Dances, p.21
Dances, page 21
And I hate to admit it, even to myself, but I am sad. Ryn was right when she said that Jasper has always been an asshole, but it was a part of him I thought I understood. Both of us compulsively choose our careers first. I always assumed there’d be time later for us to choose each other first. I thought him asking me to move in with him was a step in that direction. I’ve always known he would occasionally disappoint me, but I didn’t ever think he’d lie. I head to the Sickle to do yoga, but I find myself staring out into the ocean instead. The waves roll forward and pull back. I close my eyes and I can feel my body swaying subtly. When I open my eyes again they are damp.
My second cousin runs her hair salon out of her house, a watery blue cottage in a neighborhood full of wiry weeds and split asphalt. It is not until she ushers me inside that I realize that she only does braids. Typically, for work, my hair has to be slicked back, so I keep it straightened. I’ve never had extensions, and I haven’t let it go natural since I was a small child. But I find myself eager for something new. As she washes my hair, working shampoo into my scalp with blunt fingers, she tells me the family lore—apparently, I have a great-grandmother who was married thirteen times—and about our family’s Gullah heritage. She encourages me to check out Ebe, a section of Pinckney thick with Gullah history and culture.
The hooded hair dryer encases me in a cocoon of heat and white noise, and I feel that sadness again, the loneliness. My mind is too loud in here, so I try scrolling through Instagram to distract myself. But I can’t bear the images of everyone working, everyone dancing. The photo of Jasper diving artfully into a pool. The air under the hood of the dryer is too hot, too close. I put my phone away.
I almost welcome the pain of my cousin braiding my hair. She deftly divides it into tiny sections, and then briskly braids in ombré Kanekalon hair—my cousin’s recommendation, as I know jack shit about weave—pulling at my scalp to keep each braid tight. She is largely quiet now, watching television as she works—a marathon of a dance competition. I wonder if she’s put this on for my benefit. I hate this kind of show, but I find myself becoming absorbed. There is a Black woman on the show, a hip-hop dancer, who, despite having no formal training, is slaying every routine they give her, and yet the judges keep finding things to disapprove of. My hair is finished in the middle of the penultimate episode, and the Black woman has not been eliminated, but I’d be surprised if she wins.
I am now crowned with long braids that are black at the roots and fade to a tawny red by the time they reach the middle of my back. They are as firm as beads, and the parts in my hair allow air to lick at my scalp. My cousin will not let me pay her, but she asks if she can take pictures of me to use on her Instagram. I agree, posing normally, and then in an arabesque. When I leave, my scalp is still vaguely throbbing, and the braids are heavy and tight. But there is a part of me that likes the pain. It is like an invisible brand. Everything it sears is mine.
[pas de caractère]
It is my last day in South Carolina. My time here has been dreamy, slow. But, already, my big, loud, real life is intruding, chipping away at the quiet illusion. I do and do not want to leave. I’ve enjoyed the quiet, the sleepy pace, the still-breathing hope of finding my brother. But I miss the dancing. It is an acute craving; my body aches for the long days of movement, the repetition, the stage.
I decide to follow my second cousin’s advice and check out Ebe. My roots, through my father, are Gullah, and the new ballet is based on a Gullah story, so this seems a fitting way to spend my last day, a neat transition out of this interlude. I am heavy with not having found Paul. Part of me is afraid that I may have scared him deeper into hiding by coming here. In a strange way, Ebe feels like the best I’ll get. Like somehow I’ll be dipping into a vein Paul is also dipping into, and it’ll be almost like we’ve reached each other at last.
Ebe is all oystershell walkways, haint blue porches to ward off evil spirits, old folks weaving sweetgrass baskets under live oaks. I buy a couple of strip quilts for myself and Ryn, a basket for Kaz. I try to relax. At every moment I feel I am on the brink of either tears or a mortal scream. We can never go back. Even if Paul were to let me find him, he’d never again be the Paul of my childhood, the Paul of his good moments. If I’ve found anything here in South Carolina it’s this hard light: We can never go back. Even now, when I go back to New York, nothing will be the same. Because Ryn has found something she loves more than dance. Because Jasper and I are over. And because I have this overwhelming role to fill, this historic role, this bigger-than-me role. Dance is self-sacrifice for the sake of art, but this—Black ballerina—is self-immolation. I can never go back. I wouldn’t want to.
I don’t have any particular destination in mind as I wander around the narrow paths. I have found, in the past, that this is the best way to explore. I pass shops, a clapboard Geechee museum, a couple of nondescript restaurants. People wave to me from their stoops, their yards, their smiles open and uncomplicated. Ebe is colorful, teeming with vibrancy, and not just because of the rag quilts, the haint blue shutters and doors, the bright paintings hanging in shopwindows. But also because of the graffiti—street art, really—that covers a good number of the public buildings, the ground where there is sidewalk instead of oystershells.
I stop. The graffiti is some of the most beautiful I’ve seen, even in New York, or San Francisco, or Paris, Lisbon, Buenos Aires. It uses color in unexpected ways; it plays with space and dimension. And most of it has clearly been made by the same hand. I am staring at the side of a restaurant called, simply, Gullah Barbecue. The side of the plain white building bears a likeness of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, only Venus’s skin is a deep, rich brown, her wild, nappy hair reaches up toward the pink sky, the ocean churns, turquoise, beneath the golden shell and all around her. It stops me because it reminds me of why I love art—its complexity, its prismatic humanity. It stops me because, somehow, with only a spray can, the artist has managed to create the impression that the whole thing has emerged from a wild mass of black sketch lines.
It is tagged in the lower right-hand corner, but graffiti tags are notoriously, and deliberately, unreadable. My heart pounding, I barge into the little restaurant. For some reason, I expected the place to be empty, or nearly so, but it is actually quite busy, it being around lunchtime. Even though my stomach is far too unsettled for food now, I get in line. There is a single, harried-looking man behind the counter, and I don’t want to irritate him when he’s handling so many customers.
As people come in, I shoo them ahead of me in line, which is met with equal parts gratitude and suspicion. The restaurant, as it turns out, is popular, and judging by the heavenly smells coming from the kitchen, and the generous portions of delicious-looking food I see piled onto Styrofoam plates, this is not unearned. When it is finally my turn at the counter, the man behind it is sweating, his eyes hooded and somewhat amused.
“You hungry, miss? Or you just like standing in line?” He does something funny with his vowels, scoops them out so they’re rounded at the bottom.
Smiling sheepishly, I order a homemade lemonade, and then I ask, “That mural outside—do you know who did it?”
For just a fraction of a second, I think I see something furtive and knowing skitter across his face, but it’s gone before I can be sure I’ve seen it, and his features are settled into friendly neutrality.
“Not a clue, miss,” he says. “Graffiti like that going up all around here. Got the old folks fired up. Some of us don’t mind so much.” He shrugs.
“But something like that,” I point back outside, “couldn’t be just thrown up overnight. It had to have taken days—somebody had to have seen him.”
“Didn’t say I ain’t seen him. Just said I ain’t know who he was.”
He’s smiling faintly, the look of mild amusement back, and I get the sense he’s trying to give me something.
“Do you,” I ask carefully, “know what he looks like?”
“No ma’am,” he says.
I deflate a little. I was mistaken. He was not trying to give me anything. No one in this town is trying to give me anything. No one is going to give me my brother. I thank the man and retreat to sip my lemonade in a far corner. I drink it so quickly I give myself a brain freeze. It is saccharine. I can feel the man behind the counter watching me from the corner of his eye. I swear I even spot a couple of the kitchen workers peeking out at me. I gulp the too-sweet lemonade down and get out of there.
The street art is undoubtedly Paul’s work. The sketch lines give it away. The penchant for human subjects, the emphasis on movement, the playfulness in the color, the scaling, the light and shadow all give it away. I can’t read Paul’s name in his tag, but I know it’s him. I know his work as well as I know his face. There’s the kerchiefed woman on the side of a pharmacy, the stylized line of Maasai walking with lions across the back of a bodega. A small bouquet of eyes on a low wall, a young girl stepping through the door of a brownstone into a jungle, a child climbing a bookshelf, a woman with African features and rainbow-colored skin.
There are more plays on classical paintings—The Girl with a Pearl Earring as a Black woman with a hoop earring; The Creation of Adam with God and Adam both pitch-black; a class of little Black dancers, after Degas; The Dance of the Muses with an African village in the background; a wildly painted, black-and-white rendition of Little Dancer of Fourteen Years. That one in particular speaks to me directly. I have always been Paul’s little dancer. I still am, I guess. At least part of me is tucked away safe for him. A part of me that can’t be consumed by my career. Paul’s little dancer is a form in the midst of black chaos, her stance—hands behind her back, feet in a lazy fourth position with hips thrust forward and chin thrust up, as in the Degas—both recalcitrant and approval-seeking. Okay, Paul, I think. It’s enough. It’s enough for now. I place my hand on her little turned-out foot. I pull my hand away. There is black smeared on my fingertips.
VI
LE DANSEUR
It started as a normal day. All the predictability and lack of potential he rigidly clung to. Xavian woke up at 5:45 in the morning to the vibrant strings of Paganini coming from the Bluetooth alarm clock across the studio. He didn’t turn it off right away—he never did. Instead, he let Caprice No. 24 play as he made his bed with military sharpness. He frowned at the little crimson smudges on his crisp, white sheets. He’d been careless the night before. He had to do a better job of washing his hands when he got home.
Paganini turned into Shostakovich as he sat on the floor with his charcoals. If he didn’t do this with his hands, they itched to do other things, more destructive things. Even after four years, the longing was still bare, a stark opening within him. He could barely even remember his first year in South Carolina.
He sketched for one hour exactly, and only then did he turn the music off. In silence, he went to his freezer, retrieved the bottle of vodka he kept there. It was unopened, coated in frost, the alcohol inside thickened, nearly a syrup. He imagined what it would be like to finally open this bottle, to bring it to his mouth, to tip the cold liquid into his throat, the icy burn of it, and then the warmth, the relaxing, the heat spreading into that stark opening, shoring it up, making that place strong.
He imagined holding the ice-cold bottle in one hand and a joint in the other, alternating between the two. The antiseptic burn of the alcohol followed by the stinging burn of the pot. The weed would make his vision do that varifocal thing, where it zoomed in and out, in and out, blurring the edges around whatever he was looking at. It made him lose his balance, made his heart race like he was constantly falling, and he wouldn’t want to crush the Oxy between his teeth—because he would’ve sworn that the last time was his last time—but he would, and the incomparable pleasure would come rushing in like sweet, sweet water. But the euphoria would fade, and he’d have to take an Adderall just to stay awake, and it would get him through the day; he could usually make it someplace safe before the crippling anxiety came, punching the strength right out of him, leaving him sweating and gasping for breath. And there was only one way out of this, only one way to get the world to stop rising all around him like a tsunami, threatening to crush him into ashes: a pint of something strong.
And so on.
He put the vodka back in the freezer, checked the day off on the magnetic calendar. This month was all checkmarks, no gaps. It had been this way for three years, nine months.
* * *
Watching: The cap always felt cold against his latex-gloved fingers, and his back had felt wide open the whole time; anyone could be watching. He had to move quickly on the eyelashes so they didn’t drip. The reflection of light in the irises a deft flick of his wrist. Every blink takes a split-second-size bite out of you, the curtain dropping again and again. His back felt wide open, but the eyes in front of him stared without blinking.
* * *
Pat usually delivered fresh seafood early in the morning, before he set up shop for the day down at the marina. But Pat had recently hurt his back, and so Rey had to go down to the marina himself to pick up the fish. This meant Xavian had to open the place up, which he hated because it meant he had to do the liquor inventory, but he would never complain to Rey. Xavian all but owed Rey his life.
The day was already hot—Xavian sweated as he took the chairs down from the tabletops, mixed the day’s first batch of lemonade, which Rey insisted they sweeten to within an inch of its life. He heard Clement come in, knew it was Clement because he could hear the tinny trap music coming from the man’s earphones. He stepped out so Clement could see him, and the other man smiled in greeting, his hooded eyes friendly, faintly mischievous.
“Up late painting the town red?” asked Clement.
“Rey wants you to do the liquor inventory, man.”
“Damn,” Clement said.
Xavian smiled to himself as he moved deeper into the kitchen, his true domain. Technically, Rey was the executive chef, but really, he let Xavian rule the back of the house. Here, he danced a dance made entirely by him, set at exactly his pace. The line cooks began to come in and he greeted them as he worked, never pausing, never slowing. He loved the sounds of the kitchen—the skiss-thwap of knives cutting through onions and hitting the cutting board, the pelagic whoosh of the taps, the hiss of things frying, things sautéing, things changing shape and texture, transforming, deepening. This was not the fanciest kitchen he’d ever worked in, nor the biggest or most well-known. But he was free here.
Rey arrived and beckoned to him. Xavian thought Rey was going to take him to help unload the seafood, but instead, Rey led him to the storeroom, ushering him inside and closing the door behind them, adjusting his baseball cap.
“What’s up?” Xavian asked, growing a bit wary.
“Your sister, that’s what,” said Rey, his dark face glittering with sweat.
The room seemed to swell like a great, anaphylactic throat, the walls squeezing in. “Shit. She’s here?”
Rey nodded. “Now, she’s asking for Paul.”
The swelling stalled. He’d been going by his middle name for years. Everyone here knew him as Xavian. Everyone except Rey, who’d figured him out right away—they’d met a few times as children, when his father used to drag him and his mother down here to see Grandma Ondine.
“But,” Rey was saying, “she’s got a picture. All that scruff you got now ain’t going to hide you forever.”
Paul was silent for a long time, trying to take in air even though there was a storm inside him.
Rey sucked his teeth. “Well?” he said. “What you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Rey sucked his teeth again. “What you mean you don’t know? That poor girl is dying to find you. She’s your sister.”
Paul looked down at his hands, scarred and large and forever stained by charcoal and paint. How they used to shake when he didn’t get what he needed. He used to try and hide it from little Cece. “Did you talk to her?”
“No. I saw her asking about you down at the marina and came to tell you about it.”
Paul gnawed at a hangnail. “How did she figure out where I am?”
He was asking himself more than anything. She’d been so young the last time they came here, he didn’t think she’d remember it. They didn’t keep in touch with this part of the family. Even their father didn’t—not since Grandma Ondine died. And he never told anyone where he was going. He’d left their mother a note, but it was vague—Be back when I’m something better than me. A melodramatic line pinched, in part, from Curtis Mayfield.
“Why not give all this up and go speak with her?” Rey said. “You’re clean. What you still doing hiding?”
He was clean, but was he better? He scraped a fleck of paint from the meat of his thumb. “Look,” he said, “can you take care of her, man? Make sure she’s all right?”
“You really ain’t going to go see her?”
“I don’t know, man. I gotta think. Will you make sure she’s all right?”
Rey nodded slowly. “I’ll bring her to the cookout. She’s family, after all.”
Paul was sure that last bit was pointed, but he let it go. He thanked Rey, clapped him on the back, and returned to the kitchen, the noise he loved so well distant now, like he was hearing it from outside.
* * *
Color: Two of the most complicated applications of the color theory they teach you in art school are blackness and skin. Blackness absorbs the visible spectrum and does not deign to reflect it back. It is not, itself, on the visible spectrum. Most of what you think is black cannot, in fact, be so. Painting blackness is an exercise in light and shadow, value and hue. And skin is never what we call it—white, black, olive, tan. It is a cacophony of color that must be built. A rainbow is also a cacophony of color. He’d always thought it was an oversimplification to say that race is about the color of one’s skin. Take that away—be a rainbow—and they’d just hate you for your nose instead. Your lips. The way you spoke. The way you danced.
