Ballerina

by Edward Stewart

  ‘It’s a Sunday, Christine, the theatre’s dark.’

  ‘But I’m dancing Monday.’

  ‘Well, if that’s a problem, we’ll just arrange it so you’re not dancing Monday.’ Dorcas’ voice slid from one gear to another. She was no longer courting the daughter of a Chicago industrialist who could add luster to her party: she was instructing an employee, a corps girl who’d better stay in good with the boss if she ever expected to make principal. ‘This is important, darling.’

  ‘I’d love to, but—‘

  But she was scared. She wanted to see him: more than anything she wanted that. But she was achingly aware that she’d need support.

  ‘Good. Sasha will be so happy. We’ll count on you then?’

  ‘I’ve already made plans,’ Chris blurted. ‘Could I bring my friend?’

  A chill whooshed from the phone. ‘Darling, you’ll just have to unmake your plans.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t.’

  ‘Now really.’ There was a silence. Christine stood dripping wet from her bath, beginning to shiver. The phone sighed. ‘All right. Who’s this friend?’

  ‘My roommate—Stephanie Lang.’

  She didn’t see him.

  Chris stood in the foyer and didn’t see Sasha anywhere in the cool dim churning of gowns and jewels and dinner jackets. A maid took their coats. ‘Go right on in, please.’

  Chris and Steph went right on in. Three steps. Chris’s eyes searched. Waiters wove deftly through the crowd. Hands reached towards trays of drinks. Rings and bracelets and cuff links shot out needles of light. A hundred conversations jumbled together and arrows of tipsy laughter came flying above the grey roar.

  ‘We should find Dorcas,’ Steph said.

  Chris’s eye swept the mobbed, perfumed twilight. ‘You look for her. I’ll be along.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Steph got scooped up in the mob and Chris stood alone and squinting and uncertain. A humming white noise of chatter came whirling up around her. She took five deliberate steps into the crowd and felt swallowed up, lost, unreal, as though she weren’t there at all.

  She didn’t see Sasha anywhere.

  She struggled to ease a way through the guests, whispering ‘Excuse me’s’ that were sucked into the chatter. She recognized some of the faces: the Rockefeller who had been Vice-President; the New York senator whose wife had almost been caught in an Iranian conflict of interest; Jacqueline Onassis.

  With a courage she had not known she possessed she raised her voice. ‘I said excuse me, please.’

  She pushed. There was a pocket of silence and Jacqueline Onassis turned and looked at her.

  ‘Why, hello,’ Jacqueline Onassis said.

  Chris gulped out a hello she did not mean and pushed past. She stood on tiptoes. She didn’t see him by the piano or in the group by the sofas. A waiter stopped her, offering a tray of shrimp and hot cheese puffs and bits of liver wrapped in bacon.

  She shook her head.

  And then she saw him. He was standing in a corner. He was wearing a slimly tailored tweed sports jacket and if he’d had a tan he would have looked like a model with his grinning face and curled dark hair.

  The guests were pressed thicker and it took more chopping, almost shouted ‘Excuse me’s,’ to get through.

  She saw he was wearing blue jeans, too.

  She stopped.

  He was listening very carefully to a girl in a strapless print gown, a tall brunette with huge breasts. His expression was sad and laughing and astonished and attentive all at the same time. The girl kept gesturing with little strokes of a slender jewelled hand and he nodded as though his attention were tied to that hand with a thread.

  Chris tried to look cheerful and unconcerned as though the tide of the party had just happened to sweep her there. But her heart was pounding painfully and she wanted him at least to look at her, to give some acknowledgement.

  She kept darting glances up at him through her eyelashes, and finally she cleared her throat. He must see me, a voice inside her screamed.

  ‘Now I’ll be furious if you’re not here when I get back,’ the girl said.

  ‘I’ll be here,’ Sasha said.

  ‘Promise?’

  Sasha laughed and Chris did not find the sound of that laugh encouraging at all. His hands were on the girl’s shoulders, two flashes of white on tan, and he bent to kiss the top of her nose. The girl turned, smiling. She had triumphant emerald eyes that flicked over Chris as she slid past.

  Chris felt a faint blush spreading over her cheeks and she felt a coldness flowing out of Sasha like the door of a refrigerator left open. The silence between them grew till it had the weight of a tombstone. His gaze swivelled towards her. The ‘hello’ froze on her lips.

  For one instant, one instant only, he looked at her with eyes that were clear and cool. Her heart turned over. He said nothing. The gaze moved on.

  It came at her like a slap: for Sasha she did not matter, did not exist, was not even there.

  ‘Sasha darling,’ Dorcas Amidon cut in, and Chris stepped back. Tonight Dorcas was tall and confident and lightly dabbed with jewels. She wore a lime gown perfectly tailored to her slimness, and her chestnut hair was perfectly swept back to accent her green eyes. She might have been exhibiting her prize thoroughbred stallion. ‘I’d like you to meet some dear, dear friends, Bunky and Binnie Finch.’

  The Finches were a conservatively dressed grey-haired couple in their sixties, both very handsome.

  ‘Binnie’s a great ballet fan, and Bunky’s with Coca-Cola.’

  Sasha accepted the introduction with solemn courtesy.

  ‘I’m something of a ballet fan myself,’ Mr Finch said.

  Gently, Dorcas pointed her thoroughbred. ‘You’ve drunk Coca-Cola, haven’t you, Sasha?’

  There was an exquisitely timed hesitation. Sasha broke into a smile. ‘But of course. I adore Coca-Cola. Cannot get in Soviet.’

  ‘You people have a deal with Pepsi, don’t you?’ Mr Finch said. ‘How’s that working out?’

  Sasha made a face. His Petrouchka face. ‘Pepsi? No comparison.’

  Dorcas was pleased. The press had made Sasha a national hero, an overnight American. In a moment Bunky Finch would ask him to endorse Coca-Cola and NBT would be ten thousand dollars nearer its gala.

  Dorcas lingered long enough to make sure conversation was moving in the right direction. Then she excused herself and mingled.

  The party was a success.

  Her rich guests adored the darling, talented, fiery Russian with the cunningly broken English; and Sasha obviously adored being adored.

  Dorcas chatted with the Duponts, who’d flown up from Wilmington, and the Havemeyers, who’d flown up from Philadelphia, and that took care of two Ford Foundation votes. Her rule was sixty seconds per guest, and it was a coup to find the Taylors and the Terrys and the Creasys all standing together at the bar—two Wall Street brokerage houses and an airline in one swoop.

  ‘His English is so good!’ Amanda Terry cooed.

  Dorcas took a glass of Perrier from the bartender. ‘Completely self-taught,’ she said. She didn’t know who the hell had taught him but it sounded good.

  ‘He seems to have a great respect for free enterprise,’ Farley Taylor said.

  ‘Who wouldn’t, coming from that hellhole?’ Dorcas said.

  ‘We’re thinking of an ad campaign on ideas that made America great. Would he be interested?’

  Dorcas smiled. Farley’s airline was losing two hundred million a year and he was still trying to buy the public, the Congress, and the President. Dorcas had a second rule at parties: save the no’s and the negotiating for tomorrow.

  ‘I’m sure he’d love it.’

  She moved on to chat with a cancer specialist from Sloan-Kettering—she hardly knew the man, but something about cancer specialists loosened guests’ purse strings. Sixty seconds with the new photo-realist painter—his work was awful but Vog
ue had done a spread; sixty seconds with that dreadful girl from Louisiana, a piece of swamp trash that the President had put in charge of the federal arts giveaway—no way of not being nice to her; and then Dorcas spotted Marius Volmar sitting by himself at the end of a sofa.

  ‘Marius, you’re being sullen.’

  ‘I’m being bored.’

  ‘Stop being bored. Go out there and raise some money.’

  Dorcas turned and collided with Harry Hirsch from the board of directors of the second largest cosmetics company in the United States. They’d given lights to last year’s gala; he was carrying two drinks, so it was safe to pretend she was dying to chat.

  ‘Harry, wait till you see the costume sketches. I just know they’re going to start a whole new trend.’

  ‘We’re coming out with a line of costume jewelry,’ Harry said. ‘It’s going to be sold at perfume counters.’

  It sounded revolting. ‘But that’s marvellous, Harry. We haven’t even thought about Sleeping Beauty’s crown—I’ll bet we could work in some of your brooches, with a nice credit in the programme.’

  She watched for the shift of calculation in his eyes. She saw it.

  ‘I’ll give you a ring,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s have lunch.’ Dorcas moved on into another near collision.

  ‘Why, Emily Brontë!’ she cried.

  Emily Brontë Bateson had flown up from Dallas. You had to remember to call her Emily Brontë, because that was her first name, not Emily.

  ‘Where is he?’ Emily Brontë said.

  ‘Where’s who, darling?’

  ‘Your Russian.’

  ‘Oh—where the women are thickest, I suppose.’

  ‘I want to sit next to him.’ Emily Brontë wore too much jewellery and she had a habit of getting drunk early at parties.

  ‘Keep your fingers crossed, darling. You might be at the same table.’

  ‘I want to sit next to him.’

  Emily Brontë was oil. To her, culture meant giving the Metropolitan Opera seventy-five thousand to put new ponchos on the knights in Parsifal, then buying out the boxes and jetting a private planeload of friends to New York to see her name in the programme.

  ‘I’d have to change the place cards,’ Dorcas said.

  ‘What do you need—sets, lights, costumes?’

  ‘Oh, darling, don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I want to sit next to him.’

  ‘Let me go take care of it right now.’ Dorcas hurried into the dining room. A snow-coloured twilight hovered expectantly over the tables. The candles floating in Baccarat bowls lent a shimmer to the crystal and china and silver. The centrepieces were fresh orchids and they gave the air a faint pleasing sweetness.

  The seven waiters from the agency prowled about in their cutaways, checking place settings.

  Dorcas located Emily Brontë’s card, went quickly from table to table. It wasn’t a question of exchanging two cards but of recalculating entire balances and chemistries. It took eighteen switches before Dorcas felt she had reapproximated order.

  She told the butler, ‘You may announce dinner.’

  Throughout dinner something bothered Steph, a feeling she could not quite define.

  The senator on her left and the fashion designer on her right made interested, interesting talk; the food was delicious—she had never tasted veal scallops in madeira before—but a sense of incompleteness nagged at her. After coffee, as the guests drifted back to the living room, she looked for Chris.

  She didn’t find her in the living room or in any of the bathrooms. A couple was necking on a pile of mink in one of the bedrooms, but the woman wasn’t Chris. Adrift in uncertainty, Steph found herself on the terrace. At first she thought she was alone with the boxwood hedges and garden furniture.

  ‘Chris?’ she called.

  She stood a moment listening. Traffic moved in waves twenty-two storeys below, almost gentle at this distance. There were potted trees that had been wrapped in cloth shrouds. She peeked at one. It looked as though it might turn out to be a dogwood in a month or so.

  And then from the corner of the terrace came a soft scraping sound. It could have been troubled breathing or the scrape of a shoe on tile. It came again and she saw it was a man lighting a cigarette.

  Recognition thumped in Steph’s breast. It was Sasha Bunin.

  In the dimness and in a tailored jacket he looked taller and thinner than in company class. In profile he seemed almost fragile. For an instant she caught a hovering sadness on his face, and then he saw her and smiled.

  She’d had wine with dinner and she was sliding into giddiness and she smiled back. ‘I was looking for my roommate,’ she said.

  There was something steady and appraising in his eyes. ‘If you are looking out here, the only thing you will find is me. I am Sasha Bunin.’ He took a step toward her and offered his hand.

  ‘We’ve met,’ she said, surprised he didn’t remember.

  He stared. ‘Of course. You are in the company.’

  ‘You’ve partnered me,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. The night of my debut. You are—’

  ‘Stephanie Lang.’

  ‘But of course. How stupid I am. Forgive me. This party has made me crazy.’

  ‘Aren’t you enjoying it?’

  He stared between the boxwoods, still winter skeletons, down at Fifth Avenue and Central Park. ‘I thought America would be different.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From Russia.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Different but same. Everyone desperate. Talk desperate. Act desperate. Always “Hello we love you.” Before you even know them, “Hello we love you.”’

  ‘Maybe they do love you. Maybe they’d like to.’

  ‘No. They exaggerate. Must be loneliest people on earth.’ He tugged at a twig of boxwood. ‘And you—you enjoy party?’

  She shrugged. ‘The food was good.’

  ‘I could not taste it. These people make me too nervous.’

  It was cool on the terrace and Chris had vanished and Steph felt a numbness creeping in from her shoulders. ‘I’d better go look for my friend.’

  ‘Tell me your name again? I want to remember you.’ He smiled and it was impossible not to believe that smile.

  ‘Stephanie Lang. Good night.’

  ‘Good night, Stephanie.’

  As Steph tiptoed into the darkened bedroom Chris managed to bring her sobbing under control, but she couldn’t stop shivering. Steph saw the head buried face down on the pillow.

  ‘Chris, are you awake?’

  She turned on the table lamp. Chris pulled herself up on one elbow, eyes wincing away from the light. Steph stared at her a moment.

  ‘Why did you leave the party like that?’

  ‘I’m no good at parties,’ Chris said.

  ‘Oh, come on. Everyone noticed you and wanted to talk to you. That man from Indiana kept asking where you’d gone.’

  Chris gazed at Steph, at the pale-as-birch-bark hair and the confident smiling eyes. She began to understand why people were drawn to Steph and why they would never be drawn to her. She couldn’t fight the weariness that descended on her. ‘I don’t remember any man from Indiana.’

  ‘The junior senator. Very handsome. Reddish hair. Divorced. He has some kind of position on the Joint Committee on the Arts.’

  Chris tried to reach back but all that came was the memory of voices like wind in a tunnel and eyes empty as light sockets and a dull void where Sasha should have been. Before tonight she’d had no idea of the strength of his indifference. She felt caught and helpless and despised. ‘I honestly don’t remember.’

  ‘Well, he certainly kept asking. You made a conquest.’ Steph wiggled a good night with her fingers, switched off the light.

  Chris lay on her side, her stomach pumping wretchedness, her eyes fixed on the darkness that thickened and thinned with a heartbeat of its own.

  Steph was hardly aware of the jagged breathing on the other sid
e of the bedroom. Her thoughts were full of Sasha: how sad he seemed, how sensitive, so walled up in his fame and success and unhappy love affairs!

  Her blood raced and her temples drummed. She couldn’t explain her elation and she didn’t want to. Perhaps it had something to do with the tiny, newborn suspicion that Sasha Bunin needed someone.

  Perhaps.

  thirty-eight

  Marius Volmar did not ask how it had happened or why.

  He simply knelt at the altar of his art and gave thanks that at last some dry dead wood within him had ignited. At first he had felt only the glow of the single spark, tiny and vulnerable. He had nursed it, knowing too much air could snuff it out, too little could starve it. His spark had not gone out. It had thrown out sparks of its own that had grown and spread till now there was a flame in him, feeding off the air in his lungs, choking him and warming him at the same time.

  The flame crept nerve by nerve through his being; it grew into a running fire, a glare of colour and movement in his eyes, a blaze of sound and rhythm in his ears, a leaping contraction and release of every muscle in his body and mind.

  He was burning with his ballet.

  He did not know how much fire he had in him, but he knew fires were as mortal as men. He knew he must not squander a spark or an instant. The fire was ready. He was ready. The girl was ready to be made ready.

  He yanked Stephanie Lang from the corps of Fille Mal Gardée. She stood before him, trembling that she had done something wrong.

  ‘You’ll be dancing second girl in Sanctuary,’ he said.

  She darted a glance up at him. She had looked into Marius Volmar’s eyes before but they had always been closed to her, steel doors bolted shut. Now the doors had opened a crack, letting escape a trickle of warmth that she had never suspected in him. In her surprise she stepped back, as if brushed by a ghost.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Studio 3, eleven-thirty.’

  She nodded her head slowly and she was there at eleven-thirty.

  ‘I’ve been cruel to you, haven’t I?’ Marius Volmar said.

  She swallowed. The silence stretched and fear ran prickling up and down her legs. His cruelty had become familiar and in its way comfortable, like a partner whose shifting weight and balance she instinctively anticipated. But his kindness left her defenceless. She had no way of counterbalancing. She stood with her hands hanging limply, staring down at the floor.