Corpse de Ballet (4 page)

Anton, meanwhile, rose as bidden and went to a low wooden box, like a small sandbox, near one of the windows. Into this he dipped each of his feet, rubbing them briefly against whatever was inside. He then spread his arms, leapt from one foot to the other and executed a swift, experimental spin before going to the place Ruth had indicated. He watched her work with Patrick for a moment, then chose to crouch as if looking into the house from behind a bit of hedge. His face took on a look of intense curiosity, and the very rise and fall of his broad shoulders and chest with each breath were somehow expressive of his interest. Immediately, Juliet saw that Ruth had been right; with the innocent Pip looking on, Miss Havisham's lesson acquired a tension and forward thrust it had not had before.

At the end of each sequence of steps, Ruth would ask, “Did somebody get that?” and look to Lily Bediant or Kirsten Ahlswede, both of whom stood watching her, then trying slowly to replicate what she had done. Hart Hayden had stood up and positioned himself vis-à-vis Lily and Kirsten in a spot corresponding to the one Anton had taken. He did not crouch, however. Instead, after a moment of reflection, he hovered sidewise, as if concealed by one side of the frame of the French door. Though his face showed only the effort of professional concentration, the excitement of the secret watcher trembled in each elegant limb.

A few yards toward the back of the room, Elektra Andreades and the pigtailed, sinewy Mary Christie also echoed Ruth and Patrick's movements, though even more hesitantly. How all these dancers could possibly catch and remember such a fluid series of movements as Ruth was whirling through, Juliet had no idea, but they did. She supposed they were trained to do it, like actors who must remember improvised lines.

As Ruth worked on, going back again and again to start at measure twenty-four, Juliet allowed her attention to wander away to the only other person in the room seated in a chair. This was an elderly, slim, extremely erect woman dressed all in black: black tights and leotard, and a short, flaring black skirt tied around her waist. That she had once been a dancer was apparent not only from her clothes but her carriage and even her smoothly scraped-back hair, which, though silver, was long and twisted behind her into a bun. She sat with a clipboard on her lap and a pencil in her slender right hand, her handsome dark eyes fixed with minute attention on Ruth and the movements she was making. From time to time, she removed her authoritative gaze from the choreographer to make a little note on the paper clipped to her clipboard. Patrick would later identify her as Victorine Vaillancourt, once the star of the Paris Opera Ballet. For many, many years now, Mlle. Vaillancourt had been senior ballet mistress at the Jansch, overseeing the little cadre of masters and mistresses who gave the daily classes and rehearsed the dancers in the Jansch's repertory. Lily Bediant had been her particular protégée, Patrick added, and Victorine was concerned to ensure that none of the modern movements Ruth might require would unduly strain and injure her now decidedly mature pet—or, of course, the other dancers in her care. Ruth planned to keep her ballerinas in pointe shoes, a footgear not always convenient when dancing in her style.

Her initial spurt of invention over, Ruth at last dispensed with Patrick and was starting to work directly with Kirsten and Lily when Victorine stood up. Juliet, who was still looking in her direction, saw that she rose very slowly, and that her lips and jaw tightened briefly with effort or pain. However, she moved quite confidently toward Patrick, who had squatted to make a few notes in a notebook of his own and was again carefully watching Ruth. The moment Victorine caught his attention, she raised her eyebrows meaningfully. Patrick turned quickly to look at the clock above the door, then back to Ruth. He gave a respectful cough, which she ignored, then reluctantly went close enough to lay a hand on her arm.

She looked up angrily, but when Patrick again turned his eyes toward the clock, her expression changed. As Juliet later learned, the all-important, union-decreed break was upon them, indeed overdue. With a sullen frown, Ruth grudgingly dismissed the dancers for fifteen minutes. All around the room, company members took advantage of the pause to stand, stretch, gossip, wander about the unbearably stuffy studio, or flee it, take a swallow from a bottle of Evian tucked into their dance bags or nibble the smaller end of a baby carrot. Most of all, as it seemed to Juliet, they blew their noses. The ballerinas blew them delicately, the male dancers mightily, but they all seemed to need to clear them, and Juliet made a mental note to take zinc and buy stock in whoever made Sudafed. The place was a bacterium sanctuary, she thought, watching the dancers cross and crisscross the room, faces buried in Kleenex. Apart from everything else, they seemed to touch one another constantly, not only when dancing (as of course they must) but while walking or making plans or greeting each other or saying good-bye. Kisses, caresses, massages, tweaks, squeezes, all varieties of flesh-to-flesh contact were the rule. Juliet, dreading contagion, unconsciously folded her arms and tucked her hands under her armpits.

She had thought Ruth would want to confer with her again, but in fact, the choreographer worked on, pressing poor Patrick into servitude even during this piano-less general intermission. Hart Hayden also came forward and resumed his sidelong position as Pip, an act of generosity Ruth seemed to appreciate, for she stared at him between bursts of steps as if the mystery of where to go next were contained in his face. He did not appear to mind being treated as an object in this way. His expression was alert but quite impassive, as if he were an artist's model Ruth was painting. Yet, after a few minutes, as Ruth experimented with a section in which Patrick, as Estella, seemed to fall under Miss Havisham's spell, moving as if in dreamy hypnosis, Hayden slowly broke his pose, took a few steps backward and also began to perform the same steps and gestures, foreshadowing the power Miss Havisham would ultimately wield over Pip.

“I like that, Hart,” Ruth said, panting by now after half an hour or more of constant exertion. “That's good. Patrick, look at him. Keep that.”

Glancing at Hayden's face, Juliet thought she caught just the ghost of a smile pulling at the habitual, nobly indifferent set of his mouth. A moment later, Anton returned from a visit to some place outside the studio door and Ruth asked Hart to show him the new steps. Meantime, Ruth herself sat down on the floor, flopped over so that her forehead approached her shins and gasped in the direction of her knees. She might be in excellent shape for her age, but a life in dance takes its toll on the body. Juliet gave her a minute, then approached, intending to take her leave. On the whole, it had not been such a difficult favor to do—in fact, it had been rather interesting and fun, she thought. But she really ought to get back to her own work. It was not yet two o'clock. If she went home immediately, she could still confer with her assistant, Ames, about the text for her lecture (on “Revery and Reading”) before the Association of University Departments of Folklore and Mythology meeting in Boston next month, then get in another three or four pages before knocking off for the day. She crouched near Ruth.

“Thank God you're here,” Ruth breathed at her. “That went so much better. Thank you. Now, when they all come back, I'm going to go back to the corps' first scene. They're villagers, of course, and I want you to see what they could be doing that's a little less literal than what I have. I'm afraid it looks like a rock musical.”

“Ruth—”

“It can't look like a rock musical. Greg Fleetwood would kill me.”

Gregory Fleetwood, Juliet knew, was the artistic director of the Jansch, a former star of the ballet world who still wielded considerable influence.

“It was criminal of me to let the corps sit all that session,” Ruth was going on. “Do you know how much that costs? I was just so flummoxed until you came. Honey, I'm going to owe you bigtime.”

“Ruth, I don't think you need me to stay any longer, do you?” Juliet finally managed to say.

Ruth looked up, her dark, sulky face a mask of horror. “You're not going to leave me!” she more or less snarled. “Juliet, you just got here.”

“But you've solved your stumbling bl—”

“But it's all stumbling blocks! You can't go!”

Juliet opened her mouth to suggest Ruth could at least try to work on her own from here, but closed it again as she recalled the summer of her divorce. Ruth had been there for her, not just for a quick cheering-up or two, but over many weeks. She supposed she could just dust off the lecture she'd given to the Cyberomantics in Santa Fe last year and spruce it up a bit for Boston. And she wasn't too far behind on her schedule for
London Quadrille.
Yet.

Meanwhile, a tide of dancers began to sweep through the open door and settle on the fringes of the room, washing Juliet away from Ruth. Victorine Vaillancourt entered arm in arm with Lily Bediant. Behind them came a woman who looked strangely like an older, taller, slightly distorted version of Elektra Andreades. Then a little crowd of dancers came in all at once, a knot of men and women including Elektra herself. A moment later, a tall, muscular young man with thick black hair and rough, handsome features entered and hurried after her.

With a strong, surprisingly elegant hand, he caught at Elektra's elbow and pulled her away from the little crowd she'd been with. The man's eyebrows were very dark and the eyes they surmounted looked both angry and cold at once. He was a strikingly good-looking man—most of them were, come to that—but there was a ferociousness about him, a lack of ordinary, civilized restraint in his movements, that Juliet found disturbing. However, he did not seem to trouble Elektra. She regarded him with serene detachment as he raised one heavy eyebrow and said, quite audibly, “We have to talk.” Then she ignored him as he turned abruptly away and strode off toward one of the barres.

“Who's that?” Juliet asked Patrick, who had materialized by her side after enjoying a break of some two or three minutes, during most of which time he had attended to his own overflowing nose.

“Ryder Kensington. Mr. Elektra Andreades.”

“They're married?”

Patrick nodded.

“Is he a principal?”

He shook his head. “Never made it out of the corps. They were both in the corps when they married, I think. But Ruth likes him. She cast him as Magwitch. He's quite good.”

“I see,” Juliet said thoughtfully. “And who's the woman who looks so much like Elektra Andreades?”

“Olympia Andreades.” He smiled. “Elektra's big sister.”

“Oh! Is she in the corps, too?”

“Yep.”

“Hmm.”

Intrigued and a bit unsettled by the anger she had seen in his face, Juliet sought out Ryder Kensington again, locating him as he finally reached a corner at the farthest end of the room. Once there, he cleared a bit of a space and began to practice a powerful kind of leap Juliet could not name; it was short and quick and involved a little kick and turn before a landing on bent knee. Even from across the room, Juliet could see the thick, hard muscle tense on his thigh as he landed. His expression severe, he performed the maneuver perhaps half a dozen times before Ruth clapped and brought the room back to order. Uneasily, Juliet resumed her chair and prepared to observe for another hour.

*   *   *

Some ten minutes into the session, Gregory Fleetwood stole noiselessly into Studio Three. To Juliet's surprise, he came directly to her, seated himself in the chair beside hers, put out his hand and, with a sort of noblesse oblige, murmured his name.

“Juliet Bodine,” she whispered back. After a moment of inward debate, “We've met,” she added.

Fleetwood's thin, angled eyebrows shot up skeptically, but the rest of his aristocratic features gathered in an expression that implied the mere possibility delighted him. Before Max Devijian managed to sign him on as the Jansch's artistic director, Gregory Fleetwood had danced with most major American companies and quite a few European ones. Even now, in his early fifties, he carried with him a powerful aura of artistic authority. He was tall, with sharp, hawklike features and an arrogant bearing that trumped even the accomplished arrogance of the company's foremost current performers. As the new artistic director, he had torn into the Jansch, sweeping away every vestige of quaintness and signing up principals from leading companies all over the world. While maintaining the traditional repertory, he invited contemporary composers and cutting-edge choreographers in to experiment with the Jansch's classically trained dancers. It was typical of Fleetwood that he was backstage with Ruth Renswick on the very night her triumphant one-act
Wuthering Heights,
choreographed on the Los Angeles Ballet, premiered. As the curtain fell, he offered her a commission to create a full-length story ballet for the JRBT, and in the ecstasy of the moment, the normally cautious Renswick shrieked, “Yes!”

Now Juliet gazed into his thin, bird-of-prey face, which was surrounded by a corona of Little Prince–style, spiky yellow hair. She clearly remembered seeing him perform a number of times. He had danced with extraordinary beauty and éclat, and she certainly had not realized until that meeting last year that one of his eyes was blue, one brown. He also had a sizable scar, the type left by a bad burn, that spread across his upper-right cheek. From the look of it, he had had it since childhood. Yet he had been exquisite, flawless on stage. Amazing, how dance could transform a man.

“About a year and a half ago,” she went on. “We sat at the same table at a library fund-raiser.”

“Oh, of course!” Fleetwood gave a small smile and she suddenly understood that Max had told him she was a potential donor and sent him in here to give her a thrill. Fleetwood was one of those people who consider their own presence a noteworthy event. He moved through the world in a cloud of ego so thick he could hardly make out the separate identities of mere mortals, let alone remember them individually. It would be like expecting a monarch to name the people he'd graciously waved at. Juliet had met others like him, people who live not to see but to be seen. She doubted whether he even recalled the evening at the library. If she had asserted that they went to elementary school together, he would have replied with the same, “Oh, of course!”