Off Balance (Ballet Theatre Chronicles Book 1) (26 page)

“No, that was you, Gil. As the actor onstage that people couldn’t take their eyes off of.”

His eyes narrowed, but he tossed out the same hearty laugh. “I only wish the reporter had interviewed me instead of you. I’ve got a couple great publicity shots I would have loved to see in print again.”

Lana looked like a spectator at a tennis match, eyes swinging from one person to the next. “That was a nice article, Alice,” she offered, which made Gil guffaw again.

Alice couldn’t fake a smile any longer. “You told me you didn’t have a problem with that, Gil.”

“I don’t.”

“I had no idea she was going to do that. I told you. I wasn’t out to advertise my past.”

“Well, hey. I say it’s great. So your past got advertised. It was a great pic. Good for you.”

The food arrived quickly, an appetizer plate with cheeses, pâté, fruit and nuts, along with a crock of French onion soup for Lana. Gil ordered another glass of wine. Alice was drinking Perrier tonight, which seemed to annoy Gil, as if she were being purposefully difficult, not celebrating Lana’s big night in proper style.

“I’m just not in a partying mood, I guess,” she said.

“You’re out of practice. Haven’t had a date in a while have you, old girl?”

He chuckled and nudged Alice’s arm in an attempt to show her that he was jesting, all in good fun. She decided the Mark Haverford business had angered him more than he’d let on.

“I think you forgot that my boyfriend is on an international business trip.”

“Oh. He’s still got boyfriend status. Sorry about the mistake there.” Gil studied his glass of wine, pretending to ponder this. “So. I’m curious. What does ‘time apart’ mean, anyway?”

She told herself not to give him the reaction he was so clearly itching for.

“Time apart means he works hard and I work hard. And when he’s free, we’ll meet up again.”

“What, no phone call in the meantime?”

Her patience snapped. “No, Gil. No phone call. He is hard at work. He’s probably in meetings all day from the time he leaves his hotel room to the time he returns after a business dinner. It is a working hotel. It is not the Beverly Wilshire. He is not a toy-boy, catering to someone else’s whims.”

Gil looked stunned, perhaps the first unguarded reaction he’d ever shown her. Then contempt washed over his face, cold, pure contempt.

She’d elicited a lot of reactions from him, but never this. It was terrible. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. It was reminiscent of being disciplined by Deborah as a small child. Death by silence, by The Look.

“You might want to visit the ladies’ room, Alice,” he told her, his voice chatty, relaxed. “Your face is suddenly looking quite red. Splotchy. Maybe there’s something you can do about that. Or maybe it’s just an aging has-been dancer thing.”

The rage. The terrible, consuming rage.

She could feel Lana shrink beside her.

“How considerate of you to have pointed that out to me,” Alice said to Gil. “Someone has obviously trained you well.” She rose, took her purse and forced herself to amble, not stalk, toward the ladies’ room.

In the bathroom, her limbs shaking with anger and adrenaline, she stared at her face in the mirror. Her face was indeed a fright, with its blotchy, scarlet cheeks and too bright eyes.

This would not do. Deborah Willoughby’s spectral presence was like a giant wagging finger of disapproval in her face.

She ran the cold water and splashed it on her cheeks over and over until she began to cool down. She took her time patting her face dry, practicing her yogic breathing exercises, until she felt composed enough to rejoin Gil and Lana.

Gil and Lana both smiled at her, a forced cheerfulness. She didn’t bother to sit back down.

“I think I’ve done my work for the night,” she told Gil. “I’m going home.”

“Oh, don’t go having a hissy fit. Sit down and have another drink. Look, I’m sorry. I was rude and I apologize. Okay?”

He recited this in the bored monotone of a nine-year-old boy being told by his mother to apologize, or else.

“Good night, Gil. Good night, Lana.” She picked up her wrap, tucked her purse more tightly under her arm.

“Alice, wait.” Lana looked distressed.

“She’s fine,” Gil told her. “She gets this way sometime. Maybe it’s PMS.”

Without another word Alice walked away, ignoring everyone, everything but counting the moments till she could be alone. Outside she hailed a taxi and clambered in the back. Finally, peace, blissful Gil-free silence.

Odette greeted Alice inside the house ten minutes later. “Hi, kitty,” she murmured. “We’re safe now, away from that terrible butthead boss.” She squatted down to pet Odette, who tipped over, offering her belly for Alice to stroke as well, purring like an engine once Alice got it right. Finally Alice rose, locked the front door, switched off lights and made her way upstairs.

She was in bed with a novel, Odette at her feet, when Lana and Gil returned. She stayed in her room, vowing to ignore them. Five minutes later she heard the front door shut again, followed by footsteps on the stairs, a tentative knock at her door.

She sighed, rose from the bed and opened the door.

“Hi.” Lana smiled at her. “Um, I just wanted to let you know I was here.”

“Oh. Fine.”

“Well, good night.”

“He still here?” Alice gestured with her chin toward the living room.

“Gil? No. I sent him home.”

“Why?”

Lana squirmed. “Because it felt right. Or maybe to show you some support.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There at the restaurant, I could tell that what Gil said really hurt you.”

“Well, you’re wrong. I’m fine. I just had a headache and Gil was getting on my nerves. You missed out on getting laid for nothing.”

She made a move to shut the door but Lana was in the way now and she wouldn’t budge. Alice pushed harder at the door; Lana still didn’t move. Odette, sensing tension, leapt from Alice’s bed and darted out of the room.

Lana caught her gaze and held it. “I’m not oblivious, Alice. Maybe he is, but I’m not.”

It became a stare-down of sorts. But Lana was more persistent than Alice would have expected. “What’s the real reason you don’t go to ballet performances?” she asked.

“Why the hell do you think?” Alice snapped.

“Because it hurts to watch what you lost?”

Had Gil been the one to say those words, they would have carried a jeering element. But this was Lana. In reply, Alice offered her a curt nod.

“That’s what I figured,” Lana said softly. “And I totally get it.”

They pondered this in silence for a moment. “I wouldn’t make a very graceful ex-dancer,” Lana said finally.

Alice grimaced. “None of us do.”

Us.

Lana nodded. The hurting thing inside Alice subsided the tiniest bit.

Lana stepped away from the door. “Anyway. Thanks for coming to the restaurant like that. I really appreciated your company. But I’ll leave you alone now.”

“Thank you. Good night.”

Fifteen minutes later Alice, still wide awake, gave up on reading. Lana hadn’t merited her terse retorts. Certainly not tonight, of all nights. She slipped out of bed, put on her robe and went into the hall. Noting a wedge of light coming from the ajar bedroom door, she tapped at the door and peered inside. Lana was already sound asleep, hair spread out on the pillow, one arm flung over her head. Odette was on the bed with her, by Lana’s blanketed feet, curled up in a C. She lifted her head when Alice came in but lowered it, shutting her eyes, pressing against Lana’s leg.

“Traitor,” Alice grumbled. She crept over to the nightstand to turn the lamp off. Before clicking it off, she paused to study Lana. She looked so young, so innocent. An unfamiliar feeling passed through Alice, a mix of tenderness and unease, some vague disquiet at the thought of the Gils of the world, the Mark Haverfords, Montserrat’s Len Stevenson, indulging in what they could get from a young girl, her beauty, her freshness, her easy trust. She was fiercely glad right then that she could offer Lana her home, this sanctuary, away from potential predators.

Perhaps this was what a mother experienced when regarding her sleeping child.

Or better yet, a stepmother. One like Marianne, who’d surely paused like this to check on the young, sleeping Alice from time to time.

The thought stopped her cold. What, after all, had that been like for the childless Marianne? Suddenly sharing a home with an impressionable, vulnerable girl whose real mother was absent from the picture, and here you were, unfathomably being seen that way, as a maternal guide. All these unfamiliar feelings arising, coursing through you, that you weren’t quite sure what to do with.

The answer was simple enough: you offered them all you could. Because they needed it.

It was like seeing Marianne in an entirely new way. And Lana, too.

Too much introspection. She gave herself a mental shake, reached over and clicked off the light. “Sweet dreams,” she whispered, as she made her way out of the room and back to her own.

No one expected Anders to stride into company class the morning after opening night and teach. It was a rude awakening for Lana, spent after the adrenaline rush of opening night.
Serenade
had been lovely and exhilarating, a thrill to perform. The group of them in their soft, flowing palest blue tulle skirts, Tchaikovsky’s glorious music, Balanchine’s clever geometric patterns, the audience’s hushed appreciation of the closing tableau, one lead dancer, the Waltz Girl, held aloft by four men in a backward arch, elegant and still as the masthead of a ship, as the ensemble bourréed in two parallel lines behind them. It had been pure art in movement. She’d loved dancing it; she’d never felt closer to the other dancers, to the company as a whole.

But this morning Anders moved and spoke impatiently, as if irritated that their bodies might feel sluggish this morning. During barre, he was especially aggressive on the tendu and dégagé series. Sixteen counts, a soutenu turn to the other side, lightning-quick dégagés with a pirouette thrown in, soutenu back to the other side, eight here, eight there, then all of it split-time.

It was madness, more dismaying than exhilarating, as Lana struggled to keep up, stay alert and repeat the fiendish combinations he threw at them. At the start of class she’d harbored an idle fantasy that Anders might meet Lana’s eyes, stop in his tracks even, to tell her she’d done a splendid job the night before, that she was a welcome addition to the company. None of this, not even a glance cast her way. Which, given the way she was forced to fudge some of the trickier combinations this morning, wasn’t a bad thing in the end.

After barre, she exchanged her soft leather ballet slippers for pointe shoes, wincing at the blisters on her toes that had torn open last night, the way the sweat now rushed in to sting them. It was poor form, in truth, to not begin company class wearing pointe shoes, but she’d thought she could get away with it. Another reason why it was just as well Anders hadn’t noticed her. Although she had a hunch he’d registered her pointe shoe omission. Very little seemed to escape his notice.

The worst was her big toe: the open wound was not healing and each day it was red and angry, blood soaking through the Band-Aid every time she danced en pointe. The only solution, Lana knew, was to stay off pointe for several days and let it heal properly, which was an impossibility. Going en pointe daily, hourly, was the reality of her work. She would therefore simply grit her teeth and buy more Band-Aids.

The dancers moved to the center of the room. Lana hated the feeling of having pointe shoes on this morning, with her big toe so inflamed and throbbing, but she knew better than to display any sign of discomfort. Worse, the shoes were brand new, without having been hammered or softened in any way. Her feet in them felt numb and clumsy, which explained why, when hurrying to the back of the room after completing the first jump combination, she accidentally kicked over a cup of someone’s coffee.

A horrified silence came over the group as the creamy mixture, a Starbucks latte, flowed over the wood floor. There was a flurry of activity as people yanked their own items out of the way amid grumbles and exclamations.

Anders was furious. He strode over and stood there, hands on his hips.

“Who did that? Who knocked it over?”

The others, to their credit, avoided casting blame on Lana. She raised her hand and his frown deepened.

“You’re a dancer, not an ox,” he snapped. “Why this clumsiness? And what are you doing bringing coffee into class?”

“It wasn’t my coffee.” Lana’s voice was barely above a whisper.

“What is that? Speak up.” When Lana repeated her comment, he looked around.

“Whose coffee is this?”

Everyone had been reduced to cowering like children. Katrina raised her hand timidly.

“Shame on you. For shame. And you, a principal. You should be setting an example for the younger ones. Not this slop. This crap. Now clean it up. The rest of you, back to center. This is not a vacation. Focus. Now where’s my second group? Move, people!” He strode back to the front of the room.

Someone had brought over paper towels and Lana bent to help Katrina wipe up the coffee. Katrina said nothing but flashed Lana a reproachful look. Lana felt herself shrink. For the rest of the class, she cowered in the back of whatever group she was in, still dancing full out, but trying to remain unobtrusive.

After class, as soon as Anders departed, Lana dropped to the floor and unlaced her pointe shoe ribbons, yanking off the heel end as fast as possible. The pressure around the front of the shoe’s box eased. Pain mixed with relief as sweat sank beneath the torn skin. She sighed and shut her eyes, but a moment later she heard a murmured message move through the group: a revised rehearsal list had been posted in the hallway.

She joined the others making their way there too and scanned the list. Some of the lead roles for
Nutcracker
were being rehearsed. Sugar Plum Fairy and her cavalier. Arabian Dance. Snow Queen and King pas de deux. Lana’s name didn’t appear, and she reminded herself, sternly, there were over a dozen dancers with more seniority and rank than she had. They couldn’t use everyone for these roles, and this was early rehearsing, anyway. More ominous, though, was the rehearsal list posted for
Arpeggio
. There’d been changes.