Chapter 2
Chapter 2: The Studio on Marylebone High Street
The address Priya sends is a building I have passed a hundred times without noticing — a narrow Victorian terrace between a wine merchant and a dry cleaner, with a small brass plate beside the door that says Studio Movimento in the particular italic of someone who takes aesthetics seriously. Three flights of stairs, a door propped open with a rubber wedge, and then: a room that is larger than the building should allow, floored in sprung wood, walled in mirror on two sides, with a barre along one wall and speakers doing something layered and warm in a language I can't immediately place.
I arrive seven minutes early, which is what I always do when I am trying to appear as though I have not been thinking about something. A woman at the desk hands me a waiver — standard liability, I sign it without reading — and I stand near the back, because standing near the back is the posture of someone who has not committed.
There are twelve of us. I assess them in the mirror with the specific peripheral vision of a woman who has spent years observing rooms: a man in his fifties with the patient, slightly resigned quality of someone here at his wife's suggestion; two women who arrived together and are communicating in the shorthand of a long friendship; a young woman in expensive athletic wear who has approached this as a fitness objective and who will probably leave after three weeks when she finds it insufficiently cardiovascular; various others who are, like me, doing the private internal calculation of whether this was the right decision.
I am fine. I am a grown woman attending an evening class. This is a perfectly ordinary thing to do.
Then the teacher comes in.
He walks across the studio and I notice him the way you notice something that resolves unexpectedly into clarity — the movement first. He moves in the specific way of someone who has been entirely comfortable in their body for so long that they have forgotten it requires any management. He is not tall — perhaps two inches above my own height — and slight in the way of a dancer's slight: all the weight in the wrong places for conventional handsomeness and completely, specifically right for what he is. Dark hair, the kind that does what it wants. Brown skin, the studio's amber light on it. He is, I estimate, very young. I find out later that he is twenty-one.
He looks at the room and smiles — the quick, real smile of someone who is actually pleased to be here, without performance.
"I'm Luca. I've been dancing since I was nine, teaching for three years, I'm from Brixton and I do this four evenings a week because I love it." He looks around the room without apology. "Tonight we're starting with the basics. Movement, presence, how to take up space. You don't need to know anything. Actually, it's better if you don't — then you won't have anything to unlearn."
He speaks with the directness of someone who has not yet developed the habit of qualifying everything they say in case it inconveniences someone. I notice this. I file it in the category of things I am noticing without deciding what to do with them.
For the first forty minutes he teaches us to walk.
This is not as straightforward as it sounds. Walking — the way you move across a floor in relation to other people, the way you carry weight, the question of what your body is communicating before you have said anything — turns out to be a whole subject. He demonstrates and then corrects, with the light-touch precision of a teacher who can identify exactly where your body is doing the wrong thing and name it without making you feel named. He moves through the group: adjusts a shoulder, redirects a hip, tells the man in his fifties — whose name turns out to be Derek, who is indeed here at his wife Rachel's request, and who is approaching this with tremendous good-natured incompetence — that he is doing precisely the right thing and to keep going.
When he reaches me he says: "Your shoulders. You're holding them. Can you let them drop?"
I try.
"More," he says.
I try again.
"That's it." He watches the adjustment with the focused attention of someone observing something mechanical and assessing its effect. He does not touch me. "How does that feel?"
"Strange."
"Good strange or uncomfortable strange?"
I think about it honestly. "Both."
"That's the right answer," he says, and moves on.
The second half is partner work.
I am paired initially with Derek, which is comfortable — Derek dances with the cheerful determination of a man who has accepted that looking ridiculous is an acceptable cost, and I find myself liking him for it. Then Luca sends Derek across the room to work with one of the shorthand-friends because the footwork needs demonstrating from someone who knows it, and suddenly Luca is standing in front of me in the close hold.
His right hand at my left shoulder blade. My hand on his shoulder. The prescribed distance: close enough to feel the movement, far enough to move freely.
He says: "Just be present in the frame. You don't have to do anything. The frame does the work."
There is a clock on the wall. I become aware of it. Thirty-eight seconds. I know this because I find myself, without deciding to, looking at it.
I am thirty-two years old and I have not been looked at with this quality of full attention — the specific weight of someone genuinely present in the same frame as you — in a very long time. The thought arrives with a force that surprises me. The way a thought does when you have been not-having-it for long enough that having it finally catches you off guard.
He steps back and says: "Good."
I go home. I tell myself it is nothing.
I am already, though I do not know it yet, in some trouble.
ROM: (in the kitchen at eight-thirty, when I return from the class) How was it?
KAIRA: Good. It was good.
ROM: The dance thing.
KAIRA: Yes.
ROM: (looking up from his laptop for the first time since I walked in) You look — different.
KAIRA: I've been moving for two hours.
ROM: That must be it. (already looking back down) Is there dinner?
KAIRA: Mrs. Davies left something in the fridge.
ROM: Right. (not listening)
I shower. I stand under the hot water and think about thirty-eight seconds, which is not very long. A man's hand at my shoulder blade. The instruction to be present in the frame. The specific sensation of standing in someone's complete attention.
I have not been attended to that way in — I turn the shower colder. The thought goes.
In the morning I remember it, in the half-state before waking, before the management catches up.
By the time I am making Sia's breakfast, I have decided it is nothing.
By Wednesday I have thought about it forty-two times and have been certain each time that it is nothing.
On the following Wednesday I arrive at the studio eleven minutes early.
There are things I do not tell Priya. This is unusual — Priya is the person I tell things, has been since we were nineteen in a shared flat in Peckham with a shared bottle of cheap Malbec and a shared understanding that honesty was the only currency between us. She is small and direct and entirely without sentimentality about other people's self-deception, which makes her the worst possible confidante and the best one simultaneously.
I do not tell her about the thirty-eight seconds. I tell her the class is good, the teacher is good, I feel better for it, which is all true. She listens with the specific attentiveness that means she knows the thing I'm not saying and has decided to wait.
"What's his name?" she says.
"What?"
"The teacher."
"Luca."
"How old is he?"
"Priya—"
"I'm asking for context."
"Twenty-one. He's twenty-one years old. He is eleven years younger than me and he is my dance teacher and there is nothing to tell."
A pause that carries enormous weight for a pause.
"Okay," she says.
In the second class he pairs us differently. I work with one of the shorthand-friends — Gabi, who dances with the unselfconscious ease of someone told as a child that she was good at it and who has simply never stopped believing it — and something loosens. The mechanics begin to come. I stop thinking about the individual steps and start thinking about the movement itself, and this is a different experience, the shift from calculation to something that is less like thinking.
After class he says, while I'm putting on my coat: "That was better. The transfer from the first section."
"I've been practising."
"At home?"
"In my kitchen. Late at night. With the chairs moved to the sides." I hear myself say this and understand, from the slight change on his face — the genuine kind, surprise that hasn't been managed — that this is more than he expected.
"Good," he says. "The kitchen is fine. Anywhere with a floor."
"My floor is marble."
"Even better."
He smiles. I say good night and walk down the stairs and out onto Marylebone High Street in the October dark, and I am three streets away before I notice that I'm smiling too, and another street before I decide what to do with that.
I decide: nothing. It is nothing.
I walk to the Tube.
I think about Wednesday.
PRIYA: (Thursday, over coffee in her studio on Bermondsey Street) You look good.
KAIRA: I've been dancing.
PRIYA: You look like someone who's been thinking about something they're not telling me.
KAIRA: I've been dancing.
PRIYA: (the long patient look she has been deploying since 2010) Right.
KAIRA: It's a class, Priya. A perfectly ordinary class.
PRIYA: Of course it is.
KAIRA: He's twenty-one years old.
PRIYA: Mmm.
KAIRA: And I am thirty-two.
PRIYA: (lifting her coffee cup) Yes.
KAIRA: And married.
PRIYA: (mild, careful) I know.
KAIRA: Stop doing that.
PRIYA: I'm not doing anything.
KAIRA: You're doing the face.
PRIYA: I don't have a face.
KAIRA: You have had the face since the second sentence of this conversation.
PRIYA: (very evenly) I'm glad you're enjoying the class. That's everything I was saying.
She is not just saying that. She never is.
I drive home through the south London traffic thinking about nothing in particular, which is by now my own reliable signal that I'm thinking about something specific. I think about my kitchen at midnight with the chairs pushed to the sides. I think about thirty-eight seconds and just be present in the frame.
I think: it is a class.
I think: I am going back on Wednesday.
Both of these things are true. Neither of them is the whole truth.