Once more, I was mesmerized.
This couldn't keep happening. I was a professional with a reputation to uphold, a dance studio to maintain, and a sacred vow of marriage to think about. Not that Michael would have minded one bit, I knew -- we had long since come to an unspoken agreement to look the other way when it came to the little peccadilloes that dot every marriage, so even if he did by some fluke take it into his head to mind, I had a laundry list of names that he had stepped out with ready to go.
But it wasn't Michael or his various flings that were occupying my mind at the moment. What was making my eyes lose focus and my tempo-setting movements turn mechanical and my wellspring of crisply spoken, sharply phrased criticisms and (less occasionally) praise dry up in my mouth was the beautifully rounded posterior of a teenage girl.
Not just any teenage girl: Nicole had been a ray of light since the moment she stepped into my studio, laughing apologies for being so old (she was eighteen) and out of shape (she was nearly three hundred pounds, although she carried it well on a six-foot frame; all thigh and breast meat, as Michael would have said with a vulgar laugh). I had pointed out in my most excruciatingly polite manner that Madame De Guilles' studio catered to a rather different clientele, namely younger women who were seriously pursuing dance as a vocation, and hinted that a Zumba or even a Pilates class was what she wanted. But she had just smiled that huge disarming smile that made her eyes almost disappear into twinkling little slits and nodded, her light brown-frosted curls bouncing along, and said,
"No, that's perfect. I'm going to be on Broadway."
Not with that figure you're not, were the words that sprang automatically to mind, though I refrained from saying them out loud. But despite myself I had agreed to take her money; she happily paid in advance, and agreed to sit in on the beginner's class to start with, until I judged that she was capable of tackling the more advanced levels.
Perhaps I should have been firmer; after all, nothing good ever comes of encouraging delusion, even if it can turn a pretty profit while it lasts. But I didn't have the heart to turn that winning smile away; and when she showed up for practice the following week, towering over the tiny eight-, ten- and twelve-year-olds who stared at her with awed, mystified eyes, I found another reason to want to keep her in the studio.
I had always had a weakness for large, shapely women -- in the years before the agreement, Michael and I had even shared a few, before he started hunting his own game -- and compressed into her leotard Nicole was perhaps the shapeliest I'd ever seen. Her buttocks were massive and perfectly round; not in the obtrusive way that declares a Brazilian surgeon's work, but in that natural taut teenage way, when gravity hasn't yet done its years of dirty work. Her thighs were deliciously meaty -- either one of them was thicker than the torso of just about every other girl in the class -- but her waist, wrists, and ankles were still trim. Her breasts were far too large for the ideal dancer's figure, but not so large that they were in proportion to her magnificent ass; but anyway, she wore an athletic bra under the leotard and kept them in check, unlike her gloriously jiggly gluteus.
And she could move. Not, indeed, that she had anything like professional training, but she had a natural grace that belied her weight, and a talent for picking up the faintest hint of motion and copying it almost exactly. She came from a dancing family, she explained -- "Mamma and Daddy were on Soul Train back in the day" -- and had been a cheerleader before being discovered by the theater program at her high school.
There was no denying that she was a magnetic performer -- that smile alone! -- and I found myself more than once envying the high school students who were getting to watch her run riot in rehearsals for the school play, as I learned from her after-class chatter. I wondered if any of the teachers sat in the back rows of the auditorium watching her and wanting to touch themselves, like I did.
"Lucienne De Guille," I told myself severely, once everyone had been picked up and carted off and the studio was empty and only needed locking up, "You are an old fool. Mooning over that child a third of your age----" this wasn't quite true, I was only forty-eight, and as taut and slender as I had ever been, thanks to a lifetime of discipline through dance---- "when you have a perfectly good husband waiting for you at home." Even that was too much for my self-critical mood, however: by no stretch of the imagination could Michael be considered to be waiting around for me, although of course he would be very happy to see me.
In fact our lovemaking that night must have had a stronger spark than usual, because in the afterglow he said,
"Getting frisky out there, are you? Anyone I know?"
"Oh, shut up, Michael," I said, and put on my sleep mask. "You seem to think I'm as randy as you are."
"Not usually," he admitted. "But tonight...." he trailed off, and then leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. His mustache bristled on my newly moisturized skin. "I wish you good hunting, Luci," he murmured in my ear.
And now here I was, some weeks later. I certainly could not have been said to be hunting Nicole, as I never initiated conversation outside of classroom instruction, but my eyes followed her every movement and the mothers of some of the younger girls had begun to hint that I wasn't paying them enough attention. So I had moved Nicole up to an intermediate contemporary class, trusting that her quick study and natural charm would brave her through not knowing the drills that the thirteen- and fourteen-year old girls knew by heart. And she had proved my trust correct: although the first class was the first time I ever saw her smile slip as she studied the movements of her classmates furiously, she had picked up the majority of the routine by the end of class, and performed it almost flawlessly the following week.
Almost flawlessly: because there was one issue with Nicole's performance, one that I had been dreading having to bring up with her ever since she had mentioned her parents being on Soul Train. Her timing was off.
You mustn't imagine that this was about race. As it happens, my New Orleans Creole ancestors had left me with a darker complexion than Nicole, whose tawny skin glistened so delectably when she worked up a sweat in class. Nor was it about respectability politics: vernacular dance had been one of the great joys of my youth, when Michael and I were regulars at house-music clubs, and I understood why Nicole dragged slightly behind the beat or rushed it: she was just adding a funky accent to the dance. But professional dancers were expected to keep strict time.
I suppose I could have gone about it in a better way. The truth is that I was so disturbed by how much I felt myself craving her -- I would lose whole seconds to fantasizing about licking up the sweat as it trickled down her thighs, and I was devoutly thankful that my invariable uniform of black was least likely to give away how drenched my nethers became after an hour of watching her -- that I felt I had to make an example of her, if only to myself.
"Nicole," I snapped, "you're off rhythm." I snapped my fingers in perfect time with the music as it played. Her buttocks jiggled to a stop as she turned to look at me in astonishment, "Try again," I directed, and restarted the track.
She went into the movements again, but I cut her off again. The other girls started to frown, aware that they had made mistakes too, and wondering why I wasn't calling them out.
I walked up to Nicole, still snapping the rhythm with my fingers. "You -- need -- to -- dance -- in -- strict -- time," I said, measuring each word to the rhythm. "You're not another instrumentalist playing off the others, you're a vehicle for the choreography to express itself. And the choreography is timed -- to -- the -- rhythm."
I smacked my hand against my thigh to pound out the rhythm. I was next to her now, looking at her as she attempted to keep time to my metronomic beat, but I cut her off every time she missed.
"Again," I said, and,
"Again."
The smile disappeared entirely in a frown of concentration. She tensed, flung her body at the rhythm, and held it for only a few moments before slipping back into a funky counterpoint.
"Again," I said, but she reached out and grabbed my hand before I could smack my thigh.
"Hit me instead," she said.
