the Infant could do—how high, how fast, how bravely. “No fear—none. She’s like cat.” He’s compared other dancers to other things—“She’s like knife, clean, bam!” “She’s like smoke.” “She’s like happy little dog—jumps until you pat on the head”—but of the Infant, now, he’s gotten quieter. It isn’t the silence of having moved on; it’s a different silence, of having moved deeper. He is not making new ballets for anyone else, and he’s casting the Infant in all the old dances, wanting to see what they’ll look like on her. The old dancers are miffed and alarmed and helpless; the young ones cry and try to get thinner. She hears all this, shut up in the apartment. People bring in the gossip along with the books and the flowers. She shrugs. She sees herself shrugging, in the mirror that leans against one of the living room walls, a mirror she uses for physical therapy and otherwise pretty much ignores.
“Oh, dear,” said one visitor, who’d been fretting about losing her old parts and was suddenly aware of having been thoughtless. “But I guess there are worse things in life.”
“Yes,” she said, and laughed, “like frozen spinach. Have you ever tasted it? Somehow I never had, but I got curious last week. Oh, just frighteningly awful.” She glanced again at the mirror and saw the two of them laughing, the old chic troubled dancer and herself merrily chortling in her wheelchair, and she felt sick.
Sometimes she looks at Malcolm, and he kicks people out. “She’s tired,” he says; or he refers to some fictitious imminent appointment. It’s like being a Tudor monarch, irrational and absolute: all she has to do is lift a querulous eyebrow, and he dispatches the offender. (Except Tudor monarchs didn’t have eyebrows: too fair, or maybe they’d plucked them. She’d gone on a reading binge—all the wives. Which sounds pointed—thoughat least her husband has never resorted to decapitation—but wasn’t, because it was only one of many binges. Russian and French history; Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupassant; Beverley Nichols and then a slew of gardening histories; Lafcadio Hearn; Denton Welch; murder mysteries; Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil; and a lot more, books brought over from the public library or ordered from London or Paris, many cookbooks, volumes of diaries and letters. All the reading she never did when she was young and just danced: a spotty curriculum entirely based on her own happy, avid whims.)
But this morning, with the company safely packed onto the boat, there are no worried, exhausting visitors for her to jolly along. There’s the mail, the coffee, the tour of the plants (looking for leaves that might have died since yesterday—there aren’t any—and pinching leaves off the geraniums to get the scent), the cat stretched out in a block of sunlight, asleep and grinning, and a Mozart wind serenade on the record player. There’s the bathroom stuff; and a shampoo, a long, perilous procedure in which Malcolm binds her with white cloths, mummylike, to a board that slants up to the kitchen sink. Then there’s lunch, delicious, a salad with tiny potatoes and thin green beans and olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. And olives. And bread, thickly spread with butter. “Oh, Malcolm, thank you.”
She takes her hair out of rollers and brushes it and looks through a cookbook, thinking about dinner. “Haddock stew?” she says to Malcolm, who is folding laundry. The cat sits up and starts energetically washing a leg. “He heard me. Yes, darling, we’ll slip you something. You won’t starve, I promise.”
Then more bathroom stuff and she takes a nap while Malcolm goes out to the fish store and the wine store and the A&P. Then they go out together, she wearing sunglasses and wrapped in a plaid blanket (“my neurasthenic Baden-Badenmillionaire outfit,” she calls it), and Malcolm pushes her along Riverside Drive, where the wind is cold and the sun breaks the water into tiny
“Oh, dear,” said one visitor, who’d been fretting about losing her old parts and was suddenly aware of having been thoughtless. “But I guess there are worse things in life.”
“Yes,” she said, and laughed, “like frozen spinach. Have you ever tasted it? Somehow I never had, but I got curious last week. Oh, just frighteningly awful.” She glanced again at the mirror and saw the two of them laughing, the old chic troubled dancer and herself merrily chortling in her wheelchair, and she felt sick.
Sometimes she looks at Malcolm, and he kicks people out. “She’s tired,” he says; or he refers to some fictitious imminent appointment. It’s like being a Tudor monarch, irrational and absolute: all she has to do is lift a querulous eyebrow, and he dispatches the offender. (Except Tudor monarchs didn’t have eyebrows: too fair, or maybe they’d plucked them. She’d gone on a reading binge—all the wives. Which sounds pointed—thoughat least her husband has never resorted to decapitation—but wasn’t, because it was only one of many binges. Russian and French history; Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupassant; Beverley Nichols and then a slew of gardening histories; Lafcadio Hearn; Denton Welch; murder mysteries; Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil; and a lot more, books brought over from the public library or ordered from London or Paris, many cookbooks, volumes of diaries and letters. All the reading she never did when she was young and just danced: a spotty curriculum entirely based on her own happy, avid whims.)
But this morning, with the company safely packed onto the boat, there are no worried, exhausting visitors for her to jolly along. There’s the mail, the coffee, the tour of the plants (looking for leaves that might have died since yesterday—there aren’t any—and pinching leaves off the geraniums to get the scent), the cat stretched out in a block of sunlight, asleep and grinning, and a Mozart wind serenade on the record player. There’s the bathroom stuff; and a shampoo, a long, perilous procedure in which Malcolm binds her with white cloths, mummylike, to a board that slants up to the kitchen sink. Then there’s lunch, delicious, a salad with tiny potatoes and thin green beans and olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. And olives. And bread, thickly spread with butter. “Oh, Malcolm, thank you.”
She takes her hair out of rollers and brushes it and looks through a cookbook, thinking about dinner. “Haddock stew?” she says to Malcolm, who is folding laundry. The cat sits up and starts energetically washing a leg. “He heard me. Yes, darling, we’ll slip you something. You won’t starve, I promise.”
Then more bathroom stuff and she takes a nap while Malcolm goes out to the fish store and the wine store and the A&P. Then they go out together, she wearing sunglasses and wrapped in a plaid blanket (“my neurasthenic Baden-Badenmillionaire outfit,” she calls it), and Malcolm pushes her along Riverside Drive, where the wind is cold and the sun breaks the water into tiny
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