Page 42 of Barre Fight
She let herself into her room, pushed the door open with a little more force than was necessary, and let it slam behind her. She was so tired. Between the jet lag, the hot toddy, and the hours of walking around in the arctic cold… God, she wanted a nap.
She put her shopping bag and coat down on the worn, lumpy armchair and had just sat on the bed and pulled off her boots when she heard a soft knock at the door. Yawning, she padded over and peered through the peephole. Nothing there. She opened the door and stuck her head out. The hallway was deserted, not a soul in sight. Frowning, she closed the door and was about to unbutton her pants when the sound repeated itself, a little louder this time. Ivy froze.
It wasn’t coming from the front door. It was coming from the adjoining one. Suddenly alert, she turned slowly to face the door, knowing exactly who she’d find when she openedit. If she opened it. She stared at it for a few seconds, hoping Justin would take her silence for an answer, but just as she’d started to relax, he knocked again, louder and longer this time. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who was incorrigible. The memory of him playfully, teasingly calling her “Kurt” only to turn around and tell her tojust do her jobmade her step forward and whip the door open.
“What is it?”
Justin stood in the doorway, his arm still raised. She saw relief flicker momentarily over his face, but it vanished at the sight of her no doubt thunderous expression. Suddenly, Ivy wasn’t tired, and those rants she’d rehearsed all over the Upper West Side were fresh and ready on the tip of her tongue.
“I want to apologize,” he said quickly, as though he feared she’d slam the door on him at any moment. “And I want to answer your question. Can I come in? Please?”
She crossed her arms and stared at him. He was wearing his street clothes—dark jeans and a snug, warm-looking navy blue jumper—but his feet were bare. His hair was damp and wavy, and his cheeks a little pink; clearly he’d showered since he’d returned to the hotel. She examined him, wondering whether to let him over the threshold and into her room. He stood there, awaiting her judgment. Something about his bare feet and his pushed-up sleeves, his untamed hair and his uncertain gaze, made him look younger than his 33 years.
“Please, Ivy? I want to explain.”
Ivy sighed and walked back towards her bed, keeping her arms crossed. She sat, unspeaking, and looked at him expectantly. She’d left the door open, but he was still standing on his side of it. Slowly, he lowered his arm and stepped hesitantly through the doorway and into her room.
“I’m sorry I spoke to you like that,” he said. “I was out of line and I regretted it the second it happened.”
She raised her eyebrows and leveled him with an unflinching gaze, but said nothing, and after a moment he broke eye contact and glanced around the room, hovering awkwardly in front of her like he had an audience with a monarch. A very rightly annoyed monarch. She thought about the way he’d approached her on the street right after he’d snapped at her, like he knew he’d crossed a line.
“Thank you,” she finally said. “If you ever talk to me like that again, I’m going straight to Peter and then getting on the next plane home. You’ll be on your own. You don’t have to trust me or like me”—even if she’d thought he was starting to, and had returned the feeling—“but you do have to treat me with respect.”
“That’s fair,” he said. “I really am sorry.”
Ivy uncrossed her arms and pulled her legs up under her. He was still standing in front of her, looking slightly less miserable than when he’d walked in. But he’d promised her an apology and an explanation, and so far, she’d only received one of those things.
“And I do trust you. Which is why I’m going to tell you what happened that night. Can I sit down?”
Ivy nodded, and he walked over to the armchair and reached for her coat.
“Not there,” she said quickly, and when he pulled his hands away hastily, she let her face relax into a small smile. “It’s lumpy is all. You can sit here.” She patted the edge of the bed, and a second later he eased himself down it slowly, as if he was afraid she’d change her mind if he made any sudden moves. She pivoted to face him, then waited for him to speak.
“You’ve gone above and beyond for me. Coming here, being here. I know it’s not really a free trip to New York, not with all the work you’re doing. And…” He took a deep breath, and released it slowly, his eyes on the carpet. “And you deserve to know why you’re doing it.
“I grew up in a small country town. A few hundred people, about half an hour from Mudgee. It’s mostly farming, and lately a few people who moved out there to work the wineries and decided to stay.”
Ivy knew this. Hillstone was about a four-hour drive west of Sydney, over the Blue Mountains and out in the rolling green farmland and dense bush that took up a lot of the middle of the state.
“I started dancing because of my cousin, Missy. Who’s a girl,” he chuckled weakly, and she let herself smile at the joke. “It was a small school, but Miss Mary wasn’t one to mess around. She taught in the old church hall, and all our music came out of this shitty little boombox, but she worked us hard, even when we were little. I was the only boy in my class from the very beginning, and my mum wasn’t sure about it at first, but Miss Mary offered me a full scholarship and discounted classes for Missy. And it meant that Mum didn’t have to worry about who was going to watch me after school a few days a week, so I kept going. Missy quit after a few years because she didn’t like being forced to wear a leotard and tights, especially when I was allowed to wear a T-shirt and shorts.”
Ivy let out a smallhmmof recognition. She remembered the same rules at her own ballet school, where the teachers hadn’t made the boys wear tights until they hit puberty, for fear of scaring them away. Of course, she hadn’t thought twice about the double standard until Em had pointed it out to her years later.
“I think mum and my aunt Steen—her name’s Justine, but no one calls her that—assumed I would quit when Missy did, but I didn’t want to. I loved it. It felt as though… when I was dancing, I knew exactly who I was. Like, even when the steps were hard and in French, it just made sense to me. It made the world make sense, somehow. It madememake sense. I don’t know if that… makes sense.” He looked up at her, his face open and awash with a vulnerability she’d only caught glimpses of before.
She knew exactly what he meant. Ballet had so many rules, and lots of people chafed at them, especially when it meant being forced into a leotard or being asked to move your body in a way that didn’t feel right. But to Ivy the rules had been a source of power and possibility. Once she knew the rules, she knew how to succeed. She always knew how many tendus she was expected to do, and in what order. When she tendued to the front, she was always supposed to turn her head slightly to the side, and when she tendued to the back, she was always supposed to tilt her head so her gaze met her palm. It was a bit like learning the alphabet: once you learned all the steps, you could put them together in any order you wanted. Sometimes she could still touch that sense of possibility, when her fingers were flying over the keyboard, like her thoughts were coming out of her and into the world, clear and precise and just right. Sometimes writing could feel like dancing, or the other way around. Maybe there was a reason a fragment of choreography was called a phrase.
“It makes sense,” she said, because it did, completely. Justin kept looking at her searchingly for a moment, and she gave him a small nod of encouragement. He went on.
“I didn’t want anyone at school to know I was doing ballet, but it’s hard to keep a secret in a small town. Half the girls in my class had brothers, and before long everyone knew how I was spending my afternoons. The teasing started right away. They called me a girl, a fairy, a poof, a princess, basically any homophobic insult they could think of. They’d twirl around withtheir hands over their head whenever they saw me. It was relentless.”
“God, kids can be so cruel,” Ivy sighed. It was a familiar story; as coddled as boys who danced often were inside ballet schools, with their scholarships and their lax dress codes, the world outside of ballet could be brutal. No wonder teachers had to work so hard to recruit boys and keep them from quitting. She knew that the few boys who had danced at her school had endured similar bullying, and there seemed to be fewer of them with every passing grade.
“Yeah, well, so can adults,” Justin said darkly. “I told my mum and my stepdad what was happening at school, and they went to the teacher. The first thing the teacher said was, ‘Perhaps Justin should keep his extracurricular activities to himself.’ Like I hadn’t tried to do that. Like there was any way of hiding it in a town of 300 people where everyone knows everyone.”
“And like you were asking for it!” Ivy added, outraged on behalf of younger Justin. “You didn’t deserve to be teased like that even if you ran around telling everyone you were a dancer. What kind of teacher says that?”
“A shitty one,” Justin said. “Mum and Shane took it to the principal, who sat the worst offenders down for a talking-to, and most of them backed off after that.”
