Proprioception

In my early twenties, I had a job as a nanny to twin girls. Their names were Emilia and Micaela Torres, and when I started working with them they were six years old. The family lived in a townhouse in the West Village, and they spent the summers in Montauk, where they had a three-story house on a thickly wooded property a few blocks from the ocean.

The girls’ parents were artists: Silvia a choreographer, Leo a painter. Though both were quite successful in their careers, the real money came from Silvia’s family, who were soybean exporters in Argentina, where Silvia had grown up. Leo was soft-spoken and gentle, tall, with a generous sense of humor and a quiet, subtle brilliance. Silvia was joyful, buoyant, a hugger, simultaneously nurturing and commanding, and perpetually in motion. They were wonderful parents, fun and patient and attentive, and it showed in the girls, who had inherited the best features of each. All four were dark-haired and possessed of a unique, effortless beauty.

During the school year I picked up the girls in the afternoons, took them to their playdates and lessons, and in the evenings, helped them with their homework while either Leo or Silvia cooked dinner. I was always invited to stay and eat with them, and unless I had plans, or wanted them to think I did, I mostly accepted. I enjoyed their company more than that of almost anyone else in my life at the time, and they treated me not as an employee but as a beloved family friend.

The first summer I worked for them, they gave me three paid months off while they moved to their house in Montauk. It was an enviable situation in theory, but at the time, the idea of a summer alone unnerved me. Outside of the Torreses my life in New York was small. I had a roommate I had found through an agency, and although we got along, we were more polite acquaintances than friends. Occasionally I brought girls home from my favorite of the women’s bars in the Village, not far from where the Torreses lived, though they never knew this about me. I found a summer job at a café near my apartment on the Upper West Side, and sometimes I went out for dinner or drinks with my coworkers, who were mostly Columbia students. Otherwise I read novels, went alone to museums, took long, aimless walks down Broadway or Riverside Drive. I had moved to the city shortly after graduating from a small college in Vermont, with no firm idea of what I wanted to do but knowing that in New York I could date women, and that I could experience the freedom that comes only with complete anonymity. I immediately found great pleasure in both. Even the long stretches of solitude I didn’t mind, perhaps because in the Torreses I had something like a family.

Still, that summer was lonely, and when Silvia called to tell me they were back I was immensely relieved. Our reunion was joyful, Emilia and Micaela throwing themselves into my arms and showering me with small gifts from the Montauk shops. With the four of them back, my days became filled again with color and life. As winter came to an end I began to dread another summer alone, and was overjoyed when Silvia asked, as though it were a slightly embarrassing imposition, if I might be willing to spend the month of July with them in Montauk. Leo had been commissioned to create a series of original paintings for a private collector in Amsterdam, and Silvia was choreographing a new solo piece for Liv Berglund, a well-known Swedish dancer whose career she had been following for years. They wouldn’t have as much time to spend with the children, and anyway, she said, Emilia and Micaela had missed me terribly last summer. I’d be doing them a favor.

The four of them left two weeks ahead of me, having promised to host some of Silvia’s Argentinian relatives for a reunion, and when they were ready for my arrival at last I took an early morning train from Penn Station. I had never been to Long Island, and ignoring my book for most of the ride, watched instead as dull suburbs gave way to thick clusters of trees and dry brush, which every so often thinned out to reveal glimpses of the ocean. The train gradually emptied, and at last we slowed along a low platform consisting of a narrow, elevated strip of sandy pavement. The tracks ended at a small white station house, where Emilia and Micaela were standing outside, on tiptoe, searching for me in the crowd.

“There is a dancer at our house, Natalie,” said Micaela, by way of greeting.

“A ballerina,” said Emilia.

They hung on me, talking over each other and showing me the gifts they had received from their relatives as we slowly made our way to Leo, who was standing beside their car and gave a cheerful wave when he saw me. He was dressed in loose linen clothing, his arms and shirt dotted with paint, and he hugged me hello and lifted my bag into the trunk.

“Tell her about the ballerina, Daddy,” said Emilia.

Leo laughed. “Liv’s a modern dancer,” he said. “Not quite a ballerina.” He winked at me, but the girls had already begun to argue over the seats in the car, not hearing him. “She’ll be here for a couple weeks rehearsing with Silvia. It’s a bit of a full house; I hope you don’t mind.”

It was strange seeing Leo drive. Sitting in the backseat between the two girls, I was reminded of being driven around town by my father when I myself was a child. It was a familiar sensation; although Leo and Silvia treated me as an equal, I sometimes couldn’t help feeling like another of the children, playing make-believe, staying home while the adults went out, listening from the other room as they argued or entertained.

We drove past one clapboard mansion after another, and when we turned down a side street away from the beach and into a narrow driveway shrouded by trees, I was surprised to see a massive gray block of a house towering over us. It appeared to be made of concrete, and it had a flat roof and a set of thin stilts, two stories high at least, which held up a large patio overlooking a rugged landscape of rocks and pine trees and scattered patches of yellow flowers. It emitted such stark coldness that I felt, momentarily, as though the Torreses weren’t who I’d thought they were at all.

Only from the inside was its spectacular beauty revealed. The entryway led into a sweeping space containing a living room, a vast, industrial dining table, and an open kitchen, with walls constructed of black steel warehouse windows that rose all the way to the ceiling. In the center of each was a small lever, which allowed massive subsections of the paned glass to swing open on hidden hinges. The windows looked down a rocky drop-off to the yard, a stretch of tall grass leading to a dense, towering forest.

The girls took me on a breathless tour through the lower two floors, which were oddly laid out and broken up by small staircases in unexpected places. Later I learned that the house had been designed by a Norwegian architect friend of Leo’s. Each story seemed to have been tossed onto the one below it, and the rooms were unconventionally shaped, one with six or seven walls, the next a perfect triangle. Each room had the same steel grids of windows as the upper floor, though down here they took up smaller portions of each wall and caught less of the light.

From a shaded patio at the base of the house, the girls pointed out a shed near the edge of the woods, invisible from above. They said that it was the dance shed.

At first glance it appeared small, but when I let my gaze rest on it, as the girls tugged on my arms and begged me to watch their own dance steps, I could see that it extended quite far back into the woods. I searched the windows for signs of movement inside, but the glass only reflected the dappled sunlight.

“We’re not allowed out there,” said Micaela.

“Yes, we are,” said Emilia. “Normally. But not when Liv is here.”

“What’s she like?” I said.

“Micaela thinks she’s scary,” said Emilia. “But I think she’s beautiful.”

Leo came up behind us holding a pale yellow drink topped with sprigs of mint, which he handed to me. “Silvia’s famous spiked lemonade,” he said. “A Montauk delicacy. Everyone has to try it.”

This had taken me a while to get used to, that they didn’t mind at all my drinking in front of the girls. By then I was accustomed to having a glass or two of wine with them at dinner, but cocktails in the middle of the day seemed especially decadent. I took a small mouthful and was struck momentarily dumb with pleasure: the cold bite of lemon and ice, the warm rinse of gin, and some obscure blend of flavors swirled in, cloves and honey and something spicy, all of it leaving a tingling burn at the back of my throat. Leo watched with pride as I took another long sip, unable to resist.

I don’t remember now what we did in those hours separating my arrival from the moment I met Liv. Perhaps we played games on the deck or in the girls’ industrial palace of a bedroom. I must have taken a shower, because I recall distinctly emerging wet-haired and warm from my room on the middle floor. When I walked into the main room upstairs, Liv was there.

I caught only a glimpse of her before Silvia blocked my view, sweeping barefoot across the room to fold me into a hug and then pressing a glass of white wine into my hand. “Finally, you’re here,” she said, as though I were a childhood friend whose arrival she had been awaiting for months. Her short hair was also wet; the house had two outdoor showers in addition to the three or four inside, and in my memories now everyone seems always to have just emerged from one of them, damp and fragrant and pink from the steam.

“The house is wonderful,” I said.

“Oh, it’s all right, isn’t it?” she said, beaming. She studied my face with wide, eager eyes, as though she truly craved my approval. There was some kind of instrumental music playing, seemingly from the ceiling. Something sizzled on the stove, sending clouds of steam billowing upward. “Come,” she said, taking my wrist. “You must meet Liv.”

 She took me to the large kitchen island, where Liv was seated on a high stool, her fingers looped around the stem of her wineglass. As we approached her, she stood and turned to us.

She was older than Silvia and Leo, older than me by perhaps twenty years. Her dark blond hair fell past her shoulders, and her skin was tanned and covered in freckles. She wore heeled black sandals and a black linen dress, which fell just below her knee, displaying unusually muscular calves and a large abrasion across one of her shins. 

She cleared her throat and introduced herself, holding out a firm, weathered hand. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she said. Her skin was coarse, her voice deeper than I’d expected. I met her eyes only briefly and then looked away, toward the empty seating area. I was overwhelmed by her.

“Likewise,” I managed to say. It was hardly true; Silvia and Leo had only mentioned her in passing, and only in factual terms. What had they told her about me?

“You’re a writer, I hear,” she said. She was still looking at me when I met her eyes again.

“Yes.”

“You write poetry.”

 “Yes.” I felt my face going hot.

She nodded, still assessing me, and before I had to come up with something else to say, Leo slid a cutting board and two knives across the countertop toward us. He placed a pile of vegetables beside the board, a head of lettuce and a vine of plump tomatoes and a cluster of radishes, and asked if we would chop them. The board was not very big, and Liv and I had to stand close together to share it, close enough that twice our arms brushed against each other as we chopped.

Silvia was stirring something in a large pot on the stove, her back to us. “Natalie,” she said, raising her voice over the loud sizzling, “Liv is my muse.”

I glanced at Liv; she was smiling, her gaze focused on the tomatoes, which released small spurts of juice and seeds onto my hand as she sliced them with impressive speed. She flicked her eyes upward at me, and I held her gaze for a moment before looking abruptly down again.

“I saw her perform for the first time in the early seventies,” Silvia continued. “And I have had my eye on her ever since.”

“You could have had me back then,” said Liv. “If you wanted me.”

“But I couldn’t work up the nerve to call her until last year.”

I took a long sip of wine, letting it stay in my mouth a moment too long, until its flavor soured on my tongue. I swallowed and said, “What are you two working on now?”

“A solo piece,” said Liv. Her voice had quieted slightly, so that I had to lean toward her to hear. “Your boss is a brilliant woman, you know.”

Silvia told me about the piece, and about the festival in London where it was to premiere that fall. Liv and I continued chopping, she with quick, efficient motions while I was slower and more careful. She hardly spoke, and although Silvia carried the conversation, I had trouble focusing on what she was saying. Liv stayed very close to me. The fabric of her dress brushed against my leg, and I could detect a subtle fragrance emitting from her, wood and spices and some intoxicating floral undertone. I felt lightheaded, and when the girls rushed into the room, Leo roaring behind them with his hands raised into claws, I was glad for the distraction.

“Natalie,” Emilia cried. “A monster is chasing us!” She collided against me, warm and laughing, and pressed her face against my stomach. Micaela whirled behind her, shrieking with terror as Leo gave one last roar, and then slipping into a series of rocking pirouettes after he returned to his pot on the stove. After each rotation she glanced shyly at Liv, looking straight past me to her, and blushed whenever Liv looked back. I’d had only a few sips of wine, and the cocktail, hours ago, but in all the warm commotion I felt already drunk. Liv had chopped all the radishes into perfect pink disks and was now back up on her stool, watching the rest of us with a look of soft amusement on her face.

“Set the table, my loves,” Silvia said to the girls, and I joined them in the task, carrying dishes and silverware and glasses from the countertop to the table, where a tall, spiky succulent and three variously-sized candles formed the centerpiece.

They had prepared an extravagant dinner: blackened sea bass, grilled asparagus, spiced risotto, a large, colorful salad, and bread Silvia had made from scratch. Leo opened a fresh bottle of wine, serving the four of us before offering a toast to welcome me. I was seated diagonally across from Liv, and I watched the way she served herself from each of the dishes, graceful even in the smallest of gestures.

The conversation meandered, the three of them speaking about mutual friends of theirs. Eventually I managed to ask Liv about herself, and she spoke in brief, shy fragments, so that I had to ask more and more follow-up questions.

She was Swedish, though her family had moved to upstate New York when she was a child, and she had come to the city just after high school to study with Martha Graham. After touring internationally through most of her twenties and thirties, she returned to Stockholm to start a school of her own.

“Don’t you miss New York?” I said, unable to imagine leaving the city even then.

“Yes,” she said, holding my gaze. “Desperately.”

“What’s it like in Stockholm?”

She said that it was smaller and quieter than New York, but that it had come to feel like home. When she wasn't teaching, she occasionally performed as a soloist, working only with the choreographers she loved most.

“She’s being humble,” Silvia said, beaming with pride, as she did in the presence of all her artist friends. “She is an international sensation. She'll go down in history.”

Liv blushed, shook her head. The conversation moved on, the girls taking over, and the two of us fell quiet, listening. Occasionally our eyes met across the table, and her gaze lingered on mine long enough that I knew I was not alone in my internal chaos. It seemed we had fallen, quite involuntarily, into some sort of silent communication with each other. To my astonishment, no one else appeared to have noticed; they carried on around us as though nothing was happening.

After dinner she joined Leo and Silvia in the kitchen to help clean up, and with some relief I retreated with Micaela and Emilia to their bedroom. By then I felt heavily intoxicated, with the wine and with Liv, and the girls’ make-believe games steadied me. I gave voices to their stuffed animals and helped them brush their teeth and change into their nightgowns. I read to them longer than usual and sat on the end of the lower bunk bed, Emilia’s, for a little while after they fell asleep. I listened to the three adults one floor above, moving around and then eventually quieting; they must have settled in the living room, perhaps drinking more wine. I could hear the soft murmur of their voices, indecipherable from here. Briefly I considered returning to them, but decided against it and went instead to my room, inhaling the cool air and trying and failing to read my book until I drifted to sleep.

By the time I woke the next morning, Silvia and Liv were already rehearsing in the shed, and Leo was in his studio. The girls rushed into my room, still in their nightgowns, and begged me to make pancakes. While they watched cartoons I assembled the ingredients; I have never been a chef, but I had become somewhat proficient in simple children’s recipes.

There was a single unwashed mug in the sink with darkened water in the bottom of it, which I knew instantly must have been Liv’s; neither Leo nor Silvia drank coffee. While I waited for the pancakes to begin bubbling, I ran my finger slowly around its ceramic rim, feeling for traces of her mouth. Through the window I scrutinized the edges of the shed for movement, but saw nothing beyond the reflections of the dry, swaying grass. The first batch of pancakes burned, and I had to throw them out and start again.

Besides a handful of snow days and the occasional weekend, I had never spent a full day with the girls. They were fun and easy to be around, but still, time slowed. During the school year our afternoons passed quickly, broken up by scheduled activities, homework, dinner. But when I looked at the clock after we had sat on the deck playing cards for a seemingly endless stretch of time, I saw that it had hardly been an hour since breakfast.

“Do Mom and Liv take breaks?” I said, attempting nonchalance, as though they might suspect my motives. “Yes,” said Emilia. “Sometimes.

“They come back to the house?” I said, feeling ridiculous. “For lunch?”

“Sometimes,” said Micaela. “Or they go into town.”

I had caught a brief glimpse of the downtown on the way from the train: a street lined with restaurants and shops, a few art galleries, a small park.

The waiting became unbearable. All morning I found excuses to sneak away to my room and check my appearance, brush my hair, apply fresh gloss to my lips. But by one o’clock they still had not returned, and the girls were begging to take sandwiches to the beach for a picnic. I had no reason to say no, and so we went.

The walk took ten or fifteen minutes, and the day felt suddenly much hotter. Drifts of sand began to brush against our ankles long before the beach came into view, and when we reached it, I was stunned by the size and force of the waves. “You two swim in this?” I said.

“Of course,” said Emilia. “All the time.”

“You don’t get scared?”

 “We do,” Micaela said. “A few days ago I got dragged all the way under a wave.”

“I thought she was dead,” said Emilia.

“I thought I was dead too,” said Micaela.

“But you’re not afraid to go back in?”

Micaela shook her head, baffled, as though the question didn’t make sense.

We spread a towel close to the edge of the water, close enough that the waves sprayed our legs, and ate the sandwiches quickly. I smeared sunscreen on the girls and then on myself, and we went together into the water. It was very cold, and the waves were so forceful they stung my skin. But the girls went fearlessly beyond their breaking points, floating easily up and down, holding tightly to each other’s hands. They shrieked for me to come in after them; I had stopped when the water reached my knees. But I didn’t want them to know I was afraid, and so I charged toward them, gasping as the cold rush enveloped me. A wave pushed hard against my legs, knocking the breath out of me as a surge of water entered my mouth. I lost my balance, lost track of where I was, but found the girls finally, floating far ahead of me. The water had risen above my shoulders by the time I reached them, and they leapt onto me and clutched me around the neck, the waves kicking their small bodies against mine and pulling them away again.

  I had expected to see Liv again at dinner, but it seemed the first night's feast had been a special occasion, presumably for my benefit, and subsequent evenings were casual, disjointed, minimally planned. Over the next week I barely saw her. Silvia and Leo took her to restaurants in town while I babysat the girls at home, and I spent two excruciating evenings at a seaside mansion belonging to one of the girls’ friends, trapped in a frigidly air-conditioned basement with a loud group of children while their parents drank around a bonfire on the beach. Time slowed unbearably, and I kept perpetual track of the hours and minutes remaining before I might see Liv again, though the fluidity of the schedule made this nearly impossible, and thus even more unbearable. I usually saw her at least briefly in the evenings, but she also sometimes appeared unexpectedly during the day, returning to the house to make coffee, taking phone calls on the porch or, on one torturous occasion, emerging towel-clad from the outdoor shower, having finished rehearsal early. Although we barely spoke, she watched me, held my gaze, regarded me not with the polite smile of new acquaintances but with a searching intensity that nearly undid me.

 Much as I tried, I could not visualize what the dance rehearsals might look like. I had some vague images: Silvia doing stilted demonstrations of the movements she had in mind, the execution of them limited by her short, somewhat stocky frame, and Liv bringing them effortlessly alive. I wondered whether there was music. I could easily have seen the dance shed at some point, but although no one had forbidden me to see it, they hadn’t offered to show it to me either, and I felt that the girls’ restrictions applied by extension to me. Liv and Silvia spent hours there, and I could not imagine what might have filled all that time.

At last, over a week after I had arrived, we had another dinner all together. Leo and Emilia had gone out fishing for the day and had brought back fresh cod. The girls helped him grill it while I chopped vegetables in the kitchen with Silvia, and Liv came upstairs only just before dinner was ready, damp-haired and barefoot in a white linen dress.

 To my shock, she came straight over to me, reached across me for a bottle of wine on the countertop and, while she poured it, brushed her bare shoulder against mine. Her skin was still warm from the shower. “Hey, you,” she said quietly.

She had never spoken to me like this; I stood straighter and followed her lead. “Hey,” I said. “How was rehearsal today?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, her voice low, conspiratorial. “I’m starting to wonder if I’m too old to be doing it.”

“You’re not old,” I said, meaning it. Her shoulder was still touching mine. She swirled the wine expertly in her glass. She was, of course, much older than me, but her body exuded, if not exactly youthfulness, a stunning vitality I had rarely witnessed in anyone.

“I am,” she said. “To be performing. I think I should maybe just do the teaching.”

The idea of her teaching, commanding authority over a roomful of students, correcting their movements, placing her hands on their shoulders and their hips, aroused me intensely. I wanted suddenly and desperately for her to take control of me in some way. At the same time I was disoriented by her sudden familiarity with me and distantly aware of the Torreses milling around in our periphery. Her hair was gradually drying in blond wisps around her face, emanating a faint vanilla fragrance.

 “Tell me about your poetry,” she said, before I could come up with a response to her confession.

I gave her a clumsy, condensed explanation. I said that I liked to write about physicality, about women’s bodies. Feeling suddenly, inexplicably brave, I told her how a professor of mine had once said it was important to write about the things that obsessed you, how after that I had tried to identify my own obsessions, worried that perhaps I didn’t have any, and realized at some point that all I thought about was physical intimacy. I constantly played my limited encounters with women on a loop in my head: secretly holding hands with my best friend in high school, kissing girls in bars, even being held, as a child, by babysitters or camp counselors. Liv was listening to me with intense focus, seemingly entranced.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said when I had finished speaking. “Everything is physical. Everything comes back to our bodies.”

 I looked at her; she was studying me, searching for something in my face. I became aware that my whole body was trembling. Then Silvia broke the spell, sweeping in from the deck to announce that the food was ready.

Sometime during dinner, the girls came up with the idea that they wanted both Liv and me to put them to bed. Their bedtime was always an ordeal: recaps of the day, stories, books, and often, at their request, personal goodnights from Silvia and Leo’s guests. I was involved in these rituals anytime I was there, but special guests were always the most coveted. The girls were too shy to ask Liv directly, and so they both came to me, whispering and climbing into my lap, and Liv, hearing them, smiled mischievously across the table at me.

The girls’ bedtime had become more and more nebulous since the start of the summer, and by the time they had changed into their nightgowns and brushed their teeth, it was after eleven. Micaela took my hand and Emilia, braver, took Liv’s. All four of us piled onto the bottom bunk, the girls tucking themselves between Liv and me.

They asked Liv to read them their most beloved book at the time, a well-worn and beautifully illustrated hardcover about ballerinas. When she began, I was thrilled by her transformation: she sat up straighter and her voice took on a low, suspenseful tone. She paused dramatically at key moments, pointed out details in the artwork, even at one point demonstrated, with one arm over her head, one of the poses in the story. The girls were entranced; they curled closer to her and piled more and more books into her lap.

It was sometime during the third or fourth book that I felt her fingers, hidden behind the overflowing stacks of pillows, brush against my arm. I stayed still, certain at first that it was a mistake. But without looking up from the book or pausing even for a moment, she trailed her hand from my inner elbow down to my wrist and then, gradually, laced her fingers through mine.

By now the girls had descended into a reverent silence and, mercifully, seemed to have forgotten me. They were very observant, and surely would have noticed the reddening of my face and neck and chest, the sudden slowing of my breath. Liv continued reading, ignoring me completely except for the slow grazing of her fingers in and out of mine. With her fingertips she drew circles around each of my knuckles, traced slow lines across my palm and along the back of my hand. I watched her while she read one book after another, relaxed and radiant, never once meeting my eyes.

When the girls had succumbed at last to their exhaustion, Liv released my hand, stood up, and waited in the doorway while I guided Micaela up to the top bunk and turned off the lights, leaving only a string of miniature lanterns glowing along the railing.

No sooner had I shut the door than she pulled me to her. My body went weak, disoriented by the brush of her lips against my mouth, the heat of her breath on my neck. The hallway was very dark, and she pressed me quietly against the wall and kissed me so intimately that I whimpered aloud. She was slow at first, patient, teasing, and then abruptly she took hold of me, one hand on the bare skin of my lower back, the other pulling at my hair. She pressed her thigh firmly between my legs and kissed me hungrily; I could taste the remnants of the wine on her tongue.

The house had gone quiet. It was hard to tell whether Leo and Silvia had gone to bed or moved outside to sit on the deck and look up at the stars, as they often did. Unconcerned, Liv pulled me down the hall.

My room was tucked into a far corner of the house, with a king-sized bed on iron rails that looked out onto a particularly dense patch of trees. I had opened one of the windows after my shower, and now the cool air, scented richly with pine and saltwater, filled the room. Liv eased the door shut behind us and pushed me down on the bed, positioning herself with perfect, fluid grace on top of me. She took her time: kissed me endlessly, undressed me gradually, piece by piece, paused to look at my moonlit body before returning to me again and again. She resisted my advances on her own clothing, allowing just the straps of her dress to fall off her shoulders as she worked her way, with almost worshipful attention, down my body, settling finally between my legs, and staying there until I had fallen out of myself, brought back only much later by the touch of her fingers on my face, brushing tears from my cheeks.

In the morning I woke alone. I found Silvia on the back porch, reading the paper. She said that something had come up with Liv’s dance company. She’d been called back to Stockholm a week early. Leo had driven her to JFK first thing in the morning and was already on his way back. She hadn’t left me anything, not a phone number or a piece of clothing or a note. She was gone.

*

I left the city nine years later, when my then-partner Claire and I moved to the suburbs to raise our daughter. Before Bree was born, Claire and I had argued incessantly about the move, she in favor of the practicality and affordability of a small town while I was desperate to stay in New York. She was the last in a string of women I had been with through my twenties. None of them, including her, had ever eased the persistent ache that hadn’t left me since that summer. But she was charming and deeply kind, and we had long conversations about art and literature, and she didn’t mind my need for long stretches of time alone. 

Our battles about the move dragged on for months, and eventually she offered what she considered a compromise, which was to stay in the city until Bree was old enough to start school. But this delay, rather than sweetening those last few years in our Morningside Heights apartment, only caused me a hellish feeling of nostalgia and detachment, as though I were already living through the lens of the distant memories I would one day have of that time. 

I endured our small town for Bree’s sake, but harbored resentment toward Claire and reminisced relentlessly about my early years in the city. At night I stayed up long past the two of them, losing myself in the silence. I gave up trying to write poetry, passing the time instead with novels and old films I’d loved when I was young. My only consolation was the proximity of our house to the train, which I often took alone into the city to go to museums or readings or, most often, to dance performances. I chose them at random, never looking into them much beyond the newspaper listings in The New York Times. For years I had searched for Liv’s name, never finding it, but at some point developed my own great love for dance. I always went alone, had dinner at a different restaurant each time, and sat toward the back of the theater with an overpriced cup of red wine or a novel to occupy me between acts. I hated when the performances ended, and afterward did everything I could to prolong my time in the city, going for a drink at a nearby bar or walking aimlessly up and down the avenues. I always took the last train home.

When Bree was in high school, Claire and I started trying in earnest to work through our issues. We both genuinely wanted to. I believe still that if I had behaved better, tried harder, it might have worked. As it was, we looked at each other one morning over breakfast, not even a month after Bree had left for college, and knew it was the end.

We thought it might be difficult for Bree, but she didn’t seem to mind as much as we’d feared. I rented an apartment on the Upper West Side, near where I had lived in my youth, and found a job at a gallery. On the weekends I sometimes picked up shifts at a local bookstore. Bree was at NYU, and once every week or two we met somewhere for dinner or lunch.

In the fall of her sophomore year, she called me quite late on a Sunday night. I panicked at the sight of her name on my phone, and when I picked up, her voice was soft and strained. She said she was fine but that something had happened. She needed to talk to me in person. She wanted me to come to her apartment the following day.

I took the subway early in the morning to her off-campus building on Elizabeth Street, where she lived with two other girls. The apartment was a third-floor walkup in the center of Chinatown, stacked precariously atop a chaotic store that sold all kinds of things unfamiliar to me: bins of gnarled roots, black husks, jars full of dried mushrooms and candies and beans. I had not spent much time in Chinatown when I was young, and none at all since moving back to the city. Bree had adapted almost instantly to life in New York, navigating the neighborhoods and subway lines with ease and laying claim to places Claire and I had never known.

She let me in with a brief, nervous hug. There was a heavy smell of incense in the air, and soft music playing from some distant speaker. It was clear the apartment had been recently, hurriedly cleaned. I could imagine piles of books and papers stuffed under Bree’s bed, clothes thrown into the closet. Her roommates were both gone for the day, she said. We had the place to ourselves.

I waited for her to tell me what was going on, but she insisted on a brief period of small talk while she made me a cup of tea in the windowless kitchen. Finally she sat down on the couch beside me, tucking her knees up to her chin, the way she had as a young child.

“I did something bad,” she said, and immediately began to cry. It was vague enough that I couldn’t even begin to guess; instead I put my arm around her shoulders, which made her cry harder. When she had recovered slightly, she sat up straight again and looked at me.

“I’m taking this anatomy class,” she said. “The professor is this really great guy, and we’ve bonded a lot. I’ve been going to his office hours and we always end up talking, like, all afternoon.”

I nodded, fighting a swell of panic in my chest.

She looked down at her lap, wiped her eyes. “Mom,” she said, “he’s married. He has a little son, who’s disabled.” She took a long, deep breath. “And I kissed him.”

“Oh, honey.”

“I know,” she said, becoming defensive; she had mistaken my sympathy for scolding, but she went on before I could correct her. “He’s like, twenty years older than me, and he’s just brilliant, and I’m a horrible person. But I want to do it again. He does too.”

We sat for a while in silence. I took a sip of my tea, which was still too hot, burning my tongue. Someone sprinted up the stairwell outside, rattling the door in its frame. “Do you have a picture of him?” I said.

“Actually,” said Bree, “he’s giving a lecture in half an hour. I thought we could go.”

 We barely spoke the whole way from her apartment to the science building. We walked by the drab, cheap-looking dorm where she had lived the year before and passed through the groups of students, who were mixed in with children and pedestrians and tourists cutting across the campus on their way to other destinations. 

The lecture hall was large, brightly lit, and only about half full. We took seats in the back and sat quietly as we waited for the professor, who arrived finally in a rush from the side entrance, a few minutes late.

I have never been with a man, but even I could recognize that this one was not particularly desirable. He was not at all the suave, overconfident performer I had pictured but small, possum-like, with dust-colored hair, an anxious face, and slightly geriatric sneakers. He looked down with a furrowed brow at the large table in front of him, sorting erratically through stacks of papers and pens. The sight of him made me a little queasy, and as the room fell quiet, I felt a touch of embarrassment for Bree.

It was only after the professor began that I understood. Of the countless lectures I have attended in my life, this is the only one that remains vividly clear in my mind. 

When the room had gone dark and the projector screen illuminated the wall behind him, the professor came alive. His voice was clear and deep, and he took a sudden command of the room that stunned me after his flustered entrance.

He was speaking about something called proprioception: one of three additional senses that are rarely discussed, largely because they are less understood, and more difficult to describe, than the primary five. The term, he said, refers to the body’s way of orienting itself in space, accounting for constant movement, sensory input, and ever-shifting balance and coordination. In a person with a healthy proprioceptive sense, a network of receptors and neurons throughout the body communicates signals to the other systems, enabling us to know, subconsciously, where our bodies are relative to everything around us. It tells us whether we are walking on stone or grass, allows us to keep our balance, to know, without looking, the position of our limbs. He summarized all this neatly and succinctly, with charts and diagrams to illustrate his points.

Then, to my surprise, he turned the focus of the lecture toward his son. With a click of his small remote, he flicked the screen from a colorful graphic to a grainy video, which after a moment of static revealed a softly lit hallway lined with floral carpeting. A woman’s voice murmured something indistinct, and then into the frame came a boy of about two, pushing a small toy cart toward the camera. He was smiling, but he walked with a wide, uneven gait, and almost immediately pushed the cart into the wall. Three times we watched as he lost his balance and fell to the floor, righting himself for a few shaky steps only to fall again. A hum of sympathy passed through the room when at last he gave up and began to cry, bowing his head in shame as the video faded to black.

Among other developmental delays, the professor’s son, Sam, suffered from a sensory disorder resulting from a failure of his proprioceptive sense. This meant that he had extreme difficulty regulating his movements, unintentionally playing too roughly with other children, walking into furniture and walls, and misjudging the strength of his grip and the proportions of staircases. His son’s disorder had turned the professor’s studies toward a deeper understanding of the proprioceptive system, and he was now in the midst of a research project that could lead to breakthroughs in treatments. I was amazed by how candid he was, how well-spoken and poised. Every so often I glanced at Bree, who was hanging on his every word, her longing painfully obvious and unfiltered on her face.

After the lecture I wondered if she would want to go up and talk to him, maybe even introduce me. But instead she hurried out of the room, motioning for me to keep up. Back on the street, she said she was hungry. She knew of a good ramen place nearby. When we arrived, a waitress greeted her warmly by name and showed us to a table beside the window.

I had thought of Liv with great regularity over the years, but seeing my daughter in the same state of uncontrolled passion brought it all forth again with jarring clarity. It continues to astonish me how visceral these memories have remained, even after so many years have passed. My affair with Liv was so brief, and yet when I think of her, I still experience a current of pleasure through my body: a warming of the cheeks, a rippling of the heart, a sudden pulse in the groin. I cannot quite explain why the recollection of this fleeting encounter remains, even now, the greatest thrill of my life.

 When Bree asked me, then, what I thought she should do about the professor, I looked down at my soup, where a single uneaten dumpling had grown swollen and pale, and gave a small shrug. The professor’s family was an obstacle, of course, a complicating factor that hadn’t been a concern with Liv. But being young, free of real responsibility, and desired by an older person whose nearly forgotten passion you alone had the power to call forth, was the best that life had offered me. I felt, against all logic, that my daughter should have it too.

But when I glanced up at her again, she looked not relieved or validated but horrified.

“Mom,” she said.

And I didn’t realized until then that what she had wanted was not permission or encouragement but simple common sense. She had wanted me to talk her out of it.  

Again I shrugged, searching for something to say; it was not possible to articulate my reasoning to her, but I felt sure of what she should do. “Life is long,” were the generic words that came out. “Now is the time to enjoy yourself.”

She looked down at the table and nodded, her face contorted into that familiar tortured expression she’d had since early childhood, and with a touch of guilt I found it endearing. Like me, she had been a passionate child, prone to all-encompassing desires and fits of despair when her plans went awry. She had met each of the small disasters of a young person’s life, bad grades and disloyal friends and unrequited crushes, with theatrical distress, requiring long talks and debriefs and tearful consolation sessions with Claire and me. But in adulthood she seemed always to be fighting against her nature, whereas I relished and romanticized my fervent inner life, certain it was the only way to live.

The waitress came beaming to collect our empty dishes, her body swept up in a whirl of motion that carried her just as quickly away again. Bree moved to take her wallet from her bag, a show of independence she would keep up for years, even knowing that I would always pick up the tab.

She didn’t tell me anything more about the professor for a while after that. I nearly asked several times but found myself reluctant to bring it up, not wanting to upset her in case she had been rejected, in case she had made a fool of herself. But just before Christmas she called me, again late at night, crying so hard that it took her a matter of minutes to say anything I could decipher. They had been found out, she said at last. They had been found out, and the professor had lost his job and been kicked out of his house. He had lost his research position too, and he was forbidden from seeing his son. He had lost everything. 

*

Fifteen years later, during a visit with Bree and her husband and daughter at their new vacation house on Jersey Shore, I received the news that Liv had died. A friend of mine, the only one I had ever confided in about Liv, emailed me the article: a massive spread in the The New York Times, a photo of her from years earlier, around the time I’d known her, caught in a breathtaking aerial leap.

Bree was cooking dinner, stressed by the task of managing several dishes at once, and I was attempting to help by keeping my granddaughter Bailey occupied with a book. Earlier in the afternoon, Bree and I had stood watching her play on the kitchen floor while Bree’s husband was out picking up some wine for dinner. Very quietly, Bree pointed out the possible red flags she had read about online: the blankness of the child’s gaze, the soft, nonsensical murmuring as she tilted a small purple doll above her head.

“What do you think?” Bree had said, her voice so low I could barely hear it.

“I think it’s too early to tell,” I said. But even in her hopefulness Bree wasn’t fooled.

She lost her composure only for a moment; her face crumpled, and she lowered her head into her hand. She murmured something I couldn’t hear, and when I asked her to repeat it she said, louder, “It’s karma.” A few tears had escaped down her cheeks and onto her neck, but she immediately wiped them away. “I know it, Mom. It’s karma.”

She was looking down at Bailey, studying her closely, but there was a note of anger in her voice, a harshness, on the word Mom.

When her husband returned she transformed instantly, and to my dismay I could see that he didn’t notice any change in Bree since he’d left, not even twenty minutes earlier.

We had a small, simple dinner around the ruddy glass table on their deck. They had been so proud of the house, the result of years of savings, but I found it disappointing. Although it had a nice view of the beach, it was small and depressing, with new renovations meant to hide its shabbiness but only, to my eye, highlighting it. After working for the Torreses I found that I had acquired an expensive taste, which I had never been able to satisfy for myself. I tried to replicate some of the details of the Montauk house in my own: candles, fresh fruit, soft linens and sunlight, music always playing at the perfect volume. But I have never been able to inhabit any space of mine so fully as they did, which has led me to understand that the real sensation had to do with the essence of the five of them, the Torreses and Liv, and not with the physical details at all.

After dinner, I offered to take Bailey down to the beach. It was still early; there would be another hour or two of evening light, and the daytime crowds would be gone. I took opportunities to care for Bailey myself as often as I could, under the guise of doing Bree and her husband a favor but really because it was a certain kind of alone time. The child focused so little on me that it didn’t matter if I hardly spoke.

Bree warned me not to let her into the water. She was too uncoordinated, prone to falling and struggling to get up again. I let her run ahead of me, watched as she crouched, murmuring to herself, in the waves. Now that Bree had pointed it out, I could see clearly that something wasn’t right. When waves crashed beside her, she barely reacted. Her movements were jerky and uneven, and sometimes she froze entirely, standing stock-still for minutes at a time. When I called out to her, she turned around and looked toward me but didn’t meet my eyes. 

 After that summer in Montauk, I had seen Liv only once more. At a dance festival at New York City Center one fall evening, long after I’d left the city, I had run into Silvia and Micaela on the way out of the theater. I had visited the Torreses a few times after my job with them ended, but at the time I hadn't seen them in several years and was thrilled by the sight of them in the crowd. Silvia, incredibly, was just as vivacious as ever, looking hardly aged at all. When they were young, I had learned to tell the girls apart by small, inarticulable differences in their faces, and even then I knew instantly that it was Micaela beside her, tall and elegant, impossibly grown up. We chatted for a while, and when Silvia hugged me goodbye she turned to whisper in my ear. “Liv will be at Lincoln Center next month,” she said. “Go. She’d love to see you.”

It was the only indication she'd ever given that she knew about us. I wondered if Liv had said something to her or if, more likely, she had simply picked up on it herself.

I found the program online and saw that Liv would be appearing only for two nights, as a special guest in a weeklong festival showcasing a number of different companies. When I mentioned it to Claire, leaving out anything about Liv and intending to go alone, she laughed and shook her head. She had bought tickets to surprise me for our ten-year anniversary. I had forgotten it completely.

We took the train, crowded on a Saturday evening close to the holidays. It was a cold night, a mix of snow and rain, for which we were unprepared as we hurried without an umbrella from the train into a taxi and from the taxi to Lincoln Center. Claire knew nothing about my affair with Liv, had never heard of her at all until that night. She had splurged on the tickets; our seats were in the sixth row. 

The first two pieces were long, the kind put on by very large companies, with many sub-groupings and fragmented phases leading to grand, dramatic finales. The kind I have never really cared for. Then, after a ten-minute pause, a woman emerged alone onto the stage, silhouetted in dark blue light. It was impossible to see the details of her at first, but when she turned around, my breath caught in my throat.

She had aged, nearly fifteen years, but it was Liv, unmistakably. I recognized her body instantly, even before her face. Her hair was down, shorter than it had been back then, and she wore plain black leggings and a loose-fitting top, just as she had that summer in Montauk.

Her movements stunned me. The moment the music began, she shook to life, and for twenty minutes, jolted across the stage as though in combat with her own body. The music was loud, and the dance was brutal, animalistic. I could feel the tension in the audience, as though we were witnessing an act of violence. An immense relief came over the crowd when at last she exited the stage, leaving it emptier than it had been when she arrived.

It was the only time I ever saw her dance.

I was sure Claire would notice my emotional state when the lights came up only moments later, but she was already sorting through her bag, chattering about getting a drink. I endured the rest of the show in a fogged state of unfocus, desperate to escape the stifling crowd.

The snow had thickened by the time we emerged into the square. I had delayed us inside, retreating to the restroom downstairs and then lingering in the lobby, under the guise of waiting for the weather to let up. I had thought I might see Liv coming out. I had no plan, no idea of what I’d do or say. Quickly I ran out of excuses, and Claire was confused and in a hurry to get to our train.

In the square, the fountain was still on, illuminated from beneath by vivid white lights. A soft glow emitted from the three towering buildings around us. When we had nearly reached the street I turned around, and through the water spurting into the dark sky, I thought I caught a glimpse of her: a woman walking away, her body concealed by a long fur coat. It was an illusion, probably, but I continued to watch her. Although it was difficult to make her out from the other side of the crashing water, there was something about her slightly tilted walk, the way her body swayed with each step, hurrying through the dark. I stayed still for a moment, pretending to look at the fountain, to see if she would look back. But Claire was saying my name, saying it again, and I had to turn away.