Four Temperaments

OSCAR Oscar Kornblatt was in love. Never mind that he was gray-haired, soft around the middle and, despite his wife Ruth's patient ironing, always wearing a rumpled shirt. Forget all that. In his mind's eye, Oscar was Prince Siegfried, young, limber and lithe, as he waltzed Ginny Valentine, his exquisite swan, across the vast stage of his imagination. Oscar's Swan Lake image of himself and Ginny was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed, for he was a violinist with the New York City Ballet and Ginny Valentine was a dancer in the corps. From the shadowed nether world of the orchestra pit, he could sense her moving across the floorboards of the stage above. And, sometimes, if the angle was just right, he could even see her, just the merest glimpse. Ginny never stayed in one place for long, and Oscar did have to pay attention to the score, after all. But those moments when she came skittering into his field of vision were blessed, and late at night, lying in bed as Ruth dreamed peacefully beside him, he thought about them and he smiled. Ginny had been dancing with the company for a little more than a year. Oscar had been playing with the orchestra for nearly twenty-five. He had thought that by this time, he would be indifferent to the surge of eager young things who washed up on the gritty sands of the corps de ballet every year, each as bright and as innocuous as a bit of colored sea glass. His reaction to these girls had nonetheless undergone a transformation over the years. In the beginning, he had despised them. He was in his early thirties then, old enough to realize that the flame of youthful brilliance would not be his, young enough still to feel embittered by that fact. He hadn't wanted the job with the ballet orchestra anyway, but by then he and his wife had two sons to support. The struggle of trying to assemble one ill-fated string quartet after another was wearing him down. And then there was Ruth. Ruth, who had patiently endured their first apartment, a dark basement on East Sixth Street, and, later, the burned-out buildings that lined the block of their apartment building on West 122nd Street. But when she became pregnant for the third--and Oscar prayed final--time, even he could see that enough was enough. The job was offered and he grudgingly took it. Ruth, Oscar and the boys moved into a large, comfortable apartment on West End Avenue, an affordable option in the days before the Manhattan real estate boom. It had neither the grandeur of Riverside Drive--vistas that opened seamlessly onto an expanse of the rippling, dark waters of the Hudson River--nor the romance of Central Park West, with its lacy backdrop of flowering trees and shrubs, but it was nevertheless a big step up in the world. At least materially. The family was delighted: the boys went racing in their socks across the smooth, sun-checkered floors and spent hot, happy afternoons in Riverside Park. Ruth joined the local synagogue and befriended the owners of the small neighborhood shops. But Oscar, although outwardly cheerful, seethed within. He had become a breadwinner, not an artist. Secretly, he was mortified, pushed into the narrow world of conventional respectability. A world in which the hot star of genius, and all its urgent, unpredictable heat, was forever snuffed out. He took out his resentment not on his family, or at least not much, but on the dancers, the skinny, silly girls for whom the audiences sat mesmerized, applauded and threw armloads of expensive, useless flowers. For these Philistines--and Oscar also lumped the dancers into this category--the music was just so much backdrop, part of the decor. Oh, he had heard the dancers talk about the music, how it inspired them, moved them, whatever. But he could see that it was all a sham, a poor cover for their own monumental narcissism that pranced onstage shouting, "Look at me! Look at me!" though of course they never actually said a worMcDonough, Yona Zeldis is the author of 'Four Temperaments' with ISBN 9780385503617 and ISBN 038550361X.