"Kathe Koja - Pas de Deux" - читать интересную книгу автора (Koja Kathe)

"I don't want to dance," her own voice, not loud but the girls looked up, all of
them, starlings on a branch, prisoners in a cell. "I want to play soccer."
The woman's gaze; she did not bother to smile. "Oh, no," she said. "No sports
for you, you've got a dancer's body."


"Are you a dancer?" Shouted into her ear, that eager young voice. "I mean like
professionally?"
"Yes," she said. "No."
"Can I buy you a drink? What're you drinking?" and it was one beer, then two,
then six and they stopped on the way to her place, stopped and bought a bottle of
V . O . a princely gesture? and sat in the dark doing shots as he undressed her,
stripped like skin the moist drape of her T-shirt, her spartan white panties, her black
cotton skirt till she sat naked and drunk and shivering, her nipples hard, all the light
gone from the room and "The way you move," he said, kept saying, hushed voice of
glimpsed marvels. "Wow. The way you move, I knew right away you were some
kind of dancer, right, I mean like for a living. Are you in the ballet? Are y o u "
"Here," she said, "here, I'll show you," and downstairs, hand in hand and naked
in the dark, the lessening angle of his erection but he was young and it was easy, one
or two or six little pulls and he was stiff as a board, as a barre, stiff and ready and
she danced for him first, danced around him, Salome without the veils: rubbing her
breasts against his back, trapping his thighs with her own and since he was drunk it
took longer but not so very long, not much time after all before they were lying there,
warmths illusion and panting into one another's mouths and she told him the
difference between love and hunger, between what is needed and what must be had
and "You're so beautiful," he said, slurred words and a smile of great simplicity, a
deep and tender smile; it was doubtful he had heard anything she had said. His penis
against her like a finger, the touch confiding: "So can I, can I call you?"
Dust, grains of dirt stuck to her skin, to the skin of her face against the floor. No
prince: or not for her: her body said so. "Sure," she said. "Sure, you can call me."
When he had gone she went back upstairs, took up Adele's book, and began
again to read it page by page.


No more ballet classes, dancers body or no, she was out and now it was too late
for tap or modern dance, too late for soccer and so she spent the summer with her
father, dragging up and down the four flights of his walk-up, silent and staring at the
TV: "Why don't you go out?" Lighting up a menthol cigarette, he smoked three and
a half packs a day; by the time she was eighteen he would be dead. "Meet some kids
or something."
"There aren't any kids in this building," she said. A musical on TV, the Arts in
America channel; two women singing about travel and trains. "And it's too hot to go
out." The air conditioner worked but not well; endless the scent of mildew and
smoke, of her father's aftershave when he dressed to go out: "Keep the door
locked," as he left, to whom would she open it anyway? Sitting up by the TV, chin
in hand in the constant draft, the sound of traffic outside. In September he sent her
back to her mother, back to school; she never went to a dance class again.


"It's a part-time position," the woman said. She might have been twenty, very