Save Me the Waltz: A Novel (21 page)

During the last days of the hot weather David and Alabama moved to the Left Bank. Their apartment, tapestried in splitting yellow brocade, looked out over the dome of St-Sulpice. Old women hatched in the shadows about the corners of the cathedral; the bells tolled incessantly for funerals. The pigeons that fed in the square ruffled themselves on their window ledge. Alabama sat in the night breezes, holding her face to the succulent heavens, brooding. Her exhaustion slowed up her pulses to the tempo of her childhood. She thought of the time when she
was little and had been near her father—by his aloof distance he had presented himself as an infallible source of wisdom, a bed of sureness. She could trust her father. She half hated the unrest of David, hating that of herself that she found in him. Their mutual experiences had formed them mutually into an unhappy compromise. That was the trouble: they hadn’t thought they would have to make any adjustments as their comprehensions broadened their horizons, so they accepted those necessary reluctantly, as compromise instead of as change. They had thought they were perfect and opened their hearts to inflation but not alteration.

The air grew damp with autumn maze. They dined here and there amongst the jeweled women glittering like bright scaled fish in an aquarium. They went for walks and taxi rides. A growing feeling of alarm in Alabama for their relationship had tightened itself to a set determination to get on with her work. Pulling the skeleton of herself over a loom of attitude and arabesque, she tried to weave the strength of her father and the young beauty of her first love with David, the happy oblivion of her teens and her warm protected childhood into a magic cloak. She was much alone.

David was a gregarious person; he went out a great deal. Their life moved along with a hypnotic pound and nothing seemed to matter short of murder. She presumed they wouldn’t kill anybody—that would bring the authorities; all the rest was bunk, like Jacques and Gabrielle had been. She didn’t care—she honestly didn’t care a damn about the loneliness. Years later, she was surprised to remember that a person could have been so tired as she was then.

Bonnie had a French governess who poisoned their meals with “
N’est-ce pas, Monsieur
?” and “
Du moins, J’aurais pensée.”
She chewed with her mouth open and the crumbs of sardines about the gold fillings of her teeth nauseated Alabama. She ate staring out on the bare autumnal court. She would have got another governess, but something was sure to happen with things at such a tension and she thought she’d wait.

Bonnie was growing fast and full of anecdotes of Josette and Claudine and the girls at her school. She subscribed to a child’s publication, outgrew the guignol, and began to forget her English. A certain reserve manifested itself in her dealings with her parents. She was very superior with her old English-speaking Nanny, who took her out on the days of Mademoiselle’s
sortie:
exciting days when the apartment reeked of Coty’s L’Origan and Bonnie incurred eruptions on her face from the scones at Rumpelmayer’s. Alabama could never make Nanny admit that Bonnie had eaten them; Nanny insisted the spots were in the blood and that it
was better for them to come out, hinting at a sort of exorcising of hereditary evil spirits.

David bought Alabama a dog. They named him Adage. The
femme de chambre
addressed him as “Monsieur” and cried when he was spanked so nobody could ever house-train the beast. They kept him in the guest room with the photographic likenesses of the apartment owner’s immediate family peering through the fumes of his
saleté
.

Alabama felt very sorry for David. He and she appeared to her like people in a winter of adversity picking over old garments left from a time of wealth. They repeated themselves to each other; she dragged out old expressions that she knew he must be tired of; he bore her little show with a patent mechanical appreciation. She felt sorry for herself. She had always been so proud of being a good stage manager.

November filtered the morning light to a golden powder that hung over Paris stabilizing time till the days stayed at morning all day long. She worked in the gray gloom of the studio and felt very professional in the discomfort of the unheated place. The girls dressed by an oil stove that Alabama bought for Madame; the dressing room reeked of glue from the toe shoes warming over the thin blaze, of stale eau de cologne, and of poverty. When Madame was late, the dancers warmed themselves by doing a hundred relevés to the chanted verses of Verlaine. The windows could never be opened because of the Russians, and Nancy and May, who had worked with Pavlova, said the smell made them sick. May lived at the Y.W.C.A. and wanted Alabama to come to tea. One day, as they were going down the steps together, she said to Alabama that she could not dance any more, that she was quite sick.

“Madame’s ears are so filthy, my dear,” she said, “it makes me quite sick.”

Madame had made May dance behind the others. Alabama laughed at the girl’s disingenuousness.

There was Marguerite, who came in white, and Fania in her dirty rubber undergarments, and Anise and Anna who lived with millionaires and dressed in velvet tunics, and Céza in gray and scarlet—they said she was a Jew—and somebody else in blue organdie, and thin girls in apricot draperies like folds of skin, and three Tanyas like all the other Russian Tanyas, and girls in the starkness of white who looked like boys in swimming, and girls in black who looked like women, a superstitious girl in mauve, and one dressed by her mother who wore cerise to blind them all in that pulsating gyroscope, and the thin pathetic femininity of Marte, who danced at the Opéra Comique and swept off belligerently after classes with her husband.

Arienne Jeanneret dominated the vestibule. She dressed with her face to the wall and had many preparations for rubbing herself and bought fifty pairs of toe slippers at a time, which she gave to Stella when she’d worn them a week. She kept the girls quiet when Madame was giving a lesson. The vulgarity of her hips repelled Alabama but they were good friends. It was with Arienne that she sat in the café under the Olympia after their lessons and drank the daily Cap Corse with seltzer. Arienne took her backstage at the Opéra where the dancer was well respected, and Arienne came to lunch with Alabama. David hated her guts because she tried to give him moral lectures about his opinions and his drinking, but she was not bourgeoise: she was gamine, full of strident jokes about firemen and soldiers, and Montmartre songs about priests and peasants and cuckolds. She was almost an elf, but her stockings were always wrinkled and she talked in sermons.

She took Alabama to see Pavlova’s last performance. Two men like Beerbohm cartoons asked to see them home. Arienne refused.

“Who are they?” asked Alabama.

“I do not know—subscribers to the Opéra.”

“Then why do you talk to them if you’ve never met them?”

“One does not meet the patrons of the first three rows of the National Opéra; the seats are reserved for men,” said Arienne. She herself lived with her brother near the Bois. Sometimes she cried in the dressing room.

“Zambelli still dancing
Coppélia!”
she’d say. “You don’t know how difficult life is, Alabama, you with your husband and your baby.” When she cried the black came off her eyelashes and dried in lumps like a wet watercolor. There was a spiritual open space between her gray eyes that seemed as pure as an open daisy field.

“Oh,
Arienne!”
said Madame enthusiastically. “There’s a dancer! When she cries it is not for nothing.” Alabama’s face grew colorless with fatigue and her eyes sank in her head like the fumes of autumnal fires.

Arienne helped her to master the entrechats.

“You must not rest when you come down after the spring,” she said, “but you must depart again immediately, so that the impetus of the first leap carries you through the others like the bouncing of a ball.”

“
Da
,” said Madame, “
da! da!
—But it is not enough.” It was never enough to please Madame.

She and David slept late on Sundays, dining at Foyot’s or someplace near their home.

“We promised your mother to come home for Christmas,” he said over many tables.

“Yes, but I don’t see how we can go. It’s so expensive, and you haven’t finished your Paris pictures.”

“I’m glad you are not too disappointed because I had decided to wait until spring.”

“There’s Bonnie’s school, too. It would be a shame to switch just now.”

“We’ll go for Easter, then.”

“Yes.”

Alabama did not want to leave Paris where they were so unhappy. Her family grew very remote with the distention of her soul in schstay and pirouette.

Stella brought a Christmas cake to the studio, and two chickens for Madame that she had received from her uncle in Normandy. Her uncle wrote her that he could send no more money: the franc was down to forty. Stella made her living copying sheet music, which ruined her eyes and left her starving. She lived in a garret and got sinus trouble from the drafts, but she would not give up wasting her days at the studio.

“What can a Pole do in Paris?” she said to Alabama. What can anybody do in Paris? When it comes to fundamentals, nationalities do not count for much.

Madame got Stella a job turning pages for musicians at concerts, and Alabama paid her ten francs a pair for darning her toe shoes on the ends to keep them from slipping.

Madame kissed them all on both cheeks for Christmas, and they ate Stella’s cake. It was as much of a Christmas as she would have at their apartment, thought Alabama without emotion—that was because she hadn’t put any interest into their Christmas at home.

Arienne sent Bonnie an expensive kitchen outfit as a present. Alabama was touched when she thought how her friend probably needed the money it cost. Nobody had any money.

“I shall have to give up my lessons,” said Arienne. “The pigs at the Opéra pay us a thousand francs a month. I cannot live on it.”

Alabama invited Madame to dinner and to see a ballet. Madame was very white and fragile in a pale-green evening dress. Her eyes were fixed on the stage. A pupil of hers was dancing
Le Lac des Cygnes
. Alabama wondered what passed behind those yellow Confucian eyes as she watched the white sifting stream of the ballet.

“It is much too small nowadays,” the woman said. “When I danced, things were of a different scale.”

Alabama looked incredulous. “Twenty-four fouettés, she did,” she said. “What more can anybody do?” It had physically hurt her to see the ethereal steely body of the dancer snapping and whipping itself in the mad convolutions of those turns.

“I do not know what they can do. I only know that I did something else,” said the artist, “that was better.”

She did not go backstage after the performance to congratulate the girl. She and Alabama and David went to a Russian cabaret. At the table next to theirs sat Hernandara trying to fill a pyramid of champagne glasses by pouring into the top one only. David joined him; the two men sang and shadowboxed on the dance floor. Alabama was ashamed and afraid that Madame would be offended.

But Madame had been a princess in Russia with all the other Russians.

“They are like puppies playing,” she said. “Leave them. It is pretty.”

“Work is the only pretty thing,” said Alabama, “——at least, I have forgotten the rest.”

“It is good to amuse oneself when one can afford it,” Madame spoke reminiscently. “In Spain, after a ballet, I drank red wine. In Russia it was always champagne.”

Through the blue lights of the place and the red lamps in iron grilles, the white skin of Madame glowed like the arctic sun on an ice palace. She did not drink much but ordered caviar and smoked many cigarettes. Her dress was cheap; that saddened Alabama——she had been such a great dancer in her time. After the war she had wanted to quit, but she had no money and kept her son at the Sorbonne. Her husband fed himself on dreams of the Corps des Pages and quenched his thirst with reminiscences till there was nothing left of him but a bitter aristocratic phantom. The Russians! suckled on a gallant generosity and weaned on the bread of revolution, they haunt Paris! Everything haunts Paris. Paris is haunted.

Nanny came to Bonnie’s Christmas tree, and some friends of David’s. Alabama thought dispassionately of Christmas in America. They did not sell little frosted houses to hang on Christmas trees in Alabama. In Paris the florists’ were filled with Christmas lilacs, and it rained. Alabama took flowers to the studio.

Madame was enraptured.

“When I was a girl, I was a miser for flowers,” she said. “I loved the
flowers of the fields and gathered them in bouquets and
boutonnières
for the guests who came to my father’s house.” These little details from the past of so great a dancer seemed glamorous and poignant to Alabama.

By springtime, she was gladly, savagely proud of the strength of her Negroid hips, convex as boats in a wood carving. The complete control of her body freed her from all fetid consciousness of it.

The girls carried away their dirty clothes to wash them. There was heat incubating again in the rue des Capucines and another set of acrobats at the Olympia. The thin sunshine laid pale commemoration tablets on the studio floor, and Alabama was promoted to Beethoven. She and Arienne kidded along the windy streets and roughhoused in the studio, and Alabama drugged herself with work. Her life outside was like trying to remember in the morning a dream from the night before.

II