Pas de Deux ( A Dance for Two)

Pas de deux (A Dance For Two)

"Listen," said a voice that sounded like an elder man.  

"Understand dreams are real. We live in them as much as we live in this day-to-day world that we say is "awake."

I heard his voice soft and muffled but couldn't see anyone; I just caught a glimpse of his back, something burgundy, from the corner of my eye. So, I drifted into a grey space, not defined, not knowing how this dream would begin.

I found myself back in the ballet studio so I could practice when no one would be around. The glow from the lights seemed to cast a bit of a dirty glow, a washed-out yellow. The smells of sweat and body odor were more pronounced within the empty room. Stillness enveloped the walls, the floors, the barres, and mirrors as if they could hold onto every motion, along with aches and determination. "Practice." Monsieur Richard drummed into us though he preferred cellos and flutes for his choreographed masterpieces. Even the outside street noises, the clop of horse hooves, chatter seemed small today. I felt I was in a period like the late 1800s Europe, a time of drawn carriages waiting by the curb for its gentrified owners, though I couldn't be sure.

I wore something plain, a brown midi dress, nothing unusual except it matched my chestnut hair and fit me at the waist with a flair. I preferred bare feet, touching and gliding across the polished wood. I never minded the dirt on my soles, a fitting gift from the steps of a hundred dancers upon an oaken floor.

I stepped up to the barre, placed my right leg up to stretch, and then my left. A few plies helped me extend and retract warming tendons, muscles, and sinew.

I noticed Billy walk in with a grace of a panther stalking its prey. I stared into the mirror as he neared, softly, dropping his jacket and bag on the floor by some chairs. One of the principal dancers for this ballet company, Billy, wore brown tights, a vest with no shirt the color of acorns, bare-chested each muscle defined. Billy had a face that only intense dance and little money could chisel into defined planes. 

My eyes widened as he gently molded himself into my back while his arms reached around to mine. I heard his breath upon my neck as if touched by a falling leaf. I began to move slowly, following some unheard adagio feeling like a deer caught in the forest. I listened to inner chords and notes compelling me from some unknown source. Billy seemed to listen to me with his body.

We began to create with an easy push and a slow pull into the heart of the room. Our feet moved, though not on pointe, then Billy shifted me so that I wrapped my legs around his torso, an embrace while I gazed down to the floor, while he regarded me. 

With a spin and then another, our pace quickened, more allegro. We became swept into a sound our bodies heard as if in conversation to keep moving, keep spinning, lifting, and lowering following a staccato beat while our legs seemed to be bows playing the cello. While I formed an arabesque and then a pirouette, Billy completed a tour en l'air. We joined, embraced, up, down, bent, and straight as if we became two willows caught up in a summer storm with wind and rain.

Desire filled me. I wanted Billy to fill my depths, and he did only it was through the movement of arms and legs entwined in perfect harmony that our bodies listened to that penetrated me. Desire rang, our breaths oboes, feet sounded like silk rubbing between our hands. My fingers traced his face, his traced my side from arms to thighs as we dipped and understood the music from our bodies that demanded we be more. I'm sure he could read the desire that transformed my face as my green eyes met brown ones, like a pond hidden deep in the woods. He raised me again over his head. We stared at each other as he slowly moved me down his body till my feet touched the floor. Like autumn, when the last rains bring down the last leaves, we finished.

When our inner symphony reached its ending, we shifted into something lyrical, something soft again as our hands joined, arms enfolded torsos, and our breathing slowed. I could not get enough of him that day in full daylight as we danced across the studio floor in a timeless space, an unknown world. And in these moments, time or place disappeared.

Ω

Billy left my arms, walked over to his jacket, and reached for mine. He talked and whispered that he knew things, and I would begin to see them as if I were there. At first, I wondered what he meant. I don't remember French, yet I could understand him.

He told me about the older women, usually bored, who would get dressed up and then quite literally flirt with the young male dancers who took a cigarette break out the theater's back door. As he spoke, I could see and hear a couple of women nicely dolled up in long dresses and jewels. After the show, they hiked their dresses up casually, most daringly enticing a Rendez-Vous with a virile young man. 

We crossed the street to go to a café as it was chilly and grey. On the opposite corner diagonal to us stood a carriage with two black horses. The coachman moved about the seat, adjusting the reins for one of the horses. The horse turned and watched him. When I followed Billy's gaze, it was as if I, too, could hear the horse and "know" his feeling for his driver. I giggled, in the way a satiated lover does, those moments when the world alters into something more magical.

Ω

Billy placed his arm around me as we walked about town, like lovers though we had only just met. We found our way back to the studio. I went into the main hall. Monsieur Richard, an older gentleman with a head of bushy silver hair wearing a tattered burgundy sweater, came into the hall looking for Billy. I told him Billy went down the corridor towards the back. Monsieur Richard, the founder of the ballet company, stared at me for too long a moment. I sensed that my time here was ending. I felt a fuzziness, something beginning to blur. The lightness in my heart started to ebb as I reflected on the marvelous time Billy and I shared.

 As I gathered my things and put them in order, I noticed an old leather pouch, once black, now worn at the edges to a softer tan on a nearby chair. As I held it, I knew I would never see Billy again.

I felt okay. My romantic heart did not give way to question, wonder, and shout, how come? I noticed that I became more real during the dance. I accepted the ebb and flow of movement, inner sounds that muscles and sinew heard, that spoke to our bodies as the wind speaks to the trees. We danced within the eternal sound of a pas de deux, harmony, and bodies in the synchrony of a timeless now.

I heard a voice like the one in the beginning, maybe Monsieur Richard, whisper, "It's time to go." The studio faded.

The giving of oneself to love is precious. Billy gave me a chance to hear a facet of love in its expressive fullness. The harmony of our connection revealed itself to us, and we exposed ourselves to its rhythm in its purest way. We danced.

I reluctantly awakened, pulling myself from the grey space of an indistinct landscape back into the land of the waking. My heart, unsure of what happened, my body filled with the lingering sensuousness of the dance, my arm stretched out to my side as if wanting to be in entendre paused. Something stopped me. I pulled my hand across the sheets. I felt something soft with weight in my hand. In it, I clutched a faded and soft leather pouch. On the flap, etched words came into focus as the first rays of the morning sun filtered into my room, deliberately placing its light onto the bag:

souviens-toi de la danse, Guy – remember to dance, Billy