The Custodian

The first time I noticed him was on April 23rd. The day floats vividly in my mind, the images of that day float in my mind like softly framed clouds. The entire day seemed drenched in pastel colors because the bright sunlight of spring was blocked by the old theatre architecture and only allowed in as beams of light falling through a window, cut by a beam, and then softly scattered itself into the antique rooms, hallways, and stage. While the lighting and dust specks floating in the light beams were as docile as can be, I was full of inner turmoil and rushing.

Our company prepared for a performance at the old theatre on Cooper Place - an odd little place, built for another time and entirely different space needs. What made the rush even bigger was that this was a one-off performance away from our home theatre. So everyone was figuring out where to go. There was so much commotion among the dancers, our choreographer, our coach, and support people. The anxiety was running high. One of the stage trees hadn't made it on the truck. The stage was a little narrower. So we had to shorten our steps a little bit. One of the girls had fallen off the stage during a last-minute rehearsal while the line already started forming outside.

On top of that, we didn't have a proper changing room. Every act required us to change. The director had closed one of the stairways to the balcony level with a barricade so that we could change there. The pink-haired lady, always chewing bubble gum, from the theatre management company had a yelling fit over it, but they worked out a deal where our stage whisperer John was perched outside to look for the building inspector. So we were even more stressed because John wasn't there in case anyone got a performance blank. You could say that half the company was in pale-faced panic.

From the second to the third act, we had to change from tree and bush costumes (after having played a living forest) to standard leotard ballet outfits. We had to take our entire clothes off for which I usually prefer the safety of a changing room. There, not even having flat ground, but standing on the stairs, we didn't even have benches or lockers. My gym bag was wide open so that I could easily find things and place clothing items down. I was split naked for a moment. That's when I saw him for the first time.

He stood on top of the stairs. He pretended to lift one of those 80 lbs stage lights into a projection control booth, the heavy black thing on his shoulder, but he was paused. He was looking straight at me, gazing at my chest, which was flat from thousands of hours of ballet with two big pink nipples like maraschino cherries. His posture was well camouflaged with the pretense of being engaged in the busy setup change, but behind his posture of lifting stage lights from the cart into the room, he was standing still and watching me intently as I disrobed, exposed myself, and covered up.

The clothes on his body were oversized and floating like men with enormous bellies tend to wear. His hair was gray, long, and jelled back in a wave. There was a blue tint to his eyes like perhaps thirty years ago, he could have been handsome for a short glimmering moment of his life. What his appearance most spoke of was the abandonment of just someone not very relevant and succumbed to a boring life of beer, soccer, and the occasional steak.

I had never had anyone watch me so intently and so unabashedly. I had never been so helpless to do anything about it because our changing times were tightly choreographed. 47 seconds! That had been the drill. We had to drill taking our costumes on and off. All the girls had gotten used to throwing their clothes off with abandon.

When I got on pointe to follow the dancer in front of me in a meandering line to play ducklings following down to the creek, my mind was strangely calm. My focus was entirely with the image of that old man, furrowed skin and meaty cheeks, standing up there on the stairs watching directly down at me. Who was he? What was he seeing? A scrawny petite ballet dancer? He was so calm about it. There was nothing furtive about his action of stealing my nakedness. There was no anxiety about getting caught, but only a calm bathing in the view of my body. Somehow, his calm entered into me. I must have been the calmest dancer on stage, letting my training come through to hit all the extensions perfectly.

During the next act change, I looked around to spot him peeping again. He wasn't there. While I changed into a dress of colorful scarves for the next scene - the hero's triumphant return, the concession boy - a smitten black-haired student - pushed right through in between us. Some girls growled at him. Some were too panicked to miss the time limit to change because the buttons on the dress had too tight button holes and required fumbling. But nobody cares about us dancers. We are afraid to complain because they keep telling us that for every spot there are another hundred equally qualified girls waiting. And they let us see the competition at regular auditions for backup dancers. You get yelled at. You get mistreated. You learn to be quiet. You learn to dress like everyone else and stand perfectly in line - to do anything but to get noticed.

The theatre management staff also used our staircase to move around. They walked right through the middle of us like they purposefully didn't care. There appeared to be an argument between our director and the theatre management, who had wanted the director to rent a side stage as a changing room, but our director had wanted to save money. And so we girls started feeling really unwanted standing with one foot on a higher and lower stair, not having much privacy or comfort. The tension flared even more after each wardrobe change increased the mess of clothes thrown down in a rush. A girl through her bra in a temper away. We felt like scrawny rats that run around the feet of pedestrians, afraid to get stepped on and desperate to find some leftover pizza crust.

During the hero's triumphant return, I was confetti and kept throwing myself forward chest first in high jumps like a swirl of it blowing with the wind. I remember the look of the audience - very still, very quiet, eyes wide open, momentarily entertained by my trying, but looking for the next big oh-moment. The low lighting behind the stage that dramatized the shadow that I threw toward the audience also illuminated their faces in a pale and made the audience faces unusually visible. My eye got caught on a girl with bright red lipstick and a black veil, who was holding black theatre binoculars under her chin. She stood out among the casual clothing of jeans and t-shirts. She captured the elevation that art performances should have.

And as I turned around to walk behind the next confetti dancer, I saw the custodian again. He stood behind a curtain, shielded from the audience, with a broom in his hand, and he had only eyes for me. He wasn't leering with horniness or smirks. Calmly, he watched me, watched me move, watched my chest, watched my butt, thought his thoughts and dreams about me. The calmness infected me. My pounding heart from the jumps mellowed out. Like a dream, I felt myself moving slower, perhaps hypnotized. I think he was hypnotized by me, and I started feeling the same hypnosis that he was feeling. I turned around again to become the wall for the alley that the hero strutted down with five other dancers.

Who was he? That old man who had let his body go. I was a little over ninety pounds. He was probably over two hundred pounds. I had been trained in ballet, a high art, from a very young age. Did he even know how to read? We were from two entirely different worlds. For some reason, I felt intrigued. I felt intrigued by the foreign, by the different, by the exotic.

The next act was our last. After that, we switched into our street clothes. We were to wait for the choreographer to do a speech. After the speech, we were to come up to the stage for a final time to do a big bow. While we idled, I asked Chrissy if she had noticed the custodian. She hadn't. She had been too busy eying her crush in the third row, who followed her to every performance but never spoke. There was also a NY Times journalist in the seventh row, whom she had tried to impress because she hoped to get mentioned by name. Yes, the custodian was an invisible man. Nobody noticed an old man anymore. It's funny how when you don't have anything to offer to the world like youth and beauty or access to status, you don't matter anymore. So he got away with peeping because he was invisible.

The big bow, with everyone holding hands on stage to applause, was wonderful. It felt like a well-accomplished day. For some reason, I felt we looked best in our street clothes. It wasn't our real street clothes. We had all burned a little cash to get pretty-looking street clothes. We looked like we were hip. That was our moment of glory where we felt on top of the world before we returned to tongue-lashing in practice and living life on a shoestring budget. The audience stood up in solitary to underline how out of this world our performance had been.

We walked off stage. The stagehands had already done half the packing up. The audience had turned their backs to shuffle outside. The emptiness of a theatre after the performance is one of the most depressing things. You know that it's over. You know that you are left with nothing. You know that everyone has abandoned you. At the same time, the post-performance depression starts hitting you because all the anxiety and singular focus towards the big moment is gone in a puff.

I re-folded my costumes so that I could neatly stack them into my workout bag. The custodian was lifting the barrier on top of the stairway onto a cart. Calm! He had been calm before, during, and after the performance. Any time, I looked at him, I felt like he was the calm center of the storm. Something was drawing me towards the calm. I sensed that I wanted to abandon what I was feeling - a million uncomfortable feelings. In fact, I wanted to abandon myself. I wanted to no longer be myself. The way how he was calm, simple, and self-assured was what I desired to feel like.

I climbed the stairs towards him with my workout bag on my back - a giant thing on my skinny frame. I eyed him directly. He eyed me back directly. The folds around his eyes and on his forehead were halfway between those of my dad and granddad. That blue tint in his eyes had an unexpected quality about him, like a summer vacation in Mallorca - a certain romantic teach in the least likely place. He let go of my eyes. He roamed my chest, my belly, my legs, and paused on my feet for quite a long breath. I passed him. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw him observing my butt cheeks. For the first time, I saw a hint of emotion breaking through a calm, a little smile.

I listened for his footsteps to follow me but never looked back again. There was a thrill in not knowing but assuming and in not controlling but hoping. The balcony level had already completely emptied. I knew that I was going into an isolated place with him following me. His black sneakers made soft sounds, but the creeks of the stairs under his weight were heavy. A little fantasy of a small, weak woman and a giant, strong man alone set a certain tinge to my feelings.

I knew of the bathroom at the balcony level. I slipped in. There was a beautiful large window with a gorgeous view onto Cooper Square, which allowed ample sunlight in and made the bathroom, shall I say, cheery! I slipped into the stall closest to the window. I pushed my jeans and panties down to my sneakers and sat down on the white plastic seat. I waited.

The bathroom door opened wide. I could hear that it never closed again because the distant outside sounds kept coming in. The first stall door opened with a metallic bang. Plastic banged around. He was changing the toilet roll. The next stall door opened with the same metallic bang. He was slowly and methodically working his way towards my stall under the pretense of his work. I felt a certain tension growing that send goosebumps running across my scalp. I held my position with my panties down like a deer caught in the headlights, unable to move, unable to change the course of what was going to happen.

Inevitably, the stall next to mine opened. He stopped moving. I could see him through the slit in the stall wall. He was looking straight at me. I looked straight back at his eyes. We were complicit in our secret of staring at each other. At that moment, I realized why I was so drawn to him. I had felt lonely. Dance can be very lonely, even when you dance with people. Everyone is very competitive. The audience doesn't see you. They see your moves. They see your perfection. Your choreographer doesn't see you. She sees a puppet to be moved around. The custodian looked directly at me. He saw me. He saw me for who I was. He had the ability to not get trapped in seeing just another ballet dancer, but there was an intimacy to his watching eyes that made clear that I could see me, the way, how I'm a little scrawnier than most other dancers, the pinkish hue on my cheeks that makes me feel so self-conscious, and also a sense of who I am outside of dance when I walk down the street.

Was it the loneliness that I felt or a toxic desire for attention that couldn't be sated by an audience of 250 people but needed a more rapt and loyal attention? His eyes wandered down my body, appreciating every detail. I felt that trance again, watching his eyes. I started recognizing his little reactions to my body in his eyes. The wonder, the delight, the curiosity, the appreciation, the surprise. I burned to know more of what he discovered and felt wandering his eyes over my body. I felt an odd sense of safety and danger. I felt a danger of being alone with him. I felt safe with him, separated by the metal stall.

Nobody was going to come up here anymore. And if someone came, he would probably smoothly snap into motion to continue re-stocking the toilet paper. There was complete deniability to the moment, but the moment would last for however long we let it last. There was a suspension of time in the moment. I slowly got up. I wiped my pussy. I let him watch me. I let him get a good look. And I realized that I had become as much a pervert as he had been.

I walked out of the stall, washed my hands, and ducked under the "restroom closed" sign to get out.