The Line Between

He was a much better student than I — if it hadn't been for his help in half my subjects, I'd still be in high school. Like me, he was completely uninterested in anything beyond literature and drama; quite unlike me, he accepted the existence of geometry, chemistry, and push–ups, where I never believed in their reality for a minute. «Think of it as a role," he used to tell me. «Right now you're playing a student, you're learning the periodic table like dialogue. Some day, good night, you might have to play a math teacher, a coach, a mad scientist. Everything has to come in useful to an actor, sooner or later.»

He called me Jake, as only one other person ever has. He was a gracious loser at card and board games, but a terrible winner, who could gloat for two days over a gin rummy triumph. He was the only soul I ever told about my stillborn older brother, whose name was Elias. I knew where he was buried — though I had not been told — and I took Sam there once. He was outraged when he learned that we never spoke of Elias at home, and made me promise that I'd celebrate Elias's birthday every year. Because of Sam, I've been giving my brother a private birthday party for more than forty years. I've only missed twice.

Sam had surprisingly large hands, but his feet were so tiny that I used to tease him, referring to them as «ankles with toes.» It was a sure way to rile him, as nothing else would do. Those small feet mattered terribly to Sam.

He was a dance student, most often going directly from last period math to classes downtown. Wanting to dance wasn't something boys admitted to easily then — certainly not in our Brooklyn high school, where being interested in anything besides football, fighting, and very large breasts could get you called a faggot. I was the one person who knew about those classes; and we were seniors, with a lot of operas, Dodgers games, and old Universal horror movies behind us, before I actually saw him dance.

There was a program at the shabby East Village studio where he was taking classes three times a week by then. Two pianos, folding chairs, and a sequence of presentations by students doing solo bits or pas de deux from the classic ballets. Sam's parents were there, sitting quietly in the very last row. I knew them, of course, as well as any kid who comes over to visit a friend for an afternoon ever knows the grown–ups floating around in the background. Mike was a lawyer, fragile–looking Sarah an elementary school teacher; beyond that, all I could have said about them — or can say nowwas that they so plainly thought their only child was the entire purpose of evolution that it touched even my hard adolescent heart. I can still see them on those splintery, rickety chairs: holding hands, except when they tolerantly applauded the fragments of Swan Lake and Giselle, waiting patiently for Sam to come onstage.

He was next to last on the program — the traditional starring slot in

vaudeville — performing his own choreography to the music of Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia. And what his dance was like I cannot tell you now, and I couldn't have told you then, dumbly enthralled as I was by the sight of my lunchroom friend hurling himself about the stage with an explosive ferocity that I'd never seen or imagined in him. Some dancers cut their shapes in the air; some burn them; but Sam tore and clawed his, and seemed literally to leave the air bleeding behind him. I can't even say whether he was good or not, as the word is used — though he was unquestionably the best: in that school, and more people than his parents were on their feet when he finished. What I did somehow understand, bright and blind as I was, was that he was dancing for his life.

When I went backstage, he was sitting alone on a bench in his sweat–blackened leotard, head bowed into his hands. He didn't look up until I said, «Boy, that was something else. You are something else.» The phrase was fairly new then, in our circles at least.

He looked old when he raised his head. I don't mean older; I mean old. The glass–clear skin was gray, pebbled with beard stubble — I hadn't thought he shaved — and the dark eyes appeared too heavy for his face to bear. He said slowly, «Sometimes I'm good, Jake. Sometimes I really think I might make it.»

I said something I hadn't at all thought to say. «You have to make it. I don't think there's a damn thing else you're fit for.»

Sam laughed. Really laughed, so that some color came back into his face and his eyes became his age again. «Good night, let's just hope I never have to find out.» He got dressed and we went out front to meet Mike and Sarah.