New Yorkers (37 page)

And like all the other places in which Pauli Chavez had lived with Leni Petersh, this had one eccentric luxury, here not as hard to obtain. Whenever the friends of this couple asked themselves, “Why won’t such a woman agree to marry such a man?” The answer was agreed to rest somewhere between the two adjacent bathrooms. Though Leni was fiftyish at the least, more than one inquisitor had peered into Leni’s medicine cabinet for the contraceptive apparatus, had marked the one double bed—and had still been dissatisfied. The two were still lovers certainly. She was difficult; he was romantic. But it would be in those two adjoining cubicles that the separatist psyches of these two lovers must lie.

For in the theatre, a single dressing-room wasn’t only a convenience but a status. Leni, whose own tenure as a
prima
had been the briefest—could emerge from hers with a whole repertoire of complaint—and seduction if need be. Beyond that, their whole life, frail on the finances, strong on the conveniences, jogged along like a journal, in a continual conversation, to which both brought their anecdotes. His were tenderer, or gay. She had an enormous, instinctive tactlessness, which could go right to a point. And as was natural in a couple who made one room of three, they let nothing interrupt them. At times, often in those communicative intervals when dressing to go out together, they conversed as now, pot to pot.

“Hemorrhoids,” said Leni. “They are the same as piles?”

“I think. Why? You have them?”

“Not since St. Petersburg. There, I think I had them. Or something.” A silence. “There are things one get in Russia one never get anywhere else.” When seized upon, for her impressions, by those who in these travel-censored times discovered that she had once been there, this was her invariable reply.

He heard water running, complementary to his own.

“But Pauli. There is a spot.”

He came to look—back of one buttock, just inside the thigh. “Nothing. A prickle-heat. Put a little powder.” Over and above love, at their age, they kept passionate check of each other’s contusions, symptoms and surface changes. “What are you going to wear?” He spoke now from his own bath, the words elongated with shaving—and with the care of some days’ discussion.

“The green. Your favorite.”

Since several of her costumes—all of which had had to be at one time or another his favorite—were green, he said nothing. Years of invitation on the Mannix side, and fruitless pressure on his, hadn’t got her to the house of the family she persisted in calling his “patrons”—though it was a Mannix contention that Pauli gave constantly of himself, and never let them make return. Beyond a few dinners, this was literally so. What they gave him just as constantly, he never attempted to describe. If he ever fell on really hard times, of course they would be there. But it was really their old-style formality of life—so cosmopolitan and at the same time so bourgeois-rooted!—which he deeply admired and liked to be part of, as rather more of a coffeehouse man, himself. And how he admired the Judge’s “intellectuality,” which for him—not the best estimator of such—was absolute. There was a forceful practicality about the Judge too, of which Pauli had yet to see any venal side. Of Ruth, made almost his little foster-daughter by those fond intimacies her own august father couldn’t somehow provide, Leni had the good sense not to be jealous. Indeed, why Leni, that spirit so generous to his every need, should stubbornly, even angrily refuse every chance to become as close to that household as he—he would never see. And now, some tangent had done the trick in a flash; he didn’t yet know how or why. He had no fear she’d renege. Leni’s petulance never exceeded her loyalty. But once at the Mannixes, it would be vibrant enough as it was. “And the hair?” he said. “High or low?”

“Low.” She must be creaming her face, from the stretched sound of the word. “They would not appreciate the high.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Since the higher style was a señorita arrangement she wore to openings and other galas, he rather agreed. Best to give her the tone of the house, against his woeful awareness that he had been giving it, and she fighting its influence on him, for years. “That Blount is coming, the journalist. He has carte blanche there. Sometimes he brings a woman; never the same one, but always very chic. Or some native. It’s a very cosmopolitan house.”

And now she was rubbing the cream off, two applications, then lemon, then white-of-egg. The oatmeal masque had been last night. After the egg was on, just when she shouldn’t move a muscle—and just like when she had to have a candy, deep in its paper frill, the minute after the nail polish—she would speak.

“Pauli?”

“
Ja?
” They had no common language except the English they had learned here together.

“You know I wouldn’t go there at all—except for Ninon.” The words were tight, but not from mood. It was the egg.

“So you tell me, day and night for three days. Ever since she call up to say she’s here. But you don’t say why.”

“She is here for some business between Covent Garden and the Met.”

“Leni.
That
—I know.” Sometimes it was best to wait until the rouge was safely on, past all the other successive stages. Or even to the mascara. But today, her giggle came early.

“You really want to know, Ha?”

“I
said.
” He must show his impatience. It was ritual. And he enjoyed it. If he were a woman, he would giggle too. Instead, he slapped on cologne, and let her hear it. Slap, slap.

“A little too, she takes advantage to go
there
—because of Ruth, she says.”

“I gather.”
There
was Leni’s word for that house; if ever he found an unlikely note saying “I am there” he would know right where to go. “If Ninon can’t persuade him to let her stay on over there to study—who else?” he said carefully.

Equally, Leni knew who “him” was. So it had been pursued, for years. But this time, she was quiet for so long that he peered around his door into hers. With her back to him, she was putting on foundation masque, and might not have seen him, so he withdrew to his own side again, and sat down on the toilet seat to shine his shoes, When Leni was tender for disclosure, she was best left alone. Though one could never tell for sure; more than once she had led him straight up to a revelation and then finished off in Polish which she couldn’t be persuaded to translate—and of which he knew not a word. At her worst, she would slam the door on his gaze like an empress—with a “What are you doing here, I’d like to know?” At her lovingest, she would beam at him, skirt spread languidly, from the pot.

“You can always bring the little Ruth here to visit, Pauli. I like the little Ruth. That you know.”

“I know, darling. And how you are right. To like her.” He sighed, with a stroke of the shoe-cloth. “Not so little any more. Almost twenty-one.”

“But interesting. I find her
sehr interessant.
”

Though she couldn’t really speak his German, she had caught onto some of it—why was there no hope of his ever convincing her that she was his superior all round? “She’s just a normal, sweet girl, Leni.”

“Mmm.” She must be lipsticking. “And with so-so talent, says Ninon. On that subject, Ninon dassent hold back—not to Leni. We know each other too long ago, under too much hardship.”

Was this why she would now go to the Mannixes—with the sharp Ninon protective at her side? He knew better than to push it. One black shoe was shined. “Ruth has talent enough.”

“Oehrr.” This was the lower lip being painted. “A sweet, normal girl. Just like any girl who the mother has been shot by a lover.”

He dropped the shoe. “There is nothing to that story. I never even hear it from anybody except you.”

“And who should you hear it from—there?”

He came round to her door again; she knew how to draw him. “You meet the husband and wife once for ten minutes at a restaurant—so naturally, you know everything. Or from the kaffeeklatsches at Éclair?” For in spite of himself, he wondered too.

She was seated at her second and real dressing table, looking at herself in the mirror with that special gaze, eyes squinted against the loss of beauty, lips parted for an angel to bring it back. “
Sehr elegant,
she was. No drink she took, no dope, not even a cigarette. But there she was, along with that crowd who took everything. And burning inside. What else such a woman is after, except—?” Shrugging at his image in the glass, she drew a significant finger across her throat. “From someone, she wants it. I know that kind.” She shuddered. “I never tell you, Pauli. But, I think it was—from him.”

“
Leni!
”

“I know, I know; you don’t say it to me every day? A kinder man than your patron, never. Nine times a day people go up that stoop for a favor, nobody gets turned away. But I don’t see your patron—that night at the party. I see the
husband.
So cool, so smart—there were handsome little Jews like that in Munich. They get the girls; often for nothing, for love they get them. But they never come to the stage door themselves.”

She rested her chin on her plaited fingers and stared at him, a sybil to his image, or a Marschallin. “And such a father, you say afterwards—a double father to his child. But naturally. So—still I see the husband.” She turned slowly, to face him. He noted—as if he needed any clue that the evening was important to her—that she’d applied the extra, single-hair lashes which took even longer than the beaded mascara, and that she saw and noted his approval. “So, naturally, if I ask myself how such a man would do it, I get the answer. He hires the lover to do it.”

“
Aie.
” He struck his forehead, at the same time noting his watch.
“Now
you tell me. For God’s sake, Leni, if you are serious I had better not take you at all.” They both knew she had no curb to her tongue—and were jointly proud.

“
Aie
yourself,
stupido.
” She knew endearments in every language, and he was happy with any of them not in her own. “I think that no longer. Not for ages.” She stood up, brushing off nails squared down with the housework she could never be caught at, and tonight a shining, unmottled puce. How she must have kept herself from the candy! “Nyah—not once I know the lover.”

“You
met
him?”

“I only need to once. Then—impossible. To hire him, the lover.” She waited.

“Why?”

She gave him the grandest answer in her repertory. “
O
tterly impossible. I know
Poles.
”

And he could return now, if he wished, to the other shoe. In fact she saw him glance again at his
Gérard-Philippe.
But there was always plenty of time allotted to their toilette. This was why.

“You see?” she pouted. “You think I tell you everything—about me?”

He smiled. No, he did not think. Nor did she find it in the least odd that such an account should be referred to as “about her.” As he turned, he saw that she was arching her head in a certain familiar way; one heavy shoulder, stiffened with the ailment of old dancers, gave an arthritic crack. She was preening. The hair? But they had already spoken of that. “The new corset!” he said, twirling her completely round, circling her himself, counter-clockwise. It was of white satin, thick in quality as the waist it enclosed, and nostalgically like the bodice of a tutu, as well it might be, its undoubted source being the “only” possible supplier of same. He touched its décolletage ribbon and then looked down at himself, he didn’t quite know why—at his striped trouser leg, its perfect V on the lace of his shoe. From his vest, he took the extra handkerchief tucked there for fragrance—both of them had a French scorn of deodorants—and flourishing it to his nose, inhaled, cocking a beau’s eyebrow over it. Both of them stared at each other in the mirror. “Beautiful?” he said.

“I got it at a price. Through Erminie.”

There was never any other answer to his compliments than a murmured dossier of this sort. But in the mirror, she said, “I hear he’s very attractive to women, your Judge. They say those
little
men often have—you know.” Behind, where the mirror couldn’t see, she tickled his curly silver nape. “OK don’t shock. Your precious Mannixes; you think he’s all brain. But leave him to Ninon, I say. The one time I saw him—. I wouldn’t want to be in the dock to him. He scared me blue.”

“Leave him—to Ninon?”

“Didn’t you want me to tell you, why I agree to go?”

He had forgotten. The mirror palled for now, under the force of this gossip. He considered. “Tcha!” he said then. “No.”

“You think Madame would take so much trouble for an ordinary dancer—all right, the Ruth is sweet, she’s got something about her, and you are her second father. But you can know Madame’s standards when it comes to the ensemble—and still think that?”

“He pays for Ruth like for any student, that I know. And she is not yet in the ensemble. It is only a year she goes there.”

“How many vacancies for students? And how long a student stays, if she does not make the ensemble?”

“She
told
you this, Ninon? That she is after him?”

“Over many years, I put two and two. And all of a sudden. When she ask you to ring Anna, about dinner. Then says, ‘No, dahling, no need for you two to stop by for me, at my hotel’—I arrive there at the house, by myself. Then I get it, all of a sudden—zrrt!”

“But he is what—sixty? And she—” He considered again. “Tcha.”

“You have
seen
her sixty.”

He caught edge in her tone: You have seen mine. “It is true,” he said. “She looks very well. And he of course never changes. And even so, such a distinguished man—”

“
She
is distinguished.”

“Ah yes—yet, oh it is fantastic. For her to be after—
him.
” But he began to smile. “I begin to remember though—our dear Ninon never—it is true, we never know her to pick one of us.”

“I think…not
after
,” she said delicately. She had taken up a pencil, and was feathering a brow to suit. “I think—
before.
”

“What do you mean?”

Into one nostril, then the other, she touched a rouged fifth-fingertip, then rubbed the residue on the lobe of each ear. This allowed a shrug. “To see Ninon Fracca go after someone, even
him
—even for that I am not sure I would stoop myself, after all these years, to go
there.
That is of minor interest to me. But!” She clasped her hands and flapped her heavy-sooted lashes up at him. “I think it
already
happen. Years ago, it must be, when he and the child went over. In ’44? Yes, I should not be surprised—I think your patron and our Ninon have already had their little
affaire.
”