Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (22 page)

“Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three—but I tell you, Monsieur, you must give me the message. I occupy the position of the advisor of Madame—fifty-four, fifty-five——”

Hastings surveyed the panting body coldly. Stella lapsed into a technically seductive attitude. She had often seen Madame behave just so. She stared into his face as if she were in possession of some vital secret, and awaited his application for an introduction to the mystery. Her petits battements had been well done. She was quite
réchauffé
for so early in the afternoon.

“It was Mrs. David Knight that I wanted to see,” said Hastings.

“Our Alabama! She will surely be here before long. She is a dear, Alabama,” cooed Stella.

“There was nobody at home at the apartment, so they told me to come here.” Hastings’ eyes roved about incredulously as if there must be some mistake.

“Oh, she!” said Stella. “She is always here. You have only to wait. If Monsieur will excuse me——?”

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine. At three hundred and eighty Hastings rose to leave. Stella sweated and blew like a porpoise making believe she hated the difficulties of the self-imposed bar work. She made believe she was a beautiful galley slave whom Hastings might possibly be wanting to purchase.

“Just tell her I came, will you?” he said.

“Of course, and that you went away. I am sorry that what I can do is not more interesting for Monsieur. There is a class at five if Monsieur would care to——”

“Yes, tell her I went away.” He stared about him distastefully. “I don’t suppose she’d be free for a party, anyway.”

Stella had been so much in the studio that she had absorbed an air of complete confidence in her work like all the pupils of Madame. If people who watched were not fascinated, it must be some lack in themselves of aesthetic appreciation.

Madame allowed Stella to work without paying; many dancers did the same who had no money. When there was money they paid—that was the Russian system.

The crash of a suitcase bumping up the stairs announced the arrival of a student.

“A friend has called,” she said importantly. It was inconceivable to the isolated Stella that a visit could be without consequence. Alabama, too, was forgetting the old casual modulations of life. Against the violent twist and thump of tour jeté nothing stood out but the harshest, most dissonant incident.

“What did they want?”

“How should I know?”

A vague unreasoning dread filled Alabama—she must keep the studio apart from her life—otherwise one would soon become as unsatisfactory as the other, lost in an aimless, impenetrable drift.

“Stella,” she said, “if they should come again—if anyone should come here for me, you will always say you don’t know anything about me—that I am not here.”

“But why? It is for the appreciation of your friends that you will dance.”

“No, no!” Alabama protested. “I cannot do two things at once——I wouldn’t go down the Avenue de 1’Opéra leaping over the traffic cop with pas de chat, and I don’t want my friends rehearsing bridge games in the corner while I dance.”

Stella was glad to share in any personal reactions to life, that side of her own being an empty affair boxed by attics and berated by landladies.

“Very well! Why should life interfere with us artists?” she agreed pompously.

“Last time he was here my husband smoked a cigarette in the studio,” continued Alabama in an attempt to justify the clandestine protestations.

“Oh,” Stella was scandalized. “I see. If I had been here, I would have told him about the awfulness of smells when one is working.”

Stella dressed herself in the worn-out ballet skirts of other dancers and pink gauze shirts from the Galeries Lafayette. She pinned the shirt down over the yoke of the skirt with big safety pins to form a basque. She lived at the studio during the day, clipping the stems of the flowers the pupils brought Madame to keep them fresh, polishing the great mirror, repairing the music with strips of adhesive, and playing for lessons when the pianist was absent. She thought of herself as councillor to Madame. Madame thought of her as a nuisance.

Stella was very conscientious about earning her lessons. If anyone else tried to do the smallest thing for Madame, it precipitated a scene of sulks and weeping. Her dreamy Polish eyes were faded to the yellowish green of scum on a stagnant pool by the glaze of starvation and intensity. The girls bought her croissants and café au lait at midday and called her “
ma chère.”
Alabama and Arienne gave her money on one pretext or another. Madame gave her old clothes and cakes. In return, she told them each separately that Madame had said they were making more progress than the others and juggled the working hours in Madame’s little book so that her eight-hour day sometimes held nine or ten one-hour periods. Stella lived in an air of general intrigue.

Madame was severe with the girl. “You know you can never dance. Why do you not get work to do?” she scolded. “You will be old, I will be old—then what will become of you?”

“I have a concert next week. I will have twenty francs for turning pages. Oh, Madame, please let me stay!”

No sooner had Stella the twenty francs than she approached Alabama. “If you would give me the rest,” she pleaded persuasively, “we could buy a medicine cabinet for the studio. Only last week someone turned an ankle—we should have means to disinfect our blisters.” Stella talked incessantly about the cabinet until Alabama went with her one morning to get it. They waited in the golden sunshine crystallizing the gilt front of Au Printemps for the store to open. The thing cost a hundred francs and was to be a surprise for Madame.

“You may give it to her, Stella,” said Alabama, “but I am going to pay. You cannot afford such an extravagance.”

“No,” mourned Stella, “I have no husband to pay for me!
Hélas!
”

“I give up other things,” Alabama replied crossly. She couldn’t feel resentment against the misshapen, melancholy Pole.

Madame was displeased.

“It is ridiculous,” she said. “There is not room for so bulky an affair in the dressing room.” When she saw Stella’s frantic eyes, gluey with disappointment, she added, “But it will be very convenient. Leave it. Only you must not spend your money on me.”

She delegated to Alabama the job of seeing that Stella bought her no more presents.

Madame argued over the dried raisins and licorice bonbons that Stella brought to leave on her table and about the Russian bread she brought in little packages; bread with cheese cooked inside and bread with sugar pellets, caraway bread and glutinous black tragedian breads, breads hot from the oven smelling of innocence, and moldy epicurean breads from Yiddish bakeries. Anything Stella had money to buy, she bought for Madame.

Instead of curbing Stella, Alabama absorbed the aimless extravagance of the girl. She couldn’t wear new shoes; her feet were too sore. It seemed a crime owning new dresses to smell them up with eau de cologne and leave them hanging all day long against the studio walls. She thought she could work better when she felt poor. She had abandoned so many of the occasions of exercising personal choice that she spent the hundred-franc notes in her purse on flowers, endowing them with all the qualities of the things she might have bought under other circumstances, the thrill of a new hat, the assurance of a new dress.

Yellow roses she bought with her money like Empire satin brocade, and white lilacs and pink tulips like molded confectioner’s frosting, and deep-red roses like a Villon poem, black and velvety as an insect wing, cold blue hydrangeas clean as a newly calcimined wall, the crystalline drops of lily of the valley, a bowl of nasturtiums like beaten brass, anemones pieced out of wash material, and malignant parrot tulips scratching the air with their jagged barbs, and the voluptuous scrambled convolutions of Parma violets. She bought lemon-yellow carnations perfumed with the taste of hard candy, and garden roses purple as raspberry puddings, and every kind of white flower the florist knew how to grow. She gave Madame gardenias like white kid gloves and forget-me-nots from the Madeleine stalls, threatening sprays of gladioli, and the soft, even purr of black tulips. She bought flowers like salads and flowers like fruits, jonquils and narcissus, poppies and ragged robins, and flowers with the brilliant carnivorous qualities of Van Gogh. She chose from windows filled with metal balls and cactus gardens of the florists near the rue de la Paix, and from the florists uptown who sold mostly plants and purple iris, and from florists on the Left Bank whose shops were lumbered up with the wire frames of designs, and from outdoor
markets where the peasants dyed their roses to a bright apricot, and stuck wires through the heads of the dyed peonies.

Spending money had played a big part in Alabama’s life before she had lost, in her work, the necessity for material possessions.

Nobody was rich at the studio but Nordika. She came to her lessons in a Rolls-Royce, sharing her hours with Alacia, who had the same essence as a Bryn Mawr graduate, she was so practical. It was Alacia who took His Highness away from Nordika, but Nordika hung on to the money and they made a go of it together some way. Nordika was the pretty one like a blonde ejaculation, and Alacia was the one who had moved Milord to pity. Nordika was tremulous with a glassy excitement that she tried to repress—they said in the ballet that Nordika’s excitement ruined all of her costumes. Nordika couldn’t go around vibrating in a void so her friend managed to anchor her feet enough to the ground to keep the car. Both of them threatened to leave Madame’s studio because Stella hid a half-eaten can of shrimp behind their mirror, where it slowly soured. Stella said to the girls that the smell was dirty clothes. When they found what it really was, they were merciless to poor Stella. Stella liked having the chic Nordika and her friend in the class because they were almost the same as an audience.

“
Polissonne!
” they said to Stella. “It is bad enough to eat shrimp at home without bringing it here like a stink bomb.”

Stella had so little room at home that she had to keep her trunk jammed out the attic window half in the open. A can of shrimp would have asphyxiated her in the small place.

“Don’t mind,” said Alabama. “I will take you to Prunier’s for shrimp.”

Madame said Alabama was a fool to take Stella to Prunier’s for shrimp. Madame could remember the days when she and her husband had eaten caviar together in the butchery fumes of the rue Duphot. Forever, to Madame, a presage of disaster lay in the conjured image of the oyster bar—revolutions would almost certainly follow excursions to Prunier’s, and poverty and hard times. Madame was superstitious; she never borrowed pins and had never danced in purple, and she somehow thought of trouble in connection with the fish she had loved so well when she could afford it. Madame was very afraid of any luxury.

The saffron in the bouillabaisse made Alabama sweat under the eyes and turned the Barsac tasteless. During the lunch Stella fidgeted across the table and folded something into her napkin. The girl was not as impressed as Alabama would have liked with Prunier’s.

“Barsac is a monkish wine,” suggested Alabama absently.

Secretively Stella extracted whatever it was she dredged from the bottomless soup. She was too engrossed to answer. She was as absorbed as a person searching for a dead body.

“What on earth are you doing,
ma chère?”
It irritated Alabama that Stella was not more enthusiastic. She resolved never to take another poor person to a rich man’s place; it was a waste of money.

“Sh—sh—sh!
Ma chère
Alabama, it is pearls I have found—big ones, as many as three! If the waiters know they will claim them for the establishment, so I make a cache in my napkin.”

“Really,” asked Alabama, “show me!”

“When we are in the street. I assure you it is so. We will grow rich, and you will have a ballet and I will dance in it.”

The girls finished their lunch breathlessly. Stella was too excited to make her usual senseless protestations about paying the check.

In the pale filtrations of the street they opened the napkin carefully.

“We will buy Madame a present,” she crowed.

Alabama inspected the globular yellow deposits.

“They’re only lobster eyes,” she pronounced decisively.

“How should I know? I have never eaten lobsters before,” said Stella phlegmatically.

Imagine living your life with your only hope of finding pearls and fortunes and the unexpected stewed in the heart of a bouillabaisse! It was like being a child and keeping your eyes forever glued to the ground looking for a lost penny—only children do not have to buy bread and raisins and medicine cabinets with the pennies they find on the pavement!

Alabama’s lessons began the day at the studio.

In the cold barracks the maid scrubbed and coughed. The woman rubbed her fingers unfeelingly through the flame of the oil stove, pinching the wick.

“The poor woman!” said Stella. “She has a husband who beats her at night—she has showed me the places—her husband has no jawbone since the war. We should give her something, perhaps?”

“Don’t
tell
me about it, Stella! We can’t be sorry for everybody.”

It was too late—Alabama had already noticed the caked black blood under the woman’s fingernails where they were split by the stiff brush in her freezing pail of eau de Javelle. She gave her ten francs and hated the woman for making her sorry. It was bad enough working in the cold asthmatic dust without knowing about the maid.

Stella broke the thorns from the rose stems and gathered the shattered
petals off the floor. She and Alabama shivered and worked quickly to get warm.

“Show me again how Madame has shown you in your private lessons,” urged Stella.

Alabama went over and over for her the breathless contraction and muscular abandon necessary to attain elevation. You did the same thing for years, and after three years you might lift yourself an inch higher—of course, there was always the chance that you wouldn’t.

“And you must, after the effort of launching your body is accomplished, let it fall in midair—this way.” She heaved her body with a stupendous inflation off the floor and came to rest limply, like a deflated balloon.