Brother and the Dancer. Keenan Norris
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the pretty lies about a different world.
When lunch was done, the twins went one way and the parents and Touissant another.
Erycha followed after the parents and Touissant, so as not to end up at an expensive private school. She got in the backseat next to Touissant. As the engine revved, she felt him lean into her the way she had leaned into him at orientation. “Were you lying to me or to them?” He whispered very quietly, almost too faint to hear.
Erycha was surprised by the question but took it in her stride. She was still impressed by just how easy it was to lie. She dug in her purse, found a pen and a large business card for a hair salon. The card had nothing written on the back.
to them
She handed over the card and looked at him, straight at his dishonest eyes.
He took the pen along with the card. Why?
they wanted the lie you wanted the lie
He looked into the blood spider explosions that were her eyes. That makes no sense.
yes it does
How?
you wouldnt understand.
Is your name even Erica?
erycha evans are you really a dancer?
Touissant knew she already knew the answer to that question. If she hadn’t figured him out at orientation, she surely had at lunch, when his parents went on and on about his goals in the fields of political science and later law school and local and state government. None of what he had going for him had anything to do with dance. And he had planned to tell her the truth anyway, sometime before the dancing started. Really, Touissant just didn’t understand why his not being a dancer would make her want to retaliate in kind. He had lied, but for a good cause. He was just trying to get closer to her.
No.
Erycha kept thinking about Josephine and her cat and that incredible walk she took. She imagined herself in that beautiful body. She was walking down that Paris street buck naked, the cheetah by her side. She had no leash for it, just her will. She was Josephine and Touissant and every other fronting, foolish brother she had ever known was the cheetah. She stopped and knelt and said something in French that made the cat stop, and she placed a diamond collar round its neck. All around her female-acting Frenchmen and their jealous wives watched her. She could hear each and every murmur. The Champs-Elysées was her campus and the people watching were an audience before which to perform. Everything in Erycha’s dream was the opposite of the real world, where she sat in a far corner of the banquet hall next to a boy who had straight-up lied to her about himself and to whom she had been lying ever since just for the hell of it. Nobody was watching them. Nobody knew they were at the campus. Their only connection was the false one that they had created in their conversations that day. In the fantasy, she strolled slow and naked down the street, her walk a dance, her nakedness a basic beautiful truth. In the fantasy, she didn’t have to worry about lies or class segregation or whether her grammar was completely proper. She spoke exquisite French in her dream.
The difference between dreams and lies dwindled as the night wore on. Touissant determined to go through the motions with the girl even though he knew she was doing the same thing, writing notes back and forth, talking to him when she had to, dancing with him when she got tired of sitting in her chair too long. But she was living in her thoughts, living in a silent conversation with her own desires, just as he was. He was even more centered on himself than she was. He was only thinking about himself now and about what would come next for him: in less than a week, he would be in New Orleans, at yet another college orientation. This one would be at Xavier University. He had family all over the South but mostly in New Orleans. He had ancestors buried there who had lived and died well before Emancipation. But he had yet to visit the town. He thought about the campus and all the black people that would be there. He thought about the cedar-skinned Creole girls and wondered if it would be easier or harder to talk to bayou sisters with heavy accents and different slang than with this person from his own hometown. He imagined that he would catch on to the New Orleans chat instantly, that some deep hidden part of him, combined of his Southern heritage and whatever else was working inside his soul, would vibe with the ways of the people down there. They would be familiar to him in a way that he wouldn’t be able to understand or explain. He would just know them. That simple. It would be home out there, he thought, a return to an old home.
He wrote her one more note.
What if God told me to lie to you? What if He wanted me to meet you?
He didn’t know where that line came from, if he had heard it somewhere before, in a church, on television, or the radio, or from the mouth of some kid trying to talk one of his sisters into a date. He didn’t even know if Erycha went to church or even believed in God. He knew he didn’t. But he passed her the note anyway.
you dont talk to god
Dance, Erycha had learned somewhere, was a story. That was why, though she had trouble admitting it aloud, she now intended to dance as little as possible and to think and to write about dance until she had filled volumes with a philosophy linking movement to culture and solitude. There were reasons for this decision that in sum was a story all by itself. It was a story she was living, though, and couldn’t even talk about, let alone put down on paper. If it was a conversation, it would be one that nobody she was likely to spend time with could follow. If it was a movement, it would be something post-modern, probably some sort of desperate painful lunging on her back on the floor. She didn’t see that going over well at the banquet. Instead, she tried something subtle.
She waited until the DJ exhausted a few dance and trance and hip-hop tracks. She thought how half the time the girls doing modern dance looked like old folks trying to do the gator on their backs. She thought about clubs in Los Angeles she had only heard tale of where the dancers could leave people motionless and in awe, their ideas on a dance floor were so good. When the first staccato beats of “If I Was Your Girlfriend” began and Prince began to speak and then sing, she got up from her chair and looked at Touissant. He stared back at her unmoved but interested enough not to take his eyes from her. It wasn’t long before a slim girl in jeans and heels began dancing in her space. The girl danced close and wanted Erycha to come even closer. But Erycha was a solo act, despite the presence of a partner who flowed and shook and melted into her every time Prince came out of his pleading falsetto and dropped his voice into normal register.
Erycha was used to men dancing close and the girl was really no different. She was a shadow of movement, a likeness and a following all at once. She was willing to bend not only to the beat but to her partner, whereas Erycha, who led, told a story unshaped by the song and independent of her partner. Her body described the knife resting with its blade up right where she’d left it on the table in her small apartment. Her movement was not flow, but a strolling aggression that bent the girl in the jeans and heels this way then that and anticipated Prince’s vocal changes so that she was ahead of time. She vogued her way into Prince’s highest registers and sauntered her way out on the downbeat. She cut one dancer so quick and cold he didn’t even know he’d been upstaged, his lame Chicago-step parodied and discarded, his partner distracted by a deep laceration that he had neither felt nor seen. Then the boy’s partner stopped dancing with him and simply watched Erycha.
Erycha kept on dancing, first with the girl who had approached her, later with the girl who had left her partner. Erycha glanced at Touissant now and again. He was watching her.
In fact, he was captured by her glances. Her looks, even when they were brief, were demanding and fierce, but incredibly sad, too, like nothing he had seen before. In the parking lot after the proceedings had come to their close, she looked at him with eyes that said she wished not to be lied to, but knew that even her dreams were lies, that everything she had ever wanted was one way or another unreal. They both said goodbye and then she turned and walked away, strolling through the poorly lit lot. And he couldn’t stop staring after her.