On Their Salad Break
They all have short fine hair, tied back, and drawn faces with cruel or at least cold eyes. One is a blonde. The blonde has on a sleeveless – from which her bra strap intrudes on her slender skim-milky arms – flower-pattern granny dress and white tennis shoes. A silver-banded watch and no rings. Holding her elbows in her lap she leans forward with the slightly sick fey look of her profession.
To her left, by the window, sits the oldest-looking of the trio – the one who goes to pick up the food, which one assumes is salad, or pasta, or pasta salad served in deep white bowls that look like the mortar and pestle of alchemists, and their large white cups have the same effect of keeping their diet arcane and secret to the distanced prying eye. Why she is elected to make the two – or three – trips to the counter is also worth losing sleep over.
There are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who self-consciously enter the restaurant, self-consciously select a seat, self-consciously acquire their food and drink, and then sit staring because this is their social life and they have nowhere else to go. Then there are those who are merely stopping off. Butterfly-like, you follow them with your eye, but since they have happened to wander into the panorama and make the blue sky brighter, to scent the air and quicken your pulse – only passing through – you come back from the bathroom, focus, and realize they are gone. Of the latter category are the ballet girls. Should be – but this time they are staying for a while.
They are smoking. Just one cigarette between rehearsals….The blonde is very young, of indeterminate age, and very flat-bosomed but when she turns her head her beauty is full-blown, fresh and strange like toadstools sprung up to adult size overnight.
Across, with her bare legs crossed, by the window with its sunshiney view of white-iron patio tables under black umbrellas, relaxes (if you imagine a crane relaxing in a chair) their colleague: a dead ringer for the girl in the lefthand corner of Degas’ “The Dance Class.” Honey-colored hair, tweezed eyebrows, gaunt jutting face, a Norman complexion. Suddenly she squints her face into a pantomime that is unmistakably that of the typical middle-aged French (or German) ballet teacher. A cartoon more real than a realistic portrait. You would know it anywhere. On the backdrop of the glass, silently carping and imitating, as if behind a glass, her oblong head viciously parrot-like. Like a highly-wound string, the repressed mood pops. With feminine alacrity, they grow animated. The face of the oldest stares on, sullen and dark. But that leaves the blonde, as herbal and fragile as the wildflowers of springtime. With a quick upswing, this maiden (one of the Three Graces, no doubt) shoots the finger; one does a doubletake, but the finger is a direct unhypocritical cultural icon; you can see the tallest buildings of the downtown skyline, like phantoms, from twenty miles away, and the middle finger is about as far-traveling. Hurriedly she lights another cigarette, imprisoned and reckless like a drinker acquiescing to another flat-tasting drink pressured by a shrewd sober bartender before closing time. Oh, if this silent movie was accompanied by a soundtrack, what a noisy scandal it would cause in the quiet fashionably health-conscious room with its New Age muzak, lethargically-revolving fans, and air-conditioned escape, asylum, denial, defeat.
But what is it? I have always thought of ballet dancers as martyrs. Even as freaks. Their hermetic life, forced on them by the one extant instance of amnestied abuse (because misunderstood, rare, and European) is one of baton thwacks to the calves relieved by no social life to speak of – if one means milkshakes and late nights. Their bodies are their medium. Their feet are not their own. They are undeveloped, unexposed to if not unaware of other walks of life. That would be the kiss of death. They simply don’t have the time. Still, they fascinate me.
Everybody has his own beauty. The barmaid who teases, which comes naturally to her but not to me – oh beauty is not always complacent, it arouses me out of my humdrum state, and shakes up the atoms of the night. That sad aging woman who sits crestfallen in the bar section when her friend is in the bathroom – her allure is deep as the quest for the truth. The truth of the depths in which one swims, not the tide out of which one skips. The beauty of the guy who sits silent at the party, the only one who sings to the guitar when it’s brought out. The uncool one who has soul. The apropos direct hit of a pop song. The peaceful joy of a lull in the afternoon café. The phone call from a friend whom one had given up on. A few words that convince you that this dream life has been remembered.
They stay on. Acting out the role of victims, they are like any group of co-workers out for a drink, restively gossiping about the others. Continuing until every drop of venom is released from fangs wagging at the dummy air. Preaching to the converted. The Degas girl flirts her wrist Spanish-style. Is she mocking a tic of the old-maid instructor, or a dance step, or is the rippling arabesque a tic of her own? They stay on, sipping from the tall cups, smoking, until of an accord like a Daddy Longlegs they rise and tread past the counter, by the alternative newspaper bin, toward the glare greeting the pushing open of the doors.
See them walking away, probably to a car, because even though the bare warehouse-office building that houses their rehearsal space is on the same boulevard, a short walk of maybe two blocks, the brutal heat wave is still on.
David Francis has produced two albums of songs and one of poems. In 2008 NYCBigCityLit published his article “Utterance and Hum: The Difference Between Poem and Song.” Currently David is recording a new album in England for Monochrome Records. For more information visit: davidfrancismusic.com.
