Corpse de Ballet (29 page)

“Elektra?” he said, after Patrick explained, his tone seeming to suggest (Juliet thought) that among his many wives, Elektra was the one he would least have expected to have a medical emergency.

But after this equivocal eruption, he seemed to lose his wits altogether. Juliet told him she had a car already waiting for him downstairs, then escorted—or rather, ushered—him to it. Seeing his blank face as he climbed in, she also climbed in and sat down beside him. (Patrick, naturally, had to go back and help Ruth, who had no intention of giving up her last hour of work for the day.) And so they arrived at St. Luke's together, where the emergency room waiting area teemed with coughing children, bleeding teenagers, groaning seniors—the usual crowd of New Yorkers having an unexpectedly trying day. Juliet squeezed Ryder's muscular shoulder firmly before marching off to tackle the triage desk.

She soon learned Elektra had been taken in immediately and was now being treated in some recess she was not to penetrate. The moment her informant turned away, however, Juliet swept smoothly through a pair of doors marked “
DO NOT ENTER
” and found Greg Fleetwood leaning against a column in the middle of a maze of curtained cubicles.

“She's in there,” Greg said, pointing to a cubicle so full of people that its curtain kept billowing out as they hurried around inside.

“Do you know—?”

“Nothing at all.”

Remembering that Greg had recently spent hours at this very hospital with Anton, Juliet took pity on him and sent him out to stay with Ryder while she kept watch in his place. Behind the cubicle's curtain, legs encased in green scrubs were visible from the knee down. They bustled from this side of the bed to that, then that to this. Occasionally, a person emerged or dashed in, far too intent on the business at hand for Juliet to dare to ask a question. Machines beeped. Voices muttered unintelligibly. After what seemed a long time, a slight, very young woman came out, identified herself as Dr. Chen and asked if Juliet were the next of kin.

She felt herself blanch at the sinister question. “No. Her husband is in the waiting room.”

“I'll come with you,” said Dr. Chen, and led the way.

They found Ryder alone, Greg having escaped to go across the street and fetch a couple of iced coffees.

“Come, please,” said the doctor, waving Ryder through a door behind the triage desk that Juliet had not noticed before. She tried to get Ryder to meet her eyes, so that she could excuse herself, but he wouldn't look up.

“I'll wait for you out—” she began; but Dr. Chen gestured at her to come and she followed. The door led to a labyrinthine set of tiny examining rooms. Finding an empty one, Dr. Chen bade them sit down. Ryder taking the only chair, Juliet perched on the examining table.

“I'm afraid your wife has lost the baby,” Dr. Chen said gently, but without preface.

“The—”

So far as Juliet knew, it was Ryder's first word since he had blurted out his wife's name back in the lobby of the Jansch. He said it and stopped, looking absolutely flummoxed.

Juliet, too, felt dumbfounded. Elektra, pregnant! No wonder she'd been green.

“The good news is, she's doing well and should make a full recovery,” the doctor went on reassuringly. “There's no reason why she can't conceive soon again. She did lose quite a bit of blood. But I expect she'll be herself in a few days. Only—” she looked sympathetically at Ryder, “without the baby. I'm so sorry.”

Ryder sat as if paralyzed. Finally, “Without what baby?” he brought out.

There was a pause. Juliet felt her own heart thumping in her chest. Then, “Didn't you know?” asked Dr. Chen. “Your wife was pregnant.”

“Elektra Andreades? Do you have the right patient?”

Dr. Chen consulted a manilla file in her hand. “Yes, that's right, Mr. Andreades,” she said. “She was more than three months pregnant. Thirteen weeks.”

“My wife couldn't have been three months pregnant,” Ryder said, his heavy eyebrows lowered, his voice full of scorn for this doctor who did not know the basic facts of life. “First of all, my wife has partially occluded Fallopian tubes that make it extremely problematic for her to conceive. Second, we haven't even had sex since—”

Juliet felt herself start to blush. Seeing the flaw in his logic, Ryder suddenly shut up. There was an awful silence in the room. The fluorescent lights buzzed. Down the hall, a nurse's ringing voice asked, “And has your nose always slanted to the left, Mrs. Lester?”

Finally, “They are bringing her up to the fourth floor,” Dr. Chen said, her eyes fleeing to Juliet's for comfort. “Take any elevator from the lobby and the floor nurse at the station will tell you which room number to go to.”

Clutching her folder to her thin chest in an oddly school-girlish way, Dr. Chen gave a faint, melancholy half-smile, bobbed her head, and left the room. Just past the doorway, she stopped and remembered to shoo her visitors out with her. As the door to the examining rooms swung shut, the doctor dematerialized, leaving Juliet alone with Ryder in the waiting area once more.

Ryder was almost a foot taller than Juliet, and she could not see his face well unless she stood back a little and looked slightly up. She was reluctant to do this—she was afraid to do it—yet she was aware that a sort of electric storm seemed to be passing through his strong, handsome features. His dark eyes flinched and glowered, his eyebrows twitched, his mouth and jaw rippled. Nor was it only his face; Juliet had the impression that she could feel energy rising off his skin like steam. Scalding steam. She looked hopefully around for Greg. But they had only been gone a couple of minutes. He was probably still on line at some Starbucks. Lucky Greg.

“Do you want—” she began.

“I'll go up to her now,” Ryder broke in. “Thanks for—”

“I'll go with you,” Juliet interrupted, as an image of the helpless Elektra receiving him alone flashed in her mind.

“That won't be necessary,” Ryder said.

“I'd like to see her.” Juliet hurried beside him into the lobby. To her relief, Ryder didn't argue. She felt very small next to him and supposed he might have decided that, like a cat or a housefly, she was too insignificant to worry about. They waited in silence for the elevator, then got in together.

On the fourth floor, a nurse sent them down the corridor to Room 418. Ryder stalked off, Juliet scurrying behind. Four-eighteen was a semi-private room, but the bed near the door was empty. In the bed by the window, Elektra lay with her eyes closed, still pale but less frighteningly so than a couple of hours ago. Her dark hair, sweaty and damp, spread out in a tangle on the pillow behind her. Even at such a moment, she was extremely beautiful, Juliet thought.

Ryder went up to her bedside and touched her shoulder. Her eyes flew open.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

Juliet hovered in the doorway. She wasn't sure if either of them was even aware of her, but she was ready to summon a nurse at Ryder's first sudden move.

But he didn't make a move. Instead, “Who knocked you up?” he asked, almost conversationally.

His wife's eyes closed again. “Anton Mohr.”

“Well, son of a bitch,” said Ryder, his hands clenched at his sides. Juliet noticed his wedding ring winking in the harsh electric light. As she had grown toward middle age, she had begun to marvel at marriage, which seemed to her (when sustained long enough, at least) a mysterious and confusing institution. From the acorn of romance grew an oak of reality that no more resembled that dear, exciting, cherished little seed than—well, than an oak resembles an acorn. She had sometimes wondered what a wedding ring would look like that metamorphosed as much as the relationship it symbolized.

“When were you going to tell me?” Ryder asked.

Opening her eyes once more, Elektra began to cry. “Get out,” she said. “I feel shitty enough as it is.”

She sat up a little to reach for a tissue from the bedside table and, for the first time, noticed Juliet.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked.

Caught off guard, “I just wanted to make sure…” Juliet began, then could not finish the sentence. What the fuck was she doing here? It was obvious that there were wheels within wheels at work in the Jansch she could never understand. Nor (probably) did she have any good reason to try. She had distinctly understood Teri Malone to say that Olympia Andreades had been Anton's lover. Yet now her sister …

Juliet shook her head. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I just brought Ryder over. I'll go now.”

She went.

*   *   *

It was now almost nine o'clock on Wednesday night. Juliet took a cab straight up to Riverside and One Hundred Sixth Street and (trying to pretend she was packing heat or knew jujitsu) walked briskly into the shadowy park. The Sculptors were playing the Conceptual Artists tonight, she found. And, apparently, creaming them.

When she arrived, the Sculptors were just taking the field. Under the tall electric lights, sky-blue “Sculptors Do It In Three Dimensions” T-shirts distinguished them from their adversaries. (The Conceptual Artists wore white T-shirts with a likeness of Ludwig Wittgenstein silkscreened on the back.) Murray went out to right field, and Juliet soon saw why. The first Conceptual Artist up sent a high fly his way. Murray plucked it from the air and whipped it to the Sculptor at second. Two outs. The next batter, underfed and nearsighted, with a buzz-cut, and a totem pole tattooed down his left arm, peered, swung, peered, swung, wiped his glasses and peered and swung again, but without hitting anything. The Sculptors were up again.

In the shuffle of changing sides, Juliet managed to catch hold of Murray.

“Hey, Jule!” He looked down at her, surprised and—she couldn't be mistaken—pleased. “You came!”

“I need to talk to you,” she said, with more composure than she felt. The scene at the hospital had been extremely disturbing. She wanted to discuss it with someone who knew the dynamics involved, and it couldn't be Ruth, because Ruth would be appalled to learn Elektra had been pregnant and delighted she miscarried—she was bound to, since it meant her leading Estella could dance.

“Great. We'll be done in a half hour or so. Take a seat. You can be our fan,” said Murray.

With a valedictory nod, he turned away again to hoot encouragement at Jennifer, a weedy young blonde in miniskirt, pierced nose, and Reeboks who had trotted up to home plate.

She had already let two balls and two strikes go by without taking a swing. Apparently, the Visual Arts League frowned on catcalls and heckling, but there was plenty of shouting and whistling in support of each team's own players.

Juliet sat on the Sculptors' bench, apparently the lone spectator. Murray certainly looked good in a mitt. She made herself turn her eyes elsewhere and recognized, at first base, the captain of the Conceptual Artists, who had recently created a work involving the Flatiron building and a large quantity of Oxford shirts. The
New York Observer
had run an enthusiastic review.

By the time the game ended, Juliet was in a better mood than when she had arrived.

Winded and sweaty, Murray plunked himself down beside her on the bench. “Want to have a drink?” He nodded toward the café set up for the summer on the concrete terrace above the sandy volleyball courts.

“Sure.”

She waited while he assembled the team's softballs, bats, and other paraphernalia, then walked alongside him over the dim, slightly sloping paths. Even in the uneven electric light, she could see beads of sweat glistening in his curly hair.

“You guys certainly mopped the field with those Conceptual Artists,” she said, feeling suddenly unwilling to explain what had brought her here.

Murray shrugged. “They were at a disadvantage. Their pitcher is doing a piece where he's on display in a stall in the meat district all week. You should come next Wednesday. We're playing the Color Field Painters. They really stink.”

They sat down at a table beside the railing dividing the café from the courts and playing fields below. Beyond these lay the busy highway and beyond that, the gleaming Hudson.

“So what's the matter?” asked Murray. “You didn't come here to pick up fielding tips.”

Juliet told him.

“Anton. Jeez,” Murray said, when she got to the scene in Elektra's room. “Imagine the baby those two would have had.”

Juliet nodded. She did not think Ruth would have spared a thought for that.

“The whole thing shook me up,” she said.

“No wonder. What did Greg Fleetwood say?”

“Greg!” Juliet stared at him, stricken. “I totally forgot him.”

Landis laughed, more merrily than Juliet thought necessary. “I'm sure he's figured out where she is by now,” he said.

She dropped her head to the small table. A waiter came and she heard Murray order a gin gimlet. Grunts and thumps arose from a team of volleyballers on a court below.

Looking up, “I'll have a gin gimlet too,” Juliet said. As the waiter left, she went on, “Listen, I'm worried for Elektra. That's what I want to talk to you about. It isn't my business, of course, but I really think Ryder may do some violence to her. Olympia told me he beats her, and now she's just lying there, like a sitting duck—lying duck—waiting for when he chooses to come back. I mean, he's her husband. The nurses are certainly going to let him in.”

“Did he try to hit her just now?”

Juliet shook her head. “Not while I was there. But I keep thinking … I know it probably sounds silly.”

“It does seem unlikely he'd attack in cold blood, since he didn't in the first heat of passion.”

“I don't know. He took it so strangely. Almost like he wasn't surprised. I just feel it's irresponsible to do nothing. Except for the two of them, I'm the only one who knows what went on in that room tonight.”