Wally sniffed.
The garbage smelled ten hours older. Ellis had forgotten to dump it. Again.
Wally let his ears wander idly over the silence. Someone was walking upstairs: the ceiling creaked right above the louvered doors that would have hidden the kitchenette if the paper bags of garbage hadn’t been in the way. A TV was going downstairs, faintly. He imagined he could hear the slow intake of human breath, and then a long time later the release.
When he heard whispers he realized he was not imagining the sound. Anger began crawling along the back of his neck. He strode to the bedroom door. It squeaked open just as he was about to touch his hand to the knob.
Ellis slipped out, hitching one strap of his overalls over his naked shoulder. ‘Guess what.’ He looked flushed and bubbling and vague. ‘We’re out of milk, could you run down and get some before the deli closes?’
Wally frowned. ‘What’s that smell? And I don’t mean the garbage you forgot to take out.’
Ellis shrugged. ‘Okay, it’ll be cafe noir for breakfast, just like you hate.’
‘Jesus, it smells like you broke open two dozen poppers. You know I hate that stink.’
‘I spilled a bottle of liquid amyl.’ Amyl nitrite and the substitutes sold at sex stores were supposed to add a kick to sex, but they were bad for the circulatory system and most dancers avoided them. But Ellis had his own ideas about dance and sex.
Wally’s exhaustion was suddenly gone, like a switch clicked off. He was alert, braced.
‘Wally,’ Ellis said very distinctly, ‘go get some milk. Go. get a sandwich and sit on a bench and eat it. Just go. I’ll have this mess cleaned up in ten minutes.’
‘Who’s in there?’
‘Look, shithead, you didn’t pay the rent this month.’
‘You brought one of your tricks here!’
Ellis’ eyes were frozen and fixed and didn’t give a damn. He gave the door a bare-heeled kick. It swung slowly inwards. A rectangle of light spread across the bedroom. It began at a foot and travelled along a leg and inch by inch it illuminated Zoltan Tovary sitting naked on the bed, head tilted calmly back, eyes staring and ready to meet any gaze that could be levelled against them.
Wally squinted a moment. He felt two hundred years old. ‘This is our home,’ he whispered.
‘Was our home.’
‘A month’s rent doesn’t give you the right to—’
‘Wally, if you want to get it over with now, fine by me.’
Wally realized Ellis had arranged this moment, orchestrated it. He stood speechless and disbelieving and Ellis hitched up the other strap of his overalls.
‘Zoltan and Virginia are getting a separation,’ Ellis said.
Wally’s mind raced like tyres grabbing for traction. Virginia—Zoltan’s wife. A blonde who was always pregnant, always at rehearsals knitting.
‘Zoltan and I are going to move in together. We love each other very much. It’s really quite perfect, Wally. I only wish you and I had had something half as good.’
Wally stood straight and suddenly alone, feeling failure flake down on him like ice from a winter sky. His mind struggled to understand. Somehow the sex that had brought him and Ellis together now stood between them. The wall that had enclosed them now separated them. For a long black moment he stared into emptiness.
Zoltan rose from the rumpled bed and came to stand motionless beside Ellis. His eyes swept Wally and one eyebrow arched in an ironic flick of recognition.
Wally turned away from their joined hands. He walked across the room and fought to make his thoughts stick together. His eye roamed the walls and he realized that every stain, every crack on them was familiar, memorized. He had never realized it before. The apartment was chipped and bleak and in all the years’ arguing who would clean it they’d never cleaned it. The rooms bore the scars of a hundred screeching battles but he couldn’t hate the apartment.
It was his home and Ellis was his family.
Now his home and family were lost, taken from him by a man with three children who changed wives as often as he changed the marcel of his fading hair.
Wally lifted his eyes towards Ellis, but Ellis was somewhere else, afloat like a new moon in a cradle of stars. Wally stared a long sober moment at the boy who had dazzled him. He strained to grasp the truth of this instant. It had taken him two years and eight months, it had taken him till now, to see beneath the beauty, to see the mindless crawling thing that lived within that armour.
He didn’t hate Ellis.
What he felt was worse. He hated himself. Shame overflowed him like slime from a cesspool.
‘All right,’ he said finally, ‘I’m going.’
Ellis looked at him sharply, wanting something more. Perhaps he wanted the scene to go on longer. Perhaps he wanted to show his new friend that even though he was a boy from the corps he could still cut down a principal. Wally shaped a smile and beamed it across the lifeless space between them.
‘You’re not angry, are you?’ Ellis said, probing.
They stood staring at one another and Wally remembered the long-forgotten loneliness before Ellis. Slowly he shook his head.
In the next moment he was rushing down the dark stairs and out into the street, into the night that was warm with late spring.
‘Hi there, stranger, what’ll it be?’
Wally stared into the smiling shadow of the broad-brimmed cowboy hat, couldn’t remember whether he knew the bartender or had tricked with him or what. Didn’t want to remember.
‘Rob Roy straight up. Make that a double.’
He figured tonight he had earned it. He took his drink to the corner stool, downed it in three long gulps.
A chubby man in leather stood eyeing him. ‘Ready for another?’
The liquor had soaked up some of Wally’s anger. He felt quieter now. ‘Sure, why not?’
The man bought drinks, smiled and talked. Wally nodded and tried to listen, but the jukebox was banging out a disco version of the Infernal Dance from Firebird. The music kept edging in on his concentration. Long ago he’d performed in Firebird with Ellis. They’d both been in the corps then. The steps began coming back to him. His foot turned out on the bar stool, hooked up for an imaginary pirouette....
His thoughts skimmed back over the past, the years before he’d hooked up with Ellis. He hadn’t cruised Central Park in a long time. He glanced at his watch, squinted the hands into focus.
Seven minutes after one.
He thought of the underbrush in the Ramble, the promise of anonymity. The action ought to be pretty heavy there by now. He felt a stirring in his groin. Why not? Tonight he’d earned it.
‘Good night,’ he said to the man in leather.
A hand scooped out after him. ‘Hey, you’re not going!’
Wally waved. The street door didn’t want to open in or out, but finally, with a kick, he stumbled out onto the pavement.
The park was three blocks away. He managed to stagger reasonably straight lines, considering. He surveyed the cruisers on Central Park West. Hairdressers with poodles on leashes. The safety first crowd. Dullsville.
He took the pedestrian path that cut through the wall and curved down to the lake. It was shadowy, secluded. His eye was caught by a guy sitting on a bench. He slowed down.
‘Hey, you.’ The guy was smiling at him. ‘Want some fun?’
The guy pulled his penis out of his fly and let it dangle.
Shit, Wally decided, I’m not that drunk. He kept going. A movement in the darkness tugged at his eye. He glanced back. There were three guys now, staring in his direction. Their heads bent together, nodding. A drift of hard-edged laughter caught him.
He quickened his stride. Steps followed behind him. He didn’t look back.
‘Hey, faggot!’
The steps were gaining, clattering nearer. He broke into a run.
‘Hey, faggot, you dropped something!’
The path dipped down into darkness. Far ahead, atop a steep rise, he saw
a single lamp, a bench, a police phone. He ran full out. Heart thumped, lungs burned. Halfway up the rise a hand grabbed the neck of his jacket. Instinctively, stupidly, he held on to the jacket.
And they had him.
‘Ya fuckin’ scumbag!’
In one instant he was surrounded. One of them punched and missed wildly and another spat in his face and the third brought a beer bottle cracking down on the side of his skull, releasing a hot sticky flow that he knew was blood.
He clawed free, screaming for help. With the last will power in his legs he lunged up the hill. He yanked the telephone from its box.
The wire had been cut.
He stood panting in the circle of light. Two more of them came out of the wavering shadows.
‘Looking for us, sweetheart?’
They grabbed for him. He windmilled his arms, struggling to fend them off, but the others had caught up and someone grabbed him low around the legs. A dozen hands ripped and punched at him. A kick in the testicles knocked the breath out of him. He began choking and crying from the neon-green pain. His vision streaked out in tears and blood. He went down kneeling onto the asphalt.
They dragged him off the path and into the shrubbery, out of the light. One of them yanked his head up by the hair and two others kicked him in the stomach and face. He was screaming. They ripped off the front of his bloodied shirt and stuffed it down his throat. He couldn’t get air.
‘Look at pretty boy, he shaves his fuckin’ chest!’
The shaved chest drove them to even harder punches and kicks.
‘Hey, watch this.’
The blows stopped. An armlock around the neck held him paralyzed. He heard a match being struck and then came the grinding of a lit cigarette on his nipple.
He realized there would be no help. He knew he was going to die. His gagged mouth tried to shape the Lord’s Prayer.
Our Father who
The kicks kept coming, head, face, and back, and then they dropped him. He fell on his side. His spine felt like two pieces of glass cutting into one another. They kicked his nose till it was a flap of cartilage. Someone pulled at his wrist.
‘Nice watch.’
‘Bet his boy friend gave it to him.’
‘Get his wallet.’
And then for no reason he could imagine, it stopped. He opened his eyes, blinked through the blood. Someone was standing over him. Oh, God, more?
He curled his arms over his face.
‘Jesus—they really did a job on you.’
Someone crouched beside him. He felt the gag eased from his mouth. Vomit came up in two dark heaves. His mouth tasted of iron and salt, as though he’d been licking ship hulls.
‘Can you stand?’
He tried. Couldn’t.
Hands helped him up. He was able to move one foot and drag the other. Hands helped him to a bench. A clean handkerchief pressed against his nose, staunching the blood.
‘Say—aren’t you–?’
Wally shook his head. ‘Hospital ... please ... going to pass out....’
And he did.
Wally Collins did not show up at the next day’s Sleeping Beauty rehearsal. Or the day following.
Sasha partnered Steph instead. He danced full out and he danced brilliantly. In one variation he did a double cabriole sweeping up into a double turn in the air, landing smack on the beat in perfect extended fifth position, and he wasn’t even out of breath.
‘That’s not the choreography,’ Volmar said, to no one’s surprise. And then, to everyone’s surprise, ‘But it’s all right. Keep it.’
When Sasha lifted Steph or placed his hands on her waist to assist a pirouette she felt her heart racing. It’s because he’s ahead of the beat, she told herself. He’s rushing me and I’m nervous.
Lowering her from a lift, he let his hand slide teasingly along the inside of her leg. ‘Still angry?’ he whispered.
‘Still angry.’
‘Dinner tonight?’
‘No dinner any night ever.’
After rehearsal she saw him laughing and whispering with Colleen Jackson, who was dancing the Lilac Fairy, and she supposed it was meant to make her jealous.
It did.
She was in a foul mood showering and changing and when someone called her name in the corridor she kept right on walking.
‘Hey, Steph, slow down a minute, will you?’
It was Ellis. He looked like the wreckage of a hurricane and Steph’s first instinct was to sweep him out of the way. His eyes were yellow and bloodshot and bristles of beard were growing out of a day-old shaving gash and his breath smelled of liquor and mouthwash.
‘Wally’s been hurt.’
She stopped. The tip of a premonition pricked at her. ‘What’s happened? Where is he?’
‘I threw him out of the apartment two nights ago and he must have got drunk.’ Ellis was standing very still, speaking very softly, as though he had put himself together with Scotch tape and the least sudden movement might undo him. ‘He was attacked in Central Park. He’s in the hospital now.’
‘Oh no.’ Steph closed her eyes.
‘Would you come with me, Steph? Please. I can’t do it alone.’
A harried nurse directed them down the corridor. There was a smell of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant. Television sets and sickbed visitors whispered through half-open doors. Ellis hung back outside the room.
‘Come on,’ Steph said. ‘You’re his best friend. He needs you.’
Ellis just stood looking mutely at her. ‘If he wants me I’m right here.’
The door was partly open. Steph knocked softly and slipped into the room. ‘Wally?’
The blinds had been angled shut and the room was dark. The figure on the bed stirred. ‘Steph?’
For a moment she didn’t want to believe it was Wally. There was no face, only maplike smears of raw purple stretching across skin and bandage. Iodine, she realized with relief, not blood.
‘Can I come in?’
‘Sure. There’s a chair around here someplace."
‘Found it.’ She pulled up the steel chair and sat very close so he wouldn’t tire his voice.
Great shocks of blond hair had forced their way in fringes through the bandages. The eyes sparkled palely. The eyes and hair were Wally. Her gaze clung to them, tried to ignore the rest.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘It did,’ he said. ‘For a little while.’
There were charts hanging on clips from the front of the bed and she wondered why so many. ‘We were worried,’ she said. ‘We missed you.’
‘I missed you. It’s nice to see a friendly face.’ He tried to smile, and the attempt was heroic on a face so battered.
Something stuck in her throat. He saw her staring.
‘Looks that bad, does it?’
‘It looks—like it’ll look a lot better in two days. Is your nose broken?’
‘My nose is okay.’
Steph tried to think of something cheerful to say. She remembered a line people said in movies. ‘How does the other guy look?’
‘There were five other guys. I don’t even want to remember how they looked.’
‘I’m sorry. That’s lousy luck.’
‘My own stupid fault. I was drunk. Walking in Central Park at one in the morning. What else can you expect?’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Like an ass. Like a selfish ass the way I’ve let you down.’
‘You haven’t let me down.’ She put her hand on his and gave an encouraging little squeeze. His fingers slipped between hers, clinging. ‘How long are you going to be here?’
‘Every doctor says something different. Steph, I’m sorry, but I won’t be dancing.’
‘Not dance the gala?’
Wally shook his head. He’s taking it too hard, she thought. People dance galas with their teeth knocked out. Alonso dances them blind.
‘You can put make-up over that bruise. The swelling will have gone down by tomorrow—’
‘I won’t be dancing, Steph.’ He said it with a firmness that surprised her. ‘You’re just going to have to get used to Sasha. He’s a better dancer anyway.’
‘You’re better than anyone in the company and you know it:
‘I’m a better partner. He’s a better dancer. So watch out. He’ll try to steal the gala from you.’
‘I won’t let him,’ Steph said, just to show she could be firm too.
‘That’s the spirit.’ Wally was staring at her thoughtfully, regretfully. ‘You know, we would have been a damned good team.’
‘And we will be. Who cares about a gala? It’s just a lot of publicity and the same old Sleeping Beauty.’
‘No. You’re a special Sleeping Beauty. I’d love to have danced it with you—just once in front of an audience.’
She sensed something in him that frightened her. Not self-pity, which she would have understood. Resignation. It was as if he’d forgotten what it was to be a dancer. Dancers didn’t give up because someone smashed their nose in. Dancers survived torn tendons and swollen joints and lost toenails and slipped discs. They survived bad love affairs and failed marriages. They survived.
‘We’ll dance it, Wally. How hard did they bang you on the head? You haven’t forgotten the steps, have you?’
‘No—I’m not going to forget the steps. Not ever.’
Maybe Wally was just having a bad reaction to the beating.
Maybe he was upset over Ellis. Ellis will cheer him up, she thought. That’s what he needs.
Wally sighed. The sound of that sigh bothered her.
‘You know, they say a smile is like a turn-out. If you don’t practise, you lose it.’
He half smiled, every muscle of his face battling bandages and scabs. She wondered how many stitches he’d taken.
‘How’s that?’ he said.
‘Shows promise.’
His eyes misted over. She hugged him. She could feel the familiar strength in his shoulders and torso.
‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘I really wanted to dance it with you.’
Ballerina Page 50
