Death in the Fifth Position by Gore Vidal

now as it was when she appeared in the fashionable world with a face like a bemused horse and all that Shellabarger cash, from slaughtered pigs and sheep. Nevertheless, her blood-drenched income is adequate … though there is no longer the Paris house or the Amalfi villa or the Irish castle … only the Park Avenue mansion and the Palm Beach house, where lavish parties are given, in season. I am told that at her dinners neither pig nor sheep is served, only poultry, fish and game … real sense of guilt as any analyst would tell you at the drop of a fee.
    Mr. Washburn and I arrived before the rest of our company. As a rule, he waits until Eglanova is ready and then he escorts her; but tonight, for some reason, he couldn’t wait to get out of the theater. Both of us were hot in our tuxedos … his white and mine black, an obvious clue to our respective incomes. Fortunately, the house was cool … a gust of freshened air met us in the downstairs hall,a vast room with grey marble columns, marble floor and Greek statuary in niches. A footman took our invitations and led us up a flight of stairs where, so help me, a butler announced our names to a hundred or so decorative guests in a drawing room which looked like the waiting room at Penn Station redecorated by King Midas … the guests looked as though they might be waiting for trains, too, I thought, as we moved toward our hostess who stood beneath a chandelier at the room’s center, all in green and diamonds, receiving her guests with a half-smile and mumbled greetings as though she weren’t quite sure why she was there, or why
they
were there.
    “Dear Alma,” said Mr. Washburn, beginning to expand as he always does in the presence of money.
    “Ivan!” They embraced like two mechanical toys, like those figures which come out of old-fashioned clocks every hour on the hour. I bowed over her hand in the best Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet style.
    “You poor dear,” said Alma, fixing my employer with yellow eyes. “What a disaster!”
    “We must take the good with the bad,” said Mr. Washburn gently.
    “
I
was there!” breathed Alma Edderdale, shutting her eyes for a moment as though to recall, as vividly as possible, every detail of that terrible night.
    “Then you know what it was like …”
    “I do … I do.”
    “The ghastly fall …”
    “Can I ever forget?”
    “The end of a life … a great ballerina’s life.”
    “If there was only
something
one could do.” That didit, I thought. Mr. Washburn would immediately suggest an Ella Sutton Memorial Ballet, sets, costumes and choreographer’s fee to be paid by that celebrated patroness, the Marchioness of Edderdale. But Mr. Washburn is as tactful as he is venal.
    “We all feel that way, Alma.” Then he paused significantly.
    “Perhaps … but we’ll talk of that another time. Tell me about
him.
”
    “About whom?”
    “The husband. The … well, you know what they say.”
    “Ah … quite broken up,” said Mr. Washburn evasively, and I withdrew, moving toward the bar in the next room where, among other things, they were serving a Pommery ’29 worth its weight in uranium. I knocked off two glasses before Jane arrived, looking very young and innocent in a plain white dinner dress, her hair drawn severely back ballerina-style. She was like the daughter of a country minister at her first grown-up party, only she looked perhaps too innocent to be the real thing. She caused a mild stir, her appearance at least: this gang hadn’t absorbed her yet, made her a legend the way they had Eglanova who now stood, between Alyosha and Louis in the doorway, like some bird of paradise poised on the edge of a hen coop. In the excitement of Eglanova’s entrance, Jane and I met near the bar and toasted one another in Pommery.
    “How did you like it tonight?” she asked, breathless and young, like a bride in an advertisement (and, like the model in question, well paid for her