Baby Be-Bop by Francesca Lia Block Read Free Book Online

Dirk said. “How could she do that to you? She was sick.”
    Gazelle wrung her hands. She was trembling.
    “Are you cold?” Dirk asked her. He took a blanket off the bed and held it out.
    “Oh, no thank you. How kind you are. Kind, like him.”
    “Who?” Dirk asked.
    Gazelle’s eyes filled with tears. “He saved me, finally. I thought I was a monster. I huddled and hunched in my black dress. My fingers cramped like an old woman’s. My face grew twisted with pain. There were alwaysbruise-blue circles under my eyes from holding my tears back. Without my dancing I was like the mannequin in the corner, no arms or legs, swaddled and bound. I never left the apartment.
    “But he came to me finally. It was my sixteenth birthday, and my aunt was out. It was a windy evening full of spirits. I almost thought I heard my piano player through the walls but it was only the wind. There was a knock on the door.”
    As she spoke, Dirk saw the parlor again, the image quivering as if behind smoke or water. The girl was older this time, and her body looked as if it had never danced and never would. Dirk gasped to see how different she was, almost as ravaged as the woman in white. He wished he could have waltzed with her out of that place.
    She hobbled over to a door and opened it. There stood a small man with dark skin and blue eyes. His head was shaved so that his sharp cheekbones seemed to stick out even more.
    “I shivered with awe when I saw him. I felt my whole life lived in that moment—blooming from a seed in my mother’s belly, swimming like a tiny slippery fish, growing a birdlike skeleton, clawing forth—a baby lynx, dancing as a girl, becoming a woman with a child inside of me, lying in a satin-lined coffin beneath the earth while a young woman danced the story of her life above me.
    “ ‘I need you to make a dress for my beloved,’ said the man in a voice like a purr.
    “ ‘Come in,’ I said.
    “He sat on the brown sofa. I noticed a red jewel embedded in his nose. It caught the light like a tiny fire.
    “'I want you to make me the most beautiful dress,’ he went on. He reached into the sack he was carrying—he must have had a sack of some kind although I don’t really remember it now. But how else could he have brought the fabric in? I remember the fabric. It was a bolt of thick cream Florentine satin. And he also gave me the most fragile lace—all chrysanthemums and peonies and lilies and baby’s breath—and a golden box full of tiny crystal beads.
    “He put all these things in front of me.
    “'I’ll need to see the woman in order to make it,’ I said. I imagined a fairy woman with dark skin and pale eyes like his, jewels in her ears and nose and on her fingers, chunks of rubies, emeralds and sapphires like her eyes. I would have been afraid to touch a woman like that—to have her there at my fingertips, just on the other side of the satin, vulnerable to my pins and needles. But I wanted to see her, too.
    “ ‘I want the dress to be a surprise for her’ was all he would say.
    ‘"Do you have her dress size and measurements?’ Iasked. I was very shy. I kept my head down the whole time I spoke to him. But I had to look up to see his answer because he was silent, just shaking his head and looking at me.
    “'Well, how will I know what size to make it?’
    “His eyes on me were like the softest touch, a touch I had not known since the last time I let my own hands caress my now monstrous, bleeding body, since the last time I danced. They were the color of blue ball-gown taffeta.
    “ ‘Looking at you … I think she is just your size,’ he said.
    “I blushed so much that I thought I was the color of the ruby in his nose. How could he know about my body beneath the black shawl I wore bundled around me? But I agreed to make the dress.
    “Then he left. I almost danced again. I did dance in a way—my fingers danced over the satin. I sat at the black-and-gold sphinx sewing machine and made a ballet of