Shoving past the monocled man in formal dress and his mustachioed servant, Jeannette realizes it’s the impresario of the Ballets Russes himself she’s just treated so rudely. She curses under her breath as she makes her way down the dimly lit corridor, past the open door of another dressing-room where she glimpses a man in costume and a half-dressed ballerina, one long leg wrapped around him, his hands cradling her ass, her face buried in his neck. Why don’t people bother shutting their doors?
She sees the bald pate of the regisseur approaching and ducks her head to avoid his gaze, worrying about having her pay docked again. He leaves an overwhelming scent of cigarettes in his wake, as if he himself were made of burning paper tightly wrapped around a pinky’s worth of fragrant tobacco.
Jeannette’s heart is beating as hard as if she’d just done a series of complicated jumps in a cross-floor exercise.
Explanations percolate inside her, words and possibilities that gleam and shimmer, threatening to surface from the murkiness of her oldest and least understood feelings and memories. Looking at that woman’s face had been like looking into a mirror. Who was she?
The company’s choreographer, Mikhail Fokine, hired Jeannette on the spot when she auditioned as an extra dancer for the Russian Ballet’s season in Paris. Had he recognized something in her that she had failed to see in all her days of gazing into mirrors and dancing past them?
Russian. Russians. But Jeannette is French, through and through.
She starts to climb the metal stairs, then pauses halfway up, gazing down at the floor below and all the people scurrying about there, each of them busily preparing for the performance—the painters with their color-spattered smocks and brushes; the carpenters with their hammers and saws. Ballerinas in toe-shoes, looking like little flocks of ducks as they make their way through the dust-filled air, trying to avoid nails, tacks, and the wandering hands of the workmen.
No answer she can think of makes any sense.
The backstage bell chimes four times: thirty minutes till she needs to be on stage. Jeannette forces herself to look away—to keep climbing, taking care not to stumble.
Her aunt’s words come back to her—her sour, cold, unloving aunt, who so often spoke in a way that was full of portent and yet impossible to comprehend. What can you expect?—Jeannette had overheard her say to her father, more than once. It’s a question of blood.
Jeannette had thought it was her menstrual blood that had so offended her aunt’s sensibilities. It disgusted Jeannette too. For an embarrassingly long time, she thought she was the only person who bled that way, every month. She always did her best to hide it, scrubbing away any evidence, disposing of the soiled rags, using scent to cover any lingering odor left behind.
Blood. Her blood. One of her dance mates finally let her in on the secret, that all of them bled, in just the way she did. It had so often felt shameful to Jeannette, being an only child. Being without a mother who might have helped her make sense of what it meant, being a girl. Becoming a woman.
Her cousins, all from her father’s side, seemed as close and happy together as a litter of puppies. They all resembled one another. None of them resembled Jeannette. Their hair was lank and straight, where hers was abundant and full. They had freckles, enviable bosoms, and sturdy limbs. They made fun of her narrow feet with their high arches and long first toe.
She used to stare at photographs of her mother, looking for the ways in which she might grow up to look like her. But she didn’t really resemble her mother either, no matter how carefully she studied the photos and ransacked her memory.
How could it be that Jeannette looked so uncannily like Anna Pavlova’s Russian seamstress? It was evident from the moment they’d stood face to face in the doorway, their proportions exactly the same, their skin fine-textured and fair, their identical eyes deep-set, their faces heart-shaped, both of them with narrow, long-fingered hands.
Jeannette knew of doppelgängers in literature and even in the ballet literature: Odette and Odile in Swan Lake. She suddenly remembers that English painting Paul Poiret had made a great point of taking her to see, when she and he were still going about together. She’d been more impressed by Paul’s nervous excitement over showing it to her than she’d been by the painting itself, which showed two identical couples in medieval dress happening upon each other in the forest. There was a look of horror in the eyes of the two girls, each a mirror image of the other.
Just as the backstage bell chimes again, an idea falls upon her with the weight and rudeness of a piece of scenery toppling over. That pretty little girl in the dressing-room, with her honey-colored curls and wide-set eyes—that little girl looked like the child she and Paul might have made, if he hadn’t been such a pig.