Her knees kept bumping the press agent’s and she kept whispering, ‘Sorry.’ When he patted her on the thigh she finally forced herself to stop squirming. She’d hired the man on the suggestion of one of her exercise students, a Mrs Greenspan whose husband ran one of the TV networks. He was getting $300, which hurt, but he was supposed to be good and how else could she make sure Steph got exposure?
All through Petrouchka he kept covering yawns and looking at his watch. Anna couldn’t blame him: it was a pageant, not a ballet. The girl dancing the role of the Ballerina didn’t even bother to tap her triangle in time to the triangle in the orchestra. It was all careless and flat and the best Anna could think of it was that even if Steph fell on her ass she’d look good by comparison.
The lights came halfway up for curtain calls. Anna’s eye skimmed the grand tier boxes, stopping at the end of the row, the box that her friend in the ticket office had said was reserved for MariusmVolmar. She knew he’d gone to Brussels the week before, but she’d been certain she’d see him tonight.
Disappointment dragged at her.
‘Care for a drinkie?’ the press agent shouted over the applause. ‘On me.’
‘Sure,’ Anna said. Why not? A ginger ale to wash down an aspirin. She didn’t see how else she would survive the intermission.
They joined the tide streaming up the stairs: Hampton-tanned women glittering with Tiffany gold and diamonds; sleek men in high-fashion suits strutting with plastic champagne glasses; young people in denim and rolled-up shirt sleeves, all shouting their shrill ignorance. She side-stepped a pack of children in $300 outfits scampering down the stairway as though it were a jungle gym. The bar was crowded with noisy, chattering people: the same mob of ballet phonies she’d known all her life.
Tonight she was scared of them. No matter how hard she worked, no matter how hard she encouraged her little girl, in the end it was up to these yammering preening balletomanes. They had the power.
The press agent kept jabbing her with his elbow, aiming low and secret, pointing out people: ‘Molly Weatherbee, Women’s Wear Daily ... Paul Schoff, Cut magazine.... They’re all here, the word’s out, Stephanie is hot.’
He even introduced her to a sad little woman from Associated Press who, so far as Anna could gather, had nothing at all to do with dance.
The lights stung her eyes and the shouting deafened her and the air rippled with $100-an-ounce French perfume. She saw a second-string dance critic at a table in the restaurant, hunched over what looked like a double scotch.
‘I’m going to get a little air,’ she told the press agent. She edged out onto the balcony and stared at Lincoln Center Plaza and the computerized fountain shooting forty-foot jets up into the night.
She saw Lvovna, sipping champagne and laughing with two ballet masters from NBT. She nodded to Abe Greenfield from ICM and said hello to Mack Evarts from Columbia Artists. At least the pros were here. She didn’t fool herself that they’d come for Steph. They were here for Danny. But they’d notice Steph. They’d have to. ‘
She still didn’t see Volmar. She hadn’t expected him, but she’d hoped.
At the first bell she went back to her seat. Musicians were tuning their instruments in the pit. They were better dressed than half the audience, and no wonder—who was as rich as a union musician these days?
The final bell sounded. The house slowly filled up as the last barflies straggled to their seats.
Anna turned in her seat. The lights in the boxes blinked out one by one as ushers closed doors.
Volmar’s box was dark and empty.
The press agent squeezed into the seat beside her, breathless and smelling faintly of bourbon. ‘Got stuck with Jack Sayre; you know what a talker he is. They’re doing a spread on new dancers and he wants to use Stephanie....’
Anna heard and nodded but she felt cheated. All the photographers and agents and ballet hangers-on in the world didn’t add up to Marius Volmar.
The one man in all ballet who mattered wasn’t here.
A follow-spot trailed the conductor through the orchestra pit to the podium. A sprinkle of clapping began in the family circle, spilled down through the balconies, built to respectable applause. He bowed to the house, gestured the musicians to their feet.
After ten seconds’ applause there was silence. The conductor waited, arms folded. The house was hushed, holding its breath.
Anna fidgeted irritably. What the hell was holding them up?
Thirty-five minutes into Petrouchka, Steph’s costume still had not arrived. She waited in the corps dressing room. Because of the dancers’ superstition that it was bad luck to put on tights or toe shoes before the costume, she sat barefoot in her terry-cloth robe.
She played solitaire.
She cheated.
She tried to ignore the herds of butterflies building up to a stampede in her stomach.
The last ballet on the evening’s programme was ‘Bizet,’ and most of the other girls had already put on their white tutus. They played cards, turned pages of magazines, chain-smoked, sipped Styrofoam cups of four-hour-old coffee. Boredom hung in the air.
A few of the girls nodded at Steph or said hello. Most avoided her. They were Linda’s friends, and company gossip had it she’d stabbed Linda in the back.
The loudspeaker on the wall, wired live to the stage, sent out the last measures of Petrouchka. The sound was tinny, like a paging box at an airport. Applause came in staticky, unreal waves as the dancers took bows, and then the box sent out a deadening silence.
Still no costume.
Steph dealt herself another hand of solitaire, couldn’t concentrate. On the box a man’s voice said. ‘Fifteen minutes.’
She was aware of eyes grazing her, probing for panic. The voice said, ‘Ten minutes.’
And then two men and a woman came bustling into the dressing room. The guard tried to stop them. ‘Hey, mister, you can’t go in there.’
‘That’s all right, we’re expected. Has anyone seen Miss Lang?’
Steph recognized the costume designer, a young-looking blond man who wore tinted aviator glasses and a high-fashion suit and a great deal of confidence.
He saw her. ‘Ah, there you are!’
He came striding down the aisle, made a great show of not noticing the stares of the entire corps. His male assistant took the lid off a striped dress box. The female assistant lifted a shimmering bundle of moss-green satin from a cradle of tissue paper.
‘And how are you feeling this night of nights?’ the designer asked.
‘Nervous,’ Steph said.
‘Is that why you’ve lost weight?’
Steph wriggled carefully into the dress. Hands pulled at her waist.
‘Harry, needle and thread.’
The voice on the box said, ‘Five minutes.’
‘Is that for us?’ the designer said. ‘Well, give me a pin.’
‘Please don’t use a pin there—my partners have to catch me.’
‘Whoopsy. Harry, stitch. Frieda, can you baste that hem a little higher in back? Stand still, darling, leave the driving to us.’
Hands kept tugging at her, adjusting. The voice on the box said, ‘Places please. Curtain in three minutes.’
‘Will someone tell that bionic yenta to shut up?’ The designer smoothed the dress down and frowned. ‘Harry, take this in an inch. My dear, have you been on a hunger strike or just jogging?’
Another voice said, ‘It makes a lump,’ and the designer asked for scissors. There was a snipping sound, a slight sensation of pull and release. Steph felt oddly uninvolved, like an anesthetized patient in an emergency room.
‘Frieda, stitch this and this.’ Hands patted at each this. ‘Darling, give us a little three-hundred-sixty-degree twirl.’
Steph twirled. The designer, bent down on one knee, arched back to evaluate.
‘Well, that should hold up, God willing. Just don’t go near any magnets.’ He rose, touched her shoulder, kissed her on the cheek. ‘They’r
e paging your flight—bon voyage.’
Steph felt something more than hostility in the eyes that followed her. She felt forty girls in identical pink tights and twenty-year-old tutus envying a girl in a designer’s green satin dress. She hurried from the dressing room, closed the door on the envy, ran to put the length of a corridor between herself and it.
The dress felt strange on her skin, like the hands of a last-minute partner who didn’t know the role. Just as she reached to open the soundproof door that led to the wings, she heard something drop. It made a tiny, tinkling sound, clear as the fall of a penny.
She stopped.
A pin, she realized. One of the pins holding her together.
‘Oh, God....’
She crouched, eyes combing the grey concrete floor.
‘Lose something?’ Danny stood smiling down at her.
‘I just lost my nerve and my memory and one pin.’
He bent, picked up a pin, and held it out. ‘Here’s your nerve. Where does it go?’
‘Do you see anything loose or flapping?’
‘Looks fine to me.’
Steph peered down at her skirt, then over her shoulder at her moss-green fanny. ‘To hell with it. I’ll just fly apart at the first pirouette.’
Danny took both her hands. Steph wondered if he was at all aware of the crazy beating of her heart. She was very aware of his.
‘Merde, Steph.’
‘Merde, Danny.’
Their lips brushed. They pulled apart, saving the kiss for afterwards, and Steph slipped into the wings. She picked her way through a twilight clutter of props: Giselle’s cottage, Sleeping Beauty’s pillared staircase, the puppet theatre from Nutcracker, all canvas and flimsiness and broad paint strokes.
Dancers were warming up singly and in couples. Several sat in yoga postures on the floor, eyes shut. Frank Vandenburg, who was Ilonka’s partner in the Corsaire pas de deux tonight, leaned against Petrouchka’s bedroom, chewing a Milky Way candy bar.
Steph nodded a hello.
He didn’t acknowledge her. She supposed Ilonka’s friends were her enemies too, now.
She passed the control panel just off stage right. The chief electrician sat meticulously adjusting switches that seemed more complicated than anything on a jet plane. There were two black and white TV screens built into the console: one showed the stage with its curtain lowered, the other the conductor’s podium, still empty. Just beyond the console Steph glimpsed a small room where stagehands sat around a table and slapped down playing cards and beer cans. They were shouting and they had a transistor radio blasting disco music.
David and Victor were standing in the front wing, limbering. She recognized them by their op-art unitards. She fixed a smile, prepared a hello. It froze on her lips.
‘Will you shut up about the fifty fucking dollars?’ David screamed, veins standing out taut in his throat.
The stage lights were blinking in some last-minute disorder. An electrician came scurrying across the stage, shoved Steph aside. Applause crescendoed in the house, welcoming the conductor. Victor shouted over it.
‘What do you need it for tonight? Going to get laid?’
‘I’ve had it with you.’ David touched his palms to the floor. He straightened. The make-up exaggerated his eyes to red coals of anger. ‘You’re a pathological borrower. I’m telling every dancer in this company. You won’t be able to borrow thirty-five cents for a Diet Pepsi.’
A deep, dissonant chord thumped out of the orchestra pit. The curtain hissed up. David turned, arched his right foot, made his entrance.
‘Watch out for that one,’ Victor whispered. ‘He’s a real cunt tonight. Merde, sweetheart.’
An uneasiness washed over Anna. Black remembered dread began pushing out from the back of her mind. She recalled a winter evening in Chicago when the sun set and Stephanie still had not come home; a morning packing the corridor of a Minneapolis hospital while a surgeon operated on Steph’s tonsils. She had felt helpless then and she felt just as helpless now.
There was nothing more she could do. No phone call, no argument, no begging or subtly dropped hint could alter what was about to happen on that stage. It was up to Steph now.
Anna sat exhausted and alone, unneeded, tensed forward in her seat, slightly out of line with the rows of profiles tipped with the faint glow from the orchestra pit.
The curtain whooshed up in darkness.
Anna waited, counting heartbeats, squinting, seeing nothing, hearing vague backstage murmurs.
Somewhere in the electrician’s booth a switch was pushed. Light crashed onto the stage.
Anna lowered her fist from her mouth.
A tooth had drawn blood from her ring finger.
Victor kissed Steph, prepared with a deep plié and jeté’d smoothly onto the stage. The conductor was taking the score at a faster tempo than he had at rehearsal. The musical landmarks that she had fixed for herself, so clear and distinct on the piano, were barely recognizable in the still new and still confusing flow of orchestra colour.
As a precaution she began counting the bars till her entrance: eighteen, seventeen....
‘Well, well, big night for you,’ a voice cut in.
Steph whirled. It was Ilonka, sparkling in her Le Corsaire white and silver. She had drawn herself black tigress eyebrows that arched to her hairline. ‘I have feeling you going to do well.’
‘Thank you,’ Steph stammered.
‘Music is good, choreography is good, Victor and David are good—so, should be good.’
Steph fought to keep her mind on the count ( ... thirteen, twelve ... ), fought to keep smiling, wished Ilonka hadn’t picked this moment of all moments to be nice; or was she being nice?
‘One thing—may I make suggestion? You don’t mind?’
‘No, no—please.’ ( ... ten, nine ...)
‘Grand jeté—before David catches you—you know the place?’
‘Not exactly.’ (... seven, six ... damn, had she missed a count or not?)
‘It would work better if you-' Ilonka stopped short. ‘Ah! Better start listening to your music, darling, or you will be late. Merde!’
Ilonka’s eyes twinkled slyly behind an upraised hand and twinkling fingers. Steph’s mind scrambled to remember whether she had four counts to go or three. Onstage, Victor and David were poised in one instant of symmetry to be broken by her entering jeté.
Three counts now or two?
A flute sparked up, four darting notes edged in harp, almost like the piano cue for three counts.
She trusted her instinct, pliéd, and on three she leapt.
The minute the light hit her eyes she felt she had missed something. It was like jumping into a safety net only to realize the firemen had whisked it away. She went through her chainés, but something had been transposed. She was either wrong with the music or wrong with the stage. But which?
Her ears groped. She was aware of something more than the orchestra. At first it sounded like a scattered herd of cows. Then she realized the sound was booing. Faint, but still boos. Dimly, it occurred to her that Ilonka’s fans were out there.
My God, do they think I stole her role?
She wrenched her mind back to the stage, back to the steps. David was passing her to Victor, gritting a smile. She slowed for her first retard.
The music didn’t slow with her.
What was wrong with that conductor? The music was moving away from her, like a ferry slipping from the shore. She rushed her bourrées, trying to catch up, but the ferry wouldn’t wait.
She was going to have to cut her pirouette—but would that throw Victor off when he caught her?
There was no choice. She tried to get his eye and warn him, but he was mouthing a profanity at David. She fell toward him. His arms were there, waiting, not caring or even surprised. He didn’t even look at her, he was too busy saying ‘Shit' to David.
The music surged forward and the conductor left out the second retard. Why the hell hadn’t he come t
o rehearsal and learned the tempos? She squinted, trying to make out the blinking tip of the baton beyond the blinding arc of footlights. A firefly winked into visibility, swooped down and vanished.
She felt David’s hands on her wrists, pulling her. This wasn’t in the choreography! Then she realized he was pulling her into her piqué—arabesque, holding her, lifting her—moving her in a slow curve toward Victor. David set her down and she recognized the skittering figure in the strings. Her arm moved out towards Victor, her weight bent towards him, just as it should. His hands clasped her waist, just as they should.
She bent her legs, plié’d to lighten herself for the lift. But something was wrong, unfamiliar, she wasn’t as light as she should have been. Victor was off balance and struggling, the lift was tilting—
It hit her that David was still holding on to her, not letting go.
‘Bastard!’ she heard Victor hiss and the answering hiss flew past her, ‘You started this war, you call it off.’
She recentered her weight, trying to save the lift, but the movement was laboured and unsteady and Victor set her down early.
‘Will you two stop it?’ she whispered.
David’s head was tilted back, eyes half shut, lips slightly parted—the classic danseur noble in ecstasy. He turned and, perfectly on the beat, half lifted her.
‘Sweetheart,’ he whispered, ‘keep out of it. Two bitches are enough for this number.’ He set her down.
Now Victor half lifted her and she felt a pinch on her ass. ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered, ‘we’ll get you through it.’
David and Victor were pros, and they did just that.
Anna’s fingers relaxed their grip on the seat cushion. The ordeal of helpless watching was over. The gold curtain fell. The audience was applauding and the applause was building.
Some shmucks in the rear of the orchestra were booing. What did they know?
There were bravos in the family circle, bravos in the dress circle, bravos all around her. Anna let herself go quietly limp with relief.
The curtain rose again and Steph and her two partners came forward to take their bows. This was real applause, not just polite. The bravos were coming in avalanches. Anna settled back in her chair, smiling and weeping and too exhausted even to clap.
Ballerina Page 24