Monastery Dance

Robby Kramer was thirty-four years old and had taught history at the community college for nine years, and in all that time he had learned one thing about deans, which was that a dean with a pet project was a dean you stayed on the good side of. Dean Roach loved the dance marathon. He loved it the way some men loved vintage cars or birdwatching, quietly and completely, and every spring he drove up the winding road to the monastery guesthouse in the French Alps where the cultural foundation held its fundraiser, and every spring he came back glowing and talked about it for weeks.

So when Roach stopped Robby in the corridor in late March and asked, in that roundabout way deans ask, whether anyone on the history faculty might be willing to volunteer for the marathon committee, Robby heard the performance review hovering behind the question and said yes before the dean had even finished the sentence. His review was coming in June. He knew it, Roach knew it, and they both knew that a teacher who helped with the dean's beloved fundraiser would be remembered kindly when the forms were filled out. It was not romantic. It was not even ambitious, really. It was simple survival, dressed up in community spirit.

The monastery sat halfway up the mountain, an old stone building that had taken in guests for a living ever since the monks had left, and its refectory was a long vaulted room with wooden beams and windows that caught the afternoon light. Twice a year the foundation cleared it out, stacked the tables against the walls, and held something festive. This year it was the dance marathon, spread over four weekends, couples paying by the hour to shuffle around a floor while the mountain wind rattled the shutters.

***

Cecilia Chang arrived on a Thursday in early April with two vans, a toolkit, and a temper. She was thirty-two, a freelance lighting designer who had done three festival shows in her twenties and had built a reputation on being the person you called when the venue was impossible. The monastery was impossible. Everyone agreed on that. What nobody agreed on was what to do about it.

The foundation's coordinator, a pleasant, persistent man named Brother Anton, who was not actually a brother anymore but had kept the title the way other people kept old jackets, met her in the refectory and walked her along the stone walls with an apologetic air. He explained, gently, that the east wing had no wiring to speak of, and that perhaps the dancing could be moved there, into the older hall, where there were candles and windows and a lovely acoustic, and no electricity at all.

Cecilia stood in the middle of the east wing, looked at the bare stone, looked at the candle sconces, and said no. She said it politely, more than once, and she said it again the next morning, and by Friday afternoon she had drawn a wiring plan on the back of a catering invoice and pinned it to the noticeboard where Brother Anton could not avoid it. She wanted power runs along the beams, proper fixtures, and a control table in the corner, and she wanted them because a dance marathon lit by candles was a fire hazard with a donation box, and because she had a contract with an option for extension, and she intended to earn that extension with a light show people would talk about on the drive home, not with forty candles and a prayer. Brother Anton sighed the sigh of a man who had lost this argument in his heart days ago, and the electrician was called.

***

Robby came up for the first committee weekend in mid April, driving a rental car with tired suspension, and his job, as far as he could tell, was to carry things and look useful. He carried chairs. He carried cable spools. He held the other end of the ladder while Cecilia, in jeans and a faded green jacket, clipped fixtures to a beam twelve feet over the future dance floor.

He noticed, in the way a man notices things over a weekend of shared work, that she never seemed to tire, that her hands were steady on the ladder no matter how long the day ran, and that when the light from a test rig caught her face she watched it with an attention most people reserved for music. He also noticed she ate almost nothing. That last one explained itself later, though he did not know it yet.

The loaf happened on the first Saturday. The guesthouse kitchen put out bread for the volunteers at lunch, and one of the loaves, when Robby picked it up, collapsed in his hands, sagging into crumbs and rubble between the crust, and he stood there in the doorway holding two handfuls of what had briefly been bread.

He brought it into the refectory where Cecilia was coiling cable, and he held it out to her, and heard himself say, before his brain could intervene, that the loaf had fallen apart like a bad marriage.

She laughed. Not a polite laugh, a real one, head tipped back, and she set down the cable and took one of the crumbs from his palm and examined it like it was evidence. And that was the start of their first real conversation, the one that had nothing to do with light rigs or deans or performance reviews. They sat on stacked chairs by the window and talked while the afternoon went on without them. She asked what a history teacher did at a dance marathon and he admitted he was there to be seen by his dean, and she appreciated the honesty, she said, because half the volunteers pretended they were there for the love of dance and nobody believed them.

He asked about her work and she told him about the three festival shows, the ones in her twenties that had made her name, and about how she liked difficult venues because easy ones taught you nothing. He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was talking about his two-year relationship with a fellow teacher, the one that had ended five years ago without a single slammed door, and that she was listening the way good listeners do, without hurrying him. When the bell rang for the volunteers to reconvene, he realized two hours had passed and he could not have said where they went.

***

The kitchen at midnight was not where he expected to find anyone. He had come down for water, having failed at sleeping in a guest room that smelled of lavender and old stone, and the light under the kitchen door stopped him in the corridor. He pushed it open and there was Cecilia, sleeves rolled, flour to her elbows, standing over a bowl of dough with the expression of a scientist whose experiment had betrayed her.

On the counter behind her lay the ruins of two previous attempts, flat and dense and pale.

She did not hear him at first. She was kneading, and it seemed almost ritualistic, the same fold and turn, fold and turn, faster and faster, and Robby watched long enough to understand the problem before he cleared his throat. She startled, then relaxed when she saw it was him, and asked what a history teacher was doing awake at midnight, and he said the guest bed was unkind to his spine.

He nodded at the counter. She looked at the ruined loaves and her shoulders dropped, and it came out of her then, not all at once but steadily, the way things come out at midnight. She was not like other people. She said it plainly, and she watched his face while she said it, ready for whatever came. She was not born. She had been made, some years ago, by a person whose name she did not offer, and what kept her walking and talking and laughing at bad bread jokes was an enchantment, a persistent one, woven into her so deeply it might as well have been blood. It ran her.

It kept her warm and steady and tireless, and it also ran through everything she touched, and yeast, it turned out, could feel it. The dough near her hands rose too fast and then collapsed, overproofed, overworked, no matter how gently she treated it, because her enchantment had no gentle setting. She loved bread. She could not make bread. She had been trying since she arrived, quietly, after everyone had gone to bed, and every loaf had come out wrong.

Robby stood in the doorway of the monastery kitchen at midnight, holding his water glass, and thought about the two hours by the window, and about the steady hands on the ladder, and about how she had watched him the whole time she told him, waiting to see if he would step back through that door and leave her alone with her flour.

He set the glass on the counter, rolled up his own sleeves, and asked her to show him how the kneading was supposed to go.

* * *

The first Saturday session of the actual marathon opened with all the grace of a furniture move. The refectory had been cleared on Friday, the long tables stacked against the walls, and by ten in the morning the floor was chalked with the chalk outline of a dance area that looked, to Robby's untrained eye, like a crime scene. Volunteers carried chairs. Somebody tested the sound system and it produced a shriek that made a nun in the doorway cross herself. Robby, who had driven up from the college in the same rental car with the tired suspension, spent his first hour moving folding chairs and wondering what exactly he had volunteered for.

Cecilia worked the ladder along the east wall, adjusting the rigs she had fixed to the wooden beams. The east wing had no wiring, which was the whole reason the foundation had hired her, and she had solved it with a system Robby only partly understood, cables routed along the stone in ways that respected both the building and the budget. Every so often she called down a question and Brother Anton, the coordinator, answered from below with the patience of a man who had spent his working life in this building and still loved it.

Robby carried chairs. It occurred to him, somewhere around the fortieth chair, that Dean Roach would arrive after lunch, and that he should probably be visible doing something more photogenic than moving furniture. Then again, visible was visible. He kept carrying chairs.

After lunch the first dancers arrived, a mixed crowd from the valley, mostly in their twenties and thirties, and a teacher from the local school who had apparently decided that a history man could not possibly be worse on a dance floor than she was. The music started. The chalk outlines filled with feet. Robby stood at the edge with a clipboard he had been given for reasons nobody explained, and watched.

Cecilia came down from her ladder to check a bank of lights along the floor's edge, and the crowd between them shifted, and somehow he was standing next to her with the clipboard and nothing to write on it. She looked at the dancers, then at him, then at the dancers again, and there was a question in the look that he would later understand had been an invitation, offered the way she offered everything, plainly, with room to refuse.

Would he, she wanted to know, dance a few steps with her. For the lights. She needed to see how the floor caught movement, where the shadows fell, and she needed a partner for it, and the volunteers were busy, and he was, she said, already standing there.

So he said yes, and she took his hand, and they stepped out into the light.

It was not really dancing. It was two people moving in a large circle while she glanced up at the beams and he tried to remember whether he had ever known any steps at all. But it was also, from the first moment, strange in a way he could not immediately name, and it took him half a circuit of the floor to work out what it was.

She was weightless. Not light in the way a slim person is light. Weightless, the way a thing is weightless in water, her steps landing without sound and without weight, as if the floor were a courtesy rather than a fact. When she turned, her whole body turned at once, smooth as a mechanism, no hesitation at the hip, no correction at the shoulder. He had watched enough dancers by then, that first afternoon, to know what human movement looked like, all its little negotiations with gravity, and hers had none of them.

He slowed, and she slowed with him, and he asked her, because it seemed rude to simply stare, how she moved like that.

She considered the question while they made another circuit, and then she told him, in the same matter of fact voice she had used at midnight. Before the festivals, before the freelance work, she had been built for a cathedral's mechanical clock. Not to tell time. To move. Some clockmaker with more ambition than sense, or maybe exactly the right amount of sense, had wanted figures for the clock face that moved like living things, and so she had been made to move like living things, perfectly, every joint on its ideal arc, every step on its ideal line. The cathedral had been a long time ago. The movement had stayed.

And Robby, dancing badly in a pool of test light in a mountainside refectory, held the hand of a woman who had been a cathedral clock figure, and found that the wonder of it did not cancel out anything else he felt about her. That was the part he turned over later, walking back to the guest rooms. The strangeness and the woman were the same strangeness and the same woman, and he liked both.

She released his hand when the check was done, thanked him with a small formal dip that was almost certainly a joke, and went back to her ladder.

***

Dean Roach arrived at four, as Robby had known he would, because Dean Roach arrived everywhere at the hour that photographs him best. He stood in the corner by the tea table with a cup he did not drink from, watching the floor, and Robby made a point of walking past him twice with the clipboard, and the second time the dean actually nodded at him, which in Roach's economy of gestures was practically an embrace.

The marathon, the dean said, was exactly the kind of thing the college should be attached to. Community, tradition, a building with history, all of it, and a history teacher who showed up on a Saturday to move chairs and hold clipboards reflected well on the department. He said it looking at the floor. Robby said thank you looking at the floor too, and both of them understood the transaction perfectly, and no money had changed hands and none would, which was