‘An hour a week?’ Steph’s face did not change but she spoke with a cruelty so deliberate it surprised her. ‘Eight to nine when the theatre’s dark?’
‘You’re young.’ Anna knotted her robe more tightly around her. ‘You don’t know what it’s like when there’s nothing left and you wake up wishing you were dead. You don’t know what it’s like when you dream about the days when you used to have something to dream about. You learn to settle for what you can get—and if you can get it, you grab it. Why not? Aren’t I entitled?’ She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her robe. ‘Honey, don’t I deserve anything? Haven’t I earned a little something nice?’
‘But why does it have to be Marius Volmar?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re trying to use him to push me. I don’t need your pushing. I’m fed up with it.’
‘Pushing?’ Anna smiled and shrugged. ‘Who’s got the time?’
‘And I’m fed up with your little white lies.’
Anna’s eyes darkened. Steel crept into her voice. ‘You calling your mother a liar? When did I lie to you? Go on, when did I ever lie to you?’
‘What do you call the way you connived to get me out of Empire?’
‘Oh. That.’
‘Yes. That.
‘Come on, what are we arguing for?’
‘You connived and you’ve always connived and you’re still conniving.’
‘Well, you just thank your lucky stars somebody connived. You’re a star, aren’t you?’
‘You think that justifies it?’
‘It justifies a hell of a lot.’
‘You don’t care who or what you wreck. Sometimes I wonder if you even know.’
‘What do you mean, you and that Danny kid?’
She’s admitting it, Steph thought. She’s admitting she wrecked Danny and me and she doesn’t even care.
‘He was nowhere,’ Anna said. ‘He was using you. He would have stepped on you first chance he got. I did you a favour.’
A taste of salt and anger flooded Steph’s mouth.
‘You would have ended up like me and your dad,’ Anna sighed.
I’m going to fight her this time, Steph thought, and her voice was as even as the blade of a sword. ‘And I wonder about Dad, too.’
‘What’s to wonder?’
‘I’ve always heard your side of it. Maybe there was another side.’
Anna pushed up from the table with such suddenness that the percolator almost tripped over its electric cord. She folded her arms and she had the grim taut mouth of a bank guard stationed at the vault.
‘Maybe he wasn’t such a monster,’ Steph said. ‘Maybe he wasn’t such a bad dancer, either. Maybe he would have had a career if you hadn’t connived and meddled and sabotaged.’
A rasping, mirthless chuckle came out of Anna. She shook her head, as though pitying the ignorance of children. ‘Me, sabotage? I stood beside that bastard, I ironed shirts and worked and slaved through thick and thin while he was running off getting lushed, every goddamned minute of that marriage was hell but I stayed with him and if you call that sabotage—’
‘He’s in the dance encyclopedias, Mom. Not you.’
The words yanked Anna around like a wire. ‘I would have been in the encyclopedias! Critics called me the Duse of the dance! There’d be roles in the repertory today and people would say, ‘Anna Barlow created that—and that—and that!’ I would’ve had a career, I’d be in Balanchine’s Stories of the Great Ballets—there’d be a dozen numbers after my name in the index—if it hadn’t been for that no-good drunken lush!’
‘Maybe that no-good drunken lush would be alive today—maybe he’d still be dancing—if you hadn’t—’
‘If I hadn’t what?’ The voice was a near scream. ‘You think I pulled the trigger? Well, let me tell you, little Miss Know-it-all—’
Anna stopped. Silence exploded.
‘What did you just say, Mom?’
Anna’s eyes faltered. She sat quickly. She fumbled with a coffee cup. ‘I said you’ve got your facts bass-ackwards.’
‘You said something else.’
‘I said you’ve got a performance tonight and let’s just relax.’
Steph shouted with a strength she’d never known was in her: ‘Did my father kill himself?’
Anna flinched as though ducking a punch. ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Did he kill himself?’
‘Look, why upset yourself—’
‘Answer me!’
Anna’s gaze rose slowly to meet her daughter’s. The words came whispering and low with no denial left in them. ‘All right, all right, yes, he killed himself, yes, he was a stinking no-good coward lush, yes, he ran off with the rent money and holed up in some hotel—Aw, honey, why do you want to hear this?’
‘I want to know!’
Anna was a puddle of bathrobe and tears spilling over the kitchen table. Steph had never seen her mother look so middle-aged and miserable.
‘He was with a hooker.’ Anna’s voice was a flat monotone. ‘He spent his last ten bucks to get laid and it was the last thing he ever did in his life. He had a right. He had a right. I wasn’t—letting him have any. But what did he ever give me except—’
She stared at Steph and began pounding the table. ‘Stop looking at me like that!’
Steph couldn’t react. She felt a knife had slit her from throat to stomach and every belief she had ever possessed or lived by had spilled into the gutter. ‘And all my life you told me—’
‘I was protecting you!’
‘From what?’
‘The truth! You weren’t old enough!’
‘And when would I have been old enough?’
‘Never! You would never have been old enough! Oh, honey, look at me. Not like that. Look at me! I did it for you!’
‘Did you?’ Steph said. ‘Did you ever do anything that wasn’t for you first, me second?’
‘All right, I did it for both of us, two birds with one stone, why not?’
‘Nothing was because you loved me.’
‘It was all for you—the toe shoes when I couldn’t afford them, the leg warmers I knitted myself, the lessons I had to go down on my knees and beg to get discounts for—and I’d do it all over again, honey, I’m so proud of you!’
‘You never gave me a choice. You never even gave me a chance!’
‘You had the best choice in the world—honey, you’re a dancer!’
Steph stared at the panic and apology smeared across her mother’s face. ‘And you never even asked if that was what I wanted.’
‘Wanted? Who wouldn’t want it! Of course you wanted it!’
Steph turned and walked out of the kitchen.
‘Honey—don’t go like that—I wanted to tell you merde for tonight!’
And out of the apartment.
Silence eddied through the kitchen.
Hands shaking, Anna telephoned Marius Volmar. It was almost eleven-thirty before she got an answer.
‘Marius—Steph knows. She saw you in the elevator.’
‘No secret keeps forever,’ Volmar said, and Anna could almost hear the voice shrug.
‘And she knows about Marty. She knows how he died.’
There was an intake of breath. ‘You told her? Today of all days?’
‘She wormed it out of me. She’s jealous, Marius. She’s jealous of you and me and she nagged and screamed and it just came out, I couldn’t help it.’
Volmar sighed. ‘Anna, Anna, Anna.’
‘Don’t just say Anna Anna Anna, what are we going to do?’
‘Stay away from Stephanie till after the performance, will you? I’ll think of a way to straighten it out.’
forty-eight
Marius Volmar took the little enamel box from the leather case of his mother’s possessions. He slipped it into his pocket. The padding in the corduroy jacket had slid like the silicone in an old strip teaser, and the box looked like another lump, nothing more.
&nb
sp; He planned to give it to her before the final dress rehearsal.
She was sitting in the wings stitching ribbons onto her toe shoes.
‘Stephanie,’ he said.
She looked up and a hesitation seized him. Her eyes were cool serene blanks and his tongue stuck to his teeth. It would be easier after the rehearsal, he decided. They’d be alone.
‘Watch those battements in your Act One variation.’
She nodded. He saw that a wall had risen between them. No matter. The little enamel box would break through it.
By two o’clock the company had gathered onstage. There had been no word from the musicians. The rehearsal piano was there and the rehearsal pianist was there just in case.
Volmar took a seat in the orchestra and stared up at the stage and down at the pit. The music waited, neatly laid out on the stands, but by ten after two not a single musician had appeared.
Volmar bent toward his microphone. ‘We’ll rehearse with piano. Prologue, please—omit the overture.’
The dancers got to their feet and went listlessly to their places. The piano hammered out the first chords. Volmar watched his girls and boys. He had a sinking impression of clean costumes and dirty toe shoes, movement without joy or jump to it, muscles cold and stiff and knotted with heartbreak.
He opened his notebook, then closed it again and laid it on the empty seat beside him. He sighed. There was no use having the ballet in a notebook: Sleeping Beauty was either there on the stage or she was nowhere.
He had a leaden feeling that she was nowhere.
The rehearsal tottered and staggered, barely maintained a forward direction. They drummed through four numbers of the prologue. Marius Volmar stared sadly at the corpse onstage.
And then he detected a flick of life.
Not on the stage. Below it.
He sat taller in his seat, squinting.
A shadow crept into the dark orchestra pit, and then he made out a clarinetist dropping a weighted handkerchief through his instrument. Lights clicked on at music stands, like the first brave stars on a smoggy night.
A double bass struggled in. The harpist pulled the cover off her harp and a dim curve of gold glimmered. There were voices and shuffling, woodwinds shrilling up and down scales, the pin-prick A of an oboe and the whine of strings slithering up to pitch.
The fat gorgeous cacophony drowned out the piano and the dancers stopped dead in their tracks. A little doughball of a dresser came running to the footlights, her mouth full of pins, and her mouth fell open, spilling every one of them.
Thank God, Volmar thought, thank you, God!
He spoke again into the microphone. ‘When the orchestra is ready, let’s take it again from the prologue, first number after the overture.’
The conductor rapped his podium. There was an instant’s silence. The baton flicked out a downbeat. Music flooded the stage, warm life-giving music, and the stage burst into a rush of rhythm and colour and movement. The dancers danced full out, bold and leaping and alive.
Volmar sank back in his chair, calm and still and exultant. His Sleeping Beauty was exactly as he had dreamed her and she was on the stage where she belonged.
The rehearsal raced forward. Stephanie’s pas seul and Rose Adagio brought roars of applause from the company.
There was no pain. Have I gone crazy? she wondered. She had been used and lied to and manipulated. Her life lay in pieces, like a flung crystal vase, and yet all she could feel was piqué, chassé, a leap, a catch, the music surging through her, singing and living through her, making her weightless, lifting her above gravity and time and care.
The company bravoed her Act Three pas de deux with Sasha and she smiled at him. I like him, she realized. I actually like the bastard. She was a dancer and she could afford to like him and she knew she would shine tonight.
After rehearsal Volmar went up onstage. Everything was chatter and smiles and excitement. Except him.
‘Stephanie.’
She stood staring at him with no particular concern. ‘Yes, Mr Volmar?’
Dancers and stagehands scurried past. The newborn premonition of success hung in the air like dust. He would have liked to be alone with her, out of sight of the others, out of earshot. At least in the wings. But he couldn’t find the courage to suggest it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t be. It had to happen.’
‘It shouldn’t have happened that way.’
She slipped into her robe. She seemed to care more about the knot than him. ‘It’s not worth an apology.’
‘I want to make it up to you anyway.’
One of her eyebrows lifted and made an angle. ‘There’s nothing to make up.’
‘I’ve hurt you.’
‘You’ve taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. When I dance nothing can hurt me.’
Her thoughts had travelled a great circle that day. She had passed through every degree of indecision and surrender and somehow come back to where she’d started.
She was a dancer.
Not because her mother or a puppeteer called Volmar wanted it, but because Stephanie Lang wanted it.
‘You’ve helped me, Mr Volmar, much more than you could ever hurt me. I’m sure people helped you when you were young, and hurt you. And someday when it’s my turn, I’ll help somebody else and probably hurt them too.’
He was standing close enough to smell the dampness in her hair. Go ahead, instinct urged. Give her the box. Give it to her now. You’ll never have another chance.
‘It takes a very special sort of person to understand that, Stephanie. And to be able to say it.’ His fingers fidgeted in his pocket. ‘I may not have always shown it—I may not ever have shown it—but you’re special to me. I’d like to show you just how very special.’
‘Mr Volmar, the only thing special about me is that I have a performance tonight. There’s a masseur waiting for me. I’d like to nap, I’d like to soak in a tub, and I have to get back to the theatre in time to warm up. So would you please excuse me?’
She walked with quick purpose into the wings, leaving him behind like an axed tree.
His heart reacted with a little tremor of shock. He forced himself to breathe deeply. The air was layered with rosin and sweat and body heat. A set squeaked as it flew up. He turned to stare at the naked stage and he saw a grey poodle prowling the cyclorama.
‘Merde! Merde! Where is my sweetheart, where is my naughty darling?’
Sasha Bunin came chasing after the dog. He caught it and cradled it and cooed to it. ‘Merdoushka moya—nye znayesh kak lublyu tebya?’
Revulsion made Volmar turn away: was the idiot going to sing ‘Ochi Chorniye’ to that animal?
The last dancers were hurrying from the stage, heading toward the showers and home for a rest before the gala. The stage lights had dimmed to a deep dusk and the wings hummed with fading laughter and chatter. Something warm and unexpected gusted through him and his glance edged back toward the cyclorama. An idea hummed in him.
He drew a deep breath, heaved his body erect with the fullness of his lungs. He crossed the stage. ‘The grand promenade of the guests worked today,’ he said.
Sasha looked up, surprised.
‘You taught them.’
Sasha’s face darkened. He shuffled nervously. ‘Maître, I did not teach. The dancers asked me. I described.’
‘You must have described it well.’
Sasha tossed out a shrug. ‘Nothing special. Kirov promenade. Same in Nutcracker, same in Giselle, same in Swan Lake.’
‘But it’s good,’ Volmar said. ‘You were right and I was wrong.’
There was astonishment and gratitude in Sasha’s expression. He seemed shy and almost delicate. In many ways, Volmar reflected, Sasha is a horse. He can pull loads. He puts up with whippings and spurrings. Words do not matter to him so much as the tone of voice. To keep his attention from straying to one side or another, he has to wear blinders. Changes of direction confuse him.
Sasha accepted the little package warily. Volmar had attacked him so often and in such ingenious ways that he dared not think what new attack the tissue paper might mask.
He felt the little package for weight and shape and hardness. His fingers detected no clear menace, but Volmar was a subtle man. He eased the little enamel box out of its wrapping.
His mouth dropped open. There was a mingling of wonder and reverence and dread in his eyes.
The thin line of Volmar’s lips could not help arching in a tiny smile. My jaw must have dropped like that. My eyes must have been just as ablaze and agog when I first touched that box.
‘I have seen one of these,’ Sasha said. ‘In the museum at the Kirov.’
‘Keep it.’
Sasha’s eyes peeked up timidly. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘But, maître—I am not worthy.’
‘You’ll learn to be.’
Sasha dropped to his knees and seized Volmar’s hand and pressed it to his lips. Volmar felt warm and embarrassed. He shook free.
‘Now, now, Aleksandr Fedorovich, it’s only a box.’
Sasha clasped the box to his heart. ‘Greatest honour Sasha has ever had.’
‘You’ll have other honours. Many, many others.’
‘Nothing ever like this. Tonight, for thank you, Sasha will dance Florimund like you have never seen.’
Conceited little bastard, Volmar thought. Conceited and reliable. Like me. And when I am gone, which may be in a day or a month or a year, he will inherit the company. And he will run it well.
Volmar smiled and rested a hand on Sasha’s back.
I have found my immortality at last.
A tranquillity descended on Volmar that he had not known in fifty years.
forty-nine
Steph was sitting at her mirror redoing her eyes. The dresser fussed with a zipper and warned her not to get make-up on the costume.
Ballerina Page 52
