Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

  His eyes met hers. There was such gentleness in them that she felt he had caressed her and she had to hold her breath.

  ‘What kind of nightmares do you have?’ she asked.

  ‘Memories—Russia—my family.’

  ‘Were you unhappy?’

  ‘Aren’t families always unhappy?’

  ‘I don’t know. I had some happy moments with mine.’

  ‘My family never had happy moment. Not one.’ His eyes were not solid brown. There were tiny gold-coloured flecks in them that seemed to turn like pinwheels.

  She could not look at his eyes too long without feeling dizzy.

  ‘My father put my mother in house for crazy people. She was not crazy. But in Soviet they know how to make you crazy. My father tells doctors, ‘Make Natasha crazy.’ They give her drugs. Soon she cannot move. She cannot talk. She cannot choose when to piss, when not.’

  Chris shuddered. ‘Why did your father do that?’

  ‘He was in love with other woman.’

  ‘Oh, Sasha, I’m so sorry.’

  He put away the uneaten food. He left the wine out.

  He told how the doctors confiscated the presents he brought his mother; how they gave her electric shock, cut off her hair, destroyed her memory, turned her into an old woman. By the time the doctors released her his father had divorced and remarried and the government gave her one room to live in.

  ‘Seven stairways to reach this one little room.’

  He told how his mother pulled a chair to the one window in the one little room and jumped out. And then he sat silently staring into his wine.

  His story had a mixture of effects on Chris and the mixture disturbed her. She was sad but at the same time excited that Sasha Bunin had confided in her. She did not like to admit that she could feel sadness and excitement at the same time. She tried to concentrate on being sad.

  ‘Oh, Sasha.’

  She shook her head. She could not imagine a life where such things happened. She could not imagine people who survived such lives.

  He was looking beyond her, into the mirror. He turned his head and smiled at her. There was such bravery and loneliness in the smile, and such boyishness that she could not bear it. She wished she had the courage to reach a hand and comfort him.

  ‘You are first person I ever tell this to.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you told me.’

  ‘I am glad you let me tell.’

  ‘I’d let you tell me—anything.’

  He looked at her and she began to blush.

  ‘Ten minutes ago I was alone,’ he said. ‘And now I have friend, yes?’ He touched a hand to her hair. ‘Your hair is very soft. Like feathers on baby chicken. Have you ever held baby chicken?’

  ‘No....’

  He closed his eyes and brushed his cheek against her hair. ‘I think I am holding baby chicken now.’

  He laid a hand on her shoulder and drew her close. His lips moved gently along her throat and under her chin and up to her mouth. They kissed. And then they were quiet. She remained pressed against him, breathing fast.

  ‘You are very kind to listen to Sasha.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not kind at all.’

  ‘Sometimes Sasha is very foolish.’

  ‘You’re not foolish.’

  ‘Is foolish to say I love you?’

  ‘No. It’s not foolish. Not if it’s true.’

  He smiled. His features were odd and uneven and one by one almost ugly, but his face was the most beautiful she had ever seen. Or is any face beautiful when it’s this close and smiling? she wondered.

  He lay back on the mattress and eased her down beside him. She let her head rest pillowed against his shoulder. She tried to master the rise and fall of her bosom, the unwanted blush that covered every inch of her body.

  ‘Be peaceful,’ Sasha whispered.

  ‘I want to.’

  ‘Are you afraid of Sasha?’

  The poodle had come back to the foot of the bed and stood gazing at them. She took refuge in embarrassment.

  ‘The dog,’ she said.

  ‘Merde bothers you?’

  He got up and snapped his fingers. Merde followed him into the bathroom. He said something in Russian. When he came back he had taken off his shirt. She could hear the dog pawing and whimpering at the closed door.

  Sasha stood looking at her and for a moment she felt bewildered as a child. She heard the snap of his belt buckle and she looked away, snared in uncertainty. She did not know if she was supposed to take off her clothes or if he was supposed to. She did not know how these things were done.

  She undid a button of her blouse.

  ‘You are virgin?’ he asked.

  She felt a paralyzing rush of shame. She could only nod mutely. Her eyes went to his face, watching for some movement, some sign. Nothing in his expression changed, but she sensed something secret behind the smile.

  ‘Do you mind?’ she said.

  ‘Do you?’

  She lowered her eyes. ‘Not if you love me.’

  He came to her and nuzzled his face in her hair. Her hand closed on his neck. The strength and smoothness of it reassured her. ‘You will tell me when you are ready,’ he said. ‘I will be very slow. Nothing to worry.’

  She nodded, wanting to believe him. For a moment she was terrified and then he kissed her, deeply this time, and the terror drifted away. She shut her eyes and let her head rest against him. He undressed her, bending her this way and that as easily as the stem of a flower.

  Then he held her a long caressing moment. His arms were strong but she could feel them being gentle for her. He stroked her and kissed her and all the time her eyes were shut. His whisper was warm and soft in her ear.

  ‘Now?’

  He didn’t wait for her to answer. In one smooth move he was on top of her, taking her. There was an instant of stabbing pain that blotted out everything. She struggled not to struggle. She bunched her fist into her mouth and closed her teeth on it to keep from crying out.

  And then something astonishing happened.

  There was no pain, no fear.

  I’ve done it, she thought: I’ve leapt the abyss!

  She felt a warmth and closeness she had never known with another being. She clung to him, weeping and grateful. The aloneness was gone.

  Now there was Sasha.

  When she opened her eyes and saw that he was really there, she was amazed and happy and she said his name over and over.

  He put a finger to her lips, pulled away from her.

  They lay side by side. Not talking. Not touching. After a moment he got up and opened the bathroom door. She watched the naked man and the panting dog.

  She wondered, What will Steph say when I tell her?

  And then, like a warning signal, her mind flashed memories of all the gossip and headlines, Sasha and this girl, Sasha and that girl.

  This will be different, she decided. I’m not going to tell Steph. I’m not going to tell anyone.

  This is mine.

  And I’m going to make it last.

  ‘Everything’s different now,’ she said dreamily.

  ‘Different?’ He slipped into his blue jeans. He did not wear underpants.

  ‘Now you’re part of everything.’

  He smiled vaguely.

  She couldn’t quite understand the smile. She didn’t know men but she thought she knew smiles. Perhaps this was a Russian smile. Perhaps it was his way of telling her how much he loved her.

  ‘Now get dressed,’ he said. ‘We take Merde for walk.’

  thirty-six

  They never slept together again. He never phoned or spoke to her or even looked at her. There was no explanation, no reason. Chris was crushed.

  She retreated into a private cave of shock and despair. For days she tried to feel nothing, to shut out everything. But she couldn’t shut out the company; the whispers and rumours and eagerness pressed in on her. She couldn’t help hearing.

&
nbsp; Every day fresh rumours of Sasha’s escapades ran through the theatre. They were communicated by quick meaningful glances in class and whispers in the wings and hoots in the corps shower.

  ‘He’s been seeing Ernestine Paley.’

  ‘Ernestine Paley—who’s that?

  ‘Rich.’

  ‘But he has plenty of rich girls.’

  ‘And he wants more.’

  ‘No kidding,’ another voice cut in sarcastically.

  Dance gossip can be vicious; and blind. Nobody noticed Chris, turning her head away. Or did they? Rumours kept jabbing at her, almost as if they were aimed.

  ‘So how long can he keep it up?’

  ‘Until he has a heart attack. And he will.’

  ‘Come on, he’s just a kid.’

  ‘Kid? He’s going on twenty-six. Joanna saw his passport.’

  Like seagulls scanning a beach for dead fish, dancers searched newspapers and magazines for any Sasha titbit that might have floated in on the tide of yesterday’s gossip. Articles were clipped from Women’s Wear Daily and After Dark and Playboy, from Rex Reed and Earl Wilson and the Sunday Times second section. They were passed from hand to hand at lunch and coffee break until they grew translucent with mayonnaise thumbprints.

  Dancers read out the headlines, and their voices were mincing and pinched.

  ‘“Sasha and Bianca, any fire to the smoke?”’

  ‘“Is crime to like girls?” quips Sasha Bunin, Soviet Russia’s latest annual gift to American ballet.’

  Why do they hate him, Chris wondered, and why can’t I hate him?

  One day a new note, raucous and triumphant, sounded in the rumours.

  ‘She’s dropped him!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The actress—Lolly Popp—she got her Academy Award nomination and she ditched him!’

  ‘Whoop-ee!’

  Something fierce and jubilant flared through the company. Sasha Bunin, who could entrechat huit and double cabriole, who could fill every seat in the house and screw every girl in the company and outside of it, Sasha the invincible had failed and failed on page one.

  He came to class late the next day. The dancers made room to let him through. They were silent and watchful now. They did not want to miss a single one of Sasha’s movements or expressions, a single word or gesture that might betray the inner hurt.

  Chris fought the force tugging her eyes but finally she turned and looked.

  He moved his leg in a slow, perfect rond de jambe à terre. She loved him. She loved the pale beauty of his face and the smooth column of his neck and the strength that controlled his long, straight legs. She loved to see his body move without strain. His eyes were dark tragic wounds and they did not see her and she loved them too.

  When she looked away she felt a despair, a finality such as she had never known. He will never love me, she realized. He will love only those girls who stride through gossip columns with the golden confidence of goddesses. And they will never love him.

  It ripped at her.

  After class the dancers leaned close together and whispered. They were bitchy and they were certain.

  ‘He doesn’t space his fingers.’

  ‘The footwork’s slowed down.’

  ‘He basted those shoes in rosin.’

  Everyone was pleased. Except Chris. The image of Sasha ate into her solitude, into her walking and her sleep. It spread like a blot. If she saw a boy and a girl holding hands in the street or on television, she felt something corrode inside her. She had to look away.

  She didn’t want to eat and she had no appetite for sleep. All she wanted was to cry. Alone, she gave in to tears that racked her throat sore. She took her temperature and it was a hundred point one. She must have forgotten to shake the thermometer down, because she was aware of Steph observing her.

  ‘Are you eating enough, Chris?’

  ‘Lots.’

  ‘Sleeping?’

  ‘All the time.’

  Steph knew Chris and she knew the symptoms when Chris was preparing a new role. She knew Chris’s sleeplessness and staring at walls. But this time there was more.

  Chris’s eyes were dark and unseeing, like windows shuttered against the cold, and silence lay over her like banked snow, and she sat in the rocking chair, not moving her body, the very life in her seeming to come and go like waves on a beach.

  Steph wanted to help but she knew better than to push. She knew she could do most just by being there, silent and supportive.

  The night of the premiere Steph sat with Chris and with a fresh Kotex napkin wiped the thickening fear from her face. Chris had lost weight even since the final costume fitting, and the floor was littered with muslin snippets of last-minute adjustments.

  Chris stared dazed ahead of her. ‘I forgot to invite my parents. Not that they would have come.’

  ‘Next time,’ Steph said, trying to sound light and cheerful, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for your parents to skip every one of your premieres in favour of some board meeting or Social Register bash. She brought Chris water to drink in a Dixie cup and Chris tried to refuse it.

  ‘I’ll bulge.’

  ‘Two swallows of water isn’t going to make you bulge! You’re wearing a skirt, not a body stocking.’

  A fine sheen of sweat had crept down from Chris’s scalp, not enough to blur her make-up but enough to make Steph wonder why she was dehydrating.

  ‘Come on,’ Steph prodded, ‘time’s a-wasting.’ She helped Chris into her toe shoes and practically had to pull her to her feet.

  ‘I’m dizzy,’ Chris said.

  ‘You’re scared. Every dancer is always scared, so stop making a production out of it.’

  Chris looked at Steph. The tone of voice had wounded her. Steph put an arm around her, partially for forgiveness but mostly to start her walking.

  Steph walked her to the backstage barre. Chris was wearing leg warmers and a robe over her costume and Steph held the head shawl that she would wear onstage.

  The orchestra was playing the final measures of Mother Goose. There was a rush of dancers’ and stagehands’ feet. The applause came loud and soft, like the volume on a TV turned up and down, as the curtain fell and rose and finally stayed down. Stage sets rumbled.

  ‘I shouldn’t have had that water,’ Chris said. ‘I have to pee.’

  ‘So pee.’

  Steph stood outside the stall. It sounded like a phony pee but it was one of Chris’s rituals and every dancer’s right. In the wing Steph helped Chris out of her leg warmers and robe. She draped the shawl around Chris’s head and under her left elbow.

  ‘Merde.’

  They hugged. Something’s wrong, Steph thought, she just warmed up and she’s ice cold.

  Chris waited silently for her entrance.

  Behind the Moorish arches, the cyclorama was lit the noon-white of an Iberian sky and it blinded her. The curtain rose hissing and the footlights came up and she could feel their heat.

  Across the stage’s blazing abyss, cool and shadowed in the wing, she saw her grandee, Wally Collins. He was wearing Spanish-dancer trousers and a high-cut black jacket with flamboyant gold embroidery. He smiled his huge white smile, telegraphing it to her.

  I loved him, she thought. And he hurt me. Does he know how much, does he care how much?

  The music cut in: a solo violin sob, punctuated by two commanding orchestral chords. A downward skitter of woodwinds, bird-delicate and panicky: her cue.

  She obeyed, went on pointe, skittered forward into the light and the applause. The violin sang, low and throaty and gypsy. Her feet did what they had memorized, a very, very slow turn on pointe that filled her skirt and caused her feet to wink in and out of her eyesight. Her hands made a partner now of her shawl. She came to a slow rotating stop, still on pointe, a balancing in attitude, a glance towards the conductor as gravity eased her down.

  And then it was tambourine and tango and Wally sliding like a Valentino. Chris did not bother wat
ching her own performance. Her body piloted for her, precisely and automatically. The stage filled with grandees and not one of them was Sasha. A dozen hands held and spun and tossed her and not one was his.

  And when the applause came it had nothing to do with her, it was an ocean hurling itself at a shore. She went back and faced it six times. She gave Wally a rose from her bouquet and he bowed to her and finally the stage manager let her go back to her dressing room.

  Steph was waiting. ‘Come on, Chris—smile.’

  ‘I’m smiling.’

  ‘That is not a smile.’ Steph shook her head. The dressing table and the chairs were banked with flowers. Applause was still coming over the loudspeaker.

  And Chris looked as though she wanted to break into tears.

  ‘Chris—they loved you.’

  ‘Nobody loves me. I danced horribly.’

  It was too much, too much of the same, and Steph cut in almost shouting: ‘What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell do you want?’

  Chris did not answer. She knew what she wanted and it had nothing to do with applause. She wanted Sasha to want her. She would give anything, she would give dance, she would give life, if only he would want her just once more.

  ‘You’ve had bows after every solo—three roles made on you—reviews—success—tonight you have your own dressing room—you’ve got everything a dancer dreams of!’

  Not everything, Chris thought.

  ‘If you don’t know how to be happy, can’t you at least be a little bit grateful?’

  Chris did not know why her best friend, her only friend, was screaming at her. But she knew enough to make herself a blank, to remain perfectly still. The room was silent and then Chris took off one silver-hoop earring and it clinked as she set it down.

  ‘I’ve worked every bit as hard as you, just as long as you,’ Steph shouted, ‘and I’ve got nothing!’

  ‘You have so much more than I do,’ Chris said softly. ‘You have courage. I don’t have courage or technique or control or feet. I’m a freak. But you’re a dancer. A real dancer. And people love you.’

  ‘I can’t believe this. Tonight of all nights, when they’re tearing down the house shouting for you, you’re sitting there counting mistakes and weeping tears for little Christine Avery.’