(2016)
My patient said to me “Look at my face, doctor! Look at it! Does this look like the face of a principal?!”
I hesitated. “No,” I said. “No it doesn’t. It looks like the face of a ghost.”
Her mouth was quivering and there may have been tears in her eyes, but who could know? I had sewn them mostly shut, just two black pearls floating sadly in her orbital sockets. Her voice was soft and innocent, pouring eerily out of her cadaverous face.
“I can’t go to auditions like this,” she wept. “I can’t emote with this brow!”
I warned her to be careful with her stitches. I said that Sometimes change makes us afraid to see truth, that her new face would be her face in no time. Wait until the swelling goes down. Drink some tea.
I turned toward the window while she dressed. In the time that it took me to jot down the line items for her invoice, she had come to radically accept her newness. She had found some value in the feeling that she might be able to strike something strange into people. Before I knew it she was down on the street. I could see her crawling into a yellow cab and heading toward the studio on Lexington & 85th, having thrown her yoga pants on under her paper gown, her dance bag on her shoulder.
I canceled my appointments for the rest of the day. “Tell them I have a family emergency,” I barked at my receptionist.
In a hallway crowded with limbering bodies, with 180 degree standing splits and side bends and hovering spider walks, she peered through the observation window of the sprung-floor studio with the to-die-for natural light and it called to her like a creatureless lake on a hot summer’s day. She wanted to strip down and dive in. She wanted to float weightlessly in all directions, plunge into the melody around her and release her sense of Up for an eight count, and then come bounding toward the light again, breathless, gasping for air on the surface. Dancing in her living room was no longer enough, she wanted to hear the gravel of the director’s voice as she barked out the tempo and turn kick ball change, pah! She wanted to stand blind in a spotlight, drawing out and eliminating the last bit of weakness from her center pillar, laying it all down for the hungry eyes of her audience to lap up. I could tell.
With her limited peripheral vision, my patient didn’t notice me, not until I stepped up beside her and placed my hands atop hers, hoping that she would remember that they were warm and soft, expert, sought after, that they had done precisely what she had asked them to do; she had wanted to be unique and unforgettable. Looking at the twee bodies topped with well-boned and tight-skinned faces that lined the hallway, I knew that I had done good. If not good, then genius.
At one end of the audition studio was a plastic folding table with a banker’s lamp and a vase of white lilies. Three judges sat with their Styrofoam cups of coffee, chatting and reviewing resumes while they waited for the first auditionee to be let in. One of the judges’ faces was obscured by the flowers, only hir tweed jacket and hir hands illuminated by the glow of the lamp.
My patient didn’t know when her turn would be. She put on her sweat clothes. She stretched her hip flexors. She wiped drool from her chin, still coming down from of the heavy sedatives I had given her. She ignored the moment of heartbreak that flashed across the other dancers’ faces when they looked at her, her empty eyes flirting with their darkest sadness.
Together we watched the first dancer. She moved like water, not a lump or a joint out of line. We both stiffened as she turned her head again to spot in her triple pirouette. She was a textbook bunhead who’d let her hair down to appear more free. When I was a boy, I loved the ballet. I thought the dancers so beautiful, their limbs had such weightless elegance. Effortless. Alien. I wanted my mother to be one so badly! But she was fat, she labored with every movement. I hated her.
The second dancer danced just as well, a full inversion dropping her into a controlled tuck-roll that sprang up into another inversion like a men’s gymnast finalist on the uneven bars. Her feet pointed in a masterly way, as if they knew everything about dancing but weren’t out to make a show of it. When she did a lateral leap, one leg en passe, the other spinning on her axis and providing her power, it seemed like she would never come down again. She was born with it. The sight of her talent made my patient’s low gut tumble with nerviness.
The third dancer was just a speck of a thing, and somehow that made every movement appear larger and penetrating, a child claiming her womanhood each time her head rolled on her shoulders sensually, every unexpected degage a kick into growth. Her floor acrobatics evoked something between a freak show contortionist and a practitioner of kama sutra. On and on the dancers all moved along the same spectrum of flawlessness, inflecting their perfection with the glimmer of personality required for Art.
Because she had registered so late, my patient was among the last to be called. When it was finally her turn, she tightened the laces on her jazz shoes, adjusted her legwarmers, and made sure that the rise on her hi-cut leotard was in place, not showing too much. She gave her shell-like curly hair one last fluff, slung her black leather bag over her shoulder and stepped into the studio. Immediately the judges took notice—she had a dancer’s form and posture, like the countless hopefuls that had come before her, but something was different. Her face was featureless, it was melting, shifting, hard to pin down.
My fearless patient walked across the floor in full possession of her body. She pulled a vinyl record out of her purse and shakingly applied the needle to it.
Late nights she had found herself twirling, pushing her spine in new awkward motions, recommending herself to be graceful and daring. She had been working on this piece beyond all reason, embarrassingly in love with the feeling of one hand being lifted with the first chord and then falling into a chanet around the back with the next. She found strength in her navel and this gave her peace.
She was hitting her choreo perfectly, and it was her own gritty blend of precision and power and threat. She had danced it so many times, but today it lit a new light in her, it burned truer. I had ruined her face but I hadn’t removed it, and it still hung there like a fist bursting through every note, moving with the agony of each eight-count. She was thirty-four. This was the first time that the expression on her face seemed to come from the same well of memory that moved her body through the world in its haunting way. Finally, it was the face of the troubled life that she had been living, a face that called to her heartache like a psychic calls to the dead.
She had come to me fed-up, in need of something to tip the scales after all of these years of dancing with no one to watch it. She wanted cheek implants, maybe some rhinoplasty. I suggested freestyle, and she hesitantly obliged. I knew watching her through the observation window—the sun starting its descent toward night, the obscured judge’s hands clasped together passionately—I knew I had given her a wonderful gift.
The audition was going well. Even the harder to impress judges were faintly smiling, their eyes glossy with emotion. The obscured judge sat at the edge of hir seat. Ze loved the show, ze loved my patient on the dance floor. Nothing could stop her, she had such a feeling. What a feeling.
As the song reached its climax, the vocalist nearing the peak of her range, my patient employed a move that she’d only toyed with in rehearsals, thinking it maybe too bold or too gimmicky, too aggressive for a company that plays it safe most seasons. After a series of fouette turns into an arabesque leap towards the judge’s table, my patient addressed her audience. She took a bouncing stance in front of Judge #1, pointed her finger at them and set her beady black eyes on theirs. Even from where I stood at the observation window, I could see Judge #1 prick up the back, unable to turn away from the abstraction of a face that beamed towards hir, the blurry sketch of a human that I had created. The judge was afraid, not of my patient per se, but of her possibility. Wouldn’t she die of loneliness?
Judge #2 covered hir mouth with hir hand and tried hard to look away from my patient’s indistinct features, worried that staring too long might ruin everything. Judge #2 had always believed that in form was divinity, and here was that notion slowly coming apart, like the two sides of a hand-sewn seam moving their opposite ways.
My patient was nearing the end of her drama, sweat clustering under the breasts in her leotard. She backed away with a box step and took a swaying stance mid-floor, a wearied ungulate stabilizing after a fight. A visible fleck of energy ran up from the floor through her body, toes, knees, hips, ribs, and forced her arms into the air in a stick-up. As her fingers pulled streaks down the imaginary window in front of her, the judges started to sweat, as if the glass might break, releasing her hysterical figure onto them.
The obscured judge reached hir arms across the table and grabbed the lip of it with both hands, the brass buttons on hir blazer glistening under the light of the lamp. Watching that judge, I felt I was seeing a disaster averted. Weeks ago I had been enjoying an iced coffee on a crisp spring day uptown. Taking little sips of its cold creaminess through my straw, I had stopped to admire the emerging signs of growth in the tree boxes and all around me. A smile on my face, I heard the distinct sound of a 27 year old lawyer driving a Maserati, whipping it up the avenue without caution. Instinctively frightened, I looked up and saw a young woman wheeling a le bjorn baby carriage in one hand, clutching her older charge’s wrist in the other, asking the child perhaps what she would like for snack that day, or if she liked the flowers in the ground, paying very little attention to where she was going, having walked the same path to the park every other day for the past 29 days. I saw that she didn’t notice the Maserati starting to take a sharp turn onto the street where the wheels of the baby carriage were just now beginning to roll into, or the walk sign abruptly turning into a blinking orange hand. I swallowed my coffee and was just about to yell out when something miraculous happened. Behind her a fellow nanny friend called her name. “Asla!” she yelled, waving her free arm. “Asla, what’s up you bitch!” she said smiling. Asla turned to look and drew the carriage back with her, only moments before the Maserati entered the crosswalk.
This was the miracle that was developing as my patient dripped her hands down the air, panting. That the obscured judge saw hir baby saved in my patient was clear. My freestyle surgery had turned out differently than I had imagined. Whatever I thought was unique and peculiar had only been given a body, and my patient was very brave to put it on.