“You need somebody to take care of you,” he said seriously. “You’re a man’s woman and need to be bossed. No, I mean it,” he insisted when Alabama began to laugh.
Nourishing his roots on the disingenuous expectations of ladies whose exploits permitted them a remembrance of the fairy tales, Alabama concluded that he was nevertheless not a prince.
“I was just going to begin doing it myself,” she chuckled. “I made a date with the Princess and Dickie to arrange for a future. In the meantime, it is exceedingly difficult to direct a life which has no direction.”
“You’ve a child, haven’t you?” he suggested.
“Yes,” she said, “there’s the baby—life goes on.”
“This party,” said Dickie, “has been going on forever. They’re saving the signatures on the earliest checks for the war museum.”
“What we need is new blood in the party.”
“What we all need,” said Alabama impatiently, “is a good——”
The dawn swung over the Place Vendôme with the slow silver grace of a moored dirigible. Alabama and Hastings spilled into the Knights’ gray apartment on the morning like a shower of last night’s confetti shaken from the folds of a cloak.
“I thought David would be at home,” she said, searching the bedroom.
“I didn’t,” Hastings mocked. “For I, thy God, am a Jewish God, Baptist God, Catholic God——”
She had wanted to cry for a long time, she realized suddenly. In the weary stuffiness of the salon she collapsed. Sobbing and shaking, she did not lift her face when David finally stumbled into the dry, hot room. She lay sprawled like a damp wrung towel over the windowsill, like the transparent shed carcass of a brilliant insect.
“I suppose you’re awfully angry,” he said.
Alabama didn’t speak.
“I’ve been out all night,” explained David cheerfully, “on a party.”
She wished she could help David to seem more legitimate. She wished she could do something to keep everything from being so undignified. Life seemed so uselessly extravagant.
“Oh, David,” she sobbed. “I’m much too proud to care——pride keeps me from feeling half the things I ought to feel.”
“Care about what? Haven’t you had a good time?” mumbled David placatively.
“Perhaps Alabama’s angry about my not getting sentimental about her,” said Hastings, hastily extricating himself. “Anyway I’ll just run along if you don’t mind. It must be quite late.”
The morning sun shone brightly through the windows.
For a long time she lay sobbing. David took her on his shoulder. Under his arms smelled warm and clean like the smoke of a quiet fire burning in a peasant’s mountain cottage.
“There’s no use explaining,” he said.
“Not the slightest.”
She tried to see him through the early dusk.
“Darling!” she said, “I wish I could live in your pocket.”
“Darling,” answered David sleepily, “there’d be a hole you’d forgotten to darn and you’d slip through and be brought home by the village barber. At least, that’s been my experience with carrying girls about in my pockets.”
Alabama thought she’d better put a pillow under David’s head to keep him from snoring. She thought he looked like a little boy who had just been washed and brushed by a nurse a few minutes before. Men, she thought, never seem to become the things they do, like women, but belong to their own philosophic interpretations of their actions.
“I don’t care,” she repeated convincingly to herself: as neat an incision into the tissue of life as the most dexterous surgeon could hope to produce over a poisoned appendix. Filing away her impressions like a person making a will, she bequeathed each passing sensation to that momentary accumulation of her self, the present, that filled and emptied with the overflow.
It’s too late in the morning for peccadilloes; the sun bathes itself with the night’s cadavers in the typhus-laden waters of the Seine; the market carts have long since rumbled back to Fontainebleau and St-Cloud; the early operations are done in the hospitals; the inhabitants of the Ile de la Cité have had their bowl of café au lait and the night chauffeurs un verre. The Paris cooks have brought down the refuse and brought up the coal, and many people with tuberculosis wait in the damp bowels of the earth for the Metro. Children play in the grassplots about the Tour Eiffel and the white floating veils of English nannies and the blue veils of the French nounous flap out the news that all is well along the Champs-Elysées. Fashionable women powder their noses in their Porto glasses under the trees of the Pavilion Dauphine, just now opening its doors to the creak of Russian leather riding boots. The Knights’ femme de chambre has orders to wake her masters in time for lunch in the Bois de Boulogne.
When Alabama tried to get up she felt nervous, she felt monstrous, she felt bilious.
“I can’t stand this any longer,” she screamed at the dozing David. “I don’t want to sleep with the men or imitate the women, and I can’t stand it!”
“Look out, Alabama, I’ve got a headache,” David protested.
“I won’t look out! I won’t go to lunch! I’m going to sleep till time to go to the studio.”
Her eyes glowed with the precarious light of a fanatic determination. There were white triangles under her jawbone and blue rings around her neck. Her skin smelled of dry dirty powder from the night before.
“Well, you can’t sleep sitting up,” he said.
“I can do exactly as I please,” she said; “anything! I can sleep when I’m awake if I want to!”
David’s delight in simplicity was something very complex that a simple person would never have understood. It kept him out of many arguments.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll help you.”
The macabre who lived through the war have a story they love to tell about the soldiers of the Foreign Legion giving a ball in the expanses around Verdun and dancing with the corpses. Alabama’s continued brewing of the poisoned filter for a semiconscious banquet table, her insistence on the magic and glamour of life when she was already feeling its pulse like the throbbing of an amputated leg, had something of the same sinister quality.
Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant. Compared to Alabama’s, David’s material wisdom was so profound that it gleamed strong and harmonious through the confusion of these times.
“Poor girl,” he said, “I understand. It must be awful just waiting around eternally.”
“Aw, shut up!” she answered ungratefully. She lay silent for a long time. “David,” she said sharply.
“Yes.”
“I am going to be as famous a dancer as there are blue veins over the white marble of Miss Gibbs.”
“Yes, dear,” agreed David noncommittally.
3
I
The High parabolas of Schumann fell through the narrow brick court and splashed against the red walls in jangling crescendo. Alabama traversed the dingy passage behind the stage of the Olympia Music Hall. In the gray gloom the name of Raquel Meller faded across a door marked with a scaling gold star; the paraphernalia of a troupe of tumblers obstructed the stairway. She mounted seven flights of stairs worn soft and splintery with the insecure passage of many generations of dancers and opened the studio door. The hydrangea blue of the walls and the scrubbed floor hung from the skylight like the basket of a balloon suspended in the ether. Effort and aspiration, excitement, discipline, and an overwhelming seriousness flooded the vast barn of a room. A muscular girl stood in the centre of this atmosphere winding the ends of space about the rigidity of her extended thigh. Round and round she went, and, dropping the thrill of the exciting spiral to the low, precise organization of a lullaby, brought herself to an orgastic pause. She walked awkwardly across to Alabama.
“I have a lesson with Madame at three,” Alabama addressed the gi
rl in French. “It was arranged by a friend.”
“She is coming soon,” the dancer said with an air of mockery. “You will get ready, perhaps?”
Alabama couldn’t decide whether the girl was ridiculing the world in general or Alabama in particular, or, perhaps, herself.
“You have danced a long while?” asked the dancer.
“No. This is my first lesson.”
“Well, we all begin sometime,” said the girl tolerantly.
She twirled blindingly three or four times to end the conversation.
“This way,” she said, indicating her lack of interest in a novice. She showed Alabama into the vestibule.
Along the walls of the dressing room hung the long legs and rigid feet of flesh and black tights molded in sweat to the visual image of the decisive tempos of Prokofiev and Sauguet, of Poulenc and Falla. The bright, explosive carnation of a ballet skirt projected under the edges of a face towel. In a corner the white blouse and pleated skirt of Madame hung behind a faded gray curtain. The room reeked of hard work.
A Polish girl with hair like a copper-wire dishcloth and a purple, gnomish face bent over a straw chest sorting torn sheets of music and arranging a pile of discarded tunics. Odd toe shoes swung from the light. Turning the pages of a ragged Beethoven album, the Pole unearthed a faded photograph.
“I think it is her mother,” she said to the dancer.
The dancer inspected the picture proprietorily; she was the ballerina.
“I think, ma chère Stella, that it is Madame herself when she was young. I shall keep it!” She laughed lawlessly and authoritatively—she was the centre of the studio.
“No, Arienne Jeanneret. It is I who will keep it.”
“May I see the picture?” asked Alabama.
“It is certainly Madame herself.”
Arienne handed the picture to Alabama with a shrug of dismissal. Her motions had no continuity; she was utterly immobile between the spasmodic electric vibrations that propelled her body from one cataclysmic position to another.
The eyes of the picture were round and sad and Russian, a dreamy consciousness of its own white dramatic beauty gave the face weight and purpose as if the features were held together by spiritual will. The forehead was bound by a broad metallic strip after the fashion of a Roman charioteer. The hands posed in experimental organization on the shoulders.
“Is she not beautiful?” asked Stella.
“She’s not un-American,” Alabama answered.
The woman reminded her obscurely of Joan; there was the same transparence about her sister that shone through the face in the picture like the blinding glow of a Russian winter. It was perhaps a kindred intensity of heat that had worn Joan to that thin external radiance.
The girl turned quickly, listening to the tired footsteps of someone hesitantly traversing the studio.
“Where have you found that old picture?” Madame’s voice, broken with sensitivity, would have you believe that it was apologetic. Madame smiled. She was not humorless, but no manifestation of her emotions intruded on the white possessed mysticism of her face.
“In the Beethoven.”
“Before,” Madame said succinctly, “I turned out the lights in my apartment and played Beethoven. My sitting room in Petrograd was yellow and always full of flowers. I said then to myself, ‘I am too happy. This cannot last.’ ” She waved her hand resignedly and raised her eyes challengingly to Alabama.
“So my friend tells me you want to dance? Why? You have friends and money already.” The black eyes moved in frank childish inspection over Alabama’s body, loose and angular as those silver triangles in an orchestra—over her broad shoulder blades and the imperceptible concavity of her long legs, fused together and controlled by the resilient strength of her thick neck. Alabama’s body was like a quill.
“I have been to the Russian ballet,” Alabama tried to explain herself, “and it seemed to me—Oh, I don’t know! As if it held all the things I’ve always tried to find in everything else.”
“What have you seen?”
“La Chatte, Madame, I must do that someday!” Alabama replied impulsively.
A faint flicker of intrigued interest moved the black eyes recessionally. Then the personality withdrew from the face. Looking into her eyes was like walking through a long stone tunnel with a gray light shining at the other end, sloshing blindly through dank dripping earth over a moist curving bottom.
“You are too old. It is a beautiful ballet. Why have you come to me so late?”
“I didn’t know before. I was too busy living.”
“And now you have done all your living?”
“Enough to be fed up,” laughed Alabama.
The woman moved quietly about amongst the appurtenances of the dance.
“We will see,” she said. “Make yourself ready.”
Alabama hastily dressed herself. Stella showed her about tying her toe shoes back of her anklebones so the knot of the ribbon lay hid in a hollow.
“About La Chatte——” said the Russian.
“Yes?”
“You cannot do that. You must not build your hopes so high.” The sign above the woman’s head said, “Do Not Touch the Looking Glass” in French, English, Italian, and Russian. Madame stood with her back to the huge mirror and gazed at the far corners of the room. There was no music as they began.
“You will have the piano when you have learned to control your muscles,” she explained. “The only way, now that it is so late, is to think constantly of placing your feet. You must always stand with them so.” Madame spread her split satin shoes horizontally. “And you must stretch so fifty times in the evenings.”
She pulled and twisted the long legs along the bar. Alabama’s face grew red with effort. The woman was literally stripping the muscles of her thighs. She could have cried out with pain. Looking at Madame’s smoky eyes and the red gash of her mouth, Alabama thought she saw malice in the face. She thought Madame was a cruel woman. She thought Madame was hateful and malicious.
“You must not rest,” Madame said. “Continue.”
Alabama tore at her aching limbs. The Russian left her alone to work at the fiendish exercise. Reappearing, she sprayed herself unconcernedly before the glass with an atomizer.
“Fatiguée?” she called over her shoulder nonchalantly.
“Yes,” said Alabama.
“But you must not stop.”
After a while the Russian approached the bar.
“When I was a little girl in Russia,” she said impassively, “I did four hundred of those every night.”
Rage rose in Alabama like the gurgling of gasoline in a visible tank. She hoped the contemptuous woman knew how much she hated her. “I will do four hundred.”
“Luckily, the Americans are athletic. They have more natural talent than the Russians,” Madame remarked. “But they are spoiled with ease and money and plenty of husbands. That is enough for today. You have some eau de cologne?”
Alabama rubbed herself with the cloudy liquid from Madame’s atomizer. She dressed amongst the confused startled eyes and naked bodies of a class which drifted in. The girls spoke hilariously in Russian. Madame invited her to wait and see the work.
A man sat sketching on a broken iron chair; two heavy bearded personages of the theatre pointed to first one, then another of the girls; a boy in black tights with his head in a bandanna package and the face of a mythical pirate pulverized the air with ankle beats.
Mysteriously the ballet grouped itself. Silently it unfolded its mute clamor in the seductive insolence of back jetés, insouciant pas de chats, the abandon of many pirouettes, launched its fury in the spring and stretch of the Russian schstay,1 and lulled itself to rest in a sweep of cradling chassés. Nobody spoke. The room was as still as a cyclone center.
“You like it?” said Madame implacably.
Alabama felt her face flush with a hot gush of embarrassment. She was very tired from her lesson. Her body ached and trembled. This fir
st glimpse of the dance as an art opened up a world. “Sacrilege!” she felt like crying out to the posturing abandon of the past as she thought ignominiously of The Ballet of the Hours that she had danced ten years before. She remembered unexpectedly the exaltation of swinging sideways down the pavements as a child and clapping her heels in the air. This was close to that old forgotten feeling that she couldn’t stay on the earth another minute.
“I love it. What is it?”
The woman turned away. “It is a ballet of mine about an amateur who wanted to join a circus,” she said. Alabama wondered how she’d thought those nebulous amber eyes were soft; they seemed to be infernally laughing at her. Madame went on: “You will work again at three tomorrow.”
Alabama rubbed her legs with Elizabeth Arden muscle oil night after night. There were blue bruises inside above the knee where the muscles were torn. Her throat was so dry that at first she thought she had fever and took her temperature and was disappointed to find that she had none. In her bathing suit she tried to stretch on the high back of a Louis Quatorze sofa. She was always stiff, and she clutched the gilt flowers in pain. She fastened her feet through the bars of the iron bed and slept with her toes glued outwards for weeks. Her lessons were agony.
At the end of a month, Alabama could hold herself erect in ballet position, her weight controlled over the balls of her feet, holding the curve of her spine drawn tight together like the reins of a racehorse and mashing down her shoulders till they felt as if they were pressed flat against her hips. The time moved by in spasmodic jumps like a school clock. David was glad of her absorption at the studio. It made them less inclined to use up their leisure on parties. Alabama’s leisure was a creaky muscle-sore affair and better spent at home. David could work more freely when she was occupied and making fewer demands on his time.
At night she sat in the window too tired to move, consumed by a longing to succeed as a dancer. It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her—that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self—that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 14
