Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

‘Do you have time for supper,’ Volmar suggested, ‘or a drink?’

  Harry Burns looked shocked. And eager. The director of NBT did not, as a rule, invite dressers to dine with him. Harry glanced at the embarrassments in his arms. ‘Sure—just let me hang these up. It’ll only take a sec.’

  Harry Burns sipped at his fourth Black Russian. His blood was bubbling with excitement. In the last ten minutes he had counted over two dozen dancers hurrying along the Broadway pavement, and every one of them had instinctively glanced at the Theatre Pub window and seen Marius Volmar and Harry Burns in tête-à-tête at the front table.

  The word would spread like a brush fire tonight. Harry Burns is a somebody, Marius Volmar consults with him. The new kid, the scholarship boy NBT had just taken into the corps, would be sorry he’d been so snotty.

  Volmar nursed a coffee and picked at a half cantaloupe. He nodded through Harry’s chronicles of fornication and betrayal, slipped discs and tendonitis. He only half listened to the tale of Marsha Hamlin’s slipped fouetté, marvelled that Harry could talk through mouthfuls of liquor.

  ‘The regular clarinetist had a bar mitzvah in Scarsdale, so he sent in his cousin, who’d never even been to rehearsal. Well, you know that part in Baiser, her adagio with harp and clarinet?’

  Volmar nodded. He knew Baiser de la Fée very well. Dancers hated it because it was difficult without being showy. He loved it because it was a perfect mesh of music, movement, and story. Dorcas had dropped it from the season.

  ‘Get this. It’s scored for A clarinet, but the schmuck only has a B-flat mouthpiece. So he tries to transpose, but halfway through he loses his way. You wouldn’t believe the sounds he was making—strangled chicken. Marsha wasn’t counting—she was doing it by the music. Well, he left out her cue, she began the turn late, and bang! It’s incredible Pete didn’t lose his kneecap.’

  ‘Substitutes can be dangerous,’ Volmar said. ‘Tell me, Harry, how is the company reacting to the changes in our season?’

  Harry stirred uncomfortably. ‘It screws up wardrobe. Last week we almost had to send eight sylphides on stage in Firebird princess shimmies. The tutus were at the cleaners. You can’t reschedule like that—cleaners close at six.’

  ‘I’m not too happy with the changes myself. Bad for the company morale, wouldn’t you say?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘Morale’s okay. We’re selling out.’

  ‘But I sense resentment.’

  Harry’s chubby fingers toyed with the plastic mesh on the candle glass. ‘Maybe ... a little.’

  ‘It’s because of Sasha, isn’t it?’

  Tiny prickles of excitement were galloping across the skin of Harry Burns’s face and neck and arms.

  ‘I’m not asking you to be an informer, Harry.’

  ‘Course not.’ Harry nodded. Volmar’s informer. He liked the sound of that. Important. The boys in the corps would start showing a little respect.

  ‘Do the dancers feel Sasha’s getting too many solos?’

  ‘That doesn’t bother them.’ Harry said. ‘What do you do? He’s a Russian, people buy tickets to see Russians do barrel turns. Frankly I’ve seen Cubans do better barrel turns, but who’s going to argue with the box office? No, the solos aren’t the problem. The trouble is....’

  The voice trailed off in indecision, like a music box needing to be rewound. Volmar signalled for another Black Russian. ‘I don’t need to tell you, Harry, that anything you say goes no further than this table.’

  The Black Russian arrived. Harry took a long, fortifying swallow.

  ‘The problem is, Sasha is a sex machine. He just loves to screw. He’s screwing in broom closets, he’s screwing in his dressing room—’

  ‘He has a dressing room?’

  ‘Sure—Ray’s old room. He’s had it two, three weeks now.’

  ‘So Sasha is a great lover, is he?’

  ‘Great, I wouldn’t know. But determined. It’s like he’s keeping a score card. I swear, he’s laid half the girls in the corps and the other half he’s made dates with. He has this pattern. He comes on like gangbusters, champagne and roses and the whole seduction bit—and once he’s had the girl, boom, he drops her. Half those kids still don’t know what hit them. Not just the corps either. He’s had four soloists I know of, two principals—married principals—you want me to name names?’

  Volmar did not let his face even hint at the satisfaction he felt. He kept his expression sombre, concerned. Harry Burns named names, and by the time he had finished, Volmar had formulated his strategy.

  If chattering dressers and the entire company knew of Sasha’s amours, it could only be a matter of weeks before rumours reached Dorcas. Humiliated, publicly betrayed, she would have no choice but to turn on her protégé. Indian giver that she was, she’d strip him of every cashmere sweater, every door key, every solo that she’d lavished on him.

  All Volmar had to do was to train two dancers for the lead prince in Sleeping Beauty—Sasha and Wally. He would leave it open who was covering for whom. Dorcas would be satisfied, thinking Sasha had the lead; and after the rupture she’d have no objection to Wally’s taking it. Of course, to avoid suspicion, Volmar would have to do the same with the female principal: train two Auroras, leave the cover open.

  Stephanie Lang and ... who?

  An idea came to him. The perfect cover.

  ‘Thank you, Harry.’ Volmar slapped a twenty-dollar bill down on the table. ‘You’ve been a great help. We really must do this much more often.’

  forty

  Sasha Bunin baffled Steph. He could give a girl a bouquet one day and not a glance for two weeks afterward. In fact, not a glance for two weeks and three days.

  She counted.

  And then two weeks and four days after the bouquet, as she finished a solo in Patineurs, she almost smashed into him in the wings. He did not step aside and dancers were watching. She had a premonition he was going to do something show-offy to embarrass her.

  ‘Why you not say thank you for flowers?’

  ‘I never see you,’ she said. ‘You’re always busy.’ She felt her face redden.

  ‘You do not want to see me?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Then you see me Sunday—you show me New York?’

  She knew all the stories by heart: Sasha and this girl, Sasha and that girl, and instinct told her to say no. But he fixed her with all the brown innocence of his eyes and there was a pucker at the top of his ugly-beautiful nose. Instinct went out the window.

  ‘All right,’ she said, dashing back for her bow. ‘Sunday.’

  For the two days and four hours and thirty minutes till Sunday noon she kept wondering, Why the hell did I do that? She waited for him outside the Gulf and Western Building, and at five after twelve she was certain she’d been had. At seven after she saw him two blocks away, running. He saw her and waved.

  ‘You think Sasha forget you?’ He kissed her hello on the cheek.

  ‘In New York five minutes is normal,’ she said.

  ‘In Leningrad’—there was still that Russian y sound after his l—‘thirty minutes is lucky.’

  They laughed and he showed her the hip pocket of his blue jeans bulging with ten-dollar bills. ‘Today we take taxi. No walking, no subway. Today is holiday.’

  First he wanted museums: the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Modern Art. The crowds pressed them close together and now and then he put his arm around her. She let herself lean against him, comfortable and careful not to think it was anything special to be leaning against Sasha Bunin.

  His eyes were avid as a child’s, gobbling up the big bright Tchelichews and Légers and Picassos. ‘Never see this in Soviet. Need special pass.’

  Now and then, not minding it at all, she felt his eyes gobbling her up too. I’m foreign to him, she realized. And she felt brisk and alive and exotic.

  At the Whitney there was a storm of recognition: ‘Bunin ... defector!’ Heads turned and voices changed key and she was afraid for him
. But he was large in his hulking knit sweater and strong-jawed and despite the ivory skin and the colonies of freckles he had a trick of putting menace in his face when he wanted, and not one person who came up and said, ‘Excuse me, aren’t you—’ finished the question.

  When Sasha had had enough of museums he said, ‘And now you show me city.’

  ‘What do you want to see?’

  He wanted to see people: Chinese, blacks, Williamsburgh Jews, American Indians. Steph had to smile. They went to neighbourhoods: Yorkville, Chinatown, the Lower East Side.

  They strolled down a cross street. There was an iron-fenced garden with huge shade trees. It turned out to be a graveyard run to flowering weed.

  Across the street was a church with boarded windows that had once been stained glass and a double transverse Russian cross and strange carved lettering above the doors.

  Steph stopped. ‘What does it say?’

  Sasha stared at the lettering. His eyes narrowed. ‘Is Ukrainian, not Russian.’

  ‘Aren’t they the same?’

  He shook his head firmly. ‘Different. Ukrainians anarchists.’

  ‘Can you read any of it?’

  His face wrinkled and worked and he slouched his shoulders in a shrug. ‘God father, God son, God ghost. Is silly. Opium for people.’

  There was a pause and she stared at him. ‘Is that bad?’

  He must have caught the blank on her face where he had expected agreement because he gave his hair a thick toss off his forehead and showed her the clear merriment of his eyes. ‘Is not bad, but cocaine better.’

  He burst out laughing and she was glad it was loud laughter because he didn’t hear her not laughing. He took her arm and kept walking. That changed the subject and she was relieved.

  The cross street took them to Second Avenue. It was Sunday and sunny, easy and tolerant and who-cares, and a dozen civilizations flowed through one another. There were old couples strolling in clean old clothes and smartly dressed blacks and Latin boys whizzing on skate boards; there were last decade’s hippies, still beaded and stoned, and staggering winos rapping on windows of taxis stopped for the light; there were pavement fruit stands and illegal pushcart peddlars and Con Ed construction barriers that made mazes for traffic and strollers. The signs in English said Closed and For Sale but the signs in Spanish and Ukrainian were alive with exclamation points.

  They went into a Jewish restaurant. The tables were crowded and the old waiters looked persecuted. They ordered cheese blintzes. When the food came Sasha examined his blintz. He cut into it. Tasted it. Shook his fork.

  ‘Is Jewish?’

  ‘It’s Jewish.’

  ‘No, is Russian.’

  She saw he was honestly confused. She smiled. ‘Maybe it’s both. A lot of Jews came to America from Russia.’

  ‘Why they want to bring Russia with them? I come from Russia. I tell Russia to stay home.’

  ‘Maybe someday you’ll change your mind. Maybe someday you’ll miss Russia.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Not even your family?’

  ‘Why should I miss them? You know what my father did to my mother?’

  He leaned forward, head sinking almost to his folded arms. In a flash she knew he was going to tell her something dreadful.

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

  Steph had not foreseen this. She pressed her lips together, silent, determined to qualify as a kind listener.

  ‘Every month visitors’ day I take train to see my mother. Every month worse. They cut off her hair. They give her electricity. In one year she is old woman. I say, “Hello, Mama, remember me, Sasha?” She does not answer. To her I am no one. I bring her flowers. Books. Apples from the private market. Doctors take everything. Is bad for her, they say. But I know what is bad for her is those doctors.’

  Steph looked at the pain in his face and all she could think of to say was, ‘Did she ever get better?’

  ‘One day doctors say, “You are cured, go.” I take her home. Is not true home. My father has new wife, my mother cannot live there. The government give her one room. Seven stairways to reach this one room. I carry her two suitcases. “Mother, I help you unpack.” “No,” she says, “later.” She kisses me.’

  He touched a finger to his cheek.

  ‘I go to class. Petit allegro piano stops. “Sasha, come here,” they whisper me. “Terrible accident. Your mother fall out window. Your mother dead.”’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Window comes down to here.’

  He placed his hands at his heart, shaping a window ledge.

  ‘My mother pulls chair to window and she stands on chair and then she falls. Is not accident.’

  Steph was suddenly aware what a very unstable place the universe was. ‘Sasha, I’m sorry.’

  Sasha shrugged and blinked at a tear. ‘That night my father and his wife go to theatre. Best seats. Comedy. No, I do not miss Russia. I never will go back. You are first person I ever tell this to.’

  He moved her and he baffled her. She felt a terrible need in him. The sympathy in her surged higher, wanting to burst out. But something checked her.

  He was playing with his knife, doodling lines on the tablecloth.

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why am I the first?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said in a low voice, not lifting his head. ‘Because maybe I am stupid.’

  ‘You’re not stupid.’

  ‘Because I think maybe you understand. Maybe is stupid.’

  ‘It’s not stupid.’

  He raised his eyes and looked straight at her. ‘Could you want to be friend with someone like me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I feel sorry for you. Very sorry.’

  ‘Feeling sorry is not friend. I do not need feeling sorry. I need friend. World is no good alone. Is like blind and deaf. Nothing has taste. Nothing has feel. What can I do alone? Eat sleep wash. Watch television. I cannot work alone or talk alone. I cannot dance alone. I cannot love alone.’

  ‘You don’t need to be alone,’ Steph said gently. ‘Everyone likes you.’

  ‘Do you, Stephanie? Do you like me?’

  She hesitated. ‘I think I do now.’

  ‘You think but you do not know?’

  ‘I don’t know you, Sasha.’

  ‘You could know me. We could spend time together. I would like that.’

  Steph didn’t answer. He had shared his unhappiness with her. It was a secret and painful treasure. She was proud he trusted her and she was determined to protect his confidence. But she would not let him move her into something rash.

  They strolled and they chatted about other things. He was like silver polish stripping off her outer shell of electrons. She felt herself shining. But there was seriousness now too: he had laid a foundation beneath the smiles and jokes.

  They reached her building.

  ‘You live here too?’ he said.

  She was amazed how quickly the day had gone, like a feather blown by a breath. He kissed her good-bye. It was a quick kiss, masculine and unsentimental. He turned to go and she watched his odd mix of gawkiness and grace, ugliness and beauty.

  I’m luckier than he is, she thought: I have a past to keep me company. He has none. She felt a surge of responsibility of the have toward the have-not.

  ‘Sasha!’ she called.

  He stopped and turned.

  ‘We could go to a movie,’ she said. ‘Or have dinner.’

  His funny nose crinkled. ‘Are we friends?’

  ‘All right. Friends.’

  ‘Shake?’

  Very formally, the dark-haired Russian and the blonde-haired American shook hands.

  Friends.

  forty-one

  Tuesday, Marius Volmar called Steph and Chris to his off
ice. ‘Sit. Please.’

  They had showered and changed to street clothes and there was no company class sweat left on them. He did not object when they deposited themselves on the leather armchairs.

  ‘Our spring gala this year will be Sleeping Beauty: He explained the restored cuts. From time to time his glance touched each of the girls, absently, unimportantly. They nodded, wondering why he was telling them this, why both of them.

  ‘In the ballet, Aurora is a girl on the verge of womanhood. I could give the role to a mature woman. Older dancers sometimes project youthfulness far better than younger ones: think of Fonteyn’s Juliet; or Ulanova’s Giselle.’

  The girls shifted on their cushions.

  ‘On the other hand, a younger dancer is—young. A body in its twenties can perform miracles that a body in its thirties cannot. Youth does not get winded. Youth does not need half a beat to prepare a turn. I’ve decided in favour of youth and miracles. We shall have a young Aurora, as Tchaikovsky and Petipa intended. Since Aurora moves from girlhood to womanhood, the girl dancing her will—with this role—make the transition from soloist to principal.’

  Volmar turned to Chris.

  ‘I’m pleased with you, Christine. You have fire and you have something that very rarely goes with it: accuracy.’

  Chris dropped her gaze. For one unguarded moment she smiled with girlish embarrassment. Volmar’s eyes remained fixed on her. Her feet crept together nervously.

  ‘As for you, Stephanie—I’ve always had great hopes for you.’ Volmar’s eyes grazed Steph now. ‘You memorize fast, you’re musical.’

  What’s he saying? Steph wondered. I have no fire, no accuracy, just a little do-re-mi and a barn of a memory? She felt glanced-over, omitted, like the only child at Christmas with no present under the tree.

  Volmar swivelled back comfortably in his chair.

  ‘As dancers you two are not at all alike. But you each have a quality that illuminates a different aspect of Aurora. Stephanie, you have the virtuosity for the Act One solo. Christine, you have the sincerity to lift the part out of simple Bolshoi sentimentality.’

  Chris looked frail and small and suddenly she was sitting very straight on the leather chair, like a little girl who’d been complimented on her posture. He likes her better, Steph realized. A sour-tasting envy flooded her. Partly in shame, partly in self-protection, she fixed her eyes on the neutral confusion of Volmar’s desk, the double-decker chrome basket of In and Out mail, the set and costume sketches with tissue overlays, the scribbled-over cast lists.