The Four Temperaments

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  Gabriel thought the whole thing rather funny. Still, he kept looking for and buying signs, mainly because he continued to enjoy them himself. And as long as they did not enter their apartment, Penelope didn't mind them either. In fact, apart from this latest interest of his, she generally regarded Gabriel's collections with a kind of indulgent fondness. He had told her about all the things he collected as a boy, even the pointe shoes. Which turned out to be quite handy when she discovered—in the most unlikely way, since he was sure he had hidden them safely—the pair of battered salmon-colored pointe shoes that Ginny had given him.

  As they were leaving the hotel room in New York, Gabriel noticed that Ginny was about to toss out the pair she had worn during the performance the night before.

  “Why are you throwing them out?” he had asked.

  “Oh, they never last more than one performance. I usually do it at the theater, but I was in such a hurry last night.” She beamed at him. “No sense lugging them back across town, though. The bag's heavy enough as it is.” And she tapped the large, rather soiled zebra-print tote that was slung over her shoulder.

  “Let me have them,” he said impulsively.

  “Well, all right,” she said, clearly pleased. “But I won't sign them, okay?” So the pointe shoes had flown back across the country with him, tucked way at the bottom of the small bag he carried. They remained there for quite a while; after the scene with the shredded paper and the reconciliation that followed, he had actually forgotten that he'd taken them. When he did remember, he thought he'd bring them to the office. Penelope almost never went there, and when she did, he was always with her. It was unlikely that she'd search his desk or file cabinets, so he felt reasonably comfortable with the thought of putting them there. Once they were there, he could consider at length the best place to keep them. So he slipped them into a bag and the bag into the glove compartment of his car. Penelope claimed not to trust Gabriel's natty little Audi, and unless there was some pressing reason, she never drove it. So how was he to know that during the brief few hours between the afternoon he tucked the shoes into the glove compartment and the morning he would have taken them to the office, Penelope would decide that she needed a flashlight in her car, look all over their apartment and, when she didn't find it, check that very glove compartment in search of one?

  “What are these?” she asked, coming into the apartment, holding the shoes aloft.

  “Those?” Gabriel willed himself not to look alarmed.

  “Aren't they ballet shoes? Toe shoes?”

  “They're called pointe shoes, actually,” he said calmly enough.

  “Oh, so these are what you used to collect?”

  “That's right,” he said, hardly daring to believe that she herself had supplied the alibi he so desperately needed. “Though I never had that many to begin with.”

  “I thought you got rid of them,” she said.

  “I did. But I found those tucked into a box somewhere. So I thought I'd keep them after all.”

  “A little bit of your youth?” she said, smiling now.

  “A little bit of my youth,” he agreed. She handed him the slippers, nestled toe to heel, their sweat-stained satin ribbons binding them neatly together. He could feel the relief coursing through him now as his hands closed around them. Goddamn it! Almost caught again! And he had sworn he would be so careful! She turned to leave the room.

  “Whose were they, anyway?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “I honestly don't remember anymore,” he said, looking down at the book he had been reading when she first came in. The shoes were never mentioned again.

  Spring came slowly to San Francisco. There was lots of rain and even when there wasn't, there seemed to be an uncommon number of damp, cold days. Penelope and Isobel remained indoors much of the time, Isobel toddling around their now fully baby-proofed apartment and Penelope trailing after her. Gabriel spent long hours at his office, working mostly, but also logging on to Web sites that he dared not log on to at home, like the one for the New York Times, which gave him access, albeit indirectly, to Ginny. In the Arts section, he could read reviews of her performances. One critic described her as “magisterial” and Gabriel knew precisely what the reviewer meant. There were other reviews too, equally stellar. He read them over and over again, imagining her dancing in ballets he remembered from childhood.

  Finally, it got warm. Late in April, they had a birthday party for Isobel—her first. There were only the three of them in attendance, but Penelope bought paper hats and streamers and even produced a heart-shaped cake made by an organic baker. Gabriel thought it tasted like sand, but he didn't say so. There were no balloons; Penelope had read of too many cases where a baby ingested a scrap of popped balloon and died as a result. Still, Isobel seemed delighted, waving her fists in the air and pressing her thumb into the sliver of cake that Penelope offered her.

  Gabriel's parents called earlier in the day and despite a certain anxiety he detected in Ruth's tone, there was no overt reference to Ginny. Instead, both his parents asked to speak to Isobel, and although usually Penelope insisted that Isobel was frightened by the telephone, today she relented enough to let the baby make a few babbling noises into the receiver. Both Ruth and Oscar seemed to be listening when she did this; Gabriel could visualize their heads close together, one almost on top of the other, as they strained to hear their grandchild. Then there was the news about William and Betsy's new baby, who had arrived a few weeks earlier. “She's just darling,” Ruth told Gabriel when the phone was passed back to him. “I've never seen eyes quite like that—so big and so dark. I can't wait for her to meet Isobel. They're first cousins, after all.” Gabriel thought about that for a few seconds: he could imagine Penelope's fears about strains of foreign viruses being transmitted between the babies. Probably best to delay this meeting for a while, though he didn't say so to his mother.

  In July, the New York City Ballet went to Saratoga, in Upstate New York, for a month; Gabriel learned this from logging on to the NYCB Web site, which tracked their whereabouts. He was pleased to find short profiles of all the soloists and principal dancers, and since Ginny had recently been made a soloist, hers was among them.

  Sitting in his office in the early evening, after everyone had left, he stared at her image on the screen. The light had just begun to fade outside, and a few minutes before, he had turned on, one at a time, all the neon signs on his wall. They filled the room with their noisy, convivial hum. Ginny wore a long-sleeved black leotard, cut very low in front so that he could make out, even on the screen, the shallow division between her breasts. The tiny, crescent-shaped scar at the base of her neck—a freak childhood accident involving a dropped knife that ricocheted off a table—was hidden though, and this made Gabriel feel happy; a private bit of her to remember and savor that was not on view to the world. Over the leotard, she had on a long, diaphanous skirt, under which her legs, in their pale tights, were clearly visible.

  He learned that she was born in Bakerstown, Louisiana, that she started studying ballet when she was eight, that Serenade was her favorite ballet. He studied her face for a long while. She was heavily made up in this picture, as she was the night he met her at the hotel. Still, he could see that she was not beautiful, at least not in the way that Penelope was. But even in this frozen, digital likeness, he could see the animation that sparked her face, her body. She was avid, rapacious, bold, eager; Gabriel wanted to inhale, ingest, consume her, incorporate those aspects of her being into his own. What a pair of contrasts they were, his wife and lover. One was rich, well educated, classy, beautiful. The other was low-class, poor and without even a decent high school education. But how alive she was, how completely, totally alive. Whereas it often felt as if something in Penelope had died. He hadn't realized just how exhausting his life with her was until he met Ginny; Penelope's fears and anxieties had led to so many small renunciations and denials. But Ginny renounced nothing; to be in her presence was to be embraced.


  Yet Gabriel did not wish to leave Penelope. The thought of disrupting their life together and his home held no promise of relief. If he were to do that, what would happen to Isobel? Would Penelope even let him see her? Even though he often felt Isobel was something of a stranger to him—guarded so vigilantly by her mother—he didn't want to lose her.

  And then of course there was Nel's money. Certainly, as Ruth was fond of pointing out, Gabriel enjoyed the material comforts that Penelope's wealth allowed him. But at the same time, he resented that wealth, because it usurped his own prerogative in earning it. How many architects at his stage of a career could afford their apartment with its expensive furniture or the car he drove?

  No, rather than face the pain of upheaval, both psychological and material, he would rather accept Penelope just as she was. But he wanted Ginny too, and he had to find a way to have them both. It was an awful, selfish wish: Gabriel knew this. Yet Ginny didn't mind being part of this triangle, and if Penelope never found out, who, in the end, would be hurt? This was what he told himself in an effort to justify something for which he knew there was no justification. He thought then about his father. It still made him sick to contemplate Oscar and Ginny together. How had Oscar justified it? Though now that he knew Ginny better, he had the feeling that she was the one who decided—for what reason, Gabriel could not fathom—that she wanted Oscar. Because when Ginny wanted something, she got it.

  Quite apart from his guilt over betraying her with Ginny, Gabriel was genuinely concerned about Penelope's increasing emotional turmoil, and he wanted to help her. Not that she would admit she needed help. But Gabriel was aware of the anxieties that held her, most days, tightly by the throat. The cupboards were filled with bottles of the antibacterial soap she ordered in bulk from an organic produce supplier; its vaguely spicy, geranium-like scent hovered over her skin at all times. She talked to herself, quietly, not out loud, but her lips seemed to move in an ongoing, self-referential monologue. She was getting worse. A lot worse. He did a little research on some of her symptoms using the Internet; he questioned people—very casually, of course—at his office. He even called, with some misgivings, his brother Will, who was a cardiologist in New York.

  “Hey, Gabe,” William had said, answering the phone in that bluff and hearty way Gabriel remembered and hated. “What's the score?” Still the jock even all these years later, Gabriel thought. But he controlled himself for Penelope's sake. Once he explained what had been going on with his wife, William turned suddenly serious and concerned.

  “I'm not really sure,” he had said. “Sounds like she could be manic-depressive. With a little obsessive compulsive stuff happening on the side. There are a lot of new medications on the market now. But you really need an expert opinion. I know a couple of people you could call.”

  “I really appreciate it,” Gabriel said sincerely, as he jotted down the names and telephone numbers.

  “There's one more thing, Gabriel,” William had said.

  “What's that?” Gabriel sat, his pen poised midair.

  “She has to want it,” William said.

  “Want what?”

  “To get help. To get better.”

  “What if she doesn't?” There was a long pause during which Gabriel uncoiled a paper clip, stretching out the metal filament into a long, taut line.

  “No magic bullets, Gabe. No magic bullets,” William said finally.

  Gabriel hung up the phone and stared at the names he had written down. By a crazy coincidence, one of them was named Dr. Giselle Klaubis. Giselle. In the story told by the ballet, Giselle went mad when she discovered her lover, Albrecht, had betrayed her. Went mad and died. Gabriel crumpled the piece of paper and threw it in the trash. Only later did he retrieve it, and tentatively mentioned one of the doctors to Penelope. But he did not mention Giselle Klaubis.

  Now, as he sat, still staring at Ginny's picture, he wished he could download it and the little box of text beside it, but he didn't dare. Somehow Penelope would find it, just the way she found the pointe shoes, the ones he had since buried at the very back of his least-accessible file cabinet. So he regretfully clicked off the image and instead found the scheduled performance dates for the company's stay in San Francisco. He printed out the schedule and folded it into neat thirds, which he then slipped into the outermost flap of the leather case in which he carried his papers. He wanted it to be very visible—he had nothing to hide, after all—to Penelope should she choose to look through his things. And if she did, he could casually mention that the ballet was coming to town, and how much he would like to see it, for old time's sake. How he planned to see Ginny alone he hadn't yet figured out. But just being able to sit quietly in the theater and watch her dance—that thought was enough. The rest of it would come. He didn't know how yet, but it would. He toyed momentarily with the idea of clicking back to her image again, but he did not. Instead, he turned off the machine, and the dozen humming lights behind him, and went home, to his wife and child.

  Later that evening, he mentioned the idea of going to the ballet.

  “That would be nice,” Penelope mused, looking down at Isobel, who was, as usual, at her breast. “But what about the baby?” The baby. Penelope would not go out for the evening and leave Isobel with anyone; how could he have forgotten? When Isobel was a newborn, they took her with them. Now she was too big and too lively to spend a whole evening in her mother's arms, so Penelope preferred to stay home. “Of course, if you really want to, you can go by yourself,” Penelope was saying. She had shifted Isobel to her other breast and the nipple of the first one, glimpsed quickly by Gabriel before she covered herself, was still wet and shining. “I don't mind. Really I don't.” She looked up at him and smiled.

  “We'll see,” said Gabriel neutrally, but inside he was throbbing with pure, unalloyed joy. Here he had been so worried about how he would manage this, and Penelope had made it so easy. He could watch Ginny alone. And afterward, well, he would think of something. Gabriel's gaze lifted up and over Penelope's dark head. Through the window he saw the lights of the city spread out below him. Their distant glow gave him hope, and he could feel a plan taking shape inside of him.

  PENELOPE

  Penelope still dreamed of the accident, even all these years later. In her dreams, she was driving down that road again, hands steady on the steering wheel, the August light dappling yellow through the canopy of trees above her. It was her last summer at home; in September, she would be starting her first term at college. Where had she been going that afternoon? She didn't remember. What she remembered and what she dreamed of were the car, the quiet swerve of the road, the light. And the blurred, brown shape that darted from its invisible place by the trees. The shape that materialized into a doe who chose that precise moment to cross the road. Penelope felt, more than remembered, the impact of the deer's body as it slammed against the hood of the car. At that point, she always woke up.

  She hadn't been driving that fast, so the deer had not been killed. At least not immediately. She remembered hitting the brakes suddenly and getting out of the car. No sign of the doe, who had vanished into the woods. Looking down, Penelope saw that the hood was smeared with blood. She put her hand to the spot and found that coarse dark bits of the animal's fur were mixed in it. She wanted to atone, somehow, for hitting it, so she ran her bloodied fingers across her cheeks and forehead. Getting back into the car, she surveyed the result in the rearview mirror. Interesting. Like war paint.

  “I hit a deer,” Penelope said calmly as she headed for the bathroom to wash her hands, rather sticky now, and her face.

  “But you're bleeding,” said Caroline. “Let me see.” Penelope walked past her mother without saying anything else. When she emerged from the bathroom, face and hands newly clean, hair brushed and gleaming, Caroline said nothing, but looked steadily at her, as if trying to assess the extent of the damage.

  Penelope wondered why she had so many dreams of the accident. She didn't dream of her horse, whose deat
h she actually witnessed. Or of her father. She didn't even know what happened to the doe. Maybe the wounds were minor and the animal recovered. Maybe she went on to live a long, long life in the forest, mothering fawn after fawn, delicate Bambi-like creatures who hovered by the side of the road, drawn by some mysterious force to cross it, only to be hit again and again. Sometimes, the dreams ended with Penelope waking in tears; other times, in a frantic sweat.

  When she first met and fell in love with Gabriel, she used to tell him about these dreams. He was always so sweet with her then; he would have her lie resting her head in his lap as he stroked the long dark hair away from her forehead in an effort to soothe her. Sometimes she even woke him up in the middle of the night. He never seemed to mind; he always wanted to comfort her. But since Isobel's birth, she found herself confiding less and less in Gabriel. He had become more of an opponent than an ally. On one occasion, he even suggested that she see a therapist. He actually went so far as to get a referral from that brother of his, William, the one who was a doctor back east.

  “It might be helpful,” he suggested, as they sat on the soft white sofa, watching the news one evening. Penelope hated the news. Murders, catastrophes, encroaching poisons with which the world was being consumed. But Gabriel liked the news, and she watched to please him.

  “Helpful in what way?” she asked.

  “You know, Nel. With the washing, for instance. And the tapping.”

  “I don't have a problem with those things.” So he had seen her, been spying on her, no doubt.