The Four Temperaments

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  GINNY

  Ginny Valentine hated New York. She hated its horrible up and down shapes. To her, they looked like a million shoe boxes standing on end in a tacky factory outlet. She hated everyone packed in so tightly, no room to breathe. She hated the hundred and one kinds of dirt in New York—smog, soot, grime, grease, grit and of course dog excrement—everywhere she stepped. She couldn't understand why anyone would actually want to live here, and when she saw those T-shirts and bumper stickers with that idiotic slogan saying “I ™ NY,” she wanted to yell, “NOT ME!” There were only two things that redeemed the city in her eyes: George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet. Balanchine had been dead for years, but the New York City Ballet, the company he started and ran, was alive and kicking. And so here she was.

  Back in New Orleans, before she came here, Wes had promised that in New York City, it wouldn't matter who her parents were. “New York never looks back,” is what he said. “No one there gives a hoot about your past because they're too busy thinking about the future. And the future, my darling child, is you.” He had smoothed the hair off her face in a gesture that was one-quarter father, three-quarters lover. “Think of it: VIRGINIA VALENTINE. They'll call you ‘Queen of Hearts.' ”

  She would sit curled up on Wes's sky-blue sofa, the one with all the tasseled pillows and the ornate French legs, drinking in every damn word and dying for one of the cigarettes he waved around his handsome face as he talked. He refused to let her smoke. “Virgin lungs,” he kept telling her, “virgin lungs. If you want to be a star, you'll keep them that way. The rest of you is open for corruption, of course. And I'm just the man to see to that.” He leaned over to kiss her neck and her arms went around him. Sweet Wes! She did love him. Or she guessed she did. She certainly did need him. And what was love anyway, but need in a fancy dress?

  Still, she knew that going into Oscar's room last night was a dumb thing to do. Dumb because it made things more complicated. Oscar was already crazy about her. He helped her ditch Mia and find her own apartment, bought her dinners and even loaned her money. All of this without sex. She never meant to get involved with him that way. But as her mama would surely have said, good intentions were shining brightly all along that hot and dusty road that led to hell.

  She couldn't even blame it on the liquor, though she was certainly drunk enough when he brought her back to his apartment. But when she woke up—in the narrow bed with the one-eyed, nearly bald teddy bear staring at her—the effects of the alcohol had worn off and she was left with her own miserable self again. Mia. Erik chose Mia over her. By now, she had stopped feeling angry and was scared instead. Maybe she wasn't as talented as she thought. Maybe she was fooling herself, and was going to stay in the corps de ballet forever, while the Mias of the world danced right over her.

  She thought about going into Mia's apartment: another dumb thing. But she had been so angry. Ginny remembered, with some distaste, the tantrums she used to have when she was little. Once she had stretched out on the floor of the church sobbing and pounding her fists against the worn oak planks, all because her mother had said no, she couldn't play with June Bell Taylor after the service that afternoon; she had to come home instead. Everyone had stood around her, even her mother, baffled about what to do, until finally the minister himself had appeared, with his dark pants and brilliantly shined shoes, to lift her from the floor and deliver her, sobbing, into her mother's arms. Later she was sorry she'd made such a scene and embarrassed her mother; she didn't even like June Bell all that much.

  In Oscar's apartment, Ginny sat up and pushed the hair away from her face. Sweet Jesus, it was hot! She wriggled her toes and looked down to see that they were bare. Being the gentleman that he was, Oscar had removed her shoes but nothing else and she was sweating. “Don't say ‘sweat,' Virginia,” her mother would have scolded, “a lady never sweats, she just glows.” But she was not and would never be a lady. Too bad for Mama; she tried so hard.

  Stripping down was the logical thing to do, so she did it. Then she went looking for a bathroom. When she found it, she turned on the shower. Just as Ginny was about to step inside, under the spray of warm water, she knew that the contents of her stomach were about to come up and she leaned over the toilet bowl to vomit. Actually, it did not feel at all bad: the dark night, the cool, reassuring feel of her bare feet against the tile, and the lemony smell that wafted up from the bowl—Oscar's wife certainly kept things spick-and-span—all made it seem that Mia had been no more than a bad meal she had eaten.

  She stepped under the shower and stayed there a long time, rinsing her mouth with streams of water and lathering herself with the bar of scented soap—magnolia! home!—from a ceramic dish. Thoughts of Mia were like the bubbles that slid from her chest to her waist to her legs, and then rushed effortlessly down the drain. This was only one part, and a small one too. Her turn would come soon. She knew it. In the meantime, she would have to work harder, and she would have to be patient. Maybe apologizing to Mia wouldn't be a bad idea either, though she wasn't sure how Mia would take it. Maybe Oscar could help with that. Oscar. Where was he now, anyway?

  When Ginny got out of the shower, she wrapped herself up in one of Ruth's—she remembered her name now—big, fresh-smelling, pale blue towels. She felt better than she had in days. She was fully intending to walk back to the room where she had come from and get some sleep. But it was easy to get confused in the dark, what with the strange apartment and all, and she found herself walking right by the room where Oscar was sleeping. The door was wide open and his belly was moving up and down in the most peaceful way, and because of the light from the streetlights outside (another thing Ginny hated about New York was how it was never really, truly dark, which she knew must have accounted for a lot of the weird behavior of the people there), she could see his face, looking all screwed up and tense, as if he were trying to figure something out in his sleep. It was that look that drew her into the room. Oscar had been so good to her, and now that she was feeling good herself, she didn't want him to feel bad. She only meant to put her hand on his forehead, just to smooth the frown away, and she did. But then he opened his eyes and somehow the towel was on the floor and she was saying his name. His arms wound around her and pulled her gently down, toward the bed.

  Afterward, Ginny realized that he talked to her as if she had been a virgin, the big, sweet fool. He should only have known. She had been having sex since she was fifteen, and she didn't think of it as a big deal. At least if she was careful not to get pregnant, the way her mother had. Mama hadn't been careful and she hadn't been smart, but Ginny was determined to be both. By the time she was fourteen, she had already been to a clinic downtown and after lying about her age—Lord knows that was easy enough—got herself a prescription for birth control pills and enough condoms for the next decade. There was a whole phone book's worth of sexually transmitted diseases that she didn't want any part of.

  Her first lover was her ballet teacher, Wesley Landham. Wes had danced to standing ovations in Europe before he tore up every single one of the ligaments in his left knee and had to retire from the stage. Since he was a local boy who'd made good, he was something of a celebrity in New Orleans, and the studio he ran—upstairs from a perfume shop in the French Quarter—was filled with the daughters of the city's oldest and proudest families. Ginny was a better dancer than any of them, she knew that, just as she knew that she was not beautiful or smart in school. But she took to dancing right away, even though for the longest time Mama maintained that she had only sent her there so she could improve her posture and meet the right kind of girls.

  Not that the right kind of girls would have anything to do with her. There she was, Rita Darcy's little bastard. This was somehow common knowledge and it didn't make Ginny too popular with the other girls who came to Wes's studio, girls like Deanna May Dixon and Violet Morgan, who were brought to class by black maids who hung up their pleated skirts and matching cardigans on hangers, and rolled their socks neatly into
balls, while the girls changed into their fresh-from-the-package pink tights and black leotards.

  Ginny came to class by herself because Rita worked afternoons at the mall and since she had to take two buses, she was always late. Her shucked clothes were left in a heap on the dressing room floor while she ran to find her place at the barre, still putting the last pins in her hair as the pliés began. But once class had started, she was happy: she knew she could dance circles around those snotty brats. They disliked her as much for that as for anything. She had a real gift for turning, Wes said so, and he always made her demonstrate first. While the others were still fumbling with double pirouettes, Wes had her doing fouettés, first two, then four, and soon enough eight in perfect, spin-like-a-top succession. At the Christmas recital, she brought down the house with that particular little trick.

  She knew they made fun of her. They called her “fire engine” because of the bright colors she wore to class. She hated that pink-and-black look ballet dancers were supposed to wear. When she tried on her very first pair of pointe shoes, she looked down at the pink satin and frowned. Pink was such a sissy, spineless color. She wanted red, like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes, or, at the very least, indigo blue.

  “No one has ever, ever complained about the color before, miss,” the salesman said coldly.

  “Well, someone is complaining now,” Ginny said, ignoring Mama's not-so-subtle fingers pressing on her shoulder. “Don't you have anything else?” With a disgusted sigh, he disappeared into the stockroom. Ginny could feel how the two other girls in the store looked down at the carpeting to avoid staring. The salesman returned with a dusty box that he laid on the floor.

  “Black,” he said, gesturing to the dark satin shoes in their nest of white tissue. “Take them or leave them.”

  She tried them on and rose up on her toes. They weren't red, but they weren't bad either. Once she sewed the ribbons on, they would be better. Like a Spanish dancer. She began to imagine flouncy skirts; the shoes improved as she mentally added a fringed silk shawl, castanets and a real rosebud pinned to the front of her V-neck leotard. “We'll take them,” Ginny said. Mama sighed loudly, as if she had been holding her breath.

  Whatever the other girls said, it made no difference to Wes, who recognized that she had something special and did his best to nurture it. Extra classes, special coaching, partnering lessons; Wes saw to all of it. “Your talent is the redemption for your mama's sins,” he told her often enough, though he was always smiling when he did. After a while, he refused to let her pay for her classes. “Every serious school needs a scholarship student,” he told her. “Virginia Valentine is mine.” When it became too hard for Rita to pick Ginny up after class (she didn't want her riding the buses alone after dark), Wes started driving her home. She liked the rides because she liked him. He was as good-looking as his name promised, with thick, prematurely white hair, blue eyes and white, white teeth that he confessed to having had capped.

  “When you're onstage, your smile has to count. Mine never did before I had my teeth done,” he told her.

  She nodded, self-conscious about her own teeth. Rita didn't have the money for braces. Wes saw her discomfort and said, “Now don't go worrying about your teeth. Those big white beauties will look just wonderful under the lights. Rub a little Vaseline on them before you go on. Makes 'em look even shinier.” That's the way Wes talked to her—as if her success were a sure thing. But Ginny didn't entirely share his confidence. Not because she wasn't good enough, because she really thought she was. But New Orleans wasn't exactly the place for a girl to make a name for herself as a ballerina; the city didn't even have a resident company. How in the world was she going to succeed while living there? And how was she going to get out?

  It was Wes who showed her the way.

  He told her that every couple of years, the School of American Ballet held a regional audition in Atlanta and there was one scheduled for the next month. Ginny knew that the school was the godchild of the New York City Ballet, the company she'd wanted to dance in ever since Rita had taken her to a performance on her tenth birthday. They danced Serenade that night, and when she saw that girl who lets down her hair and dies for her dancing, she was stunned. She pored through the program notes to see who the choreographer was and saw the name George Balanchine. Well, obviously he was someone who understood the way she felt about dancing and she knew that she would have to find a way to audition for him. It turned out he was dead, but he'd choreographed dozens of ballets and, along with someone called Lincoln Kirstein, started the company besides. She swore to herself that she would find her way to New York City to dance in it.

  For the next four weeks, Ginny practiced constantly for the audition. Mama even let her miss school so Wes could give her special coaching during the day, before her regular lessons. He offered to drive her to the audition because it was so hard for Rita to take off from work. Wes and Ginny would have to stay overnight in a motel, but Rita wasn't worried; she had this idea that Wes liked boys, not girls, and Ginny saw no reason to tell her otherwise. So it was in a room at the Peach Tree Palace that Wesley Landham carefully and cordially deflowered her. She let him do this because she understood that Wes was a gentleman. Once he had become her lover, he would feel more than interested in her career. He would feel obligated.

  Afterward, she felt a little shaky, but it was more because the reality of the next day's audition had set in—what if she didn't do well? then what?—than the shock of losing her virginity. But Wes was very tender and sweet; he filled the motel's peach bathtub and carried her, still naked, to the bathroom. He left her soaking while he went out to buy a cold six-pack. Cigarettes were forbidden but Wes thought that the beers might take the edge off her nerves.

  He was right. The next morning, Ginny got up feeling calm, centered and ready to dance as she had never danced in her life. She did, too. She could hear the whispers of the other girls at the barre as her feet beat their way through a tricky entrechat quatre combination; by the time she got to the fouettés, the girls were silent. Though the official word didn't come for several days, it was clear to everyone that Virginia Valentine was on her way to New York, on her way to the big time.

  But she had told Oscar none of this. It was easier to let him think that she was still pretty innocent. Mama had always preached discretion, and in this case, she was right. And Ginny couldn't say she didn't enjoy being with Oscar. Lord knew he wasn't handsome like Wes, but he was so grateful, so humble, so adoring. She didn't know that Oscar had never been with anyone else besides Ruth—not ever, not even before he was married. And Ginny didn't know that he would fall in love so hard and so deep.

  Oscar was still sleeping when she let herself out of his apartment. In the daylight, she could really appreciate how nice his place was. Not that the stuff in it looked expensive. But you could see the careful, loving way things were arranged: the apples in a blue-and-white bowl; the sheer white curtains that softened the light from the windows; the rugs placed just so and the wooden floors gleaming beneath them. She thought of Ruth—tall, big-boned, with a blond pageboy that was just turning to white at the sides and at the crown of her head—and she suddenly felt the sharp poke of conscience. Ruth had been so nice that time Oscar brought her home for dinner. This was how she repaid her.

  Back in her own apartment, Ginny began cleaning for the first time in months. It was pretty funky in there, with dust bunnies grown to the size of warthogs under the bed, empty, greasy cartons all over the kitchen (from the Chinese restaurant on Seventy-seventh Street that Oscar recommended) and heaps of dirty clothes—most of them practice clothes—everywhere. The shower curtain had some unfamiliar pinkish-brown gunk growing on it—and she thought that as a southern girl she knew everything there was to know about mold. It was too disgusting to mess with, so she threw it away. She filled two big bags with garbage and two more with laundry, to be done later that night, after the performance. She actually liked going down to the laundry room around mid
night, when she wouldn't have to wait for the dryers. When she told Oscar this once, he was horrified. You could be mugged. Or worse, he had said, and made her promise not to do it again. He was probably right. Her money had been stolen three times since she arrived in New York, the last time by a teenaged boy with mean eyes and the worst acne she'd ever seen. She actually saw him slip his hand into her bag while they were on a bus, but the look he gave her was filled with such menace that she hadn't dared to say a thing.

  She was lucky to find some clean practice clothes hidden in the back of a drawer—stuck there for emergencies like this—and after shoving them into her bag, she splurged on a taxi to the theater. She had already missed company class—another dumb move—but she knew that there was at least one rehearsal where she belonged and she wasn't going to miss that. She checked the big bulletin board where the schedule was posted. Sure enough, there was her name, listed with a dozen or so others, for a rehearsal in Studio C. Also listed was Mia McQuaid. Ginny hesitated for a minute but realized she would not be able to avoid Mia forever. It was bad enough that she had missed class, she couldn't miss rehearsal too. And maybe it would be better to face Mia in the studio than onstage. Ginny changed quickly and took the stairs two at a time up to Studio C.

  Rehearsal had just started, so she wasn't really late. The ballet was a new one, choreographed by a guest choreographer from Norway and everyone in the company seemed to think it was great. Ginny thought it was a piece of garbage. She couldn't understand why Erik was interested in commissioning this new stuff when there were so many perfectly good Balanchine ballets in the repertory, just waiting to be danced again. She knew this because she used to look through the old programs in the dance library near Lincoln Center; when she first got to New York, she had spent a lot of time there between rehearsals and classes. The library was clean and quiet and the librarian liked her.