To Paul, Kurt spoke in riddles. It hadn't occurred to him that he was "risking gracelessness," as Kurt put it, but maybe he was, and if it met with Kurt's approval, then he was willing to own it. "Thank you," he said, choosing his words carefully, "you know, I haven't been working on this dance for very long. I'm sure I can improve it. I'd like to do as you say, but I don't really know what you want."
"I don't want to dictate to you. Think about it. You have plenty of time."
* * *
"We don't have much time, Paul. About ten days to get your dance into shape. Pam has just told me that she must go to Seattle. Her mother has cancer, and they're operating a week from Monday. There's no one else to go, she says. Her father's dead, and her brother's in Australia. She'll continue with the tour in New Haven, but she won't be with us when we open in New York. She's leaving me in the lurch, but what could I say? I said, 'Do what you feel you must, and come back when you can.'"
Kurt shrugged, as if he wished he could take back his permission. "If only it weren't New York. She's going to try to return to wind up the engagement, but she can't make any promises. In the meantime, I've got to fill in the gaps in the Joyce program. Cloak is out, of course. I may go ahead with Flying Colors. Of course, Michiko can take Pam's part in Wild West. Weighing my choices, I thought, Why not go with Paul's new solo, if he's willing? Ever since I saw it yesterday, I haven't been able to put it out of my mind, and that's got to mean something. You understand," he continued, before Paul could reply, "that I'm putting myself on the line for you. I'm full of misgivings. My ego's at stake—my company, my dancers, my program. Maybe it's crazy, but still I'd like to see you do it."
"You don't think I'll make a fool of myself?" asked Paul.
"I intend to work with you every step of the way to get this dance ready. We go to New Haven tomorrow, where we have four performances scheduled. We'll have time to rehearse the dance there, and more time after we return to New York next Wednesday. I'm hoping we can present your dance when we open on Sunday the 16th. As I indicated yesterday, the length will have to be abridged by half. You can't presume on the indulgence of your audience. Maybe you've got it in you to hold an audience's attention for a quarter of an hour, but not in this dance. Seven minutes is plenty long enough, believe me."
"I don't object," said Paul, "but what if we disagree on what stays and what goes?"
"We'll fight it out man-to-man."
Paul liked Kurt's answer. "I'm offering you the opportunity of a lifetime, Paul. To open at the Joyce Theater in your first dance, and in my program."
"I know," said Paul. "How could I say no? I can't. If I succeed, it will be the best thing that ever happened to me, but if I fail, I'm on my ass, and every dancer in New York will know it."
"I'm not sure it's as black-and-white as that," said Kurt, "and you won't be alone either."
"You mean because I'm part of the company?"
"That's right. I'm both proud and jealous of what I'm offering you. I want you to be aware of that, and all it implies. I've known you a long time, and I know that you are perfectly capable of drawing inspiration from my envy as well as from my pride in you. In spite of the first and because of the second, I intend to help you as far as I can. I want you to live up to my estimation of you."
"I intend to try," said Paul, touched to the quick.
* * *
There followed one of the more excruciating weeks of Paul's life. Kurt showed him no mercy, working him to exhaustion and trying his patience. To Kurt's credit, Paul had to admit that his perceptions were valid and his changes were improvements. Kurt was as exacting a taskmaster with Savage Landscape as he was with his own dances. Although he didn't spare Paul's feelings, neither did he try to override Paul's vision and impose his own. He was result-oriented, which Paul appreciated. Despite a couple of temperamental outbursts when both men were on edge from the strain, Paul felt blessed in the collaboration. He didn't mind yielding to Kurt's greater experience and to Benny Pensky's expertise in making dances look their best on the stage.
At any rate, there was no time to agonize over decisions which had to be made rapidly. The week, so crammed with effort, seemed to Paul, after it had passed, to have gone by in a blaze.
When, on Halloween, he had given in to a whim and bought an Aeolian harp, he had anticipated finding Bryce back in New York on his arrival. However, events proved him wrong. Again, on November 12th, as on Labor Day, he returned to an empty house. Despite his neglect, the rooms seemed to envelop him in their peaceful quiet. He felt comfortable, as if he had inherited them, but he also felt sad.
The day that he arrived in New York so did the harp. It must have been sent immediately from California, surprising his return as no human being had, less than two weeks after he had ordered it. The delivery man from United Parcel Service carried it all the way up to the penthouse himself. "Quite a place you have here," he said, gazing about the roof as Paul signed for the package.
After having ordered the harp for Bryce, Paul was unwilling to unwrap the package himself. He believed that Bryce would eventually return to receive it, and that he would come of his own accord, as he had gone.
That night—the first night Paul had had off since the troupe had opened in Hartford—he stayed home for a needed rest. In his solitude, he recalled his first trip to New York, a dozen years ago. A man whom he had met in Minnesota, a musician, had sent him a round-trip plane ticket and another ticket to attend his Manhattan recital. Paul was seventeen. In accepting David's invitation to visit him, he had embraced what was bound to occur. Paul remembered his excitement at New York and the affair, the glamour for him in it. The relationship with David hadn't lasted, but he had come back to New York after that, and one day he'd stayed.
Now he realized that the glamour had been as much in himself as in David's New York. His willingness to be impressed and his enthusiasm, like his appetite for late nights out and his languor in the mornings, had seemed greater somehow and freer against the perspective of the New York that he had first glimpsed as David's guest and David's lover. Later, he had found his own way in the city. Now, he was older than David had been at that encounter and in a position to dispense tickets to his performance of his own dance.
It had happened so quickly—in the space of a month. This past week he had been working so hard with Kurt that he hadn't entirely taken in that his sole creation—his solo performance- was to have its world premiere on Sunday. In four days. There was still much to do: the technical rehearsal and the dress rehearsal, where the company would see his dance for the first time. It seemed like a fantasy.
He tried to prepare himself mentally for that moment when he would arrive before the audience, and what he had created would then create him. In the thought he found a wish: he wanted someone who loved him to be there. Like David before him, he yearned for the pleasure of distributing largesse. A free ticket, he thought, was in fact a summons in the guise of a gift.
He wondered, If he sent Bryce a ticket, would he then come? An hour ago he'd planned to wait for Bryce to take the initiative, but now he considered how this attitude was hurtful to himself—not to mention Bryce. He was loathe to call Bryce after all this time, but why not mail him a ticket? Then Bryce could decide for himself what he wanted to do, Paul thought, and he wouldn't have to bear the blame for not having told him.
The ticket that Paul enclosed in an envelope to Bryce was for his last performance of the week, on November 22. He would give Bryce the maximum amount of time to respond, he decided.
Basking in the glow of this gesture, he considered his opening night. If it was too soon for Bryce to come, it wasn't too soon for Jeanne or for Althea. Picturing both women there for him in the audience gave him a tremor of pleasure. He thought of how each was connected in his imagination to his dance, without either being aware of it. Jeanne first, because his inspiration had come on the heels of their weekend together, in the same Connecticut setting, after she'd gone back and he'd stayed behind
. And Althea second, because he'd seen her image in another woman, when his dance was first blossoming and still entirely his secret.
He wondered if his conjuring of Althea's mirage on Beacon Hill was a sign that he must wish to see her. He hadn't seen her, he realized, since their return from Block Island, when he'd bid her goodbye at her door, declining her invitation to come inside. In her expression he had read her need mixed with her hopelessness, her certain intuition that he was going to refuse her, and it had made him apprehensive that she might try to cling to him. He had thought to himself then that he already knew all about artists' lives when they were little known or appreciated. He knew without having to be told that there was an austerity in the way Althea lived in New York that didn't interest him in the least. He'd been there, too, and he didn't want to go back. He was determined to avoid those aspects of her life. On Block Island, enjoying her beneficence, it had been easy to do so. However, he didn't think it would be so easy in New York. He had dreaded what she might try to claim from him, and even when it turned out that Bryce had not been waiting for him, he hadn't regretted having distanced himself from her. However, over two months had passed since then, and she hadn't tried to claim anything.
He found himself hoping she would come to his opening night performance and hoping Jeanne would come, too. The tickets which he sent them were for single seats in different parts of the theater. They happened to be the tickets that Kurt had given him to give away. He was glad, he thought, that they weren't together. As he had done with Bryce's ticket, he put each one in a folded sheet of paper with a brief note and then sealed it in an envelope.
He copied Bryce's Mississippi address from the address book in Bryce's desk. In the phone book he looked up Jeanne's address and confirmed Althea's, just down the block. He stamped the three envelopes and posted them that night, depositing them in the mail chute in the lobby of his building before he could change his mind. By this action, too, no less than in his rehearsals, it seemed to him that he was readying himself to bring his dance to the public.
Chapter 15
On the Saturday following her weekend with Paul, Jeanne returned to Greenwich for her car. She had called her parents to tell them she would be arriving. After retrieving her car from the garage, she dropped by to see them.
Her parents kept the doors locked all day long. Even though she had a key, Jeanne didn't use it. She rang the bell and waited for her father to answer the door. He had been watching a football game in the den; she could hear the television. "Come on in," he said. "How's the car?" And without waiting for an answer, he continued, "Your mother's in the kitchen."
"It seems to be okay, but I've only driven from the garage. Maybe you'll look at it before I go back to New York."
"If you wait till after the game."
"How long is the game?"
"Another hour or so."
"All right."
There was a pause, in which he didn't seem to know what to say to her, and she realized that he considered their conversation had come to a close. "Well," he said, "I guess your mother's waiting to see you."
As she went back to the kitchen, Jeanne wondered why her father always seemed to want to hand her over to her mother as soon as he saw her. She felt resentful, and still she acquiesced. In fact, she, too, hardly knew what to say when they met. Their conversations were confined to concrete matters, like her car.
Her mother, however, wasn't in the kitchen. Instead of going to look for her, Jeanne filled a glass with water from the tap and plunked in a few ice cubes. She sat down at the table, thinking about her father, and remembering, in contrast, a scene that she had witnessed after leaving Block Island on Labor Day.
The ferry had docked in New London, and the passengers were lined up in the stairwell leading to the lower deck. She had forgotten her hat on a bench and had gone back to retrieve it, leaving Paul and Althea to see that her car was safely taken off the ferry. She had lingered to use the bathroom, and by the time she descended the stairs, most of the passengers had already disembarked. The dock bustled with the activity of people leaving.
It was just after seven p.m., the light already dimming. She thought of how it would be dark long before they got to New York. As she was looking around for Paul and Althea, she saw not far from her a young girl standing with an older woman at the edge of the blacktop.
The woman was dressed formally in a suit. The girl, who was perhaps fourteen and tall for her age, was wearing shorts. Jeanne noticed that they seemed quite separate from each other, a distance reflected in the difference between their clothes. Not mother and daughter, she decided; perhaps the girl is her godchild or her niece or the daughter of a friend. Just as she realized that the two were waiting for someone, she heard the woman call out, "There he is," and the girl cry, "Where? Where?" her eyes darting, her body instantly readied for flight, like a bird's. As Jeanne watched, the girl took off, running, while the woman stood still, and before Jeanne's eyes there materialized the reunion of a father and daughter.
For to what other man perhaps thrice her age would this girl rush with such abandon, throwing her arms around his neck, crying unashamedly, thought Jeanne; and who else would hug her back so warmly and yet chastely, and then release her, as happy as she, with as misted an eye?
The sight of their emotion, so generous, so spontaneous, had brought tears to Jeanne's eyes. Once I, too, greeted my father like that, she reflected, but I was much younger, and it is unlikely that it will ever happen again. Struck by the finality of her thought, she bowed her head, and a tear slid down the side of her nose.
She had wiped it away with the back of her hand, and looked up. She saw her car being driven off the boat, and Althea and Paul approaching, holding cans of soda. They met her, and Paul handed her a Coke. "We fed coins into a machine at the end of the dock," he explained.
She had kept the scene she had witnessed to herself and then had forgotten about it until now, in her parents' home. The recollection made her feel sad. Now, as then, she understood that the tear she had shed was truly for herself.
Her mother came through the back door into the kitchen, surprised to find Jeanne sitting alone. "When did you get here?"
"Just a few minutes ago."
"Does your father know?"
"Oh yes, he let me in."
"Well, I'll put up some coffee," said Myra Mann briskly. "You'll stay for a while, won't you?"
Jeanne nodded. Out of habit, she helped her mother prepare the snack. The two of them working together in the kitchen felt familiar to her, even secure. Jeanne carried out the silver tray, loaded with delicate china plates, cups, and saucers, and a fat wedge of cake, which she laid on the table in the dining room. Her mother followed behind her, with coffeepot, sugar, and creamer. Myra's high-pitched voice, calling her husband, carried from the room.
Summoned, he stopped under the open arch. "Do you want to have it in here?" he asked, clearly reluctant.
"Go on, Don, take yours back with you and watch the game. We don't need you."
Myra shooed her husband away. Jeanne silently handed her father a plate with cake, as her mother gave him a cup of coffee. Jeanne was thinking how, in spite of what her mother said, she did care that her father preferred to see the game than visit with her. Yet in a way she was also relieved. How hard it was, she reflected, for her to find in this father the young man for whom she had once waited at a window and greeted ecstatically with cheers and happy tears as he came home from work. And it was almost impossible to picture herself as the little girl, perhaps two or three years of age but a baby no longer, who had watched for her dad.
It wasn't that she fought with her parents now, or that they were unkind to her. They just weren't close. Jeanne had never learned how to confide in her parents. It seemed an unspoken pact, that there were distances that none would broach. Her parents themselves put it this way: they were always glad to see their three children when it was mutually convenient, or to help out when their children were
in need, but their years of raising a family were over, and they all had their own lives. The whole family got together once or twice a year, when Jay visited from San José, California, where he now lived. Then Jeanne would come up from New York, and Peter down from Boston, where he was still in school.
"I've heard from your brothers," Myra told her daughter, as she stirred milk into her coffee. "Jay's not coming for Thanksgiving. He'll visit on Christmas instead. Peter says he won't be here either. He's planning to see a friend. I've decided to take a vacation from cooking this year. I accepted an invitation from the Smithsons. I don't know what your plans are. If you like, I'll ask Janet. I'm sure you'll be welcome with us."
"I don't have any plans yet. I'll let you know."
"All right. Just don't give me too short notice." Myra took a bite of cake. "Greenberg's is the best bakery. I don't care what anyone says. What was the trouble with your car? Did your father look at it?"
"Apparently the timing had to be readjusted. The guy at the garage said they fixed it. Dad says he'll check it later."
"I know. After the game," her mother chimed in. "Well, he's no auto expert, take it from me. How'd you happen to bring it to Angelo's? Did you drive out from the city?"
"I was in Litchfield for the weekend." The tone of Jeanne's voice warned her mother not to inquire further, and Myra didn't, so the issue was circumvented without incident. What Jeanne instead found so oddly and unusually unpleasant was the instant feeling of alarm that ruffled her when her mother asked after Althea. The question should have been innocuous; Myra had known Althea for years as her daughter's friend. Yet Jeanne could barely bring herself to answer.
"I guess Althea's fine. I haven't seen her for awhile."
"Didn't you visit her on her vacation?"
"Yes, I did, but that was at the end of August."
"That long ago? Well, did you have a good time?"
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