The Four Temperaments (2 page)

“My mother met my father at a Valentine's Day dance in Atlanta. She'd gone there with her church group for the weekend. He told her he was the son of the minister at the First Baptist Church. That his daddy was a big deal in the community. Guess that won her over.”

“But it wasn't true?”

“Not a word. She went back home with a phony name and address on a piece of memo paper. Oh, and with me too—though she didn't know it yet.” There was a noisy pause as Ginny drained her glass through her straw.

“So you never knew him?” Oscar asked.

“Only what Mama told me. She said he seemed so sincere. Genuine. And handsome too. She picked Valentine as a way of remembering him. For a long time, she really did think he'd come back.”

“She must have been devastated when he didn't,” Oscar said, not really knowing how she would have felt.

“My mama was class valedictorian and had a full scholarship to Randolph-Macon. She gave it up to stay home and have me. I don't think ‘devastated' would have been the way she would have described it.”

Oscar felt foolish.

“And Ginny is from . . .?” he asked, looking for a diversion.

“Virginia,” she said, looking suddenly shy. “For my grandmother. Though everyone thought it was kind of an odd choice, considering I was a bastard and all.”

“No one really thinks that way anymore, do they?” Oscar said gently.

“Where I grew up, they did,” she said.

By the
time they rose to leave, the spring afternoon had deepened to a soft violet evening and Oscar was in love. He walked home feeling buoyant and terrified. He thought of Clarissa for the first time in years. Ginny was nothing like the elegant, cultivated sort of woman he usually liked, which was precisely what made her company so compelling and so unsettling. You're headed for trouble, Oscar, he thought as he let himself into the apartment. Ruth was not yet home and there was something poignant about the way darkness filled the rooms. He sat for a long while on the sofa, looking but not seeing out of the living room window. He was frightened, yes, but not so frightened that he wouldn't follow whatever he was feeling—this urge—a little farther along the path. Wherever it might take him.

“Oscar, you startled me!” Ruth said when she walked in some time later. “Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

After that
first meeting, things followed a fairly predictable course: more meetings in coffee shops, dinners after the performance. But even in that insulated world of the ballet company, where gossip, and especially romantic gossip, was as necessary as air, Oscar and Ginny provoked no talk, no speculation of any kind. Oscar was of course glad, but also disappointed to realize that he was past the age of creating scandal.

He began to appear at rehearsals he was not required to attend, just to see more of her. From the unfamiliar vantage point of the back of the darkened theater, he watched raptly as Ginny moved through the intricate patterns of the ballet. While she never danced alone, she always seemed to stand out. There was an expansiveness to her movements, a breadth of arms and legs that he didn't see in the others. Her arabesques were clearer and sharper, her ports de bras filled with longing. He saw something ferocious in the way she danced, something fearless and even dangerous that knew no boundaries. Unlike many of the dancers, she didn't mark the steps during the rehearsals, but executed them full out. Though Oscar still had little regard for ballet, he had to admit that Ginny had something special, something that would, if she knew how to cultivate it, lift her out of the ranks and into the burning isolation and resplendent joy of the limelight.

She told Oscar how when she first had started dancing to live music, she kept anticipating her cues and charging out onstage ahead of time because she was so exhilarated. “Erik wasn't even angry about it,” she said, laughing a little at the memory. “He said that he liked how eager I was.”

“Have you ever had stage fright?” Oscar asked.

“Never,” she said, and Oscar believed it.

He even
had the audacity to bring her home to dinner. Ruth was her lovely, welcoming self, making sure Ginny's plate was filled with pot roast, buttered noodles and challah bread; for dessert, she had baked a glazed apple tart. Ginny ate and Ruth beamed. It was a successful evening, or so Oscar had thought. But lying in bed that night with his wife, Oscar was aware of Ruth's wakeful, fixed concentration on some unseen point on the ceiling.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“Ben,” she said.

“What's the matter with Ben? Did he call?” Their youngest son was a wanderer, a pilgrim whose feet had touched the streets of Paris, Bangkok, Moscow, Glasgow, Buenos Aires, Nairobi. He had barely finished college and ever since had taken whatever work was available—taxi driver, waiter, bartender—until he earned enough to set off again.

“No, he didn't,” she said. “But I was thinking: we should introduce him to Ginny.”

“Ben and Ginny?” said Oscar, trying to keep the incredulity—and anger—out of his voice. When he thought of the girls his peripatetic son had brought home, like the daughter of an impoverished Italian nobleman whose thick sheaf of pale hair, black sunglasses and wetly painted red mouth vied with the cool, chiseled beauties on the silver screens that illuminated Oscar's own youth, he knew that Ben would find nothing appealing in Ginny. Besides, he wanted this one for himself.

Not that
she thought of him in that way. No, it was clear that she relied on Oscar the way she might have a father, or an indulgent, older uncle. He was always ready with a willing ear, a solid shoulder, a nugget of sound advice. When she had roommate troubles, he extricated her from her lease and found her an affordable studio apartment on West Seventy-first Street, only blocks from the theater. He helped her get a checking account and credit card (when they had met, she kept her crumpled bills in her pockets, where they were frequently lost or stolen); showed her the best wine shop, supermarket, drugstore in the neighborhood. Except for her dancing, where she was as focused and bright as the steady beam of a Tensor lamp, the ordinary business of living left her mostly baffled. “I don't know what I'd do without you, Oscar,” she said more than once, touching her head to his chest, “I'd be lost.”

Oscar was grateful for being needed by her, in any way at all, and encouraged her to confide in him, which she did easily and lavishly. But the confidences never seemed to be of the romantic sort, which is what Oscar sought. He couldn't help but want to know what sort of men attracted her.

“Who's got time for any of that?” she said one Sunday afternoon in September as they strolled through Central Park together. She was responding to his question about Boyd Michaels, a handsome young corps de ballet member. Oscar had observed how Michaels, who was short but had a compactly built body, smooth, hairless chest—maybe he shaved it?—and strong, well-defined features, seemed to hang around Ginny a lot. Was he a suitor? Ginny laughed. “You sound like my mama,” she said, dismissing the notion. No, she was more interested in a small, solo role in an upcoming performance; company gossip said she was being considered for it.

The afternoon was hot. He held Ginny delicately by the elbow and steered her through the steady stream of cyclists, roller bladers, joggers, mothers with strollers and couples with their arms locked around each other's waists. Silver razor scooters, bright and quick as minnows, darted their way through the throng. Ruth was in California with their son Gabriel, his wife, Penelope, and their baby daughter, so Oscar did not have to feel overly guilty about spending time with Ginny. Not that his guilt was much of an impediment.

When Oscar and Ginny reached the boat pond, he bought her an ice cream that the vendor dipped in hot, liquid chocolate. It dried to a brittle shell that she cracked with her big, lovely front teeth. They sat down on a bench and watched the tiny sailboats slip by.

“Do you really think he'll give it to me?” she asked. Oscar knew by now that the “he” in question was Erik Holtz, the ballet master.

“You certainly deserve it,” said Oscar.

“I heard that he was thinking about Mia McQuaid too. I can't believe he'd even consider giving her that part,” Ginny fumed. “Have you seen her feet? No arch at all; they're as flat as Kansas.” Mia had been Ginny's roommate, and there had been plenty of friction between the two young women when they lived together.

“Who told you that he was considering her?” asked Oscar.

“Boyd,” she said. Oscar studied her carefully, but she seemed entirely focused on the part. “He says she's awful to partner. That it's like lifting a side of beef.”

“Well, surely Erik won't give the part to a side of beef, will he?”

Ginny smiled.

But as it turned out, that was just what Erik did. Ginny was livid. She brooded and seemed to be dragging herself to rehearsals and classes. Above her garishly colored practice clothes—red, royal blue, plum, emerald—her face looked gray. On the third day after their conversation by the boat pond, she didn't show up for rehearsal at all. This had never happened as far as Oscar knew and it worried him. He went to her apartment, where he found her sitting listlessly amid the huge piles of soiled clothing that she was sorting.

“Washday,” she said when she saw his gaze. “Want to help?”

“Where have you been?” Oscar asked, knowing he had no right to sound so demanding, but unable to help himself.

“You don't want to know,” she said, depositing a purple garment, crunched beyond recognition, into one of the piles.

“Yes, I do,” he said, looking straight into her eyes.

“All right, then, I'll tell you,” she said, kicking her way past the clothes. “But not here.”

She refused to go to any of the restaurants near Lincoln Center where the dancers from the company usually congregated. Oscar hailed a taxi that took them to the East Side, and he ushered her into a dark, noisy place on Third Avenue where neither of them had ever been before.

“I'm not eating,” Ginny announced to the waiter when he came to take their order. “I'll have a banana daiquiri.”

“Ginny, you should eat something,” Oscar said in his best avuncular voice.

“Why?”

“What about a nice piece of broiled chicken?” He sounded like Ruth, personifying the food she tried to coax one of the boys to eat. Oscar could just imagine what the waiter was thinking.

“No, actually I'll have a steak,” she said, snapping the menu shut suddenly. “Very rare. Bloody, in fact.” She turned her gaze to the waiter. He looked down, pen poised over his pad. “And a baked potato, no, make that potato skins, and a salad. Oh, and what's the soup today?” He told her and she said, “I'll have that too.”

When the waiter finally, mercifully, left, Ginny busied herself shredding her napkin and opening several packets of sugar, the contents of which she emptied onto the table. By the time the waiter reappeared with their drinks—Oscar's only a ginger ale, he thought someone had better stay sober tonight—she had created around herself a small white island of debris.

“I went to Mia's,” she said abruptly. “I still have the key, you know.”

“But you didn't stay,” prompted Oscar, knowing that this was not what he was going to hear.

“I didn't mean for anything to happen, Oscar, I swear I didn't. I've just been feeling so upset. I mean, how could he give her that part over me? So I went there to see what it was.”

“What it was?” he repeated, confused.

“Her secret,” said Ginny, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. “What it was she had that I didn't. Because I know I can dance circles around her.”

“Then what?” asked Oscar.

“I saw this dress of hers. I remembered it because I was still living there when she bought it and she made such a big deal of it. Some designer or other. I can't remember the name.”

“You did something to the dress?” Oscar asked, getting worried. But she shook her head.

“I wanted to, though,” she said. “I even had my scissors with me,” she added. “See?” She held up a small, bright pair of scissors, no bigger than her hand. They glinted in the light. “I keep them in my bag. For sewing ribbons on my pointe shoes,” she explained, as if this were somehow important.

“That's very practical,” Oscar soothed. “But you left after you looked at the dress, right?”

“Not exactly.” Her head went down.

“Ginny,” Oscar said firmly, “what did you do in that apartment? I want you to tell me.” There, now, that was better. The authoritative, parental approach usually worked. It did this time too.

“Not much, not really. I found a squeeze bottle of mustard in the fridge.” She stopped.

“And?” Oscar prompted.

“I squirted some in her shoes. Not on the dress, though.” As if that mattered. Still, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Oscar almost wanted to smile; her gesture of revenge seemed so childish. The sort of thing the boys would have done to each other when they were young. But of course she really was a child.

“And then you left.”

“Not exactly. I went into the bathroom and found her toothbrush. Dipped it in the toilet.
Then
I left.”

“Thank God,” said Oscar, exhaling now. It could have been much worse. He'd have to help her control herself, this wayward girl sitting there amidst the remains of the napkin. Because clearly those impulses could get her into real trouble someday. Even now, if Mia McQuaid were to figure out that Ginny had been in the apartment, and if she were to complain to someone in the company . . . Oscar's mind raced ahead. Ginny would be suspended from dancing or fired, and he would never get to see her or be near her again.

“You are never to go there again, do you understand?” he said, feeling as if he had slipped back a decade and was lecturing one of his sons.