Grand Pas de Deux by Katie Darby Mullins
"You may wonder whether or not Maria knew who Lisa was, and it’s a fair question. Of course she did. It’s not as though Maria didn’t recognize her lover’s wife."
I can be a sucker for a story with a good form, an interesting structure. When I teach my “Art of the Essay” course, we end the semester with a unit on “hermit crab essays,” an explicit look at, taking apart of, and playing with form, and I always love the way it opens something up in so many of my students, helps them think about storytelling in a whole new way.
So, when Katie submitted this story and wrote, “this story is in the shape of a grand pas de deux. No, I don’t know how to explain that,” I didn’t really know what that meant (and still don’t, not entirely), but I was intrigued. And one of the things I so love about this story is that playful and curious playing with form, but also how that form is so perfectly married to the story itself… I forget all about any kind of story shape or structure or constraint. I become totally wrapped up in the story (and lives!) of these two women, Maria and Lisa, and everything they are telling one another, and not telling each other, and all the tension and magic in those spaces and gaps in-between.
—Aaron Burch
Listen to Katie read “Grand Pas de Deux”:
Entrée
How long does a ballerina prepare before the grand pas de deux finally commences? How many toenails are sacrificed to the block of wood as she shuffles en pointe? Why put herself in pain just so she can replicate that pain over and over again for spectators while she pirouettes under a hot spotlight?
There are no ballerinas here, though these women have roles that were assigned before the curtains split to the proscenium. The background had already been designed and the duet set up. Neither woman could have abandoned their parts, at least not this late in the show.
*
As an EMT rolled the stretcher out of the ambulance, Lisa realized that the woman— who was awake, shouting wildly, not dying or apparently in any danger of doing so, more in danger of killing, even— was the one she’d seen pictures of on her husband’s phone. Well. One of them. The one she would recognize most easily. And with that, they had both entered the stage, Lisa, a nurse helping a woman fill out paperwork that Lisa could have written most of without asking; Maria, a patient, early forties, a strange birthmark right above her hipbone, not that said mark was pertinent information. It’s just that Lisa had seen it. On her husband’s phone.
“Address?” It was a perfunctory question. She knew the address well.
You can guess, right? It showed up a few times a month in the GPS on her husband’s phone.
Lisa was not the type to do a drive-by, but was somewhat proud she’d correctly guessed which address belonged to Maria— there were more people than her, of course, men and women. Her husband was insatiable since she went back to work. But Maria… Maria wanted more. No one else tried to talk to her husband about leaving his family.
M: What’s she really like?
H: Who?
M: Your wife?
H: She’s fine.
M: Then why are you with me?
H: I love you.
M: Do you love her?
H: She can be a real bitch sometimes.
M: You deserve better.
“I deserve better,” Lisa said.
“What?” Maria asked.
“I’m— I’m sorry. You said you told your doctor yesterday that you were experiencing pain and exhibiting symptoms of gallbladder problems?”
“Yes,” Maria said, as though Lisa were daft.
“You deserve better. Treatment. Men don’t take women seriously enough.”
“My doctor is a woman.”
Lisa laughed, though it was clearly insincere. “Internalized misogyny. What are you going to do?”
Maria looked a little uncomfortable, but said softly, “I don’t like the hospital. I had a rough pregnancy, and I wound up here for weeks. I’m afraid if I have to have surgery—”
“It’ll be routine,” Lisa said, and forgetting for a moment who Maria was, she reached out to grab her hand. “You’ll be fine. I promise. I won’t see you until you’re out of recovery and on the surgical floor, but I’ll be there until the night nurse gets there. I’m only down in the ER because someone’s on break.” (That was true, but does it matter?)
Maria nodded curtly. “Thank you.”
*
Adagio
“On the pain scale, this is like a twelve,” Maria said, and Lisa had to fight not to roll her eyes. In some strange way, she wanted to spend as much time with Maria as was allowed; she needed to know what this woman offered her husband that she couldn’t.
“I know this hurts,” she said. “We’ve got you on a pain pump. All you have to do is press the button—”
“I’m not stupid,” Maria said.
Lisa was supporting Maria, here: lifting her, helping her with her sheets, bringing her water and ice chips, listening to her talk about how much pain she was in. She brought all her medication. Maria could not have performed any of her role as sad hospital patient without Lisa. But if Lisa is the danseur, Maria is the prima. Lisa decided not to think who had been cast in what role. She came first, certainly, but was the story about her? Had she aged out of the central role?
You may wonder whether or not Maria knew who Lisa was, and it’s a fair question. Of course she did. It’s not as though Maria didn’t recognize her lover’s wife. Sure, Lisa looked slightly different with her hair pulled up, but Maria had combed her Facebook page for family pictures at Disney World, annual trips to the American Girl store in Chicago with the twins, anything that might prove the discontent her boyfriend claimed was there. Zoomed in on every face, every perfectly pearly-white-Norman-Rockwell-tooth. Of course, in all the pictures, he was smiling. He had to be, right? Otherwise, he’d basically be a sociopath. The girls would need these pictures of their father smiling with them.
“Can I get you anything else?” Lisa asked.
“I’m… no. I’m fine.”
Lisa looked— Maria looked for a word— disappointed?
“You can page me with that button.”
Maria nodded. “That’ll be all.”
She can be a real bitch sometimes, Maria remembered her boyfriend saying of Lisa, the woman who, so far, seemed to want nothing more than to be helpful. “She’s been a bitch all morning,” he said once while they were still naked after a morning quickie. He’d barely pulled out. “She wanted me to take the kids to school at the last minute, and—“
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Maria said.
“I did,” he said, looking confused. “I wouldn’t skip something with them for anything.”
“How was she being a bitch, then? If you want the time with them?”
“She demands. She never asks. Not like you,” he said, cupping her chin and kissing her. “You always defer. That’s why things will be so much better when we’re together all the time.”
Maria had actually giggled. She was too old for it, she knew, but she felt young when he was around. As if to enhance the power imbalance, he started getting dressed, but she stayed naked. “And will we make love in the mornings?”
“Only every morning,” he said, kissing her again, no hint of stubble on his perfectly manicured face.
Variation 1: Lisa’s Solo
Perhaps it was their age that made him seem so thoughtful and wise: he was ten years older, a graduate student at Chapel Hill, and she was just an undergrad. But he could play guitar and drink four or five beers without feeling anything at all, and Lisa was jealous of that. She couldn’t do anything without feeling: every falling leaf seemed to provoke some kind of moment for her. She exhausted herself. She had no idea how she didn’t exhaust him.
“You could never be exhausting,” he said one night, stroking her face in the dark. Her eyes had adjusted just well enough to tell where his glassy eyes were, and she tried to look at him. “You are perfect. Your energy, your emotion: they make you who you are,” he said. “I love a woman with fire.”
Who has time for fire once life has started in earnest? But Lisa fought to keep hers. And now, now he found that— her— exhausting. His black hair was speckled with white tufts here and there and his blue eyes still shone glassy in the dark from the bourbon he drank after the girls were in bed. He’d grown wide around the middle, but so had she: she had never recovered the “before” body after the twins. She still thought he was handsome, but after the first round of affairs, she had placed a keystroke tracking app on his phone that made it abundantly clear that he didn’t feel the same way about her.
Sometimes, after she’d read a few messages from his Tinder account, a few from Grindr, a few from Facebook— even people who pretended to be her friend to her face— she’d be so overwhelmed, she’d go sit in the bathroom, turn the shower on, and sob as quietly as possible next to the noise. She jokingly called it her “shower confessional.” She’d been doing it since the first time she found him at the bottom of the stairs, drunk. She thought he was dead, but after screaming and crying, waking up the girls, he just opened his eyes. She’d been too surprised to do much else: she slapped him.
Both girls burst into tears. “Why did you hurt Daddy?” Lacy asked.
H: She hit me once, you know. Out of no where. I was asleep, then she was yelling for me, the next thing I know, my cheek is warm and my girls are crying.
M: Oh, God. That’s awful.
H: Not the way she tells it. It’s some sob story where she’s the victim.
She sat and cried by the shower for a long time after that one, especially given how hard she tried to hide his drinking, how poorly she was apparently doing.
M: I hate when people act like they’re saints so they can lord their morality over you. How is her hitting you less awful than you being with me while you two are separated?
Lisa did not realize she was separated, since he still came home every night, kissed her goodbye every morning, these actions trained into their bodies over decades, movements that had been practiced so many times their muscles found those positions easier even than sitting alone.
The morning he took the kids to school, it was because she realized that she only had thirty minutes to get herself together before they needed to walk out the door. She’d woken up at 3:30, known she wouldn’t sleep, made coffee, and read message after message for hours—
Hey, hot stuff—
Are you busy—
How could someone with your abs be single?—
No, I don’t have kids—
And suddenly it was time to go to school. Her old trick— remembering moments she’d shared only with him, that had been so vivid as to seem sacred at the time— usually took about thirty minutes. There was no way she could get them ready and out the door and still be put together enough for the day. She’d overindulged in self-abuse.
“Honey?” she called from the bathroom. “Can you take the girls to school? I’m not feeling well this morning and I really can’t call in at work.”
“Really?” he said. “You spring this on me now?”
“Isn’t it on your way to work?” she asked, knowing perfectly well that it was in the opposite direction of Maria’s house, where he was actually planning on going.
There was hesitation, and then he said, “Of course, of course. I’m happy to.” A belated, “Can I do anything for you?” floated through the bathroom door. She tried to hide the coating of tears in her throat.
“No, I’m fine,” she said. “I just need a little more time today. Thank you.”
She had her phone notifications silenced so that her phone didn’t go off every time he sent or received a text, but she saw the screen light up.
H: Running late. She has one job. Take care of the kids.
M: Two, right? Then be a nurse?
H: I mean in the morning. Are you on her side?
M: No, not at all. I don’t know any mother who wouldn’t take her own kids to school.
M: You aren’t mad at me, are you?
M: You are still coming, right?
M: I’m sorry.
M: I love you. Please still come.
M: Please?
Lisa had been young and beautiful, too. Once, she was on a date with her now-husband and the drummer of the bar band came up and asked her to dance, right in the middle of dinner. For years, she hid the pride she felt at being asked and allowed the story to become her husband’s— “Anyway, he stood up and punched him, and that’s how you get kicked out of the VA in a small town in North Carolina,” she usually said amongst laughter. Classic. Just like him.
It wasn’t that the drummer asked her to dance, though. It’s that she said yes. She laughed, threw her hair back over her shoulder as she went to yell, “I’ll be right back!” to a man she would grow so familiar with, his body would be more real to her than her own. None of those things bothered him. He had a beer and a book and didn’t mind her dancing a little. But the drummer had also been drinking, and some of the things he thought he was whispering were a little louder than he realized.
“That white skirt,” he said. “When you walked in, backlit by the street lamps… you looked like an angel.”
Lisa giggled. She knew, because that’s what her date yelled at her later. You giggled, you giggled like an idiot, you raised your shoulders— he thought you were going to—
“Oh, be quiet,” she said. “My boyfriend is over there. I’m only dancing with you because he won’t dance.”
The drummer smiled and leaned in, only to sing a few off-key bars of Bowie— “John, don’t get me wrong/ John, she turns me on/ But I’m only dancing.” He made eye contact with her boyfriend while he said it.
That’s when they got in a fight. Lisa looked back now and wondered: which of them was he flirting with? But no, she shouldn’t take that memory from herself, the one where she was backlit by streetlights, where she looked so beautiful she started a fight. She had to believe that she once had this kind of power over more than one man. Over even one man. Over herself.
Variation 2: Maria’s Solo
Nothing feels so helpless as being in the hospital. Maria had a cholescystectemy, a fancy new word she’d learned for “no more gallbladder.” She found out pretty quickly that the painkillers they give after surgery— which were no longer nearly as hardcore as they used to be— did little to ease her pain, so she stayed awake, wincing every time she breathed too deeply, googling things like, “Does gall bladder surgery make you lose weight?”
M: Do you think I’m fat?
M: I won’t be able to work out for a while.
M: I saw her, you know. At the hospital. Where I just had my gallbladder out.
H: You didn’t say anything, did you?
M: I’m doing fine.
H: You know what I mean. The girls.
M: Of course. I’m just lonely and maybe a little scared.
H: You are so beautiful.
M: I just feel guilty. We just started this new exercise routine…
She watched as the blinking ellipsis floated on and off on her screen until finally he wrote back, “We can always start something like that over. Your health is what matters.”
Lisa came in and said, “Are you holding up?”
“It hurts. A lot. Nothing is helping.”
Lisa sat down on the side of her bed. “I’m really sorry,” she said. “It’s good that you came in when you did, though. Things could have gotten a whole lot worse. You were—” she almost choked on the word— “smart to come here.”
Maria nodded. She wasn’t sure if Lisa knew who she was or not, but assumed she didn’t. Her boyfriend had told her they were separated, so even if she did know they were seeing each other, what would the big deal be?
M: Why would it be a big deal if I told her? If you’re separated?
H: No reason. Just… don’t want to hurt her unnecessarily. She’s so unhappy. I don’t want her to know how much easier it was for me to move on.
“Is everything OK?” Lisa asked.
“Yes,” said Maria. “I’m sorry. My boyfriend… he keeps texting to check on me.”
Lisa knew who texted first. She’d watched the phone since she went in the room. “That’s sweet. Is he going to come stay with you tonight?”
Maria looked confused for a moment and then said, “No, I don’t believe so.”
She had met him on a dating app. He was ruggedly handsome. She thought he looked like a taller, more athletic Liam Neeson and told him so, and he had been so playful their first time together. It had been so long since she’d been on a date with anyone where there was actually chemistry. They initially had coffee at a bookstore during his lunch break, and by the second date, he’d offered to come to her house and make shrimp primavera. “I’m a good cook,” he said. “I want to show you how I could take care of you.” It took Maria a while to realize he always planned elaborate dates to ‘show her what she was worth,’ but they never left her house.
Maria didn’t know he had a wife or kids until almost a year in. She knew that he blew her off with alarming frequency, and she had a sneaking suspicion she wasn’t his only girlfriend, but she also knew that managing the pharmacy was a big job.
The strangest thing about being on hospital medication is that it doesn’t work until it finally, brilliantly does, and the world kicks in. This hospital room went from greys to blues before Maria even noticed she was able to take deeper breaths, though Lisa was documenting everything for changeover. “I never wanted this to happen,” she said.
“For what to happen?” Lisa said. She held her breath.
Maria maintained just enough composure before passing completely into a moment from the past: “This. The surgery. I never wanted to be sick.”
Lisa smiled curtly, pulled her lips tight. “Few people want to be sick, and those people… well, are sick,” she said. Maria tried to laugh, but gently. The incision was still very present in her mind, even if she could feel the body and brain gently float away from each other into an old memory.
This wasn’t the first married man. The first was a man she’d met at a club when she’d been in England for a year before college. She had been dancing on a raised platform, sober. She was always sober. “Buy you a drink?” he’d asked, and she told him water was free.
He laughed. “You’re American. Nothing’s free here. Except, you know. Health care. Some stuff like that.”
“That’s not free, it’s socialized.”
He looked at her like she was in a gallery. “You’re awfully smart to be up there dancing to ‘Gangsta’s Paradise.’”
“And you look too old to make sweeping generalizations about a person after watching them perform exactly one task.”
He watched her perform a few more tasks that night, and one again in the morning. After they’d finished, he blurted out, “I’m married,” and it was like some kind of bile thrown up on the hotel bed.
“Why didn’t you say that, first?” Maria had asked.
“You wouldn’t have—”
“What makes you think you know so much about me?”
He was right. She wouldn’t have. But she was anxious to prove to herself how worldly she was. Wasn’t that why, when everyone else went off to college, she bought a slightly bigger backpack and a plane ticket? Because she was going to be somebody, dammit, and she needed to prove it immediately.
“Would you have?” he asked, pulling his shirt on first, and making him look patently ridiculous. She hadn’t had a single drink, and yet she remembered him more svelte, less with a convex belly. Perhaps it was that the pants contributed to the illusion of his flat waist.
“I don’t know. But would you leave your wife for me?”
“If I didn’t have kids?” He got off the bed and pulled his underwear and pants up in one movement, tucking in his polo and buckling the belt he hadn’t even bothered to take all the way off. “In a heartbeat. My God. You’re perfect.”
Maria knew now that nothing was perfect forever, but there had been a feeling of— something like power when he said yes, of course, he’d leave for her. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever feel that important to anyone ever again. She couldn’t decide, as she was falling into a morphine sleep, whether that made it better or worse.
Variation 3: Morphine Interlude
All light— even sunlight— is unnatural in hospitals. Sterility seems to extend itself to the natural world. The only times that seem real in a hospital are indistinguishable: sunrise, sunset.
“I thought you left,” Maria moaned.
“That was yesterday,” said Lisa.
Maria moaned and pressed the button for pain medicine.
“I doubt that will help,” said Lisa. “You fell asleep with your thumb on the button.”
“This is what you look like in the morning? After you get ready?”
Lisa flinched. It had been a busy morning, sure, but she could hear Maria’s voice was thick with judgement. “Yes,” Lisa said calmly, trying to take deep breaths. She looked at her unkempt patient. “Is this what you normally look like in the mornings?”
“When I’ve had an organ removed and have had to writhe around all night while no one will help me with the pain? I guess. I didn’t realize it was morning. If I had, I’d have brushed—” Maria realized there was no one in town she could call to bring her anything, not even a hairbrush. Not anyone. She could have called Lisa’s husband last night, she guessed. Lisa’s husband. Can a person be whittled down so far that they are just a noun preceded by a proper noun? Antonio’s daughter. It seemed so fuzzy all the sudden. “Deberias ser hermosa para el, you know.”
“I don’t. What did you say?” Lisa tightened her ponytail, suddenly feeling very much as though she was under a microscope. When was the last time she’d done her hair? Put on makeup?
“Ser. I always thought that one was funny,” Maria said. “My parents, they don’t speak much English, and always correcting my ‘ser’ and ‘estar.’ Say I still don’t understand the difference, that they raised me wrong.”
“Where are they?” Lisa asked. Even she couldn’t identify her motive. Was she trying to start a friendly conversation with a patient or was this reconnaissance?
“El Paso,” Lisa said. “It’s a fourteen— no, sixteen hour— drive, now.”
“What’s ‘ser’ and ‘estar’?”
“To be.”
“Or not to be?” Lisa joked.
“No, they both mean ‘to be.’” For one moment, through the drugs, Maria looked completely sober.
The air in the room felt heavy. But no, all hospitals feel like that. If Lisa slowed down and looked every high patient square in the eyes, she could have a moment like this with them, she didn’t doubt it. But she looked at Maria, really examined. And she admitted to herself, finally, she felt threatened.
“Like if I say “Soy de El Paso,” that’s “I’m from El Paso,” that can’t ever change.” She stretched and then winced. “How long is this going to be so painful I can’t breathe?”
“Your oxygenation is at 99%,” Lisa said, robotically. “You’re breathing.”
“It doesn’t feel like it.”
Lisa sat on the edge of the bed. “Sometimes it feels like that in here,” she said, speaking only of this time, this room. Right now, she wasn’t sure she was breathing either. She took Maria’s hand, like she would do with a normal patient to comfort her, and wondered how many times that tender little thing had slipped inside her husband’s hand. Now they’ve both held it. Lisa wondered absently if it brought them closer, her comforting his mistress.
Maria wanted a hairbrush. She wanted a mirror. She wanted to be anywhere else, to reject Lisa, but so much more than that, she wanted someone to show up and comfort her, and who was she to tell Lisa no, anyway?
Lisa thought about her freckled face that almost certainly looked older from having been in the sun. She hadn’t even looked in the mirror this morning. She knew she had big blue eyes: people often complimented her on them. She tried, for a moment, to focus all of her energy into that part of her, the only part people seemed to all notice, and look at Maria.
*
Coda
If someone had actually choreographed this dance, the coda would have been so easy. Someone from props could have wheeled a floor-length mirror to the middle of the stage, effectively cutting it in half. When the lights rose again, a man in a Mardi Gras mask would have been standing stone-still in perfect first, both Lisa and Maria performing leaps, arabesques, grand jetes, until they both reached one of his hands and stood, looking in the mirror— though from the audience’s perspective, it would look, simply, as though he was a conduit, and they were talking to each other. They would have a simple conversation, but they would say each line at the same time.
“I didn’t know.”
“How did we wind up here?”
“I have been so curious about you.”
“How are you like me?”
“How are you different?”
“Why do we stay?”
But the lights can never go off until one woman is willing to come down off pointe, pull her hand back, and walk off stage from the same direction she came, backtracking in order to move away from the show entirely. The last woman standing, it’s her story of triumph and power, of controlling the narrative, of saving “her” relationship.
This story? The ending would be more of a staring contest, each scrutinizing the other in moments of weakness, both trying to be more worthy than the other, and in the middle, a man who is not much of a man, not really much more than a collection of stories they’ve told themselves about the form behind the mask.
STORY:
Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she's been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, and Prime Number. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her poetry book, Me & Phil, came out this summer with Kelsay Books.
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ART:
Everin Casey is a multimedia freelance artist and theatrical scenic painter from the Florida/Georgia line currently working in and around the Pacific Northwest. Their work can be found in various households, galleries, and theaters from coast to coast or on Instagram at @everrinart._.
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature an interview with Katie about this story!