Corpse de Ballet (28 page)

As she peeled a kiwi, her mood became gradually less philosophical. She could not shake off a guilty sense of having leapt a little too gladly to Ruth's aid today. She really was like an alcoholic; whenever the slightest excuse arose, she abandoned her desk. Poor Sir Edward Rice was still sitting alone in his study contemplating Lord Morecambe's insolent challenge. Books, she reproved herself, do not write themselves. And when she had come home this evening, she found a note from Ames saying that the cover illustration for
London Quadrille
had been posted that morning on her fan club's Web site. Juliet wished the publisher would not release those covers in advance. They seemed to create such pressure. She sighed again. She would work six hours tomorrow, no matter what. She could go to the Jansch afterward. She would have Ames call Victorine and let her know when to expect her.

She finished her meal, started to stand up, then wriggled around uncomfortably. That itch. It had been so long since she had a yeast infection. Perhaps another yogurt for dessert? She had even heard of women applying plain yogurt directly … Maybe she should check for natural cures on the Internet.

At about 9:30, feeling that she must read Rob's letter, she went to her office and found it on top of the pile of correspondence Ames had left her. It was folded, and a yellow Post-it was stuck to the outside, with the message, “I'm so sorry!” in Ames's psychotically neat print. Juliet thought a moment, then decided it would be best to read it at her desk, where she usually felt her most confident. Perhaps Rob had had a practical reason for writing, something Juliet could help him with. Maybe he needed an organ transplant, or had mistakenly become the target of a nationwide FBI manhunt. She opened the letter. But the matter was nothing so simple.

When Rob and Juliet's marriage had exploded, the ostensible cause, the catalyst, was an affair Rob had been having for four months with an aspiring young actress named Elise. The marriage had had plenty of problems that Juliet was aware of before then, but she had no inkling of this business until he brought it to her attention. Then she was as hurt by the accumulation of lies Rob had told her during the secret liaison as by his revelation. Declaring that he could no longer live stifled and under Juliet's “thumb,” Rob had packed up his belongings and moved with his inamorata to Toronto. Three weeks after she signed the final divorce papers, Juliet had received an announcement of the marriage of Robert Vincent Ambrosetti to Elise Maria Craig. Six months later came a second announcement: the birth of their daughter, Jemima Rose Ambrosetti.

Rob's friends and Juliet's had never quite mixed, and Juliet had not known a baby was in the works. She had reached a sort of emotional equilibrium before Jemima's arrival, but the birth announcement set off a period of distress, almost despair, hardly less painful than the initial breakup. Still, she pulled out of it. By the time, two years later, when a mutual acquaintance informed her that Elise and Rob also had divorced, Juliet had put Rob and her marriage well into the past.

Unfortunately, since his second divorce, Rob had been writing to her with increasing affection and ever greater frequency. At first the letters were penitent and pleading, then sober and weighty, then merely wistful. But finally (and much more intelligently), they became entertaining. Rob was in the theater, after all. He could be very amusing. Juliet had asked him not to write; it upset and confused her. But though he would abstain for a month or two, eventually a missive always came. He was dying to leave Toronto, he told her, but Elise had settled in. Moving back to New York would mean giving up his visits with Jemima, at least until he had enough money to fly back and forth. Rob could be very funny when he was unhappy, and he was quite hilarious on the subject of Canada in general and Toronto in particular. Juliet felt herself twisted with every letter she received.

This letter was a particularly funny one. She read it, set it down with tears in her eyes—tears from laughing and from crying—and mentally drafted the short, measured reply she would send back tomorrow. For now, she picked up Teri's opening chapter, which comprised a description of life in a large family in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in 1902, and carried it off to read in bed. It was not, she found with pleasure, half bad.

*   *   *

The following morning, Sir Edward Rice chose Francis Sneed, his cousin, as his second. Juliet, sitting dutifully at her desk with a pitcher of iced tea to sustain her, was surprised by the choice—but she had to concede that although Charles Dalrymple might be Sir Edward's closest friend, Dalrymple was also a Derbyshire neighbor of Lord Morecambe. Naturally, Sir Edward would not wish to force him into an awkward position. (Actually, Morecambe was Dalrymple's neighbour, Angelica K-H always favouring the English style of spelling.)

Usually, the first half hour or so of work was the hardest, Juliet found. Once she had made herself go to her desk and sit there for a while, things began to take on a momentum of their own and she worked quite happily. The redoubtable Ames had already located the requested notes on Hampstead Heath, so after arranging the matter of Sir Edward's second, Juliet spent a happy couple of hours rambling there, refreshing her knowledge of landmarks and locating a likely retreat where a duel could be fought unobserved early one April morning. It was a wrench to look up from a description of the bill of fare at Jack Straw's Castle in 1817 and find it was 4:15 in New York. Hastily, she snatched up Teri's chapter (now embellished with an admiring, and mostly sincere, note on a yellow Post-It), a few essentials and sped out the door.

As the season of preparation continued and the season of performance approached, Juliet had noticed a growing sense of purpose and efficiency at the Jansch. Anton Mohr's death had not been forgotten, but the memorial for him seemed to have succeeded in bracketing off the trauma somewhat, making it part of the past so that the company could look forward and the requisite work go on.

Peering into the studios that day (after leaving the chapter in Teri's mailbox, behind the bandbox lobby), she saw in each room a competent little machine busy at work: dancers settling into their roles, instructors starting to make familiar jokes about persistent failings, projects beginning to gel. Even Studio Three had lost some of the ambience of sustained emergency that so often pervaded it, although it had not yet achieved the calm Victorine thought essential. Still, Patrick actually came to the door to usher Juliet in while Ruth managed to work on without him. Ruth had not been able to get hold of Ryder and Hart for the hour between three o'clock and four, Patrick explained to Juliet in a whisper; but between one o'clock and three she had had Elektra, Hart, and Lily, and they had gotten a very good distance in that time toward completing the four-minute “Love Her, Love Her” pas de trois. She had them again now and was hoping to finish the thing before going home that evening. At six, the whole ensemble was scheduled to come to Studio Three and she planned to try a run-through then of all she had choreographed so far of Act Two.

“How is Lily?” Juliet whispered back. “What did the doctor say?”

Ruth was working with the injured star just at the moment, going over with her a maneuver that required her to wave her arm as if performing some evil act of magic. The ballerina was listening attentively and looked quite as usual. The only sign Juliet could see of yesterday's mishap was a bluish bruise under her jaw.

“He said it was nothing,” Patrick replied. “Just a bump. And she says her head feels okay now.”

“Well, that's good luck.” Juliet gazed a moment longer at Lily, then glanced around the room. Hart was holding onto the barre, performing some sort of leg-stretching exercise. Elektra, some yards away, was standing unnaturally still, her head dropped forward, her shoulders uncharacteristically hunched. She looked peaky, strange, a bit less anorexic than usual somehow, but very unhappy.

Juliet pointed this out to Patrick.

“I know,” he said. “She must have a stomach bug. You can see she's green around the gills.”

Juliet nodded. She wished Ruth would notice and let Elektra go home. It was painful to watch someone so obviously miserable trying to act normal.

And try Elektra did. Soon, Ruth turned back to her and asked her to dance the whole sequence up to the measure she was now working on. And Elektra danced—not “full out,” as the dancers called it, but not merely “marking” it either. As she had yesterday, she grunted often, especially when Hart lifted her or set her down. When at last Ruth declared a break, the two sat down together near the piano, not far from Juliet.

Ruth was busy with Patrick and sat scribbling notes with him for a while, so Juliet was at liberty to eavesdrop. Indeed, it would have been hard not to.

“God, I am so sick!” Elektra more or less yelled. “Ouch! Help me!”

Hayden gave her what seemed to Juliet a peculiar look, but all he said was, “Maybe you're hungry. You haven't been eating very much.”

“How could I be hungry?” she answered irritably. “You've been feeding me those fucking raisins for two days. I feel like I'm going to puke them out every time I go up or down in the air.” She lowered her voice. “I wish she'd get off that damned ‘Madonna/Whore Lift.'” (Such was the name Ruth had given to the tricky raising-and-lowering bit of business she had devised yesterday.) “My ribs feel like shit. Not that that's your fault,” she added, then lay down flat on the floor.

“Sorry. I'm pretty whipped, too,” Hart said, and he did in fact look terrible. His yellow hair hung in damp clumps; his lean, handsome face was pale and strained. He even had a sort of twitch at the corner of one eye, Juliet noticed. Patrick had told her it was simply not done for the dancers to complain to the choreographer, no matter how worn out they were or how much pain they suffered. Listening to these two, Juliet thought it a ridiculous and perfectly inhumane system. As if Ruth were some kind of god whose creative throes were so extraordinary and precious that they must be allowed to toss and tumble the lives of everyone around her!

The break came to an end and the difficult, tedious rehearsal session began once more. Lily Bediant, who had gone out of the room, came back in with a full, new bottle of water and an expression of serene martyrdom. Mary Christie, Nicky Sabatino, and Kirsten Ahlswede, who had spent their ten minutes of freedom stretching and hopping by the barre, resumed their places toward the back of the room, apparently resigned to another hour of trying to copy what the first cast was doing (and being utterly ignored). Elektra dragged herself to her feet and placed herself at Ruth's mercy, while Hart went back to carting her and Lily from (as Anton Mohr might have put it) here to there, there to here. Victorine sat on, upright and vigilant. Luis Fortunato uncomplainingly played the same notes over and over and over.

And then Elektra fainted.

She was dancing by herself just before she fell, watching herself in the mirror as she practiced a sort of run-and-spin step from the second act, while Hart and Lily once again tried the early lift in the “Love Her” section. She made a little sound, almost inaudible under the heavy piano notes, and sort of toppled woozily over. Then she lay on her side in a semi-fetal crouch, eyes half open but rolled back, arms limp and askew, skin clammy and pale.

“I'll get an ammonia capsule,” said Patrick, rushing from the room.

“It's probably hunger,” Hart suggested, still gasping from his exertions. “She hasn't been eating.”

Victorine cast a look of disgust at Ruth. “Exhaustion, more likely.”

“Maybe the heat?” suggested Juliet, who was always appalled by the greenhouse temperatures of the studio.

“Oh, look!”

An expression of horror on her face, Kirsten Ahlswede was pointing to her fallen colleague. At first, standing on the other side of the room, Juliet, Ruth and Victorine could not see what she meant. Then it spread.

A scarlet stain had begun to seep from between the unconscious woman's legs. It was turning rapidly into a red, red puddle.

Chapter Sixteen

Ryder Kensington did not seem to Juliet the sort of man to lose his head in a crisis. Yet, twenty minutes after hearing that his wife had been rushed to the hospital, he appeared to have fallen apart completely.

“You stay here,” Juliet said, sitting him down in a molded plastic chair in the emergency room waiting area at St. Luke's–Roosevelt. “I'll find out where she is.”

An hour ago, in a scene creepily reminiscent of Anton's removal two weeks before, medics and police officers had clomped into Studio Three. (Juliet now knew police were automatically dispatched whenever the city sent an ambulance.) They asked questions, then vanished with Elektra on a stretcher. At least she had recovered consciousness and could answer some of the questions herself. But her husband was not to be found. Greg went with the ambulance, while Juliet and Patrick searched for Ryder in vain, chasing grimly up and down the corridors of the Jansch while trying not to create an appearance of alarm. The schedule showed he had not been called to any rehearsal during that hour, but he should have shown up for Ruth's full-cast second act run-through at six.

He didn't.

It was past 6:30 when Amy Egan got out of the subway at Astor Place and found that her pager had been beeped. Ryder had gone downtown to the costume-makers for an emergency fitting, she told Gayle, the receptionist, an urgent matter on account of which (as Amy had taken care to inform the second Magwitch) he had been granted a late arrival for the six o'clock call. Gayle relayed the message and phoned the costumiers; but they said Ryder had left the workshop some time ago.

And indeed, he ambled into the sleek little lobby just as Gayle hung up. Looking strangely ordinary in a red tank top and jeans, he was mouthing the words to something on his Walkman and did not at first realize that the little knot of worried people in the lobby had anything to do with him.