Falling in Love with Natassia Read online

  Mary had always known she had something special about her. The story of the miracle of her father’s finding her newborn had proved that. Just that he’d gone to the trouble of looking for her made it clear to Mary that she was worthwhile. But her father was so weak, crying often, so nervous around Dorie, Mary couldn’t love the spots on her face where she saw she was like him—his skinny nose, his soft chin. She preferred to focus on all the ways in which she was different from the other Mudds and everyone around her—her narrow, uplifted eyes; her golden skin; her coarse dark hair; her smallness; her perfect dance form. And yet the gap. There was nothing inside her that matched the outside of her. Mary was exotic even to herself.

  At the end of class, the teacher held Mary back and asked her, “Mary, for a minute there you looked like you were almost going to cry.”

  “No!”

  “You can be a ballerina, my dear. Surely you can have that, but you will have to work, yes? Toughen up!”

  Mary never knew what had made the woman think Mary wasn’t tough, that she was going to cry. Mary had already trained herself not to cry.

  Years later, in Rome, dancing in the garage with Lulu and Mama Ci-Ci and Sula and Ama and the other African women, surrounded by all their dark, warm flesh, Mary felt the gap within her being filled. She felt in the presence of what she imagined when she imagined Mother. It was here, pounding the floor, not flying, staying in one place, digging in as if to claim a spot of earth, pound it down, making wild noises, that Mary began to believe she was going to have a child.

  AFTER THE AFRICAN CLASS—even in those sleepy first months—Mary ran to a different part of town to do an hour of barre work, then she rushed to Via del Gesú to rehearse with Teatrodanza. They were the only professional modern-dance company in Rome—maybe in all of Italy—but Tim Dillon had given her a contact, and Mary had auditioned and got in. She danced full-out in every class and rehearsal; no way was she letting them know she was pregnant, not until she really had to.

  When she finally got back to the dorm after all those hours of dance, Ross loved the scent on her. Early evening, he’d be sitting by the window in his stuffed armchair, writing in his journal, entries of self-analysis to send back to his psychiatrist in New York. As Mary walked in, Ross put aside his notebook and his pipe, pulled her onto his lap. “I adore you, do you know that?” Talking to Mary, talking about her, he often used the word “adore.”

  “You’re so comfortable,” she told him, “like a piece of furniture.”

  “Climb onto me, baby. Climb all over.”

  YOUNG AS SHE WAS, Mary didn’t kid herself. She knew she didn’t adore Ross. But she had never known anyone—no friends, no family—she liked so much. He had tried to ask her a few times, in quiet middle-of-the-night moments after making love, “Why’re you having a baby with a loser like me?” and all Mary could do was turn away from him. The dare still confounded her, both in its stupidity and in the power it had had over her: a seduction she hadn’t managed to steer clear of. When, of course, she got knocked up, an even scarier thing had happened—Mary could find nothing inside herself to help her turn away from this particular pregnancy. After each of her abortions, there had been a feeling of relief, a release, when she got her next period; now that same easier breathing came to her each month when she saw there was no blood. What inside her was insisting on this baby?

  Ross kept telling her, “Everybody thinks this is the coolest thing.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re morons.” The kids they were in school with knew nothing about dance. Having a baby at twenty was, basically, a dancer’s death wish (and years—years—would pass before Mary would begin to have even a clue why she’d decided to do it). Back then, when Ross asked her, Why?, the only thing she could think of to say was “So she’ll have a chance for nice long dance legs, like yours.”

  “So she’s going to be a dancer?” Ross asked, and, “She’s going to be a she, huh?” Mary turned toward him, nudged him onto his side, and for the rest of the night pressed her fattening self up against his back. With her body growing right out of her leotards, as out of control of herself as she was, what could she tell Ross? In her way, as best she could, she cared for him.

  He didn’t have the body intelligence she had, but Mary loved it that Ross could do with words what she could do with her body: create illusion, convince, transport, seduce. She loved him a lot the day they were called in to talk with Dean Margaret Greco about Mary’s pregnancy.

  The word in the pipeline was that Mary and Ross were going to be kicked out of school. “Nervous?” everyone asked them.

  “No way,” Ross said. “This is our ticket to ride.”

  The two of them stood at the closed door of the ballroom that was the dean’s office. Ross was carrying his backpack like a briefcase. He leaned down and kissed Mary for good luck. She slipped him the tongue.

  They knocked. The heavy door opened. Dean Greco stood there dressed in her signature white, lots of pearls. “W-e-l-l,” she said. She was a Southern belle gone awry—an expatriate, divorced from an Italian diplomat she’d met during her debutante tour abroad in 1958.

  “Please, have a seat,” she said, and motioned for them to take the reconstructed Louis XIV chairs in front of her desk.

  “We’re glad you called us in,” Ross said. “We’d been hoping to get a chance to talk to you.”

  “Why, I’m always available to talk,” she said, “you know that. You just know that. Anytime.” Mary smiled. It came up often—how Greco wasn’t available for students. Ross had her on the defensive already. Mary just had to sit back and enjoy.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard our news,” Ross began, “that Mary is expecting our child.”

  “Yes, I heard. In fact—well, first, have you told your parents about this development?”

  “Absolutely,” Ross said.

  In a lower voice, the dean asked, “Mary?”

  “Yeah,” Mary lied. Her family didn’t even know she was in Italy. A couple years had passed since she’d talked to them. She’d been too busy trying to do two things at once: have a dance career and prep for some non-dance career that would inevitably have to follow. College was barely paid for by scholarship and loans and money she earned dancing Fosse-style jazz on a Caribbean cruise ship during the summer. Mary had been in the dance program at SUNY Purchase for two years, but the academic stuff had just not worked for her. She’d gone on the junior-year-abroad program because she could be with Ross and get college credit, and Teatrodanza liked foreign dancers and the company was getting attention. If she had the chance to perform with them for a year, Tim Dillon Dancers might have a spot for her when she went back to New York. Even if they didn’t, she’d be way ahead of where she’d been before. Already Mary was paranoid about the shelf life of her career. Her parents were the least of her problems, but the dean kept pushing.

  “So—your parents, they do know?”

  As she sat in the tall, ornate chair, Mary’s feet didn’t touch the floor. She pulled them up under her, like a kid at a movie, and yawned. She really was sleepy these days. When Mary said nothing, Greco looked at Ross. “And your families’ reactions?”

  “Joyous,” Ross said, “as expected. As the occasion demands.”

  “You do understand, don’t you, that your families will have to help you with the medical arrangements.” Ross nodded and let there be a long beat of silence.

  “W-e-l-l.” The dean was pushing away from her desk, giving them a full look at her long white-stockinged legs. “Is there anything else you-all’d like from me? Besides, of course, giving you my very best wishes, is there anything I can do?”

  “Yes,” Ross said, “there is.” Mary knew pretty much nothing about the publishing business Ross’s father was in. She did know, though, that he was a major operator, and now, seeing Ross cross one leg over the other and lean forward, a gesture that was both intimate and businesslike, Mary knew she was seeing David Stein, New York book editor, at work. It came natural
ly to Ross, that instinct to look in the eye, keep the voice down, concede a few points—he had that innate savvy.

  “This pregnancy,” Ross said in a voice gilded already with the sobriety of fatherhood, “we see it as an important opportunity toward growth for us. We want to make the most of it.” Reaching down into his open backpack, he looked away from Greco, and the dean followed him with her eyes. Mary saw that Ross had the power of a lodestone. He pulled out a manila folder thick with papers, held it in his hand, not giving it up yet, making Greco lean forward, reach for it. Then, for a second, he hesitated, so the dean’s hand was suspended there, empty.

  “Why, what is it?” By the time he gave it to her, she couldn’t wait to have it in her hands.

  It was a twenty-page outline for an independent study that Mary and Ross privately called “Fucking for Credit,” but the title on the cover sheet was “An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Prenatal State as Experienced Through the Prisms of Science, Dance, Art, and Literature.” What the paper proposed was that Mary and Ross would chart the pregnancy and get a bunch of credits.

  “My,” the dean said, “this is different.”

  “We knew you would connect with it.” Mary got such a kick out of watching Ross, how he kept that sincere pinch between his eyes, even while they were talking total bullshit. He was like Twyla Tharp choreography, witty. Ross turned to Mary. “See, Mar. I told you we could depend on Dean Greco to back us up.”

  Greco blushed, Mary winced. Greco really did have a thing for Ross. Mary had always suspected it, that’s why she’d worn her peasant dress with the deep U-neck. It showed cleavage. Mary was starting to have cleavage, and though she was terrified by her new heft, she did know how to use her body to get an important point across. Greco leaned forward, her blouse dipping open a bit farther, as if on cue, and said, “W-e-l-l. Well, I just need you to explain to me a bit what exactly you-all’ve got in mind here.”

  “Well, it’s simple—”

  “Yes, I’m just a little—”

  “No, you’re right. We should explain. What we are proposing is that through the varied and layered lenses of physiology, psychology, movement, dance, poetry, folklore, photography, and personal journal we will trace the development of the embryo now firmly planted in Mary’s uterus and—”

  “Yes, well.” After “uterus,” Dean Greco wasn’t going to ask anything more.

  “There’s just one last point we feel is important with this independent study.”

  “Yes?”

  “What we’re proposing here is extensive.” Ross spread his wide hands on the desk in front of him. “It’s big. And as I said, it means a lot to us. Heck”—Mary loved that, “Heck”—“it’s the birth of our child. We want to give this program of study our full attention.” Ross’s fingers tapped the desk, as if he’d just completed a difficult task there. “Naturally, we’re going to have to drop our other coursework.”

  It was only a matter of time—less than a week—before Dean Greco approved Fucking for Credit. When Mary and Ross got the word, with a note brought to them in the dining room at dinner, Mary went after Ross with a heat that surprised them both. She made him leave his tortellini, made him go upstairs to their room, pulled a mattress onto the floor, and tied his wrists lightly with scarves to the legs of his desk. She slipped her hands inside his jeans and slid them down over his hips, over their firm skinniness. God, how she loved the taste of his skin. “Yes,” he moaned. “I love this.”

  Maybe then, that one night, after the meeting with Greco, Mary adored Ross. She was flamed up to realize how good he was at what he was good at. And heating it up hot-white that night in Rome was the dash of jealousy, the way the dean was so willing to melt for Ross.

  What Mary didn’t know was the thing Ross had never told her, because, in ways, he was older than his age, already practicing the discretion he would be a master of years later, when he was a doctor. Ross knew how to use people’s weaknesses to get what he wanted, but he also knew it was important to handle any weakness of the soul gently. What Ross never told Mary or any of the other students was that occasionally Dean Greco handed him a fistful of lire and asked him to go to Piazza Navona to buy her any numbing shit he could find. He brought her small amounts and gave back her change. “Oh, Ross, this is all you got?”

  “That’s all they had this time,” Ross lied. More than supplying her, he was medicating her. The semester after Mary and Ross graduated, while she was relying on another student, Greco overdosed. Years later, Ross would remember the dean as the first and only patient he ever lost.

  THE AGREEMENT was that Mary and Ross would drop all their classes but one. Mary stayed in art history, since the course was mostly just going around to churches to look at art. Ross stayed in European Novel, because he’d already read everything on the reading list. They lived then in a state of perfect freedom. They didn’t have to do anything they didn’t want to do. There was more time for Mary to dance, more time for Ross to read and take drugs. The drugs helped him keep up with her energy, and at the same time Mary was getting bigger and a bit slower. Before, she’d always kept her thick blue-black hair short, a fringe, but now she was letting it grow longer. Ross liked that, he could hold on when he was inside her. She stayed still longer, she didn’t mind the anchor of him so much. Some mornings, he woke and found Mary sleeping with her face on his stomach.

  “Hey,” he’d whisper, “hey, Mary, come on up here.”

  “Not yet.” Was it because of his scent, Mary wondered, that she wanted, needed, to latch on to him?

  There was hardly any distance between them now. Years later, when they were separating, both of them made a point of telling Natassia that the time in their history when they were most completely together was those months in Rome when they were waiting for her.

  FOR THE INDEPENDENT STUDY, Mary choreographed her first solos for herself. At SUNY Purchase, she’d choreographed a duet and an ensemble piece and got good grades, but it had all felt like homework, which is what it had been. Now the impulse to create dance came from within her as, week by week, her body grew. Fairly early in the pregnancy, her center of gravity began to shift, causing Mary to lose balance, even fall. Quickly, privately, she made small adjustments to the pieces she was performing with Teatrodanza. At first the adjustments were just frantic efforts to protect her secret. Those early months, she was frantic a lot. She’d always had mild asthma; now she needed to do daily meditation to keep her breathing steady. A twenty-year-old dancer with a baby. I’m fucking crazy! But Mary’s secret pregnancy tuned her in to her body more intimately than dance ever had. In the dorm room at night, she let the small adjustments evolve into longer phrases of movement; then, when her secret was out and her director was finding ways to work with it, Mary created a series of dances on herself, and this was her birth as a choreographer.

  Ross wanted to call the series “Gravità,” which in Italian means “seriousness” and “gravity,” and brings to mind gravida, which means “pregnant,” but Mary just called them “The Pregnant Dances.” In a rare lucid moment, Dean Greco asked Mary if she’d do a few small performances in the school’s theater. Students came from all the different Rome study programs. Mary packed them in. The story had gone around town about the couple who had got knocked up on a dare and now were getting mucho credits for nothing but watching the girl’s stomach expand. But after the first performance, in November, they came because word got out about how good Mary was.

  She wasn’t flying as much as she used to, but she was still quick. People watched. There was the thrill of her speed across the stage, and there was the magic act of her transitions from shape to shape. There she’d be, small and pulled into a contraction, and in the next second she’d be huge, arms and legs stretched out so wide they’d be reaching into the wings.

  In February, when everyone was back from break, she performed again. It was her sixth month. She wore a white leotard under a white silk slip from the flea market. Ross stood in t
he back of the audience for this one. In November, he’d sat in the front row, but something about it had been weird for him.

  He couldn’t figure it out, spent a lot of time doing self-analysis in his journal. Why didn’t he like her pregnant performance? In their dorm room, Mary’s dancing did nothing but turn him on and on; when she was onstage, though, he could barely watch. Was he jealous that she had all the attention? Or jealous that everyone was getting a look at what her body could do? Yet he also felt an icky pride that his friends were getting a glimpse of what he got every night. Standing in back, leaning up against the wall, he felt the crowd turn liquid. Mary was doing the slowest glide downstage with her head thrown back and the top of her body arched back and up, and even with that white silk draping her full breasts and her wide middle, her sexiness wasn’t the thing that caught everyone. The room wasn’t turned on, Ross could tell. What they were was alert. Mary was forcing everyone to see there was some way for their bodies to move that they’d forgotten about or never known.

  At center stage, Mary lifted up from her arched position, brought her head up to face the audience. Tiny as she was, she had turned grand on the stage. Ross felt he’d never seen a taller person. He knew she was spotting the back wall—maybe his head was her centering spot. He imagined her gaze grazing the top of his height, focusing with such power he felt compressed by it, compressed and made small. For eight slow counts, she just stood there, and the audience seemed not to breathe. Ross noticed people’s heads dipped to the side, watching for what she was going to do next. What she did was lift her arms, spread them at her sides. Balanced, still as stone, she began to raise one leg, bent at the knee, and the music crescendoed as the leg straightened and lifted high in front of her. Moving absolutely nothing else, she glided the raised leg to her side.