Page 43 of Just Say Christmas
“Zavy’s telling us about our future dancing dog,” Kevin said. “Fred Astaire.”
“Oh,” Holly said. “Yeh. I took him to the shelter while you were gone on tour last week, to look. There was a lovely dog there. Female, a bit older. Seven or eight, they said, and she’s pretty big, so . . . not so much public interest, but she had such beautiful eyes, and she sort of prances when she sees you, which is adorable.”
“Yes,” Zavy said. “She’s a girl dog, and her name is Fred, and she’s a dancing dog.”
“Right,” Kevin said. “Our girl dog. Fred Astaire. Except that I’m not here all the time, so . . .”
Holly sighed. “I’mresponsible,all right? Don’t Noelle and I put Zavy to bed, if you’re not home? Yes, we do. It takes avillage,Kevin. Wearea village. We’re nothingbuta village.”
Well,thatwas true. He’d grown up with dogs on the farm. He liked dogs fine. Chloe, maybe not so much. He couldn’t imagine her mother, with her absolutely pristine all-white apartment and her rigorously perfect life, ever allowing a dog. He’d bet Fred Astaire had a tail that could wipe a coffee table clean. She sounded like that kind of dog. He told Chloe, “Your choice, I reckon. Also, Holly . . . just how hairy is Fred?”
“Pretty hairy,” Holly admitted. “That’s the other reason she’s still there. That, and she’s a bit fat. But that’s because she hasn’t had enough exercise.”
“Dog hair on the floor?” Kevin asked Chloe, who spent a fair amount of her time at home on the floor.
She waved a hand. “We can hoover more.”
She and Kevincould hoover more, she meant. Holly and Noelle, twin cyclones in the home-maintenance department, wouldn’t be hoovering more. “Reckon Fred should come home for a visit, then,” he told Holly. “And we’ll see. Chloe and I will see, that is,” he hurried to add. It was a bit hard, sometimes, to get across the message that he and Chloe were in charge. Their family life could be a bit fluid. A bit redheaded. Chloe was the most disciplined of women married into the least disciplined of families, other than Kevin, the steady cuckoo in a somewhat chaotic nest.
“Hear that, Zavy?” Holly asked him. “Fred gets to come for a visit! And then live with us! Yay!” She jumped up from the table, and Zavy laughed and looked hesitant, but expectant. Waiting to jump in, as usual. Holly grabbed him out of his chair, twirled him, and said, “Yay, Fred!” and he laughed again and shouted, “Yay, Fred!”
Kevin was getting a hairy dog. Who was a bit fat. He told Chloe, “So. Fred. And two roles in theNutcracker.Explain why?”
She said, “Because it’s Michael Landry, my old partner, come back from the Royal Ballet in London for a sabbatical. Well, actually to be close to his mum, who’s ill. This is the role that got us both noticed in the first place, and it’s such a crowd-pleaser. Coffee, inNutcracker.The Arabian dance. The choreography is unique, you’ll see.But we can’t only do that, of course, because I’m a principal. People want to see the principal dance Sugar Plum, and besides—I want to do it. Ineedto do it.”
He had to admit that he understood that. You never wanted to give the fella on the bench a chance to nick your starting spot. It was a team, but it was also a competition. You couldn’t get away from it.
Chloe went on, “And Michael does Cavalier—the Sugar Plum Fairy’s partner—like a dream, of course. He’s the partner who spoiled me for all other partners. Anyway, if you’re going to rehearse and you’re going to dance, you may as well do both.”
“Express yourself,” he suggested. That was what the All Blacks would call it, anyway. Putting your stamp on the game.
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly. And it’s such a good part, Kevin. Sugar Plum is fiendishly difficult, even though it’s not as much time on stage as in other ballets. To look that light, that effortless . . . it takespain.But Coffee,thisCoffee? Wait until you see. It’s . . .” She glanced at Zavy and Holly. “I’ll tell you later. I’ll show you. You’ll see.”
He’d seen. He was seeing again now. It still got him, every time. It was getting him again right now.
23
Coffee
KEVIN
Your first clue was the costumes. Chloe came out onto one side of the stage as Michael came out on the other, both wearing sheer harem pants whose sparkling, V-shaped waistbands were cut far below the navel, Chloe’s in pink and Michael’s in burgundy. That was about all, except for their ballet slippers, Michael’s head wrap, studded chest band, and collar, and Chloe’s abbreviated little top.
Kevin had seen them do this dance twenty times. It still went straight to his groin. That wasn’t a very refined thing to think, or to feel. He couldn’t help it. The first time he’d seen Chloe in that costume, he’d thought,Abs.Until she’d turned around, and he’d thought,Whoa.When the two partners came out together, though, meeting with all that assurance, grace, and restrained passion, you thought more,Male and Female. And it just got worse from there.
Michael was built like a back. A little like Koti James, in fact. As chiseled and as broad-shouldered, but leaner, as if every part of his body that wasn’t useful for ballet had been stripped away, leaving him as pure power. And Chloe looked more elementally feminine in those harem pants than she did in any tutu. Her thighs, her small breasts, her tight, round bum, the grace in her arms and the way she held her beautifully shaped head, all of it was . . . perfect. There wasn’t much of her, because she’d slimmed down, under the discipline of performing six days a week, until she too was nothing but ballet muscle, but what was there worked for him. She was the exact opposite of Kevin, as he was built more along battering-ram lines, but that was what made it so exciting.
He’d always been an easygoing fella. When he’d met Chloe, though, something had shifted. He’d had to suppress a pang of purely primitive jealousy, for example, when he’d first seen her dressed like this, doing this dance. A feeling that he shouldn’t let everybody see her this way, or pride that theywereseeing her this way, and he knew she was his. He wasn’t sure even now which of those won, and he wasn’t sharing either one with her or anybody else. Generally, he let his body do the talking with Chloe, and when she came home after the kind of performance he could already tell she was going to give today, because he was in the audience . . . her body would know what his wanted to say.
Then there was the music. A low, driving beat from the cellos, and the woodwinds and violins carrying the slow, sensual melody. He could have closed his eyes and guessed what he’d be about to see, but it was better with his eyes open.
Thirty seconds in, and the audience was sitting up straighter, as Michael turned a slow, fully controlled walkover, ending up sitting, one leg stretched before him, then lying on his back, and Chloe lowered herself over him. He grasped her by the hips, then spun her as she lay flat in the air. Kevin did his best to think about core strength, and the audience sighed. Michael set her down, she twirled away, and he caught one hand and pulled her back to him, after which she straddled him again, standing over his face, facing away. Push and pull, both of them completely aware of the other, Michael catching her, releasing, and catching her again, and Chloe letting herself be caught, secure in the power of her femininity.
It looked like it was going to be sex. Itfeltlike it was going to be sex. It was the music, and the expectancy in both their bodies. Michael’s hands went flat against her upper thighs, and he lowered her slowly over his head behind him, then all the way to the floor, as the audience made a noise, something between a murmur and a groan.
It got you. It did. As much acrobatics as dance, or as Chloe had said, “It’s Cirque du Soleil, not Bolshoi Ballet, but it’s Christmas. It’s fun.” People got their fun in different ways, Kevin guessed, as he watched Michael’s back arching with impossible slowness, to a degree that screamed “pulled muscle,” until only the back of his head and his heels touched the floor, and Chloe held her body rigid, every muscle taut, but placed with absolute grace, as she went down. Her feet were captured between her partner’s forearms and biceps, and her arms went out to her sides, then over her head in one continuous motion as she swan-dove slowly through space until her chest nearly reached the floor. The two of them were one long, curving, S-shaped line, the wave in a pink ribbon as you snapped it through the air. The audience held their breath, and they did the entire thing in reverse, with Chloe coming up again just as slowly as she’d gone down.
He’d asked her, when he’d gone to rehearsal and watched her do this, had had to snap his mouth shut and attempt to disguise how she made his temperature rise, “Don’t you need to train specially for that? Do more core work? Flexibility work?” He’d thoughthedid core work. Planks, side planks, one-armed planks, burpees . . . yeh. Core work. He’d never, though, had somebody steady him while he went slowly down to the floor and back up again using every muscle in his body, let alone done it with grace. He’d also never done what she did a minute later, when Michael lifted her high over his head, and she twined her whole self down around him, circling his body slowly from head to toe, held only by her arms, like a goldfish swimming around a castle, its graceful tail swishing through the water. It was a magician’s trick, where you knew there was a physical sequence to it, a way it worked, movement upon movement, but it still didn’t look humanly possible.
