Dancer (34 page)

I watched poor Tom become the chair.

At midnight I decided to go ahead with dinner, even without Monsieur. The guests took their seats grudgingly. However, Tom, without my noticing, had grown terribly drunk. I had thought originally that he was nursing the one glass of wine all evening, but it seemed that the waiters in their petty spitefulness had been topping up his glass. Unused to the wine, Tom remained on the couch and proceeded to loudly regale the table with tales of a London soccer team nobody else was interested in. Mrs. Godstalk snorted while the men attempted to drown him out. Only the dancers seemed vaguely interested.

I suggested to Tom that he take a seat at the table and I guided him across. The only available chair was next to Mrs. Godstalk. I tried to take his glass of wine but he held on to it and spilled a little on the leg of his trousers. He tucked a napkin into his shirt collar with great difficulty and one of the ballerinas giggled.

I returned to the kitchen to serve the first courses.

As the dinner went on Tom's English accent grew stronger and louder as he waved his fork in the air, a piece of capon attached.

I watched from a crack in the kitchen door and finally decided that I'd need to take action. Tom had reached a point in his anecdote where his team was about to take a penalty kick. I waited for the appropriate moment to come out from the kitchen saying: Mister Ashworth! Mister Ashworth!

I quickly rattled off that the dishwasher had broken and, since Tom was a handyman, I would need his help, could the guests please excuse him from the table?

—At your service, said Tom, knocking his knee against the edge of the table, almost dragging the cloth with him.

He stumbled and I took his arm, sat him at the kitchen table, close to the wall in case he fell over.

—Odile, he said, slightly slurring my name.

Just then I heard the sound of Monsieur at the front door. Within moments there was some kind of altercation at the dinner table. Voices were being raised, Monsieur's loudest of all. Someone shouted back at him. I knew trouble was imminent—it was always so when Monsieur was confronted. I told Tom to stay where he was and I left the kitchen. All the guests were standing, fingers were being pointed, nails being chewed, cuffs being buttoned, and Monsieur, in the middle of the fray, was dispatching them one by one.

—Late? he was shouting. Me, late? Out! Out!

Some were dawdling, trying to ingratiate themselves with Monsieur, but he was having none of it. Mrs. Godstalk whispered in his ear but he brushed her away. Horrified, she kept saying his name over and over again. She tried to touch his forearm but he shouted: Out! The Argentinean critic was muttering at the door and he even managed to get in a complaint about the capon, but I was too caught up with thoughts of poor Tom to be annoyed. I wanted to get back to the kitchen before he too suffered Monsieur's wrath. I simply couldn't imagine what might happen if Monsieur found Tom sitting there, drunk—the furies of Hades would surely be let loose.

I hurried to get the guests' hands through the armholes of their coats, straightened their collars, all the time straining to hear sounds from the kitchen.

I finally shooed Mrs. Godstalk, the last of the guests, away.

Imagine my surprise when I found Tom and Monsieur in the kitchen, both liberally sipping from large glasses of red wine. Tom was telling Monsieur about a special pair of shoes he had made for himself for his soccer games. Tom was explaining that he had put platforms in his shoes to see over the heads of fellow supporters. But he had built the shoes so the platforms were unnoticeable and his landlady had never figured out why he was taller on days when there were soccer matches.

—My friend Victor could do with a pair of those, said Monsieur.

They spent the next hour in laughter. Monsieur took out some photographs that he kept in his wallet, one of his mother and one of his young niece, Nuriya, who had been born a few years previously to his sister in Russia. Tom held back a belch and said they were wonderful photographs, that he'd always liked Russian women.

He looked at me: Odile, even though you're not Russian, you're beautiful too.

His body finally gave in to the alcohol and he fell asleep at the kitchen table, his head resting against a slab of cheese.

Monsieur helped me move him into the spare bedroom. He even took off Tom's shoes and socks and wished him a good night's sleep. I rolled Tom over to his side and put a bucket beside him in case he should vomit.

For some reason I was inspired to kiss him, very gently, on his forehead. And then I went to bed.

The next morning broke with raindrops. I crawled from under the covers and went down the corridor. I was surprised to see the door of the guest room slightly open. I peeked inside. Tom was hunched over, trying to tie his shoelaces. His face was flush and his hair was askew.

—Good morning, Tom, I said.

He looked up, startled. His suit jacket hung precariously on the chair and his shirt was creased.

—I'd be delighted to press your clothes for you, I said.

—Thank you, but I really must be leaving.

—It would be no trouble.

—Many thanks, but no.

There was a catch in his throat. I left him alone since he seemed embarrassed. In the kitchen I prepared tea and coffee and set the table. I was cleaning up the remnants of the night before when out of the corner of my eye I saw Tom trying to leave the apartment on tiptoe.

—Mister Ashworth! I called out but he didn't reply.

—Tom! I said and he turned around.

Never before have I seen such fear on a grown man's face. His eyes were hooded and red, his lids were swollen, and he looked as if he was carrying the weight of an awful injury. He didn't say a word, just fingered the buttons of his jacket. When he was sideways to the door I could see that his eyes were glassy with tears. I ran up to him but he was already stepping slowly down the curving staircase.

I went after him. At the front door he hung his head, looked at his feet.

—I shamed myself, he said. Shoemakers in my family for many hundreds of years and I shamed them.

—There's nothing to be ashamed of.

—I made a fool of myself.

—No no no. Monsieur had a wonderful time.

—I'm a clown.

—Of course not.

—I have made my last shoe.

—Pardon me? I asked.

—Please give Mister Nureyev my apologies.

With this Tom bowed slightly and was gone, out the front door, along the quays. I watched as he moved through the rain. He pulled his suit jacket up over his head and rounded the corner.

Monsieur woke half an hour later and asked after Mister Ashworth. I told him what had happened. Monsieur stared into his tea and munched on a croissant. I stood at the sink and washed the last of the glasses. I couldn't help but feel empty. Monsieur must have intuited something because he asked me to face him, he wanted to see my eyes. I couldn't do it. I heard him rise from the table and then he came and touched my elbow. I stopped myself from crying or falling into his arms, but he took hold of my chin and tilted my face upwards. Monsieur had the kindest eyes.

—Wait, he said.

He went to his bedroom and came out, stuffing something into the pocket of his bathrobe, dangling his keys in the other hand.

Monsieur said: Let's go.

—But you're still in your bathrobe, Monsieur.

—It'll be a new fashion! he said.

Before I knew it we were driving the wrong way down a one-way street, with Monsieur shouting some crazy Russian love song at the top of his lungs.

Ten minutes later we pulled up outside Tom's hotel. Cars behind us hooted loudly. Monsieur jumped out and gave the drivers a rude gesture, then ran into the hotel but came out shaking his head.

—We'll try the airport, said Monsieur.

He put the car in gear and just then Tom appeared. He saw us, stopped, hesitated, then buried his hands in his jacket pockets and proceeded to the hotel entrance.

Monsieur shoved something down in the pocket of his bathrobe, jumped from the car and, at the bottom of the hotel steps, caught Tom's arm. A porter came out of the hotel to hold an umbrella above Monsieur's head.

Tom's eyes darted away from Monsieur. He cleared his throat as if about to say something, but Monsieur shook his head emphatically before Tom could say a word. From the bathrobe pocket Monsieur produced a pair of old dancing slippers. He flourished them in the air.

—Fix these, he said to Tom.

Tom's eyes locked with Monsieur's.

—Fix them, said Monsieur.

—Pardon me? said Tom.

—I want you to fix them. Since when do you not understand English?

Tom stood fidgeting, his face raw and red.

—Yes sir, he finally stammered, taking the shoes from Monsieur's hands. He held them a moment, and then said: You must forgive my foolishness of last night.

Monsieur hesitated: If you ever resign again I will kick you in the ass! Do you understand me?

—Sir?

—Nobody resigns on me! I fire them!

Tom bowed again, not a full bow, more a deep nod of the head. When he was upright he peered at me, his spectacles halfway down his nose.

*   *   *

She had practiced her smile all through the years, her stage smile, the perfect smile, the smile that said,
I am in control, I am regal, I am ballet.
And she was smiling it now, Margot, across the table at Rudi. Indeed, everywhere the wedding guests were smiling. Still, Margot could sense there was something wrong with the day, mismatched, out of sync, she just couldn't put her finger on it.

Rudi, directly facing her, had his head thrown back in laughter, creased lines on his face, wrinkles around his eyes. Beside him was his friend, Victor, with his dumb mustache and a multicolored cummerbund. Margot wished she could seize Rudi's arm and shake him, say something to him, but what would she say? There was a thought at the back of her mind that she desperately wanted to communicate, yet she was only aware of its existence, not its content. So many days felt like this now. She had retired. Tito had passed on. She brought flowers to his gravestone in Panama City like a character from some nineteenth-century novel. She often stood at the edge of the field near the graveyard and found herself watching the wind move the grass. Or she found herself caught at a traffic light in London wondering just what sorts of lives were being carried in the cars that passed her. Or she would read a book and suddenly forget what it was all about. As a child, nobody had told her how the life of a dancer would be, and even had she known she never would have understood, how it could be so full and empty at the same time, seen in one manner from the outside but experienced differently on the inside, so that two completely dissimilar ways of living had to be held in unison, juggled, acknowledged.

Rudi had once told her they were hand in glove. She had wondered who was what, was she hand or glove, and now was she neither? Rudi was forty-three, maybe forty-four now, she couldn't remember. Yet he was still performing. And why not? She had gone on until she was sixty.

She watched the bride and groom begin their first dance. Tom with his old stiff body. Odile in her white shoes made especially for the occasion by her new husband. White satin rimmed with lace, no heels. Her thin legs. Her small hands. Tom lifted the train of Odile's veil and draped it over his forearm. Surely that must be the key, Margot thought, to live your life freely and honestly and
with love.
Her love had been dance. Rudi's also. It wasn't that they had been denied access to the other kind of love, no, that wasn't it at all, not at all—but theirs was a love of a different thing, bruising and public. Love had never quite happened to her in the way it happened to others. Tito, yes. But Tito was an impossible person until he became an impossible body. Tito saw her as an elegant armpiece. Tito had warmed other beds. And then Tito had been shot and became everything he had never been before, useless and good-hearted. Oh, she had loved him, yes, but not love in the sense that it hollowed her out whenever she saw him. Margot often wondered if she were naïve, but she had caught glimpses of real love and was catching one now, she was sure of it, Tom and Odile, the awkward way they handled each other's bodies, their shy courtesy, the sheer beauty of their homeliness.

Rudi had a champagne glass at his mouth. She had heard that he'd paid for the wedding ceremony, yet had not told anyone. His hidden generosity. Still, he seemed distant as the couple dragged themselves across the floor. People spoke of it as loneliness but Margot knew it was not loneliness. Loneliness, she thought, caused a certain madness. It was more a search for that thing beyond dance, a desire for the human. But what could be better, what could top the never-ending ovations, was there anything in life that had ever crested them? And then she knew. The thought had never struck her quite so clearly. She had danced until her body gave out and now she was loveless. The doctor had told her she had cancer. She would probably last quite a few years but it was cancer, yes, cancer, that was the full stop toward which her life was heading. She had not told anyone. She would not even tell Rudi for a while. But, still, there was something else she had to tell him, and she was searching her mind for the words. Dance. Cures. Pills. Sleeping pills and diet pills and pain pills and pills for life itself, pills for every illness, jealousy to bronchitis, pills in the drafty hallways where young girls sweated and wept for the roles they never got, pills for ruptured bank accounts, pills for backstabbings, pills for betrayals, pills for the broken way in which you walked, pills for the pills themselves. Margot herself had never taken the pills, but she often swept little white imaginary tablets through her mind to cure the pain. And now ovarian cancer. No pills to cure that. She felt the room closing in. She watched dancers on either side of her, tucking into their food, as they always did. Later the girls would throw up in the bathrooms. And the shoemakers were raucous at the other end of the room. Beer glasses swaying in the air. Toasts. Later Rudi would sing his Vladivostok love song, his party piece. She could feel the evening creeping to its end, the inevitable farewell to the newly married couple, the envy she might feel. It was nothing she would ever make public. If anything, she was diplomacy itself. She had always been. And she was happy for Tom, happy he had found something beyond his craft. But what had she found, what had she discovered? A dark tumor in her body. She was not bitter, it wasn't that, she was just shocked to have been dealt such a hand. Surely she deserved more. Or perhaps not. Her life had been fuller than any other she had known. Death would probably arrive in a yacht, or a drawing room, or on a sandy beach.