Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

  ‘Why doesn’t the President stick to his own goddamn guidelines?’ Seymour Harnett cried. ‘Why is it always the musicians subsidizing this country?’

  ‘The musicians don’t subsidize me,’ Volmar said. A storm of anger was beginning to rise in him. Belgium had said yes, and now was the time to let these parasites know. ‘Mr Harnett believes he has NBT trapped. He is mistaken. The Belgian government has offered us a home and a charter—and freedom from American unions. If the orchestra refuses reasonable terms, NBT will move abroad—beyond the clutches of Local 802. Mr Harnett and his men will be free to eat picket boards and welfare cheques for a change. NBT has fed them long enough.’

  There was panic in the eyes of Seymour Harnett and Dorcas Amidon and the President’s man. Marius Volmar didn’t need any of them. They had no hold. He smiled.

  ‘Feed us!’ Seymour Harnett cried. ‘You’ve been stealing the bread from our mouths.’

  ‘Thirty-two thousand a year for tapping a triangle?’

  ‘This is an expensive town—we’re entitled to the cost of living!’

  ‘A dancer gets nine thousand five hundred.’

  ‘Who gives a fuck what a dancer gets?’

  For an instant the room was a whirlpool of grey spots and Marius Volmar could not find breath to answer. I must speak, he prodded himself. They must not know.

  ‘I do,’ Volmar said. ‘I give a fuck what a dancer gets.’ His heart was battering furiously against his lungs. He rose. ‘Gentlemen, Dorcas—delightful as this is, I still have a ballet company to attend to.’

  There was a clattering rush of heels and Dorcas caught up with him in the hallway. ‘Marius, can’t we talk?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Must we be like those people in there?’

  ‘Why not?’

  She was pained at the change in his appearance. His face had lost weight and he looked like an eagle gone old and shabby. ‘We shouldn’t argue. It’s bad for us. You’re not looking well, Marius.’

  Her eyes were pleading and oddly brilliant and her make-up showed the smudges of hasty blotting.

  ‘You’re looking badly yourself,’ Volmar said.

  She flinched but recovered. ‘Oh, Marius, we’re squabbling like children, and if only we could all calm down—if at least you and I could calm down—’

  ‘I’m perfectly calm.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m not calm at all. I’ve never been so miserable in my life.’

  ‘Then you have a lot to learn about life.’

  ‘I never thought I’d have to learn it from you.’

  ‘You American women are all virgins,’ he snapped, ‘and there’s nothing more grotesque than a rich foolish old virgin.’

  He’d never seen a woman look so stunned and vulnerable, not even his mother when the Germans took her away in the police car. Dorcas stared at him one instant. Then her eyelids fell and she turned away.

  The rehearsal that Volmar returned to was a disaster.

  ‘What do you do before you catch the girl?’ he asked a dancer.

  ‘Stand around,’ the boy said.

  It hit Volmar like a blow. Was he losing his gift for authority?

  ‘You have échappé?’ he asked a girl.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why is every else doing chassé?’

  She shrugged. ‘Ask them.’

  It was incredible. Where was the respect?

  ‘Are you dancers or dolts?’ he cried. ‘We’re going to rehearse this till we get it right!’

  The problem was in the grand promenade of guests in Act One, Aurora’s birthday celebration. Something had gone wrong, and kept going wrong, in the placement of the dancers.

  ‘Let’s take it from the third phase—two groups once more. Piano, very, very slowly—slow motion now.’

  Volmar watched, squinting like a police inspector trying to spot a culprit. He stopped the guilty-looking couple.

  ‘Let me see how you promenade out.’

  They promenaded out. Innocent. He was baffled.

  ‘Maître, if you will excuse.’ Sasha Bunin gave a quick, almost apologetic bow of the head. ‘In the Kirov we avoid this trouble by—’

  ‘No,’ Volmar said quietly and very firmly. ‘No legends of the Kirov, thank you. We’re going to walk through this like turtles, one beat at a time, dead stop on every beat, till we see who’s right and who’s wrong.’

  The dancers knew he was furious. Usually, though it stung, they were grateful for his fury: it drove them to dance better. But this was wrong fury. The grand promenade was not worth an hour of rehearsal. Besides, the mistake was there, in his notebook, and not in the dancers’ feet. They stood resentful and humiliated. They had not earned his abuse. He was wasting their time.

  The grand promenade was still a confusion when the rehearsal finally ground to an end. Volmar watched his dancers straggle towards the door. No: he would not permit this defeat, this Waterloo. He clapped his hands sharply.

  ‘Girls and boys, one more moment of your time, please.’

  He waited till they were absolutely silent and absolutely still with all eyes fixed absolutely on him.

  ‘You are professionals. You wouldn’t be under contract to this company otherwise. You are also artists, and while in this theatre you will conduct yourselves as artists. It is true that we’re having difficulties with the orchestra. I don’t know what rumours you may have heard. Put them out of your heads. When there are facts, you will hear the facts—from me.’

  He saw the sullenness in their bodies. He saw the fatigue in their faces. He found it obscene that young people should permit themselves fatigue. Discipline must never again slip as it had today. If they ever doubted the whip in his hand, the company was doomed; the Sleeping Beauty was doomed.

  ‘Today you disgraced yourselves. Tomorrow you will dance. You may go.’

  Volmar hurried home shaken. He had never distrusted himself before.

  He lived in two rooms on West Eighty-seventh Street. Few people ever saw them. A cleaning woman came twice a week; the rooms were dark but neat.

  He pulled a chair to a closet and searched the shelf.

  He found what he was looking for: a small leather case of his mother’s possessions. Inside the case he found a small parcel wrapped in time-parched tissue paper that crumbled at his touch.

  He took it gently, as though it were a mouse sleeping in his hand, and set it on a table and sat gazing at it.

  The little candy box with white and blue enamel panels was one of three hundred filled with chocolates that Tsar Nicholas had given the imperial dancers on his last birthday. Naturally there were no chocolates left: his mother had been sixteen at the time, a little Maryinsky ballerina with strong legs and a very sweet tooth.

  He was not a sentimentalist and he did not know why he had kept the box or why it had come into his thoughts today of all dreadful days. But as he stared at it the battering of his heart subsided.

  He thought of the tsars and shook his head. They must have been odd men to have given the world such misery and such ballet and such little enamel boxes. The tsars were gone, but there was still misery and there was still ballet and there was still this little enamel box.

  He touched it. His finger traced out the copper edging of the panels.

  This box had travelled seas and continents. It had survived political and artistic revolutions. And here it sat on the table of a dark little apartment in New York City.

  A box like this, Volmar thought, never stops travelling. Never stops surviving. Long after me, there will still be this box.

  Long after me.

  The thought gave him a strange smiling comfort, and when he dreamed that night, he saw his Sleeping Beauty at last.

  forty-five

  After performance Steph sank down into the chair. Her head was throbbing. She crossed her arms on the dresser, made a pillow out of them to rest her head. Over the call box she could hear the massive rhythms of Symphony in Three Movements. She tried to shut it
out, thanked God she wasn’t dancing it tonight.

  Layered laughter and gossip came drifting in from the corridor. She raised her eyes to the mirror, winced at the wreck staring back at her. She summoned energy, began brushing her hair. Electricity crackled in the bristles.

  ‘The Pierre?’

  Dimly, at the edge of her awareness, she heard a voice curling with incredulity.

  ‘That costs a fortune!’

  ‘What does she care? Her parents have a charge account. She can get all the grapefruit and yogurt she wants on room service.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, I’ll bet even the Pierre doesn’t have bee pollen à la carte.’

  The voices were coming from behind her. It flashed through her mind that the girls must be talking about Chris. She stopped brushing. Her ear clutched for another strand of the conversation.

  ‘Sasha really flipped her out, did he?’

  ‘Oh, come on, that little debutante was never flipped in to begin with.’

  Maria Coelho, a new Brazilian girl in the corps, approached and asked if Steph would like to go for a hamburger. Oh, hell, Steph thought, do we have to chitchat now?

  As pleasantly as she could, she said, ‘Could we make it another night?’

  During that instant of distraction she lost the voices, lost hold of the link to Chris. There was only blanketing chatter and waves of Stravinsky surging from the speaker.

  She made a quick scribble in her address book with an eyebrow pencil: Pierre. She took a taxi home, telling herself it was because she was dead tired.

  The Hotel Pierre answered on the twelfth ring.

  ‘Do you have a Christine Avery registered there?’

  ‘One moment, please.’

  Steph switched the phone to the other hand, wriggled out of the other sleeve of her coat. She felt a growing nervousness. What the hell was she going to say to Chris?

  ‘Miss C. Avery is in room 1012. I’ll connect you.’

  Relief went through her and then a smothering fear. She jammed a finger against the cradle, broke the connection.

  ‘Hello?’

  Chris stood in her bathrobe holding the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  After a few seconds the phone began making a scraping sound. Sweat began to creep down the back of her neck. She hung up. She hurried to check the front door of the suite. It was double-locked and chained.

  She felt helpless, like a chick trapped inside an egg in a nest.

  The bedroom door had a push-button lock and she pushed it up and crawled back into bed and turned off the light and curled up beneath the bedclothes. Very gently she tried to ease herself into a position that did not ache.

  She lay listening to all the tiny sounds that made up silence.

  The phone rang again. She held her breath, prayed it would stop. It kept ringing. She sat up.

  If I take a very long time answering it will go away ....

  Her hand inched to the night table, found the switch, hesitated. She thought the ringing had stopped and then it came again. She pressed the button. For an instant light blinded her. She lifted the receiver.

  Warily, voice neutral, she said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Chris? It’s me—Steph.’

  No., she thought, no! Time moved with nightmare slowness, like an anaesthesia mask clamping her down.

  ‘Chris, I’ve got your medicine.’

  With her last fading strength she laid the receiver on the pillow.

  No answer.

  Nothing.

  At first Steph thought the line had gone dead. And then, from a great distance, her ear made out the sound of breathing. Chris’s breathing—quiet, stubborn, as familiar as the neighbours’ voices through the bedroom wall.

  Steph stood holding the phone, adrift in Chris’s refusal, not knowing what to say or do next.

  ‘Chris, you need your medicine.’

  No reply.

  ‘You’ve missed three days.’

  Still no reply.

  ‘I’ll come down to your hotel tomorrow morning at nine o’clock.’

  At eight fifty-five Steph was sitting outside Central Park, gathering resolve, grateful for a bench to rest on.

  She had her tote bag beside her, securely gripped against snatchers. She’d stuffed it with practice clothes and Chris’s medicines, and—a last-minute inspiration—the book Chris had been reading for the last three months, St Exupéry’s Little Prince.

  She stared across Fifth Avenue at the sand-blasted elegance of the Pierre. Traffic was different here from the rest of New York: there were limousines and double-decker London buses and flocks of cruising Checker cabs and they looked waxed and clean, like the fresh vegetables at a luxury grocer’s.

  At eight fifty-nine she crossed the avenue and went into the hotel. For an instant she was lost among the shifting patterns of people. Their clothing and voices suggested money, many different sorts of money, but a great deal of it. She went direct to an elevator and up to Chris’s floor. She buzzed at the door and when there was no answer she knocked.

  ‘Chris? It’s me.’

  A chain slipped noisily and the door swung open.

  Chris looked very small and thin. Her hair was unkempt, her face pale, and her eyes were like huge ash-rimmed burns in a bed sheet.

  Steph tried to mute the shock on her face. She hesitated, one foot touching the doorsill, and waited for Chris to say the first healing words.

  There was only silence.

  ‘You forgot these.’ Steph held out the tote bag. The medicine bottles were on top.

  Chris barely glanced at them. The three days seemed to have wasted her totally. Steph was overwhelmed by a sense of terrible guilt, as though she’d ripped the wings off a butterfly.

  ‘Chris, I’m sorry.’ Her eyes pleaded for a hug, a handshake, a friendly glance, anything.

  Chris’s small hands were bloodless and taut and unforgiving. Her mouth unclenched and very quietly she said, ‘I’m not afraid of you any more.’

  She held a tiny balled-up wad of Kleenex in one hand. She had been crying, but she was not crying now. She was standing back from the door beside a table with a huge porcelain vase of roses. Her empty hand caressed the dark scarlet buds.

  Steph reached out. ‘Chris, please—friends?’

  Chris stared at her. ‘You can be so blind when it suits you.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were seeing Sasha.’

  ‘You knew I was in love with him.’

  ‘But everyone thinks they’re in love with him.’

  ‘All those nights—all those phone calls when you said you were at your mother’s—you were with him. I was going crazy and you were the reason he wasn’t seeing me.’

  ‘Do you think for a minute I’d have seen him if I’d known?’

  From somewhere, some small untapped pocket of rage hidden deep within Chris, the reply came bursting: ‘Yes! You knew and that’s why you did it! You took him from me!’

  ‘I’d never take anything from you. You’re my best friend.’

  ‘I’m not your friend—I’m your charity. I make you feel generous.’ Chris’s voice took on a mincing viciousness. ‘“Poor Chris, always so nervous, she wouldn’t get through her performances if I didn’t wheel her onstage.” “Poor Chris—always falling in love with gay boys. What am I going to do with her?” But let poor Chris fall in love with a man and you’ve got to grab him! “Sasha’s not for babies—Sasha’s for big girls. Here, little Chrissie, I’ll take Sasha.”’

  Suddenly Steph felt very weary. Sadness filled her. ‘Chris, I’ve broken it off.’

  ‘You never wanted him. You just had to prove you could take him from me.’

  Steph’s jaw dropped and she stood staring. She had never heard such quiet, coiled conviction in Chris’s voice before and it frightened her. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘You’ve always had to prove you could take things from me.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like Cantabile. Like Graduation Ball.


  ‘Chris, I was covering. You’ve covered for me—you’ve walked into my roles. And you’ve done some of them better than me. Look at Do I Hear a Waltz?’

  ‘And you’ll never forgive me for it.’

  ‘Forgive you? Chris, I’m proud of you!’

  ‘Proud of the baby—good little Chrissie, noble Steph. So noble and proud you have to steal Sleeping Beauty!’

  Steph felt herself very near to exploding. ‘I didn’t steal it. You walked out.’

  ‘I didn’t walk out—you drove me out.’

  ‘Chris—I really think you’re disturbed.’

  ‘Disturbed? You kick down my life and I’m disturbed? What the hell do you expect? Thank you? Roses? Okay, here are your roses—catch!’

  Chris snatched the vase from the table and hurled it.

  Steph ducked.

  At first she couldn’t believe it had happened. She stared down at the water and petals and razor-edged porcelain strewn like a suicide on the carpet. Her hand went to her face. The truth slowly soaked into her. Chris could have scarred me—and she doesn’t care.

  Chris’s gaze met hers, righteous and cold. There was no remorse. No apology.

  ‘You spoiled, stupid rich brat,’ Steph said.

  ‘Rich and how you hate me for it.’

  ‘No, Chris. I don’t waste time hating you for anything. You’re doing a terrific job of it yourself. You could have had a career. You could even have had Sasha. And you could have had a friend. A good friend.’

  ‘A good friend like you?’

  ‘Yes, like me. But you had to throw it all away on one of your little-girl breakdowns. Let me tell you something, Chris. Whether it’s a role or a man—you’ll never get it whining. You have to work and you have to fight. Like a woman. Something you seem to know nothing about being.’

  ‘I’m going to surprise you, Steph.’ There was a crazy calmness to her voice more frightening than anything she had yet shouted or thrown. ‘I’m going to fight you—just the way you’ve been fighting me all along. And I’m going to win.’