Previously – Chapter 14: Unsteady Alliances
Adam had read the agreement twelve times and he still could not have told you what clause 6.2 did.
He had it open again in the back of Lucy’s car, on his knees, with his reading glasses on. He only wore them when there was nobody to see, and he had not put them away fast enough when Lucy adjusted the mirror.
“Nice glasses.”
“Drive the car.”
“They’re very distinguished. You look like a man who owns a small vineyard and has regrets.”
The costume clause ran to ninety words and the only one he was sure about was costume. It came down, somewhere in the middle, to the phrase apportioned pro rata by headcount, and he knew what all of those words meant. He could not make them into a number, and a number was the only form in which he had ever understood anything.
He wrote in the margin: how many kids in the finale? x = ?
Heather would have known what it meant. That was the thing he kept arriving at and having to walk away from. Heather had never read a contract in her life, as far as he knew, but she’d have looked at the page for nine seconds and said this bit’s them making us buy the sparkly stuff, tell them no, and she’d have been right, and they’d have gone and had lunch.
She had done it in front of the bank once. Two thousand and nineteen, the equipment loan, and the man from the bank had used a phrase about their projections and she had leaned forward and said say that again but as if I’m a person and he had gone red and said it again as if she were a person and they had left with the loan.
Adam had loved her most in that room and had never told her so, because there had been a hundred rooms after it and he’d assumed there would be a hundred more.
“You’ve stopped turning pages,” Lucy said.
“I’ve read it.”
“You’ve read it twelve times, you told me.”
“Twelve.”
In the passenger seat Mia had her own copy, unopened, on the dashboard. She had read it twice and made four notes, and been right about all four.
“What do I do,” Adam said, “if she says something and I don’t understand it.”
Both women turned around, which was alarming from the driver.
“Eyes forward, Lucy.”
“You say say that again but as if I’m a person,” Mia said.
Adam looked at the back of her head for a while.
“Right,” he said.
* * *
Crestwood’s conference room was on the second floor with a glass wall onto the lobby, so that from the corridor you could see the whole meeting happening, like a display.
There were nine chairs and there were five of them. There was a pitcher of water with slices of lemon in it. It struck Adam as the single most expensive thing in the building, because somebody had to have thought of it and somebody had to have cut them.
Danielle sat at the head with a woman from her insurers on speaker for the first ten minutes. Celeste, the wiry one, took notes on paper. Lucy sat next to Adam with her laptop and did not open it. He understood that to be solidarity.
“Right,” Danielle said, when the speaker phone was done. “Your counsel came back on billing and I’ve given you billing. Equal size, both names, Crestwood first for alphabetical reasons and don’t fight me on it, it’s alphabetical.”
“It is alphabetical,” Adam said.
“Thank you. Six-two.”
Adam opened his mouth.
“Six-two is the costume clause,” Mia said, without looking at her copy. “It’s fine in principle and wrong in practice. Central procurement makes sense for the finale because you need the fabric to read as one piece under one lighting state, and it’s a disaster on apportionment, because you’ve got forty-one dancers in that finale and about half of them are mine, so pro rata by headcount means Lockwood pays half a costume budget set by a studio that can afford a costume budget.”
Danielle sat back.
“Go on.”
“Cap it. Central procurement, single supplier, and Lockwood’s exposure is capped at nine hundred dollars, and anything above the cap is yours.” Mia turned her copy around and slid it across, and there was a pencil line under the clause and a figure written next to it in the margin. “Nine hundred is thirty percent of what you’ll actually spend. You’ll spend three thousand. You were always going to spend three thousand, because you want it to photograph.”
There was a pause of about two seconds.
“Nine hundred,” Danielle said. “Celeste, note it.”
Adam looked at the water pitcher.
It went on like that for fifty minutes and it was, he understood after the first ten, not really a negotiation. It was two professionals establishing what the piece needed, and a third woman writing it down, and him.
He tried. He tried four times. He counted them afterwards in the car, because counting was a thing he did.
The first time he asked about rehearsal transport, which mattered, because four of his families did not have a second car. Danielle said “minibus, we’ve got one, we’ll run it Tuesdays and Saturdays” before he had finished the sentence, and wrote nothing down, because to her it was not a problem, it was a vehicle she already owned.
The second time he asked what happened if the show lost money.
“Then I lose it,” Danielle said, without any edge at all. “You’ve got no downside in this document, Mr. Lockwood. That was deliberate. If you’d like me to put some in, I can.”
Lucy made a small noise beside him.
The third time he asked about clause 9.1 and Celeste explained it and he understood it, and it turned out to be about who owned the recording, and he said, “So the video’s yours,” and Danielle said, “The video’s joint, that’s what it says,” and he said, “It doesn’t say that, it says the recording rights vest in the party procuring the recording,” and there was a small silence.
“He’s right,” Celeste said.
“Change it,” Danielle said.
It was the only thing Adam got all afternoon and he took it home and turned it over for two days.
The fourth time he asked whether there was any provision for a child who couldn’t afford the costume cap.
“They wear what they’ve got,” Danielle said. “In the finale it’s black and silver and they can wear a black leotard from a supermarket and nobody in row K will know the difference.” She looked up. “Is that a problem you have?”
“It’s a problem I have.”
“How many?”
“Five. Maybe six.”
“Then it’s six black leotards, Mr. Lockwood, I’ll put them in the central order and I will not itemize them.” She went back to the page. “Seven-one. Rehearsal schedule.”
He was proud of Mia. He noticed that he was, in the middle of it, at about minute thirty, when she took Danielle through why the master class had to happen at Lockwood and not at Crestwood.
“It’s ours,” she said. “You’ve got the floor and the rig and the eight hundred seats and the star. If the kids meet on your ground they will spend the first hour deciding they’re the poor relations and you will never get it back, and it will be on the stage in December where eight hundred people can see it.”
“That’s sentiment.”
“It’s staging.” Mia didn’t move. “You’ve got twenty-two dancers who’ve never been in a room with anybody worse than them, and I’ve got eleven who’ve never been in a room with anybody better. The only version of this where they come out as one company is the one where yours have to come to a building with a bad floor and be polite in it.”
Celeste, unexpectedly, said: “She’s right.”
Danielle looked at Celeste, and then at Mia, and said, “Master class at Lockwood. Fine.”
Underneath the pride, in the same place at the same time, was the other thing. It did not have a name he was willing to give it. It felt like standing slightly outside a door.
Danielle capped her pen. “That’s it, I think. Celeste will send the redline tonight.”
“One more,” Mia said. “The finale’s nine minutes.”
“It’s six.”
“It’s nine.”
“Derek will want six.”
“Derek can want what he likes,” Mia said, “he’s a guest artist,” and Danielle laughed out loud, once, genuinely, and at that exact moment the door opened.
* * *
Adam had expected somebody taller.
The man who came in was compact and moved like a cat crossing a kitchen, and he was wearing a coat that had cost more than the Lockwood sound system.
“Am I late? I’m late.” He put a paper cup down on the table. “Danielle, the floor at the arts center is a nightmare, there’s a dead patch downstage right, I want it looked at before we bring kids anywhere near it.”
“Noted.”
“I mean actually looked at, not noted. I want a person with a hammer.” He shrugged the coat off. “There’s a soft spot about a meter in from the wing line and if a fourteen-year-old goes through it on a jeté we will all be on the local news for the wrong reason.”
“Celeste, get somebody with a hammer.”
“Thank you.” He turned, and his eye went around the table, and stopped.
Adam watched it happen. He watched the man’s face change.
“No,” Derek Raines said.
Mia said, “Hello.”
“No.” He came around the table so fast that Celeste had to move her chair. “Chicago. The Aubade. The second cast, the Sunday matinee, two thousand and seventeen, and you did the transition into the third section, the one where you come off the diagonal and there’s no preparation, you just arrive, and I have been stealing that for eight years and telling people I made it up.” He had her hand in both of his. “Mia Chambers. I saw you dance when I was thirty-three and I went home and cried in a stairwell.”
“That’s a lot.”
“It was a stairwell, I’m not proud of it.” He was still holding her hand. “Nobody told me. Danielle, nobody told me.”
“I told you her name was on the finale.”
“You said a local choreographer.”
“She is a local choreographer.”
Derek made a sound of pure outrage. “She is a principal. She is a principal who lives locally. Those are different words in a different order and they mean completely different things.”
“I’m not a principal any more,” Mia said.
“Neither am I, darling, I’m a man who does openings.” He let go of her hand at last and put both of his flat on the table. “Right. Tell me about the finale. Danielle says six minutes and I’ve been assuming six minutes and I am extremely open to being told I’m wrong, providing it’s you telling me.”
“Nine.”
“Nine.” He didn’t even blink. “Fine. What’s it about?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Good. The ones people know about in November are always terrible.” He picked his coat back up, and turned, and saw Adam, and his whole manner adjusted with the smoothness of a man who does this eight times a day.
“Sorry, hi. Derek.”
“Adam Lockwood.”
“Right, right, the studio.” Derek shook his hand warmly. “Thanks for getting us the room, by the way. Danielle said you’d sorted out the Tuesdays.”
“That’s the minibus.”
“Whatever it is, it’s a nightmare and somebody has to do it, so thank you.” And he meant it, entirely, and it was said with real warmth, and then he turned back to Mia and said, “Nine minutes. Walk me out, tell me what you’re thinking,” and did not look at Adam again.
Nobody in that room was unkind to him. That was the part Adam turned over afterwards, in the car, with the folder shut on his knees. Not one person in that building had been anything other than pleasant, and he had still come out of it the smallest man in it, and he could not work out who to be angry with.
Lucy dropped Mia first. Mia leaned back in through the door and said, “You were right about the recording clause, it was the only thing I’d missed,” which was kind, and was true, and did not help as much as it should have.
* * *
He had the four o’clock, so he went straight to the studio and did not go home to change.
The four o’clock was eleven children between five and seven years old and it was the class nobody else wanted and Adam had taught it every Tuesday and Thursday for five years.
He was extremely good at it. It was the one professional fact about himself he had never doubted, and it was worth precisely nothing in a glass room with a pitcher of lemon water, and that had been sitting on his chest for two hours.
“Right,” he said. “Where were we.”
“WOLVES,” said eleven children.
“We were doing wolves. Correct. Who remembers what a wolf does with its feet?”
“QUIET FEET.”
“Quiet feet, thank you.” He got down on his heels, below all of them. That was the trick. “Now, Rosalie raised a very serious point last week. Not everybody wants to be a wolf. Some people want to be a horse. So this week we’re doing an animal each and I want to hear the argument.”
It took nine minutes to allocate the animals and it was the most ferocious negotiation Adam had participated in that day. There were two claims to being an owl and the matter was resolved by the establishment of a category of owl and a second category of a different kind of owl, and everybody was satisfied, and he did not raise his voice once.
Then he taught them a phrase.
Sixteen counts, in twenty minutes, to a room in which four of them could not reliably tell left from right, and at the end of it they could all do it together. Their mothers, watching through the glass, thought that their children had done it.
They had not. He had. Nobody in that corridor would ever know, and there was no clause in any contract in the world that priced it.
At the end a boy called Theo cried because he had wanted to be the first owl.
Adam sat on the floor with him for the last four minutes of the class while the others put their shoes on, and did not tell him it didn’t matter, and did not tell him he could be first owl next week. He asked him what the first owl did that the second owl didn’t, and Theo explained it at length, and by the end of the explanation Theo had talked himself into believing that the second owl had the better part. That was the outcome, and Adam had engineered it without saying a single persuasive sentence.
Mrs. Fletcher, locking the register, said, “You’re good with them.”
“I know,” Adam said, and was surprised at how it came out.
* * *
Lucy stayed after the six o’clock, as she did on Thursdays, and they sat at the reception desk with the laptop open between them and did November.
“Enrollment’s up eleven since the showcase,” she said. “Two of those are Kelly Nowak’s neighbors and one is a woman who saw the video Sophie’s mom put on Facebook. Four hundred views, which for Pine Falls is basically the Super Bowl.”
“Good.”
“At that rate you break even in about nine years.”
“Right.”
“Adam.”
“I said right.”
Lucy turned the laptop slightly so he had to look at it.
“January,” she said.
“Jensen’s already got his eight percent for January.”
“Jensen takes eight percent whenever he can get it, and there is nothing in that lease that stops him going again in April.” She let that sit. “And the insurance renewal is going up because of the flood claim.”
Adam sat back and looked at the ceiling.
“How long,” he said.
“With December? Properly, with a decent December and if enrollment holds through January?” Lucy turned the pen end over end on the desk. “September. Maybe October.”
“And without December?”
“April,” Lucy said. “Maybe May.”
The building was very quiet.
“Say the rest of it,” Adam said. “You’ve had a face on since Tuesday.”
Lucy closed the laptop halfway.
“I’ve been doing your books for two years,” she said, “for nothing, and I’ve never once mentioned that either, because the first year you were in no state to be asked anything and the second year I could see the numbers.”
Adam did not say anything.
“I’m not asking for it now, either,” she said, “so don’t do the face. I’m telling you because in about four months one of two things happens. Either you go under, in which case none of this matters, or you don’t.” She closed the laptop the rest of the way. “And if you don’t, then you have to start paying people, Adam. Me, and the Wednesday woman, and whoever teaches the Thursday when Mrs. Fletcher’s knee finally goes. That’s the thing that’s actually going to be too expensive. Not the rent. The rent is the easy one and you’ve been staring at it for two years because it’s the only bill with a date on it.” She opened the laptop again. “Danielle King has a woman who does the books for four studios. That’s what that costs. About nine hundred a month across four of them, so, two-fifty for you.”
“We don’t have two-fifty.”
“You don’t have it in November,” Lucy said. “That’s not the same sentence as you don’t have it, and you’ve been saying the first one and hearing the second one for two years.”
Adam put his hands over his face.
“Was that too much?” Lucy said.
“No.”
“Because I’ve been working up to it since about August and I’d hate to have done it badly.”
“You did it beautifully,” Adam said, from behind his hands, “and I’d like ten minutes and then I’d like you to say it again slower so I can write it down.”
* * *
He went back into the empty studio after and did not go home.
Half past nine, the building dark and ticking as the heating went off. He put the folder on the desk and did not open it. He took the day’s cash out of the register, forty-one dollars in twos and fives from the drop-in class, and counted it twice, and wrote it in the book.
The book was a ledger. An actual paper ledger, because Heather had bought it in the first week, in 2019, out of a stationery store in Everett that had since closed, and had written LOCKWOOD DANCE ACADEMY on the cover in silver marker with a heart over the second D.
He had bought accounting software in the spring of the second year. He had never once opened it.
Adam sat down and pulled the drawer out.
The photograph was face down under a box of staples, where it had lived since about four months after the funeral. He did not know why face down. He had put it there one evening and it had stayed and now moving it would be an event, and he had spent two years arranging his life so that there were no events.
He took it out and turned it over.
Opening day. The two of them under the sign. It had gone up crooked and they had left it crooked for a year. Heather had her arms folded and her chin up and she was laughing at whoever was holding the camera, and the person holding the camera was her mother. He had one hand on the small of her back and he looked, in the photograph, like a man who had won something.
He put it on the desk, face up, and did the takings for November. It took forty minutes and came out at Lucy’s four hundred and ten better than October, all of it from the eleven who had signed up after the showcase.
Then he sat with his hands flat on the ledger and let the thought come, because it had been coming for about six hours and he was tired.
Mia is better at this than she was.
He tried to put it down and it would not go down.
Not kinder. Not braver. Heather had been braver than anybody he had ever met; she had walked into a bank and made a man speak English, and she had told a specialist in Bellingham to stop talking about percentages, and she had never once in thirteen years been afraid of a room.
But if Heather had been at that table today, Heather would have argued about the costume clause for twenty minutes out of principle and lost it, and got the alphabetical order changed out of spite, and come home glorious and empty-handed, and he would have loved her for it. She would have said we don’t need them in the car and he would have agreed, and they would have run their own show in their own room in December for fourteen people, and Jensen would have put the rent up anyway.
Mia had read it once and found the number and taken it in four sentences.
She’d have gotten us a worse deal, Adam thought, sitting alone in the building his wife had named, and I’d have said it was a wonderful deal, because she’d have been so pleased with herself.
He sat with that for a long time. It did not get better with sitting.
It was not that he loved Heather less at the end of it. It was that he had, at nine-forty on a Thursday night in November, in a cold room, with forty-one dollars in a ledger, understood that keeping a thing alive and making it worth keeping are two different jobs, and that neither of them is the same as being good at it.
The heating clicked. Somewhere at the back of the building a pipe knocked twice and stopped.
He turned the photograph face down again, and put the box of staples on it, and shut the drawer, and sat there for a long time with his hand still on the handle.
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