“You make no sense.”
And when he looked around the table, into the faces of his friends for backup, suddenly everyone was smiling again, laughing, having fun, and we were off on a new topic.
Conversely, when I intentionally tried to pick a fight with him to vent some anger over my day, coupled with the fact that I was starving, he crossed his arms and said I had five minutes to scream at the world at large and he would not play devil’s advocate even for a second. I always felt better after that.
I had no doubt that he could be a dangerous man, but he kept that in check at all times, on purpose. His mother told me that when he was young, she’d worried because his temper had been explosive. She’d been thrilled that after college he’d committed to law enforcement and the marshals. He had channeled anger into service, for which she was thankful. When I asked others, the only friend of his who had seen Eli mad was Jer Kowalski.
“You don’t want to see it,” Jer assured me. “He holds himself kinda tight. I wish he wouldn’t. I wish he’d trust himself more, but Ian used to be like that before he started loving Miro, so maybe it’ll change when Eli finds the one too.”
I wasn’t so sure about Jer’s assessment of Ian Doyle. The way he went from zero to yelling in seconds was terrifying. The fact that his godchildren, a little five-year-old girl and her two-year-old brother, weren’t at all bothered by the volume from his diaphragm gave me pause, though. They didn’t even startle.
“He’d take a bullet for either one of them,” their mother, Aruna Duffy, told me. “He’s scary, like most of these guys, like my husband can be, but never to me or my kids. It’s something, knowing you have lions between you and the world. It’s all about balance, isn’t it? If you have a lion to protect you, you have to deal with the roaring now and then.”
“That makes perfect sense,” I agreed as she slipped her arm through mine.
Eli’s friends became mine, all of them, even Ian Doyle.
“I’m so sorry,” I announced to the room last October, tightening my face into a grimace. “But I couldn’t get tickets to theNutcrackerfor all of you.”
As everyone tried to figure out who would have to miss out, Ian mouthed the wordsthank youfrom the kitchen before he announced that he would make the sacrifice.
When I made principal four months after meeting Eli, I called him first. At dinner, he informed me that I didn’t look happy.
“I’m happy,” I assured him irritably. “Why wouldn’t I be happy?”
“Oh yeah?Happyis totally the word I would use to describe you right now.”
I looked up at him and then glanced away.
“Speak, or I’m picking dessert, and last time I got whatever that was with the pistachio glaze. You nearly coughed up a lung.”
I shuddered just thinking about the gelatinous mess that had been the dessert at a new place we tried that was supposed to be fusion Creole. It was not good.
“Now. Tell me now,” he demanded.
I groaned. “I just keep wondering if this is all there is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean, my days are sort of running into each other.”
“Of course they’re running into each other because you do the same things over and over. How else would that work? Everybody’s days run into each other.”
I warmed up for two hours every morning, barre class, center floor, in order, a routine I followed. Then there were four to six hours of practice for whatever the show was, and then after dinner, there was evening class. An endless loop broken up only by a show. I was forever performing one thing and rehearsing another. And that was the life of a dancer.
“You know, I was attached to the New York Ballet Theatre through my dance academy when I was ten,” I told him flatly. “I was a full-time dancer at fourteen, and at seventeen I was picked to be in the corps.”
“Which is awesome.”
“But I’m twenty-eight now, and I’m tired, and my years are getting shorter.”
“Then you have to branch out, do other stuff. You did the modeling, you performed in Vegas with Cirque du Soleil, you choreographed ballets for other dancers in other cities. What more do you want to do?”
The problem was I had no idea.
“Is Hollywood calling?”
“Oh God, absolutely not.”