The Four Temperaments (3 page)

“All right,” she said quietly. “I won't. I promise. But right now, I'm so thirsty. Could I have another drink? Please?” He saw then that her glass was empty.

By the
time they left the restaurant an hour and a half later, Ginny was drunk. Oscar felt responsible; she had ordered a third drink before the meal came and another while she was eating it. But when he tried to suggest that she slow down, she argued, saying that she was old enough to do what she wanted. In the end, he didn't insist.

As he propelled her out into the street, she waved cheerfully at their waiter, at the hostess and several people who were just coming in. Then she began humming; Oscar thought he recognized the score from Stravinsky's
Firebird.
He was trying to hail a cab when she broke loose from his grasp and darted out into the middle of the street. A large dark car screeched to a halt and an angry face appeared at the window. “What the hell do you think you're doing, lady?” the driver hollered.

“Grands jetés?” Ginny replied in a small voice, her high spirits instantly evaporating. She looked frightened and near tears. Oscar put his arm firmly around her shoulders and led her back to the curb, where he was successful in his quest for a taxi. He gave the driver his address. He wasn't going to leave her alone. Not in her condition.

The apartment
was dark when they arrived. Oscar was sorry that Ruth was still away. She would have been better at handling a drunk and weepy girl; Ginny had cried most of the way uptown in the cab. As it was, he took Ginny to the guest room, where he took off her shoes, wiped her face with a washcloth and watched solicitously as she downed a big glass of water and the two Tylenol he insisted she take. Then he gently helped her to lie down on one of the narrow beds where the boys had slept—a scruffy teddy bear still snuggled against the pillows. He went on into his own room, the room he and Ruth had shared for so many years. He left the door open, so he would hear her if she called out or needed anything. She must have passed out immediately, for by the time he had undressed, he could hear the raucous sounds of her snoring.

Later—he
had been sleeping soundly under a cool, pale sheet—he was aware of something on his forehead. Was it Ruth returning early?

“Oscar,” said a voice it took him a few seconds to identify. “Oscar, get up,” Ginny whispered urgently.

He opened his eyes. Though the room was dark, he could see that she was naked; her white skin seemed to glow. Without hesitation, he reached for her, and at long last, she was in his arms. He kissed her frantically, as if she were a dangerously ill child whose raging fever had just broken. The scar, the tiny scar on her neck. He could feel it in the dark, and he kissed it over and over again. Oscar was surprised—but also deeply and humbly grateful—for the ardent way in which she responded to his fumbling. Under his hands, she seemed as delicate and easy to wield as his violin.

Oscar woke again at dawn and lay for a long while without moving as he watched the silver light brighten into the flat white glare of day. Ginny was sprawled out next to him, extended limbs as wide and flagrant as those of a starfish. Even in sleep, she was immoderate, expansive and enticing. Very carefully, Oscar raised himself from his prone position. But she opened her eyes, instantly alert.

“Good morning,” she said, holding out her arms. Afterward, he drifted off to sleep, and when he woke again, she was gone. There was a note on the pillow: “See you at the theater. Love & XXX G.”

Oscar reached for his robe and, when he had put it on, took the note into the kitchen, where he read it one last time before setting it on fire in the sink. He longed to save it—love, she had written
love—
but he knew his own carelessness all too well. One day, Ruth would find it and then what? Better to let it remain in memory's private, sanctified eye. The note burned quickly and the ashes washed easily down the drain. Then he went into the bathroom for a long, hot shower. As he lathered himself, he marveled at how her impossibly young touch had made his old bones feel quite new.

But euphoria evaporated quickly, to be replaced by a crushing sense of guilt and anxiety. How could he have betrayed Ruth? What would she do if she found out? Oscar gloomily predicted that she would find out, that the stink of guilt and deceit would rise up from his person and Ruth would wonder, wonder and recoil, at its rank smell. She would denounce him to his sons, leave him, and he would deserve it all. And, yet, he was sick with longing for the girl, scheming already about how he could meet her, touch her again.

He called his lawyer and asked some discreet questions, for he still had some lingering worry about what Ginny had done in Mia McQuaid's apartment the night before. Warren Greenberg, his attorney of some twenty years, was not terribly helpful and Oscar felt no better as he put down the receiver.

He was even more unsettled when he went back into the bedroom and saw his violin sitting precariously on top of the bureau, with the neck end jutting way over the edge. Although still in its case, Oscar knew how easily it could have been knocked over and damaged, perhaps even beyond repair. He quickly put it on the top shelf of the closet, in the spot where he always kept it when not in use. He had never forgotten to put it away before. But he must have been so addled last night, when he brought Ginny home, that he had, for the first time in memory, imperiled his instrument.

This was no small matter. Oscar had owned this violin for longer than he had been married. It had been crafted by a Milanese maker in the middle of the nineteenth century, and its graceful, symmetrical curves, stained with an amber brown varnish, had become—when he played—a part of his own body. It had cost several thousand dollars at the time, the kind of money Oscar didn't have but had paid out slowly, as if it had been a mortgage. Musicians talked of “dating” an instrument when they were considering its purchase; Oscar could still remember others—a French twentieth-century instrument made by Delanoy; another by the German maker Ernst Heinrich Roth—that he dated before settling on the Milanese. Now that he was more established and financially well off, he sometimes fantasized about an instrument crafted by a legendary maker. How he would love the light, bright and open tones of a Stradivarius or the darker, more somber sounds of a Guarneri. But, no, he was wed as surely to this instrument as he was to Ruth.

Ruth. She returned home from San Francisco later that day, filled with stories about Gabriel, Penelope and the baby. The trip had done her good, he could see that. Was it simply the pleasure of seeing her son and his family, or was it being away from Oscar? He had never had such a thought before; he had always relied on Ruth's unswerving devotion. But then he had never been unfaithful to her before and that astounding act seemed to throw all of his former assumptions into an unfamiliar and frightening configuration. He realized that he had cherished his dreams of Ginny far more than the complicated reality she presented. What had he done? he thought over and over.

“Oscar,” Ruth said gently when she saw that he was barely listening to her, “Oscar, dear, are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” he lied, wishing suddenly that he could just close his eyes and bury his face in her lap. “I'm perfectly fine.”

GINNY

G
inny Valentine
hated New York. She hated its horrible up and down shapes. To her, they looked like a million shoe boxes standing on end in a tacky factory outlet. She hated everyone packed in so tightly, no room to breathe. She hated the hundred and one kinds of dirt in New York—smog, soot, grime, grease, grit and of course dog excrement—everywhere she stepped. She couldn't understand why anyone would actually want to live here, and when she saw those T-shirts and bumper stickers with that idiotic slogan saying “I ™ NY,” she wanted to yell, “NOT ME!” There were only two things that redeemed the city in her eyes: George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet. Balanchine had been dead for years, but the New York City Ballet, the company he started and ran, was alive and kicking. And so here she was.

Back in New Orleans, before she came here, Wes had promised that in New York City, it wouldn't matter who her parents were. “New York never looks back,” is what he said. “No one there gives a hoot about your past because they're too busy thinking about the future. And the future, my darling child, is you.” He had smoothed the hair off her face in a gesture that was one-quarter father, three-quarters lover. “Think of it: VIRGINIA VALENTINE. They'll call you ‘Queen of Hearts.' ”

She would sit curled up on Wes's sky-blue sofa, the one with all the tasseled pillows and the ornate French legs, drinking in every damn word and dying for one of the cigarettes he waved around his handsome face as he talked. He refused to let her smoke. “Virgin lungs,” he kept telling her, “virgin lungs. If you want to be a star, you'll keep them that way. The rest of you is open for corruption, of course. And I'm just the man to see to that.” He leaned over to kiss her neck and her arms went around him. Sweet Wes! She did love him. Or she guessed she did. She certainly did need him. And what was love anyway, but need in a fancy dress?

Still, she knew that going into Oscar's room last night was a dumb thing to do. Dumb because it made things more complicated. Oscar was already crazy about her. He helped her ditch Mia and find her own apartment, bought her dinners and even loaned her money. All of this without sex. She never meant to get involved with him that way. But as her mama would surely have said, good intentions were shining brightly all along that hot and dusty road that led to hell.

She couldn't even blame it on the liquor, though she was certainly drunk enough when he brought her back to his apartment. But when she woke up—in the narrow bed with the one-eyed, nearly bald teddy bear staring at her—the effects of the alcohol had worn off and she was left with her own miserable self again. Mia. Erik chose Mia over her. By now, she had stopped feeling angry and was scared instead. Maybe she wasn't as talented as she thought. Maybe she was fooling herself, and was going to stay in the corps de ballet forever, while the Mias of the world danced right over her.

She thought about going into Mia's apartment: another dumb thing. But she had been so angry. Ginny remembered, with some distaste, the tantrums she used to have when she was little. Once she had stretched out on the floor of the church sobbing and pounding her fists against the worn oak planks, all because her mother had said no, she couldn't play with June Bell Taylor after the service that afternoon; she had to come home instead. Everyone had stood around her, even her mother, baffled about what to do, until finally the minister himself had appeared, with his dark pants and brilliantly shined shoes, to lift her from the floor and deliver her, sobbing, into her mother's arms. Later she was sorry she'd made such a scene and embarrassed her mother; she didn't even like June Bell all that much.

In Oscar's
apartment, Ginny sat up and pushed the hair away from her face. Sweet Jesus, it was hot! She wriggled her toes and looked down to see that they were bare. Being the gentleman that he was, Oscar had removed her shoes but nothing else and she was sweating. “Don't say ‘sweat,' Virginia,” her mother would have scolded, “a lady never sweats, she just glows.” But she was not and would never be a lady. Too bad for Mama; she tried so hard.

Stripping down was the logical thing to do, so she did it. Then she went looking for a bathroom. When she found it, she turned on the shower. Just as Ginny was about to step inside, under the spray of warm water, she knew that the contents of her stomach were about to come up and she leaned over the toilet bowl to vomit. Actually, it did not feel at all bad: the dark night, the cool, reassuring feel of her bare feet against the tile, and the lemony smell that wafted up from the bowl—Oscar's wife certainly kept things spick-and-span—all made it seem that Mia had been no more than a bad meal she had eaten.

She stepped under the shower and stayed there a long time, rinsing her mouth with streams of water and lathering herself with the bar of scented soap—magnolia! home!—from a ceramic dish. Thoughts of Mia were like the bubbles that slid from her chest to her waist to her legs, and then rushed effortlessly down the drain. This was only one part, and a small one too. Her turn would come soon. She knew it. In the meantime, she would have to work harder, and she would have to be patient. Maybe apologizing to Mia wouldn't be a bad idea either, though she wasn't sure how Mia would take it. Maybe Oscar could help with that. Oscar. Where was he now, anyway?

When Ginny got out of the shower, she wrapped herself up in one of Ruth's—she remembered her name now—big, fresh-smelling, pale blue towels. She felt better than she had in days. She was fully intending to walk back to the room where she had come from and get some sleep. But it was easy to get confused in the dark, what with the strange apartment and all, and she found herself walking right by the room where Oscar was sleeping. The door was wide open and his belly was moving up and down in the most peaceful way, and because of the light from the streetlights outside (another thing Ginny hated about New York was how it was never really, truly dark, which she knew must have accounted for a lot of the weird behavior of the people there), she could see his face, looking all screwed up and tense, as if he were trying to figure something out in his sleep. It was that look that drew her into the room. Oscar had been so good to her, and now that she was feeling good herself, she didn't want him to feel bad. She only meant to put her hand on his forehead, just to smooth the frown away, and she did. But then he opened his eyes and somehow the towel was on the floor and she was saying his name. His arms wound around her and pulled her gently down, toward the bed.

Afterward, Ginny realized that he talked to her as if she had been a virgin, the big, sweet fool. He should only have known. She had been having sex since she was fifteen, and she didn't think of it as a big deal. At least if she was careful not to get pregnant, the way her mother had. Mama hadn't been careful and she hadn't been smart, but Ginny was determined to be both. By the time she was fourteen, she had already been to a clinic downtown and after lying about her age—Lord knows that was easy enough—got herself a prescription for birth control pills and enough condoms for the next decade. There was a whole phone book's worth of sexually transmitted diseases that she didn't want any part of.

Her first lover was her ballet teacher, Wesley Landham. Wes had danced to standing ovations in Europe before he tore up every single one of the ligaments in his left knee and had to retire from the stage. Since he was a local boy who'd made good, he was something of a celebrity in New Orleans, and the studio he ran—upstairs from a perfume shop in the French Quarter—was filled with the daughters of the city's oldest and proudest families. Ginny was a better dancer than any of them, she knew that, just as she knew that she was not beautiful or smart in school. But she took to dancing right away, even though for the longest time Mama maintained that she had only sent her there so she could improve her posture and meet the right kind of girls.

Not that the right kind of girls would have anything to do with her. There she was, Rita Darcy's little bastard. This was somehow common knowledge and it didn't make Ginny too popular with the other girls who came to Wes's studio, girls like Deanna May Dixon and Violet Morgan, who were brought to class by black maids who hung up their pleated skirts and matching cardigans on hangers, and rolled their socks neatly into balls, while the girls changed into their fresh-from-the-package pink tights and black leotards.

Ginny came to class by herself because Rita worked afternoons at the mall and since she had to take two buses, she was always late. Her shucked clothes were left in a heap on the dressing room floor while she ran to find her place at the barre, still putting the last pins in her hair as the pliés began. But once class had started, she was happy: she knew she could dance circles around those snotty brats. They disliked her as much for that as for anything. She had a real gift for turning, Wes said so, and he always made her demonstrate first. While the others were still fumbling with double pirouettes, Wes had her doing fouettés, first two, then four, and soon enough eight in perfect, spin-like-a-top succession. At the Christmas recital, she brought down the house with that particular little trick.

She knew they made fun of her. They called her “fire engine” because of the bright colors she wore to class. She hated that pink-and-black look ballet dancers were supposed to wear. When she tried on her very first pair of pointe shoes, she looked down at the pink satin and frowned. Pink was such a sissy, spineless color. She wanted red, like Moira Shearer in
The Red Shoes,
or, at the very least, indigo blue.

“No one has ever, ever complained about the color before, miss,” the salesman said coldly.

“Well, someone is complaining now,” Ginny said, ignoring Mama's not-so-subtle fingers pressing on her shoulder. “Don't you have anything else?” With a disgusted sigh, he disappeared into the stockroom. Ginny could feel how the two other girls in the store looked down at the carpeting to avoid staring. The salesman returned with a dusty box that he laid on the floor.

“Black,” he said, gesturing to the dark satin shoes in their nest of white tissue. “Take them or leave them.”

She tried them on and rose up on her toes. They weren't red, but they weren't bad either. Once she sewed the ribbons on, they would be better. Like a Spanish dancer. She began to imagine flouncy skirts; the shoes improved as she mentally added a fringed silk shawl, castanets and a real rosebud pinned to the front of her V-neck leotard. “We'll take them,” Ginny said. Mama sighed loudly, as if she had been holding her breath.

Whatever the other girls said, it made no difference to Wes, who recognized that she had something special and did his best to nurture it. Extra classes, special coaching, partnering lessons; Wes saw to all of it. “Your talent is the redemption for your mama's sins,” he told her often enough, though he was always smiling when he did. After a while, he refused to let her pay for her classes. “Every serious school needs a scholarship student,” he told her. “Virginia Valentine is mine.” When it became too hard for Rita to pick Ginny up after class (she didn't want her riding the buses alone after dark), Wes started driving her home. She liked the rides because she liked him. He was as good-looking as his name promised, with thick, prematurely white hair, blue eyes and white, white teeth that he confessed to having had capped.

“When you're onstage, your smile has to count. Mine never did before I had my teeth done,” he told her.

She nodded, self-conscious about her own teeth. Rita didn't have the money for braces. Wes saw her discomfort and said, “Now don't go worrying about your teeth. Those big white beauties will look just wonderful under the lights. Rub a little Vaseline on them before you go on. Makes 'em look even shinier.” That's the way Wes talked to her—as if her success were a sure thing. But Ginny didn't entirely share his confidence. Not because she wasn't good enough, because she really thought she was. But New Orleans wasn't exactly the place for a girl to make a name for herself as a ballerina; the city didn't even have a resident company. How in the world was she going to succeed while living there? And how was she going to get out?

It was Wes who showed her the way.

He told her that every couple of years, the School of American Ballet held a regional audition in Atlanta and there was one scheduled for the next month. Ginny knew that the school was the godchild of the New York City Ballet, the company she'd wanted to dance in ever since Rita had taken her to a performance on her tenth birthday. They danced
Serenade
that night, and when she saw that girl who lets down her hair and dies for her dancing, she was stunned. She pored through the program notes to see who the choreographer was and saw the name George Balanchine. Well, obviously he was someone who understood the way she felt about dancing and she knew that she would have to find a way to audition for him. It turned out he was dead, but he'd choreographed dozens of ballets and, along with someone called Lincoln Kirstein, started the company besides. She swore to herself that she would find her way to New York City to dance in it.