the possibility of rejection and infection and even depression if lungs aren’t available—”

“But maybe you’d be handing yourself over to the possibility of life.”

“I am
not
an experiment,” she snapped.

I sat down beside her and waited until her features settled. “Is this about your mom?”

She took her time before speaking again. “I took myself off the list.”

“What?”

“I’ve seen what my friends went through. I do not believe God ever intended to torture me. He gave me this mind and these lungs to shape me.”

“But maybe God could shape you through the doctors. They’ve dedicated their lives to finding treatment—”

“Let me finish. I must believe I’ve had a purpose, Penny. If this body is on its way out, then so am I. Maybe God’s telling me we’re packing it in.”

I lost it. Were we to sit here and watch while she drowned in her own fluids? I had to do something. I pulled out her suitcase and started packing her stuff.

She said, “I’m not going back to the hospital.”

“I’m not taking you to the hospital. We’re going to Oregon. I am going to call the airport and get—us—tickets,” I said, accenting the words by throwing in one toiletry item per word. I couldn’t hide my anger anymore. I was angry at her for fighting so damn hard to live and angry with her for giving up and angry at her mother for not being angry and angry at myself for being so helpless, and I was ready to explode from acting like none of it was bothering me.

“Why Oregon?”

“Did you think I’d only been holding your hand these last few weeks? I’ve learned things. I know about Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act. Doctors will prescribe pills so when you can’t take it anymore, you can put an end to all this.”

“Penny.” Her wheezy whisper commanded my full attention. “That’s not how I want to go.”

I stood up and squared off. “Well, look at me, sister, because I am living proof you can’t control how you go.” The words flew from my mouth. Added up. Resonated within me. I started to shake.

“Exactly.” She drew several breaths, waiting until I had calmed enough to catch up with her reasoning. “I understand the desire to escape from pain. But I can’t turn back. This is my life. I’ve got to fight.”

“Then fight better. With new lungs.”

She shook her head, gently waggling her nose tubing.

“This is such a big decision. Are you sure?”

She rested, a chorus of crackling noises accompanying each breath. “I’m sure of this body. Trying to trade up feels like Russian roulette to me.”

I wanted to run, to scream, to do physical battle on her behalf. “I want to make your suffering go away.”

She smiled and closed her eyes. “You help”—breath—“by being here.”

I took her hand in mine, slipping my fingers up high enough to feel her pulse. Her fingers were delicate, more sparrow’s foot than human hand. I remembered my silent promise, to stay by her side. I hadn’t done this enough. I pressed my palm to hers, hoping to infuse her with my energy.

She looked into my eyes as if searching for something. “I’m worried about you, Penny. You need a way to manage your stress.”

“Unbelievable.” How could she worry about me?

“When I’m agitated, I paint.”

“Fine. Where’s a brush?”

“Seriously?”

I nodded.

“This should be good.” She settled back onto her pillows and told me where to find her supplies. To protect the floor, I grabbed a newspaper from her pile. “Not that one, I haven’t read it yet.” I took one from the recycling pile instead and tried to act confident as I dabbed a slim paintbrush in burnt sienna.

I stared at the wall but didn’t know where to start. Angela suggested adding another camel to the rolling sand dunes, but after a half hour my dromedary still looked like a humpbacked sawhorse. I added a smile to its face, in blue. Angela was kind enough not to break into painful spasms of laughter when I tossed the brush into the bathroom sink.

“Oh what the hell,” I said. “I’m not a painter.”

“No, you’re not.
I’m
a painter.”

When I went to pick up the newspapers, she grabbed my hand. The ferocity in her grip stunned me.

“What is it?”

Tears formed in her eyes, and her breathing grew shallow. “It also hurts me, you know. To watch you suffer. Penn—” My name choked off. “You’re starving.”

She let the gentle hiss of oxygen and the rhythm of deeper breaths steady her voice, then said, “You’ve got to find a way to feed yourself.”

“What I long for is the eagerness to meet life, the curiosity, the wonder that you feel when you can really move…”

—Martha Graham

My body knew what it was doing before my mind caught up. Still a bit winded from my run up the stairs, I strode to the desk where Bebe was shuffling papers and plunked down my fifteen dollars.

“I have to dance.”

She took a moment to study the face and haircut.

“Darling, it is so good to see you! And in one piece.” She reached for my hand and squeezed it, then motioned to a chair. “Sit, sit. I heard about the…well, your…and then DeLaval left…”

I winced.

“I’m so sorry, dearest, I was out of the country.”

Something seemed off about her. “You got your tooth fixed.”

“You cut your hair.” She shrugged. “We do what we can. So tell me what you’ve been up to.”

I had just suggested that my best friend consider suicide, that’s what. As good as it was to see my mentor again, holding still—holding a conversation—holding anything was torture. I needed to spill, not hold. To thrash, leap, bounce, and swing until anxiety loosened its grip on my body.

A tide of twittering adolescents washed into the reception area through the door of the back studio.

“Can we talk later?” I said. “It’s going to take me a while to get ready for class.”

“Adult intermediate? Penny, you started teaching that class when you were nineteen years old. Come back in the morning for the professional class.”

“Give me a break, Bebe. I haven’t danced in eight months.” My tone was sharper than intended and sliced through the buzz of conversation around us.

Bebe raised her meticulously drawn eyebrows. “Go on in.”

• • •

Stripped down to my leotard and sweats, I walked around Bebe’s front studio. Without their calluses, my soles felt as soft and sticky as a newborn’s.

I rested my hand on the barre in the back of the room. My body knew what to do: shoulder blades slid down the back, navel pressed upward and inward, hips squared off. This preparation, repeated mindlessly countless times in my life, rendered my body taut yet resilient. Fully engaged. Ready. I marveled at this. I massaged each sole against the floor, over and over, allowing the wood to suck away moisture and toughen the skin for the fight ahead.

Bebe clapped her hands and we arranged ourselves center floor. She began:
plié, relevé, bend again, and straighten
. Bebe never demonstrated; she spoke in shorthand augmented with small hand movements. But her voice and hands clicked my body back into a long dormant groove: I was a student of the dance.
Tendu, roll down through the foot, push away, and close
. I hadn’t been using my feet enough. All of those little muscles, tendons, and ligaments had gone stiff.
Flat-back, release, roll up, arch, hold, hold, return, swing down, swing up, plié, repeat
. Oh my god, Bebe, that felt great. Repeat, repeat—do it twenty more times. Nothing about everyday life offers the spine such sweet release.

When she moved us across the floor, I almost wept with the joy of it. Mauricio was wrong—I could dance! The galloping and skipping of aerobics had never satisfied; it left me feeling flat as an animated cartoon character with a thumping chest. Dance added shading, perspective, texture. I was at once tortoise and hare, antelope and inchworm, coyote and sailfish.

For ninety blessed minutes, I left my stress outside the door, and when class ended, I was in no rush to greet it. As the number of dancers in the studio thinned, I caught a glimpse of my body in the mirror. I saw those same intractable hips, yes, but my face glistened with the sweat of hard work and the joy of movement.

“Miss Penny, is that you?”

Behind me stood a petite black woman, no more than four foot ten, with dreadlocks in her hair and a diamond stud in her nose.

“I’m Jeannie Richards. I used to take your beginner class. Of course I was fifteen then.”

When I mentally subtracted six years, cropped her hair, and removed the stud, I found a face I recognized.

“Goodness, Jeannie, you’ve changed.”

“You haven’t. I mean, your hair is different, but I wouldn’t forget that body.”

I smiled and excused myself to cover that unforgettable yet quickly chilling body with a sweatshirt. Jeannie followed.

“I wanted to grow up to be just like you, but I stopped about a foot short,” Jeannie said. “So where’ve you been?”

Heat rose to my face. Desperation had precipitated my rush back to class. I wasn’t prepared for bumping into people I knew, hadn’t rehearsed a quick answer. “I took a break.”

“I heard about that night, you know, last winter. How awful.”

“I guess I’m trying to work my way back.”

She told me about a class she liked in Manayunk. André’s. “It’s a great workout. Thursdays at six. Maybe I’ll see you?”

“I thought I’d take Bebe’s improv tomorrow night.”

“Bebe hasn’t had that class for a while now.”

“But it was so popular.”

Jeannie shrugged. “I gotta run, but it was so good to see you again, Miss Penny.”

When I emerged from the studio, I found Bebe at her desk, catching up on paperwork. I flopped into the chair across the desk from hers.

“I thought you’d retired,” she said. “Or given up.”

“It was more like Dmitri hijacked my career.”

“So life’s a bitch and he’s a bastard. That’s no reason to turn your back on everything you are.”

“You don’t even know what happened.”

She shrugged. “This theme doesn’t have many variations. You fell in love with him and found out he was gay.”

I stood and gathered my things. Tears threatened. “If you think it was easy for me to come here tonight, you’re wrong. I am not in the mood for this, Bebe.”

“I apologize, darling. Sit.” She tipped her head toward the chair. “Enlighten me.”

I hesitated for a moment, but the release the dance class offered left me eager to rid myself of everything I’d dammed inside of me. I took the seat. “You know what it meant to me to get that job with Dance DeLaval. Dmitri saw me the way you did—the way others never could. The dancer I was on the inside. He gave me a chance, and when he saw what I could do, he promoted me to rehearsal assistant.”

“So he wasn’t completely without faculties.” Bebe punched numbers into a calculator while she spoke. I wasn’t going to go through the anguish of relating this story if she only planned to lend half an ear. I waited until she closed her attendance roster and checkbook and turned to me. “I’m sorry, darling. The back studio has a leaky pipe, and I’ve had to shuffle the schedule.”

“Can’t you get a plumber?”

“Sounds deceptively easy, but with plumbing this old you never know what it’s going to cost once they start fiddling with things. They remove one joint and break the next—but go ahead, I’m listening.”

“We had a huge piece due to premiere later that week, and since I was buried in final production details, Dmitri pulled me aside to say he worried about all the pressure on me. I figured he was being extra sweet because the night before I’d walked in on him having sex with—”

Bebe nodded as if she knew this part of the story. “A hidden boyfriend.”

“He is
not
gay, Bebe. Sometimes I think that would’ve been easier. She was in the company.”

“Ooh, that is extra sweet.”

“This was his bright idea: take on a new dancer. I said no way in hell. He said he’d already hired her. I said he couldn’t possibly have hooked up with a new dancer already, and he said Margaret MacArthur had recommended her. He said the new girl would take my role in
No
Brainer
for the premiere. I told him that was bullshit. He said it was his company. I said pull her. He said she’d already learned the steps. I said that after all I’d done for him he owed me my job. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. I stood, shaking—he’d taken everything. I begged him: Please, Dmitri, I need to dance.”

Bebe shook her head.

“My anger wasn’t fazing him, it was only hurting me. I knew the only way to get my life back was to forgive him. I was heading down the hallway toward the studio for that very reason when I overheard Dmitri’s voice. Turns out, I had happened upon a company meeting—one which I’d known nothing about.”

I moved to the window but couldn’t take the smell of dust on the blinds any more than the glare of the late-day sun reflecting from the windows across the street. I turned to look at the woman who had nurtured my love of modern dance. She stood with her arms crossed, caftan wrapped around her like a chrysalis. She gave nothing away in her face, but her voice was soft when she said, “Go on.”

• • •

It was the night before the New York premiere. I walked through the studio door, and they all looked up at me—Lars, Mitch, Tina, Karly, Dmitri, and the new girl—then, as if they’d choreographed it, they all looked back down to the floor.

Dmitri said, “Penny, we are in a meeting. Could you wait at home?”

I demanded to know what he was talking to them about. The air in the studio thickened until I could hardly breathe before Mitch said, “They’re heading toward Russia early. Next week.”

“That makes no sense,” I said. “You have a year left in your residency—”

“What do you mean,
they
?” Dmitri said, looking at Mitch.

“I can’t go,” Mitch said. “My marriage is on shaky ground as it is. Evan doesn’t want to raise our daughter in Russia. I can do the premiere tomorrow and that’s it.” I hated to see Mitch go. Of all the dancers, he’d been the kindest to me. So before he left the room, I gave him a hug—but he responded with only one arm and a weak pat on the back. As if he’d had a stroke.

Silence once again swelled within the room. I broke it.

“It’s a good thing I’m here, then. You’ll need me.” I read the confusion on Dmitri’s face as a translation problem. “Because I know all the roles.”

But he said, “Please Penny, I will talk to you at home.”

“You have it wrong, Dmitri. What’s between the company members should happen at the studio, and what’s between
us
should happen at home.” I glared at Tina as I said this, sure that by now all of them must know Dmitri had slept with her.

I waited for Dmitri to speak. He worked his mouth as if chewing words whose taste troubled him. “The company asked for this meeting without you. Lately, it is too intense in the air. They think it better if…if you do not come for the tour.”

“Then we’re lucky they’re not in charge, aren’t we?”

He paused. Too long.

“Dmitri?”

He took the time to commit fully to his next words, then finally sputtered: “I am not taking you, Penny.”

I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him into the office. I wanted to slam the door, to scream, to knee him in the groin, but I held it in. Someone had to take the lead and restore order. And I would not allow him to see my anguish. I searched his eyes for the man who called me his muse, who said he had fallen in love with dance when he saw me perform his movement.

With a level voice, I said, “Was this Tina’s idea?”

Dmitri shook his head as if he pitied me and with his next words imploded whatever slapdash foundation had been propping up my self-respect. “It is unanimous.”

I was already falling, but made one last attempt to reach back for him. “And this is what you want too, Dmitri? You would choose them over me?”

“I need the company. Offers to perform in Europe are coming. If I could see earlier what problems our relationship would cause, I never would have—”

“Don’t. Don’t finish that sentence.” I would not listen to him reduce what we’d had together to lack of foresight. I let myself crumble, then, and landed in the office chair.

“You can stay in the penthouse until you find a new place. I will pay you for two months.”

• • •

Bebe guffawed. “Guilt money.”

“I know. He always liked to think of the company as some big American corporation, but I had wanted it to be more like a family where everyone is loved for the part they bring to the whole.
No
Brainer
was like our baby, but I would never see its birth.”

“And that was it?” Bebe said.

“He said good-bye to me that night, and I sat motionless in his office chair until the studio lights went out and every faint sound of the retreating dancers had faded to silence. I left alone, feeling my way through the dark. When I got home, his stuff was gone.” I paused to honor my emptiness. “I never saw him again.”

I wanted Bebe to wrap me in the wings of her caftan, but comforting had never been her strong suit. She had sharper edges, and used them well to poke and prod and keep her dancers moving. She stood beside me at the window.

“He yanked out my heart and held it up so everyone could watch it wriggle. I lost everything.”

“No. It was Dmitri who lost everything. A parasite disengaged from its host has to move on, darling, in search of fresh blood. Have you been reading about the progress of his European tour?”

“Jeez, Bebe, I’m not that hard on myself.”

“Margaret MacArthur wrote a small update in the
Sentinel
last week. Seems that starting new relationships isn’t the only thing DeLaval does too quickly. The critics haven’t been kind. They say he’s lost focus. He wasn’t ready for that tour.”

I was surprised MacArthur would speak ill of her pet choreographer. Maybe she was more discerning than I’d given her credit for. Yet Dmitri’s failure didn’t make me feel any better. “Dmitri was the best thing that ever happened to me. I wanted so desperately to make him proud. His goals were big. Important.”

“Goodness, darling—if I felt my work had to be big to be important, I would have stopped teaching long ago.” Bebe turned to me and, to my surprise, took my face in her hands. “Listen to me. People do stupid things for love. But you don’t need to host a heartworm to know your creative blood has value. And there could be no stupider move in a life full of promise than jumping off a building.”

Shame dark as night swept through me. Angela fought so hard, every day, for her life. I tried to turn away, but Bebe held tight to my jaw, forcing me to look at her, until at last a tear slid from my eye to her hand.

“It hurt, Bebe. To lose Dmitri. And now I’m about to lose someone else I love.”