Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

  ‘Danny—I love you.’

  He stood motionless, walled into his anger. ‘Sure. Sure you do. Likewise. It’s been a pleasure.’

  ‘You don’t think I pretended!’

  His face was turned away. He was dead to her.

  ‘Danny, I begged you to let Ilonka dance that role!’ If only he would touch her, make some move of reconciliation: she didn’t want Marius Volmar, she didn’t even want dance, all she wanted was for Danny Gillette aka Goldberg to tell her to stay with him.

  But he didn’t.

  Words she didn’t want to hear came spitting from him.

  ‘Sure you begged. Right over there in the sack.’ He was hunched and heavy-shouldered, like a cornered bull.

  ‘I was honest with you right from the beginning!’

  ‘With a mother like that, you don’t need to tell lies. Or stick knives in other people’s backs. She does it all for you.’

  ‘My mother has nothing to do with this! It’s my decision! I love dance and I love you, and if I want to go to the best company, that’s my choice, and if you want to make some kind of conflict out of it—’

  ‘If I want to make a conflict out of it?’

  ‘Well, you are! I’ll be dancing solos—principals—good ballets—if you loved me you’d want me to do well—just the way I want you to do well!’

  ‘Sure you want me to do well.’

  She had never heard such a voice before. Not from Danny. It had dropped to a hiss. What it lacked in full breath it made up in venom.

  ‘Thanks to you, I haven’t got a friend left in the corps. There’s not a soloist or a principal who’ll talk to me. Lester and Hannah will probably cancel my contract next spring. As my yiddishe momma used to say about people like you, with a friend like that, who needs friends?’

  The whole situation had gone violently wrong. She couldn’t understand. All she had wanted was to ask his advice and instead, suddenly they were fighting and his lips were twisted like a half-healed scar and his face was an ugly red lie and his mind was made up and hers was just as made up as his.

  ‘I never tried to use you, Danny!’

  ‘Because I was dumb enough to volunteer. Well, now I am un-volunteering; so why don’t you just get your shit together and stuff it in your tote bag and get the hell out of my life?’

  He snatched her clothes from the chair and her tote bag from the floor and sent them crashing against the wall. There was a flurry of spilled change and scampering cat and then only the ticking of the clock.

  Steph did not move. Instinct told her everything was lost. There was nothing to do now but wait and be sure he had used up all the violence in him. When she could hear his breathing slow she gathered her clothes and what her fingers could detect along the floorboards of her scattered small possessions.

  She dressed as fast as she could but her movements had an exasperating underwater slowness. She heard his breath coming in gasps, trying to shape more words, more hate. She didn’t want words. She didn’t want light. She didn’t want to see him. She wanted to speed. She felt unmoored, lost, with only one direction to guide her: out.

  She kept her eyes busy with buttons and pennies and lipstick cases and the clasp of her bag. She did not want to see if he was watching or if there was anything in his hand. Humiliation and emptiness drummed in her and with them an awareness that the moment was dangerous, it must be crossed quickly.

  She sped across the room and shut the apartment door quietly and went down the three flights of stairs two steps at a time.

  As she ran toward West End Avenue to look for a cab, tears stung her eyes.

  Chris was fighting her nightly losing battle with insomnia when a sound made her start. She recognized the scrape of a key probing the front-door lock. That couldn’t be Steph, she thought, it’s much too early. Someone’s trying to break in!

  Her heart thudded and she debated whether she had time or courage to make a dash for the telephone. Just as she slipped one foot out of bed she heard the door bang open and shut. There was a stumbling in the other room.

  A junkie, she thought. Dear God....

  A light went on and Steph stood in the bedroom doorway, out of breath and disheveled, as if someone had tried to attack her. And succeeded.

  Chris snapped on the bedside light. ‘Steph—what’s happened?’

  ‘I’ll be okay—I just—’ The voice had all the life squeezed out of it.

  A fist of ice grabbed Chris’s heart. Steph staggered to her bed and sat down. For a long moment she stayed slumped over some private pain, white and shaking, and then she looked up.

  ‘Is there any vodka left?’

  What’s wrong? Chris thought, Steph doesn’t drink. ‘There’s a little—but we haven’t got anything to put with it.’

  ‘Just an ice cube will be fine.’

  Chris fixed the drink, hurried back to the bedroom, and watched Steph down half the shot in a swallow. This isn’t Steph, Chris thought, coming home at two in the morning, belting back straight vodka.

  ‘Steph, you’ll make yourself drunk.’

  ‘The sooner the better,’ Steph sat gazing at the vodka and then at Chris and finally she said, ‘It’s over. Danny and I are through.’

  There was a long sighing silence. Chris felt a stab of surprise and then a rush of unthinking empathy. ‘Oh, Steph, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I feel numb. I can’t believe it. I can’t understand why.’

  Chris sat beside her and Steph leaned against her shoulder and shut her eyes.

  ‘We argued. Like two trains coming at one another on the same track. He wouldn’t stop and I wouldn’t stop. It was stubborn and ugly and stupid and neither of us wanted a collision but it happened.’

  ‘But if neither of you wanted it, can’t you apologize?’

  Steph smiled sadly. ‘There’s no way. A wreck’s a wreck. It’s over.’

  She described the argument. Chris listened, feeling sympathy but feeling something else too. A strength was flowing back into her, strength she hadn’t felt for weeks. Steph needs me now. I’m not alone.

  ‘So it looks as though I’ll be joining NBT.’ Steph frowned at her glass as though it had cheated her. ‘Funny, liquor gets you drunk when you don’t want to be, and when you do—forget it.’

  ‘Do you want another?’

  ‘No. Full day tomorrow at Empire. Even if I am about to walk out on them.’ Steph slipped out of her dress and moved toward the bathroom. Her steps lurched, as though one leg had grown two inches longer than the other. There was a quality about her that shocked Chris. It wasn’t that Steph was drunk: anyone could drink. But she was shattered and gutted, like a bombed-out city. Defeated.

  Chris couldn’t believe it. She tried to think of something reassuring, something Steph would say if the roles were reversed. ‘It’ll work out, Steph. You’ll see.’

  Steph turned and squinted at her. ‘You sound just like me.’

  ‘I don’t care who I sound like,’ Chris said firmly. ‘It’s going to work out because you’re going to make it work out.’

  Steph stared a moment, then lurched to Chris and hugged her. ‘Bullshit but thanks.’

  ‘And, Steph—it’ll be like the old days, when we were in school. We’ll be working together again.’

  The old days, Steph thought, when we knew how to believe, when nutcrackers were princes and swans were really enchanted princesses.... How comfortable those old days seemed.

  Steph smiled. ‘Remember the promise we made to each other? That silly promise?’

  Chris nodded. ‘Now it’s come true.’

  twenty-five

  NBT was the worst mistake of Steph’s life.

  On her second day, as she came into the dressing room, she couldn’t help overhearing the conversation.

  "... complete operator. Steer clear.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘What didn’t she do! She had Linda axed, she got Ilonka axed—’

  ‘Ilonka!’

  ‘
Can you believe? And she walked all over Danny and dropped him. Linda says don’t go near her—ne touchez pas—poison.’

  The girls saw her and suddenly it was so quiet Steph could hear Kleenex blotting cold cream. No one looked at her directly but eyes followed her in the mirror. It was a long aisle with dressing tables on both sides and she had to walk all the way to the end.

  The hostility was so tangible she almost tasted it. Not just that day but every day. No one in the company talked to her. Except Chris, who always smiled when they met in the corridors or in class and asked how she was doing.

  ‘I thought you were exaggerating,’ Steph said, ‘but, God, they’re cliquish.’

  There was something sad in Chris’s nod.

  ‘I don’t see how you kept your sanity,’ Steph said. ‘It’s like persecution. They’re really shits—every damned one of them.’

  ‘Two or three aren’t.’

  ‘I sure haven’t met them. This morning I was practising a leap into arabesque. A half dozen girls were watching and they saw I needed help. But not one of them told me what I was doing wrong.’

  Chris shrugged. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  When Chris was busy Steph’s only company at lunch was a book or magazine and the silent stares of strangers. At NBT she felt something she had never before experienced.

  She felt hated.

  She lived in terror of company class. Discipline hung in the air like tear gas. There was no late arriving, no early leave-taking; no hanging on to the piano instead of the barre; no chatting, no sitting-this-one-out; worst of all, no smiling. Every minute was work and sweat and ouch.

  There were certain mannerisms to the style of any company and Chris drilled Steph in NBT’s.

  ‘Space your fingers evenly,’ Chris corrected.

  ‘I thought I did.’

  Chris smiled and shook her head. ‘At NBT even means all the time—whether you’re taking a fish dive or leaping into the wings.’

  Watching herself in the mirror of the deserted studio, Steph did a pirouette with arms in low second. It didn’t make sense, but somehow the spaced fingers completed the line of the upper body and the entire movement seemed just a touch more graceful.

  ‘And when you come down from your relevé, do it with a tiny hop.’ Chris demonstrated.

  ‘Why?’ Steph said.

  ‘You’ll look lighter.’

  Steph tried it, and to her surprise she looked as though there were twenty pounds less of her.

  ‘And when you jump, always begin on the upbeat.’

  Steph jumped, beginning on the accented ‘and' that dancers were trained to hear in their heads before the first beat of the measure. The result was a surge of movement, quick and clean as the flick of a scalpel.

  ‘My God,’ Steph said, ‘how many other tricks do they teach you?’

  Other NBT mannerisms were harder to pick up. For one thing, the speed of the company was frightening, and she found herself writhing in the coils of impossible fast tempos. Dance masters invariably singled her out.

  ‘You there—a bit more on top of the beat, couldja?’ or ‘You in baby blue—don’t drag so hard.’

  The tones of voice ranged from kindly bitchery to bitchy kindness, but the undertone was always there, the hint that she didn’t really belong.

  And, in a way, she didn’t.

  The virtuosity of NBT’s dancers was of a level demanded only of principals at Empire. The entire company, from corps on up, could do double turns in the air, effortlessly. They could all do double, even triple fouettés.

  All of them except Steph. Her body was so unaccustomed to the demands put on it that her life began to feel like one uninterrupted wince. Bunions erupted on her feet where there had never even been blisters before. She spent a fortune on sterilized lamb’s wool, packing her toe shoes against disaster.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Chris said. ‘It took me a while too.’

  Steph got used to it—the way a sick body gets used to inoperable cancer. She ceased being surprised at the pain.

  Until the day that Marius Volmar gave company class.

  Freddy Branson, an aging principal who had been with NBT twenty years, had taken the dancers through most of the barre work when the door opened and Marius Volmar strode into the room. He stood watching a moment, hands on hips, and allowed the dancers to finish their combination. Then, with a sharp nod, he indicated that he was taking over.

  He stared down the barres. His gaze took in Steph for one hollow moment, then moved on.

  ‘You’ve learned how to take class,’ he said, ‘now you’ll learn how to dance.’

  He wasn’t looking at her, but Steph felt her face flush. She knew the remark had to be aimed at her. A flutter of glances said that the others knew it too.

  Volmar barked out the remainder of the barre. ‘Go to the centre, adagio, please. You all look like machines dancing.’

  Steph flushed again, knowing she was his target. His eyes followed her through the adagio and pirouette combinations. During the petit allegro she kept her movements fluid and lyrical, maintained her turn-out. Volmar snapped his fingers to the beat. The noise was staccato, insulting, like something aimed at a waiter.

  ‘Up to tempo, please.’

  Behind her, Ellis whispered. ‘This is the petit allegro, honey, not the adagio. If you can’t move your ass, at least get out of my way.’

  By the time they reached the fouettés, she was dizzy from trying to pull herself up to the beat.

  ‘Stop!’

  The dancers froze. The pianist’s hands recoiled in mid-phrase from the keyboard. The entire class was silent now, all heads turned to Volmar. His eyes raked the class and came to a stop at Steph. The skin of her arms and face began to burn.

  Volmar clapped his hands, spanking out the beat. ‘Single, single, single, double. Single, single, single, double. We’ll do it till we get it.’

  They did it over and over. It was a hellish combination. The other dancers were perfect, but Steph kept flubbing her double. Each time she flubbed, Volmar had the entire class start again.

  At the end of eighteen minutes the dancers were exhausted, hanging off the barres. Volmar gave a wave, silencing the music. He lit a cigarette, stared at the dancers. His eyes were a paralyzing mixture of contempt and disgust.

  ‘Grande révérence.’

  The dancers bowed. He turned his back, walked swiftly from the room, and slammed the door.

  Silence dissolved into muttering. Dancers threw Steph glances. Their eyes said, What are you doing here anyway? Why don’t you go work in the corner? She fumbled with her bag, wishing she were tiny, invisible, dead. Never in her life had she felt such humiliation.

  Until Volmar’s next class.

  He peered in her direction and she sensed a shaft of malice sliding through his smile, clear as sunlight through a stained glass window.

  ‘Miss Lang—one moment, please.’

  That was all. She waited. He turned his back. He whispered with the ballet master. He beat time for the accompanist, indicating the tempo of a passage. He joked with several of the principals.

  Steph stood shivering at the barre, needing to get out of her damp clothes. In chattering twos and threes, the other dancers left. Some of them glanced at her, but most were above showing any sort of curiosity. Chris saw the look on her face and stopped to throw out a hurried whisper of encouragement.

  ‘He’s not a monster—he only acts like one.’

  ‘I feel more than an act brewing. Chris, I’m still such a schlep in class!’

  ‘He’s probably going to whisk you upstairs and give you a solo.’

  Chris smiled and waved and then Steph and Volmar were alone in the domed emptiness of the studio. He had propped a score open on the top of the upright piano and was bent over it, tongue poking mountains of dissatisfaction in his cheek.

  Steph pulled a wad of paper towels from her tote bag and sopped the moisture off her neck and arms, reached under her blo
use to pat the goose flesh dry. Hopeless. She put on her wristwatch, wondered if he’d forgotten she was there, finally worked up the courage to clear her throat.

  ‘Mr Volmar—’

  He raised a hand, silencing her. ‘In a moment.’

  And kept her waiting three minutes more.

  Abruptly, he closed the score, tucked it under his arm, and with a glance at her went to the door. She stood shivering in speechless amazement.

  ‘Come along.’ He was holding the door, frowning as though she was a stupid puppy. ‘We haven’t all day.’

  She followed him to the elevator, through the third-storey corridors. He made no allowance for her toe shoes; she had to run to keep up. He unlocked the door of his office, gestured her in.

  ‘Make yourself comfortable. But don’t sit in the leather chair—you’re sweaty.’

  All the chairs in the office were leather. Except one. It was wooden, slatted and uncomfortable, something out of a high school auditorium. It did not belong in a room of glass and chrome and leather and signed Chagall lithographs. She speculated that he kept it there especially for occasions like this.

  She sat, winced as the slats pinched, shifted. And waited.

  With maddening slowness Volmar prowled the bookshelves, exploring till he found a suitable hole to slide the score into. Steph’s muscles began to cramp. She shifted. Volmar went through an unhurried ritual of cleaning his pipe, stuffing it with tobacco from a leather pouch, lighting it.

  ‘Mr Volmar—if you’re not in any rush—maybe I could come back? I really need a shower.’

  His eyes fixed her over the match flickering at the rim of the pipe bowl. ‘I am not interested in your hygienic problems.’

  Something in him goaded her. ‘Mr Volmar, I have to be interested in them.’

  He glanced up as though she had suddenly made him curious. ‘I should like to see how you move.’

  ‘You’ve seen how I move.’

  ‘That was not movement. That was class. I am contemplating a minor ballet—very minor. And within this very minor ballet I am contemplating a very minor role for a female of your physique.’