Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (25 page)

Bonnie thought of her parents as something pleasant and incalculable as Santa Claus that had no real bearing on her life outside the imprecations of Mademoiselle.

Mademoiselle took Bonnie for promenades in the Luxembourg Gardens, where the child seemed very French in her short white gloves bowling her hoop between the beds of metallic zinnias and geraniums. She was growing fast; Alabama wanted her to start training for the ballet—Madame had promised to give her a debut when she found time. Bonnie said she didn’t want to dance, an incomprehensible aversion to Alabama. Bonnie reported that Mademoiselle walked with a chauffeur in the Tuileries. Mademoiselle said it was beneath her dignity to contest
the supposition. The cook said the hairs in the soup were from the black mustachios of Marguerite, the maid. Adage ate up in a silk canapé. David said the apartment was a pest house: the people upstairs played “Punchinello” at nine in the morning on their gramophone and cut short his sleep. Alabama spent more and more time at the studio.

Madame at last took Bonnie as a pupil. It was thrilling to her mother to see her little legs and arms seriously follow the sweeping movements of the dancer. The new Mademoiselle had worked for an English duke; she complained that the atmosphere of the studio was not fit for the little girl. That was because she couldn’t speak Russian. She thought the girls were Fiends Infernal jabbering in the cacophony of a strange tongue and posturing immodestly before the mirror. The new Mademoiselle was a lady neurasthenic. Madame said Bonnie did not seem to have talent, but it was too soon to tell.

One morning Alabama came early to her lesson. Paris is a pen-and-ink drawing before nine o’clock. To avoid the thick traffic of the Boulevard des Batignolles, Alabama tried the Metro. It smelled of fried potatoes, and she slipped in the spit on the dank stairs. She was afraid of getting her feet crushed in the crowd. Stella waited for her in tears in the vestibule.

“You must take my part,” she said. “Arienne does nothing but abuse me; I mend her shoes and piece her music and Madame has offered me to gain money by playing for her lessons and she refuses.”

Arienne was bent over her straw chest in the dark, packing.

“I shall never dance again,” she said. “Madame has time for children, time for amateurs, time for everybody, but Arienne Jeanneret must work at hours when she cannot get a decent pianist to play.”

“I do my best. You have only to tell me,” Stella sobbed.

“I am telling you. You are a nice girl, but you play the piano like a
cochon!
”

“If you would only explain what you want,” pled Stella. It was horrible to see the dwarfish face red and swollen with fright and tears.

“I explain at this instant. I am an artist, not a teacher of piano. So Arienne goes that Madame may continue her kindergarten.” She, too, was crying angrily.

“If anybody goes, Arienne,” said Alabama, “it will be me. Then you may have your hour again.”

Arienne turned to her, sobbing.

“I have explained to Madame that I cannot work at night after my rehearsals. My lessons cost money; I cannot afford them. I must make progress when I am here. I pay the same as you,” sobbed Arienne.

She turned defiantly to Alabama.

“
I
live by my work,” she said contemptuously.

“Children have to begin,” said Alabama. “It was you who said one must begin sometime—the first time I ever saw you.”

“Certainly. Then let them begin like the others, with the less great.”

“I will share my time with Bonnie,” Alabama said at last. “You must stay.”

“You are very good.” Arienne laughed suddenly. “Madame is a weak woman—always for something new,” she said. “I will stay, however, for the present.”

She kissed Alabama impulsively on her nose.

Bonnie protested her lessons. She had three hours a week of Madame’s time. Madame was fascinated by the child. The woman’s personal emotions had to be wedged in between the spacings of her work since it was incessant. She brought Bonnie fruit and chocolate
langue-de-chat
, and took great pains with the placing of her feet. Bonnie became her outlet for affection; the emotions of the dance were of a sterner stuff than sentimental attachments. The little girl ran continually through the apartment in leaps and pas de bourrée.

“My God,” said David. “One in the family is enough. I can’t stand this.”

David and Alabama passed each other in the musty corridors hastily and ate distantly facing each other with the air of enemies awaiting some gesture of hostility.

“If you don’t stop that humming, Alabama, I’ll lose my mind,” he complained.

She supposed it
was
annoying the way the music of the day kept running through her head. There was nothing else there. Madame told her that she was not a musician. Alabama thought visually, architecturally, of music—sometimes it transformed her to a faun in twilit spaces unpenetrated by any living soul save herself; sometimes to a lone statue to forgotten gods washed by the waves on a desolate coast—a statue of Prometheus.

The studio was redolent of rising fortunes. Arienne passed the Opéra examinations first of her group. She permeated the place with her success. She brought a small group of French into the class, very Degas and coquettish in their long ballet skirts and waistless backs. They covered themselves with perfume, and said the smell of the Russians made them sick. The Russians complained to Madame that they could not breathe with the smell of French musk in their noses. Madame sprinkled the floor with lemon oil and water to placate them all.

“I am to dance before the President of France,” cried Arienne jubilantly one day. “At last, Alabama, they have begun to appreciate La Jeanneret!”

Alabama could not suppress a surge of jealousy. She was glad for Arienne; Arienne worked hard and had nothing in her life but the dance. Nevertheless, she wished it could have been herself.

“So I must give up my little cakes and Cap Corse and live like a saint for three weeks. Before I begin my schedule I want to give a party, but Madame will not come. She goes out to dine with you—she will not go out with Arienne. I ask her why—she says, ‘But it is different—you have no money.’ I will have money someday.”

She looked at Alabama as if she expected her to protest the statement. Alabama had no convictions whatsoever on the subject.

A week before Arienne danced, the Opéra called a rehearsal that fell at the time of her lesson with Madame.

“So I will work in the hour of Alabama,” she suggested.

“If she can change with you,” said Madame, “for a week.”

Alabama couldn’t work at six in the afternoon. It meant that David dined alone and that she couldn’t get home until eight. She was all day at the studio as it was.

“Then we cannot do that,” said Madame.

Arienne was tempestuous. She lived at a terrible nervous pitch, dividing her resistance between the opera and the studio.

“And this time I go for good! I will find someone who will make me a great dancer,” she threatened.

Madame only smiled.

Alabama would not oblige Arienne; the two girls worked in a state of amicable hatred.

Professional friendship would not bear close inspection—best everybody for herself, and interpret things to conform to personal desires—Alabama thought like that.

Arienne was intractable. Outside the province of her own genre, she refused to execute the work of the class. With the tears streaming down her face, she sat on the steps of the dais and stared into the mirror. Dancers are sensitive, almost primitive people: she demoralized the studio.

The classes filled with dancers other than Madame’s usual pupils. The Rubenstein ballets were rehearsing and dancers were being paid enough to afford lessons with Madame again. Girls who had been to South America drifted back to town from the disbanded Pavlova troupe—the steps could not always be the tests of strength and technique to suit
Arienne. It was the steps that molded the body and offered it bit by bit to the reclaiming tenors of Schumann and Glinka that Arienne hated most—she could only lose herself in the embroiling rumbles of Liszt and the melodrama of Leoncavallo.

“I will go from this place,” she said to Alabama, “next week.” Arienne’s mouth was hard and set. “Madame is a fool. She will sacrifice my career for nothing. But there are others!”

“Arienne, it is not like that that one becomes one of the great,” said Madame. “You must rest.”

“There is nothing I can do here any more; I had better go away,” Arienne said.

The girls ate nothing but pretzels before the morning class—the studio was so far away from their homes they couldn’t get breakfast in time; they were all irritable. The winter sun came in bilious squares through the fog, and the gray buildings about the Place de la République took on the air of a cold caserne.

Madame called upon Alabama to execute the most difficult steps alone before the others with Arienne. Arienne was a finished ballerina. Alabama was conscious of how much she must fall short of the fine concision that marked the French girl’s work. When they danced together the combinations were mostly steps for Arienne rather than the lyrical things that Alabama did best, yet always Arienne cried out that the steps were not for her. She protested to the others that Alabama was an interloper.

Alabama bought Madame flowers which wilted and shriveled in the steam of the overheated studio. The place being more comfortable, more spectators came to the classes. A critic of the Imperial Ballet came to witness one of Alabama’s lessons. Impressive, reeking of past formalities, he left at the end on a flood of Russian.

“What did he say?” asked Alabama when they were alone. “I have done badly—he will think you are a bad teacher.” She felt miserable at Madame’s lack of enthusiasm: the man was the first critic of Europe.

Madame gazed at her dreamily. “Monsieur knows what kind of a teacher I am,” was all she said.

In a few days the note came:

On the advice of Monsieur——I am writing to offer you a solo debut in the opera
Faust
with the San Carlos Opera of Naples. It is a small role, but there will be others later. In Naples there are pensions where one can live very comfortably for thirty lire a week.

Alabama knew that David and Bonnie and Mademoiselle couldn’t live in a pension that cost thirty lire a week. David couldn’t live in Naples at all—he had called it a postcard city. There wouldn’t be a French school for Bonnie in Naples. There wouldn’t be anything but coral necklaces and fevers and dirty apartments and the ballet.

“I must not get excited,” she said to herself. “I must work.”

“You will go?” said Madame expectantly.

“No. I will stay, and you will help me to dance
La Chatte
.”

Madame was noncommittal. Looking into the woman’s fathomless eyes was like walking over a stretch of blistering pebbles through a treeless, shadeless August as Alabama searched them for some indication.

“It is hard to arrange a debut,” she said. “One should not refuse.”

David seemed to feel that there was something accidental about the note.

“You can’t do that,” he said. “We’ve got to go home this spring. Our parents are old, and we promised last year.”

“I am old, too.”

“We have some obligations,” he insisted.

Alabama no longer cared. David was a better person at heart than she to care about hurting people, she thought.

“I don’t want to go to America,” she said.

Arienne and Alabama teased each other mercilessly. They worked harder and more consistently than the others. When they were too tired to put on their clothes after classes, they sat on the floor of the vestibule laughing hysterically and slapping each other with towels drenched in eau de cologne or Madame’s lemon water.

“And I think——” Alabama would say.

“Tiens!” shrieked Arienne. “Mon enfant begins to think. Ah! Ma fille, it is a mistake——all the thinking you do. Why do you not go home and mend your husband’s socks?”

“Méchante,” Alabama answered. “I will teach you to criticize your elders!” The wet towel fell with a smack across Arienne’s rigid buttocks.

“Give me more room. I cannot dress so near to this polissonne,” retorted Arienne. She turned to Alabama seriously and looked at her questioningly. “But it is true—I have no more place here since you have filled the dressing room with your fancy tutus. There is nowhere to hang my poor woolens.”

“Here is a new tutu for you! I make you a present!”

“I do not wear green. It brings bad luck in France.” Arienne was offended.

“If I had a husband to pay I, too, could buy them for myself,” she pursued disagreeably.

“What business of yours is it who pays? Or is that all the patrons of your first three rows can talk to you about?”

Arienne shoved Alabama into the group of naked girls. Somebody pushed her hurriedly back into Arienne’s gyrating body. The eau de cologne spilled over the floor and gagged them. A swat of the towel end landed over Alabama’s eyes. Groping about she collided with Arienne’s hot, slippery body.

“Now!” shrieked Arienne. “See what you have done! I shall go at once to a magistrate and have it constaté!” She wept and hurled Apache invective at the top of her lungs. “It is not today that it shows but tomorrow. I will have a cancer! You have hit me in the breast from a bad spirit! I will have it constaté, so when the cancer develops you will pay me much money, even if you are at the ends of the earth! You will pay!” The whole studio listened. The lesson Madame was giving outside could not continue, the noise was so loud. The Russians took sides with the French or the Americans.

“Sale race!” they shrieked indiscriminately.

“One can never have confidence in the Americans!”

“One must never trust the French!”

“They are too nervous, the Americans and the French.”

They smiled long, superior Russian smiles as if they had long ago forgotten why they were smiling: as if the smile were a hallmark of their superiority to circumstance. The noise was deafening yet somehow surreptitious. Madame protested—she was angry with the two girls.