Jeannette stands for a long time, in a light rain, concealed behind a topiary outside the gate of 109 rue du Faubourg St. Honoré. A beige Renault Torpedo, its protuberant
headlamps gleaming with bravado, rattles up to the curb, driven by the Poirets’ liveried chauffeur. The front door of the mansion opens. Paul’s young wife, that celebrated gamine fashion plate, Denise Poiret, trips down the path and lets herself into the car. She is wearing emerald-green kid boots and a hat unlike any Jeannette has ever seen before.
Patiently Jeannette waits a little longer, until a wagon and workmen arrive with more furnishings for the Poiret’s new home, which is being readied for yet another of Paul’s increasingly famous parties.
While the gate is open, she walks up one side of the elaborate front garden, which looks like a miniature Versailles, past the sculpted hedges and flowerbeds and through the door, which has been left ajar.
Jeannette is prepared to shout at the Poirets’ servant, if need be—to demand to speak with Paul. But here he is, standing just inside the entryway, directing traffic. His smoking jacket, she thinks, is quite ridiculous. He’s dressed like a Chinese emperor.
“This way, madame, this way,” he says to her, describing a pathway with his right hand—the hand that is the only thing about him that betrays his origins as a man of the people. She loves his hands, the thick fingers strong and clever when touching her body or making his sketches but clumsy when it came to plying a needle and thread.
When she just stands there, he tries to look at her face, which is hidden behind the spotted veil of the frumpy little hat she borrowed for the occasion. The rest of her is well disguised beneath a plain black cloak.
“Is it you?” he says tentatively, in a low, intimate voice.
Slowly she lifts her veil. She is not wearing any makeup. She sees his confusion. She tries as hard as she can, given the circumstances, to assume an expression of goodness and innocence, tempered by weariness. She smiles without showing her teeth. She sees him panicking.
“I didn’t expect you!” he says.
She will not speak—because she knows that will give her away.
“Come in, come in,” he says, taking her hands, trying to pull off her gloves—
trying to peer at her body beneath her cloak. “My dear heart,” he says. “My dear little flea!”
Coming close to him—standing close enough to feel the soft skin of his ear against her lips—she whispers, “Say my name!” She has tried to speak with a Russian accent, easy enough to affect after spending the last two weeks with a troupe of Russian dancers.
He holds her at arm’s length, smiling. “Won’t you take off your cloak?”
She shakes her head slowly. Then, sighing, she makes her shoulders slump in a way no well-trained ballerina would ever do.
“Sonya!” he says, with obvious relief. “What a marvelous surprise!”
Jeannette throws her hat and her cloak onto the boldly patterned black-and-white marble floor. She wishes she’d thrown them at his face. “You knew!” she says, almost sings with the frenzy of an operatic soprano, finally making sense of what happened in Pavlova’s dressing-room. “And the child is yours too!” She is screaming now. “Isn’t she?”
Paul holds his head in his hands. He is aware of the sudden coldness of his fingers, a faint sense of pressure at the back of his head, and, incongruously, a rush of blood to his groin. He has suffered several episodes of insomnia since first hearing the rumor of Sonya’s resumption of work for Pavlova, knowing, as he did, that Jeannette was dancing as an extra with Diaghilev’s troupe. He has been dreading this very scene—and yet has also been vaguely thrilled by the prospect of experiencing the denouement of this long-running episodic drama that has delighted his idle hours for the past six years. He is as thrilled as he feels at the theater when the play and the actors have taken possession of him to the obliteration of everything else.
“Does she know?” Jeannette asks him in a voice drained of feeling. “Does she know about us?”
He shakes his head no. In his fantasies, the scene always ends with an episode of spectacular lovemaking, made all the more intense by his anguish and that of whichever twin has discovered his betrayal of her.
Jeannette peels his hands away from his face, so that she can look into his eyes. “You allowed her to bear your child—but not me?”
Tenderly, Paul leads her over to one of the bright yellow velvet and rosewood chairs lined up against the wall—he loves those chairs. She sits, looking down at her shoes. They are stout, practical shoes of the kind she noticed the seamstress was wearing. She had to comb the flea market to find a similar pair.
He sits in the chair beside hers. He has not let go of her hands. “You are mistaken about the child,” he says, looking around to make sure no one is there to hear them. “Sonya already had her children when I met her.”
“Children?”
“I believe,” says Paul, “she has two.” He frowns, impatient with the way this sort of detail seems to elude him, whereas other things—things that really matter to him—are jealously hoarded in his memory. “Or is it three?”
“Three! Perhaps they’re all yours.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jeannette. Sonya first came here in January of ’03. I remember precisely, because it was the year I left Worth and launched my label.”
Jeannette’s eyes are wide. “The year of our excursion to Fontainebleau.”
Paul makes a sympathetic face to make sure that she knows he’s caught her reference. Of course! Nasty business, that pregnancy. Rather careless on his part.
“She came here looking for you,” he says. “Well, ostensibly to scout the fashion houses for Anna Pavlova.”
Jeannette snatches her hands away from him. “You never told her you knew me? How could you be so wicked, Paul?”
His sense of displeasure in himself passes quickly. He smiles and his brown eyes sparkle, like those of a naughty boy caught red-handed but nonetheless proud of the feat of mischief he’s managed to pull off.
“It was too delicious,” he says to the mistress he’d so recently told, as gently as he could, that it was over between them. He’d promised his wife. He catches Jeannette’s hands again, then wanders up the length of her arms, which have the beautiful firmness of all the ballerinas he’s ever known. And yet, of all of them, she has the silkiest skin. “Oh, my sweet,” he whispers huskily. “How I’ve missed you!”
Again, she pushes him away.
An attractive young woman appears in the doorway, holding a beautifully dressed three-year-old child by the hand. The little girl looks a lot like Paul—and also like the little girl Jeannette saw in Pavlova’s dressing room, although not nearly as pretty. Not as pretty as the child Jeannette and Paul might have made together.
“Ah, Miss O’Reilly!” he calls out in English, and then, opening his arms wide, “Rosine, my angel!” The child leaps into his embrace, covering his face in kisses.
“Papa, mon cher Papa!” she says with effusive adoration.
Jeannette would have given anything for such a warm and loving relationship with her own papa. The nanny—who is so pretty that Jeannette knows it must be annoying to Paul’s wife—straightens the child’s dress when he sets her down. “Say ‘Good morning,’ Rosine!” the woman, hardly more than a girl herself, says with a charming Irish accent.
“Good morning, Rosine!” the child lisps, giving a toddler’s version of a curtsey.
Paul and the nanny both burst out laughing.
Jeannette, overcome with a sense of humiliation, feels herself start to sweat. “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” she says to the child. Looking at the nanny, head to toe, she says icily, “Miss O’Reilly.”
She can’t stop thinking about that last child Paul had planted in her. Her third pregnancy, all in all. She knows she’s lucky to still be alive. She knew two dancers who died from botched abortions, and one—though made an honest woman by her patron—who died in childbirth. Rumor was that the baby was sent to an orphanage.
Mothers were never happy when their sons married dancers. Paul had been about to introduce Jeannette to his mother once. But then, at the last moment, he changed his plans. Too frightened, she’d guessed. It was just about the time he asked his mother to lend him 50,000 francs.
Jeannette entertains the possibility that Paul doesn’t know about the little girl she saw in the dressing room. It makes her insides ache, thinking about the tenderness with which that child had caressed her mother’s hand, bringing her round again—and the joy and ardor in the eyes of the Russian seamstress as she looked up at Jeannette. How it had been like discovering a mirror that showed a version of her face much kinder than the one she saw every day.
She looks at Paul without the scrim of love she’s felt for him since they were both in their teens. How stout he’s grown! Was he always such a cad? She gathers up her cloak and hat. She forgets her umbrella.
“Goodbye, goodbye!” says little Rosine, happy that she will have her father to herself, at least for a few precious moments.
“Yes, thank you for coming by, madame,” says Paul, all businesslike. “We will, of course, be delighted to have you as part of the cast for our soirée—won’t we, my pet?”
“Oh yes, Papa!” the child chimes in.
Without even bothering to answer or say goodbye, Jeannette heads out the door. Too late, she remembers that it’s raining—and realizes that she’s left her umbrella behind. She doesn’t want to go back inside that house or ever to see Paul Poiret again.
There’s something that she does want—although she can’t find the words yet to express what it is. Ignoring the rain, she strides toward rue de Penthièvre with her head pounding and a sense of hollowness inside her that isn’t only hunger.
***
Despite the rain, Jeannette walks all the way from the Poirets’ house to the Opéra Garnier, arriving with her clothes soaked through, her stockings slipping inside the ill-fitting, ugly shoes. She knows it’s too early for anyone but the stage crew to be there. But still, she reasons, they’ll let her in and she’ll be able to wait. She hopes the heat is on.
It would be unbearable to wait at home now.
She knows she should go home, change her clothes and rest until the pre-performance class convenes. She should eat. But she can’t stand the idea of seeing her little apartment now, with its inescapable sense of belonging to someone who belongs to no one. Reflexively, she climbs the metal staircase to the dressing-room, hoping the rain hasn’t brought in rats—actual rats, as it sometimes did—then plunks herself down onto one of the rickety chairs.
Her clothes and hair are dripping—and she’s cold. She unbuckles and shakes off the shoes, peeling off her stockings, stripping down to her poor, misshapen, much-abused bare feet. She always tries to keep them hidden out of view—the overlong first toe with its nail hideously thickened and perpetually black from the daily assault of her weight bearing down on it, through the tips of her toe-shoes. Her other toenails as often as not missing. The bunions, bruises, and corns that make her naked feet look as if they belonged to an old woman. En pointe, her slender ankles and chiseled calves crisscrossed in pink silk ribbons—bathed in stage lights—fairylike. Beautiful, or so she is regularly told. She has kept her secret ugliness well hidden from the world.
The mirror shows her the only rat in the room—herself. How ghastly she looks, like a bedraggled puppy! She pushes a dripping hank of hair behind her ear, ashamed in a way she’s rarely been before her own reflection, which seems changed somehow. Foreign.
Reaching out, she touches the image of her hand, fingertips to fingertips. There are tears in the other’s eyes, the lips form a tender smile—and something starts to feel unhinged inside her.
The voice from the doorway—accented, Russian, girlish—takes her by surprise. “It’s absolutely incredible, isn’t it?” Tamara Karsavina is standing in the hall, looking just as beautiful as she does in her publicity photos. She radiates a positively grotesque degree of joy. “Mademoiselle Jeannette, I’ve been searching for you everywhere!” She floats in and sits down in the chair next to the one where Jeannette is seated, her feet tucked under her skirt. “But you are shivering! Here,” she says, pulling an embroidered shawl and a pair of soft woolen stockings out of her dance bag. With a flick of her wrists, she drapes the shawl over Jeannette’s shoulders and presses the socks into her hands.
Jeannette is dumbstruck. “You—searching for me?”
Tamara Karsavina is the new darling of the Saison Russe, even though it’s Pavlova who’s featured on the poster. Pavlova who, or so rumor has it, couldn’t be bothered to show up for the first two weeks of Diaghilev’s Russian Season. And maybe that was why the older ballerina was now in such a foul mood, while le tout Paris went mad for Karsavina. Jeannette couldn’t be more flustered if the queen of Spain had just walked in and handed her a pair of socks.
“Sonya told me what happened! How you found each other, in the doorway of Pavlova’s dressing-room.” In response to Jeannette’s look of confusion, Karsavina adds, “Sonya—Pavlova’s seamstress.”
Jeannette shivers again, feeling chilled in every part of her.
“Here, put on the socks. Oh, your poor feet!”
Jeannette remembers again that she forgot to eat today. She left a little bowl of stewed lentils on her counter, meaning to have them for lunch.
She actually doesn’t want to hear whatever it is that Karsavina is about to tell her. The room seems to be listing, like the little boat Paul used, in the old days, to ferry the two of them down the river to his little hideaway at Meudon. How they laughed on those Mondays, when there were no classes and his shop was closed! They feasted and made love all day and night, till Tuesday dawned. She wonders, did he take Sonya there as well? Was that where the child was conceived?
Jeannette feels Karsavina’s large dark eyes trying to see inside her—and braces herself when it’s clear that she’s decided to speak. “She is your sister, ma belle—your twin!”
The words are no sooner spoken than Jeannette is suffused with a guilty sense that she’s always known she had a twin—that she is one of two. Rossetti’s gaudy painting flashes before her eyes again—the look of shock in the eyes of those two sets of identical twins, male and female, encountering one another in the forest. Jeannette had instinctively understood the outrage emanating from the eyes of the two young women in the painting. Now she understands why—and, horribly, why Paul had particularly wanted to show it to her.
What do any of us have but the uniqueness of ourselves? Why would anyone rejoice to discover a second self—unmoored from one’s own identity—taking up space that is rightfully ours in the world? A twin! But the idea is, of course, absurd. Jeannette’s maman, who loved her so mightily and often said how devoutly she’d prayed and hoped for her arrival, would never in a thousand years have given birth to twins and then given one of them away.
“I have no sister!” Jeannette says in a much nastier tone than she would ever have thought possible in speaking to such an exalted personage as Tamara Karsavina. Her heartbeat is throbbing in her ears. Looking down and seeing her own bare feet, she frowns.
“Oh, do put the stockings on, please! They’re very soft wool—cashmere, I believe. Don’t be ashamed. What ballerina doesn’t have hideous feet? You should see Pavlova’s!”
Jeannette bends to pull the stockings on. She owned many such fine things, before she ran away from home. Before the years and years of being so terribly poor. She has a few such things still—gifts from Paul or other admirers.
“Wait here,” the younger dancer says. Then, “No—it’s too cold here.” She takes a fistful of coins out of her little pigskin purse. “Wait at the Café de la Paix. Inside, in the grand salon. I will bring her to you.”
Jeannette catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. “I couldn’t possibly meet anyone now. Another day, maybe…”
Karsavina stares at Jeannette, cocking her head, then laughs again. “You look so amazingly like her. Those are the same eyes I first saw through her little shop window on Zagorodny Prospekt, on my walks home from school. Sonya’s eyes!”
Jeannette has never before had a parallel sense of being looked at, but not being seen.
Karsavina places the coins into Jeannette’s hand, wrapping her fingers around them. “Promise me you won’t run away. That you’ll be at the Café de la Paix at one o’clock on Thursday afternoon.”
Jeannette understands well enough Karsavina’s power over her and every other member of the corps. One whispered word from the company’s bright new star, and Jeannette would lose her job in a heartbeat. She bites her lip then says, “As you wish, mademoiselle.”
“You mustn’t look so glum!” Karsavina says with a laugh. “Sonya has been searching for you for years and years—and wants nothing more than to shower you with love.”
Jeannette blinks her eyes once then twice before she can speak. “Can you tell me? Is it true that Pavlova’s seamstress is a Jewess?”
“Of course, my dear! But then why should you have known?”
Jeannette and Paul had an ongoing, sometimes bitter argument over the years about her stance as an anti-Dreyfusard. “Think hard, you ignorant flea!” he’d said to her more than once. But she couldn’t help how she felt, could she? Jeannette had been raised to hate and fear the Jews. Had Paul known all along? Did other people know? Could that have been what her aunt meant when she spoke about Jeannette’s blood—about being “one of them”?
“So pretty,” rhapsodized Karsavina, “just like you. And so good and kind. She has three children—three nieces for you!” The newly minted prima ballerina is overflowing with her own romantic feelings about life. “It can only be, for all of you, a joyful reunion!”
Jeannette feels herself falling, as if she had stepped off a cliff, and a dizziness that makes her close her eyes. She remembers the change she noted in the way Paul looked at her, some years ago. How many years ago? She’d wondered then if he was noticing how much less radiant her skin was than it had been when they’d first met, when she was only sixteen, when he so often told her that her skin was as smooth as the most expensive Chinese silk. She’d wondered if he’d found someone younger, fresher, more to his liking. And why wouldn’t he?
Sonya. The name is oddly, deeply familiar to her. All at once, Jeannette knows that she’s heard Paul murmur that name before, when they were both sated and half asleep. It had meant nothing to her at the time beyond the usual anguish of knowing that he had other women. So many women in the life of Paul Poiret! Models, midinettes, dressmakers. A fleet of terrifying saleswomen and all those exceedingly rich, imperious clients of his—although he never called them by their Christian names! Lovers, too, without doubt. She knew it all along but chose not to think about it. Not too often.
She’d nursed the dream, up until the very day of his wedding, that she was the only woman who really mattered to Paul. His first love from the moment of their first kiss, that day at the Folies-Bergère, just weeks before she won the audition to join the Opera Ballet.
Even after he married Denise Boulet—surprising everyone with his odd choice, this unknown, unpolished and not even very pretty nineteen-year-old dredged up from his past—he’d been convincing in the very special feelings he harbored for Jeannette. And, after all, he continued to help her in countless ways. When that bright light of his was shining on her, bathing her in lustful adoration, she simply took it in with gratitude—love. A ferocity of love she hadn’t felt since her mother died and it came to seem that no one would ever really love her again—not with such hunger.
That pretty little girl in Pavlova’s dressing-room, with her broad forehead and the impish gleam in her warm brown eyes, was so clearly Paul’s. The child’s look of unconditional love for Sonya exactly resembled the way Paul used to look at Jeannette. It strikes her that she’s been sharing that look of Paul’s—that special look, reserved only for her—all this time.
She never knew what Paul was thinking. He used to scrutinize her with the minutest attention, feeling her with his thick yet sensitive fingers, as if she were a piece of sculpture. Seeming to memorize the shape, breadth, and depth of every part of her, as if planning to re-create her in some other medium—marble or wood or stone. Was it because he’d been comparing the two of them all that while?
“It must be a lot to take in,” says Karsavina, startling Jeannette out of her reverie. The ballerina kisses her three times, in the exact same way Jeannette has seen the Ballets Russes dancers kissing each other. She has been drawn to the warmth of the Russian ballerinas, which seems to go so well with their passionate approach to their art. “You won’t forget, will you?”
“One o’clock on Thursday, at the Café de la Paix,” Jeannette says in the dutiful voice she’d used with the nuns. A voice inside her is saying that it isn’t so, it can’t be possible—and another voice inside her, a much grimmer voice, answers back, “But it explains so much, don’t you see?”