Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

At dinner that night Volmar asked Dorcas, ‘Have you hired a press agent for Sasha?’

  She mumbled through a mouthful of the restaurant’s pâté and he waited for her to wash the swallow down with wine.

  ‘Two. They’re brilliant youngsters with the most incredible contacts. Can you believe they’re getting us a spread in Sports Illustrated?’

  Volmar turned on the banquette to face her directly. ‘It’s cheap.’

  ‘And we’re broke and it’s selling tickets.’

  ‘Those innuendos about his sex life aren’t even innuendos.’

  She shrugged and the Barbados tan of her shoulder slipped a half inch further into view. ‘Sex sells.’

  He studied her. ‘You don’t care?’

  She arched her head back and laughed softly. ‘My poor dear Marius—it’s publicity, just publicity. Would you like a piece of my pâté? They’ve made it with Calvados, it’s sublime.’

  In the dressing room after performance Chris heard two of the girls gossiping about Sasha Bunin and some jet set party.

  ‘How the hell does he have any strength for class? He couldn’t have gotten to bed before seven in the morning.’

  ‘Women’s Wear Daily says nine in the morning.’

  ‘It’s not fair—he even photographs well. Do they say who he went home with?’

  ‘Some millionaire from Texas. She’s a model and very in.’

  Chris was dressed and ready to go home but she sat back down at her mirror and neatened her drawer, choosing powder puffs to be thrown out and powder puffs to keep, shoe ribbons that might make it through one more class and ribbons that definitely wouldn’t.

  ‘Is that her? Jesus, he likes them skinny.’

  ‘Novelty. There aren’t any skinny rich girls in Russia.’

  ‘It’s lucky Dorcas doesn’t subscribe to this paper.’

  ‘How do you know she doesn’t?’

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  Chris heard paper crumple and hit the wastebasket, and after the girls had gone she went and retrieved the clipping. She smoothed it out on her dressing table, weighting the corners down with a cold cream jar and bottles of bee pollen and vitamins. She read the article three times and each time she felt more hollow inside. She recognized the names of pop singers and socialites; it sounded like a lot of drugs and money and disco and she wondered what an artist like Sasha saw in people like that.

  She was staring at the photograph of the millionaire Texas model, thinking the blonde hair couldn’t be natural, when something furry brushed her leg and made her jump. She looked under the dressing table. A huge grey poodle was chewing one of her dropped powder puffs.

  ‘Hey, whose dog are you? Don’t you know you’re not allowed in the theatre?’ She petted the animal and pried the powder puff out of its mouth. One of the good puffs, thoroughly ruined. Damn. ‘Come on, pooch. They’re turning out the lights.’

  She was buttoning her raincoat when a voice called, ‘Merde! Where is my sweetheart! Here, Merde! and Sasha Bunin came bounding into the dressing room. He stopped short at the sight of Chris.

  ‘Forgive—I thought girls all gone home.’ His eyes became shiny as chocolate drops. The poodle nuzzled his leg and dropped easily into a chair. ‘Is all right I sit? I have been chasing Merde all over theatre, no breath left.’

  Chris nodded. She noticed how strong and straight his neck was, almost feminine in its smoothness and length. Sasha gazed at her, smiling. She lowered her eyelids, unaccountably embarrassed.

  ‘You are here late, last one, yes?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘You dance Alborado tonight?’

  She nodded again, intriguing him because she was still giving no clear hint as to whether she was an opportunity or a waste of his time. He snapped his fingers suddenly.

  ‘Second gypsy, yes? I knew I recognize you. Very nice elevation. Very nice balance. Very, very nice.’

  A blush began to flicker in her face. He doesn’t remember me, she thought. We held hands over the Atlantic and he doesn’t remember.

  Her hand went to the dressing table and before she placed her tote bag over the clipping he saw his photograph. A pleasant certainty came over him. He was not wasting his time.

  ‘Do you like dogs?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve never had one.’ A doctor had told her she was allergic. She wondered why she wasn’t sneezing now.

  ‘This is regulation show poodle. My very best friend in all America. I tell him all my secrets. What is your name?’

  ‘Christine Avery.’

  ‘Of course, Christine Avery, second gypsy in Alborado, how stupid I am. Christine, this is Merde. Merde, say hello to Christine, she is very good dancer.’

  The poodle nuzzled Chris’s skirt and she reached down to pet its neck. Her hand touched something through the thick grey curls. Sasha Bunin’s fingers. The two of them stayed that way, the touch of their hands hidden in a poodle’s fur. The air around them smelled of soap and rosin and powder and sweat. Chris felt outside the moment, aware but not taking part.

  Sasha stroked her fingers and the dog, fingers and dog, until he felt her relax and become trusting and calm beneath his hand. ‘Where you go now?’ he asked.

  ‘Home.’

  ‘Walking?’

  She nodded.

  He studied the bridge of freckles across the nose, the sweep of ash-gold hair, the shyly bulging underlip. It came to him that she did not know she was beautiful. He smiled.

  ‘Merde and I will walk with you. Merde needs to walk.’

  For a moment Chris looked away from the brown eyes that seemed to be memorizing her. Sasha watched with interest. Her uncertainty pleased him. She was the first uncertain American girl he had met. Finally her shoulders dropped as if there was very little strength left in them.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’d like to walk.’

  She felt safe walking with him. He was lean and strong, with narrow hips and broad shoulders, and he talked and laughed and got her to talk. She didn’t feel lost or lonesome as she usually did walking home alone. Merde kept tugging on the leash, dragging them across streets in search of the perfect hydrant or tree, and finally settling for the white-wall tyre of a Rolls-Royce.

  ‘Merde has good taste, yes?’ Sasha said.

  She laughed. ‘The best.’

  She couldn’t believe she was walking on West Seventieth Street at eleven thirty-six at night with the newest and maybe the greatest star of international ballet. Later, lying in bed, remembering, she would have time to believe it. For now she would just enjoy it. She felt alive and happy, but odd, as though she were on the moon, not earth. A different gravity pulled at her. She was lighter.

  They reached her building.

  ‘Will you invite me and Merde up?’

  Without even thinking, she shook her head. ‘I don’t live alone.’

  He seemed surprised and a little hurt. ‘Boy friend?’

  ‘I room with a girl friend. She’s with the company.’

  Sasha nodded. ‘I understand. Is okay.’ He put two fingers to his mouth and whistled a Checker cab to a brake-grinding stop. He held the door and Merde jumped in and he kept holding the door and she realized he was holding it for her.

  ‘We go to my place,’ he said.

  Something warm and whispering gusted through her and her knees felt liquid. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She didn’t know why not. Maybe there was no why not and that was what frightened her. ‘I just—can’t.’

  His eyes showed concern. ‘Wrong time for you?’

  She nodded. ‘Wrong time.’

  ‘You very nice girl, Christine. Not like other girls.’

  She stood silent before him, breathing rapidly. His hand brushed her hair and then gently, reassuringly, lifted her face. The movement was grave and compassionate. An arm went protectively around her waist and another around her shoulder and he pressed her to him.

  I will never forget this moment, she thought. Thi
s moment is complete, nothing can be added to it.

  And then he kissed her and she felt her mouth dissolve under the kiss.

  ‘You not forget me, Christine?’

  ‘No, I won’t forget.’

  ‘Next week we make date, my place?’

  ‘Yes.’ She didn’t dare but she still said yes.

  Her hand clung to him and to the moment, and then he was in the taxi and the taxi was moving away. He turned and waved through the rear-view window and she saw the furry ball of Merde’s head beside him.

  She rode up the elevator in a glow of excitement. Somebody cares, she thought. Sasha Bunin—cares.

  thirty-four

  There was a very short period in Chris’s life when she awoke each morning to joy. He’ll talk to me today, she thought. But in class Sasha nodded only one day. Another day he didn’t see her and another he was talking to Lucinda Dalloway.

  He’ll phone, she thought, and she hired an answering service just to be sure of not missing the call.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Steph said. ‘No one phones us except wrong numbers.’

  But he didn’t phone and Chris realized he didn’t know her number. He knows the address, she thought, he’ll write. But there was no letter.

  She began to feel betrayed and helpless, trapped in her own longing like a bird in an oil spill. The need to see him suffocated her. She had never known anything so strong in her life. She took to hanging around the theatre after his performance. She lingered in the corridor near the men’s dressing room. She heard voices laughing and Merde barking but she always panicked before Sasha came out and she ran and hid.

  She saw him with women: Dorcas Amidon and Hedi Luftig, who danced with ABT, and Sondra Kessler, who reviewed for one of the news weeklies. He’s busy, she thought. He never knows till the last moment when he’ll be free. He’ll put a note in my box.

  She took to checking the A box four and five times a day. But the only note for Christine Avery came from Marius Volmar, and when she went to his office he asked if she knew the Danish composer Jakob Gade.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Years ago he did a very nice little tango. Light, but no lighter than Lehar. I’m thinking of a tango rhapsody. I’m going to make the part on you.’

  Which meant she was not even covering roles at Sasha’s rehearsals. She was cooped up learning Volmar’s new steps. The loneliness and lostness in her screamed. She wrote Sasha a note—Please phone!—underlining the words three times. She slipped it into the B box and then she thought of the company gossips and the humiliation if someone else should open it, and she went back and ripped it up and stood trembling, wanting to scream and not able to.

  ‘Hey, what’s the matter?’ Steph stood staring. ‘You look like you need to hiccup and can’t get it out.’

  Chris did not dare tell the truth. She knew Steph would laugh at her. She grabbed at the nearest excuse. ‘Volmar’s making a new ballet on me and I’m just nervous, that’s all.’

  She described the enchaînements and the leaps and the feet pointed in instead of out. She made it all sound harder than it was so that Steph wouldn’t suspect how weak and stupid and in love she was.

  Steph listened and looked at this girl with skin the colour of bone. She’s not a conniver and she doesn’t sleep around, Steph thought, and she’s climbing up through this company faster than a surfacing shark. Steph felt a terrible weight of envy. Perhaps no matter how hard she worked Chris would always be ahead of her. Perhaps Chris had some essential talent that she did not.

  She watched Chris leave for rehearsal and she moved restlessly to the pay phone. Her dime hesitated at the slot. I can’t live like this, she thought. I can’t be jealous of my best friend.

  She had to tell someone or she would explode.

  She dialled her mother at work. There was a background of shouts and Anna Lang was shouting in the foreground.

  ‘Mom, can I talk to you?’

  ‘Make it fast—it’s a madhouse here today.’

  ‘No, I have to sit down and talk to you. Now. Please.’

  ‘Honey, you sound like a mess. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just have to talk to you.’

  ‘Christ, I have an exercise class in five minutes. Tell you what, I can take a fifteen-minute break at four. I’ll meet you in the coffee shop, four on the dot.’

  Anna listened to her daughter, nodding and sympathetic. Her face revealed nothing and she said nothing.

  But her mind was working. She sifted the evidence of the last two years. She sorted fragments and where she found matching edges she assembled them. She could begin to make out bits of a pattern, and the pattern was Marius Volmar.

  She felt an anger unlike any other in her life. It did not blind her or sicken her. It gave her sight and strength. She saw she had been patient far too long. She saw with an absolute certainty that she must strike in her little girl’s defence, strike now, immediately.

  ‘Calm down, you’re all worked up over nothing.’ She placed a reassuring hand over Steph’s. ‘Chris is Chris and you’re you and you’re both talented. Sooner or later it was bound to happen. Just go home and soak in a hot bath. And don’t worry. When you’re doing Giselles and Juliettes and Odile-Odettes she’ll still be dancing fandangos.’

  Anna told the people at Arden’s she had to leave for the afternoon. She didn’t even wait for their no. She strode out onto Fifth Avenue and hailed a cab, to hell with the three bucks, this was important, this was her little girl’s career.

  She was a familiar face, and the guard at the stage entrance nodded her past. The doors on the third floor of the State Theater had been outfitted with slots so that black and white plastic nameplates could be slipped in and out. The nameplate reading Marius Volmar, Director had been fastened with bolts.

  The door was partway open. Volmar sat at his desk, gloomy and rocklike, chin propped on one hand and the other holding a grease pencil to mark an orchestra score. He bobbed time to some rhythm inside his head.

  Anna stared a moment at the neatly bald head, the muscular neck. She inhaled sharply, gathering strength, then cleared her throat.

  He did not hear.

  She rapped on the door.

  He looked up. For an uncomfortably long moment his eyes seemed to pull themselves back from a dream into an irritating reality. He nodded and got to his feet. ‘Yes, Anna—can I help you?’

  ‘You can give me three minutes.’

  His eyes were politely curious. ‘You’re angry?’

  ‘I’m angry.’

  ‘Why don’t you close the door? It’s better to be angry in private.’

  She closed the door. He reached into a bookcase and placed a wine bottle and two glasses on the desk. The bottle had been uncorked and was already half empty.

  ‘Now then.’ He blew dust off the stem of one of the glasses. ‘Would you like a drink?’ The bottle gave a telltale xylophone rattle against the rim of the glass. He was nervous. Anna allowed herself a tiny smiling satisfaction.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘One of the ballerinas brought me a case from France. I assure you, it’s not bad.’

  She shook her head. ‘I never touch liquor.’

  ‘This is wine, Anna. Not liquor.’

  ‘I still don’t touch it. Alcohol destroys muscle. And a lot else too.’ Anna sat down. Her hands were like restless children and she had to concentrate to keep them from squirming in her lap.

  ‘And how much muscle do you need for an angry little chat?’

  ‘I’ll keep my head straight, thanks. But don’t let me stop you. Go ahead and drink.’

  ‘Dear Anna—do you deny yourself all the pleasures of life? Or just the civilized ones?’ He lifted the glass and drained it. His eyes watched her. She sensed a mockery in them that he did not bother to disguise and that she wasn’t going to waste time trying to understand.

  ‘I want to talk about Steph,’ she said.

  ‘Naturally.’
<
br />   ‘Why do you hate her?’

  An instant’s silence slid by and he said, ‘Anna, you have no sense of other people. To you, that little girl is the world. To me, she’s nothing. She’s hardly developed enough to notice, let alone hate.’

  Anna sucked in her breath. The nerve of the man. ‘I happen to know for a fact that you hate her. And I want to know why.’

  ‘Anna, you’re quite, quite mistaken.’

  ‘I think it’s because of me. I think you hate her because I stood up to you and no one stands up to Marius Volmar. If Volmar tells sixty-two girls to pirouette à la seconde, they pirouette à la seconde. If Volmar tells them to bang their heads into a wall, they bang their heads into a wall.’ Anna’s hands began shaking uncontrollably, like a drunk’s. Damn. ‘You run an army, not a ballet company, and when I was one of your soldiers I rebelled and it’s been stinging you ever since.’

  ‘I don’t keep grudges,’ he said. ‘Life is too short.’

  ‘We all keep grudges.’

  ‘I’ve had a good deal more on my mind these last twenty years than the departure of a soloist.’

  ‘Principal,’ Anna corrected.

  Volmar shrugged.

  ‘And I know what you hate most of all,’ she said. ‘You hate what’s inside Steph.’

  Volmar’s eyebrows arched up.

  ‘Talent,’ Anna said. ‘You’ve never had it. Not in yourself, not in your dancers. All you can do is boss the cowards who don’t trust themselves. If one of your dancers has real talent you have to warp them or hide them or wreck them. If you ever let a real dancer on that stage, the whole world would see that NBT is a bunch of Volmar-programmed zombies. Faster than anyone else, more accurate than anyone else, and who cares?’

  ‘You’re right.’ His voice narrowed and his eyes were cold. ‘She has no speed, no accuracy.’

  A sense of raging justice made Anna strong and certain. She felt she was looking down at Volmar from a great, safe height, reading him as easily as an X-ray. ‘Then how come she’s in your company? How come you bid for her and when I turned you down flat you came crawling back with a bigger bid? You want her, Mister Volmar. She’s good. One day she’ll be great. You know it and you want in on it!’