The Unmaking of a Dancer by Joan Brady

Author:Joan Brady [Brady, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849839549
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

13

There is a basic fear in human beings of losing balance, doubtless related to the fear of falling, and so it is that pirouettes are a dancer’s trick step, defying, as they do, the natural order of things. Like all tricks, once mastered they give the performer an undeniable exhilaration, a sense of freedom from mundane things, a sheer, sensual joy in movement.

ONE FALL MORNING – the air had a freshness to it, a bite unfamiliar to a Californian like me – I saw Dexter far ahead of me on the street. I had been thinking about him, as I allowed myself to do from time to time, rationing out such periods of indulgence like sugar coupons in a crisis, and at first I was sure the figure I saw was only a convenient stranger, transformed by the intensity of my imaginings into the object of them. But no, there he was. That was his walk and that was his hair and those were his clothes. Cream-coloured trousers, light-tan jacket and black T-shirt: nobody else dressed like that then, particularly in October. I ran after him and touched his shoulder. He was out to buy wineglasses to go with the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding his wife was cooking, for he did have a wife. Her name was Christina Malman, and she was a New Yorker artist.

I knew little about Christina. I had met her when I was eight and coming back from England through New York. She was more interested in Judy, who had some graphic talent, than in me, who was interested only in Dexter. My mother disliked her intensely and spoke of her slightingly, but she spoke that way of any of ‘Dexter’s women’, as she called them. One Christmas, Christina sent us one of her drawings, a portrait of her younger sister in puff sleeves, a delicate rendition. My mother threw it away. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said, ‘that woman makes me want to throw up. I’m tired of’ – and her voice took on a mincing tone – ‘sensitive people. The “we sensitive few”. To hell with them.’

I rescued the picture from the garbage can and it lay in my bottom drawer for years; I packed it in preparation for the New York trip, and hung it in my room at the Studio Club. Christina was not well, I knew that, although I did not know precisely what was the matter with her. There had been hospitalizations and doctors, and my mother pursed her lips angrily whenever the matter came up. As for my plans, they did not include Christina, but they did not necessarily exclude her, either. She was, after all, a part of Dexter.

I knew of a good glassware store. Dexter bought six wineglasses there and took me to lunch. We went to the Palm, on Second Avenue at Forty-fifth Street. We drank dry martinis together, two of them, and we ate poached eggs on corned beef hash. I cannot remember a single

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