The Rooftop Gardener's Submission

I climb the fire escape at midnight on a Tuesday in July, and by the time I reach the fourth landing my shirt is stuck to my back and my arms are shaking a little, and not just from the climb. I'm thirty-five years old, I'm a landscaper, I spend all day hauling mulch and pushing wheelbarrows, so you'd think a few flights of iron stairs wouldn't bother me, but my stomach is doing something worse than my arms. I've paid for five dance lessons in advance, which is a stupid thing for a man like me to do, and I keep telling myself I can still turn around and go home and eat the cost.

But then I look up and she's there, leaning on the railing at the top, watching me come. Sonia Adams, forty-three, built like a dancer obviously, with her hair pinned back and a loose black top and these pale gray eyes that go over me the way I go over a neglected yard, taking inventory of everything that's wrong. She doesn't say hello right away. She just watches me make the last flight, and I'm aware of every awkward step, my big feet slapping the metal, my shoulders too wide for the space, and when I finally pull myself over the last rail she looks at her watch and then at me.

"You're punctual," she says. "That's more than most people manage. Come on, the studio's around the back of the water tower."

The roof is all tar and gravel and heat shimmer, with potted junipers and rose bushes lined up along the parapet, and her studio is this alcove she's converted, three walls of mirrors on one side, a worn wooden floor, a little portable AC unit that's losing the fight against July. There's a stereo and a bench and a hook on the wall holding what looks like a folded velvet cloth, and I try not to stare at any of it. She tells me to take off my shoes, and I do, and the floor is warm under my socks, and then she stands me in front of the mirror and I wish she hadn't.

"So," she says, positioning herself beside me, her hand on my shoulder blade, "we start with the basic box step. Waltz. Left foot forward, right foot side, left foot together, and then reverse it. Count it out loud, one two three, one two three. Ready, and..."

I get through maybe four boxes before it falls apart. My left foot goes forward when my right should, my arms swing like loose scaffolding, and when I catch my reflection mid-stumble, this big heavy man with his hair thinning at the temples, hunched and thudding across a dance floor like a refrigerator falling down stairs, something just closes up in my chest and I stop. I stand there staring at the floor, my face burning, sweating worse than the climb made me.

"Stop," I say, or I don't say it, I just stop, and she circles me once, slow, her arms folded, looking me up and down in the mirror instead of directly, which somehow is worse.

"Why did you stop, Tomas?" she asks, and her voice isn't cruel, it's flat and patient, like a teacher who already knows the answer.

"Because I look ridiculous," I tell the floor. "I'm thirty-five and I move like I'm eighty. I'm too heavy, I'm too big, I've got no grace at all, and paying you to watch it is just, I don't know, embarrassing for both of us."

She's quiet a second, and then she says, "Take off your shirt."

I look up at her in the mirror. "What?"

"Take it off. You want to feel the movement, you feel it in your skin, not through a sweaty cotton rag. Take it off, hang it on the hook, and we go again."

Well, I've got no good argument, so I pull the shirt over my head and hang it up, and standing there in the mirrors in just my shorts, all my lumpy imperfections lit up from three angles, I feel like a steer at a stock show. She walks around me once, close enough that I can feel the air move, and she puts two fingers flat against my lower back and presses, and my spine straightens without my deciding anything about it.

"There. That's where your weight lives. Now, again. One two three."

I go again, and this time I'm so aware of her eyes on my bare back and shoulders that I count out loud without being told, and I manage six boxes, eight, and then I lose the count on a turn and stumble and catch myself on the barre, and my face is red all over again. But something else is happening too, and I can feel it and I hope she can't see it, which is that my nipples have gone hard, tight and tingling, from nothing but her looking at me, and the air on them, and the strange electric shame of being on display.

She sees it anyway. Of course she sees it. She stops in front of me, and her eyes drop to my chest, deliberate, taking her time, and heat floods through me.

"Interesting," she says, and nothing else for a long moment, and then, "Kneel."

I don't move. My knees want to, they actually want to, and that scares me more than anything she's said so far. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"Kneel here, on the floor, and put your hands on my ankles." She's already standing square in front of me, waiting, like it's the most ordinary instruction in the world, like one two three. "You came to me to be taught, Tomas. So be taught. Kneel."

I go down. The wood is warm and gritty under my knees, and I reach out and lay my hands on her ankles, and her skin is cool and smooth above the soft leather of her slippers, and looking up at her from down there, with the mirrors showing me this big sweating man kneeling at a small neat woman's feet, I feel something come loose in me that I didn't know was wound tight. My breath is coming short. She looks down at me and there is no shock in her face at all, no surprise, like she ordered this from a menu and here it is.

"Tell me the truth now," she says, crouching to my level, her forearm across her knee. "It isn't really the dancing, is it. You hate how your body has started looking older than what you feel like inside. Say it out loud."

And I do say it, my voice cracking on the way out. "Yeah. That's it. I feel thirty in my head and I look forty-five from the neck up and I've got this thick ugly slab of a body, and I thought if I could just move nice, if I could just be graceful at one thing, then maybe, I don't know, maybe I'd feel like somebody worth wanting."

She studies me for a while, and then she stands and walks to the hook on the wall and takes down the folded velvet, and it unrolls into a long ribbon, deep wine red, soft as water. She comes back behind me.

"Wrists behind your back," she says, and I put them there, and she winds the ribbon around them, once, twice, and ties it in a firm, unhurried knot that isn't tight enough to hurt but is absolutely not coming loose. "Your body isn't your enemy, Tomas, and it isn't ugly. It's just undisciplined. Undisciplined things feel clumsy and shameful. So we will teach it to obey, and once it obeys, it will stop embarrassing you, and once it stops embarrassing you, other people will stop being able to embarrass you. Do you understand?"

"Yes," I say, and my voice comes out hoarse. "Yes, I understand!"

"Good. Now, the count. One two three, starting again from the top, in your head, and you will keep it perfectly, because from now on there are consequences." She moves around into my line of sight and picks up something off the bench, a small flat paddle, smooth wood, no