The Four Temperaments (19 page)

OSCAR

O
scar and
Ruth had been coming here, to this isolated New Hampshire lakeside, for about five years. When their sons were young, they always rented places on Cape Cod. The boys had loved the ocean and they did too. But when the children no longer accompanied them and the Cape grew more and more crowded, they began to look for something else. The alternative they found pleased them both and the weeks they spent here were idyllic, even for a couple married as long as they had been. True, this past year had been harder than most. All the more reason, then, to look forward to the restorative powers the place had always had.

It was the water that had originally drawn Oscar to the spot; the cottage itself was modest, even cramped, and though the surrounding woods were pleasant enough, they lacked any real character. But outside the cottage was an ambling wraparound porch, punctuated with several large, heavy glass windows that extended nearly from its floor to its ceiling. No matter where he sat, he could see the open expanse of the lake, and there was always something to see. In the morning, he and Ruth brought their breakfast out to the porch to watch the water, which was sometimes smooth as glass and other times animated by small, noisy waves. Since the sun rose on the other side of the cottage, the morning light was cool and muted—shades of gray, silver, blue—on the water's surface. As the sun climbed higher in the sky, the light spilled down over the water, turning it first gold, then bronze and, as the daylight faded, silver again. Morning was a good time for birds too: there were loons, herons and ducks, and Oscar liked to watch them. Some nights when the moon was low and full, the water threw back its radiance, making everything around it seem impossibly bright.

All through the day, the lake was their beacon, their touchstone. They swam in it, of course, pushing back the water with their legs and arms, spraying it out of their mouths. They took their lunch down to its edge and late in the day, their cocktails, which they consumed while seated at the rusted little table and chairs that had sat there for years. The cottage came equipped with a canoe, so they frequently took rides across the lake before dinner, paddles dipping into the water as they moved peaceably along its surface.

When he was feeling lazy, Oscar skipped the swimming and boating and instead took a book or the local newspapers to read, positioning his chair on the narrow strip of a dock that extended outward into the lake, so that everywhere he looked he was embraced by water. And one afternoon, he took his music stand down to the dock, where he played the violin solo in Bach's Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins; this was the score for Balanchine's
Concerto Barocco,
which he knew the company would be dancing in the fall.

He hadn't played this music in a long while, and he needed the practice. There were two solo violin parts, and although Oscar knew that he would be playing the first, he decided to practice both. The relationship between the two was so quicksilver, so cunning; the first violin began a melody that the second might echo, in another pitch, only a split second later. If he were familiar with both parts, he would have better command of the intricate, even breathtaking pace of the timing.

Ruth came down from the cottage to listen. She sat in a chair, facing the lake rather than Oscar; still, when he finished, he saw that her face was wet with tears. He reached out his arms to her as she rose from the chair and they stood there together for a few minutes, looking out at the water, whose silent approval seemed to have blessed them both. He felt he had never loved her so much.

“We should
invite the boys up here some year,” Ruth said later that day. She always said this while they were at the lake. “I think William and Betsy would love it, don't you? And what about Ben and Laura?” Oscar nodded but knew she would not do anything about it, for which he was grateful. He thought she—they—were too immersed in their sons' lives, and he had come to enjoy this bit of forced separation. Did he really need to know about Gabriel and Ginny? Was anything in his life made better for the knowledge? Although Gabriel had done his best to reassure his parents that whatever happened with Ginny was totally and completely over, Oscar didn't believe him. Not that he would say this to Ruth—after all, what could he do about it and why worry her?—but he knew Ginny better than that.
She
never said that things were finished with Gabriel. Quite the opposite. Oscar remembered that night in her apartment, the stripped-down bed as naked as he had wanted her to be, and he shuddered—in disappointment and in shame.

Oscar tried his best not to think of Ginny. It was as if the water, and the mellow tenor of his days in its company, pushed all thoughts of New York and his life there to the periphery of his mind. Of course, when he started playing the Bach, that brought him back, mentally at least, to New York, for he was aware that it might occasion a moment when he and Ginny—as musical soloist and leading ballerina—were onstage together. He knew of her promotion within the company—that much hadn't escaped him. And she might be given that role. But even this thought didn't trouble him much. What could possibly happen if they were forced to take the stage together? The entire company, orchestra and audience would be watching. It was only when they were alone that his good intentions receded, overpowered by the perplexing, dismaying tide of feeling he still, despite everything, had for her. So pushing those thoughts away, he instead focused on the music—mournful, complex, beautiful—and tried to find his peace within it.

Oscar could remember the first time that he heard George Balanchine had actually choreographed a ballet to what had to be one of the most sublime pieces of music ever written. He couldn't believe the audacity, the arrogance of it. Forget about Bach rolling over in his grave—Oscar imagined the great man tearing out his hair and banging his head against the carved, wooden coffin in vexation. But then he calmed down and actually watched the ballet, and he had to admit the thing had a power commensurate with the music it so skillfully employed. The stage was bare, lit only by a deep blue light, a color that made Oscar think of the sky over the Mediterranean. As if to continue the classical mood inspired by the light, the dancers wore sleeveless white leotards with short white skirts; they might have been the figures on a Grecian urn, come suddenly and stunningly to life. Apart from that, no costumes, no scenery attempted to compete with the music, or the choreography that articulated it so fluidly. Oscar was transfixed. He had never understood the Bach score so deeply as when it was danced by Balanchine's dancers; he had been wrong and the knowledge humbled him. He would never complain about
Concerto Barocco
again.

Returning to it all these years later, he found that the feeling it inspired had not deserted him. He practiced the Bach to the exclusion of anything else. Around it, his days unfolded calmly and cleanly. He and Ruth took the canoe out the whole length of the lake early one morning; they stopped at one of the tiny islands that interrupted its surface and picked two pails of wild blueberries and added some of them to pancake batter for their breakfast. Another day, they reluctantly pulled themselves away from the lake and drove to Portsmouth. They spent the morning walking through its well-tended streets and playing a game from their early married life: they each picked their favorite house, the one they would like to live in, without telling the other which one it was. Only later, over a lunch of steamers and cold lobster salad eaten at Newick's (big picnic tables covered with torn red-and-white oilcloth, paper napkins and plastic bibs), did they discover that the house each had selected was the same one, a fine old Federal at the crest of a hill, its warm red bricks so well and seamlessly joined that they looked like cloth.

Near the end of their stay at the cottage, Oscar decided to look at some of the other music he had brought. Opening up the old leather case, he began to sift through the white sheets with their black notations; in his mind, he could hear the music while reading the score. But then another piece of paper fluttered loose from the pile, and this one was typed with words rather than notes. It was a schedule for the ballet company, something that must have been handed out before he left and which he had not looked at since. He saw that there was a break after the spring season, after which the company went upstate for its month-long stay at Saratoga. Oscar had never been to Saratoga. Its association with the ballet was too strong for him, and he never wanted to go. After Saratoga, the dancers were traveling to another city. And since the musicians never accompanied them, Oscar seldom paid much attention to where they went. He scanned the sheet quickly, and then stopped, reading over the destination San Francisco several times. The company would be in San Francisco in August.

Although he had not looked at a calendar in days, Oscar knew that it must be August already. Which meant that the 120-person ballet company—including Ginny Valentine—would be in San Francisco any day now. Why did this thought fill him with apprehension? Gabriel might not even have known the ballet was coming to town.

A sound distracted Oscar from these thoughts. Ruth had walked over, carrying a plate of blueberry muffins and a pitcher of iced tea on a tray. The ice cubes tinkled like bells. “Oscar, darling, what's wrong?” she said. Oscar looked at her tender and trusting expression and said nothing. Instead, he handed her the schedule. Ruth set down the tray. Then she herself sank heavily to the flowered wicker sofa, fists clenched tightly around the sheet of paper.

GINNY

G
inny liked
Saratoga. She would take it over New York City any day. Saratoga reminded her, just a bit, of the town in Louisiana where she grew up. Old houses, old trees. Porches, lots of them, with rocking chairs, swings or wicker settees, and pots of flowers that someone watered every day. Clean sidewalks, without any dog shit.

Ginny had been in Saratoga with the company last year, and she liked it then too, but this year, she was sharing a room with Althea Johnson and that made it even better. Since they arrived in July, Althea had taken Ginny to all of her favorite spots, like the store that sold the secondhand clothes—Althea called them “vintage”—where they spent three solid hours.

Now these were the kinds of clothes Ginny had always liked, only she had never been able to put a name to them. She found a silk robe with great big orange poppies all over it; a tight red dress with bugle beads sewn up and down the front and a short, tight red bolero jacket to match; black platform shoes that looked as if they were new when her Grandma Virginia was young, with more bugle beads, cut-out toes and a sexy strap that wound up and around her ankle. Ginny also bought a long, magenta silk scarf with marabou trim and a rhinestone necklace, star-burst earrings and bracelet that came in their original black velveteen box. Althea approved of everything and Althea was a person whose taste she could trust.

Another day they went to the spa, where they were dunked in Saratoga's famous mineral water and taciturn old ladies in sweat-stained uniforms gave them massages. Althea even convinced her to have a mud wrap, which consisted of being smeared all over with some very suspicious-looking brown stuff and then rubbed off with salt and a big, stiff brush. Afterward, though, Ginny's skin did seem positively dewy, so she went back to have her face done, which she hadn't agreed to the first time.

At night, after the performances, they went out to eat, just the two of them or occasionally with some of the other dancers. Sometimes Ginny thought she could detect a wistful look in Althea's eyes when the dancers were dissecting some aspect or other of that evening's performance. But mostly Althea maintained what Ginny privately thought of as a kind of regal detachment: poised, lovely and interested in the conversation, yet a little aloof from it as well. With her arms draped casually across the table and one of her signature chiffon scarves around her throat or shoulders, it seemed that she was beyond feeling, beyond pain, and Ginny admired her for it.

In the middle of the company's stay in Saratoga, the Federal Express truck that brought all the boxes of pointe shoes arrived. This was a big deal because the shipment—it usually came once a month—was late, and lots of the dancers thought they would have to scour the dance-supply stores around town to find shoes in a hurry. Finding ones that fit wasn't easy, and the local Capezio or Selva didn't have the best selection—or the necessary quantities. Dancers went through lots of shoes during a season, at least twelve pairs a week. The ballet company ordered them in bulk from England, where little old men (Ginny thought of Pinocchio's father, Gepetto) sat at their workbenches. Each girl had a “maker” whose mark—a tiny
x
or
y
or
p—
appeared on the bottom of the shoe, like a brand. “Know thy maker” was a joke the dancers liked to repeat to each other and, in fact, they all did know their makers, very well. Store-bought shoes just couldn't compare.

When the custom-made shoes had finally arrived, praise and hosannas poured out from all the dancers who worried that they wouldn't get there in time. Althea had the job of sorting and distributing them. Ginny grabbed hers. Time to break them in.

First she tested the toes: if they felt too soft, she brushed them with shellac or clear nail polish to make them harder. But if they were too hard, which did happen with certain batches, she soaked the toes in water or rubbing alcohol; otherwise, they would make her bleed. Next, she had to snip out the satin toe and roughen the leather on the bottom—she used sandpaper—to make the soles of the shoes less slippery. She also needed to yank out the cotton insole, which was as bulky as a sanitary napkin. Then she sewed on the ribbons and elastic. Each girl had her own way of doing this, a private ritual that she believed would bring her luck onstage; Ginny used dental floss in place of thread for hers. But there was still more: she had to step on the toes to flatten them, and bend the shank, to make it flexible. Then she smacked the shoes against the wall a few times, because otherwise they were just too damn noisy. No one wanted to hear a ballerina clomping like a horse onstage—it killed the illusion of weightlessness and grace that she had spent her whole professional life trying to perfect. After that, Ginny could finally put the shoes on, for all of fifteen or twenty minutes, the time that it took to dance a single ballet. Then they were finished and would be tossed out, unless there was some sentimental reason to keep them.

Ginny still had her first pair. The blood inside had seeped through and turned the toes a dull shade of brown, but that was part of their appeal. And before she left New York, Ginny gave Gabriel the pair she had worn the night he watched her dance. Ginny was a little worried about his having them—that wife of his sounded positively cuckoo—but hopefully, he'd be careful and put them somewhere out of harm's way. He had told Ginny about how she had cut up all the books and magazines. Poor Gabriel. She wondered—but only for a second—what sort of wife she herself would have been. Then the thought passed. Ginny knew that she didn't want to be a wife—not even Gabriel's wife—for a long time. Maybe never.

Since Ginny
had started sharing a room with Althea, they became even more friendly. Over dinner in the one southern-style restaurant in town, Althea confided how hard it had been to be a black girl in the resolutely white world of ballet.

“No matter how high my arabesques were, I was never going to look right,” she said. “There was this line of white bread girls with their white bread skin and white bread hair. And then there was me. I always stuck out.”

“Or stood out,” Ginny said. “Mr. B. must have thought that.”

“He did,” Althea said, and she smiled, remembering.

“But I know what you mean about sticking out. I did too.”

“You? Weren't you a star even back in Louisiana?”

“In ballet class. Not anywhere else.”

“So we were both misfits,” Althea said. She had ordered coconut cake for dessert, though both she and Ginny agreed that it was a poor imitation of the cakes they were used to back home, in the South. “The kind my grandmother made had coconut flakes as long as your nail,” Althea said, frowning at the tiny, minced bits topping the piece she was eating.

Althea also told Ginny how much she had hated New York when she first got there. Ginny could certainly relate to
that.
“I still hate New York,” she said.

“Give it time,” Althea advised. She ate the last bit of her cake and put down her fork.

“Do I have a choice?” Ginny asked.

One night,
Althea didn't come back to the room at all. Ginny was curious, but since Althea didn't volunteer any information the next morning, it seemed nosy to ask. All she said was, “Everyone has a right to a private life. Even the ballet mistress.” Ginny said “Amen,” and Althea laughed.

“How about you?” Althea then asked, looking at Ginny carefully as if she had missed something. “What about your private life?”

“Let's just keep it private, okay?” Ginny answered. She was fixing her hair for class and Althea gave her ponytail a yank, but that was all.

After Saratoga,
the ballet company returned to New York. They had a few days off before they were scheduled to fly to San Francisco, and some of the dancers went to the beach at East Hampton or Fire Island. Not Ginny. She had things to do. First there was the packing. All those clothes she had bought in Saratoga were coming with her. Instead of stuffing everything into the suitcase and sitting on it to make it close, Ginny folded things neatly, even pausing to put tissue paper in the sleeves of the jacket and the toes of the shoes. Rita would have liked that.

Once the packing was completed, Ginny took a walk down Broadway, where she decided, on impulse, to have her nails and toes done. Not that she usually paid attention to things like that, but Althea and her mud wraps had started her thinking. Ginny picked bright red polish for her toes and clear for her fingernails—she knew that Erik didn't allow red fingernails onstage. As the young, pretty Korean woman filed and painted, she watched the other women who were getting their hair cut and styled. Dancers always wore their hair long, so that they could put it up into a bun. But it did occur to her that she could have the ends trimmed with something other than the same pair of tiny scissors she used for sewing the ribbons on her pointe shoes.

The black-clad man with the crew cut and the earring who was blow-drying the hair of another customer must have read her mind because he asked, “How about a trim? If you wait until your nails dry, I'll have some time then.”

“All right,” Ginny said, and then surprised herself by adding, “What about the color? Can you do something about that?”

“Maybe some blond highlights? That would really bring out your eyes.”

“Blond,” Ginny repeated. “Sounds good to me.” She waited until her nails were dry, and then moved over to the other chair, the one by the sink.

“Winter Wheat,” the hairdresser was saying, looking at a row of bottles on a shelf. “Or maybe Golden Autumn.” In the end, he trimmed about two inches off the bottom and didn't do the highlights after all. Instead, he dyed her whole head blond.

All this took quite a while; first her hair had to be washed, cut and combed out. There was a nasty-smelling shade of dye used on her entire head. This was followed by crimped foil packets applied to carefully selected strands of hair; the packets contained still another nasty-smelling shade, another permutation of blond. “So it will look natural,” explained the stylist. “Not like you dipped your head into a vat of peroxide.”

Ginny decided she liked him. While she waited for the various colors to take, the stylist offered her a batch of fashion magazines, but Ginny shook her head.

“How about a latte, then?” he asked. Ginny happily accepted the coffee and the hazelnut biscotti that he offered.

“So you're a ballerina,” said the stylist, whose name turned out to be Craig, as he sat down next to her.

“Right.” She blew on the coffee to cool it.

“Where do you dance?”

“Lincoln Center. New York City Ballet.”

“Wow,” he said. “City Ballet.” A wistful look crossed his face. “I love the ballet.”

“You do?”

“I even wanted to be a dancer,” he confided.

“Did you ever take lessons?” Ginny asked, and not just out of politeness.

“My parents wouldn't let me. Thought it would make me a sissy. So I fooled them and became a hairdresser instead!” He laughed and Ginny joined in.

“You'll have to come see me dance,” she offered. “I'll make sure you get comp tickets.”

“Really?” Craig asked. “That would be great.”

After the
color had taken, someone else washed Ginny's hair and then Craig set to work combing and styling it. The color they had finally settled on was called Honey Kissed Blonde; the highlights, Midnight Sun.

“Are you dancing tonight?” Craig asked. His hands fluttered gracefully as small birds around her face. “Because when you do, you're going to knock 'em dead!” He called two other stylists over to see his handiwork and they exclaimed over her transformation. Ginny turned her head this way and that, to get a better view in the mirror. Her hair glowed like a sunset. Blond. Why had she never thought of it before? She and Craig exchanged phone numbers before she gave him a hug and a big tip. Then she ambled out onto Broadway again.

She could see how people—men—were suddenly checking her out as she passed. She stopped in front of a drugstore that had a mirror in the window, and rummaged through her bag for a red lipstick, the kind she usually saved for the stage. She couldn't believe the effect. Wait until Gabriel saw it.

She went inside the drugstore and bought a pair of dark sunglasses. Then she went back outside, checked the mirror again. She liked what she saw. Not even caring who might hear her, she addressed her reflection. “California, here I come!”