water and it’s easy to float, isn’t it? If you let yourself, floating is the most natural thing in the world.
One song fades and another begins. The melody is different but once again I feel the beat beneath the notes. This must be what they call musicality and everyone says it’s the hardest thing to learn. You can’t practice it alone in your foyer, the way I practice the steps. Musicality is spontaneous, like God. It’s either there when you need it or it’s not.
At one point Nik slips behind me, pressing his chest into my back. This is what they call shadow hold, a high Bronze step or maybe even Silver, and I’m tentative at first but then quickly confident. Sure that the floor is there and Nik is there and that the world is safe and steady. I step forward and he turns me. I step again, we turn again, and we fall into a pattern that I cannot see but that I imagine to be like a braid, like two people weaving their way across the room. For a split second, life seems easy. For a split second, I’m rapturous.
“What do you call this step?” I ask him.
His voice is close to my right ear. “Waterfall,” he says.
“That’s right. I remember.”
“We have never done.”
We stop. Nik pulls my blindfold down and I blink.
“Better,” he says.
I grin. I know I earned that “better.”
When I walk to the couch to get my purse, my eye drags by the clock. We’ve gone over. It’s ten minutes after three and Nik never goes over. A minute is money in this business. Every minute is two dollars.
The room is empty. No one else on the floor and no one at the desk. Nik seems surprised too. He turns the music off abruptly, not fading it out in that deejay way like he usually does, and he heads straight across the dance floor. There’s a room somewhere in the back where the instructors take their showers and eat their lunches, a cot where they nap between lessons. I sign the schedule on Quinn’s desk as I walk out. It’s not like Nik to forget to say good-bye or confirm the time of our next appointment, but then it’s not like him to go over either.
As I slide into my car seat, I realize I still have the scarf around my neck. It’s such a strange thing for Nik to have in a drawer. The edge says Hermès, and while it’s probably one of those fakes that you can buy in the straw market of Nassau or on some side street in New York, it’s still somebody’s scarf. I pull the visor down and study myself in the mirror. It’s tied badly, one big knot in the back like a noose, but it’s nice and I don’t know why I never wear scarves. I should get one like this, in a mix of blues and greens.
The studio is silent when I walk back in. I start to put the scarf in Nik’s drawer, but that’s presumptuous, to just go into his little cubicle and mess with his desk. Quinn would know what to do with it, but her desk is on the other side of the room and now that I’ve held it in my hands for a few minutes, it’s dawning on me that perhaps this scarf is a true Hermès, because the pattern is exactly as clear on the back as on the front. In fact, there is no back or front. It isn’t hemmed, it’s carefully rolled at the edges so that both sides are completely identical.
I was wrong about it being a knockoff. Nik blindfolded me with someone’s five-hundred-dollar scarf. This is not the sort of thing a woman would leave behind by accident and I can’t just drop it on a desk by the front door. I can’t stuff it into some random drawer and I sure as hell can’t take it home with me.
I start toward the back room. Nik is probably in there, having his snack or maybe lying down on the cot. I’m holding the scarf out in front of me like it might bite and I’m at the door before I really think about what I’m doing.
One step in the room and I see them. Nik and Pamela.
They aren’t embracing. They’re standing very close and although Nik stands close to everyone, although people touching other people is pretty much
One song fades and another begins. The melody is different but once again I feel the beat beneath the notes. This must be what they call musicality and everyone says it’s the hardest thing to learn. You can’t practice it alone in your foyer, the way I practice the steps. Musicality is spontaneous, like God. It’s either there when you need it or it’s not.
At one point Nik slips behind me, pressing his chest into my back. This is what they call shadow hold, a high Bronze step or maybe even Silver, and I’m tentative at first but then quickly confident. Sure that the floor is there and Nik is there and that the world is safe and steady. I step forward and he turns me. I step again, we turn again, and we fall into a pattern that I cannot see but that I imagine to be like a braid, like two people weaving their way across the room. For a split second, life seems easy. For a split second, I’m rapturous.
“What do you call this step?” I ask him.
His voice is close to my right ear. “Waterfall,” he says.
“That’s right. I remember.”
“We have never done.”
We stop. Nik pulls my blindfold down and I blink.
“Better,” he says.
I grin. I know I earned that “better.”
When I walk to the couch to get my purse, my eye drags by the clock. We’ve gone over. It’s ten minutes after three and Nik never goes over. A minute is money in this business. Every minute is two dollars.
The room is empty. No one else on the floor and no one at the desk. Nik seems surprised too. He turns the music off abruptly, not fading it out in that deejay way like he usually does, and he heads straight across the dance floor. There’s a room somewhere in the back where the instructors take their showers and eat their lunches, a cot where they nap between lessons. I sign the schedule on Quinn’s desk as I walk out. It’s not like Nik to forget to say good-bye or confirm the time of our next appointment, but then it’s not like him to go over either.
As I slide into my car seat, I realize I still have the scarf around my neck. It’s such a strange thing for Nik to have in a drawer. The edge says Hermès, and while it’s probably one of those fakes that you can buy in the straw market of Nassau or on some side street in New York, it’s still somebody’s scarf. I pull the visor down and study myself in the mirror. It’s tied badly, one big knot in the back like a noose, but it’s nice and I don’t know why I never wear scarves. I should get one like this, in a mix of blues and greens.
The studio is silent when I walk back in. I start to put the scarf in Nik’s drawer, but that’s presumptuous, to just go into his little cubicle and mess with his desk. Quinn would know what to do with it, but her desk is on the other side of the room and now that I’ve held it in my hands for a few minutes, it’s dawning on me that perhaps this scarf is a true Hermès, because the pattern is exactly as clear on the back as on the front. In fact, there is no back or front. It isn’t hemmed, it’s carefully rolled at the edges so that both sides are completely identical.
I was wrong about it being a knockoff. Nik blindfolded me with someone’s five-hundred-dollar scarf. This is not the sort of thing a woman would leave behind by accident and I can’t just drop it on a desk by the front door. I can’t stuff it into some random drawer and I sure as hell can’t take it home with me.
I start toward the back room. Nik is probably in there, having his snack or maybe lying down on the cot. I’m holding the scarf out in front of me like it might bite and I’m at the door before I really think about what I’m doing.
One step in the room and I see them. Nik and Pamela.
They aren’t embracing. They’re standing very close and although Nik stands close to everyone, although people touching other people is pretty much
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