Corpse de Ballet (12 page)

Patrick's blush had begun to subside, but Juliet wondered: Could he resent Anton's favored position with Fleetwood, and would such a grudge be enough to make him want to injure the favorite? The trouble with people, she could not help thinking, was that you never knew; you never knew what the hell was going on in their hearts. It was always guesswork, and taking their word for things, and supposing their past behavior would predict their future. But for herself, she knew she lied all the time, tried to mislead people into thinking she liked them when she did not, or persuade them she was not angry when she was, or make them believe she'd never noticed a slight or oversight that in fact had outraged her, and that still rankled deeply. Was Patrick capable of plotting a secret and vicious revenge? Was he the sort of person who could nurse a growing hatred of his employer until it exploded in violence?

As Olympia Andreades might have said, who wasn't?

Across the courtyard, the couple who had been necking were now laughing uproariously. Juliet wondered which of them had made the joke, since they both seemed to be enjoying it equally. Perhaps something they had overheard.

“Oh, dear,” she said aloud, adding innocently, “What was the favor?”

At this, Patrick's blush returned all over again. He looked down (at last!) at his hands and seemed to steady himself before he spoke. “It was just—Oh, for Chrissake, I took care of his gerbils while he was away, that's all.”

“His gerbils?”

“Pet gerbils. You know, those jumpy little rodents? Greg keeps them—or he used to, I wouldn't know.”

There was an element of injured dignity in Patrick's last few words that suddenly gave Juliet a flash of insight into his character. Patrick Wegweiser was not only a happy server. He was the kind of person who enjoys abasing himself. If he had worked in an office, he would have been the one who washed out everyone else's coffee mugs. At parties, no doubt, he took it upon himself to hang up coats, empty ashtrays. Perhaps it was a handy neurosis for a less than stellar dancer—perhaps for any dancer.

“People are swine,” she said.

“Well,” Patrick seemed determined to be fair, “they're better than rodents, anyway.”

“Bigger than rodents,” Juliet allowed. Then, “Why do you think Anton hurt himself that day?” she asked suddenly. “What made him fall?”

This time, even though her nose itched and the couple in the window behind him had gone back to groping each other madly, she was careful to keep her eyes on Patrick's face.

If he were covering guilty knowledge, he did it very well. “Dancers fall,” he said informatively, once more the impassive tour guide in the world of ballet. “There's a lot of balance involved, and the steps Ruth creates are particularly odd sometimes.”

“But he wasn't dancing Ruth's steps,” Juliet objected.

Patrick only shrugged.

“He said he thought something made him slip,” she persisted.

Patrick crumpled up his empty waxed paper and brushed crumbs from his lips. “God knows I love Anton,” he said, “and there's no dancer like him. But thinking isn't really his strong suit, if you get my drift. Look, I've got to go down to Ruth and see if she's looking for me. She's pretty jumpy about having all these people here.” He stood, smiling. “Good to catch up with you. You know your way back to the studio?”

Juliet nodded and smiled. She had also finished her lunch, but she sat on for a few minutes anyhow, gazing absently at the couple across the way, who were now undressing each other while in offices all around them, their unwitting colleagues frowned at papers and snarled into phones. What an interesting way to spend the afternoon. And how extremely different from her own plans. Her thoughts returning to these, she began to pack away her flask and tumblers, at the same time mentally crossing Patrick off her list of suspects. Unless he suffered from multiple-personality disorder, he admired Anton far too much ever to do him harm.

In no particular order, that left Elektra Andreades, Olympia Andreades, Hart Hayden, Lily Bediant, Victorine Vaillancourt, Ryder Kensington—and anyone else of forty or so people she might have failed to notice near the rosin box at the crucial juncture, five unremarkable minutes at the end of last Wednesday's rehearsal when a full ensemble of dancers had stood and stretched and knelt and packed and crossed and crisscrossed and recrossed a vast studio before whisking themselves away in a dozen directions.

Juliet stood to leave Ruth's office and was somehow dismayed to notice that the busy couple, who had disappeared a moment before, could not be missed from this new height. They were rolling on the gray wall-to-wall industrial carpeting: clinched, half-dressed, and apparently either sobbing together or chortling at each other like maniacs.

Chapter Seven

Having literally bumped into him as she left Ruth's office after lunch, Juliet walked to the run-through in the company of Max Devijian.

The executive director had not neglected her during the week since she had first visited Ruth at the Jansch. Several times, he had stopped to fawn on her as they passed in the corridors. On each occasion, his dark eyes blazing energy, his thinning hair alive with purpose, he would grab her head in his hands like a melon and smooch either side of her face.

“Our good angel!” he would chortle, and smooch again before hurrying off.

One time, he had broached the idea of having her join the Jansch's board, and it was to this subject that he returned today. Juliet, who found the Authors Guild bureaucracy enough for her, knew she would never accept any such position. Healthy distraction was one thing; becoming enmeshed in an organization was quite another. She first tried gently to discourage him, then slowly realized gentle was not the way to go. By the time they had descended both flights of stairs, her stomach was knotted and she noticed with some embarrassment that her voice had grown quite shrill.

“No!” she heard herself shriek, then amended, “I mean, no thank you.” They turned into the corridor that led to Studio Three. “I appreciate your faith in me, Max, but it's out of the question.”

But shrill or reasoned, all her protests were for nought. Max raised a slender finger and wagged it playfully at her. “You're not off the hook, Miss Bodine,” he said. He put a hand on the knob of the closed door to Studio Three and paused long enough to bus her soundly on the cheek. “I'll get you yet!”

As he opened the door, a wave of heat and noise swept into the corridor. Studio Three had been transformed, no longer a quiet atelier but an ad hoc cocktail lounge. A tangle of voices bounced off the walls. Bodies in street clothes milled at random. There was the unfamiliar smell of food.

Max dove into the fray, abandoning Juliet, who hovered near the door to survey the scene. Gregory Fleetwood, elegantly animated, was already holding court amidst a small cluster of designers and their assistants. Not only the invited guests but any member of the Jansch staff who could find an excuse to come had crowded into the room, where they chattered ferociously and muscled each other to get to a little buffet composed of cheese, grapes, and Champagne. It was even hotter than usual. Juliet noticed the Champagne was moving especially well.

This little cocktail hour had been Ruth's idea, a chance for the administrators of the Jansch to put faces to the names of her creative team (and vice versa) in a way she hoped would strengthen everyone's commitment to the project. Even she had mustered some semblance of social grace: Juliet saw her introducing a slight, youthful woman dressed all in red leather (the costume designer?) to a gaunt, gawky man of perhaps sixty. (Photographer? Press agent?) Dressed in a simple but stylish black shirt and her usual tights, Ruth was concealing her nervousness well, betraying it only now and then with a quick look at the clock. Patrick trailed around behind her, doubtless cleaning up the social gaffes she left behind.

Juliet sidled up to the buffet to pour herself a small glass of Champagne, then threaded her way back out through the mob to a chair in the corner near the piano, the last in a triple row of folding chairs set up along the front wall for the visiting dignitaries. A shyness that seldom afflicted her elsewhere came over her in sociable crowds. As she sat, she noticed Max reaching out to give Ruth a celebratory kiss, which Ruth tried to receive calmly. Ruth was afraid of Max, she had confided to Juliet. Greg Fleetwood was a dancer, and he had done some choreography himself. He knew how productions faltered and floundered as they were put together, then gradually came to cohere. But Max was no artist, and what he might or might not understand of the creative process Ruth did not know. She only knew that if he felt
Great Ex
was going wrong, it would be her head on the line, her comfort and authority undermined. The Jansch was still struggling to renew itself. The company had a lot riding on
Great Ex,
far more than Ruth liked. Rehearsal time cost them well in excess of one hundred thousand dollars a week. Competition with other New York ballet companies would be brutal this year: City Ballet was working on a major project with Mark Morris, Ballet Theater was producing a new full-length work by Lar Lubovitch. And the Kirov, the Royal Danish, and the Feld Ballet would all be in town for substantial runs. Max might want to give her her freedom, creatively speaking, but they both knew if
Great Ex
flopped, it would be a punishing blow for the company.

While the guests refreshed themselves, meanwhile, the ensemble waited, pushed deep toward the back of the studio, corps by the windows at the rear, soloists and principals chiefly on the sides. They did not have to be told to lay off the refreshments. Not one went near the little buffet. Instead, they behaved as always during unstructured time in the studio, stretching and toning their muscles, practicing bits and pieces of choreography, teasing one another, comparing notes on elusive steps. Juliet noticed Teri Malone wore pink tights and a dazzlingly white leotard; she sat some yards toward the back wall from the piano, wrestling (as it seemed) with a pointe shoe while glancing almost surreptitiously, ever and anon, toward Anton Mohr. In the farthest corner of the room, Olympia Andreades sat side by side with the angular Russian tobacco fiend. The two of them were looking intently through a magazine whose name Juliet could not read. Ryder Kensington was working at the barre not far away, while his wife leaned back under the opposite barre, near the door, and serenely sewed ribbons onto a shoe. Beside her, Hart Hayden sat with legs splayed, bowing forward, then diving from side to side. In the middle of the room, Kirsten Ahlswede hunched over her feet, apparently stuffing shredded paper towels between her toes, yet somehow managing to look coldly autocratic anyway. Anton Mohr lay on his back almost under the piano, doing his abstrengthening exercises and swigging between repetitions from a plastic bottle of Coke. Presently, Juliet dared to creep over to him and interrupt him.

“Anton?”

She crouched beside him, wishing her thighs were thinner.

Anton sat up and took a slug of soda.

“You were gorgeous to watch today.” She smiled. “Even scary, in such an enclosed space. Kind of like seeing an eagle fly in a pet shop.”

The handsome face darkened as Anton frowned and slightly shook his head. “The listening scene does not please me,” he said. “There I am too—what would you say?” He made a slicing movement with his hand. “Thin? Flat? Not deep.”

Juliet nodded as he conveyed his thought correctly, then worried he would interpret this to mean she agreed with him about the performance. She was about to address this when she felt someone coming up behind her. She turned her head to find Lily Bediant approaching; from the corner of her eye, she saw Anton's face quicken in response. Feeling hopelessly clumsy and uninteresting between these two fairy-tale creatures, Juliet straightened hurriedly, her knee almost knocking his Coke bottle over in her haste. It tottered, but Lily swooped in and neatly caught it. She looked up at Juliet with a cold, violet glance that sent the latter clomping away.

After last session's star turn, Anton was even more a center of attention than usual, Juliet noticed, resuming her seat. Something of glamour that was ordinarily absent in the studio seemed to cling to him. Lily's delicate head bent to that of her ex-lover as she whispered what seemed to be a joke in his ear. When they laughed at the end, their heads gleamed together so brightly that Juliet would hardly have been surprised to see a shower of sparks stream from them. What could the joke have been? How many choreographers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Whatever it was, Lily rose gracefully and left him.

But he was too magnetic today, it seemed, to be left alone. A minute or two later, Ryder Kensington sauntered across the room and squatted easily near him. From his gestures, Juliet gathered they were discussing some detail of their initial collision in Scene One. Moving the Coke away to have more room, Ryder stretched his long arms straight out from his chest and made the snatching gesture Ruth had devised for just after Magwitch's first near-collision with Pip. Anton abandoned his exercises and stood up with him. Experimentally, he turned his head away and created the flinching gesture with which Pip responded to Magwitch's grab, whereupon Ryder briefly adjusted the younger man's head as if to suggest an even more frightened cringe. As the men stood nodding, murmuring and comparing gestures together, Juliet thought of all the times she had watched ballets and wondered what were the real relations between the prince and princess, the Sugar Plum Fairy and her swain, the doll and the inventor. In all other forms—operas, plays, even modern dance—it seemed possible to her to read something of the performers' offstage feelings in their body language. But ballet was body language. Personal feeling seemed totally hidden.

And now, here she was, if not privy to the most personal moments of a company, then at least front and center while they were off guard. Hart Hayden had come up near Anton while the latter was still talking to Ryder Kensington. For a few minutes, Hayden waited quietly, first sitting on the soles of his feet, then stretching out his legs and leaning over, hands clamped to his toes, while the other two finished up. How must it be for Ryder to see his wife touching Hart every day, intimately joined in steps and rhythm, as interdependent as two trapeze artists swinging to each others' wrists? Juliet was still unsure of Hart's (shelved) sexual proclivity, though she was normally able to place this, and Hayden did not seem to be trying to hide it. He was one of those men who are most of all charming. An old-fashioned strength, perhaps, but all the more welcome for that, Juliet thought. It was not the heady charisma Greg Fleetwood exuded, nor the rather smarmy ooze emitted by Max, but rather a subtle kind of charm genuinely focused on setting another person at ease. It was oddly close to the princely air he had on stage—minus the noblesse oblige, luckily. As she watched, Ryder walked away and Hart knelt on the floor, setting the bottle of Coke on a nearby chair to get it out of the way. He leaned forward interrogatively to Anton, apparently singing a snatch of the score while counting it out on his fingers, then sketching a few of the gestures that punctuated it with his narrow hands.