The Winter of Her Discontent (9 page)

A
S
J
AYNE AND
I
WERE
getting ready to leave for rehearsal the next morning, Ruby's voice, strained with the effort to be nice, called out, “Rosie, I need you.”

Jayne went to wait for the cab she'd generously offered to split with me. I cautiously approached the lair of the swollen. The night had not been kind to Ruby. The hives were bigger, the swelling increased, and her skin color hovered between fire engine and tomato soup. It took everything in me not to flinch.

“Hiya, Rube. What can I do for you?”

She left her bed and approached me, her natural poise and grace yanked down by the weight of her enormous, misshapen head. If St. Patrick's started sounding the hour, the similarity to Quasimoto would've been undeniable. “Are you going to rehearsal?”

“Absolutely.” Truth be told, my knee needed another day of rest, but I knew Maureen wouldn't be willing to grant me one.

“Could you do me a favor?” Her hand reached toward mine. I reflexively backed away. “On your way there could you mail this for me?”

In her palm was a piece of V-mail directed to the AFPO address. I took it, taking care not to touch her skin, and slid it into my pocket. “Sure.”

“You'll make sure it goes out p.d.q.?”

“As God is my witness.”

She relaxed at that and slumped back to the bed.

 

We arrived at the Bernhardt early. While Jayne went into the rehearsal room to stretch, I went in search of Zelda. Since the odds were good that Maureen would fire me after this rehearsal, I decided that if I didn't talk to Zelda and her friends now, I wasn't likely to get a chance again.

The actors were rehearsing a floor above us in a room dominated by a table laden with coffee and Danishes. A mock-up of the set had been arranged at one end of the room, and while the cast waited for Walter Friday to arrive, they lounged on the makeshift tables and chairs eating their breakfast and looking over their lines.

Paulette's friends sat together on a well-worn sofa, their legs crossed right over left. Their staginess didn't end there. They all wore belted wool dresses in complimentary shades of blue and styled their hair—one blonde, one brunette, one redhead—with a part to the left and a series of tight curls on the right. They mirrored one another in their bright red lips and nails, and the brown T-strap shoes they'd polished to a shine. They'd even arranged themselves so that the blonde—the smallest of them—was seated in the center while the taller women flagged her on either side.

Everything about them said sophistication, and while I should've found them utterly intimidating, Zelda caught my eye and offered me a welcoming smile.
Hello again,
the grin said.
Don't be scared. We're just like you only better dressed
.

I took a step in their direction and found my path blocked.

“Hi, Rosie.” Minnie stood directly in front of me. I looked helplessly at Zelda. She had gone back to her conversation. “What are you doing here?” The question was asked on the sly. I was an infiltrator, not a guest.

“I…uh…need to talk to Walter Friday.” I gazed about the room as though Walter were hiding behind one of the folding chairs Paulette's friends perched on.

“He's in his office. Phone call.”

I glanced at my wristwatch. There was no hope of talking to Paulette's friends with Minnie here playing chaperone. And if I was late
to my rehearsal, I would only be giving Maureen another reason to give me the boot.

“Did you see Ruby this morning?” asked Minnie.

“I think so. It was hard to tell with all the swelling.”

“Poor thing. I meant to stop by before I left, but I overslept. I feel awful—I told her I'd mail a letter for her and completely forgot to pick it up.”

“No worries—she got me to do it.”

Minnie looked surprised. Who could blame her? “That was nice of you.”

“What can I say? Pity brings out the best in me.”

“Do you want me to give Mr. Friday a message for you?”

“That's all right. I'll see him later.” I began my careful limp back the way I came.

“There's a shortcut.” She took two steps toward a door on the other side of the room and offered me a wide, off-kilter smile. I was overreacting. She wasn't making me feel unwelcome—I was.

“Thanks,” I told her, then I exited through the door.

Minnie's shortcut put me in the hallway outside the administrative offices. It was separated from the rehearsal halls by a swinging door. I'd assumed we weren't welcome back there, but it was indeed a faster way to get from where I was to where I was going.

“What time will you be out of here tonight?” A low voice leaked into the corridor and planted me where I stood. The speaker had a slight lisp, as though he were being forced to talk while clenching a pencil between his teeth. It had to be Garvaggio and his omnipresent cigar.

“By five—six at the latest.”

“I don't know if that's good enough, Walt.” So he was talking to Friday. So much for the phone call. “My guys—they don't seem to trust you so much anymore. After the last time…”

“It was a mistake, Vinnie. It happens.”

“Not in our business. When the space is ours, it's ours.”

“Can't we talk about this later? I've got a rehearsal to get to.”

“There won't be a show if you don't hear me out. Get it? I'm going to need the building on Thursday no later than five thirty.”

“Impossible. We're bringing the dancers in. Things are supposed to run late.”

“Then you're going to have to move your rehearsal, aren't you? If we want the space on Thursday at five, it's happening on Thursday at five.”

Something in the office hit a hard metal surface, sending a hollow boom through the corridor. I couldn't tell if it was Walter Friday's head or his hand. “I can't keep this up, Vinnie. I can't be running a show with your people coming in and out of here.”

“That's the deal we made.”

“One of the girls is bound to see something. Your friends didn't do such a good job cleaning up last time.”

“If you're that worried, Walt, maybe we should close down this show here and now.”

“I can't do that!”

“But I can, get it? My job isn't to keep you happy—your job is.”

Friday muttered something under his breath before slipping out the door. I flattened myself against a wall and prayed for invisibility. Fortunately, he was in such a tizzy that I could've hit him with a sledgehammer and he wouldn't have noticed. As soon as he was out of the corridor, Garvaggio started talking again. The conversation this time was one-sided. He was on the phone.

“How's our friend? Ain't that a shame. Did you let him know that as soon as he's out we'll be paying him a visit? Good. Good. Well, he should be scared. Go back tomorrow and make the point twice as hard.”

The phone slammed into the base. I left the wall and limped toward my destination. I was almost past the swinging doors when a voice called after me.

“You lost, sweetheart?” Vinnie Garvaggio stood in all of his obese glory, the cigar still firmly clamped between his teeth. Despite the ring of smoke that surrounded him, he had a sweet, fresh smell. Never had I seen a dress shirt that was so white.

“I got a bum knee and was told there was a shortcut to the dance chorus rehearsal.”

In his hand was a piece of bread so heavily buttered the middle of it had started to sink. He used it to point me in the right direction. “Through those doors.” Then he winked at me, disappeared back into the office, and closed the door behind him.

 

Naturally, I was late to rehearsal. Instead of reprimanding me, Maureen greeted my return as an inconvenience she hadn't anticipated having to deal with. She'd assumed I was smart enough to stay away for good. “Leg all better?”

“Good as new,” I said, which would've been true if
good
meant painful and inflexible.

“Und yet you are late.” She clucked her tongue and rested both hands atop her walking stick. The other dancers were already assembled in their lines. There was no gap made to represent where I would be standing. Delbert had been grouped into a trio with another guy and gal and was doing his best not to make eye contact with me.

Maureen offered me the kind of smile she usually reserved for Hansel and Gretel when they visited her candy house. “Perhaps you should sit zings out to catch up.” It wasn't a question; it was an order and one that I gladly took. The pianist began a piece I wasn't familiar with, which meant that after I'd left rehearsal the day before, the group had progressed enough to learn something new. It turned out Maureen had done me an immense kindness. While I rested in relative comfort on a folding chair, the dancers performed a militaristic combination of steps that I wouldn't have been able to duplicate if I'd had a hundred hours of rehearsal. They leaped, bent, whirled, and flew with the perfect grace and timing of a pack of starlings on the last day of fall. Despite this apparent flawlessness, when they finished, Maureen sighed and tapped her cane in time to her chant of
“Nein, nein, nein!”

I would've been crushed, but the dancers accepted this reprimand and, on her command, repeated the piece, somehow making everything bigger, faster, tighter, and more cohesive. To this victory of movement Maureen sighed and announced, “Ve vill vork on it later. For now ve move on.”

She reconfigured everybody for the next piece, sending half of the pairs to one side of the room, the other half to the other. When it was apparent she'd forgotten she still had me to contend with, I faked a cough to get her attention. “Oh, you,” she said. “Go stand vith Delbert. In the back.”

It was a rough morning. My knee didn't like being jarred, my ego didn't like being pummeled, and gravity insisted on raising her ugly head at every opportunity. Maureen, mercifully, directed little of her criticism my way, not because I was improving but because she was smart enough to know not to kick a gal when she was down. Where was the fun in that?

After lunch, we resumed our positions for the latest combination and with renewed vigor attempted to not disappoint Maureen. We were doing good—me included—until Luke Piccolo, a trollish man with a lazy eye, attempted to lift his partner above his head. Before his elbows reached his ears, he slipped, sending his partner, Lily, belly first onto the wooden floor. We all backed away in shock, waiting for a sign that she was still alive. A moan was our only confirmation.

“Can you stand?” Maureen asked for the second time in as many days. Lily pushed herself into a kneel and gratefully latched onto Maureen's arm for support. Slowly she rose, her face making it clear that every ounce of her was in pain. While Luke murmured excuses that ranged from Lily's weight to the poor construction of his ballet slippers, I stared at the floor, grateful it wasn't me that had fallen. A few feet from the scene of the crime was a particularly shiny patch of floor. I ran my ballet slipper through it to confirm what I suspected: the floor was slick enough to trip a rhino. And I was willing to bet that if I put my shoe to my nose, I'd be fighting the temptation to wipe what I found on a piece of toast.

With Lily out of commission, Maureen called it a day. Jayne offered to split another cab, but after six hours of movement my knee was so numb I could've hopscotched home. We caught the subway and exited at Christopher Street.

“Odd, isn't it?”

“What?” Jayne asked.

“Two accidents in two days? Yesterday when I fell I thought it was a fluke, but now I'm not so sure.”

“Dancers fall all the time, Rosie.”

What she meant was dancers like Luke and me, two people who clearly had no business being anywhere near a leotard. No, she wasn't thinking that.
I
was. I pushed it out of my mind. “When I fell yesterday I could've sworn I smelled butter, and today I noticed a particularly slick looking patch of ground near where Luke stumbled.”

“So you think someone was trying to sabotage you?”

“Me, specifically? No. I'm good enough at doing that on my own. I do think, though, that someone was trying to create another problem for Maureen by making conditions unsafe for her dancers.”

“It could be a coincidence,” said Jayne. “Someone might've spilled something, and Maureen didn't realize it so it never got cleaned up.”

“Perhaps.” I was in a bad mood, and it was possible I was looking for problems.

“I'll mention the slick spots to Maureen tomorrow,” said Jayne.

I was trying hard not to let my own misery seep her way, but she would've had to have been in an iron lung not to have felt a little of it. She'd had a good day, receiving some of the only praise Maureen would dole out for the year. It was natural that she'd be the person to tell Maureen about the floor. If I did it, I would get dismissed for trying to blame my lack of grace on invisible forces. But for some reason I read in Jayne's plan an arrogance that couldn't possibly exist.

“It'll get better, Rosie,” she told me. It was a sweet lie, but it was still a lie.

“Is it better to quit or be fired?”

“They won't fire you.”

“If I quit, I can still retain my dignity.”

“What about Al?” It was cruel of her to use my own motives against me. Jayne was clever like that.

“If he's guilty, he's guilty. My suffering through another month of this isn't going to help anyone.”

“You're not a quitter.”

“I'm not a dancer either.” I also wasn't someone who let insecurity eat away at me. At least not when it came to my career. I wasn't enjoying this new, whiny version of myself. Where was the girl who wowed the audience on the opening night of
In the Dark
? “Let's set this aside for a minute.” I kept my voice low and told her about Walter and Vinnie's conversation. Not that it counted for much. All it proved was what we'd already suspected: Vinnie was backing the show in return for some favor that likely involved the theater being used as a mob drop point.