recording came on: “We’re sorry, but that number is not listed.”
He stood up, gathered his passenger lists, waved good-night to Detective Cota, and walked out of the office to the lobby and the street.
He felt pride in Wendy Harper. She had done well.
11
SYLVIE TURNER had been staring at the lighted display on her laptop computer screen for two hours, watching the line of bright blue dots appearing on the map in their predictable progression, and her eyes were getting tired. She closed them for a moment, then turned her head to watch Paul drive. She still felt lucky whenever she looked at him. He was tall and slim and graceful, but he was also strong, the perfect dance partner, and for Sylvie, the dance was the sign and physical expression of all of the complex relations between a man and a woman. It was flirtation, shyness, flattery and affection, celebration, sharing, demand and compliance, and even possession by force. Dance projected all of her feelings, and let her act them out. She owed that to Paul, too. Dance was something she had lost, but he had restored it to her life.
Long before she met him, she had been a good dancer. Her mother had taken her to ballet class from the time when she was three until she was sixteen. She had loved it, but the discipline had been inhuman, an exercise that seemed to punish her body rather than build it. The toe shoes deformed her feet, and there was the look. A dancer was not a personality, but a fiction that had to do with the idea of perfection. Nobody had ever told Sylvie that she could not be a dancer if she ate, but it was obvious even to a small child that she shouldn’t eat. She stayed so thin that she had not begun her period when she was fifteen.
It had not bothered her particularly. Her slender flat-chested body had made her seem more like a dancer. She had kept training, practicing, dancing. She had outgrown four ballet schools by then, each one farther from home. Her mother had been driving her from Van Nuys to Santa Monica every day after school for her class at the latest and best school for nearly a year when Madame Bazetnikova had subjected the girls to her annual evaluation.
The first few girls who had gone into Madame’s office had come out smiling and crying at the same time, hugged each other and then collapsed. Madame was a difficult woman. She had been a dancer in Russia, not for the Kirov, but for a lesser company in Minsk. Her dancing career had ended in the 1960s, and by the time she defected she had been only a chaperone in a company touring Norway, and her government didn’t bother to protest her loss. But she had moved to Los Angeles and built a fanatical following among the ballet mothers of the city. As she reached old age, she had begun to look dramatic, the way they thought a ballet mistress should look. Each year she took a corps of twelve girls from all of her classes and toured the state for a week during Christmas break, presenting them in excerpts from
After most of the other girls had been called into the office and come out, she called Sylvie. By then Sylvie expected to hear that she would be Odette in
“Yes, Madame.”
“You are a serious, hardworking girl. You have studied your labanotation, learned your steps, and practiced.” She stared at Sylvie for a second. “How long do you practice at home each day?”
“Two hours, sometimes more.”
“I’ll bet a lot of times it’s more. I’ve watched you, and so I know. And you know that in each girl’s fifteenth year, I make a decision about her. You are over fifteen now, but I needed more time for you. Now I’ve decided. You will never be a ballet dancer. It’s not your fault. You tried as hard as any girl, but your body is wrong. You don’t have the look. You’re nothing but bones, but you’re still too big.”
“I’ll try harder,” she protested. “I’ll practice. I’ll stop growing and—”
But Madame was shaking her head. “That’s the wrong thing to do. Stop trying. Dance for pleasure, for the joy of it. Eat. Or don’t eat and go be a model. I know the world of dance, and I can tell you that you have gone as far as you can go.”
“Can I still come and take lessons?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it would make us both unhappy.”
Sylvie went out of the room slowly, took off her ballet slippers slowly, put them in her bag slowly, all the time hoping that something would happen to keep her from leaving. Nothing did. She went outside, walked alone to a diner down the street and used a pay telephone to call her mother, then waited in a booth for her mother to arrive.
For a year after that, she did nothing except go to school and do her homework. She ate and she grew. In a very short time, she stopped looking like an emaciated child and began to acquire curves. She grew taller, had her first period. Her resentment and sense of grievance seemed to be what transformed her into a pretty young woman over six feet tall.
Sylvie glanced at Paul again. He was driving with his usual graceful aggression, cutting in and out among the other cars, never making the others nervous, never attracting attention from the police because his coordination seemed to make his speed justified. His driving was like his dancing. When they met, she had not danced for almost ten years.
She had graduated from high school in Van Nuys and gotten a job as a receptionist at a company that sold ceramic tiles for bathrooms and kitchens. She still went out with her high-school boyfriend, Mark Karsh. She had been in love with Mark Karsh from the age of sixteen. Mark Karsh had curly black hair and brown eyes that promised intelligence. Mark had decided not to go to college because he had an uncle who was a film editor. After graduation, the uncle drew heavily upon old friendships and got Mark a job at a company that used computers to make special effects for television shows. After a few days at work, Mark was shocked: He was expected to start at the very bottom of a strict hierarchy. All he had been given was a chance to learn difficult technical skills, and to prove himself by working harder and longer than he was paid to.
Sylvie accepted his complaint that his employers were exploiting him. If they had appreciated his true worth, then he would already have been promoted, and his real movie career would have begun. But after a few months, he still had not learned to operate the machines with any skill, and he had grown sullen and lazy, so he was fired. Sylvie paid for their dates while he searched unsuccessfully for a new position. Finally he accepted the job Sylvie had gotten him in the tile factory.
One night after about a year at the tile factory, Mark asked Sylvie out to an early dinner at Il Calamari. He said he was celebrating something that he wanted to be a surprise. She had always wanted to go there, and she had waited a long time for Mark to take her on a real date, where he invited her somewhere and drove her there and paid. All through dinner he teased her, refusing to tell her what the surprise was. After dinner he drove her to her apartment. She had thoughts of special new careers for Mark, and in unguarded moments, a vision of a ring for her.
Once inside, he told her the news. “You’re not going to believe this. When I was working at the digital- imaging studio, I met a few industry people. One of them was a guy named Al Molineri. He’s known in the business.” Mark was artful in the way he underplayed it. “He’s not a major player or something. He’s just a guy who has connections. He’s written a few scripts, done some editing, video and sound, produced a movie or two. He knew my uncle’s name and he introduced me to some other guys who can get a movie made. They liked me. While I was at it, I showed them your picture, too.”
She began to feel a difficulty in her breathing. He was keeping something back—no, keeping a lot back—and she was afraid she knew what some of it was. “What picture?”
“Well, just the one I carry in my wallet at first, but then a few other things.” He hurried past that topic and into his news. “They were really interested. They want to meet with us and put us in a movie.”
