Reserved for the Cat (3 page)

This went on two more times before the applause finally died down. And she went back to the dressing room in a daze, and sat in her little seat in the crowded room shared by all the
sujets
and stared at herself in the mirror and didn’t know if she was glad or disappointed that the evening’s performance was not La Sylphide, but Giselle, and La Augustine’s understudy for
that
was certainly pounding on the toes of her new shoes at that very moment in a fever of excitement.

A thin, rangy, tabby-striped tomcat surveyed the departing audience from his perch on the overhead scaffolding with satisfaction.
That went well.

The little brownie that kept the
sujets’
dressing-room reasonably clean raised a skeptical eyebrow.
You really are an evil creature. Tripping a ballerina! La Augustine is furious.

La Augustine’s patron will buy her an emerald bracelet and take her to Maxim’s. Everyone there will make much of her and she’ll have enough champagne sent to her table to bathe in it. She won’t do badly out of this, and if she is wise enough to do all of the exercises she can, she won’t lose anything. Just a few performances.
The tabby cat’s tail twitched.
She might even end up with a new patron.

The brownie smirked.
And so might Ninette. Get a patron in the first place, that is, not get a new one.

The only betrayal of the tomcat’s sudden anger was the increased twitching of his tail.
She won’t need a patron after this.

The brownie snorted.
She’ll get one. Like it or not, she’ll get one. She certainly wants one, and this performance should net her one. And as for her not needing one, don’t count your chickens before the eggs have hatched. She’s not an
etoile
yet.

She will be.
The tomcat said it with passion.
She will be.

The next morning at class, as always, everyone from the
coryphées
to the
etoiles
had their noses in the papers, looking for a mention in the reviews. The instructor had not yet arrived and girls were doing their warm-ups over spread-out newsprint, chattering like a flock of sparrows. The papers went from hand to hand, Ninette was certainly not immune, and discovered that in most of them, the matinee reports were mostly full of La Augustine’s injury, and her performance rated only “
Sujet
Ninette Dupond was called upon to replace the
etoile
and managed a creditable, if sometimes naïve, interpretation.”

“You are damned with faint praise, Ninette,” laughed Jeanne LaCroix, another of the
sujets.
It was not a nice laugh, but Jeanne was not a very nice person. “By hook or by crook” seemed to be her motto for getting ahead. One expected a certain amount of that backstage, but Jeanne seemed to take delight in it. She never let an opportunity pass to make another feel small if she could help it.

“Oh!” cried Madeline Clenceau from the other side of the room. “Listen to
this!
It’s the reviewer for
Le Figaro!”
Now everyone took notice, for
Le Figaro
was universally thought to be the newspaper for artists and thinkers.
“The matinee performance of La Sylphide was notable for the substitution of the
sujet
Ninette Dupond for a suddenly injured La Augustine, and one can only applaud the stroke of fate. Mademoiselle Dupond is far lighter on her feet than La Augustine, and brought to the part the proper air of fragility and otherworldliness that La Augustine lacks. Her Sylphide is innocent and unworldly as a butterfly, she entreats the earth-bound James to come play on the wind with her; La Augustine’s Sylphide seems about to invite him to a Montmarte bistro for wine and sausages. Of particular note is the death scene. La Augustine is well known for drawing this out until one is tempted to rise from the audience and give the Sylphide a mercy stroke to put her out of her misery. Mademoiselle Dupond, however, made the scene heartbreakingly brief. One moment, she is borne on the wings of the zephyr; the next, the cursed scarf has worked its sinister magic, her wings fall away, and she is stricken, and drops lifeless to the ground before we, or James, have quite realized that anything is wrong. The pathos then is all the clearer; like a naughty boy with his first bow and arrow, James has shot at a bird and brought it cold and dead to the earth, destroying with his clumsy touch what he had only wanted to cherish. This is not to say that La Augustine is a poor dancer, but let her be confined to the parts where sensuality is an asset—La Fille Mal Gardee, for instance, or Corsair. And let us hope that this will not be the last time Mademoiselle Dupond graces the stage as the tragic Sylph.”

The chatter in the rehearsal room had stopped dead. Ninette bit her lip. The first thing that struck her was how very wrong the critic had been—he had mistaken her own exhaustion for deliberate art!

But the second thing was this. La Augustine was probably reading the review at this very moment.

And she was not going to be pleased about it.

L
A Augustine was furious.

Ninette was in hiding; one of the sympathetic teachers, Isabella Rota, a former
premier danseur
herself, had hidden Ninette in a tiny closet when La Augustine came storming through the ballet school, limping heavily and in the sort of rage where she would snatch objects up and throw them—not actually at anyone, or at least not yet, but certainly doing some damage to walls and the objects themselves.

La Augustine was very popular with the audience. The critic at
Le Figaro
undoubtedly knew this. He also knew his review would provoke angry letters, and angry letters sell newspapers. The ballet company of the Paris Opera was an established organization, and
Le Figaro
took the position that anything that had been established for more than a handful of years deserved skewering on a regular basis. The critics of
Le Figaro,
considered themselves far more intelligent than the general run of an audience, and, being mostly poor, were openly contemptuous of the balletomanes, the rich old men in the private boxes.

But the critic in
Le Figaro
would probably never have to face the wrath of La Augustine himself. He probably submitted his work under a
nom de plume,
and thus was secure from retribution by means of the blanket of anonymity. The only one who was going to suffer in this instance was Ninette, and she had known from the moment when La Augustine began her rampage through the studios and classrooms that if a head had to go beneath the guillotine, that head would not belong to the managers or the ballet master.

As she huddled in the small, stuffy black closet among old rehearsal costumes, brooms, a mop and a bucket, she tried to plan how she should deal with the managers. Should she weep? That might be good. After all, she had done nothing wrong and none of this was her fault! She expected to be demoted to the
coryphées
again. And that would be hard. She did not know how she could keep the little garret apartment on the salary of a
coryphée
without augmenting it somehow. She might have to call upon her mother’s artist friends and model for them. And somehow manage to stay out of their beds. If she could keep her head, perhaps she could somehow fit in dancing elsewhere. Perhaps—perhaps she should find another place to live; a smaller room, a cellar instead of a garret, although the idea of the mice and rats and black beetles gave her horrors. Maybe she should . . .

But all these plans came crashing down when Madame Rota came for her. Ninette emerged, blinking in the light, from the closet. The old woman’s face told her that it was worse than she had dreamed. But even she could not have guessed
what
she had done—until Madame Rota told her.

“Oh,
petite,
you have done the unthinkable,” Madame Rota said sadly, patting her hand. “La Augustine’s patron was in the boxes, for he was entertaining friends and, once his paramour was safely bestowed on her maids, saw no reason why he should not continue to do so.” She shook her white head in its little black lace cap. “You smiled at him,
cherie.
And worse, he was taken with you. And worse still—he said as much to La Augustine.” Madame Rota let go of her hand and sighed. “I am sorry, little one,” was all she said. “In the managers’ eyes, the good review would balance La Augustine’s anger at the insults to her in that same review. After all, you scarcely put the critic up to it, and not even she could claim that. But when her patron expresses his admiration—that is never to be forgiven, and not even the director of the company can save you.”

Numb now, Ninette followed the old woman to the office of the director of the company. It was the first time she had entered those august precincts; the office was a jewel box of red velvet and gilt, much like the expensive private boxes in the theater itself. It was as well that she was numb, for the blow was a cruel one, and a final one.

She was fired. Turned out. Ordered to collect her belongings and go.

Not
quite
thrown out on her ear . . . but the whispers followed her as she changed out of her rehearsal dress and into her street clothes, and the looks followed her too, some pitying, some smug. And at three o’clock in the afternoon she found herself outside the building, as the music from the rehearsal rooms rang out over the street, a mishmash of five or six pianos all playing different pieces at once.

And she hadn’t the least idea of what to do.

Despair gave way to tears; she hung her head to hide them and slowly made her way through the narrow streets to her building, then up the three flights of stairs to her little apartment. Very soon not to be hers at all, for the rent was due and she had no salary to pay it with. Three days was all she had, three days in which to find work. If she could.

A good review of a ballet matinee performance, it seemed, meant nothing whatsoever to the managers of the
Folies Bergere,
the
Moulin Rouge,
the
Comedie Francais.
Patiently or impatiently, the company managers gave her the cold facts; she learned that such a thing could have been a fluke, her one good performance of a lifetime. Or it could merely have been spite on the part of the critic, who used her as a vehicle to lambaste La Augustine. Oh, she could audition—but there were no openings. Not for a mere chorus dancer. And at any rate, this was not ballet, it was a very different style of dance. Had she danced in such performances before? No? Thank you, mademoiselle, but your services will not be required.