Reserved for the Cat

Behind him, Wolf sighed. “Well,” the parrot said in resignation. “At least I won’t have to make up any little tinkly tunes this time.”

5

NINETTE sat up in the bed, curled her arms around her knees, and listened in astonishment to the cat. Thomas posed on the foot of the bed, looking precisely as if he had always belonged there. Somehow over the last few hours he had transformed without essentially changing, from the rakish alley-prowler to a creature of great elegance.

And he had been listening to her hosts while she had been sleeping, then come back to report to her what was transpiring. “They are planning the production around me? But—but—but they have not yet seen me dance!”

You have seen what passes for a dancer in these music halls, the cat said, with a touch of arrogance. Did you not say yourself that you would make the best of them look like a pony doing tricks?

“Well, yes, but—” But these girls weren’t dancers, not really. Oh, they might have taken some lessons, but they clearly had not been trained as Ninette had been trained. Ballroom dancers with a few tricks and high kicks, and one or two of them could teeter about on their toes, but they were not trained dancers as she knew training.

And you know all of the applause-garnering turns, the passages that make people leap to their feet, yes?

Ninette considered that. Yes, she did. The thirty-two fouette-pirouettes from the Black Swan pas de deux, Kitri’s exuberant solo, full of leaps where her heel touches the back of her head from Don Quixote, the mad scene from Giselle, the character solos from Sleeping Beauty, Le Corsair, Swan Lake, all of these things. She had rehearsed them over and over again, against the day when she might actually be called upon to dance them. These were the sorts of pieces that the great dancers dismissed as “tricks” or cursed the need to perform, but that audiences adored.

I very much doubt that they will have a choreographer as such. So you will be making up your own dances. I would advise you to make them as showy as possible and steal liberally from anyone you think audiences would like. Loie Fuller, for instance. The cat sniffed derisively. By now so many have stolen from her that one more will not matter, and everyone loves seeing yards of fabric being tossed about under colored lights.

And by now, everyone in the dance world knew how Fuller manipulated her lights and silks, despite her attempts to keep such thing secret. There was even a kind of name for it, the “serpentine dance,” or “skirt dance” by which such things were advertised on playbills. That gave Ninette some ideas . . . the best thing she could do, if she was going to have a show built around her, would be to manage pieces that looked very impressive but involved short passages of flashy footwork interspersed with a great deal of stage effects. A skirt-dance would certainly fit that bill. Now, she had seen some Swiss and Finnish girls in France performing a kind of dancing-gymnastics with long ribbons, balls, hoops and clubs. She could certainly do a piece with a ribbon, and perhaps another with a hoop or a ball.

The rest she could certainly lift whole from the ballets she had learned. “If they are going to create a show around me—” she began eagerly.