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choreographers in to experiment with the Jansch’s classically trained dancers. It was typical of Fleetwood that he was backstage with Ruth Renswick on the very night her triumphant one-act Wuthering Heights, choreographed on the Los Angeles Ballet, premiered. As the curtain fell, he offered her a commission to create a full-length story ballet for the JRBT, and in the ecstasy of the moment, the normally cautious Renswick shrieked, “Yes!”
    Now Juliet gazed into his thin, bird-of-prey face, which was surrounded by a corona of Little Prince–style, spiky yellow hair. She clearly remembered seeing him perform a number of times. He had danced with extraordinary beauty and éclat, and she certainly had not realized until that meeting last year that one of his eyes was blue, one brown. He also had a sizable scar, the type left by a bad burn, that spread across his upper-right cheek. From the look of it, he had had it since childhood. Yet he had been exquisite, flawless on stage. Amazing, how dance could transform a man.
    â€œAbout a year and a half ago,” she went on. “We sat at the same table at a library fund-raiser.”
    â€œOh, of course!” Fleetwood gave a small smile and she suddenly understood that Max had told him she was a potential donor and sent him in here to give her a thrill. Fleetwood was one of those people who consider their own presence a noteworthy event. He moved through the world in a cloud of ego so thick he could hardly make out the separate identities of mere mortals, let alone remember them individually. It would be like expecting a monarch to name the people he’d graciously waved at. Juliet had met others like him, people who live not to see but to be seen. She doubted whether he even recalled the evening at the library. If she had asserted that they went to elementary school together, he would have replied with the same, “Oh, of course!”
    Nevertheless, doggedly, “We discussed ginkgo trees, male and female ginkgos,” she went on.
    â€œIndeed we did,” he agreed, casting a lightning glance into the mirror behind her before meeting her gaze.
    Juliet recalled that the conversation had gone from there into a discussion of male and female pipe fittings and thence even further afield. It had been, to her mind, a peculiar and memorable discussion. But she was sure she was the only one who remembered it.
    Fleetwood had unconsciously allowed his voice to grow a bit louder, and since the music had suddenly ended, Ruth turned suddenly to glare at him and Juliet. Fleetwood’s eyebrows rose again, and with an amused smile and a graceful hand raised in salute to Juliet, he stood and hurriedly stole back out of the room.
    â€œThat’s better,” muttered Ruth tartly, as the door closed behind him. Only a few of the principals dared to smile openly at this bit of insubordination, Juliet noticed, while the rest of the ensemble confined themselves to meaningful glances at one another. She also noticed that Ruth remained entirely unaware of the little stir her quite audible remark had caused. Ruth Renswick, Juliet had to concede, was low on what are sometimes called “people” skills. She was not really a “people” person.
    Juliet forced herself to pay attention as her friend struggled on with the villagers’ first appearance. Like the book, the ballet started with Pip in the graveyard, meeting the terrifying, escaped convict, Abel Magwitch. But the corps soon appeared, some as Christmas diners at Pip’s home, some as soldiers in search of the fleeing convict. Ruth had devised some mildly comic bits of business in an effort to convey the rough, grudging treatment Pip receives at home from his sister, Mrs. Joe, and Juliet began to suspect it was these that were throwing her off. There was a fancy piece of nonsense in which the other diners, dancing on and around the table, distributed half a dozen oranges between them but