T. Boyle: The Women

And how did that make him feel? Belligerent. Angry. Disgusted. Let them ignore him, the prudes and the timid little rodents they were married to, afraid all their lives to break ranks, to live, to make the grand gesture, any gesture. . but now his companion 3had him by the arm and was leading him toward a group of men in the very center of things — was that Robert? Oscar? — and he felt himself swell up till he could hardly keep his cane from pirouetting across the floor. What he didn’t notice — nor did his companion — was the tall dark sober-faced young woman slipping in through the door, her ticket clutched in one gloved hand, her purse in the other. She noticed him, though, her gaze roving over the crowd from the place she’d chosen in the corner — both wanting to be seen and at the same time striving for anonymity, unescorted at a matinee, unattached and at odds with her husband, a devotee of the dance and of what Karsavina had once been, a single woman out on a rainy afternoon. Olgivanna saw the same hats, shoulders, furs and jabbering faces he’d seen, a cotillion, a pecking order, society at large, and then all at once he was there and her eyes seized on him.

Her first sensation was the thrill of recognizing a celebrated face in public, a jolt of the nervous system that carried with it a hint of self-congratulation, as if she’d come up with the solution to a puzzle in a flash of inspiration. The second thing she felt was that she absolutely must talk to him — a compulsion so strong she very nearly bolted through the crowd to him, though here she was an utter stranger and unescorted and unintroduced, but she suppressed the impulse out of shyness and a vertiginousness verging on panic: What could she possibly say to him? How would she break the ice? Get him to look at her even? And the third thing, a thought clamoring atop the other two and cloaked in a rush of hormonal flapping, was that he would know her on some deep unfathomable level, as if it were fated, as if they were reincarnated lovers out of the Mahabharata or Rice Burroughs — and more: that he would take her to himself, master her in a fierce blend of power and submission. 4

Frank 5was oblivious. He was the center of attention, preening and performing for the little group that had gathered round him, old friends and fellows-well-met, joking, laughing, carting out one story after another and making his deadpan observations about this couple or that — and let them look, let them — when the start of the program was announced and Albert took him by the arm and they made their way to a box in front. As it happened, Albert slid in first, taking the seat adjoining a vacant one, and Frank settled in on his right. The lights dimmed. The conductor rose from the pit, his arms elevated over the score. And then, at the last minute, Olgivanna drifted gracefully down the center aisle, a moving shadow against the backdrop of the stage. The usher stood aside, the curtain rising now, the audience stirring, and here was her seat, and she barely had time to register the unremarkable figure beside her before the music began and the dancers appeared and she realized with a jolt that he was there, right there, one seat over from her.

For his part, Frank had glanced up as she slipped into her seat — a reflex of the human organism: there’s a movement, the eye goes to it — just as he would have glanced up at anyone, the cows from the lobby or the stuffed shirts they were with or even one of his sworn enemies. A glance, that was all, but he liked what he saw. She was hatless, with minimal makeup, her hair parted in the middle and drawn up in a chignon, a lace shawl clinging to her shoulders. He registered that — the simplicity of her dress and style, a kind of purity and faith in her own beauty that stood all the rest of the puffed-up, powdered and behatted matrons on their heads, and the way she’d moved, a tall young woman in her twenties, sliding into a seat at the ballet with a balletic grace all her own. He stole another glance. And then another.

There was movement on the stage now, a burst of applause as Karsavina appeared — her legs good still, her face less so — and its dying fall. He was conscious of silent effort, of women and men twirling and wobbling like bowling pins that won’t go down, and he understood immediately that this would be a mediocre performance by an artist in decline. A bore. A wasted afternoon. He bent forward to look past Albert. The young woman — she was a girl, really — sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on the stage. Her carriage was flawless, from the way she held her shoulders to the swell of her breasts to the pronounced lines of her jaw and cheekbone in profile, the beautifully scalloped ear and the pale jewel that glittered at the lobe of it — minimalist, everything about her a studied composition of the minimal. But she wasn’t an American girl — he would have bet on it.

Ten minutes into the performance — or perhaps it was longer than that, perhaps it was twenty — he began to fidget. He wanted to get up and leave — they were just going through the motions up on the stage, tired motions, dead motions, and nobody in the audience knew any better — but he had an even stronger impulse to stay and somehow attract this girl’s attention because he knew her, knew her just by looking at her, and he wanted more, much more, contact, recognition, a glance, a smile. “They’re lifeless,” he murmured, leaning into Albert, his friend’s startled face hanging there in the glow of the stage like a jack-o’-lantern on a wire. “They’re dead,” he said, just loudly enough so that she could hear — and she did hear, he could tell from her reaction though she never shifted her eyes from the stage—“dead and dancing to the dead.”

At the intermission — at the moment the applause died and before she could get up and wander off by herself — he leaned across Albert and said, “I couldn’t help but notice your response — you agree, don’t you? That Karsavina might just as well have stayed in London for all the inspiration she’s showing here today? That she’d rather be in London. Knitting. Or whatever she does there.”

She turned her face to him then, her eyes fastening on his. He couldn’t know what he was saying, couldn’t know how his comment during the dance had echoed one of the dicta of Gurdjieff, 6her master, who had striven his whole life to awaken the race from the deadness of the material world and into the consciousness of the mystic truths that lay beyond it, or that she’d been one of Gurdjieff’s principal danseuses, or that she’d left Paris just three weeks earlier at his insistence after she’d nursed him through the worst of his injuries from the automobile accident that had nearly killed him, or how she’d chopped wood all afternoon every day so that he’d have enough fuel to keep warm through the blasts and contingencies of the winter — or even, on a more elemental level, that she agreed wholeheartedly with his assessment of Karsavina. “Yes,” she said, “you are absolutely right. This is a rote performance. An embarrassment.”

Her voice captivated him. Soft, rhythmic, the beat of the phrases a kind of music in itself, and what was her accent? Eastern European of some sort — Polish? Romanian? He said, “She’s married to a diplomat, isn’t she? Running a school now”—he’d gleaned this from the program and added, redundantly—“in London.”

“The Royal Academy of Dancing. She helped to found it.”

“Yes,” he said, talking past Albert’s flaming face, “yes, of course. But let me introduce myself — and my friend here, this is Albert Bleutick—”

She dropped her eyes a moment, then came back to him. “But you do not need an introduction,” she murmured, and he felt the blood charge through his veins as if a ligature had been loosened. “Certainly, this is the case, no? But I am Olga Milanoff, known to my friends”—and here she paused to let him consider the freight of nuances the association was meant to carry—“as Olgivanna.”