Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

  The colour had bled from Steph’s face. When she finally spoke the words came out edged and hoarse. ‘You mean I should lie and make a fool of myself.’

  ‘I mean you should do what your dear friend Christine Avery did.’

  ‘ How can you be so sure what she did?’

  Anna looked at the ceiling as though it could offer help or succour. ‘Because I saw her dance. Because I heard three thousand idiots go crazy over a no-talent.’

  ‘You happen to be dead wrong. Chris is one of the most honest and hard-working people I know.’

  ‘Look, you idiot,’ Anna shouted, ‘I’m on your side! And the sooner you’re on your side the sooner we’ll see some results!’

  Steph did not move. Anna pulled herself up short.

  ‘What are you staring at?’

  ‘You,’ Steph said.

  ‘What have I got, two noses all of a sudden?’

  ‘I never realized how you felt about me.’

  ‘I love you, that’s how I feel about you.’

  Steph turned her face down toward the table. Her shoulders began shaking. Anna realized her little girl was crying. The tears made no sound but they were tears all the same. Anna wondered if she had pushed too hard. The shaking went on a long time, too long. Ashamed, Anna touched a hand shyly to Steph’s face.

  ‘I’m sorry if I sounded off. But, honey, you’re every bit as good as she is, don’t try to tell me you’re not, I won’t listen.’

  The evening had ended and ended badly. Neither of them could finish her ginger ale.

  ‘I wouldn’t try to tell you anything,’ Steph said softly.

  Anna inspected her little girl’s face. She reached a finger and adjusted a curl of hair and then she kissed Steph on the cheek. ‘Come on. You’ll tell me when I’m a nag and I’ll tell you when you’re an idiot, is it a deal?’

  ‘It’s a deal. You’re a nag and I’m tired.’

  ‘You’re an idiot and I’ll give you a lift home.’

  Ray Lockwood went backstage after the performance. He knocked at the door that the guard said was Chris’s, and a Chinese woman who must have been her dresser let him in. Chris was standing, still in costume, staring at a bouquet of red roses.

  When she looked up at him he felt a soft footfall of fear. The body that had looked so strong on stage seemed fragile and undernourished now.

  ‘You must be very happy,’ he said.

  ‘Relieved. I never thought I’d get through it.’

  She came to him and held both his hands for just an instant. Behind that smooth forehead he sensed the grey chambers of her mind twisted in a fierce and unhealthy concentration.

  ‘You did a hell of a lot more than get through it. Tonight calls for a celebration.’

  She smiled weakly. ‘Thanks, Ray. But tonight calls for a good sleep.’

  He felt like an idiot who didn’t understand dancers and their needs. He tried to think of something to keep the conversation going. There were flowers on the dressing table, and a little cloth panda was propped against the mirror. The layout of the dressing room reminded him of a tourist cabin on a steamer.

  ‘Do you always have this dressing room?’

  ‘They let me have it tonight.’

  The dresser, firm as a nurse, sat Chris down in a chair and helped her out of her slippers and then stood behind her and daubed the sweat from her neck and shoulders with a virgin Kotex. The Kotex embarrassed Ray, and he said without thinking, ‘Chris, don’t you ever relax?’

  She smiled up at him. ‘I sleep eight hours a day.’

  ‘I mean relax. Let yourself go. Reward yourself a little.’

  She looked at him with wondering blue eyes. ‘Reward for what?’

  ‘For tonight. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

  She saw the sincerity and ignorance in his face and thought how sweet he was, how well meaning. A vague sort of animal gratitude lit her. ‘Thank you, Ray. I’m glad I make somebody happy.’

  ‘You know you do. I just wish to hell I could do something to make you happy.’ He stared at her. ‘I’m a great cook, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t know lawyers cooked.’

  ‘This lawyer cooks a terrific beef bourguignon. Interested?’

  ‘I like beef bourguignon.’

  ‘What night are you off?’

  ‘Monday.’

  His mind skimmed upcoming tests and papers due. ‘Next month? The twelfth?’

  ‘Every Monday.’

  ‘Eight o’clock? My place?’

  He’s kind, she thought, and she smiled at the notion of this lawyer who was willing to cook beef bourguignon for her. She remembered her sister’s parties and all the college boys who never gave her a glance. She remembered her parents’ dinners and the men in three-piece suits who tried to talk golf and travel with her and then gave up. She wasn’t glamorous and she wasn’t a hostess and most men who were serious about what her parents called the serious things in life didn’t waste their time on her.

  She didn’t know what Ray Lockwood saw in her, but she was afraid it was something that wasn’t there.

  ‘You were sweet to come by, Ray. Thanks. I appreciate it.’

  The dresser had turned on the shower and stood holding a bath towel. Chris pushed up from her chair.

  ‘Sorry I’m such a wet blanket. It’s the post-performance blahs.’

  ‘I understand.’ Ray put his hand gently under Chris’s chin and turned her face towards his. His finger traced the line of her cheekbone and touched the tininess of her ear. There was no movement, no objection. He bent to brush his lips very lightly against hers.

  As he left the dressing room he felt giddy and weightless and off balance and happy. On his fingers he counted the weeks till the twelfth.

  fifteen

  The corps rehearsed onstage the next day. Heinrich was tidying up the Nutcracker waltzes for tomorrow night’s benefit. ‘Hold it!’ he screamed. ‘Stephanie, you’re one measure ahead of everyone!’

  The rehearsal pianist, bent like a coal miner over the little upright, went back eight measures. Again Heinrich shouted the music to halt.

  ‘Stephanie, your hands!’

  Steph felt sweaty and dirt-streaked and tired of being singled out. Everyone was off today, not just her. ‘Where are my hands?’

  ‘Here.’ Heinrich demonstrated, cupping an imaginary beer belly. ‘En baisse!’ He was wearing a purple beret and Steph wondered if his transplant was hurting, because he was in one of his picky, tyrannical moods. Over and over, he made the kids hone their turns and arabesques. They danced full out, on pointe and not marking, till their calves screamed.

  ‘Central couple!’ Heinrich waved furiously. ‘Somebody have wrong runs—red couple, ask it another couple. Downstage, all of you—absolutely move! Almost in orchestra, please!

  The company dragged through the waltz formation like smashed, earthbound butterflies. Their circles grew lopsided, wheels pressured out of shape. One boy’s hand got too sweaty to grip and a girl went spinning into a canvas Giselle tree that had no business being there.

  More and more dancers gave up, dropped to the floor. With the unspoken understanding of cats huddling together for comfort, couples massaged one another’s muscles.

  Heinrich grimaced at his watch. Five o’clock.

  ‘We have just tomorrow, last rehearsal. We have to figure out right tempo for this. We have to do it, kids. Tonight, early to bed. Every one of you.’

  He stamped offstage. A spattering of applause followed him, grudging and perfunctory. Dancers gathered up their bodies and their tote bags and straggled toward the dressing rooms.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ a fading voice complained. ‘The more we rehearse it, the worse it gets.’

  Steph stayed behind. There was no sense rushing to line up for a shower. She shut her eyes, stretched on the floor. She liked to smell the desertedness of the house. It reminded her of long ago when she had dreamed of being a real dancer, privileged to wander the w
ings and backstage of a real theatre.

  In the orchestra pit a pianist was playing a Chopin nocturne for that evening’s Dances at a Gathering. He sounded like a real pianist, not one of the rehearsal trolls. She let the music fill her, lullaby her: She was almost able to forget the toe shoes blistered to her feet, the aching weight of her muscles.

  She must have dozed.

  When she opened her eyes again the fire curtain was half lowered. The lights were dimmed. A solitary electrician adjusted a gel on a spot in the wings. He used one of those poles that grocers use to get at faraway shelves. And then he was gone, pole and all, and the stage was peaceful as a country road at night.

  Steph stood up. She walked to stage centre. She planted herself firmly on one foot, tucked the other up, went on pointe and did a double turn.

  Not bad. Amazing what was possible when you didn’t have an itchy-scalped ballet master yelling at you.

  She tried it again.

  Better.

  And again.

  She smiled at herself. Steph, it may take a decade or two, but you’ll make it to prima ballerina assoluta yet.

  She realized the piano had stopped, but she could not remember the exact moment of its stopping. The darkness of the house stared at her, tempting her, telling her she was alone.

  She walked to the stage apron, stood at the dark footlights, gazing over the tide of empty seats. She lowered her eyes and on a sudden impulse she curtseyed: Makarova’s solo curtsy, the little-girl ‘Who, me?’ that brought bouquets and bravos showering to the stage.

  Her heart was beating very fast. The blood was applause in her ears. She raised her eyes, smiling her Makarova smile, and the darkness winked back at her.

  She began another curtsy.

  And stopped.

  Her muscles stiffened. She sniffed some warning, some chemical change in the air. She took a step back from the darkness. This wasn’t the first time: she’d felt it before at stage rehearsals, something out there, observing, invading.

  Her eyes flicked across the blackness. Not a shadow twitched. She scanned the orchestra seats, each layer of boxes.

  Then she caught something. The shift of a barely visible bulk. Her eyes jerked back to the source of movement.

  There.

  The grand tier box on the left, nearest the stage. A ringed knuckle glinted on the railing. Something was tilting out of one of the chairs.

  She squinted. Her eye groped out dim contrasts. A head—a bald head. A body straining forward, wrapped in dark cloth. A bald man in a dark suit, unmoving as a painted shadow.

  She held her breath and when she could hold it no longer she took a quick little suck through her nostrils. Fear shot through her, electric and stinging. She backed away, eyes on the box where something had shifted. She slid one foot carefully behind the other, aiming toward the light in the wings.

  And then she turned and ran. And felt a hand.

  And screamed.

  ‘Hey!’

  It was Danny Gillette, standing in the half shadow of a wing, watching her with a smile that was ever so slightly off centre. ‘Long rehearsal?’

  She managed, barely, to pull herself together and say, ‘Killing.’

  ‘Why’d you scream?’ He asked offhandedly, as though it had been a very offhand scream.

  ‘I—didn’t expect to see you.’ She felt warmed by the cloudless spread of his good humour, protected by it. She moved near to it. ‘You’re not in Nutcracker, are you?’

  ‘Lester wouldn’t even let me dance Candy Cane. Not that I didn’t try.’

  ‘Then why were you in the wings? You weren’t watching that mess, were you?’

  ‘Just waiting.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Me?’ The disbelief must have been audible in her voice.

  ‘Haven’t seen you in a while.’

  ‘I’ve been here. I guess I’m pretty hard to spot in a tutu.’

  They walked, not quite touching, through dark wings where the season’s props were stored in bins the size of garbage trucks. Canvas-covered planking whispered under their feet. They passed through a security door and came blinking into the bright fluorescence of a corridor.

  ‘I thought of putting a note in your box,’ he said, ‘but I’d rather talk to you. If you have a minute.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘If you have a minute.’

  She stared at him. His blue shirt was open at the neck. The taut unassuming dancer’s muscles of his chest rose and fell.

  ‘Just let me shower and change.’

  ‘Meet you at the stage door.’

  Steph practically broke her neck showering and changing. She rushed to the stage entrance foyer.

  A great lump of disappointment thunked inside her.

  Dancers scurried past, some just arriving, some just leaving, a few stopping to trade pellets of gossip. The switchboard operator, with her frizzy hair that had to be a wig, was busily fending off phone calls, and the uniformed guard, tipped back in his chair, was calmly fending off crashers.

  Everything was movement and voices and nattering fluorescence: but no Danny.

  And then he stepped out of a phone booth.

  She saw him before he saw her, and there was a soft sweet strength about him that awakened something in her. He waved and came toward her with the cool, gliding strut of the offstage male dancer. He was sexy. She had a feeling he knew it. The funny thing was, he didn’t need to act sexy to be sexy and she had a feeling he didn’t know that.

  ‘If you ever need an answering service,’ he said, ‘don’t use mine.’

  He reached an arm to hold the door for her. She saw a shape flick across the corridor behind him—a bald man in a dark suit. Her heart thumped.

  ‘Danny, wasn’t that Marius Volmar?’

  Danny glanced over his shoulder. ‘Didn’t see. Not much hair and a teeny-weeny Legion of Honour red thread in the lapel?’

  ‘I didn’t notice the lapel. Would he be hanging around Empire?’

  They took the escalator up to ground level.

  ‘Who knows?’ Danny said. ‘He could be comparison shopping for dancers—stealing company secrets—maybe he needs some pointers on how to screw up a Nutcracker.’

  ‘Seems funny.’

  ‘He is said to be an extremely funny man with no sense of humour.’

  They cut across a corner of Lincoln Center Plaza. The sun had dropped below the skyscraper tops and the air was cool and blue now, shadowed and soft like a forest. Children were jaywalking, arms outstretched, along the edge of the fountain.

  Danny touched her arm lightly, steering her. It seemed a very natural thing to do. The stage of the Metropolitan Opera felt far away. They strolled past the Vivian Beaumont Theater and stopped to stare at the reflecting pool with its huge, tranquil Henry Moore sculptures.

  ‘Steph—the reason I want to talk to you—I got a grant yesterday, from the Harkness Foundation. They’re giving me five hundred dollars to do a ballet.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’

  ‘It’ll be small—four dancers, taped music—part of the series at the Damrosch shell.’

  She gripped his arm. ‘Danny, I’m so happy for you.’

  ‘I have an idea—two women, two men. My own twisted version of a Greek myth.’ His face was tensed in some hidden pocket of thought. ‘Steph, will you dance it?’

  ‘Me?’ She felt Manhattan tremble beneath her.

  ‘I’ve seen you dance, Steph, and I saw you tonight. You do a very good Makarova, by the way, but don’t let Natasha see it.’ Something changed. The brown of his eyes deepened. ‘I’ve made the part on you, Steph. I mean, on my idea of you. It uses your extension and you’d look great and it would look great. I can’t pay you, but—’

  ‘Pay me!’ It was honour enough, nowadays, for a dancer to have any sort of part made on her at all. But there were problems, and her mind sifted them. She was under contract and she’d need permission to work outside the company.
And then there was her mother.

  They were standing on the bridge over Sixty-fifth Street and his hands were on her shoulders in a good-bye way. He was looking into her eyes asking. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Danny, I—oh, I want to so much.’

  ‘Then it’s yes, yes? Yes.’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you dare offer it to anyone else. Yes.’

  He kissed her. On the lips. Very fast, very soft, but on the lips.

  ‘We start rehearsal Sunday.’

  ‘Sunday?’ Her one day off, the day of apartment chores and visiting her mother.

  But Danny’s ballet was more important.

  ‘It’s a date. Sunday!’

  ‘Mom, I’ll be leaving early today.’

  They were sitting in the breakfast nook of Anna’s apartment. Anna had missed her daughter in little ways since they’d moved to separate apartments and she was grateful for the weekly coffee and muffins and gossip, the chance to listen and advise and remember she was needed.

  ‘And would you mind if we didn’t see one another for a few Sundays?’

  Anna couldn’t have been more surprised if her daughter had slapped her. ‘Of course I’d mind—unless there’s a damned good reason.’

  Steph talked excitedly about the project. Anna listened quietly. Steph hadn’t even asked about her week at Arden’s, which had been hell. At the mention of Danny’s name Anna laid a silencing hand on Steph’s shoulder.

  ‘Who? Who did you say?’

  ‘Danny Gillette. He’s been with Empire three years and he was one of Lvovna’s star pupils. He’s a soloist now but they’re going to make him a principal next year.’

  ‘I know who he is. I just didn’t know you were involved with him.’

  ‘I’m not involved with anyone. He asked me to help out, that’s all.’

  ‘He must think you’re friends. He wouldn’t ask a perfect stranger, would he?’

  ‘He’s asked me and two other dancers to contribute time.’

  Anna watched her daughter’s eyes. They were butterflies, never stopping anywhere. ‘How much time?’