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

Gazing at her as if she were already naked. "You ever wear makeup? You could
stand a little lipstick. Do something with your hair too, maybe."
"How much?" she asked, and he told her.
Silence.
"When?" she asked, and he told her that too.


Too-loud music, she brought her own tape player and a selection of tapes,
twenty-two different choices from The Stripper to soft rock to thrash, she could
dance to anything and it didn't matter as much as she had feared, being naked, not as
bad as it might have been although at first it was terrible, the things they said, they
were so different from the young men at the clubs, being naked must make the
difference but after a while there was no difference after all or perhaps she had
forgotten how to listen, forgotten everything but the feel of the music and that had
not changed, the music and the sweat and the muscles in her body, dancer's muscles
and she did tour parties a night, six on a good night; one night she did ten but that
was too much, she had almost fallen off the table, almost broken her arm on a chair's
unpadded back, and with that much work she had no time for herself, for the real
dancing, alone at the barre, alone in the dark and the winter, it seemed, would last
forever, her hands were always frozen, broken windows in her studio and she
covered them over with cardboard and duct tape, covered them over with shaking
hands and her hands, she thought, were growing thinner or perhaps her fingers were
longer, it was hard to tell, always so dark in here, but she thought she might have lost
some weight, a few pounds, five or ten and at the parties they called her skinny, or
scrawny, get your scrawny ass movin', babe or hey where's your tits? but she had
gone past the point of listening, of caring; had discovered that she would never
discover her prince in places like this, her partner, the one she had to have: find your
prince and although Adele made less sense these days, spoke less frequently still she
was the only one who understood: the new copy gone to rags like the old one,
reading between the lines and while she talked very little about her own life it was a
biography of Balanchine after allstill some of her insights, her guesses and pains
emerged and in the reading emerged anew: she's like me, she thought, reading certain
passages again and again, she knows what it's like to need to dance, to push the
need away and away like an importunate lover, like a prince only to seek it again with
broken hands and a broken body, seek it because it is the only thing you need: the
difference between love and hunger: find your prince and find a partner, because no
one can dance forever alone.
 Different clubs now in this endless winter, places she had never been, streets she
had avoided but she could not go back to some of the old places, too many young
men there whose faces she knew, whose bodies she knew, who could never be her
prince and something told her to hurry: time tumbling and burning, time seeping
away and it was Adele's voice in her head, snatches of the book, passages mumbled
by memory so often they took on the force of prayer, of chant, plainsong garbled by
beating blood in the head as she danced, as she danced, as she danced: and the
young men did not approach as often or with such enthusiasm although her dance
was still superb, even better now than it had ever been; sometimes she caught them
staring, walking off the floor and they would turn their heads, look away, did they
think she had not seen? Eyes closed still she knew: the body does not lie but the
ones who did speak, who did approach were different now, a fundamental change:
"Hey," no smile, wary hand on the drink. "You with anybody?"