Corpse de Ballet (24 page)

The program was brief but powerful. A chamber music group had been assembled and supplied with music to which three numbers were danced, the first two choreographed by Twyla Tharp and William Forsythe respectively and performed by members of various contemporary troupes. Both were pieces with which Anton Mohr had been closely identified, and both were full of vigor and enthusiasm, far from melancholy. It was clear a decision had been made to lean in this direction, and the short orations that followed (by Greg and Victorine for the Jansch and by several other luminaries of the American and European dance worlds) reflected this. For Juliet, the most moving part of the service was the last, the third dance, which Kirsten Ahlswede (as Anton's last partner) performed solo to what Murray whispered was one of the courtly dances from Benjamin Britten's
Gloriana.

“Are you a Britten aficionado?” Juliet whispered back, momentarily distracted by what seemed a remarkable feat of musicology.

He shrugged. Still curious, she turned her eyes back to the stage. The choreography, whoever had created it, was somewhere between ballet and modern dance, with repeated gestures of slowly bent head, slowly bowed back, slowly bent knee. It was more a tribute than an elegy. Without being maudlin, it spoke of both loss and recovery, anger at death, and acceptance. Later, Juliet learned that Ruth herself had choreographed it some years ago, after the death of a former lover.

There was an uneasy silence when Kirsten's performance came to an end. It seemed strange not to clap, but equally incongruous to applaud at a memorial. The curtain fell and a few long seconds went by before Greg took the stage again.

“That concludes the service,” he said. He had lost the look of utter exhaustion and shock he had worn just after Anton's death and now had almost his habitual panache. Juliet thought again of his decision not to tell Anton about the talcum powder, of his sudden resignation, which had yet to be made public. “Thank you for coming. Good night.”

Pensive and sober, the audience rustled gradually to its feet, filing into the aisles and out of the auditorium almost in silence. The program had been very lively and beautiful, yet it left an impression of solemnity that was not much like Anton Mohr. On the sidewalk in front of the hall, a number of people lingered in pairs and clusters, murmuring about the program, trying to avoid anything that sounded like a review, unsure what to do with themselves now that it was over. Murray and Juliet were among these, trying to decide whether to go have a bite together, when Ruth, who had been backstage to prepare Kirsten, came out of a side door.

She was alone and apparently not in the mood for conversation. She gave Juliet a stiff little wave and Landis a barely perceptible nod, then barreled away in the direction of Seventh Avenue.

“I thought she was a good friend of yours,” said Murray, smiling in the way people do when startled by some sudden rudeness.

“Oh, yes.” Juliet had also been disconcerted, but recognized Ruth's abruptness for what it was: sheer obliviousness of the feelings of others. “If I call her tomorrow and tell her that she was rude, she won't remember having done it—but she'll apologize anyway,” she assured him. “So—”

They returned to their former impasse, which secretly had more to do with each guessing whether the other cared to prolong the evening than whether either or both wanted to go and eat. They wanted to go and eat. And they wanted to prolong the evening. But Juliet made Murray nervous. She was too soft, too conventional, too sheltered, too prosperous for him. She wrote genre novels; he made cutting-edge art. His family was blue collar, hers—well, diamond collar, probably. Since his divorce, he had concluded it was unwise to see women who differed from him on such basic matters. He could not imagine Juliet Bodine knocking back Rolling Rocks at gallery openings in Greenpoint, or camping out on the mattress in his fourth-floor walk-up, or grabbing a burger at the Irish Harp with a couple of guys from the station—not to mention noshing on gefilte fish with his folks in Sheepshead Bay. Eve, his ex-wife, had glittered in the moneyed, sunny world where she worked for an auction house, but wilted and sulked whenever he took her to his turf. That had been enough of that.

For her part, Juliet saw in Landis precisely the sort of man who would resent her success. In fairness, she had learned that almost any man would do that who was not more successful, in worldly terms, than she. But Landis would surely suffer from it—and he would make her suffer. She had had enough of that during her marriage. When they met, Rob Ambrosetti had been a clever, up-and-coming off-Broadway director. When his career sagged and languished and hers soared, he had taken his frustration out on her.

She had seen in Landis's eyes by now that he did, indeed, remember that sweet, erotic hour of careful inaction they had shared, and that he still felt the pull toward her that he had felt then. That was mutual. But they were both too old to imagine they could simply indulge the sexual charge between them without creating an emotional mess. Still, the question remained, could they at least have a meal together?

Finally, “It's such a lovely evening. I'm heading north. Will you walk with me?” said Juliet.

“Yes, let's walk,” Murray answered, with evident relief.

The rhythm of walking, the soft warmth of the night, the growing distance between them and the sad impressions of the ceremony, plus the constant necessity of evading other pedestrians, gradually distracted them from their awkwardness and allowed them to speak naturally again. Indeed, the need to release at least some of the painful energy each felt after the service soon led them to take an almost giddy tone.

“I always think there should be a verb that means ‘to pass,' but with regard to walking,” remarked Juliet, as they neared the outskirts of Lincoln Center. “The way you pass in a car, only on foot. I've thought ‘skibble' might do it. As in, ‘These tourists ahead of us are so slow. Let's skibble.'”

“Skibble,” repeated Murray reflectively. “Nice. What about circumambulate?”

“Oh, that's good, I like that. That's really a word, isn't it? ‘Shall we circumambulate?' Could it be transitive, do you think?”

“‘Let's circumambulate them?' I don't think so.”

“How about ‘peristep'?”

“Or ‘pedipass'?”

“‘What's your hurry? Why did you pedipass that family?'” Juliet tried it out. “Yes, that could work.”

It was almost eight o'clock, but because it was a Monday, Lincoln Center was closed. The Met, the Newhouse, Avery Fisher were blank-faced, dark, almost ominously so. Yet scores of people, many of them young, hung around the plaza for no apparent reason, evidently simply enjoying the night, the colorful banners billowing toward Broadway, the coolness of the fountain.

“Thanks for inviting me,” Landis said as they crossed the complicated intersection at Sixty-fifth Street.

“Thanks for coming.”

“I've never had much time for ballet per se, but I like modern dance quite a lot. Dance is the musical equivalent of sculpture, I always think. Music you can see.”

“I like sculpture because when you walk around it, it seems to move,” Juliet said. “Hey, how did you recognize that Benjamin Britten piece?”

“Just an old favorite of mine. I'm a bit of an opera buff.”

“Are you?”

“You don't have to sound shocked. Cops can enjoy opera, you know.”

“I'm sorry—”

“In fact, we have a policeman's amateur opera company. ‘CopOpera,' it's called.”

“Really?”

“No, not really.” Murray burst out laughing—not very politely, Juliet thought. “Oh, I loved the look on your face!” Calming himself, he went on, “But there is a Visual Arts Softball League. I'm captain of the Sculptors.”

“Now I know you're joking.”

“Not at all. We play every Wednesday night at eight, Field Four in Riverside Park. Come and watch us. We'll be there this week.”

“Where's Field Four?”

While Murray told her, Juliet returned in her thoughts to what Ruth had said about him the other night at the sidewalk café. On the whole, she now believed Ruth was right. Murray's attitude toward her during the official investigation of Anton's death had been no more nor less than professionally appropriate, and she had wronged him by taking it personally. Moreover, she suspected he had been rather offended by her own attitude, which (she recognized too late) had been quite mistrustful of him. Quite prejudiced, in fact. She shook herself mentally.

“What I'd really like to see is your work,” she told him.

“That could be arranged. My studio—”

“Oh look, we're at Planet Sushi,” she cried, interrupting him. “Let's eat here on the porch.”

At dinner, Murray introduced Juliet to edamame—steamed, salted soy beans. Juliet introduced Murray to smoked eel and sea urchin. They discussed the old days in Cambridge and current mayoral politics in New York. Treading carefully to keep the fact marooned in history, Murray revealed that he and Mona had once had a memorable fight because Mona thought he was attracted to Juliet (true, he admitted). Equally carefully, Juliet confessed she had found Murray attractive in those long-ago days as well. As for Mona's current life, Murray had last heard from her a couple of years before. Her husband had left the diplomatic service and entered a Buddhist monastery. Mona was back in Cherry Hill, living with her parents.

It wasn't until their table had been cleared and red bean ice cream set before them that Juliet returned to the idea of arranging to see his work.

“Oh yeah, for sure,” Murray said. “I'd like that. Maybe next week?” He poured her a little more sake, then took the last of it himself. “I'll give you a call and we'll make some plans.”

The conversation flagged. There was a bad moment over the ice cream when they looked each other in the eyes. Definitely, Juliet thought, it would take some effort to keep the brakes on here. After dinner, when Murray offered to walk her home, she said she'd take a cab. Then she jumped into one before he could talk her out of it. He stood on the curb as she waved good-bye through the open window.

Chapter Fourteen

After the memorial service and her dinner with Landis on Monday night, Juliet decided to make herself stay away from the Jansch again for at least a couple of weeks. None of this was really her business, anyway. And it was clear that Ruth was quite able now to move forward on the choreography on her own. Whereas
London Quadrille
would not grow a page longer (she reminded herself severely) unless she herself sat down and wrote it.

“‘For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams,'” she quoted aloud the next morning, as she put herself on a forced march up the stairs to her desk, “‘so various, so beautiful, so new,' is really just there to make us crazy and distract us from our work,” she finished, veering sharply off from Matthew Arnold as the rough, spicy smell of Murray Landis's skin returned to her, and that bad moment of gazing at one another.

“No, no, no,” she loudly declared.

As to the business of Anton Mohr's death, though she could not quite relinquish the notion that something other than accident had at least contributed to it, she could think of nothing Landis had failed to do by way of investigation. If he had turned up nothing, there must be nothing to turn up. She was being morbid, clinging to the idea that there was more to the story despite all the evidence (or lack thereof). Certainly, the memorial service had provided no clue of anything untoward. It had been respectful, ceremonious, and properly sad. Now it was time to move on, and the best way to accomplish that was to keep herself at her desk.

Unless, she added, arriving at that desk, something interesting happened.

*   *   *

It was not Juliet's fault that something interesting happened just one day later, on the following morning, in the form of an urgent phone call from Victorine Vaillancourt. Ames knocked to report it just as the author was sitting down with Sir Edward to consider Lord Morecambe's challenge. Naturally, he would have to accept it; but should he choose pistols or swords? And who could he ask to be his second? The obvious man was—

It was at this point that Ames softly rapped and put her head in to announce the “urgent” call.

Juliet was annoyed. What could possibly be more urgent than choosing a second?

“I'm sorry. She sounds very anxious,” said Ames. “Is she old?”

Juliet sighed, her mind reluctantly returning to New York and the present century. “I don't know. Yes, she probably is quite old. Thank you, Ames. I'll pick up in here.”

Victorine was extremely, ornately apologetic. She knew Juliet had her work; she herself hated to be disturbed when at work, and yet—

It was true that her voice sounded shaky. She was so severe and formidable in person, one forgot that she really was elderly (at least, one forgot until seeing her stand up or sit down, which she never did without careful attention to her worn, obviously painful joints). Juliet automatically sought to soothe her by assuring her that she had interrupted nothing of note.

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I'm afraid it's your friend Ruth,” said Victorine, her accent thicker than usual. “She phoned me last night after the memorial service. Now that I come to the studios, I find she evidently phoned many dancers in
Great Expectations.
I don't know quite what she said to them, but to me, I think the word is—harangue?” she finished tentatively.

Juliet hesitated. “There is such a word as harangue in English,” she conceded cautiously. “Berate, it means. Scold.”

“Perhaps the word I am looking for is harass?” Victorine suggested.

“I don't know.” Juliet sighed again. “Maybe you'd better tell me exactly what she's been saying.”