Chapter 3 #2
“If you don’t want to be thrown out of the company, I need you to stop drawing attention to yourself. I need you to give me a reason to keep you. Show me something. Show me you’re worth all this,” Monsieur Lefèvre snapped, then charged off into the wings, shouting for Joseph Buquet.
I’m not sure how I made it offstage. My limbs no longer felt within my control, and I trembled all over. Tears blurred my vision, and I had the strong desire to lash out and strike something. Anything.
It was all so painfully unfair.
I knew I wasn’t the best dancer in the corps, but I certainly wasn’t the worst. I’d worked so hard all season long. My only fault was that I’d been caught by the gimlet eye of Carlotta Giudicelli.
My livelihood, my ability to support myself, my entire life, hung in the balance, all because this one woman had decided she didn’t like me.
I pushed the back of my hand over my face, wiping my wet eyes and runny nose. I felt like a disastrous mess and knew I looked it. Several of the crew gave me worried glances as I passed by, wandering down the long maze of corridors to my dressing room.
I didn’t want to go inside.
I didn’t want to be alone.
Outside my door, I stopped and took in deep breaths, pressing a hand to my stomach as I tried to rein in my racing heart.
Knowing all too well how quickly this panic could spiral into all-out terror, I willed myself to focus on better things.
Smaller things. Little, tiny crumbs of positivity that could help pull me out of impending despair.
I still had a job.
Monsieur Lefèvre hadn’t fired me.
Yet.
And he’d given me concrete instructions on what I needed to do to keep my job.
Show me something. Show me you’re worth all this.
I’d gone nearly an entire season without Carlotta noticing my presence. I needed to slip back into the anonymity of the corps. Once she realized how utterly unremarkable I was, I could go back to being just another ballerina, faceless in a crowd, and undeserving of attention.
My worth was not in my singularity. My worth was in my ability to disappear into a roomful of dancers, taking a girl with dreams and wants and longings—me—and turning her into just another body onstage, moving in time with all the other bodies.
A tiny piece of color in an enormous mosaic whose whole was far greater than any of its individual pieces.
I felt my chest lighten. Breaths came easier now. My heartbeat began to calm. There was a plan. I would keep my head down. I would do what I was meant to do and dance.
As I entered the dressing room, I could tell that there was something different. The space didn’t feel the way an empty room was meant to. The air stirred, as if it had just slid over another form, another body, another presence.
Someone had been in here while I was gone.
I pulled my reticule from the little drawer I’d stashed it in. A quick check of its contents showed it had not been touched. Whoever had come in did not have thievery in their heart.
In fact…
I turned, my gaze sweeping over the room, and saw that the intruder had instead left something behind. There, on the upright piano, was a Faust score, spread open and ribboned, as if inviting me to sit down and begin at the selected passage.
I took a hesitant step closer, squinting to see what the music was, then froze.
The score was opened to “The Jewel Song.”
It was too tempting to ignore, though I tried my best.
I took off my wig and removed my costume, putting both of them away with care, then slowly removed my heavy stage makeup. All the while, my eyes unconsciously strayed back to the piano.
As a dancer, I had no cause to ever come into contact with a score.
Our movements were instructed by measurement claps and the pounding of Silvio’s piano.
Earlier in the season, during rehearsals for Samson and Delilah, Silvio had fallen ill with a nasty cough, and we’d been forced to learn the choreography with only the beats from Madame Giry’s walking stick under our dance.
So why was this score now in my dressing room?
A dark part of me wondered if Carlotta had instructed her entourage to plant it here so that she could discover it in my possession and use it as further proof that I was plotting to steal her role.
Why else would it be here? Why else would it be open to the very page that would look the most damning?
I had to get rid of it.
I wanted to hide it away in some unused corner in the darkest part of backstage so that it would never be found. I wanted to…
My fingers twitched.
I wanted to study it.
Father had taught me how to read music when I was quite small.
I knew how to pick out time signatures and keys.
I knew what each of the notes and symbols meant.
Sometimes he’d brought home whole scores, with the entire orchestration laid out across the page, and he would have me hum one of the instruments’ parts as he zipped through a tricky section on his violin.
I’d been a decent sight reader, playing the piano with serviceable skill, but it had been many years since I’d had reason to look through pages of music.
I put on my own clothing, keeping a careful watch on the score as if it might come to life and attack me, and I readied my belongings as if about to head out for the night.
Only…
When the time came to walk out of the dressing room, I didn’t.
I waited until I was certain every performer had left, then took a seat in front of the old upright.
I ran my fingers across the keys, feeling out the chords, before I committed to pressing them down.
I checked behind me once, twice, a full three times to make sure the door to my room was shut.
And then I took a deep breath and played the first notes while attempting to match their pitches.
Immediately, I knew I sounded terrible.
There was no power, no support. I felt like a fish hooked out of the Seine, flopping about on the quay, gasping for water.
I tried again. This time, my voice was right and it was true, but it was not enough. I wouldn’t be heard in the front row, let alone from any of the balconies.
Frustrated, I shoved myself away from the piano and paced the room, humming through a quick warm-up. The notes sounded sweet, neither sharp nor flat, but when pushed to become louder, to sound richer and fuller and more there, I floundered.