The heat of July beat on the studio skylight and Madame sprayed the air with disinfectant. The starch in Alabama’s organdy skirts stuck to her hands and sweat rolled into her eyes till she couldn’t see. Choking dust rose off the floor, the intense glare threw a black gauze before her eyes. It was humiliating that Madame should have to touch her pupil’s ankles when they were so hot. The human body was very insistent. Alabama passionately hated her inability to discipline her own. Learning how to manage it was like playing a desperate game with herself. She said to herself, “My body and I,” and took herself for an awful beating: that was how it was done. Some of the dancers worked with a bath towel pinned around their necks. It was so hot under the burning roof that they needed something to absorb the sweat. Sometimes the mirror swam in red heat waves if Alabama’s lesson came at the hours when the direct sun fell on the glass overhead. Alabama was sick of moving her feet in the endless battements without music. She wondered why she came to her lessons at all: David had asked her to swim at Corne-Biche in the afternoon. She felt obscurely angry with Madame that she had not gone off in the cool with her husband. Though she did not believe that the careless happy passages of their first married life could be repeated—or relished if they were, drained as they had been of the experiences they held—still, the highest points of concrete enjoyment that Alabama visualized when she thought of happiness, lay in the memories they held.
“Will you pay attention?” Madame said. “This is for you.” Madame moved across the floor mapping the plan of a simple adagio.
“I can’t do it,” said Alabama. She began negligently, following the path of the Russian. Suddenly she stopped. “Oh, but it is beautiful!” she said rapturously.
The ballet mistress did not turn around. “There are many beautiful things in the dance,” she said laconically, “but you cannot do them—yet.”
After her lesson, Alabama folded her soaking clothes into her valise. Arienne wrung out her tights in pools of sweat on the floor. Alabama held the ends while she squeezed and twisted. It cost a lot of sweat to learn to dance.
“I am going away for a month,” Madame said one Saturday. “You can continue here with Mlle Jeanneret. I hope that when I come back you will be able to have the music.”
“Then I can’t have my lesson on Monday?” She had given so much of her time to the studio that it was like being precipitated into a void to think of life without it.
“With Mademoiselle.”
Alabama felt great hot tears rolling inexplicably down her face as she watched the tired figure of their teacher disappear in the dusty fog. She ought to be glad of the respite; she had expected to be glad.
“You must not cry,” the girl said to her kindly. “Madame must go away for her heart to Royat.” She smiled gently at Alabama. “We will get Stella to play for your lessons at once,” she said with the air of a conspirator.
Through the heat of August they worked. The leaves dried and decayed in the basin of St-Sulpice; the Champs-Elysées simmered in gasoline fumes. There was nobody in Paris; everybody said so. The fountains in the Tuileries threw off a hot vaporous mist; midinettes shed their sleeves. Alabama went twice a day to the studio. Bonnie was in Brittany visiting friends of Nanny. David drank with the crowds of people in the Ritz Bar celebrating the emptiness of the city together.
“Why will you never come out with me?” he said.
“Because I can’t work next day if I do.”
“Are you under the illusion that you’ll ever be any good at that stuff?”
“I suppose not; but there’s only one way to try.”
“We have no life at home any more.”
“You’re never there anyway—I’ve got to have something to do with myself.”
“Another female whine—I have to do my work.”
“I’ll do anything you want.”
“Will you come with me this afternoon?”
They went to Le Bourget and hired an aeroplane. David drank so much brandy before they left that by the time they were over the Porte St-Denis he was trying to get the pilot to take them to Marseilles. When they got back to Paris he urged Alabama to get out with him at the Café Lilas. “We’ll find somebody and have dinner,” he said.
“David, I can’t honestly. I get so sick when I drink. I’ll have to have morphine if I do, like last time.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to the studio.”
“Yet you can’t stay with me! What’s the use of having a wife? If a woman’s only to sleep with there are plenty available for that——”
“What’s the use of having a husband or anything else? You suddenly find you have them all the same, and there you are.”
The taxi whirred through the rue Cambon. Unhappily she climbed the steps. Arienne was waiting.
“What a sad face!” she said.
“Life is a sad business, isn’t it, my poor Alabama?” said Stella.
When the preliminary routines at the bar were over, Alabama and Arienne moved to the centre of the floor.
“Bien, Stella.”
The sad coquetries of a Chopin mazurka fell flat on the parched air. Alabama watched Arienne searching for the mental processes of Madame. She seemed very squat and sordid. She was the premiére danseuse of the Paris Opéra, nearly at the top. Alabama began sobbing inaudibly.
“Lives aren’t as hard as professions,” she gasped.
“Well,” Arienne cackled, exasperated, “this is not a pension de jeunes filles! Will you do the step your own way if you do not like the way I do?” She stood with her hands on her hips, powerful and uninspired, implying that Alabama’s knowledge of the step’s existence imposed on her the obligation to perform it. Somebody had to master the thing; it was there in the air. Arienne had put it there, let Arienne do it.
“It is for you, you know, that we work,” said Arienne harshly.
“My foot hurts,” said Alabama petulantly. “The nail has come off.”
“Then you must grow a harder one. Will you begin? Dva, Stella!”
Miles and miles of pas de bourrée, her toes picking the floor like the beaks of many feeding hens, and after ten thousand miles you got to advance without shaking your breasts. Arienne smelled of wet wool. Over and over she tried. Her ankles turned; her comprehension moved faster than her feet and threw her out of balance. She invented a trick: you must pull with your spirit against the forward motions of the body, and that gave you the tenebrous dignity and economy of effort known as style.
“But you are a bête, an impossible!” screeched Arienne. “You wish to understand it before you can do it.”
Alabama finally taught herself what it felt like to move the upper part of her body along as if it were a bust on wheels. Her pas de bourrée progressed like a flying bird. She could hardly keep from holding her breath when she did it.
When David asked about her dancing she adopted a superior manner. She felt he couldn’t have understood if she had tried to explain about the pas de bourrée. Once she did try. Her exposition had been full of “You-see-what-I-means” and “Can’t-you-understands,” and David was annoyed and called her a mystic.
“Nothing exists that can’t be expressed,” he said angrily.
“You are just dense. For me, it’s quite clear.”
David wondered if Alabama had ever really understood any of his pictures. Wasn’t any art the expression of the inexpressible? And isn’t the inexpressible always the same, though variable—like the X in physics? It may represent anything at all, but at the same time, it’s always actually X.
Madame came back during the September drouth.
“You have made much progress,” she said, “but you must get rid of your American vulgarities. You surely sleep too much. Four hours is enough.”
“Are you better for your treatments?”
“They put me in a cabinet,” she laughed. “I could only stay with somebody holding my hand. Rest is not commode for tired people. It is not good for a
rtists.”
“It has been a cabinet here this summer,” said Alabama savagely.
“And you still want to dance La Chatte, poor?”
Alabama laughed. “You will tell me,” she said, “when I do well enough to buy myself a tutu?”
Madame shrugged her shoulders, “Why not now?” she said.
“I’d like to be a fine dancer first.”
“You must work.”
“I work four hours a day.”
“It is too much.”
“Then how can I be a dancer?”
“I do not know how anybody can be anything,” said the Russian.
“I will burn candles to St. Joseph.”
“Perhaps that will help; a Russian saint would be better.”
During the last days of the hot weather David and Alabama moved to the Left Bank. Their apartment, tapestried in splitting yellow brocade, looked out over the dome of St-Sulpice. Old women hatched in the shadows about the corners of the cathedral; the bells tolled incessantly for funerals. The pigeons that fed in the square ruffled themselves on their window ledge. Alabama sat in the night breezes, holding her face to the succulent heavens, brooding. Her exhaustion slowed up her pulses to the tempo of her childhood. She thought of the time when she was little and had been near her father—by his aloof distance he had presented himself as an infallible source of wisdom, a bed of sureness. She could trust her father. She half hated the unrest of David, hating that of herself that she found in him. Their mutual experiences had formed them mutually into an unhappy compromise. That was the trouble: they hadn’t thought they would have to make any adjustments as their comprehensions broadened their horizons, so they accepted those necessary reluctantly, as compromise instead of as change. They had thought they were perfect and opened their hearts to inflation but not alteration.
The air grew damp with autumn maze. They dined here and there amongst the jeweled women glittering like bright scaled fish in an aquarium. They went for walks and taxi rides. A growing feeling of alarm in Alabama for their relationship had tightened itself to a set determination to get on with her work. Pulling the skeleton of herself over a loom of attitude and arabesque, she tried to weave the strength of her father and the young beauty of her first love with David, the happy oblivion of her teens and her warm protected childhood into a magic cloak. She was much alone.
David was a gregarious person; he went out a great deal. Their life moved along with a hypnotic pound and nothing seemed to matter short of murder. She presumed they wouldn’t kill anybody—that would bring the authorities; all the rest was bunk, like Jacques and Gabrielle had been. She didn’t care—she honestly didn’t care a damn about the loneliness. Years later, she was surprised to remember that a person could have been so tired as she was then.
Bonnie had a French governess who poisoned their meals with “N’est-ce pas, Monsieur?” and “Du moins, J’aurais pensée.” She chewed with her mouth open and the crumbs of sardines about the gold fillings of her teeth nauseated Alabama. She ate staring out on the bare autumnal court. She would have got another governess, but something was sure to happen with things at such a tension and she thought she’d wait.
Bonnie was growing fast and full of anecdotes of Josette and Claudine and the girls at her school. She subscribed to a child’s publication, outgrew the guignol, and began to forget her English. A certain reserve manifested itself in her dealings with her parents. She was very superior with her old English-speaking Nanny, who took her out on the days of Mademoiselle’s sortie: exciting days when the apartment reeked of Coty’s L’Origan and Bonnie incurred eruptions on her face from the scones at Rumpelmayer’s. Alabama could never make Nanny admit that Bonnie had eaten them; Nanny insisted the spots were in the blood and that it was better for them to come out, hinting at a sort of exorcising of hereditary evil spirits.
David bought Alabama a dog. They named him Adage. The femme de chambre addressed him as “Monsieur” and cried when he was spanked so nobody could ever house-train the beast. They kept him in the guest room with the photographic likenesses of the apartment owner’s immediate family peering through the fumes of his saleté.
Alabama felt very sorry for David. He and she appeared to her like people in a winter of adversity picking over old garments left from a time of wealth. They repeated themselves to each other; she dragged out old expressions that she knew he must be tired of; he bore her little show with a patent mechanical appreciation. She felt sorry for herself. She had always been so proud of being a good stage manager.
November filtered the morning light to a golden powder that hung over Paris stabilizing time till the days stayed at morning all day long. She worked in the gray gloom of the studio and felt very professional in the discomfort of the unheated place. The girls dressed by an oil stove that Alabama bought for Madame; the dressing room reeked of glue from the toe shoes warming over the thin blaze, of stale eau de cologne, and of poverty. When Madame was late, the dancers warmed themselves by doing a hundred relevés to the chanted verses of Verlaine. The windows could never be opened because of the Russians, and Nancy and May, who had worked with Pavlova, said the smell made them sick. May lived at the Y.W.C.A. and wanted Alabama to come to tea. One day, as they were going down the steps together, she said to Alabama that she could not dance any more, that she was quite sick.
“Madame’s ears are so filthy, my dear,” she said, “it makes me quite sick.”
Madame had made May dance behind the others. Alabama laughed at the girl’s disingenuousness.
There was Marguerite, who came in white, and Fania in her dirty rubber undergarments, and Anise and Anna who lived with millionaires and dressed in velvet tunics, and Céza in gray and scarlet—they said she was a Jew—and somebody else in blue organdie, and thin girls in apricot draperies like folds of skin, and three Tanyas like all the other Russian Tanyas, and girls in the starkness of white who looked like boys in swimming, and girls in black who looked like women, a superstitious girl in mauve, and one dressed by her mother who wore cerise to blind them all in that pulsating gyroscope, and the thin pathetic femininity of Marte, who danced at the Opéra Comique and swept off belligerently after classes with her husband.
Arienne Jeanneret dominated the vestibule. She dressed with her face to the wall and had many preparations for rubbing herself and bought fifty pairs of toe slippers at a time, which she gave to Stella when she’d worn them a week. She kept the girls quiet when Madame was giving a lesson. The vulgarity of her hips repelled Alabama but they were good friends. It was with Arienne that she sat in the café under the Olympia after their lessons and drank the daily Cap Corse with seltzer. Arienne took her backstage at the Opéra where the dancer was well respected, and Arienne came to lunch with Alabama. David hated her guts because she tried to give him moral lectures about his opinions and his drinking, but she was not bourgeoise: she was gamine, full of strident jokes about firemen and soldiers, and Montmartre songs about priests and peasants and cuckolds. She was almost an elf, but her stockings were always wrinkled and she talked in sermons.
She took Alabama to see Pavlova’s last performance. Two men like Beerbohm cartoons asked to see them home. Arienne refused.
“Who are they?” asked Alabama.
“I do not know—subscribers to the Opéra.”
“Then why do you talk to them if you’ve never met them?”
“One does not meet the patrons of the first three rows of the National Opéra; the seats are reserved for men,” said Arienne. She herself lived with her brother near the Bois. Sometimes she cried in the dressing room.
“Zambelli still dancing Coppélia!” she’d say. “You don’t know how difficult life is, Alabama, you with your husband and your baby.” When she cried the black came off her eyelashes and dried in lumps like a wet watercolor. There was a spiritual open space between her gray eyes that seemed as pure as an open daisy field.
“Oh, Arienne!” said Madame enthusiastically. “There’s a dancer! Wh
en she cries it is not for nothing.” Alabama’s face grew colorless with fatigue and her eyes sank in her head like the fumes of autumnal fires.
Arienne helped her to master the entrechats.
“You must not rest when you come down after the spring,” she said, “but you must depart again immediately, so that the impetus of the first leap carries you through the others like the bouncing of a ball.”
“Da,” said Madame, “da! da!—But it is not enough.” It was never enough to please Madame.
She and David slept late on Sundays, dining at Foyot’s or someplace near their home.
“We promised your mother to come home for Christmas,” he said over many tables.
“Yes, but I don’t see how we can go. It’s so expensive, and you haven’t finished your Paris pictures.”
“I’m glad you are not too disappointed because I had decided to wait until spring.”
“There’s Bonnie’s school, too. It would be a shame to switch just now.”
“We’ll go for Easter, then.”
“Yes.”
Alabama did not want to leave Paris where they were so unhappy. Her family grew very remote with the distention of her soul in schstay and pirouette.
Stella brought a Christmas cake to the studio, and two chickens for Madame that she had received from her uncle in Normandy. Her uncle wrote her that he could send no more money: the franc was down to forty. Stella made her living copying sheet music, which ruined her eyes and left her starving. She lived in a garret and got sinus trouble from the drafts, but she would not give up wasting her days at the studio.
“What can a Pole do in Paris?” she said to Alabama. What can anybody do in Paris? When it comes to fundamentals, nationalities do not count for much.
Madame got Stella a job turning pages for musicians at concerts, and Alabama paid her ten francs a pair for darning her toe shoes on the ends to keep them from slipping.
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 15
