‘Thanks, Steph. That’s the best review anyone could have given me.’
He’ll get through, she thought. He’s badly scratched and he’s argued with Ellis. But that can all be fixed.
‘I brought you something,’ she said.
‘You didn’t have to.’
‘Close your eyes.’
She motioned Ellis into the room. He entered hesitantly and stood at the foot of the bed. When he spoke his voice was thick and hoarse as though the words had to fight through clogs in his lungs.
‘Hello, Wally.’
Wally opened his eyes. Steph knew instantly, This was a mistake.
‘What do you want?’
‘Just to say hello—and I was worried about you—and I’m sorry.’
Wally pushed a silence toward Ellis. He turned his face away. ‘Steph, get him out of here.’
‘I’ll make it up to you,’ Ellis said. ‘I promise.’
‘There’s no way you can make it up.’
The words poured out of Ellis in a pleading rush. ‘I’m going to stop playing around. I’m going to stop drinking. I’m going to tell Zoltan to get out. You can come back. I want you to come back. Please come back, Wally.’
Wally stared at Ellis. Steph sensed something cruel and final and murderous building in him. She felt helplessly unable to head it off.
‘Why don’t you go get drunk and get laid,’ Wally said, ‘and get lost?’
‘Give him a chance,’ Steph said.
‘I gave him a chance. It took him two years—and he finally wrecked me. And if I could get out of this bed and walk, I’d throw him out of here myself. But I can’t get out of bed and I can’t walk, so I’m asking you nicely, Ellis—get the hell out. You wrecked me, mission accomplished, go wreck someone else.’
A cold shock went through Steph. ‘Wally—is there something wrong with your leg?’
‘The leg’s fine.’ Wally’s hands fumbled at the sheet and finally managed to throw it to one side. ‘But the foot’s shit.’
Steph tried to lock the muscles that controlled her facial expression. The foot no longer had the shape of a foot. It was a bloated mass of plaster and adhesive, as though someone had taken eighteen yards of surgical tape and anchored a telephone directory to his leg.
‘One good thing about getting your ankle pulverized, they give you morphine. I’m flying.’
Ellis had lowered his eyes, unable to look.
Steph made herself look. She had to show Wally it didn’t matter. ‘Will it—heal?’
‘They say in a few months.’
She took a deep breath of relief. For a moment she had been afraid.
‘I’ll walk normally. I won’t run very fast, but I won’t be on crutches.’
‘Will you—dance?’ Ellis asked.
‘Believe it or not, Ellis, I’d be a worse dancer than you. No half pointe, no balance, no turn, no jeté. No, thank you. Happy about it?’
Ellis stood bulkily beside the bed. For a long moment his face worked, but nothing came out—not tears, not words. And then, very softly: ‘Wally—I’m sorry.’
‘Are you? Do you understand? Look at my foot! Take a good look! You did that!’
Ellis slumped and began to sob.
‘Don’t you come crying to me.’ Wally shouted. ‘You still have two feet—I’ll never dance again!’
‘Wally—I’ll give up dancing. We can open a business. A school.’
‘Big fucking deal! You’re no good—never were, never will be. I could have been someone!’
Ellis jerked as though each word were a pin impaling him. ‘Wally—please—let me help—please.’
Ellis reached his hands out. No one took them.
Steph couldn’t even feel pity for him. She felt only anger at the enviers and destroyers of this world, sorrow for the human wreckage they left behind.
‘Get out of my life!’ Wally screamed.
Ellis backed falteringly out the door. The room was very silent now. Steph stared at the foot and then at Wally staring at her. She remembered his tour en l’air and his six unsupported pirouettes and the sensation of leaping across space into the safety of his arms and she thought she would go crazy if she couldn’t think of something else.
It was Wally’s voice that rescued her. ‘Steph—would you do one thing for me?’
Steph couldn’t answer because the tears were too close. She nodded.
‘I’ll be watching you on that TV set. Just be the most beautiful Sleeping Beauty that ever was. Promise?’
She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want him to see her crying. ‘Oh, Wally, I’m not that good.’
‘You are that good. You’re good as the best. I danced with them, Steph. I know.’
Tears and sniffles came spilling down. She grabbed blindly for the Kleenex box by his bed. He took her hand.
‘Hey—a smile is like a turn-out.’
‘I can’t smile.’
‘Yes, you can. Smile—and kiss me.’
She choked back the sniffles. And smiled. And kissed him.
And promised.
forty-seven
A guy couldn’t even piss in peace. The second oboe followed Seymour Harnett out of the meeting and kept on arguing, right there in the men’s room of the American Hotel.
‘So it’s my fault the dumb faggot gets mugged?’ Seymour Harnett said.
‘It’s nobody’s fault. But now this Russian steps in and he looks like a saint, and we look like shits.’
‘So we look like shits.’
‘That’s not the attitude, Seymour. Learn from the Russian.’
‘What am I going to learn? Russian? Toe dancing? Sixty-nine positions?’
‘How to get the public on our side.’
‘Yeah? How?’
‘We volunteer to play the gala.’
‘That’s a shitty idea.’
‘It’s our gift to the city. It’s our gift to the nation. We send telegrams to the mayor, to the President, to the papers. It’s our gift to civilization.’
‘Civilization never gave me a damned thing except tax surcharges.’
‘Just that one performance. It’ll be on coast-to-coast TV. It looks good. We look good. Artists. Americans’
‘N. O. No way.’
‘I’m going to propose it at the meeting, it’ll go to a vote.’
‘You do that and I’ll have your union card. I happen to know you don’t cut your own reeds, I happen to know you get them on Forty-third Street.’
‘And the same guy sells reeds to every bassoon and flugelhorn in New York, including your brother-in-law, which is why his English horn quacks.’
Seymour Harnett was so angry he could hardly zip up straight. And sure enough, when he got back to the emergency meeting of the strike committee and asked if there were any motions, the second oboe raised his goddamned hand.
Marius Volmar watched from the orchestra. When he could bear it no longer he bent toward the microphone.
‘Can we have Carabosse’s entrance again? She comes in stage centre, I want the light to pick her up. And where was the flash? Let’s put this together.’
It was the first stage rehearsal and it was going badly, as they always did. The dancers who weren’t dancing kept getting in the way of the ones who were. Electricians wandered the stage with hand-held mikes, dragging wires behind them that were sure to trip unwary feet. Stagehands prowled. The Lilac Fairy was dancing in ski pants and a hooded parka. The pianist diddled at his little upright. Sets raised and lowered themselves for no reason. High on a light pole a blinding strobe began to flash.
Volmar’s mind was numb from the effort of not despairing. His heart pumped a steady stream of pain through his chest and left arm.
The grand promenade still did not work. He was down to two principals, Stephanie and Sasha, with no real covers. The new girl couldn’t handle the Act One solo and the new boy couldn’t handle the battements in Florimund’s Act Three variation.
The company was a creature living on raw
snapping nerves, and Volmar kept whipping it forward towards that slender maybe of a gala. Just when he thought he had it under control, the creature would rebel, and an entire rehearsal would veer wildly off course, as it had today, like a punctured, rocketing balloon.
He still did not know if he had a Sleeping Beauty or not. Let alone an orchestra.
He spoke again into the microphone. ‘Are we ready for that entrance?’
A voice shouted. ‘Ready!’ and he signalled the conductor, and the conductor beat time for the pianist. Three counts before the entrance an electrician dashed across the stage, waving his thumb-indexed score.
‘I got a flash coming up! Gimme a flash!’
Four boys came running onstage, dragging behind them the fairy’s black chariot. There was no lightning, no puff of smoke.
‘Where’s my flash?’ the electrician screamed, and the cry came back, ‘Warren’s working on the wire!’
Volmar struggled against his anger. He had asked for the wicked fairy, and as a prank they’d given him a brawny stagehand, slouched in the chariot with a can of beer. Volmar grabbed the microphone.
And then the stagehand stepped down onto the stage and pirouetted.
It was a real pirouette. That fat muscle-bound body could pirouette.
The man was once a dancer, Volmar realized, and now he’s a stagehand. Volmar put the microphone down. The pincers gripping his heart relaxed. But he needed to breathe. He needed to move. He pushed up from his seat and walked toward the back of the house.
From several rows away he saw someone in the viewing room at the back of the theatre.
‘Marius?’
It was Dorcas, sitting with arms clasped on crossed knees. Her face was pale and her huge eyes moved with him.
‘We’re back on the same side,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing left to quarrel about now.’
Volmar’s frown wobbled. ‘Nothing,’ he agreed. ‘Sasha dances the gala.’
Dorcas attempted a smile. ‘Assuming the orchestra lets us have a gala.’
‘Assuming.’
‘He’ll be good. He’ll be as good as Wally would have been.’
‘He’ll be better than Wally could ever have been.’
Dorcas stared at him. ‘You knew that and you still blocked him?’
‘I knew it from the first company class.’
‘But didn’t you want Sleeping Beauty to be the best you could possibly make it?’
‘I wanted it to be mine.’
Dorcas arched her eyebrows. ‘Well—that’s human. And it’s honest to admit it.’
‘It’s foolish. Foolish to do, foolish to have to admit.’
She patted the seat beside her and he sat.
‘You’ll just have to forgive yourself,’ she said. ‘I’ve had to forgive myself, God knows.’
‘For loving Sasha?’
‘Partly.’
‘I thought the other women might discourage you.’
‘Not about Sasha. Anyone else, but not him. It’s weak of me, but I am weak. And I’m old and I’ve never had any talent but money. He’s young and he’s strong and he’s got every talent a dancer would sell his soul for.’ She looked at Volmar. ‘And you don’t love anything about him at all, do you?’
‘I’m past tense and he’s future and I hate him for that. It’s unfair of me, I know.’
Volmar shrugged. ‘Friends always find an excuse for arguing.’
‘And are we friends, Marius? Still?’
For a moment he didn’t answer. ‘I was thinking of death the other night. At first I was frightened. And then I thought, Hell won’t be so bad—not with Dorcas there to argue with.’
‘Do you think they’ll let me into hell? I was always afraid of winding up someplace wishy-washy—like purgatory.’
‘If they don’t let you in, I’m going to have a very lonely eternity.’
‘Do you know, Marius, that’s the first truly kind thing you’ve ever said to me?’
Mrs Avery stood beside the hospital bed and gazed at her daughter. The girl stirred and Mrs Avery quickly dried her cheeks with the back of her hand.
Chris opened her eyes and looked up at her mother. She saw something in the face that made her sorrowful.
‘I’ve made you unhappy,’ she said. ‘All my life I’ve made you unhappy.’
Mrs Avery shook her head. ‘No. You’ve made your father and me happy. Never anything but happy. And there’s good news. The doctor says you can leave this afternoon.’
There was colour in Christine’s face and she smiled when her mother bent down to kiss her. Mrs Avery left the hospital room feeling hope for the first time since she’d arrived in New York.
But the doctor kept her waiting in his office and the wait chipped away at her hopefulness. She was standing when the doctor hurried in. He had one arm still in a smock. Beneath the smock he was wearing the vest and trousers of a beautifully tailored dark suit.
The suit reassured her more than the smile.
‘Mrs Avery.’
It was a pained smile. There was a handshake, an apology for the delay. He motioned her to the high-backed chair she had been avoiding. He took the armchair facing her. He had a lapful of documents and he shuffled them and Mrs Avery felt like a figure in the background of a painting, present but playing no part.
‘She’s very run down,’ the doctor said.
Mrs Avery nodded.
‘X-ray shows no injuries, no bones broken from the fall. Thermoscan shows no new tumours.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
He gave her a long, grave glance. ‘The autoimmune system is breaking down.’
Mrs Avery did not know what an autoimmune system was. It sounded necessary, like a heart or a kidney or a lung; but they had machines for those things now, didn’t they?
‘And the lymphatic system is affected. That much we can tag without actually cutting her open.’
‘You’re telling me Christine is very ill,’ Mrs Avery said in a quiet voice. ‘Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘It’s gone too far.’
For twenty years Mrs Avery had felt she’d been prepared for this. But she wasn’t prepared at all. She sat in silence and the doctor, whose time was valuable, permitted her the silence.
And then, tactfully defending her daughter, feeling out the finality of this verdict, she suggested that perhaps there had been an error.
‘Mrs Avery, we have your daughter’s records since birth.’
Mrs Avery put out her cigarette with a slow grinding. She sat very still, looking at the doctor. Her eyes remained fixed on him and he took their steadiness as a sign of her realism and self-control.
In fact Mrs Avery did not feel real at all. Everything seemed so unreal to her that she took this news as one more unreality among many. Children did not die and leave their parents to live on after them. Especially an only child. That was not reality; that was unbearable.
But Chris is not an only child, Mrs Avery tried to tell herself. We have two other children, two normal and lovely children.
But only one Chris, she thought. Only one Chris. Darkness closed over her.
‘Is there anything we ought to do?’ she said.
‘Anything you like. You can take her on a trip. Let her go on dancing. For the next two months or so she’ll seem normal. You won’t even have to tell her right away.’
‘And after the next two months?’
The doctor explained that at the present state of medical art very little could be done.
‘She wanted to live her life. What else could we have done, Doctor? Kept her in prison with round-the-clock nurses?’
The doctor sighed and Mrs Avery waited for an answer that did not come. Her hands lay still in her lap. The doctor noticed that they were small hands, smooth like a child’s, the fingers shaping an empty nest.
The doctor shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Our records show she’s only twenty.’
Mrs Avery sighed. She knew the doctor was tryin
g to be sympathetic.
He stood and made a dusting movement of his hands. ‘I’m very, very sorry.’
His glance touched her face and her lips in reflex went through the motion of ‘Thank you.’
As Steph stepped out on her mother’s floor she saw a man hurrying into the other elevator. Just as the door closed she glimpsed his face.
Marius Volmar.
Steph froze. It couldn’t be. My eyes must have been playing a trick.
She pushed the buzzer. Her mother came fluttering to the door in a bathrobe.
‘Oh, hi, honey,’ Anna said. ‘I was just putting on coffee. Would you like some?’
‘For a moment I thought I was barging in.’
‘Barging in on what?’
‘I thought I saw Marius Volmar getting into the other elevator.’
Anna’s mouth was a silent, whooshing O. So it was true.
‘No big deal,’ Steph said. Why shouldn’t her mother have a sex life? she thought; and then, But why does it have to be Marius Volmar?
Anna’s eyes sparkled wetly. ‘Honey, I’ve been so nervous—and lonely—’
‘It’s nothing to cry over.’
‘You’re angry at me. I can tell when you’re angry.’
It flashed through Steph that this was no accident. She visited her mother every Sunday morning. It was their weekly ritual. Anna couldn’t have suddenly forgotten what day it was. She had produced Marius Volmar on purpose. She was trying to prove something.
‘I can always tell when you have that pout. Don’t be angry with me, honey.’ Anna led the way to the kitchen. She walked as though her back ached. ‘You know, I’m human too—and I’m not exactly over the hill.’ From the stove she threw Steph a glance that hinted at all sorts of reproach. ‘Three years—three years I’ve been sitting in this apartment. You never phone, you never come over.’ Anna sat at the table. She poured coffee, shoved cups. ‘You don’t need me any more. I’m not part of your life.’
‘You’ll always be part of my life.’
Anna was silent and then she said in a voice edged in bitterness, ‘After tonight you’ll be a star. You’ll see me in Bloomingdale’s and you’ll say, ‘Who’s that old woman? Don’t I remember her from someplace?
‘That would never happen.’
‘A lot’s going to happen. It’s going to happen so fast you’ll be dizzy. I’m glad for you, honey, but I’ve got to be included somewhere.’ Anna hesitated and then her words came quickly, as though the faster they spilled the less responsibility she bore. ‘And Marius includes me! Maybe only an hour a week, but at least it’s every week and I can count on it and he makes me feel welcome!’
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