Corpse de Ballet (25 page)

“Oh, thank you. I wonder, is there any chance at all you could come here to discuss this? I wouldn't ask, except that—” Her voice broke off and she was silent for a few moments. “It's quite difficult for me to travel even a short distance. I try not to display my infirmities, but … You will do me a very great favor.”

Juliet was beginning to understand why the dancers so adored Victorine. She had a side that was very winning. Her presence was naturally powerful, almost forbidding; but when she revealed her frailty, it was impossible not to want to do your best to help her. Some people were like that; Juliet had met them before. In fact, she had created a similar character in
Cousin Cecilia,
her third book. Lady Sophia—what had her name been? Oglethorpe? Rattray. King of Siam syndrome, you could call it, she supposed.

Which, for the moment, made her Anna.

“I can be there in half an hour,” she said now, literally pushing her manuscript aside.

“I am grateful to you.” In Victorine's voice, with her manner, it was as if she had paid Juliet a rare, long dreamed-of compliment.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes after they hung up, Juliet was seated on an uncomfortable metal chair opposite Victorine's desk.

As senior dance mistress, Victorine Vaillancourt had been given a somewhat larger office than the common run of cubicles on the second floor. It was midway down a long corridor, just next to the library of scores Juliet had once visited. She had summoned Victorine from this office on the day of the talcum powder attack, and she had passed it many times since on her way to the ladies' room (the ladies' room on the first floor was also the women's locker room, where Juliet felt hopelessly out of place). But the dance mistress seemed to spend little time here. The desk had on it only a few notebooks and oversized loose-leaf volumes, a mug full of pencils and pens, and a sheaf of unopened letters.

At Victorine's request, Juliet had closed the door, yet the dance mistress pitched her voice very low as she started to explain. Juliet remembered that, passing along the hall, she had often heard voices and sounds from inside the cubicles on this floor; the walls were probably nothing more than Sheetrock.

“I don't wish to involve you in intrigues,” Victorine began, giving a wisp of a smile, “let alone put you in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis your friend. But the truth is, Miss Renswick seems to have gone a bit over the line last night. She complains to me that the dancers are not concentrating enough on their characters. She seems to feel they are shortchanging her production and giving their best elsewhere. This is not true. I tried to explain to her—although she certainly ought to know for herself—that the dancers cannot be expected to polish their characters, to develop their precise manner, and so on—while they are still learning,
enfin,
while she is still creating the steps! Dancers do not study acting—”

“They don't?” Juliet had not meant to interrupt, but she was so surprised by this assertion that she did so anyway.

“No, they do not. Chinese dancers, perhaps, receive such training. Perhaps some few other schools. But for us, no. Nor is acting per se a part of the dancer's art, I believe. Dance is dance, acting is acting. In any case, to demand that my people create characters like—” Victorine had lost her soft, imploring tone and spoke with energetic indignation, “—like instant rice, like instant, what do you say here, mashed potatoes,
non. Ça, non!
”

Juliet did not quite know what to say. “I can see this is very troubling for you,” she murmured. That seemed safe enough.

Victorine clearly realized she had become carried away in an unseemly fashion. Much more quietly, “Yes, indeed,” she answered. “Very troubling to me and for the dancers, no help at all. To work with dancers is a delicate task.” She frowned. “I don't know if your Miss Renswick comprehends this. Lily Bediant was in tears when she came in today,” she said, pronouncing the surname Bay-dee-ahn, as if it had been a French word. “She has worked her toes to the bone for Root. And they are all still row from the loss of Anton Mohr.” Juliet realized after a moment she meant all the dancers were still emotionally “raw.” “It is too much. A dancer responds to strictness, to discipline, yes, but she is not to be—
tyrannisée. Tyranniser,
how do you say it?”

“Tyrannized? Not to be bullied?”

“
Précisément.
You speak French.”

“A little,” said Juliet, with a false modesty she was later to reflect bitterly ought to have been authentic. “I was fluent once, but that was many years ago.”

Victorine gave a sudden, surprisingly deep laugh. “Wait a few decades before you start speaking of ‘many years ago,' that is my counsel,” she said. “Treasure your yout.”

Victorine's accent was back in force, and her syntax was going fast. Juliet wondered whether the real trouble was simply that Ruth had made her favorite protégée cry, or if the harm was truly more widespread.

“On the phone, I understood you to say that Ruth had spoken to several people—?” she prompted.

“Oh yes, indeed. They do not all cry, but two or three come to me very angry, and I hear there were others. And I heard her myself, she have take me to task as well. This is not done, Mademoiselle Bodine. In ballet, not done at all.”

Juliet's discomfort must have showed in her expression, because although she paused, Victorine did not wait for her to answer.

“However, I do not invite you here so you can soot my feelings. My feelings are still pretty tough, thank God, whatever else has happened to me. I ask you here because I think perhaps you can save your friend from herself. She will do her ballet no good by such tactics, and she must be told. I have discussed this with Grégoire, but he thinks, and I agree, you are the better one to have a word with her. If she hears it from him, she will think he is displeased with her work and become even more—
déboussolée,
what is the word?”

“Unglued? Disoriented? Unhinged?”

“Unhinged. Dear God, thirty years in New York and still I must ask.
En tout cas,
if I speak to her, she will imagine Grégoire does not support me. I have not his authority.
Alors, enfin,
we appeal to you. As a friend of Miss Renswick and as a friend of the Jansch. She needs you. It's clear she is worried, she is
sous pression,
it is a difficult job, no one doubts this. I myself once drove an automobile into the Seine while choreographing a new version of
Giselle
—”

“You did?”

“Oh, yes,” said Victorine, her tone implying she saw no reason why Juliet should doubt it. “Dance is hard. Dancers' lives are full of difficulty. Fathers lose sight of their children, children allow their mothers to die unattended, husbands get fed up with their dancing wives and fall by the sideway—”

“Wayside,” Juliet corrected automatically.

“The wayside, bones break, people roar at each other, all sorts of unattractive behavior is normal in a field that is so demanding.
Enfin,
I am not angry at Miss Renswick, nor is Grégoire. We all understand what she suffers. But can you calm her? She was much, much calmer in the days when you were in the studio, Mademoiselle, and the dancers cannot work without calm.

“Of course, if you say no,” she added with a Gallic twitch of her upper lip, “we will understand.”

*   *   *

But of course, Juliet said yes. Ames raised her eyebrows when she called to say she would probably be at the Jansch the whole afternoon (Juliet could hear her raise her eyebrows, even over the phone) but work was not everything, Juliet told herself. Friendship was more. And so began her second vigil at the bedside of Terpsichore.

When Ruth came in at 11:30 that morning, Juliet intercepted her and chatted with her until, inevitably, Ruth herself referred to her frenzied phone calls of the night before. Juliet then gently suggested that you catch more flies with honey than et cetera. Ruth was too glad to see her to argue.

Later in the day, pretending she had just heard of the dancers' reaction to the phone calls while eavesdropping in the lounge, Juliet managed to persuade Ruth to apologize in person to those she had phoned, expressing her confidence in their abilities and blaming her own frayed nerves for the contretemps. Ruth meekly obeyed, with the result that by three o'clock, when she began working with the full ensemble for the first time that day, the atmosphere in the studio was reasonably congenial.

It was during the break in this session, at 3:45, that Juliet left the room to find a quiet corner from which to call Ames. Apparently, her brain had already been engaged enough with the manuscript when she left her desk that morning that it was continuing to work on Lord Morecambe's duel even without her conscious attention. Several bright ideas had come into her imagination unbidden while she watched Ruth walk the corps (now transformed from villagers into Londoners) through a complex scene just before Act Two ended. If would be most helpful to her if Ames could locate certain notes she had made five or six years ago about the layout and landmarks of Hampstead Heath.

Many of the dancers also left the studio at the break, some to smoke, some to pee, some, no doubt, just to escape from the room. In the next studio over, a rising young Mexican soloist named Rafael Paredes was rehearsing a bit of bravura dancing from
Don Quixote,
and several of the
Great Ex
-ers, especially men, crowded around the windowed door to watch. Juliet noticed Ryder Kensington and Nicky Sabatino among them. Hart had also come out and was strolling down the corridor, exchanging a few words with a corps member Juliet believed was named Kip, or Skip. Lily Bediant was making a beeline for the dancers' lounge, Elektra ditto, a few steps behind her.

The few pay phones at the Jansch were always engaged, and Juliet thought it in poor taste to blather cryptically into one's cell phone in a public place. She was starting to head up to Ruth's little office to call Ames when the idea of borrowing Victorine's more centrally located cubicle crossed her mind. Victorine was still in Studio Three, and surely she would understand if—

But as she neared Victorine's office, she found the door was not, as usual, wide open but only very slightly ajar. She had come near and was about to peek in when the sound of a drawer being opened and closed inside arrested her. Then another drawer—opened, shut. She hesitated, confused. The idea that someone else might share the little office with Victorine occurred to her. Or perhaps a junior staff member had been sent to fetch some notes. In either case, it was an inopportune moment to borrow the office, and she was just turning away to climb the staircase up to Ruth's after all when a familiar, but temporarily unidentifiable, rattling sound from within met her ears. It ended at once and another drawer slid shut. Slowly, Juliet resumed her retreat down the hall to the staircase. Something faintly disturbing about her impressions continued to tickle the edge of her thoughts, but without penetrating them enough to take definite form.

In any case, she wanted her thoughts to herself. Along with the Hampstead Heath setting, a few other small revisions and new ideas had occurred to her, and she hurried up to the quiet of Ruth's office, whence she could call Ames and ask her to write them all safely down.

She found her assistant in an unprecedented tizzy. Evidently, the mail had come and Ames had inadvertently opened what she then discovered was a private letter. As far as Juliet could tell, no harm whatever had been done, but Ames had never made such a mistake before (she had almost never made any mistake before) and she was in an agony of remorse.

“I didn't want to call you on the cell phone during the rehearsal, Dr. Bodine,” she kept explaining, “because I didn't know what I might be interrupting. I thought it was wiser to wait, but I am so glad you called. Dr. Bodine, I don't know how I'll sleep tonight—”

“Ames, dear, for heaven's sake, it really doesn't matter. Who was it from?”

“Oh, I hate to even tell you—”

“Ames!”

“It's from Mr. Ambrosetti, I think. He just signs it ‘Rob.' And there wasn't any name at all on the envelope or, as I say, I would never in the world have—”

“Rob?”

Juliet's voice had changed entirely. More than five years after the divorce, word from Rob still had the power to stir in her a stinging mixture of longing, anger, pain, and remorse that could drain her body of pleasure in a moment. Like radioactive waste, she sometimes reflected, these sorrowful byproducts had half-lives much longer than that of the happiness that long ago spawned them.

With an effort, she worked to regain her composure. “What did he want?”

“Please, I really would rather not read it out loud unless it's absolutely—” began Ames, in such evident anguish that Juliet temporarily set aside her own distress.

“Never mind. I just wondered if it was business or—” She faltered. Or what? Or funny business. Forcing herself to focus, “Listen, there are a couple of things I need you to take care of for me,” she said.

She had been standing all this while, facing Ruth's window and idly looking across the courtyard at the woman in the office opposite (it was her office, evidently), who today appeared to be engaged in composing something on her computer. Juliet supposed it could be passionate e-mail, but the woman's expression suggested a managerial report or a legal brief. She herself now rounded Ruth's desk, sat down in Ruth's chair, and allowed her gaze to wander over the desktop for the first time.

“What I need most,” she continued to Ames, “if you can find it—Oh!”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, just a minute. Nothing.” With a new effort of will, Juliet made herself remember and repeat her list of requests. But what she had just seen had broken her train of thought, made her forget even the waiting letter from Rob. Lying on Ruth's desk was a note written with a black felt pen in block capitals on a torn sheet of plain white paper: