Save Me the Waltz: A Novel

by Zelda Fitzgerald

  Alabama approached the visionary figure, advancing behind her shoulder blades, bearing her body tightly possessed, like a lance in steady hands. A smile strained over her features painfully—pleasure in the dance is a hard-earned lesson. Her neck and chest were hot and red; the back of her shoulders strong and thick, lying over her thin arms like a massive yoke. She peered gently at the white lady.

  “What do you find in the air that way?”

  There was an aura of vast tenderness and of abnegation about the Russian.

  “Forms, child, shapes of things.”

  “It is beautiful?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will dance it.”

  “Well, pay attention to the design. You do well the steps, but you never follow the configuration: without that, you cannot speak.”

  “You will see if I can do it.”

  “Go, then! Chérie, it is my first role.”

  Alabama yielded herself to the slow dignity of the selfless ritual, to the voluptuous flagellation of the Russian minors. Slowly she moved to the protestations of the adagio from Le Lac des Cygnes.

  “Wait a minute.”

  Her eyes caught the white transparent face in the glass. The two smiles met and splintered.

  “But I will do it if I break my leg,” she said, beginning again.

  The Russian gathered her shawl about her shoulders. From a deep mysticism she said tentatively and without conviction, “It is not worth that trouble—then you could not dance.”

  “No,” said Alabama, “it’s not worth the trouble.”

  “Then, little one,” sighed the aging ballerina, “you will do it—just right.”

  “We will try.”

  The new studio was different. Madame had less space to spare; she gave fewer lessons for nothing. There was no room in the dressing room to practice changement de pieds. The tunics were cleaner since there was no place to leave them to dry. There were many English girls in the classes who still believed in the possibility of both living and dancing, filling the vestibule with gossip of boat rides on the Seine and soirées in the Montparnasse.

  It was awful in the afternoon classes. A black fog from the station hung over the studio skylight, and there were too many men. A Negro classicist from the Folies-Bergère appeared at the bar. He had a gorgeous body but the girls laughed. They laughed at Alexandre with his intellectual face and glasses—he used to own a box at the ballet in Moscow when he had been in the army. They laughed at Boris, who stopped in the café next door for ten drops of valerian before his lessons; they laughed at Schiller because he was old and his face was puffy from years of makeup like a bartender’s or a clown’s. They laughed at Danton because he could toe-dance, though he tried to restrain how superb he was to look at. They laughed at everybody except Lorenz—nobody could have laughed at Lorenz. He had the face of an eighteenth-century faun; his muscles billowed with proud perfection. To watch his brown body ladling out the measures of a Chopin mazurka was to feel yourself anointed with whatever meaning you may have found in life. He was shy and gentle, though the finest dancer in the world, and sometimes sat with the girls after classes, drinking coffee from a glass and munching Russian rolls soggy with poppy seeds. He understood the elegant cerebral abandon of Mozart, and had perceived the madnesses against which the consciousness of the race sets up an early vaccine for those intended to deal in reality: The voluptés of Beethoven were easy for Lorenz, and he did not have to count the churning revolutions of modern musicians. He said he could not dance to Schumann, and he couldn’t, being always ahead or behind the beat whipping the romantic cadences beyond recognition. He was perfection to Alabama.

  Arienne bought her way free from laughter with gnomish venom and an impeccable technique.

  “What a wind!” somebody would cry.

  “It is Arienne turning,” was the answer. Her favorite musician was Liszt. She played on her body as if it were a xylophone, and had made herself indispensable to Madame. When Madame called out ten or so consecutive steps only Arienne could put them together. Her rigid insteps and the points of her toe shoes sliced the air like a sculptor’s scalpel, but her arms were stubby and could not reach the infinite, frustrated by the weight of great strength and the broken lines of too much muscle. She loved telling how when she had been operated on the doctors came to look anatomically at the muscles in her back.

  “But you have made much progress,” the girls said to Alabama, crowding before her to the front of the class.

  “You will leave a place for Alabama,” corrected Madame.

  She did four hundred battements every night.

  Arienne and Alabama split the cost of the taxi each day as far as the Place de la Concorde. Arienne insisted that Alabama come to lunch at her apartment.

  “I go so much with you,” she said. “I do not like to be indebted.”

  It was a desire to discover what they were mutually jealous of in each other that drew them together. In both of them there was an undercurrent of disrespect for discipline which allied them in a hoydenish comradeship.

  “You must see my dogs,” said Arienne. “There is one who is a poet and the other who is very well trained.”

  There were ferns, silvery in the sun, on little tables and many autographed photographs.

  “I have no photograph of Madame.”

  “Perhaps she will give us one.”

  “We can buy one from the photographer who made the proofs the last year she danced in the ballet,” suggested Arienne illicitly.

  Madame was both pleased and angry when they carried the photographs to the studio.

  “I will give you better ones,” she said.

  She gave Alabama a picture of herself in Carnaval in a wide polka-dotted dress which her fingers held like a butterfly wing. Madame’s hands constantly surprised Alabama: they were not long and thin; they were stubby. Arienne never got her picture, and she begrudged Alabama the photograph and grew more jealous than ever.

  Madame gave a housewarming at the studio. They drank many bottles of sweet champagne that the Russians provided, and ate the sticky Russian cakes. Alabama contributed two magnums of Pol Roger Brut, but the Prince, Madame’s husband, had been educated in Paris, and he took them home to drink for himself.

  Alabama was nauseated from the gummy pastry—the Prince was delegated to ride with her in the taxi.

  “I smell lily of the valley everywhere,” she said. Her head swam with the heat and the wine. She held onto the straps of the car to keep herself from throwing up.

  “You are working too hard,” said the Prince.

  His face was gaunt in the passing flares from the streetlamps. People said he kept a mistress on the money he had from Madame. The pianist kept her husband; he was sick—almost everybody kept somebody else. Alabama could barely remember when that would have offended her—it was just the exigencies of life.

  David said he would help her to be a fine dancer, but he did not believe that she could become one. He had made many friends in Paris. When he came from his studio he nearly always brought somebody home. They dined out amongst the prints of Montagné’s, the leather and stained glass of Foyot’s, the plush and bouquets of the restaurants around the Place de l’Opéra. If she tried to induce David to go home early, he grew angry.

  “What right have you to complain? You have cut yourself off from all your friends with this damn ballet.”

  With his friends they drank Chartreuse along the boulevards under the rose-quartz lamps, and the trees, wielded by the night over the streets like the feathery fans of acquiescent courtesans.

  Alabama’s work grew more and more difficult. In the mazes of the masterful fouetté her legs felt like dangling hams; in the swift elevation of the entrechat cinq she thought her breasts hung like old English dugs. It did not show in the mirror. She was nothing but sinew. To succeed had become an obsession. She worked till she felt like a gored horse in the bullring, dragging its entrails.

  At home, the household fell into
a mass of dissatisfaction without an authority to harmonize its elements. Before she left the apartment in the morning Alabama left a list of things for lunch which the cook never bothered to prepare—the woman kept the butter in the coal bin and stewed a rabbit every day for Adage and gave the family what she pleased to eat. There wasn’t any use getting another; the apartment was no good anyway. The life at home was simply an existence of individuals in proximity; it had no basis of common interest.

  Bonnie thought of her parents as something pleasant and incalculable as Santa Claus that had no real bearing on her life outside the imprecations of Mademoiselle.

  Mademoiselle took Bonnie for promenades in the Luxembourg Gardens, where the child seemed very French in her short white gloves bowling her hoop between the beds of metallic zinnias and geraniums. She was growing fast; Alabama wanted her to start training for the ballet—Madame had promised to give her a debut when she found time. Bonnie said she didn’t want to dance, an incomprehensible aversion to Alabama. Bonnie reported that Mademoiselle walked with a chauffeur in the Tuileries. Mademoiselle said it was beneath her dignity to contest the supposition. The cook said the hairs in the soup were from the black mustachios of Marguerite, the maid. Adage ate up in a silk canapé. David said the apartment was a pest house: the people upstairs played “Punchinello” at nine in the morning on their gramophone and cut short his sleep. Alabama spent more and more time at the studio.

  Madame at last took Bonnie as a pupil. It was thrilling to her mother to see her little legs and arms seriously follow the sweeping movements of the dancer. The new Mademoiselle had worked for an English duke; she complained that the atmosphere of the studio was not fit for the little girl. That was because she couldn’t speak Russian. She thought the girls were Fiends Infernal jabbering in the cacophony of a strange tongue and posturing immodestly before the mirror. The new Mademoiselle was a lady neurasthenic. Madame said Bonnie did not seem to have talent, but it was too soon to tell.

  One morning Alabama came early to her lesson. Paris is a pen-and-ink drawing before nine o’clock. To avoid the thick traffic of the Boulevard des Batignolles, Alabama tried the Metro. It smelled of fried potatoes, and she slipped in the spit on the dank stairs. She was afraid of getting her feet crushed in the crowd. Stella waited for her in tears in the vestibule.

  “You must take my part,” she said. “Arienne does nothing but abuse me; I mend her shoes and piece her music and Madame has offered me to gain money by playing for her lessons and she refuses.”

  Arienne was bent over her straw chest in the dark, packing.

  “I shall never dance again,” she said. “Madame has time for children, time for amateurs, time for everybody, but Arienne Jeanneret must work at hours when she cannot get a decent pianist to play.”

  “I do my best. You have only to tell me,” Stella sobbed.

  “I am telling you. You are a nice girl, but you play the piano like a cochon!”

  “If you would only explain what you want,” pled Stella. It was horrible to see the dwarfish face red and swollen with fright and tears.

  “I explain at this instant. I am an artist, not a teacher of piano. So Arienne goes that Madame may continue her kindergarten.” She, too, was crying angrily.

  “If anybody goes, Arienne,” said Alabama, “it will be me. Then you may have your hour again.”

  Arienne turned to her, sobbing.

  “I have explained to Madame that I cannot work at night after my rehearsals. My lessons cost money; I cannot afford them. I must make progress when I am here. I pay the same as you,” sobbed Arienne.

  She turned defiantly to Alabama.

  “I live by my work,” she said contemptuously.

  “Children have to begin,” said Alabama. “It was you who said one must begin sometime—the first time I ever saw you.”

  “Certainly. Then let them begin like the others, with the less great.”

  “I will share my time with Bonnie,” Alabama said at last. “You must stay.”

  “You are very good.” Arienne laughed suddenly. “Madame is a weak woman—always for something new,” she said. “I will stay, however, for the present.”

  She kissed Alabama impulsively on her nose.

  Bonnie protested her lessons. She had three hours a week of Madame’s time. Madame was fascinated by the child. The woman’s personal emotions had to be wedged in between the spacings of her work since it was incessant. She brought Bonnie fruit and chocolate langue-de-chat, and took great pains with the placing of her feet. Bonnie became her outlet for affection; the emotions of the dance were of a sterner stuff than sentimental attachments. The little girl ran continually through the apartment in leaps and pas de bourrée.

  “My God,” said David. “One in the family is enough. I can’t stand this.”

  David and Alabama passed each other in the musty corridors hastily and ate distantly facing each other with the air of enemies awaiting some gesture of hostility.

  “If you don’t stop that humming, Alabama, I’ll lose my mind,” he complained.

  She supposed it was annoying the way the music of the day kept running through her head. There was nothing else there. Madame told her that she was not a musician. Alabama thought visually, architecturally, of music—sometimes it transformed her to a faun in twilit spaces unpenetrated by any living soul save herself; sometimes to a lone statue to forgotten gods washed by the waves on a desolate coast—a statue of Prometheus.

  The studio was redolent of rising fortunes. Arienne passed the Opéra examinations first of her group. She permeated the place with her success. She brought a small group of French into the class, very Degas and coquettish in their long ballet skirts and waistless backs. They covered themselves with perfume, and said the smell of the Russians made them sick. The Russians complained to Madame that they could not breathe with the smell of French musk in their noses. Madame sprinkled the floor with lemon oil and water to placate them all.

  “I am to dance before the President of France,” cried Arienne jubilantly one day. “At last, Alabama, they have begun to appreciate La Jeanneret!”

  Alabama could not suppress a surge of jealousy. She was glad for Arienne; Arienne worked hard and had nothing in her life but the dance. Nevertheless, she wished it could have been herself.

  “So I must give up my little cakes and Cap Corse and live like a saint for three weeks. Before I begin my schedule I want to give a party, but Madame will not come. She goes out to dine with you—she will not go out with Arienne. I ask her why—she says, ‘But it is different—you have no money.’ I will have money someday.”

  She looked at Alabama as if she expected her to protest the statement. Alabama had no convictions whatsoever on the subject.

  A week before Arienne danced, the Opéra called a rehearsal that fell at the time of her lesson with Madame.

  “So I will work in the hour of Alabama,” she suggested.

  “If she can change with you,” said Madame, “for a week.”

  Alabama couldn’t work at six in the afternoon. It meant that David dined alone and that she couldn’t get home until eight. She was all day at the studio as it was.

  “Then we cannot do that,” said Madame.

  Arienne was tempestuous. She lived at a terrible nervous pitch, dividing her resistance between the opera and the studio.

  “And this time I go for good! I will find someone who will make me a great dancer,” she threatened.

  Madame only smiled.

  Alabama would not oblige Arienne; the two girls worked in a state of amicable hatred.

  Professional friendship would not bear close inspection—best everybody for herself, and interpret things to conform to personal desires—Alabama thought like that.

  Arienne was intractable. Outside the province of her own genre, she refused to execute the work of the class. With the tears streaming down her face, she sat on the steps of the dais and stared into the mirror. Dancers are sensitive, almost primitive people: she
demoralized the studio.

  The classes filled with dancers other than Madame’s usual pupils. The Rubenstein ballets were rehearsing and dancers were being paid enough to afford lessons with Madame again. Girls who had been to South America drifted back to town from the disbanded Pavlova troupe—the steps could not always be the tests of strength and technique to suit Arienne. It was the steps that molded the body and offered it bit by bit to the reclaiming tenors of Schumann and Glinka that Arienne hated most—she could only lose herself in the embroiling rumbles of Liszt and the melodrama of Leoncavallo.

  “I will go from this place,” she said to Alabama, “next week.” Arienne’s mouth was hard and set. “Madame is a fool. She will sacrifice my career for nothing. But there are others!”

  “Arienne, it is not like that that one becomes one of the great,” said Madame. “You must rest.”

  “There is nothing I can do here any more; I had better go away,” Arienne said.

  The girls ate nothing but pretzels before the morning class—the studio was so far away from their homes they couldn’t get breakfast in time; they were all irritable. The winter sun came in bilious squares through the fog, and the gray buildings about the Place de la République took on the air of a cold caserne.

  Madame called upon Alabama to execute the most difficult steps alone before the others with Arienne. Arienne was a finished ballerina. Alabama was conscious of how much she must fall short of the fine concision that marked the French girl’s work. When they danced together the combinations were mostly steps for Arienne rather than the lyrical things that Alabama did best, yet always Arienne cried out that the steps were not for her. She protested to the others that Alabama was an interloper.