Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (20 page)

“Yes?”

“You cannot do that. You must not build your hopes so high.” The sign above the woman’s head said, “Do Not Touch the Looking
Glass” in French, English, Italian, and Russian. Madame stood with her back to the huge mirror and gazed at the far corners of the room. There was no music as they began.

“You will have the piano when you have learned to control your muscles,” she explained. “The only way, now that it is so late, is to think constantly of placing your feet. You must always stand with them
so.”
Madame spread her split satin shoes horizontally. “And you must stretch
so
fifty times in the evenings.”

She pulled and twisted the long legs along the bar. Alabama’s face grew red with effort. The woman was literally stripping the muscles of her thighs. She could have cried out with pain. Looking at Madame’s smoky eyes and the red gash of her mouth, Alabama thought she saw malice in the face. She thought Madame was a cruel woman. She thought Madame was hateful and malicious.

“You must not rest,” Madame said. “Continue.”

Alabama tore at her aching limbs. The Russian left her alone to work at the fiendish exercise. Reappearing, she sprayed herself unconcernedly before the glass with an atomizer.

“
Fatiguée?
” she called over her shoulder nonchalantly.

“Yes,” said Alabama.

“But you must not stop.”

After a while the Russian approached the bar.

“When I was a little girl in Russia,” she said impassively, “I did four hundred of those every night.”

Rage rose in Alabama like the gurgling of gasoline in a visible tank. She hoped the contemptuous woman knew how much she hated her. “I will do four hundred.”

“Luckily, the Americans are athletic. They have more natural talent than the Russians,” Madame remarked. “But they are spoiled with ease and money and plenty of husbands. That is enough for today. You have some eau de cologne?”

Alabama rubbed herself with the cloudy liquid from Madame’s atomizer. She dressed amongst the confused startled eyes and naked bodies of a class which drifted in. The girls spoke hilariously in Russian. Madame invited her to wait and see the work.

A man sat sketching on a broken iron chair; two heavy bearded personages of the theatre pointed to first one, then another of the girls; a boy in black tights with his head in a bandanna package and the face of a mythical pirate pulverized the air with ankle beats.

Mysteriously the ballet grouped itself. Silently it unfolded its mute clamor in the seductive insolence of back jetés, insouciant pas de chats,
the abandon of many pirouettes, launched its fury in the spring and stretch of the Russian schstay,
¹
and lulled itself to rest in a sweep of cradling chassés. Nobody spoke. The room was as still as a cyclone center.

“You like it?” said Madame implacably.

Alabama felt her face flush with a hot gush of embarrassment. She was very tired from her lesson. Her body ached and trembled. This first glimpse of the dance as an art opened up a world. “Sacrilege!” she felt like crying out to the posturing abandon of the past as she thought ignominiously of
The Ballet of the Hours
that she had danced ten years before. She remembered unexpectedly the exaltation of swinging sideways down the pavements as a child and clapping her heels in the air. This was close to that old forgotten feeling that she couldn’t stay on the earth another minute.

“I
love
it. What is it?”

The woman turned away. “It is a ballet of mine about an amateur who wanted to join a circus,” she said. Alabama wondered how she’d thought those nebulous amber eyes were soft; they seemed to be infernally laughing at her. Madame went on: “You will work again at three tomorrow.”

Alabama rubbed her legs with Elizabeth Arden muscle oil night after night. There were blue bruises inside above the knee where the muscles were torn. Her throat was so dry that at first she thought she had fever and took her temperature and was disappointed to find that she had none. In her bathing suit she tried to stretch on the high back of a Louis Quatorze sofa. She was always stiff, and she clutched the gilt flowers in pain. She fastened her feet through the bars of the iron bed and slept with her toes glued outwards for weeks. Her lessons were agony.

At the end of a month, Alabama could hold herself erect in ballet position, her weight controlled over the balls of her feet, holding the curve of her spine drawn tight together like the reins of a racehorse and mashing down her shoulders till they felt as if they were pressed flat against her hips. The time moved by in spasmodic jumps like a school clock. David was glad of her absorption at the studio. It made them less inclined to use up their leisure on parties. Alabama’s leisure was a creaky muscle-sore affair and better spent at home. David could work more freely when she was occupied and making fewer demands on his time.

At night she sat in the window too tired to move, consumed by a longing to succeed as a dancer. It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her—that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self—that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

The heat of July beat on the studio skylight and Madame sprayed the air with disinfectant. The starch in Alabama’s organdy skirts stuck to her hands and sweat rolled into her eyes till she couldn’t see. Choking dust rose off the floor, the intense glare threw a black gauze before her eyes. It was humiliating that Madame should have to touch her pupil’s ankles when they were so hot. The human body was very insistent. Alabama passionately hated her inability to discipline her own. Learning how to manage it was like playing a desperate game with herself. She said to herself, “My body and I,” and took herself for an awful beating: that was how it was done. Some of the dancers worked with a bath towel pinned around their necks. It was so hot under the burning roof that they needed something to absorb the sweat. Sometimes the mirror swam in red heat waves if Alabama’s lesson came at the hours when the direct sun fell on the glass overhead. Alabama was sick of moving her feet in the endless battements without music. She wondered why she came to her lessons at all: David had asked her to swim at Corne-Biche in the afternoon. She felt obscurely angry with Madame that she had not gone off in the cool with her husband. Though she did not believe that the careless happy passages of their first married life could be repeated—or relished if they were, drained as they had been of the experiences they held—still, the highest points of concrete enjoyment that Alabama visualized when she thought of happiness, lay in the memories they held.

“Will you pay attention?” Madame said. “This is for you.” Madame moved across the floor mapping the plan of a simple adagio.

“I can’t do it,” said Alabama. She began negligently, following the path of the Russian. Suddenly she stopped. “Oh, but it is beautiful!” she said rapturously.

The ballet mistress did not turn around. “There are many beautiful things in the dance,” she said laconically, “but you cannot do them—yet.”

After her lesson, Alabama folded her soaking clothes into her valise. Arienne wrung out her tights in pools of sweat on the floor. Alabama
held the ends while she squeezed and twisted. It cost a lot of sweat to learn to dance.

“I am going away for a month,” Madame said one Saturday. “You can continue here with Mlle Jeanneret. I hope that when I come back you will be able to have the music.”

“Then I can’t have my lesson on Monday?” She had given so much of her time to the studio that it was like being precipitated into a void to think of life without it.

“With Mademoiselle.”

Alabama felt great hot tears rolling inexplicably down her face as she watched the tired figure of their teacher disappear in the dusty fog. She ought to be glad of the respite; she had expected to be glad.

“You must not cry,” the girl said to her kindly. “Madame must go away for her heart to Royat.” She smiled gently at Alabama. “We will get Stella to play for your lessons at once,” she said with the air of a conspirator.

Through the heat of August they worked. The leaves dried and decayed in the basin of St-Sulpice; the Champs-Elysées simmered in gasoline fumes. There was nobody in Paris; everybody said so. The fountains in the Tuileries threw off a hot vaporous mist;
midinettes
shed their sleeves. Alabama went twice a day to the studio. Bonnie was in Brittany visiting friends of Nanny. David drank with the crowds of people in the Ritz Bar celebrating the emptiness of the city together.

“Why will you never come out with me?” he said.

“Because I can’t work next day if I do.”

“Are you under the illusion that you’ll ever be any good at that stuff?”

“I suppose not; but there’s only one way to try.”

“We have no life at home any more.”

“You’re never there anyway—I’ve got to have something to do with myself.”

“Another female whine—I have to do my work.”

“I’ll do anything you want.”

“Will you come with me this afternoon?”

They went to Le Bourget and hired an aeroplane. David drank so much brandy before they left that by the time they were over the Porte St-Denis he was trying to get the pilot to take them to Marseilles. When they got back to Paris he urged Alabama to get out with him at the Café Lilas. “We’ll find somebody and have dinner,” he said.

“David, I can’t honestly. I get so sick when I drink. I’ll have to have morphine if I do, like last time.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to the studio.”

“Yet you can’t stay with me! What’s the use of having a wife? If a woman’s only to sleep with there are plenty available for that——”

“What’s the use of having a husband or anything else? You suddenly find you have them all the same, and there you are.”

The taxi whirred through the rue Cambon. Unhappily she climbed the steps. Arienne was waiting.

“What a sad face!” she said.

“Life is a sad business, isn’t it, my poor Alabama?” said Stella.

When the preliminary routines at the bar were over, Alabama and Arienne moved to the centre of the floor.

“Bien, Stella.”

The sad coquetries of a Chopin mazurka fell flat on the parched air. Alabama watched Arienne searching for the mental processes of Madame. She seemed very squat and sordid. She was the
premiére danseuse
of the Paris Opéra, nearly at the top. Alabama began sobbing inaudibly.

“Lives aren’t as hard as professions,” she gasped.

“Well,” Arienne cackled, exasperated, “this is not a pension de jeunes filles! Will you do the step your own way if you do not like the way I do?” She stood with her hands on her hips, powerful and uninspired, implying that Alabama’s knowledge of the step’s existence imposed on her the obligation to perform it. Somebody had to master the thing; it was there in the air. Arienne had put it there, let Arienne do it.

“It is for you, you know, that we work,” said Arienne harshly.

“My foot hurts,” said Alabama petulantly. “The nail has come off.”

“Then you must grow a harder one. Will you begin?
Dva
, Stella!”

Miles and miles of pas de bourrée, her toes picking the floor like the beaks of many feeding hens, and after ten thousand miles you got to advance without shaking your breasts. Arienne smelled of wet wool. Over and over she tried. Her ankles turned; her comprehension moved faster than her feet and threw her out of balance. She invented a trick: you must pull with your spirit against the forward motions of the body, and that gave you the tenebrous dignity and economy of effort known as style.

“But you are a
bête
, an
impossible!
” screeched Arienne. “You wish to understand it before you can do it.”

Alabama finally taught herself what it felt like to move the upper part of her body along as if it were a bust on wheels. Her pas de bourrée progressed like a flying bird. She could hardly keep from holding her breath when she did it.

When David asked about her dancing she adopted a superior manner. She felt he couldn’t have understood if she had tried to explain about the pas de bourrée. Once she did try. Her exposition had been full of “You-see-what-I-means” and “Can’t-you-understands,” and David was annoyed and called her a mystic.

“Nothing exists that can’t be expressed,” he said angrily.

“You are just dense. For me, it’s quite clear.”

David wondered if Alabama had ever really understood any of his pictures. Wasn’t any art the expression of the inexpressible? And isn’t the inexpressible always the same, though variable—like the
X
in physics? It may represent anything at all, but at the same time, it’s always actually
X
.

Madame came back during the September drouth.

“You have made much progress,” she said, “but you must get rid of your American vulgarities. You surely sleep too much. Four hours is enough.”

“Are you better for your treatments?”

“They put me in a cabinet,” she laughed. “I could only stay with somebody holding my hand. Rest is not
commode
for tired people. It is not good for artists.”

“It has been a cabinet here this summer,” said Alabama savagely.

“And you still want to dance
La Chatte
, poor?”

Alabama laughed. “You will tell me,” she said, “when I do well enough to buy myself a tutu?”

Madame shrugged her shoulders, “Why not now?” she said.

“I’d like to be a fine dancer first.”

“You must work.”

“I work four hours a day.”

“It is too much.”

“Then how can I be a dancer?”

“I do not know how anybody can be anything,” said the Russian.

“I will burn candles to St. Joseph.”

“Perhaps that will help; a Russian saint would be better.”