Corpse de Ballet (5 page)

Nevertheless, doggedly, “We discussed ginkgo trees, male and female ginkgos,” she went on.

“Indeed we did,” he agreed, casting a lightning glance into the mirror behind her before meeting her gaze.

Juliet recalled that the conversation had gone from there into a discussion of male and female pipe fittings and thence even further afield. It had been, to her mind, a peculiar and memorable discussion. But she was sure she was the only one who remembered it.

Fleetwood had unconsciously allowed his voice to grow a bit louder, and since the music had suddenly ended, Ruth turned suddenly to glare at him and Juliet. Fleetwood's eyebrows rose again, and with an amused smile and a graceful hand raised in salute to Juliet, he stood and hurriedly stole back out of the room.

“That's better,” muttered Ruth tartly, as the door closed behind him. Only a few of the principals dared to smile openly at this bit of insubordination, Juliet noticed, while the rest of the ensemble confined themselves to meaningful glances at one another. She also noticed that Ruth remained entirely unaware of the little stir her quite audible remark had caused. Ruth Renswick, Juliet had to concede, was low on what are sometimes called “people” skills. She was not really a “people” person.

Juliet forced herself to pay attention as her friend struggled on with the villagers' first appearance. Like the book, the ballet started with Pip in the graveyard, meeting the terrifying, escaped convict, Abel Magwitch. But the corps soon appeared, some as Christmas diners at Pip's home, some as soldiers in search of the fleeing convict. Ruth had devised some mildly comic bits of business in an effort to convey the rough, grudging treatment Pip receives at home from his sister, Mrs. Joe, and Juliet began to suspect it was these that were throwing her off. There was a fancy piece of nonsense in which the other diners, dancing on and around the table, distributed half a dozen oranges between them but just prevented Pip from quite getting hold of his. The troupe performed this bit of jugglery nimbly, especially the Pips (who had the difficult job of appearing to catch at the oranges without actually disrupting their trajectories) but most of the other humor somehow didn't work. It was too broad, too Dickensian, not Renswickian enough. Ruth would have to learn to be less respectful of her co-librettist, Juliet decided. After reaching this insight, she considered herself at liberty to turn her thoughts to her own problems (books did
not
write themselves, she reminded herself sternly), and so she spent the rest of the hour mulling over how Lady Porter could engineer a marriage between her niece and the Earl of Suffield.

She had no opportunity to share her thoughts with Ruth during the next union-required break, for the company publicist—a fanatically groomed woman in her middle fifties—sailed into the studio the instant Ruth dismissed the dancers and carried the choreographer off, peppering her even as they went with questions about an imminent press release on
Great Ex.
When Juliet turned around, she found Hart Hayden standing by her chair, an unexpectedly warm smile on his handsome, rather ascetic face. Along with the other principals, he had had little to do in the last hour, as Ruth focused on the corps and soloists, so his breathing was relaxed and he did not seem very tired. Looking at him now, Juliet could see that his complexion was badly pocked, no doubt by acne in his teens.

Instinctively, she stood.

“No, don't,” he said. She ignored him, discovering as she did so that she stood a disconcerting two or three inches taller than he. “I hope you don't mind my introducing myself.”

He did so. Juliet reciprocated.

“I couldn't help wondering who you were,” Hayden continued. His voice was surprisingly resonant and deep, his accent slow and Southern. “People are taking bets, you know. Some of the dancers think you're on the board, some that you're a reporter doing a story on the company. And some say you're the lighting designer.”

There was something inviting in his manner that prompted Juliet to ask, “And what's your theory?”

Hayden grinned and leaned over—and up—to speak into her ear. “Oh, I think you're Ruth's lover.”

Juliet was too startled to answer at once. To the best of her knowledge, at least, Ruth was not and never had been gay. Nor was she.

“Well, it's a theory, anyway,” she said at last.

“Obviously a wrong one,” he observed contritely, stepping back. “Who are you?”

Juliet gave her credentials.

“Oh, really? Do you have a pen name?”

“Angelica Kestrel-Haven,” said Juliet, experiencing the quiver of silliness the admission always gave her.

She was relieved when Hayden replied admiringly, “Good choice. I was born George Washington.”

Juliet laughed before she could stop herself. “Oh, dear,” she said.

For a minute or so, they stood in companionable silence, gazing around the room. The studio was once more full of dancers blowing their noses. Several of the women stood stretching their thigh muscles, one leg bent and held by the foot behind them, like cranes. Kirsten Ahlswede sat near the front mirror, dexterously sewing a ribbon onto a pink pointe shoe, her long, slim body curled, her shiny blond head bent, her cold, beautiful, sharply cut features completely blank. Her partner, Anton Mohr, had resumed his supine position and was once more pumping his legs in the air with fierce concentration, a plastic bottle of Coke by his side.

“What is he doing?” asked Juliet, indicating Mohr with a discreet thrust of her chin.

“Strengthening his abs. He hurt his back a few months ago,” Hayden said. “A lot of dancers rely on their backs too much and let their abs get weak. Then when they—”

He cut himself off abruptly as Ruth reentered, clapping as she came. The studio sprang to attention. Waves of chatter stopped abruptly; laughter died mid-giggle. Several of the ballerinas went to the low wooden box and dipped their feet in as Mohr had done.

“What is that b—?” Juliet began.

But Hart Hayden, she found, had left her and was already on his way to the middle of the room, where he took a place facing Ruth and stood quite still, clearly composing himself both physically and mentally. Juliet felt better for her conversation with him; it was nice to feel she had a friend (or at least a friendly face to seek out) in the room.

With one notable exception, the rest of the session was lackluster, devoted to a few measures of transitional music that tied the recapture of Magwitch to the pas de deux (now a pas de trois) in which Miss Havisham instructed Estella. All the dancers except Pip had to be gotten off the stage, and Miss Havisham and Estella brought on, a bit of mechanical work akin to what Juliet, when she was writing, thought of as furniture-moving. She did not see what good her presence could possibly be doing for Ruth, and the welcome exoticness of the studio had already begun to wear off. Finally, her head filling unbidden with voices, she brought out the little notebook she always carried and began to write snippets of dialogue for Lord Suffield and Lady Porter. She realized, as she looked up between sentences, that those dancers who thought her a reporter now considered their hypothesis confirmed. Several of them allowed themselves to look sidelong at her for a moment or two, and she read even in their well-trained faces the yearning to be singled out.

The session's one note of excitement came shortly after two-thirty, when Ruth decided she wanted to see the “Peeping Pip” pas de trois (as it soon came to be called) performed by Lily, Kirsten, and Anton. The corps sat down to rest as the three principals assembled at the front of the room. Luis Fortunato struck the now familiar first notes and Lily and Kirsten, coached by Patrick, repeated as best they could the steps Ruth had devised earlier that day. Ruth watched the sequence from under lowered eyebrows, making furious notes on index cards and signaling her skepticism about various moments to Patrick. Juliet thought she was concerned only to see her own handiwork, not about the quality of the performances. So she was startled when Ruth suddenly clapped twice in manifest displeasure.

The music came to a halt at once, as did the dancers. The heads of the entire ensemble swiveled to face front.

“Not like that,” Ruth muttered fiercely, walking around behind Lily Bediant and seizing her by the waist. She laid her own front flat along Lily's back, took one hand of the ballerina's in each of her own and began to perform a sort of warding-off gesture in which Miss Havisham's head bent low and her hands and arms stretched before her. “You are
middle-aged,
” she said, forcing Lily's body to twist crookedly under her own. “Middle-aged. Remember it. You are dancing much too fluidly.” She added, with vehemence, “Stop being a ballerina.”

When she let go, Lily straightened immediately, anger radiating from her rigid spine, her almost trembling shoulders. “Miss Renswick—” she began.

“Lily!”

Victorine Vaillancourt had come forward in her chair and her low voice thrilled with warning. Juliet saw her protégée's eyes meet hers, hold their defiance an instant longer, then drop in automatic deference. All the same, Juliet would not have liked to be near Lily Bediant just at that moment. Fury told in her limbs and her narrow, stiffly held torso. Her slender, white hands were clenched into fists. When she raised her violet eyes and trained them again on Ruth, her face was set, her gaze burning. Victorine got carefully to her feet and went to the choreographer. Into Ruth's ear, she murmured a few inaudible words.

Ruth turned back to Lily. “I meant that Miss Havisham is middle-aged, of course,” she said, her tone (alas) more annoyed than apologetic.

Lily's gaunt cheeks drew in more sharply than ever at this explanation, which Juliet felt she must certainly take as a further indignity; but she only bowed slightly to Ruth—a very measured, very noble bow—and said nothing. The session proceeded, with the villagers reassembled to polish the transition. By the time Greg Fleetwood slipped quietly back in, tossing a smile to Juliet, murmuring a word in the ears of several dancers around the room, then departing with a quick, wry salute in Ruth's direction, the tension had dissipated substantially. Promptly at three, Ruth curtly thanked the dancers and dismissed them.

An immediate tumult ensued as they prepared to hare off, most of them to lunch (generally ingested, with great self-consciousness, in the dancers' lounge on the second floor), a few of the soloists and principals to concentrated sessions with Victorine Vaillancourt or other instructors. Most had bags in which they carried shoes, bottles of water, morsels of nutritive matter, cold pills and the like. These had been left all around the perimeter of the room, and the dancers now hurried to them. They crouched to shove them full of wadded tissues and other detritus. Several of the women pulled out shawls or sweatshirts and wrapped them around their bony hips or shoulders before venturing from the steamy studio into the merely baking corridors. Elektra Andreades, who had settled herself with Hart Hayden near the sandbox (or whatever it was) through the last part of the session, slipped her legs into a pair of bright pink leg-warmers. Hayden, after a certain amount of gathering this and that into his bag (he seemed to have spread himself out liberally over the floor around them), fed her a tiny morsel—a cornflake? a sunflower seed?—kissed her casually on the side of the neck and rose to join the crowd streaming out the door. He threw a farewell smile to Juliet as he passed her.

At the same time, Ryder Kensington bore down on his wife from across the studio. He crouched and initiated a brief, murmured conversation. Thirty seconds later, he strode off again to leave the studio, looking to Juliet somewhat less angry than before.

On the other side of the wooden box, meanwhile, Lily Bediant listened as Mlle. Vaillancourt spoke softly to her. Mlle. Vaillancourt had remained standing throughout the end of the session, and Juliet wondered if getting up from a chair was so difficult for her that she avoided it. Her attitude was gentle but earnest as her words to her protégée flowed on; Lily, still stiff-backed but calmer, nodded occasionally, her face a careful, impassive mask. When Patrick Wegweiser crossed the room to join them, Juliet was sure it was to make apologies for his employer.

If so, Lily was not interested. She turned her head away as he arrived, avoided his eyes while he spoke, and for answer only glared at him briefly in silence. Mlle. Vaillancourt, clearly disapproving of this lapse in good breeding, put her arm on Patrick's and drew him away with her toward the front of the room. Lily then knelt by the dance bag she had left near the wooden box and, with the utmost dignity, blew her long nose one quivering nostril at a time.

Across the box, looking not at all ruffled by her conversation with her husband, Elektra Andreades was refastening a pigtail for Mary Christie. Mary turned and said something to Elektra that made her laugh as she gathered up the rest of her things. Then, dance bags slung over their shoulders, arms twined around each other's waists, dark, graceful heads tilted together as if Petipa had so arranged them, they left the room together.

Gradually, the vast, echoing studio emptied out. One of the last to leave was a blond, apple-cheeked, round-faced girl of nineteen or twenty whom Juliet had vaguely noticed hovering uncertainly some yards away from her. At last she darted up.

Apologetically, “Did I hear someone say you're Angelica Kestrel-Haven?” she asked. Her voice was wispy and small, her brown eyes bright.

Juliet nodded.

“Oh, I love your books!” The girl dropped what little she had of the dancer's hauteur and gushed with adolescent eagerness, “I'm Teri Malone. I'm in the corps. Oh, would you talk to me some time about writing? I love to write.”

Inevitably (and despite the fact that, in her experience, most people who loved to write were not doing it correctly), Juliet said it would be a pleasure. The ballerina bobbed what Juliet realized, after a moment's thought, was a curtsey before glancing at the clock, squeaking, “Oh, God!” and dashing away again. Watching her vanish, it occurred to Juliet that the world of ballet and the world of historical romance were probably adjacent at several points.