In Transit

A Short Story

~In Transit~

“Take you, for example. You pretend to be a lot stupider than you really are.”

She blinked at him with those big, doe eyes. He wondered, not for the first time, how many tickets those doe eyes sold. He lifted a finger, a masculine finger, veined, with rough skin, and pointed at those blinking eyes.

“There. That. That’s how you do it.”

The troupe of twenty-seven dancers had been on tour around the country for the last three months. Max was their business manager. He made sure the venues were set, hotel rooms booked, and all necessary items provided on time. He handled any snafus, any irregular activity. Max ran a tight ship, so there weren’t many of those. He did not typically travel with the troupe; he had plenty of other interests to manage.

He had seen them perform many times before of course. If he didn’t believe in the arts or find value in them, he wouldn’t have bothered. There were better ways to make money. But his mother had been a dancer and had raised Max with a healthy appreciation for beauty and a respect for the sacrifices artists make for their craft. Managing the business affairs of the Chicago Ballet Company was one of the ways he honored her memory.

His work did not often allow him to travel with them. But he had a business meeting in New York that happened to coincide with their last performance of the season. He liked to check in and take the temperature on how the company was doing. Besides, it was their last performance, the last time this collective would be on stage together as a group. A whole new season of tryouts, choreography, and rehearsals. Who knew who would make it on stage next? It was a moment in time, as delicate as a soap bubble, and his mother had trained him to appreciate the beauty of the fleeting.

Max often wondered, if not for his mother, what kind of life would he be living now. One filled with only numbers, mergers, and a quagmire of politics. Would he have taken time to enjoy the beauty of the world, enjoy life, or simply measure and quantify it? Thus, the Chicago Ballet Company… and Max maintained some grip on his humanity.

He did not have any personal connections with the dancers beyond the memory of his mother. He kept himself mostly separate from them, understanding there was no commonality between him and them beyond performer and audience member, artist and patron. When Alessandra had walked into the restaurant and seen him, on impulse, before he could stop himself, he had waved. And then she couldn’t un-see him, and he couldn’t un-wave, and so, of course, she had to sit, and thus began the first real conversation he had had with the principal dancer.

Travelers passed on either side of them, rolling suitcases on the polished floor, striding smoothly from one gate to the next. Humans modeling various responses to the question of dress while in transit: shabby chic; athleisure, with the yoga pants and designer backpacks that cost several hundred; just plain shabby, kicking it with the grey sweats and crummy trainers for those travelers whose main goal is to roll out of bed and maintain that state of comfort for the duration of their trip; business professional; jeans and floral print; parents rolling strollers and luggage, resembling pack mules more than homosapiens. Max’s heart always went out to these, particularly the single mothers.

For himself, Max preferred the business professional. Yes, it was less comfortable than sweats, and the clothing certainly creased and crumpled, but The suit jacket, the collared shirt, the nice watch, and the polished shoes gave him authority. Smaller fish stayed out of his way.

Groups always seemed to match, go together, and follow some basic thematic visual principles. So many stories rolling past them at the speed of a squeaky wheel. Max read people from a distance; labeled them, in the blink of an eye. He prided himself on his accuracy. Yet how much of how he read these glimpses had he accurately interpreted?

That was how their conversation began: awkward remarks about the travelers around them. Conjectures about the lives they led. He had commented that people were easy to read. She had agreed. Easy. Neat. No fuss. Except that wasn’t always the case, was it? Take her, for example. Alessandra. She was not what she appeared. Thus, his backhanded compliment. Possibly designed to provoke a response.

Something had always struck him as off about her. She was quiet, like him. Yet when she entered a space, a restaurant for a celebratory meal, an elevator, or the stage, a gravitational weight pulled the gaze towards her.

She was good at shifting the attention though, like a black hole: anything drawing too near simply disappeared, went away, and then she was spinning off in the next pirouette. It took Max long enough to recognize this, this missing piece of information. It was one of those facts you only recognized by absence, by something missing, a dropped beat, something not lining up. Like one of those pictures you look at for the longest time and see only a grassy glen with a mountain, and then by softening your focus, you finally see the spaceship underneath.

Max tapped the small silver spoon on his coffee cup, enjoying the high-pitched ringing. They were in a little alcove, the noise just past the implied barriers constructed along the airport restaurant runway. Pretend privacy, that’s all this was. Expected respect based on social norms, unspoken obedience as people averted their eyes and acted as if they were alone, bobbing and weaving in and out of traffic, everyone in their own little worlds. Well, he wasn’t averting his eyes anymore, the conundrum before him far too interesting.

“What I can’t figure out, is why,” he said.

Alessandra did not look away. She always had before. Avoiding his gaze, like she might trigger a trip wire. It had fooled him for long enough. Not anymore. They might have been manikins in a window, a tableau of patrons at rest in a café. Come in, try our cappuccinos, and you too can look this engaged and interesting.

He thought, for a flicker, that she wasn’t going to answer him. That she was going to give a silly laugh, joke it away with shy flirtation. And then it was as though she lifted the actor’s mask from her face and set it aside on the table next to the empty cappuccinos, the plates with flakey pastry bits, and her plane ticket.

“It’s what people expect,” she said.

“Who cares what people expect?”

“It’s easier.”

Max nodded slowly. He understood that. It was a technique he used in many of his business dealings. Allow the party across the table to think you a fool, that you had missed key details, that you were most interested in their good above and beyond common business sense, and then sweep in and walk away with the majority share.

“To what advantage?” he asked. She frowned.

“What?”

“You’re not afraid of hard work. You don’t get to where you are, principal dancer at a well-respected company, without putting in an un-godly amount of sweat-equity. So when you say it’s easier, to what advantage.”

“You enjoy doing things because they’re hard?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” he admitted, his smile cool. He didn’t get where he was without some sadistic pleasure in hard work. “But you’re dodging the question. To what advantage?”

“It’s not what the world wants,” she said.

He just watched her. She sighed.

“You can be talented and beautiful, maybe even hard-working, but don’t add in smart. People can’t take that. It’s too much. They’re afraid of it. They feel like they’ll get cut if they come too close to you.”

“Who cares if they’re afraid of you?”

“Says the man.”

“That’s bull-crap.”

“Says the wealthy man,” she said.

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “I didn’t always have what I have now. I had to work for it.”

“And I had to work for what I have,” she retorted. There was fire in her eyes, defiance. True: humans were the sum of their experiences, and Max had no idea what sort of wars she had faced. But he didn’t believe in self-imposed glass ceilings. He didn’t believe in glass ceilings, period. Certainly, his gender afforded him certain privileges, but if there was anything that pissed him off, it was self-victimization. Another lesson gained from watching his mother.

“So, you think your life would be more difficult if you were honest about who you really were.”

Max wondered if they really did put that to the test, would he walk away cut? The possibility intrigued him. But again, he was a sadist for difficult projects.

“We all have our coping mechanisms. I pretend to be shy. Stupid,” she said, using his word. “You pretend to be a callous asshole.”

Max raised his eyebrows. She tilted her head at him.

It took a second for his heart to stop pounding.

“How do you know I’m not?”

“You fund a ballet company.”

“Lots of rich assholes patronize the art. They use it to boost their image.”

“None of those rich assholes travel with dance companies or come to half of their shows. Besides,” she peered at him, and now he did want to look away, feeling that black hole suck him in. Except this black hole had blue eyes edging towards seafoam green. “You waved.”

Max was suddenly very aware of the travelers all around them. The loud conversations, the bags rolled in and tucked next to the tables, the clack of silverware on plates. Exposed.

“You have a heart. You want the connection with others, you just don’t think you can have it,” she said. Sharp indeed.

“Whereas you deny who you really are so you can pretend you have it.”

She set her jaw at this. He couldn’t stop himself.

“Let me ask you this, if you can’t be who you really are with the people around you, do you have a real connection with them? Real relationships?”

“I don’t see what the alternative is,” she said.

Stop crawling on the floor, he wanted to snap at her. Instead, he said,

“Let them deal with the real you. Stop pretending.”

She looked down, shaking her head. She retrieved her plane ticket, shouldered her bag, and draped her coat over one arm. She rolled her suitcase past him.

“See who sticks around,” he said.

He heard her pause. He wanted to turn but he held perfectly still. Then she left, and the sound of wheels on her suitcase was lost in a million sets of wheels and shoes, all seeking their destination.

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