Page 25 of Barre Fight
Hello, Justin – I hope you like how this turned out. I think it should get you where you want to go.
Regards, Ivy.
He stared for a few seconds at the sign-off.Regards,Ivy. He supposed it accurately reflected the fragile, mutually necessary truce they’d arrived at a few days ago. But it looked chilly on the screen. And she hadn’t been chilly on their walk. Well, neither of them had been chilly, it had been thirty degrees and they’d been out in the bush for two hours, with the trees providing only patchy shade from the February sun.
Still, once she’d gotten over her surprise that this was how he liked to spend his precious afternoons off, they’d settled into an easy rhythm, walking beside each other on the uneven track he knew so well. She’d come with a long list of questions, and he’d tried to remember that it was in his best interest to answer them in as much detail as he could, even when her follow-up questions had follow-up questions. But it had felt more like a conversation than their previous attempts at an interview. She’d smiled when he’d joked about broccoli, and had laughed when he lamented how unfair it was that foam rolling worked as well as it did. Her suggestion of a neutral territory had been a stroke of genius, even if the place he’d suggested was somewhere she’d never been before. Being out in the bush always made him feel calmer, and so did moving his body. Plus, Ivy was a lot easier to talk to when she wasn’t jotting down everything he said and did on that bloody notepad.
At one point, the track had narrowed so much that there wasn’t quite enough room for the two of them to walk without their bodies touching. Her arm had bumped into his a few times, and the third time it happened, she’d glanced up at him with wide eyes. Her cheeks were pink with the heat and the exertion, and sweat had glued a few strands of her hair to her temples. In the dappled light, her eyes looked moss-green, and they were full of surprise, or alarm, or something, as she looked up at him. Justin was struck, not for the first time since they’d met years ago, by how pretty she was, even when she looked like she was desperate for a cool shower and an ice-cold beer.
“I’ll just walk behind you,” she’d muttered, and before he could object she’d stepped behind him and cleared her throat. Then she resumed her questions, and they kept walking.
Regards, Ivy.Chilly. Or just professional. Which was appropriate, given she’d sent it from her work email address. He pulled his eyes away from her signature and scrolled down, then read the newsletter article she’d forwarded him.
She’d done a very good job, he thought. He sounded like himself, but also like the person they both knew the company needed him to be right now. Upstanding. At peace in nature. In a complicated committed relationship with his foam roller. It helped that he was all those things, but Ivy had made him sound like the best version of himself, and she’d leaned heavily on what he’d told her about why he liked dancing “If Love.” The subtext in her writing was clear: it would be an awful shame if he didn’t get to perform it in New York after all.
Great job, Justin typed in the reply field. Then he erased it.Good job. No.Nice job. Or how about—he hit send, unwilling to agonize any further over an email to a colleague, hoping he had matched her tone. And hoping that the hours they’d spent together would pay off. He needed this to work. They both did.
ChapterSix
It hadn’t worked.
A week later, Ivy was still fielding calls from journalists about the “Pointe Shoe Punch” and the “Tutu TKO.” The papers were really having a field day with this story. Every time her phone rang and Ivy delivered her now-well worn line directing the reporter to the company’s official statement and refusing further comment, she wanted to scream.Nowthere was interest in stories about the arts? And never mind that traditionally, men didn’t dance on pointe or wear tutus. Tabloids never let the facts that get in the way of a good pun.
Ivy had tried to pitch alternative coverage to some of the more sensible outlets, ones she thought could be relied on to cover the upcoming tour to New York, or a lifestyle-oriented story about how Heather Hays was juggling motherhood with her dancing career. (Childcare. The answer was childcare and a husband who didn’t expect her to do the bulk of the work of parenting.)
But no one was interested. Now, the coverage of the “Nutcracker Knockout”—Ivy had rolled her eyes especially hard at that one—had moved from the news pages to the opinionsection. What did the incident say about modern masculinity, columnists asked. Why did today’s young men, even the ones who had been raised to express themselves through the arts, still ultimately resort to violence? What did this mean for the women of ballet, who were held to much higher standards of talent, skill, and behaviour than the men were? Forget death by a thousand cuts, this was death by a thousand think pieces.
Ivy got it, really she did; the contrast between the refined, mannered performance of a ballet dancer on stage and the unleashed aggression Justin had displayed in that bar, it was hard for reporters and readers to resist. But it had been weeks now, and it was time for this story to die. It would die faster if Ivy could just secure some other coverage.
More worrying than the persistent press attention was the news from the membership department. Deb, who oversaw the company’s subscriptions, seemed to be receiving just as many calls as Ivy was, but she was hearing from longtime subscribers who were threatening to withhold their support unless the company issued an official apology, or “disciplined” Justin.
Em didn’t have a subscription—she’d happily accept a free press ticket to a ballet performance when Ivy had one to spare, but on principle, she didn’t spend her money on ballet—but she agreed with those angry subscribers. Let Justin suffer the consequences of his actions, she’d argued a few days ago, when Ivy had vented her frustrations over text during her lunch break, and stop trying so hard to save him from himself.
But Ivy couldn’t stop trying. She had agreed to this job—had given up so much to do it—and she couldn’t countenance failure.
Even if failure seemed inevitable this morning, when Peter called her and Justin into his office and greeted them grimly from behind his desk.
“More bad news from Deb this morning,” he said, whenthey’d sat down across from him. He looked sterner than she’d ever seen him. His ex-dancer’s posture was perfectly straight, his usually affable face was crumpled in a scowl, and dressed like he was in head-to-toe black, he looked like the grim reaper. “A small group of donors has organized and threatened to withhold their support for next season. And Connie tells me there’s chatter on social media about subscribers calling for a boycott of any performances featuring Justin throughout this season. They’d still buy tickets, thankfully, but not for anything Justin would be dancing. The anger amongst our most reliable supporters is… considerable.”
“I’m trying my best to shift the narrative,” Ivy said quickly. “I can think of a new strategy, since what we’re doing now obviously isn’t working.” Next to her, Justin had his hands in his lap, but he was fidgeting with the hem of his T-shirt.
“It isn’t,” Peter said flatly. “And we’re out of time.”
“Out of time?” Justin repeated. The words came out loose and jumbled, like he’d lost some of the feeling in his lips. Ivy felt like she’d lost feeling in her fingertips, like panic had numbed her. She wrapped her hands around the seat of her chair and squeezed hard, pressing sensation back into her fingers.
“There has to be something more we can do,” she said. She had wanted it to sound pragmatic, but it came out more like pleading. “Can Justin issue a public apology?”
“Absolutely not,” Justin growled.
She looked over at him and saw the pink flush high in his cheeks. He was frustrated, and she understood why, but she didn’t see any other solution to this problem.
“You wouldn’t have to mean it, you’d just have to say it. Maybe it would be enough to mollify them,” she said reasonably.
He met her eyes, fierce determination all over his face. “No. I’m not apologizing forwhat I did.”
“But why not,” she argued, “when it could?—”
“I said. No.” His tone was so definitive, so final, sofurious, that all she could do was stare at him. Hopelessly. Because that’s what this situation was. Hopeless. If he didn’t listen to reason, there’d be nothing more she could do to help him. She turned back to Peter, who looked almost as frustrated as she felt. Part of her wanted to channel Em: Throw up her hands and throw Justin to the wolves, to say to her boss,you see what I’ve been trying to work with?But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
