And that was it. There was nothing else. He sat back in his chair, and thought about all three. How to find them, where to start. The wheels were already turning. And then with a sudden start, he glanced at his watch.
“Son of a bitch …” he muttered to himself. It was just after ten-thirty. He grabbed his jacket off the back of a chair, and hurried down the three flights of his brownstone. He had the top floor of a lovely house on East Sixty-ninth Street. And he was lucky enough to find a cab almost at once, but with posttheater traffic, he barely made it to the stage door in time to meet Sasha.
She came out at precisely eleven-ten, as he knew she would, looking tired, wearing jeans and sneakers and carrying her dance bag.
“How was it?” There was always the tension of someone having performed major surgery, not unlike Eloise's struggles with difficult denouements in the plot. But somehow this seemed more exciting.
“It was awful.”
He knew better than to believe her, and put a protective arm around her as he took her dance bag. “You expect too much of yourself, little one.” She was so tiny, it always made him feel protective of her, and in any case, he was that kind of person.
“No, it was terrible. My feet were killing me. It's going to rain tonight. I can always tell.” John had learned that dancers' feet were a constant source of agony, and a constant topic of conversation.
“I'll massage them when we get home.” He promised as they climbed into a cab and headed back to East Sixty-ninth Street.
The apartment was peaceful and quiet when they arrived. There were only two other tenants in the building, one a doctor who never seemed to be there. He was younger than John, and when he wasn't on call, delivering babies at New York Hospital, he seemed to be staying with assorted women. And the other was a woman who worked for IBM and traveled eight to ten months of the year. So most of the time he was alone in the building. He had a view of the little garden outside, and the larger gardens of the town houses on Sixty-eighth Street. “Do you want a drink?” he inquired, poking his head out of his well-ordered kitchen.
“Just some tea, thanks.” She sat down on the couch with a sigh and stretched her arms and her back and her legs. She never cooked anything in his small kitchen. It never dawned on her to do things like that for him or herself. John always did them for her.
He emerged a few minutes later, bringing her tea in a glass, the way she liked it. It was a Russian tradition he had come to like, and he had bought special glass mugs just for that purpose. He had been equally expert at preparing Eloise's snacks while she was working. But in return, she had cooked him some wonderful dinners between books. She loved to bake, and had a real flair for French cuisine. Unlike Sasha, who thought being expected to make toast was an affront to her as an artist.
“Are you coming to the performance tomorrow?” she asked as she slowly pulled the pins from her hair, and it began to cascade in long blond sheets past her shoulders.
John looked at her with regret. He hated to remind her. He knew that whenever he did it would create a scene between them. It annoyed her when he went anywhere. She expected him to be always near. And the next afternoon he was flying to Boston.
“I'm going up to the Cape for the weekend, Sash. I said something about it a few weeks ago, but you may have forgotten. It's my mother's birthday. I tried to get out of it, but I really couldn't. It's her seventieth, and it's important.” Both of his brothers were going to be there, and their wives, and their children. It always made him feel inadequate somehow, going there without an entourage to show for his years of marriage and assorted romances. Everything they had was tangible and obvious, wives who had nice sapphires or diamonds as engagement rings and anniversary presents, kids who had skinned knees and missing teeth, and in the case of his oldest nephew, even a high school diploma. It was going to be a long weekend. But he knew it would be fun too. He was fond of his two brothers, one older, one younger. His sisters-in-law were a bit difficult, but the kids were great. And there was no way he could bring Sasha. Even at his age, his parents would have frowned on his bringing a woman with him for a family occasion. “I'll be home Sunday.”
“Don't bother.” She straightened her back and dropped both feet to the floor gracefully. “I have rehearsal Sunday afternoon. And I'm not interested in crumbs left over from your parents' table.” She looked so outraged that he could only laugh at her choice of words. Sometimes her English was outlandish.
“Is that what I am, Sash? A crumb?” It was more than obvious that she thought so.
“I don't understand what is so sacred about your family. You've met my parents, my aunt, my grandmother. Are your parents so much better than mine? They would disapprove because I'm a dancer?” She sounded terribly Russian and looked extremely dramatic as she paced around the room, her hair flying and her hands shoved into the back pockets of her blue jeans, her tiny little body tense with emotion.
“They're very private, that's all.” And very Bostonian. A writer had been difficult enough. A ballerina would drive his mother totally crazy. She had a healthy respect for the arts, but preferably on a stage, not in her son's bedroom. “They don't understand relationships like ours.”
“Neither do I. Are we together or are we not?” She stood in front of him looking like an enchanting elf, but an elf who was extremely angry. She felt shut out by the family he never introduced her to, and without his ever saying so, she was aware of their disapproval.
“Of course we're together. But as far as they're concerned, you don't acknowledge those things until you're married, or at least engaged.” And she was the one who resisted that. She saw no need for a permanent statement.
“They think we're immoral?”
“Maybe. They prefer not to think about it. They don't want to have to confront this kind of thing, so they don't. And as their son, I have to respect that. They're pretty old, Sash. My mother is going to be seventy on Saturday, my father is seventy-nine. It's a little late to force them into acknowledging modern arrangements.”
“That's ridiculous.” She stormed across the room again, and then stood glaring at him from the kitchen doorway. “And if you were any kind of a man at all, you would take me anyway, and force them to acknowledge my existence.”
“I'd rather invite them to see you dance the next time they're here. That would be a better introduction. Don't you think so?”
Sasha thought it over as she crossed the room again, only slightly mollified, and then she sat down on the couch and began to put on her sneakers. He knew it was a bad omen. She was always storming out at two in the morning and going back to her apartment.
“What are you doing?”
“I'm going home. Where I belong.” She looked at him malevolently and he sighed. He hated scenes, and she doted on them. They seemed to be part of her art form.
“Don't be silly.” He stretched out a hand and touched her shoulder. It felt like rock beneath his fingers, “We each have things in our lives we have to do on our own. You have your work and your ballet friends and your rehearsals. I have my own work, and a few other obligations.”
“I don't want to hear it. The truth is, Mr. Chapman” —she stood up and glared at him, swinging her dance bag over her shoulder—“that you're a snob, and you're afraid your parents won't think I'm good enough. And do you know what? I don't care. You can have your Mayflower and your Plymouth Rock and your Boston. I don't need to be in the social register, I will be in Who's Who one day. And if that's not good enough”—she made a gesture that said it all, and stalked to the door. And for once he didn't stop her. He knew that by Sunday she'd cool off, and he couldn't appease her by not going.