Fountain of Death(11)

Gregor Demarkian was a tall, broad shaggy man in an expensive winter coat. He had an air of authority, but he was much too old—much older than Greta had imagined a woman like Bennis Hannaford would be willing to put up with. Maybe they weren’t lovers after all. Maybe they were just friends, and Bennis Hannaford had other lovers who weren’t famous or didn’t like publicity. Whatever was going on, she didn’t seem to be with him, and Greta wasn’t interested enough in Gregor Demarkian on his own to go on standing in a drafty hallway in a leotard and tights. There wasn’t as much going on as there had seemed to be at first anyway. There had been some kind of accident, and part of the balcony railing had fallen over. The police had been called in, but no one was being arrested. The real reason the police were there had to do with a mugging that had taken place in the backyard almost a month ago. Greta found it very hard to straighten out.

The part of the railing that had fallen was a mass of splinters and nails. A tall black man with a dancer’s way of moving came out onto the balcony and called for all the beginners’ smorgasbord group to get back to their classroom. If he had come out ten minutes earlier, nobody would have listened to him, but by then everybody was bored. The women from the experts’ class had already disappeared in the direction of their studio. Greta allowed herself to be herded back to work in the company of the very fat woman who stood next to her in the dance line and a smaller, older woman who was so well dressed and fierce she made Greta nervous. A lot of the women in the class made Greta nervous. Most of them looked like they had more money than she did. All of them looked like they’d had better educations.

Back in the studio, the pace suddenly seemed to be much faster and more demanding than it had been before. The black man introduced himself as Nick Bannerman, but unlike the woman who had run the first three dances the group had done, Nick Bannerman didn’t talk on about his life and his feelings. He just got to work, and they got to work with him. Greta didn’t think she had ever moved so much in her life, or come down so hard on her knees and ankles. By the end of the first dance Nick Bannerman led, her feet ached. By the end of the second one, her legs and hips felt stiff and frozen. By the end of the third, Greta wanted only to stop—and was surprised, when she looked up at the clock, to see that it was quarter to twelve. It didn’t feel like quarter to twelve. There were windows at the back of the studio, overlooking the downward sweep of Prospect Street, showing hedges and houses and cars and spires. The sky was gray and thick with clouds. It looked darker now than it had when Greta had gotten up in the morning.

“We must have spent more time looking at the accident than I thought we did,” Greta said to the very fat woman when Nick Bannerman had finished the third dance and gone off to drink some water from his plastic tube bottle.

The fat woman was panting and shaky. She had sweat so much, the top half of her leotard was soaked through. “Two and a half hours,” she said, when she was finally able to catch her breath. “I kept checking the time.”

Greta shook her head. “And we didn’t even do anything. I mean we didn’t accomplish anything. We just wandered around.”

“I don’t see that there was anything else we could do,” the fat woman said.

The older, thinner woman turned around now and gave Greta and the fat woman a tight little smile.

“I’m Virginia Hanley,” she said, in a mock-formal voice, like someone interviewing for a job she didn’t really want. “You two are—?”

“Greta Bellamy,” Greta said.

“Dessa Carter.”

Virginia Hanley fussed with the top of her bright red Danskin leotard and the rhinestone stretch belt she was wearing at her waist. “That receptionist was a total little fool,” she said, “screaming and screaming like that when nothing had even happened. If she’d kept her head, we wouldn’t have lost any classroom time at all.”

“I don’t think we lost any dances,” Dessa Carter said drily. Sweat was making rivers down the sides of her face. “I think we just got them crammed into a very small space.”

Virginia Hanley sniffed. “I couldn’t believe the production they were making about it down there. I mean, for God’s sake. Things like that happen in old houses like this all the time. Things get worn out.”

“It didn’t look like those nails were worn out,” Dessa Carter said impassively. “It looked like they were brand new.”

“They did look brand new, didn’t they?” Greta said, startled. “You know, all the time I was looking at them, I kept feeling that something was wrong, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.”