Corpse de Ballet (8 page)

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Meanwhile, rehearsals went on—and, true to her word, Juliet went on attending them. The first thing she did, on entering each afternoon, was to take a sniff at the rosin box. So far, the outrage had not been repeated.

On the day following his injury, Anton Mohr, his left ankle firmly wrapped with an elastic bandage, sat in his wonted place near the piano and watched as Hart Hayden came to the fore, both literally and figuratively. Partnering Elektra, Hayden gave himself unstintingly to Ruth, while Kirsten Ahlswede, temporarily paired with the dancer who was to be third Pip, a longtime soloist named Nicky Sabatino, stood behind them and followed their lead. If Anton had been shaken emotionally by his slip and the knowledge of its cause, he did not show it. On the contrary, he seemed relaxed and attentive, any professional threat he might feel from Hayden's taking his place expertly erased from his features.

Hayden, Juliet noticed, while fully as diligent as Mohr had been, fully as cooperative, had nevertheless quite a different manner of working. Where Anton would grin or crack up in the midst of devising a difficult lift, Hart was always serious, his face as impassive as if he were meditating. He seemed to draw his energy from some deep, interior well. At the same time, he frequently offered solutions or even inventions to Ruth. And he danced delightfully. The inviting charm Juliet had felt emanating from him when they first spoke was concentrated now into a working essence that made Pip come alive in gesture after gesture, movements infused with eagerness, innocence and longing.

Ruth spent the first part of the day correcting the choreography of the Christmas dinner ensemble scene in accordance with Juliet's suggestions (“It's the humor! You're absolutely right!” she had exclaimed almost joyfully, when Juliet gave her her critique). Then she turned to polishing the duet for Pip and Estella that came after the “Peeping Pip” pas de trois. Juliet watched, her eyes less on Ruth and her progress than on the room as a whole. Though it worried her to leave Lady Porter and Lord Suffield in mid-conversation, the Jansch had been much on her mind. She did not like the idea that someone might be out to undermine Ruth, and last night as she lay in bed, she had gone over and over what she could recall of the crowded scene at the end of yesterday's group rehearsal, the swirl of the dancers between Ruth's dismissal and the general departure, the various people she had noticed passing near the rosin box.

As Ruth polished the Pip-Estella pas de deux, Juliet looked on with quickened attention. The duet was a strange one, in which Pip had to dance out, by turns, his fear of Estella and his attraction to her, while Estella remained inscrutably haughty (hence its eventual nickname: the “Approach-Avoidance” duet). Juliet noticed Lily Bediant sitting in a corner, her knees drawn up to her chest, her violet eyes staring moodily as Hart Hayden and Elektra Andreades worked. Neither scene being addressed today included her. At the very least, Juliet surmised, she did not like having her time wasted.

It was while she was watching Hart Hayden experiment with various ways of lifting Elektra's right foot to his left shoulder that Juliet realized her own right foot had fallen asleep. She decided to creep out and wander around the building a bit. The slightly cooler air of the corridor came as a relief, and, pausing now and then to rotate her tingling foot, she climbed the stairs to the second floor.

Here, she poked around in the warren of little cubicles that served as offices for the dance instructors and stage crew. She stuck her head into a small room that housed a library of scores and notes on repertory. She scanned a number of bulletin boards where roles, schedules, and want ads were posted. She sat in a corner of the comfortable dancers' lounge, pretending to read the
Times
while eavesdropping as corps members gossiped and teased each other over cups of fat-free yogurt. Injuries were a staple of the chatter: who did what to which limb or joint, how long she or he would be out of commission, and what therapy had been prescribed. Anton's injury was mentioned. His claim that something external had caused the slip was noted and dismissed as the wishful thinking of a chagrined professional; apparently, he had so far obeyed Fleetwood's stipulation that he keep the truth to himself. From their tone and glances, Juliet got the idea Mohr was still considered an outsider by the corps. One member complained that he never took class with the rest of the company. But a tall, willowy woman immediately defended him, saying he lived in Brooklyn and that the class he went to was just quicker to get to. This bit of special pleading was met with a round of grins that caused the willowy girl to flush bright red, and Juliet knew then that probably half the women in the place were smitten with the German.

After injuries, complaints about colds dominated the conversation, along with jokes about blunders committed by company members during various rehearsals. One dancer, a compact man with a heavy Spanish accent, remarked that he'd heard Lily Bediant really “got it” from Ruth Renswick yesterday. But no one took him up on this opening gambit and the discussion moved on. Whether this fizzle was the result of a simple lack of interest on the part of the other dancers, or respect for Lily—or fear of her—Juliet could not tell. Meanwhile, without linking it to Anton's slip, the dancers began to discuss the “malicious incident” flyer they all had received; but as no one claimed any knowledge of what it could possibly refer to, this topic also was abandoned, in favor of last night's Letterman show.

Juliet stood and ambled away. In the women's locker room, she found a cardboard box with a sign soliciting worn-out pointe shoes to be donated to indigent aspiring ballerinas. Everywhere she went, people eyed her mistrustfully. Strangers were rare inside the Jansch, and stalkers (she later learned) not unheard of. Innocuous as Juliet thought she must look—a soft, somewhat shabby, no longer very youthful little person wearing a fixed, meaningless half-smile—her appearance seemed to waken all manner of suspicions here. Yet she did not, as yesterday, experience her dubious reception as the result of arrogance or snobbery but now saw in it the defensive clannishness of circus performers, even of freaks.

She had strolled restlessly up the stairs again and was absently coming down, musing on this epiphany, when she literally bumped into Hart Hayden.

“Excuse me!” she exclaimed fervently. The thought that she might bruise a dancer by knocking into him or stepping on his toe horrified her, like the idea of giving a singer strep throat. “I wasn't looking—”

“Takes two to collide.” Hayden smiled. “I'm just going up to get a Dr Pepper. Come with me.”

He swept his small, slim hand through the air, a gesture immensely, innately, involuntarily balletic, to invite her to turn and precede him. “Unless you're in a hurry.”

“Oh, no.” Juliet turned and trotted up ahead of him as gracefully as she could. She was surprised—and pleased—to find this great star of the company chose to be so friendly to her. He could so easily have scorned her, as most of his colleagues seemed to do.

“What were you daydreaming about?” he asked. “Got a hot date tonight?”

“Good God, no.” She laughed. Hart led the way to the lounge and over to a sleek, automat-style, refrigerated machine that dispensed fresh fruit, juice, sodas, and other snacks. “Do you?”

“Me? I'm married to the dance. No kidding,” he added, after Juliet laughed again. “If I sleep with anyone, I don't dance as well. So I don't sleep with anyone.”

“Wow.”

“I love dance,” Hart Hayden said simply. He put some coins into the machine, pushed a button, waited while the selections revolved, then opened the door and plucked out his bottle in one neat motion. “It's hard, but there's nothing like it.”

“I admire your dedication.”

Dr Pepper in hand, he returned to the staircase and headed back down. “I'm sure you feel the same way about writing,” he went on, over his shoulder.

“I don't know. I'm not sure I like it enough to stay celibate.”

“Oh, you would if you had to.”

“I write better when I'm having sex,” she said thoughtfully, wondering at the same time what kind of person (male? female?) Hart would have sex with if he did have any. Confusingly, she couldn't tell. “But I've never started an affair just to keep my sentences limber.”

“Haven't you?” They had descended the stairs. Hayden's break would soon be over. “I would,” he said seriously. Then, “Forgive me. I have to get back inside. Coming?”

“In a minute.” Reluctant to reenter the steamy studio just yet, Juliet turned away and strolled down the corridor that led toward the locker rooms. A few yards along she stopped dead. Was that—? She sniffed. The odor was unexpected, yet decidedly familiar. She followed the scent down the hall to a heavy metal door with a red bar across it.
ALARM WILL SOUND IF OPENED
, the sign on it read.

The door opened, silently. A dancer pushed in, apologizing as he brushed past her. Juliet went out and found half a dozen corps members lounging on a rectangular metal platform that formed part of a fire escape, peacefully polluting the sunshine with burning cigarettes. It was a smoking parlor, obviously illegal, just as obviously well-attended.

“Hi,” said Juliet, trying to hide her shock at finding dancers smoking. Especially the men, for whom weight was not so fraught an issue. But she soon reflected that since tobacco (chiefly in the form of Philip Morris) had been good to American dance—it had kept it alive almost single-handedly as troupes proliferated and audiences aged—it was only fitting that American dancers returned the favor.

Ruth must have granted the corps a longer break than the principals, because four or five of the dancers on the platform were in
Great Ex.
But Juliet knew the name of only one: Olympia Andreades, Elektra's sister. Olympia said, “Hi” back—not very enthusiastically—but the others greeted Juliet with the same hard glare she had experienced elsewhere. She persisted, pulling a worn pack of Winston's out of her purse and asking if anyone had a match. Conversation had stopped, but smokers' camaraderie began to work in her favor as a male dancer held out a cheap lighter. Juliet smiled her thanks and lit up. She was trying to think up an icebreaker for Olympia when the other abruptly broke the silence herself.

“So, what do you think?” she asked.

“Pardon me?”

“How does it look to you?”

Olympia Andreades took in a deep lungful of smoke, then exhaled mightily. She had her younger sister's dark eyes and hair, but she was bigger and her features were on a larger, heavier scale. She had olive skin, where Elektra's was ivory, and her lips were full, soft, lush. “
Great Ex,
” she went on. “How does it look?”

“A little new,” said Juliet guardedly. “But I think it will develop nicely. What do you think?”

“Oh, we love it,” Olympia answered promptly. “The music is wonderful and the steps are more interesting than we usually get. We the corps, I mean.”

“I'm Juliet Bodine,” said Juliet, since they hadn't been introduced. “You're Elektra Andreades' sister, aren't you?”

There was a pause.

Then, “Among my other achievements,” Olympia drily agreed.

Juliet blushed and supposed it was not very entertaining to dance in the corps while your little sister reveled in the limelight, a treasured principal. She wondered how deep Olympia's resentment ran.

She smiled awkwardly. “How's Ruth to work with?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.

Olympia shared a skeptical glance with her colleagues. “You're her friend, aren't you?”

“Yes, but that doesn't mean I think she'd be easy to please. I'll bet she's hell to please.”

No one answered.

Then, “They're all hell to please,” said one of the men, a tall, dark-headed dancer with angular shoulders and hips. He had a foreign accent which Juliet tentatively identified as Russian. She looked at him.

“They?”

“All the choreographers. Choreographers everywhere. They play, and we are their puppets.”

“You don't feel you are collaborating with them?”

“The corps?” He laughed, expelling smoke. “Maybe the principals do.”

“Anton Mohr told me he felt Ruth allowed him to move in his own way.”

To her surprise, this provoked a huge laugh from everyone.

“Anton Mohr moves his own way whoever he's with,” said Olympia, with what Juliet could only think of as a snigger. The angular man sniggered in Russian, and Juliet saw a strange look pass between the two. Something about Anton Mohr was a company joke, something sexual.

Juliet's heart sank. Ruth had told her earlier today that, so far at least, no one had responded to Greg Fleetwood's wishy-washy flyer, either openly or anonymously. So Juliet was all the more inclined to keep an ear out for any useful bits of gossip. She was inquisitive by nature, and rather enjoyed poking her nose into things, especially for a good cause. But she did so hope sex would not be a central element in this little business. Not that she disliked sex—quite the contrary. It was just that she found the prospect of snooping around in other people's sex lives deeply embarrassing.

Nevertheless, she forced herself on. “Bit of a lady's man, is he?”

Again there was general laughter.

Then, “Oh, more than a bit, I'd say,” Olympia Andreades replied. She dipped her head knowingly, once more exchanging a glance and a grin with the angular Russian, then raised an expressive eyebrow. “And I think we'd have to say he's more than a bit of a man's man, too.”

Chapter Four

Ballet dancers don't have a lot of spare time, and what they do have is often devoted to soaking in hot tubs or icing their knees or shellacking their pointe shoes (for strength) or hammering at them (for flexibility). So it was that, despite her eagerness to talk about writing, Teri Malone was unable to accept an invitation to lunch at Juliet's apartment until the Sunday following Anton's unfortunate fall.