The Four Temperaments

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  Instead, he had begun courting her again, and how embarrassing was that. He sent expensive flowers to a communal dressing room where everyone knew your business, right down to the brand of tampons and deodorant you used. All the other dancers wanted to know who her secret admirer was; she couldn't get them to stop bothering her, so she finally said it was one of those guys—and there was always a little cluster of them at the stage door—who hung around hoping to talk to or maybe even arrange a date with a dancer. Someone once told her that one of the principals had met her husband this way. Anyway, the story seemed to work. But when the chocolates arrived and, after that, the earrings, the questions started all over again. The iced tea was a much better present; everyone thought it came from her mother, and in fact it was just the sort of thing that Rita would have sent. Ginny made sure to let him know just how much she appreciated the tea.

  But Thanksgiving would be different. Since there was absolutely no chance of their being alone, she wouldn't have to worry about things getting out of hand. But, oh, how wrong she turned out to be. Things certainly did get out of hand. Only the problem wasn't Oscar. It was his son Gabriel, incredible, beautiful, she-wanted-him-like-she'd-never-wanted-anyone-in-her-life Gabriel.

  This was a shock to Ginny, because even though she could certainly appreciate good looks from an aesthetic point of view—she was a dancer, after all, and dancers lived for beauty—her appreciation never translated into her wanting to kiss, hug, fondle or get naked with a person just because they were good-looking. Now Wes was quite handsome, but he was the one who pursued her—she could have taken the sex or left it. Of course her being with Oscar had nothing to do with lust. At least not with hers. And when she heard the girls go on about Erik, she could only wonder, because though she admired him as a teacher and choreographer, the thought of having sex with him left her cold as a corpse.

  Ginny had always thought of herself as being immune to that sort of thing. Not to sex, because sex felt good. But so did taking a long, hot shower after a grueling rehearsal or eating dinner when you were starving. Romance—all that starry-eyed stuff—seemed beside the point to her. Like the song said, What's love got to do with it? She was too busy being in love with dancing to be in love with anyone else. But that was before she met Gabriel.

  When she first saw him, he was standing in the middle of Oscar's living room next to his wife. Ginny couldn't stop staring, even though she could hear her mother's voice saying, “Virginia, if you leave your mouth open for long enough, you may find a fly sunbathing on your tongue.”

  Finally, Ginny had the presence of mind to shut her mouth, though she kept staring. She stared while they took off their coats—Penelope's was smooth and white, how in the Lord's name did she keep it clean?—and handed them to Ruth. Stared while they hugged and kissed their relatives and in-laws. Stared while Penelope sat down on the sofa, hauled out one of her ample breasts—you could certainly tell she wasn't a ballet dancer—and the baby, she couldn't think of her name, began to nurse. Ginny was made uncomfortable by that, so she turned back to Gabriel.

  He was tall, like Oscar, with Oscar's unusual blue-green eyes, only his were much clearer and brighter-looking. His hair was black and curled up a little around his ears and collar; Ginny saw that it was threaded ever so slightly with gray, but to her, the gray glinted like silver. She watched his body carefully; dancers always looked at bodies, and Gabriel's was lean and fit. Maybe he jogged or lifted weights. He had a full bottom lip and a slight space between his two front teeth and she began imagining, to her own surprise, how delicious it would be to touch her tongue against that opening, when there he was, pressing his hand into hers.

  “I'm Gabriel. Oscar's son,” he said. Ginny liked his voice. It was low, but somehow smooth too.

  “Virginia,” she said, demure as you please. “Virginia Valentine.”

  “From City Ballet? Mom told me you were coming. Is this your first winter in New York?”

  And so it started innocently enough, party chatter that moved from the hallway to the living room to the dining room and back again. No one else seemed to bother about them. Penelope was totally absorbed by the baby, as were the older women. The cousins and the other brothers had each other. Gabriel and Ginny were free to talk, and all the while, she kept looking at his mouth, his hands, his shoulders. Though she couldn't help her response, she was nonetheless shamed by it. He was married after all. Then he asked if she had ever been to the apartment before.

  “Only once,” she lied. “Your father invited me for dinner.”

  “Then you've never seen the rest of it?”

  “Never.”

  “Come on, then. I'll show you where I slept. I grew up here, you know.”

  “You did?” she asked, hardly caring about that, but instead thinking, We're going to be alone together. They walked down the hallway toward a bedroom—actually, she remembered it quite well, because it was where Oscar had put her to sleep on that other night she had been there, the night nobody knew about—and Gabriel opened the door. Here was the narrow bed, here was the teddy bear. And, yes, here was Gabriel—thank you, sweet Jesus!—pulling her into his arms and kissing her as if he would never stop. They stood like that, arms around each other, kissing, until the door must have opened—neither of them heard it—and there was Ruth and the baby gesturing toward Gabriel.

  Of course, the rest of the afternoon was ruined. Ginny didn't trust herself to look at Gabriel and she could only glance—for a few embarrassed seconds—at Ruth. Ginny felt awful when she saw the older woman's glittering eyes, her pained mouth. But he kissed me, she wanted to tell her, to tell all of them.

  When she was finally able to leave, she forced herself to say a cheery good-bye to everyone in the room. Then she turned to Ruth.

  “Thank you so much for inviting me,” she said. On impulse, Ginny hugged her. Though she knew Ruth wouldn't believe it, Ginny was sorry for what she had seen, sorry for having hurt her. The older woman went rigid in Ginny's arms but was too stunned to push her away.

  “Thank you for coming,” Ruth managed to get out. Ginny left. From the hallway where she waited for the elevator, she could hear more good-byes; she must have started the exodus. She didn't want to have to talk to any of the other guests in the elevator, so she found her way to the stairwell and hurried down.

  Ginny walked back to her apartment slowly, trying to make sense of the strangest afternoon of her life. Could this really be her, Virginia Louise Valentine, consumed by desire for a man she had just met? A man who was the son of the man she had just stopped sleeping with? Before, whatever passion there was in her had been reserved for her dancing; she burned to execute entrechats quatre as sharp as knives in the air, arabesques that grazed the sky. She understood that being a classical ballet dancer was rigorous and awful enough that in order to even hope to succeed, she had to want it more than anything else under the sun. And she had. Now she wanted Gabriel with what felt like an equal intensity. It scared her.

  Soon she reached her street, but instead of heading into the building, she kept walking. West End Avenue was quiet on this holiday afternoon, with the dark just starting to settle in. The warmth had seeped from the air when the sun set, and her hands felt cold, so she shoved them down deep into her pockets. That's when she felt it: the smooth, folded bit of paper. She pulled it out and found a small white square that hadn't been there when she had left her apartment. She opened the note quickly, and read the words again and again:

  I'm leaving New York in a couple of days but will be back soon. Will you see me?

  Gabriel

  Did he need to ask? It all slipped away then: Ruth's face, Oscar's gloom, Penelope, the baby. She knew it was wrong, but she also knew she couldn't help it. Gabriel wanted to see her again and Lord she wanted to see him.

  Ginny looked left and right; only a handful of other people were in the street. Although she hadn't had class that morning, hadn't warmed up at all, she did a leap—a large, joy-filled, I'm-i
n-love kind of leap—across the empty pavement. It felt so good she did another and another until the few pedestrians who were out began to stare and only then could she bring herself to stop.

  GABRIEL

  Gabriel sat in the first tier of the New York State Theater, trying to shield himself with the Stagebill. Not that he really thought anyone would see him and wonder what he was doing there. He knew, of course, that his father was there, buried somewhere deep in the orchestra pit, though Oscar would not be able to see Gabriel so high above him, even if he were looking. Which he surely was not. But still. So holding the little booklet in both hands, he positioned it at eye level and tried to bury his face in its pages. Soon, the theater's lights—which looked like outsized, imitation gems—would dim, and he could relax. At least a little. If a man who had intentionally lied to his wife and flown to another city for the express purpose of making love to someone else can be said to relax. It wasn't as if he didn't know that he was betraying Penelope. And it wasn't as if he didn't care. But that kiss had been his undoing.

  Gabriel was no stranger to this theater, the place where his father had made music for so many years. His mother used to bring them all here when they were little. William and Ben liked Stars and Stripes, with its big Sousa marches and even bigger American flag emblazoned across the backdrop of the stage. Also Western Symphony, which they called the Cowboy Ballet. This made Ruth smile and ruffle their hair with her fingers. Gabriel, though he didn't like to admit it, preferred the more overtly romantic ballets, the ones where the dancers wore flowing, diaphanous costumes, or short, starchy-looking tutus which gave them an endearingly comic appearance. He liked the way the dancers looked altogether, their supple, slender arms moving in time to the music his father made, their delicate necks held so erect and yet so mobile. For a time, he would develop a crush on this or that particular ballerina, and he had even stood at the stage door a few times waiting to get his program autographed. Of course Oscar could easily have done this for him, but Gabriel didn't want to tell Oscar—or anyone else—about his secret loves. The programs were then stored in a fireproof metal box under his bed to which only he had the key. But the phase passed, and eventually he and his brothers stopped going to the ballet.

  Having finished reading the Stagebill from start to finish—program notes, where he first turned just to find Ginny's name listed for her small solo, restaurant reviews, advertisements for estate jewelry and custom furriers—Gabriel ventured a look around at the theater itself. The architect in him found something uninspired about the place, with its gaudy round lights and cheesy gold curtain. Like the inside of a candy box, he thought, remembering theaters he had seen in Europe—the Maryinsky in Saint Petersburg, the fantastic blue-and-gold marvel in the Châtelet in Paris. Theaters where there was a sense of majesty—this place was just too damn democratic for Gabriel's taste. Much pomp but no splendor here. No romance either. Though Ginny said it was a wonderful place to dance, with a specially engineered floor and all sorts of other dancer-friendly innovations. “Some places have you dancing on concrete,” she told him that day in his parents' apartment. “Can you imagine what that does to your knees?” He could imagine what he would like to do to her knees, her thighs and any other parts of herself that she offered. He could not remember feeling so excited by a woman in his entire life.

  Ginny was the reason he was here after all, the reason he had left his wife and child, lied to them too, with that story about the clients in Santa Barbara. Penelope scarcely seemed to care when he told her he was going. And despite the long plane ride, he planned to stay only a single night, so as not to arouse her suspicions. He would call her later, after the performance, but before he met with Ginny. Ginny who was coming to the East Side hotel where he had booked a room, a room where he would finally get to hold her, pull off whatever ridiculous clothes she was wearing and devour her fierce, vibrant and anything but pliant body.

  Finally, the lights dimmed and the curtain rose. There on the stage before him were the Victorian parlor and shining snowflakes of The Nutcracker, and Gabriel was lost again in memory, reliving something he hadn't thought of for years. This time, he was quite small and he and Ruth were here alone—William was a baby and Ben not even born. In fact, Oscar had not started playing in the orchestra yet. But Ruth had this idea about The Nutcracker being something all New York children should see, and she took him to it by herself, on the subway, one winter afternoon. She had a coat of some camel-colored wool, which made Gabriel think of caramels and butterscotch, and because he still felt chilly when they got to the theater, Ruth draped it around his shoulders and knees as he watched. It had her scent, whatever light, floral cologne she wore, and some other indefinable but infinitely reassuring quality too. Sitting in the dark, Gabriel was dazzled by the performance, the toys and candy that came to life, the Christmas tree that grew—like an ogre or a giant—to dominate the stage. He drank it all in as he dreamily sucked his thumb and nestled in the warmth of Ruth's arm, which she had placed around him.

  And now he was back again, back with the snowflakes and the flowers that danced and, finally, there was Ginny, dancing the Coffee variation. She wore something that could have belonged to an odalisque, at least one painted by a voyeuristic nineteenth-century Frenchman like Ingres or Delacroix. The abbreviated top left her midriff bare, scarlet fabric fringed in gold was wrapped around her slim hips. Nude colored tights and pointe shoes gave the illusion that her legs and feet were bare. The costume must have been trimmed with bells or metal coins; there was a musical tinkling when she moved. Her hair was pulled back tightly, the way they all wore it, and he was more aware than ever of her long, pale neck, her eloquent shoulders. She moved with an electricity and a precision that to Gabriel seemed astonishing. He did not know the names of the steps, though he knew he would ask her about them later. But he could appreciate the sense of attack in her movements, the bright, crisp way her body silently moved through space to command and dominate it. All this happened in mere minutes; her appearance on the stage seemed achingly brief and he felt abandoned when it was over. Only the sound of the applause after she had stopped let him know that his vision of her was one that other people shared and not entirely colored by his desire.

  The rest of the ballet was pleasant if anticlimactic. His mind wandered over the program again, and back to San Francisco and Penelope. It would be after five o'clock there now, which meant that she would be feeding Isobel one of her organic concoctions.

  “Can't she start eating some real food soon?” Gabriel asked one day as he watched her spoon some rather unappetizing-looking greenish-brown mixture into Isobel's small, open mouth. He had a sudden desire to take the child on his lap and feed her chocolate chip ice cream, a bagel whose cream cheese she would use to decorate her face and hair, tiny bites of pizza and buttered toast. But Penelope would have none of that. “Do you want to start poisoning her already?” she demanded when he suggested this. “Do you have any idea how fragile her immune system still is? There are toxins that exist today that hadn't been dreamed of when we were babies. It scares me even to think about it.” So Gabriel backed off, as he always did, retreating to his world of work, the lines on paper and the shapes in space that he patiently conceived and designed. At first, after Isobel's birth, the world of work was infinitely soothing and appealing to him. Here was a place where he still had some effect. But as the months wore on, and Penelope remained as preoccupied as ever, he grew restless. How could she so completely have lost interest in him? Wasn't he the father of this miraculous life that held her so in thrall? Didn't he count?

  There was, of course, no sex during these months. In the beginning, he was tender and solicitous; he had seen her labor through childbirth and knew how her body had been stretched and torn. But surely, all these months later, she must have healed? He wanted to ask her, but the whole subject seemed to leave her cold. “You want to put what where?” she had said, half-mocking, a couple of months ago when he had nuzzled up to her
on one of the rare nights that Isobel was not in their bed. That was another thing: the baby slept with them nearly all the time, and the pale dye-and-resin-free natural hardwood crib his parents had bought, at her specifications, remained mostly unused. “She's so tiny,” Penelope would murmur when Gabriel tried to suggest that maybe Isobel could start sleeping in her own room. Or she would say, “It's so much easier to nurse when she's right there next to me.” Which of course was true. But Isobel was a restless, noisy sleeper; her small body and limbs rotating, like the hands of a clock, in the bed so that Gabriel would wake with her heel wedged between his neck and shoulder or her fist in his eye. And the sounds she made! She didn't so much snore as hoot and wheeze through the night. Then she woke wailing, and only Penelope's breasts—ripe with hormones and milk and denied to him—would quiet her. Often, Gabriel would just take his pillow and curl up on the sofa. Soon, he stopped even trying to sleep with his wife. Penelope didn't seem to mind.

  He spoke, tentatively at first, and then with greater candor, to some of the other men in his office who also had young children at home. Most treated the subject with patient resignation or mildly hostile humor. All of them agreed that a new baby had turned their once lovely and loving wives into unrecognizable mommy-pods. But none of the wives Gabriel heard described seemed quite so exclusive, even obsessive in their focus, as Penelope.

  Not that this was justification for what he was about to do, he knew that. His present situation was merely the jumping-off point for some leap he may have been destined to take, no matter what was happening in his marriage. He only knew that the force of his feelings for Ginny—the pull, the draw she exerted—was something he couldn't resist.

  The performance was over, the curtain coming down on the enchanted winter world below him. There was more applause, many curtain calls, and flowers were delivered to the stage. Ginny curtsied and Gabriel clapped so hard his palms stung. Sometimes, Gabriel knew, if there had been a particularly beautiful or complex musical solo, one of the musicians might be invited onto the stage for a bow. Tonight was not one of those nights and Gabriel was glad. Oscar was already too present in this situation; Gabriel had no desire to see him.