Corpse de Ballet (3 page)

“I'm sure it will be.”

Patrick smiled again. He had stopped before yet another closed door and now peeked in through the window. A piano rendition of a spiky melody Juliet did not recognize could be heard in the corridor, its notes muffled by the door. After a moment, Patrick moved back and beckoned to her to take his place. She peered in. Ruth was inside, working with a very tall, lithe dancer Juliet recognized as Lily Bediant. She had been a Jansch principal for years, perhaps decades, Juliet thought. She wondered if it were possible Bediant could still be taking leading roles. Margot Fonteyn, she knew, had danced through her forties, but that was hardly the rule, and Bediant must be forty at least.

A second dancer, a tall, icy blonde Juliet did not recognize, stood nearby, watching carefully each move Ruth and Lily made. “That's Kirsten Ahlswede,” Patrick whispered suddenly in her ear. He had come forward so quietly that she had not even sensed him. Now he peered in over her shoulder. “You must know Lily.”

Juliet nodded.

“We'll just wait until she reaches a little pause,” said Patrick, the “she” clearly referring to Ruth. Indeed, every time he mentioned Ruth, there was something almost reverential in his tone, as if he were saying “the admiral” or even “her Grace.” “Kirsten is Estella in the first cast,” he added. “Lily is the first Miss Havisham.”

“There's a second Miss Havisham?”

“There's a second everyone. Eventually, in fact, there will be three casts. What they're working on now,” he added, “is a pas de deux where Miss Havisham teaches Estella a dance to enchant men but also to keep them at arm's length. That little tune is Estella's motif. We've been working on it for days.”

Ruth had taken hold of Lily Bediant's graceful arm and was moving it up and down, in and out, apparently trying to convey the trajectory of a gesture she envisioned, as well as the degree of anger it was to carry. It was quite angry, and when Lily tried it a moment later, Ruth shook her head and showed her again what she wanted, demonstrating this time with a slash of what seemed authentic fury.

“What's the difference between the casts?” Juliet asked.

“The first cast dances on opening night and Saturday nights, and probably most of the other performances. The second will dance too, but probably mostly matinees. The third cast is really more like understudies, in case of injuries. Normally, a choreographer only works with the first cast while the dance is being created, but Ruth likes to take ideas from everyone. That's why Elektra Andreades and Mary Christie are there. See them? That small, dark woman who looks like you imagine Cleopatra must have looked—Cleopatra during a famine, anyway—that's Elektra Andreades. She's the second Estella. Mary, the lady with the pigtails next to her, is her Miss Havisham.”

Juliet glanced at the women. “And who is the first Pip?”

She scanned the studio for likely candidates. Some four dozen dancers were ranged around the vast room, which was mirrored on three walls and windowed on the fourth. Long barres were attached to the walls on either end of the room. The floor was of dark, battered linoleum; fluorescent lights glared unsteadily from above. The windows, Juliet could see even from this distance, were extremely dirty, admitting only a dim, unwholesome glow. They faced north, with a view of a solid brick wall a few feet away.

Patrick drew back a bit from the door, and his voice went up a couple of keys. “Ruth didn't tell you?”

Juliet shook her head.

“Anton Mohr. You know, the German dancer? Greg Fleetwood just managed to sign him last year. He's only nineteen. He is quite amazing.”

“I've seen him. Not with the Jansch yet, but he danced with the Royal Ballet a few years ago, didn't he?”

“Yes. What did you see,
Billy the Kid?
”

“
Petrushka.
” Juliet looked back in through the window, trying to match one of the dancers inside with the blaze of glorious energy she recalled from that evening.

“Lucky you,” said Patrick from behind her, as her gaze finally came to rest on a young man lying on the floor near the piano, knees bent, one hand under the small of his back, engaged in raising and lowering first one, then the other, extraordinary leg. Like all the other dancers, he was dressed in tatters—it seemed to be de rigueur—but even his faded brown T-shirt and threadbare black tights could not disguise the tall, magnificent body inside them. From this curious angle, with Mohr lying down and facing away from the door, Juliet could see only the top of his head and a sliver of face; but it was enough. His lush hair fell in thick, honey-blond waves; his taut skin was creamy, his forehead smooth, his nose straight, his lips full. As she watched, he relaxed his legs, withdrew his hand and lifted his head. With an effortless, articulated elegance, he arched his back and turned to look at what she would later find was a clock over the door. His heavily lidded eyes were jade green and huge, his gaze sleepy and sensuous. No wonder Patrick sounded faintly orgasmic.

“Mm,” Juliet agreed. “Who's the second Pip?”

Patrick's tone lost its dreaminess. “Oh, Hart Hayden, of course. Elektra's partner. They've been dancing together since they were teenagers at North Carolina School of the Arts.”

“Hart Hayden?” echoed Juliet, who had seen him dance several times. “But didn't he dance Romeo on opening night last year? Why would he be the second Pip? He was wonderful.”

She tried to pick him out among the dancers inside as Patrick answered, “Oh, yes, Hart's great. Ruth worked with him here a few years ago, when they mounted a revival of her one-act,
Cycles.
But his style is totally different than Anton's. Hart's very balletic, you know, very up in the air and youthful and effortless, that kind of classic ballet thing. Wonderful precision, really breathtaking. He was terrific in
Cycles.
But for this, Ruth wants a more athletic, muscular movement. Which Anton has.”

“But isn't he a principal? And Elektra Andreades?” asked Juliet, still puzzled. She thought she had located Hayden, sitting under a barre between a woman tapping a busy rhythm on her bony knees and another who seemed to be clipping her toenails with a kitchen shears. His back was very straight, his arms stretched up to the wooden rod above him. He was very short and slight—considerably shorter and slighter than he appeared on the stage—but she recognized his fine, shingled, extremely pale hair and the long, narrow, handsome face it framed. For a dancer, he looked unusually intellectual, Juliet thought; the bones of his face were sharp, and intelligence shone from the light-colored eyes beneath his pale eyebrows. She could easily have taken him for a State Department policy analyst had he not been wearing burgundy tights and a faded black T-shirt with “Ballet Rio” printed on it in white. Now that she looked at him, she realized she knew Elektra Andreades too—knew her to see her on stage, anyway. She looked Andreades over again, this time taking in more clearly the heavy dark hair and ivory skin, the clear, slightly tilted brown eyes, the delicate, idiosyncratic lift of the head as she stood, hardly five feet tall, absorbed in watching the choreographer. Certainly she had been Hayden's partner in last year's
Romeo and Juliet,
but without her costume and stage makeup, she looked a dozen years older than the love-struck adolescent she had played. Juliet supposed that meant Hayden was also thirty or so by now, since the two had met in ballet school.

“Oh, you bet,” Patrick answered. “In fact, they've pretty much been the brightest lights of the company for years. But—” He fell silent abruptly, drew himself straighter, and gently turned the knob, pushing in at the door. “She's stopping now,” he whispered. “Let's go in.”

Chapter Two

The first thing Juliet noticed as she entered the studio was the heat. It was warm outside—it was July, after all—but the studio was so hot and the air so damp that a cloud of outrushing steam seemed to roll over her as she followed Patrick in. It was like walking into the tropical glasshouse at a botanical garden—or rather, she corrected, as the smell assaulted her, at the zoo. She had already gotten a hint of this odor in the corridors, but here it was a Phil Spector–style Wall of Smell: sweat, perfume, sweat, cologne, more sweat, deodorant, powder, yet more sweat.

Juliet Bodine was afflicted with hyperosmia, a highly abnormal sense of smell. Her nose was sensitive to a degree that was freakish. Moreover, like a person who can't filter out background noise, she experienced all odors in her vicinity with equal immediacy. Scents flooded up to her from every corner of whatever place she walked into, so that the fragrance of a vase of flowers on the mantelpiece at the distant end of a long living room slammed into her with no less force than the reek of a glass of Scotch on the coffee table at her elbow. The roses on her terrace, which she kept for their visual beauty, had been chosen for their near lack of aroma. She was the only person she knew who smoked tobacco for medical reasons: A handful of cigarettes a day dulled her nose just enough to make New York tolerable.

She crept in behind Patrick hoping to make as little stir as possible. But she soon realized her efforts to be unobtrusive were needless. While they were in motion, the dancers kept their eyes diligently glued to the mirror, apparently lost in a world of literal self-reflection. When at rest (except for a few of the most junior members of the corps), they were far too well trained in maintaining their dignity to look at her, or at least to be seen looking at her.

Ruth, by contrast, came anxiously to meet her, kissing her on the cheek and urging her to make herself comfortable on one of the three or four chairs ranged along the east wall, by the door. She was wearing a much-washed green sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, long enough so it struck her white tights mid-thigh. Ruth had not gained an ounce since college. She fit right in among the stick-thin, wisp-waisted ballerinas around her. Juliet, on the other hand, felt as if she were waddling across the floor, even though her softly rounded, familiar little body was normally quite comfortable to her. While the subject of body weight generally bored her silly, she could not help but notice the almost anorexic faces on several of the dancers, Elektra Andreades especially. Her fair skin, made to seem even fairer by her fine, dark eyes and the dark hair that fell to her shoulders, seemed almost too scarce to cover her sharp jaw and delicate nose; her collarbones and shoulders poked up like spiky pebbles from under her leotard, as did a row of bumps down the center of her sternum and the “outie” bellybutton on the tiny dome of her tummy. Lily Bediant was bone-thin, lean in a hard, sharp way that was almost scary. Her large eyes—could they really be violet?—had a cold, predatory look, and with her crinkly, almost platinum mane of hair, she reminded Juliet of a rather feral Australian Shepherd. The men looked less likely to blow away in a good breeze, but even they were generally more slender than they appeared on stage. All the dancers held themselves with a self-conscious poise that struck Juliet as almost smug, as if being encased in their bodies were a particularly great honor. In fact, thought Juliet, every one of them looked as if his or her coronation were just about to begin.

Wishing herself invisible, she schlumped into a chair as far from them as possible. Ruth knelt down at her side.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Don't be silly. You know I'd pay money to get out of writing.”

“Did Patrick explain to you what we've been doing?”

Juliet nodded.

“I want this duet to encompass all the malevolence of Miss Havisham, but also the way she can't see Estella as a separate individual—her narcissism, you know?” Ruth explained. “And I want to make it clear that Estella is completely dependent on her, and always has been. She's like an abused child, she doesn't know anything else.”

Ruth murmured on for some while, referring eventually to the synopsis, a copy of which she had faxed to Juliet late the night before. The pas de deux came early in the first act, which Ruth felt was necessary both dramatically (you had to show your prima ballerina before too much time went by, after all) and for clarity. But it felt static to her, she now realized, and this was the stumbling block that had been driving her to despair.

“It's a set piece,” Juliet diagnosed. “It doesn't advance the narrative.”

“That's right,” Ruth exclaimed, as if much struck. “It is. It's free-standing. It doesn't flow from what precedes it and it doesn't lead anywhere.”

This apparently dismal epiphany seemed to have the paradoxical effect of allowing Ruth to find her solution.

“It needs to have Pip watching,” she exclaimed, and visibly breathed easier. She sprang to her feet, then began to move, by herself at first, then with Patrick, whom she grabbed and forced to act as her Estella. Juliet, who had never seen Ruth actually create, watched in astonishment as a new set of steps seemed to flow out of her.

“Anton, I need you to stand there,” she said, after three or four minutes of twirling and hopping and gliding on various angles with Patrick. She pointed to a spot off to the side from where she had been working. “You're not going to do much, but you must watch intently, as if you were peeking into a house through a French door. Luis, start from measure twenty-four,” she added, calling to the pianist, who had been hidden from Juliet when she peered in, but who she now saw was a small, paper-dry, middle-aged man with thick glasses and large liver spots on his face and hands, as well as under his thinning gray hair. Even with his nimble hands on the keyboard, he had an air of fussiness; his clothes were crisp and spotless and much more formal than those of anyone around him, and he moved his head pedantically at the start of each new measure.

“Andante,” Ruth added, as she felt her way tentatively into the new idea, barking now and again at Patrick, “Try a rond de jambe there. Come around this way. No, fall back against me.”