Broken

Raven-haired Larue was bayou-French, and possessed a ravenous libido. Her olive-skinned body was smooth, and long, with large-nippled smallish breasts, the size of which were in inverse proportion to her pursuit of fleshly pleasures, the pursuit that darkened all other aspects of her life.

She would let him drive her car, allowing him to act the part for her, to pretend for her that they grew up in the same wealthy Louisiana circle. She'd have him drive to the top of South Mountain, an amber fluid-filled bottle stuck suggestively between her taut thighs, and she'd make him say to her, 'daddy's girl's been very naughty.' And then she'd scream, 'take me daddy.' And he would. He was master and slave, lifting her up in dance class, high above his head, catching her before she fell to the ground. She was only eighteen, a prima ballerina, and a party girl. In her eyes he was merely her chauffeur that provided sexual favours, but he loved her as he had loved all his women, as he loved all women, savouring their essence, giving in to their power over him.

One day Larue was escorted to rehearsal by a new companion, Marcus Orbea, the Swiss-Basque heir to a banking dynasty, a family whose Alpine-Andorran tentacles extended into the balance sheet of the
ballet. The same age as Donn, Marcus had been with the company for less than a month, having previously studied in San Francisco and danced with the San Jose-Cleveland Ballet in California. Dark hair framed a face that held his perfect green eyes in the chalice of his aristocratic and incestuously-born bone structure, for his mother had
married her first cousin, keeping the business in the family.
Marcus's looks were an intrusion upon his dancing, thought Donn. He mussed his mad rust locks and mused: surely a face that wept over the loss of innocence of the world was better to portray the lead than that of a male model coverboy, bland and unblemished, extolling
nothing, offering no knowledge or insight. A vacuous emblem of the complacent comfort bought by inherited wealth.

They preened and postured for the principal role, duelling in concert during the laborious rehearsals, coming within inches of disturbing the grace of the dance. But Donn knew already he would not be taken out of the corps and groomed for the lead, that role was stolen by the Swiss-Basque lapur. Donn was but a moment replaced by another to someone like Larue, someone who didn't need the dance as much as he.

His dance career faltered in the dying light of what he knew was not to be his. It was then he began in earnest his longest pas-de-deux, with a bottle of Southern Comfort. She was a fragile partner, sweet and sultry. And so willing to allow him into her warm, dark embrace,
so willing to take it all from him. And he gave her his best.

He left Phoenix, and moved back to that mystical and crazy coastal land of Northern California, which welcomed him with the open arms of the Gold Rush whore greeting a long lost customer. A decade disappeared between a Giant's baseball opener and Donn finding himself at the end of it sleeping on his drinking buddy Hans-Rudi's
sofa that smelled of dog, cigarettes and Hans-Rudi's wife's
cabbage-induced flatulence.

He enrolled in dance classes, and got a job serving meat and mash at a yuppie watering hole to supplement the sometimes money he made putting in hardwood floors with Hans-Rudi, or lighting performances at the Wozniak Centre in San Jose. But he still wasn't sober. He was thirty-four, and time was running out. He needed to teach ballet, to dance, to scrape some dignity back into his life.

He first saw Sophie whilst shining a spotlight down on her from the rafters; he watched her from the shadows, his sister golden hair surprise.

He saw her again in an advanced modern dance workshop at the Isadora Duncan Institute in San Francisco. Modern dance was much more accepting of the older or miss-formed dancer. He saw her staring at him as he spoke his bio, he negated the part about being routed from
the East-West Ballet corps and relegated to laying hardwood floors and waiting tables to make ends meet.

She hadn't a ballerina's body, but an hourglass form courting the non-conformity that modern dance would allow, and waves of honeyed and flaxen hair that entangled his concentration when she moved. Yet, something inside him bled open, warning him not to subject her to his volatile charms. Or a flash of primeval intuition, a sulcus in the collective conscious told him she was dangerous.

Temptation and synchronicity are strong enticements. He sought only to desire her from afar, to watch her when she wasn't looking, but she caught him out.

She walked into the reception hall as he walked out, and they both looked back over their shoulders at one another. Both had their answers then, no need to be coy or wonder. And he immediately walked to the gas station on the corner, purchased a single red rose, and walked back.

Twenty-four-year-old Sophie was talking to a fellow dancer, a little bird of a girl, who looked younger than her eighteen years. She twittered and tweeted and seemed to move imperceptibly whilst standing completely still. Sophie was listening intently to the little sparrow. The spring air coiled under Donn's nose as he drew courage and walked up to the two of them, handed Sophie the rose, and
spoke to her for the first time, "I thought you might like this. My name is Donn Frederick." And then he turned and walked away.

And sometimes she would bring to him, late at night, her sweetness and light, her evil blonde menace, taking from him his loneliness and restraint. But she would leave, and the loneliness would return.

Or maybe it was the fact that she projected an aura of chameleonic malleability, in his words you could "take her to the ballet or a biker bar, and she would fit in completely, perfectly in either environ. Hit me again, Monty." And his favourite bowling alley bartender, Monty Tatsuku, would pour another shot of Canadian Club
and de-cap another bottle of Heineken, and watch as Donn drank away another small part of his soul. And Monty would walk Donn out, and down the street he would watch him head, hear him rasp over the din
of the late-night freeway traffic on highway eight-eighty, "You understand, Monty. That's what I like about you." And off he'd go, catching the moonlight in his hair, turning it to firelight, scraping the sidewalk from his feet, leaping Nijinsky-like into the air for an audience of one.

************

He decamped from the number twenty-two bus stepping over the legs of a vagrant sleeping in the doorway of the old Woolworth Building that now housed a discothèque and a brewery on the opposite side. He walked from the corner of Santa Clara and First Street, up the thirteen blocks to his new studio apartment on the olive-tree-lined
North Fourteenth Street, dodging cholos selling dust, and savouring the smells of the Vietnamese restaurants, 'extra-spicy, just for you,' they laughed. He was 'number-one, good luck' to them, with his flame-red hair; they thought he was 'nguoi nuot lua', the fire-eater.

The daughters and granddaughters looking at him, then giggling, remarking to themselves on his skin almost translucent, blue veins pulsing through; he laughed and told them they couldn't make it hot enough for him but he would tempt them, handing over his six dollars and grasping the plastic parcel as their grins followed him out the door. His own father had probably never even tasted Vietnamese food, went missing in action in seventy-one. The war ended, and his mother died in seventy-five clutching a bottle of armagnac to her bosom, her liver having given up the bloated ghost. He went to live with his paternal grandmother, Lottie, who drank almost as much as his mother, but whose liver was more resilient. It was from her he learned to question the world, and everything in it, to observe, and to fight the urge to become complacent. She would say to him, having once
taken tutelage from the great one, Martha Graham, "There are three kinds of people in the world, Donnie: people who make things happen, people who watch what happens, and people who wonder what happened. Know which you are, Donnie, it will make life much easier for you."

And she'd crumple her empty pack of Winston's, projecting it across the room and missing the wastebasket. She'd get up and walk to the fridge, dislodge another box of cancer-injectors from the carton and light the fuse one more time, tempting the girlish whimsy of the Fates. "Which one are you, Grandma?" he made the mistake of asking.
And she replied, "Someday you won't have to ask, you'll be able to see, but for now I'll tell you: I'm all three." She tenderly touched his fuzzy head, and said, "Now dance for me, kleine-mouse."

He climbed the three flights of stairs to his apartment in an old Victorian converted into thirteen studio and one-bedroom apartments for students and the financially-challenged. It had the residual smell of fresh paint, stale rose water, and quiet orgasms.

Loneliness left him at eleven as Sophie walked through his unlocked door, unannounced and giddy, having left the production she was starring in, Errand Into The Maze, to four ovations, and a shower of flowers. Her face was flushed with the warm glow of success and youth, and the expectation that it would last forever. Donn blanketed her with his gaze and embraced her fully. They drank of
the sauvignon grapes of the Napa Valley vintner Mondavi, and made love, soft and exploring for each time he saw her she was a stranger all over again.

He drew a bath and sprinkled rose petals over the surface. He loved and despised her for what she did to him, how she made him feel. If only she would stay. They bathed together by candlelight, drifted in and out of conversation, Donn played with the idea that he could love this woman. He asked her to move in with him, and her silence was his answer. He plucked a petal from the bath and put it into his mouth, his eyes not leaving hers as he did so.

"Move in with me," he asked again, and the candlelight and sadness flickered.

"I can't, you know that. We are touring with the show in a month."

"That's not a good reason."

She knew it was no reason, to be sure. If she really wanted to be with him, she'd move in with him. No, there were other, darker reasons.

She got out of the tub and towelled off. He watched her, and the rivulets of water flowing down her exquisite voluptuosity, trapping the candlelight in liquid microcosms. He pulled the plug from the drain and escaped the seduction of the rose water.

He draped a silver and black silk robe he'd bought on a tour of Japan with East-West Ballet around her, and they made love again, and then drank and talked into the wee hours of the night. Her submission to his sensuality marginalized the deep creases on his worn and knowing
face. They lay together on his futon; he hugged her close, afraid she would leave. The city quieted down, and the June air pushed the scent of gardenias through the open window. They slept.

At four-thirty-five in the morning, the alcohol withdrawal woke him and he got up. He lit a cigarette and watched as she slept; he was reeling from her drunken confessions to him, of her childhood, and how she left home at fifteen, sold drugs to survive, 'better than prostituting myself,' she'd said. She was homeless for a few months,
attempted suicide at one point, but was saved from jumping off the Golden Gate bridge by a man in a wheelchair, who took her in, helped her when she needed it most. She went back to school, joined a dance
company, worked very hard as she'd had very little classical ballet training as a child. And now she was going to be dancing all over the country. She was amazing, he thought, a creature whose heart should have long ago hardened, yet she still believed that dreams could come true.

************

Hans-Rudi slapped a twenty on the counter, and Monty obliged, lining up three more shots, one for Hans-Rudi, one for Donn, "And have one yourself, Monty," Hans-Rudi said. "I've got a half-day job tomorrow up in Los Gatos. Just need to put the finishing touches on an exercise room and dance floor. Dirk's left me high and dry again. Rich guy's pad, pay's real good. You interested, Donn?"

"You tell him, Monty. I've never said no to cold, hard cash," Donn spoke, his words not yet slurred, his body conditioned to the slow nightly poisoning.

Monty polished a brandy snifter, "He's never said no to cold, hard cash, Hans."

************

Hans-Rudi and Donn drove up Skyline Boulevard, and down a private road that ended in a semi-circle in front of three buildings, one obviously the main house: a three-story Alpine-style redwood mansion that couldn't be seen from the main road, invisible in the forest. Two smaller buildings, one off to each side, completed the compound.
They parked near the building next to the tennis court.

"We're working in here." Hans-Rudi gestured towards the building next to the tennis court. "Gotta finish up the exercise room."

"What's the other building for, servants?" Donn laughed.

"You got it."

They finished up at lunchtime. Donn and Hans-Rudi loaded the pickup with the equipment.

"I'm gonna get my money."

"Our money."

"Yeah, some of it. And see if the butler will let me use his
highness's bathroom. Be right back." Hans-Rudi said.

Donn finished loading the pick-up, decided he could use a splash of water on his face, headed for the main house. He walked in, "Hello? Hans? Is it all right if I use the bathroom?" The house was huge, with two long oak-floored halls snaking away from the entrance. Donn
stepped into what looked to be a recreation room that opened onto a patio, and magnificent views of Silicon Valley. And then he saw him.

Sunning himself like a cat, a blanket draped over his legs. Donn's head felt as if it were being sucked into a vortex. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and walked out the open glass doors and onto the patio deck, forgetting his need for the bathroom.

"Those things'll kill you. Course, you were never too concerned about looking after yourself, were you Donn Frederick?" Marcus Orbea turned around and faced Donn.

"Nice view you got here," said Donn, gazing out at cloudless azure sky and the unobscured view of Silicon Valley.

Marcus recounted the last night he was able to ambulate fully, how Larue was drunk, as usual. There was an accident; he'd been driving.

"She didn't want me to drive, we'd been arguing." She confessed to her many affairs, to having slept with the director of the ballet company, other dancers, Marcus's father, it didn't matter to her. But Marcus loved her. "I loved her, like no other." It was an accident, he said, a woman darted out in front of the car, he swerved
too late, hit a phone pole with the passenger side of the car, crushing Larue, crippling him. Donn's gaze drifted to the Burberry blanket covering Marcus's legs. "I can still walk, a little, I can even fuck sometimes, but the effort almost isn't worth it. It happened just after you left East-West. You could have had the lead," Marcus said, a bitter edge distorting his voice. "Involuntary manslaughter, suspended sentence; judge didn't want to put a cripple
in San Quentin. Larue's father spat on me on the way out of the courthouse. He was a paedophile, touched his daughter when she was little, did you know that? His dead daughter was worth three million dollars to him. Course, you know my family has enough money to take care of 'those sorts of things', as my mother would say."

Donn was silent, his face smoothed by a sheet of icy distance.

"I met a woman, an angel." He described a night on the town with his manservant, feeling sorry for himself, culminating on a lone stroll on the bridge, the great Golden Gate. He saw her, standing very still, he introduced himself to this child-goddess, his desire for her excluding all other rational thought until she turned to him, tears streaming down her face, 'I want to die,' she'd said. He
talked her out of it, out of leaping off the bridge. "She was my saviour, she was God giving me a chance to redeem myself, and I stopped her. She told me everything, she was just sixteen. Eight years next week, we've been together. I gave her a home, gave her
everything. She doesn't know it, but I've left her everything in my will, the houses, the shares, all of it."

Donn momentarily lost the capacity for speech and rational thought, he looked through the patio door and at the birthday cards on the black baby-grand Steinway piano, could only think to utter, "Whose birthday?"

"Mine. Saturday."

"So's mine."

"So, we have much in common it would seem. Geminis. Friends to everyone, isn't that what they say? Funny, I could have been you, you could have been me," Marcus whispered. "They don't visit now. All my friends were dancers." The word 'were' hung in the air between them, funereal. "People don't want to confront their fears,
do they Donn? You're a brave man, talking to me."

"I'm not brave. I think we both know that."

"You didn't know she lived with me, did you? Of course you didn't. I had her followed, after the show last week." He had watched her from the balcony. She didn't know he was in the audience, he was going to surprise her, ask her to marry him, but she left before he had the chance. "She didn't come home that night, it was the first time. I'm losing her." The acrimony returned to his voice as he
tested the touchstone of truth and watched Donn's basanite eyes staring at the picture of Sophie next to the birthday cards. Sophie, soft and feral, light and dark, chiaroscuro. Donn's face hid nothing. "You were always better at the acting part than me, your face always that much more expressive." He threw the wine glass onto
the decking, watching it smash to bits. "I love her. Jesus Christ, I love her." He choked back a sob and hid his face.

"Look, I'm sorry. I didn't know. Is she here?"

"At rehearsal." A moment of silence introduced itself before Marcus broke it with a whisper. "As long as she is happy." His feline eyes glistened in the sunlight. "Life cripples us all in the end. Some of us just get to dance a little longer than others. Perhaps you could come by tomorrow, I've got some Bordeauxs that are bursting to
be opened." His laugh, abrupt, shot from him like a bullet, and then the grimace left his face, replaced by despair. "We could talk ... never mind, you probably have things to do."

"I better leave. It's not her fault, I pursued her."

Marcus turned away. "Your cheque is on the table in the hall. Could you turn the stereo up on your way out? There's a good man."

Donn walked back into the living room, and turned up the stereo; the Bach concerto resonated through the house, the sound followed them out to Hans-Rudi's pickup, almost masked the sound of the gunshot.

^

Biography

Marlene Mason was born and raised on the west coast of America and currently resides in North Wales. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals. She can be contacted at marlene_mason@yahoo.co.uk.