“Nu, you think you can handle me?” he said.
There was something of a young Catherine Deneuve about her, he thought.
“I almost peed myself,” she said.
Nata always seemed older when they danced, more serious, and he was often surprised at the silly things she said after practices — when she would turn back into a girl.
* * *
At nine o’clock Roman Ivanovich came out of the office. The chess boys had set up curtained partitions to accommodate the upcoming costume-changing frenzy of over a hundred dancers, aged six to twenty-one. The darkened studio resembled a military camp, still and quiet before battle. Asik and Sasha sat on the windowsill. Asik was dressed in all black.
They winged through the five standard dances with few mistakes. During the Viennese waltz, they shipwrecked one of the changing tents.
“Don’t bend back as much, Asya, head at a forty-five-degree angle between his ear and the tip of his shoulder,” he shouted over the music because he couldn’t be silent. “Sasha, straighten your fingers, hand no lower than her shoulder blade.”
The first two Latin dances — flawless. Then rumba. Roman Ivanovich had arranged for his favorite rumba song, “Loco,” to be played during Asik and Sasha’s turn on the stage. He turned it on now — though to the other dancers their competition songs would be a complete surprise — and sat down to watch.
At first Asik stands alone, dancing with just hips and arms. The man walks around her as she watches coyly. Sasha couldn’t yet master the right seductive look. He circled her like a predator. On the first couplet of Loco, he takes her hand and gives her a light push, initiating the classic Hockey Stick figure. For several counts they dance Alemanas, Cucarachas, Chase Peek-a-Boos, Serpientes. She dances a little carelessly — a tease to his attention. Nothing more.
On the third Loco, she twists into another Hockey Stick, reaching out away from Sasha with her hand. She is ready to leave, but the man doesn’t let go. He lowers her within a hair’s breadth of the floor. She dares him to drop her. Then, she puts one foot on his high shoulder and he drags her across, her other foot slicing the parquet like a blade.
On the sixth Loco he spins her away from him, and she bends like a bow. This time she comes back to him herself. She holds his face as he dips her. Could she have changed her mind about wanting to leave? After a few counts he lifts her and turns with her. Then she rolls off his shoulder, down his side, and between his legs. He gives her a hard whirl and she swivels on her backside, away from him. On the floor, right leg pulled up, she arches back. She never surrenders.
“Stop, stop, stop,” Roman Ivanovich said and turned off the music. “The dismount — Sasha, make sure you hold her with both hands when she’s mid-hip, and then quickly switch the grip for the push-off. Otherwise you’ll drop her.”
“I’ve never dropped her,” Sasha said.
“I am a little afraid every time, Sasha,” Asik said. “To be honest.” She flicked her weight from one hip to the other.
“Watch my hands,” Roman Ivanovich said.
Sasha stepped aside.
Roman Ivanovich picked Asik up. She was heavier now than in the fall, when they’d blocked the choreography. And warmer, despite the chill of the studio. He wanted to coil her around his sore, tired neck. He rolled her down his side and pushed her from between his legs. She spun across the floor. One, two turns. It was so easy. Sasha could accomplish only one. They demonstrated the move several times.
“Your turn, Sasha,” Roman Ivanovich said. He was sweating. There was something he didn’t like about Sasha’s complacent smile.
At eleven, Sasha’s tall mustachioed father arrived. Both Roman Ivanovich and Sasha were exhausted. Asik remained on fire. She and Sasha ran through paso doble and jive. Sasha’s father applauded after each take, puffed out with pride. So this was the source of Sasha’s poise, Roman Ivanovich thought, his father. They adored each other.
“Anybody coming to get you?” Roman Ivanovich asked Asik after Sasha and his father had left.
“Nope. They’re busy. Busy, busy, busy,” Asik sang out.
He watched her small black figure slip into the changing room curtains. “I’ll walk you home, Asya. Hurry up.”
“If you want,” she yelled back.
He walked to the office to get the new golden sandals, then remembered that he had decided not to give them to her yet. No need to distract her from what is important. He would give them to her tomorrow, as a present for winning first place.
Away from the glow of the town’s center, the streets became emptier, angrier, underlined by violet ankle-snatching snow. The wind, with its erratic sense of rhythm, made it comically difficult to walk. Should he hold Asik’s tiny mittened hand? She prattled on about some intrigue at her school.
The world felt like a small, black box.
“Make sure you get a good night’s sleep,” he said when they reached Asik’s building.
“Roman Ivanovich, can you walk me up to my floor? You’re here already and it’s dark and I’m scared of the drunken bums that hang around on the stairs. Please?”
He came in. The hallway stank of piss and God knows what else. Weak light leaked from the upper flights, illuminating the nail-carved and chalked graffiti on the walls like cave paintings. They climbed the stairs, holding on to the rails. Asik kept on and on about school. Sometimes he’d catch a word: home ec, burnt, two, so unfair. He tried to reel his mind back, for he could not help looking down on this strange scene — his bearish body, sweaty and cold, dressed in a sheepskin and a synthetic woolen cap, clambering after a little girl.
Asik turned to him abruptly on the fourth floor. “Are you very tired, Roman Ivanovich?”
She had a few steps on him, her wan face level with his. He was no longer tired, though he wanted to be.
“Yes. You?”
She took off her gray rabbit hat, and a scent of wet bread rose from her scalp.
“Not really. Actually, night is my favorite time. They finally stop nagging me.”
“Isn’t your sister home?”
“Inka? She’s already in bed. She’s a lark.”
“I’m a lark, too.”
“Good night, Roman Ivanovich,” Asik said cheerfully. Neither of them moved. Then she threw her arms around the bulk of him. “You’re the only person in the world who’s on my side.”
She pulled away. Her child’s face was open. Tomorrow, she would pull back her hair, glue on the fake lashes, paint her lips red. She would put on the glittering dresses and go out into the floodlights. Her unbeautiful features already contained the drama of tomorrow’s competition, all the disappointments of her future and its small moments of bliss. Already in them lived the Asik of ten years from now, and thirty, and fifty — long after Roman Ivanovich had gone.
He grabbed her folded forearms and covered her mouth with his. Asik’s tongue fluttered like a butterfly under the net of his lips. He traced the uneven ridge of her small, cool teeth, flew up to the scratchy ribs of her palate, then swooped down and cajoled her tongue into submission.
Oh, his dancey girls! Their images flew before his eyes like a trick of cards: Anya with the dark curl tickling her ivory neck; the spattering of freckles on Oksana’s neck and chest; Lara’s chubby stockinged legs. Their cometlike flight over his gray planet had kept him alive.