Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (24 page)

“You have no batterie,” stormed Arienne, “outside of a batterie de cuisine, perhaps, and I would have Stella know that I form my own protégées.”

When Stella had to tell Kira to move farther down the bar, Kira cried and went to Madame.

“What has Stella to do with where I stand?”

“Nothing,” answered Madame, “but since she lives here, you must not notice her more than the walls.”

Madame never said much. She seemed to expect the girls to quarrel. Sometimes she discussed the qualities of yellow or cerise or Mendelssohn. Inevitably the sense of her words was lost for Alabama, drifting off into that dark mournful harvest of the tides of the Sea of Marmara, the Russian language.

Madame’s brown eyes were like the purple bronze footpaths through an autumn beechwood where the mold is drenched with mist, and clear fresh lakes spurt up about your feet from the loam. The classes swayed to the movements of her arms like an anchored buoy to the tides. Saying almost nothing in that ghoulish Eastern tongue, the girls were all musicians and understood that Madame was exhausted with their self-assertion when the pianist began the pathetic lullaby from the entr’acte of
Cleopatra;
that the lesson was going to be interesting and hard when she played Brahms. Madame seemed to have no life outside her work, to exist only when she was composing.

“Where does Madame live, Stella?” asked Alabama curiously.

“But, ma chère, the studio is her home,” said Stella, “for us anyway.”

Alabama’s lesson was interrupted one day by men with measuring rods. They came and paced the floor and made laborious estimates and calculations. They came again at the end of the week.

“What is it?” said the girls.

“We will have to move, chéries,” Madame answered sadly. “They are making a moving-picture studio of my place here.”

At her last lesson, Alabama searched behind the dismantled segments of the mirror for lost pirouettes, for the ends of a thousand arabesques.

There was nothing but thick dust, and the traces of hairpins rusted to the wall where the huge frame had hung.

“I thought I might find something,” she explained shyly, when she saw Madame looking at her curiously.

“And you see there is nothing!” said the Russian, opening her hands. “But in my new studio you may have a tutu,” she added. “You asked me to tell you. Perhaps in its folds, who knows what you may find.”

The fine woman was sad to leave those faded walls so impregnated with her work.

Alabama had sweated to soften the worn floor, worked with the fever of bronchitis to appease the drafts in winter, candles were burning at St-Sulpice. She hated to leave, too.

She and Stella and Arienne helped Madame to move her piles of old abandoned skirts, worn toe shoes, and discarded trunks. As she and Arienne and Stella sorted and arranged these things redolent of the struggle for plastic beauty, Alabama watched the Russian.

“Well?” said Madame. “Yes, it is very sad,” she said implacably.

III

The high corners of the new studio in the Russian Conservatory carved the light to a diamond’s facets.

Alabama stood alone with her body in impersonal regions, alone with herself and her tangible thoughts, like a widow surrounded by many objects belonging to the past. Her long legs broke the white tutu like a statuette riding the moon.

“Khorosho,” the ballet mistress said, a guttural word carrying the sound of hail and thunder over the Steppes. The Russian face was white and prismatic as a dim sun on a block of crystal. There were blue veins
in her forehead like a person with heart trouble, but she was not sick except from much abstraction. She lived a hard life. She brought her lunch to the studio in a little valise: cheese and an apple, and a Thermos full of cold tea. She sat on the steps of the dais and stared into space through the sombre measures of the adagio.

Alabama approached the visionary figure, advancing behind her shoulder blades, bearing her body tightly possessed, like a lance in steady hands. A smile strained over her features painfully—pleasure in the dance is a hard-earned lesson. Her neck and chest were hot and red; the back of her shoulders strong and thick, lying over her thin arms like a massive yoke. She peered gently at the white lady.

“What do you find in the air that way?”

There was an aura of vast tenderness and of abnegation about the Russian.

“Forms, child, shapes of things.”

“It is beautiful?”

“Yes.”

“I will dance it.”

“Well, pay attention to the design. You do well the steps, but you never follow the configuration: without that, you cannot speak.”

“You will see if I can do it.”

“Go, then! Chérie, it is my first role.”

Alabama yielded herself to the slow dignity of the selfless ritual, to the voluptuous flagellation of the Russian minors. Slowly she moved to the protestations of the adagio from
Le Lac des Cygnes
.

“Wait a minute.”

Her eyes caught the white transparent face in the glass. The two smiles met and splintered.

“But I will do it if I break my leg,” she said, beginning again.

The Russian gathered her shawl about her shoulders. From a deep mysticism she said tentatively and without conviction, “It is not worth that trouble—then you could not dance.”

“No,” said Alabama, “it’s not worth the trouble.”

“Then, little one,” sighed the aging ballerina, “you will do it—just right.”

“We will try.”

The new studio was different. Madame had less space to spare; she gave fewer lessons for nothing. There was no room in the dressing room to practice changement de pieds. The tunics were cleaner since there was no place to leave them to dry. There were many English girls
in the classes who still believed in the possibility of both living and dancing, filling the vestibule with gossip of boat rides on the Seine and soirées in the Montparnasse.

It was awful in the afternoon classes. A black fog from the station hung over the studio skylight, and there were too many men. A Negro classicist from the Folies-Bergère appeared at the bar. He had a gorgeous body but the girls laughed. They laughed at Alexandre with his intellectual face and glasses—he used to own a box at the ballet in Moscow when he had been in the army. They laughed at Boris, who stopped in the café next door for ten drops of valerian before his lessons; they laughed at Schiller because he was old and his face was puffy from years of makeup like a bartender’s or a clown’s. They laughed at Danton because he could toe-dance, though he tried to restrain how superb he was to look at. They laughed at everybody except Lorenz—nobody could have laughed at Lorenz. He had the face of an eighteenth-century faun; his muscles billowed with proud perfection. To watch his brown body ladling out the measures of a Chopin mazurka was to feel yourself anointed with whatever meaning you may have found in life. He was shy and gentle, though the finest dancer in the world, and sometimes sat with the girls after classes, drinking coffee from a glass and munching Russian rolls soggy with poppy seeds. He understood the elegant cerebral abandon of Mozart, and had perceived the madnesses against which the consciousness of the race sets up an early vaccine for those intended to deal in reality: The
voluptés
of Beethoven were easy for Lorenz, and he did not have to count the churning revolutions of modern musicians. He said he could not dance to Schumann, and he couldn’t, being always ahead or behind the beat whipping the romantic cadences beyond recognition. He was perfection to Alabama.

Arienne bought her way free from laughter with gnomish venom and an impeccable technique.

“What a wind!” somebody would cry.

“It is Arienne turning,” was the answer. Her favorite musician was Liszt. She played on her body as if it were a xylophone, and had made herself indispensable to Madame. When Madame called out ten or so consecutive steps only Arienne could put them together. Her rigid insteps and the points of her toe shoes sliced the air like a sculptor’s scalpel, but her arms were stubby and could not reach the infinite, frustrated by the weight of great strength and the broken lines of too much muscle. She loved telling how when she had been operated on the doctors came to look anatomically at the muscles in her back.

“But you have made much progress,” the girls said to Alabama, crowding before her to the front of the class.

“You will leave a place for Alabama,” corrected Madame.

She did four hundred battements every night.

Arienne and Alabama split the cost of the taxi each day as far as the Place de la Concorde. Arienne insisted that Alabama come to lunch at her apartment.

“I go so much with you,” she said. “I do not like to be indebted.”

It was a desire to discover what they were mutually jealous of in each other that drew them together. In both of them there was an undercurrent of disrespect for discipline which allied them in a hoydenish comradeship.

“You must see my dogs,” said Arienne. “There is one who is a poet and the other who is very well trained.”

There were ferns, silvery in the sun, on little tables and many autographed photographs.

“I have no photograph of Madame.”

“Perhaps she will give us one.”

“We can buy one from the photographer who made the proofs the last year she danced in the ballet,” suggested Arienne illicitly.

Madame was both pleased and angry when they carried the photographs to the studio.

“I will give you better ones,” she said.

She gave Alabama a picture of herself in
Carnaval
in a wide polka-dotted dress which her fingers held like a butterfly wing. Madame’s hands constantly surprised Alabama: they were not long and thin; they were stubby. Arienne never got her picture, and she begrudged Alabama the photograph and grew more jealous than ever.

Madame gave a housewarming at the studio. They drank many bottles of sweet champagne that the Russians provided, and ate the sticky Russian cakes. Alabama contributed two magnums of Pol Roger Brut, but the Prince, Madame’s husband, had been educated in Paris, and he took them home to drink for himself.

Alabama was nauseated from the gummy pastry—the Prince was delegated to ride with her in the taxi.

“I smell lily of the valley everywhere,” she said. Her head swam with the heat and the wine. She held onto the straps of the car to keep herself from throwing up.

“You are working too hard,” said the Prince.

His face was gaunt in the passing flares from the streetlamps. People
said he kept a mistress on the money he had from Madame. The pianist kept her husband; he was sick—almost everybody kept somebody else. Alabama could barely remember when that would have offended her—it was just the exigencies of life.

David said he would help her to be a fine dancer, but he did not believe that she could become one. He had made many friends in Paris. When he came from his studio he nearly always brought somebody home. They dined out amongst the prints of Montagné’s, the leather and stained glass of Foyot’s, the plush and bouquets of the restaurants around the Place de l’Opéra. If she tried to induce David to go home early, he grew angry.

“What right have you to complain? You have cut yourself off from all your friends with this damn ballet.”

With his friends they drank Chartreuse along the boulevards under the rose-quartz lamps, and the trees, wielded by the night over the streets like the feathery fans of acquiescent courtesans.

Alabama’s work grew more and more difficult. In the mazes of the masterful fouetté her legs felt like dangling hams; in the swift elevation of the entrechat cinq she thought her breasts hung like old English dugs. It did not show in the mirror. She was nothing but sinew. To succeed had become an obsession. She worked till she felt like a gored horse in the bullring, dragging its entrails.

At home, the household fell into a mass of dissatisfaction without an authority to harmonize its elements. Before she left the apartment in the morning Alabama left a list of things for lunch which the cook never bothered to prepare—the woman kept the butter in the coal bin and stewed a rabbit every day for Adage and gave the family what she pleased to eat. There wasn’t any use getting another; the apartment was no good anyway. The life at home was simply an existence of individuals in proximity; it had no basis of common interest.