Nearby he noticed Alex Davison, the fair-haired, full-lipped young air force attaché in his thick round eyeglasses framed with translucent flesh-pink plastic; he was chatting earnestly to two stalwart Russian bureaucrats, clean-shaven, arctic-eyed, featureless. Davison gestured enthusiastically towards the dining room and ballroom, inviting his Russian acquaintances to eat; he put an encouraging hand on a strapping back. How could the Russians resist? John wondered. But one of them shook his head, smiling, wagging two fingers towards the floor where he stood, as if to say, Meet me here.
So they’re not letting Penkovsky out of their sight anyway. None of them, John concluded.
He considered Wentz; he considered Phipps. Latching on to Balanchine’s impresario, as if they were actually interested in ballet. Lincoln Kirstein, thought John, there is one deep guy. Maybe too deep to plumb. Could he be one?
But Nina’s for real; she’s there for the beauty. He smiled with pleasure. She’ll be giving them all a load of her candour, including that Russian ballet know-it-all. If only we could all read Nina in Pravda tomorrow. I don’t want to miss this conversation, he thought. And she deserves to be rescued by now.
But as he set out across the floor, someone grabbed his elbow, pulled him back towards the ambassador.
Nina saw John stoop, turn away, move off. I’m handling it fine on my own, she told herself. Another hour or so. All I really need to do is hold up this dress. The dress can practically do it without me. But she longed to be near John.
Wentz drawled to Kirstein, ‘You’ll have to forgive these philistines. Rodney’s expertise is in fertilizers and corn production.’ Wentz’s accent seemed to Nina to grow more southern when he mentioned farming. ‘I may be the only one who’s done any homework. I know all about Stravinsky, our other Russian exile – who wrote the music for your third ballet tonight, Agon, hey? But you have to admit, it was pretty hard to make sense of that.’ And he gave a belly laugh, elbowing the Soviet critic in the ribs, acting the hillbilly.
This elicited a round of pedagogy from Kirstein, which was delivered with a thin pretence of caring whether it was understood. ‘I’m sure you know that Mr Stravinsky composed Agon partly by what’s called serial method – using a sequence of twelve tones – a new technique for him. And the choreography is also organized around the idea of twelve – twelve dancers, twelve movements, dividing into twos and threes and fours, duos, trios and quartets. The timings are exactly projected in minutes and seconds. It’s exquisitely made. Spare, undecorated.’
Wentz seemed positively buoyant at the news. ‘Well, isn’t that something! It sounds like rocket science on stage!’
Again, naïve enthusiasm won the day, and there was much laughter and more ribbing.
The Russian critic remarked, half-smirking, competitive, ‘We have our own Soviet ballet of the space age. Konstantin Sergeyev, of the Kirov, has made Distant Planet in honour of our hero Gagarin’s flight – and with Gagarin we truly were first, long before John Glenn. But, you see, our ballerinas are not trained to count bars in the way of the West – ours dance with the soul, with the spirit. Dance is not a science for us, mechanistic, nuclear; it is an art. It transcends the physical, from within, even.’
Nina thought that Penkovsky, with his fine, bulbous nose, the soft cleft in his chin, his pouting mouth, looked tense. Why couldn’t he, too, find rocket science amusing? His eyes were gentle, heavy-browed, hooded, but there seemed to be something the matter with them, some watering and redness, scum he kept wiping at, and for a moment Nina wondered if he was actually weeping. Really, Nina thought, Penkovksy seemed hardly able to stand still, as if his clothes itched, as if he might be in pain. He constantly glanced at Carlson, then glanced away, swivelling his whole head, even his shoulders, around behind his gaze, as if it were hard for him to see anything unless he looked directly at it.
A waiter passed and Wentz whirled around, lifting glasses from the tray. ‘Who can hold another vodka?’ Only the ballet critic accepted one, so Wentz drank the other himself, crying, ‘Vashe zdorovye!’ and lifting his glass.
With his eye resting coldly on the critic, Kirstein continued, ‘I believe Agon was inspired by some French Baroque dances. In fact, the dances are named on the score. So, as well as the ballistic feeling you have noted,’ he tipped his massive head towards Wentz, ‘there is also something from the Renaissance, and you can hear it perfectly clearly, a sound of clarions. Or sometimes you can almost imagine there is a lute playing. Picture a courtly tournament, with dancing rather than fighting. The dancers are the knights – competing, showing off. They have no regard for risk. They pretend it’s easy, daring each other into one-upmanship, brinksmanship.’
Wentz smiled bashfully. ‘You lost me there, sir. My goodness.’ Then he turned to Nina, who unexpectedly found his look rather too direct, fresh even, so that she dropped her eyes. ‘Maybe you understand that, Mrs Davenport, being a dancer yourself?’
Before she could reply, Penkovsky intoned in a tired voice, ‘Come now, Mr Wentz. To anyone who follows the relations of our two governments, that interesting analysis should sound perfectly familiar.’
His voice gave Nina a chill, he seemed to speak from a depth of unhappiness, rage even, intense, suppressed. As she studied him, he looked away, perspiring, sweeping his head and shoulders all around the party as if he were searching for something, some hole in his existence, some gap through which he might slip.
Across the room, the American ambassador was at last circulating among his guests. John Davenport was still at his side.
‘Your wife’s a real pro, Davenport. She’s turned herself out very attractively, and just look at her making friends for us. Good for her. That’s what it’s all about.’
As they watched, Fred Wentz gave the Russian ballet critic a hearty slap on the back and pulled away from the group, gesturing in the air, one finger up, laughing, admonishing. John couldn’t hear anything but answering laughter. Then Wentz turned to Nina, leaned down close to her, whispered something. John saw him touch Nina’s bare shoulder casually, confidently, with his left hand before Wentz drifted off with Tom Phipps.
John pressed his lips together, the skin puckering out all around them in aggravation. Then he noticed that Phipps, thick-necked, muscular, almost immediately gravitated back towards Nina’s group. Phipps’s bullet-shaped skull showed pink-fleshed under his crew cut. He stood alone, his feet not quite flat on the floor, as if he might take another step, closer or further; his hands frisked his pockets, hunting for something, a pack of cigarettes.
What are they waiting for? John wondered. What are they expecting?
Phipps is definitely watching. And those two Russians are watching. And Davison, too.
He fell into step again with the ambassador who said, ‘I’ll go into supper with Balanchine and the director of the Bolshoi. Maybe you’d like to join your wife? Be sure she tells the dancers to eat all they can here where there’s plenty of food, would you?’
‘Fine, sir.’
As John turned back to look for Nina in the music room where he had just seen her, he nearly bumped into Wentz who remarked confidentially, ‘Your wife is certainly in possession of subtle opinions, isn’t she? How’d she get in with this whole ballet crowd?’
He found himself taken aback, not wanting to reply, but he said with grudging courtesy, ‘She danced herself. I thought you knew that. Had to quit when she was fifteen or so. Got injured. She loves the ballet scene, though, and I think – well – they can just tell she loves it, the dancers, that’s all.’
John wasn’t sure what he thought about Fred Wentz. At the office, he’d heard that Wentz had once been a career Foreign Service officer and had served a tour of duty in Russia towards the end of the 1950s. According to rumour, Wentz had been sent home for handing out copies of Dr Zhivago on the Moscow-Leningrad overnight train.