five years after we’d gotten married, S and I were invited to a dinner party at the home of a German dancer then living in New York. At the time S worked at a theater, now closed, where the dancer was performing a solo piece. The apartment was small and filled with the dancer’s unusual possessions, things he had found on the street, or during his tireless travels, or that he had been given, all arranged with the sense of space, proportion, timing, and grace that made him such a joy to watch onstage. In fact, it was strange and almost frustrating to see the dancer in street clothes and brown house slippers, moving so practically through the apartment, with little or no sign of the tremendous physical talent that lay dormant in him, and I found myself craving for some break in this pragmatic façade, a leap or turn, some explosion of his true energy. All the same, once I got used to this and became absorbed in looking at his many little collections, I had the elated, otherworldly feeling I sometimes get entering the sphere of another’s life, when for a moment changing my banal habits and living like that seems entirely possible, a feeling that always dissolves by the next morning, when I wake up to the familiar, unmovable shapes of my own life. At some point I got up from the dinner table to use the bathroom, and in the hall I passed the open door of the dancer’s bedroom. It was spare, with only a bed and wooden chair and a little altar with candles set up in one corner. There was a large window facing south through which lower Manhattan hung suspended in the dark. The other walls were blank except for one painting tacked up with pins, a vibrant picture from whose many bright, high-spirited strokes faces sometimes emerged, as if from a bog, now and then topped with a hat. The faces on the top half of the paper were upside down, as if the painter had turned the page around or circled it on his or her knees while painting, in order to reach more easily. It was a strange piece of work, unlike the style of the other things the dancer had collected, and I studied it for a minute or two before continuing on to the bathroom.
The fire in the living room burned down, the night progressed. At the end, as we were putting on our coats, I surprised myself by asking the dancer who had made the painting. He told me that his best friend from childhood had done it when he was nine. My friend and his older sister, he said, though I think she did most of it. Afterwards they gave it to me. The dancer helped me on with my coat. You know, that painting has a sad story, he added a moment later, almost as an afterthought.
One afternoon, the mother gave the children sleeping pills in their tea. The boy was nine and his sister was eleven. Once they were asleep, she carried them to the car and drove out to the forest. By this time it was getting dark. She poured gasoline all over the car and lit a match. All three burned to death. It’s strange, the dancer said, but I was always jealous of how things were in my friend’s house. That year they kept the Christmas tree until April. It turned brown and the needles were dropping off, but many times I nagged my mother about why we couldn’t keep our Christmas tree up as long as they did at Jörn’s.
In the silence that followed this story, told in the most straightforward manner, the dancer smiled. It’s possible that it was because I had my coat on, and the apartment was warm, but suddenly I began to feel hot and light-headed. There were many other things I would have liked to ask about the children and his friendship with them, but I was afraid I might faint, and so after another guest had made a joke about the morbid end to the night, we thanked the dancer for the meal and said goodbye. As we rode down in the elevator I fought to steady myself, but S, who was humming quietly, seemed not to notice.
At that time, S and I were thinking of having a child. From the beginning both of us had imagined that we would. But there were