Dancer Page 19
Early in the morning Erik came to watch me swim. I made my way underwater to the rocks, surfaced and hid. He called my name and soon became frantic. He jumped up from the sand and began to scream for help. After five minutes he dived into the sea in his pajamas. How he hates the chill of the sea. He didn’t notice me until a few meters away, then in Danish called me a cunt.
I told him I had seen a bright star move in the darkness. He said it was obviously a satellite looking down on me, perhaps Russian. He was getting his revenge, but the thought was chilling.
In bed we read Flaubert’s letters from Egypt. Outside the sea crashed.
The pair of underpants hung on the bedpost. An exuberant flag.
The stewardess hardly seemed pleased when she told me to take my shoes down from the seat and I replied that it was a first-class cabin, would she prefer my foot somewhere else—up her enormous German ass for instance?
Jan. 6. New Year promise to Margot: I shall keep my mind free from attachments to everything but dance.
Valentina’s classes: her movements are like prayers in a church. One feels almost shy in her presence.
A bad class and the day was ruined. Then at performance the lights were too bright and I was looking down more than usual, away from the glare, and my feet tangled. Arthur, in his high pitch, said: We all have our nights. The glass narrowly missed his head.
(At times like these I hate myself. The idea of being a genius-madman is tiresome.)
At the gathering Bacon asked why dance? I retorted, Why paint? He dragged on his cigarette and said painting was the language he would give his soul if he could teach his soul to speak. Yes!
* * *
Each night he waits for the cue, stretches, meshes his fingers. Onstage, Margot unspools a length of chaînés, sweeps, descends and is still. He touches his left ear for good luck, waits a moment beyond the quietness, breaks the wings, takes flight, is released.
Music reaches into his muscles, the lights spin, he glares at the conductor, who corrects the tempo, and he continues, controlled at first, each move careful and precise, the pieces beginning to fit, his body elastic, three jetés en tournant, careful of the landing, he extends his line, beautiful movement ah cello go. The lights merge, the shirtfronts blur. A series of pirouettes. He is at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into his arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher, and is skyheld.
The audience leans forward, necks craned, mouths open. He descends, lands and is off again towards her, the wind rushing past his ears, a blur of unbroken energy, to where she is waiting, headbent. He plants his feet before her, she accepts him, he lifts her upward, she is light, she is always light, he stays away from her ribs, bruised from rehearsal. A bead of sweat spins out from his hair. His face against her thigh, her hip, her stomach. Both of them burning away, they are one movement, a body nation. He allows her down, a gasp from the hall, they are alive—a French audience, the good ones are always French, even in Lebanon, New York, Buenos Aires, Vienna, London, they’re always French—and he can smell her perfume, her sweat, her approval, he moves stage left and off. She will control it now, her solo. Standing in the shadows, he regains his breath, tissues his face, dams the sweat, his chest rising and falling, begins to calm, ah yes this darkness an embrace.
He scuffs in the resin box for traction, waits as she receives her applause. Here it is now, take it, grasp it, explode!
He returns from the wings already in midair, moves through four cabrioles, keeping his line long until the sound catches up, an instant of conjunction, a flash of muscle and he sweeps the stage with his body, owning it, no limits. Eight perfect entrechats-dix, a thing of wonder, the audience silent now, no body anymore no thought no awareness this must be the moment the others call god as if all doors are open everywhere leading to all other open doors nothing but open doors forever no hinges no frames no jambs no edges no shadows this is my soul born weightless born timeless a clock spring broken, he is in flight, he could stay like this forever and he looks out into the haze of necklaces eyeglasses cufflinks shirtfronts and knows he owns them.
Afterwards in the dressing rooms there are exaggerated complaints to keep themselves going—you changed your perfume, you sweated too much, your chaînés were abysmal, you missed the cue, you stayed out too late, you pirouetted like a donkey, let’s do it better tomorrow—and they exit the stage doors together, arm in arm, laughing, smiling, the crowds waiting, flowers and shouts and invitations, they sign autographs and programs and shoes, but as they walk away the dance is still in their bodies and they search for the quiet point the still point where there is no time no space only pureness moving.
* * *
The crowd outside the Sydney Opera house was boisterous, charged. Some protesters were shouting about Vietnam. Margot and I sent in a dummy limousine and drove ourselves to the entrance instead. The crowd cheered when they realised it was us.
Rock Hudson came to the green room, shirt ambitiously undone. He said he was shooting some movie somewhere and sat in the dressing room while I applied make-up. He mentioned that he had found a restaurant with the most perfect oysters in the world, he would see me after the show if I desired. I caught a glimpse of him in the audience. He was turned away from the stage, looking at someone through binoculars.
At the restaurant Rock was loath to pay the bill since I had brought fourteen people with me (ha!). He went to the bathroom and came back re-energized.
In the museum café we fought about the impulse for Albrecht. Frederic suggested that intuition was an excuse. He tried shoring up his plate of shit with a quote from Goethe who said that nothing belongs to Nature once the artist has chosen it as his subject. As if that is even mildly relevant!
I threw my coffee at him but later in the Sobel Hotel at the bottom of the Kings Road (yet another Kings Road!) I thought perhaps he was just frightened by the enormity of the task. I sent him a telegram, charging it to the hotel bill.
Such fine choreography. (At last he learned his lesson.) For the second act he showed us a photograph of a kingfisher tossing its prey in the air after stabbing it, both bird (alive) and fish (dead) gloriously turning in midair.
The Persian rug was worth eighteen thousand francs. The owner saw me admire it and then said it was mine—for free. Erik said the first thing I would do is set up a model train on it, which is not entirely true. The owner seemed disturbed, his great gift cheapened, so I said that a journalist from Vogue was coming to my apartment and I’d mention the name of his store. He beamed and took out his business card with great formality.
Outside I threw the card into the gutter. Erik was horrified to see the owner staring at us through the window.
The woman in the Jacuzzi complained about my feet, said they were cracked and anyone with an open wound was not allowed in. I told her who I was and she smiled stiffly, sat up in the water, left shortly thereafter.
Beckett was at the café counter. He nodded hello. He was pouring his coffee into his cognac, rather than the other way around.
Somebody said I should smoke the marijuana cigarette, that even Brigitte Bardot might seem humorous if I was high. Even then I had no interest. Why lose the mind, even worse the body?
At home I sought refuge in Richter. His mischief. It is said that he can stretch his hands to twelfth.
Margot’s ligament tore. Antony asked her how she felt: Rather sore, I’m afraid.
The search for a replacement. Evelyn has been told in no uncertain terms that her performance is shit, there is far too much marking in her movement, that if she is to be worthy of Basil, if she is to dance at all, she will have to learn to perform at least a half-decent grand jeté. She warmed up for a ful
l hour and then bourréed out onto the floor. She soared high and arched her back so far that her nose actually touched her calf, like a scissor blade meeting the round thumbhole. It was as if she had no bones at all. Then she snapped her legs together with wonderful violence. I could only applaud. She picked up her bag (full of barbiturates?) to leave.
She was so elegant throwing the scarf over her shoulder that I offered to partner her for the rest of eternity, but already the elevator door was closing, ah well. (Perhaps I really did feel something for her, but the truth is we are apples and oranges.)
A call from Gilbert. The suicide notion. If you don’t come back soon, Rudi, I will leave a gap between the floor and my feet. His wife, it seems, has taken to bed in distress.
I told Ninette that, as a Tatar, I had spent centuries contemplating the gap between floor and feet. She shot back that she was Irish and had already spent hundreds of years in the air.
Mrs. Godstalk is almost a perfect copy of Madame B., except she once danced with Balanchine and now keeps her old toe shoes in the freezer, as if she will one day dance again. She took me to Madison Avenue at eight in the morning, before the antique shops opened. She said she would buy anything I wanted, even put it on an airplane to Paris rather than shipping it.
I suggested the Russian library chair in the shop on Sixty-third. It cost perhaps four years or more of Soviet wages. Later in the afternoon the envelope arrived with confirmation of purchase. What an idiotic cunt she is! She phoned eight times in three days until I used a pay phone in the rehearsal corridor and said in a French accent that Monsieur Nureyev had run off with her white poodle to serve it sautéed to the corps, who were all broke and very hungry.
(Margot laughed so hard she began hiccuping.)
Later in a moment of stupidity I reduced the chair to kindling. I called Mrs. Godstalk to say it had happened when a box of books fell from the shelf, shattering the legs. She sighed, said she was not naïve but that it was all right, she understood the artistic impulse.
Truth: I rope them in, then lock the gate and walk away laughing. Not very human, but true. The other voice says: Fuck them, they have far more money than sense.
Another call from Gilbert. The suicide notion yet again. There was the thought of returning to Paris, fucking him, then lending him a rope.
Margot was so happy with her recovery, she was smiling to herself and saying how warm the night was and did I see the old man in the orchestra seats, that was Bernardo Bertolucci.
The bewildered cockroach (it was New York, after all) crawled through the resin box. I nailed him with Margot’s spare toe shoe. The orchestra was tuning up and it drowned out most of her screaming. But she managed to laugh when I flicked the dead roach under the curtain down into the pit near the contrabasses.
The doctor, Guillaume, said it was absurd and dangerous, but I danced through the fever anyway. Hard to believe, but even the stagehands interrupted their poker game to watch the solo, presumably waiting for me to collapse, but I danced better than ever, could feel the fever vaulting out of me. Afterwards my temperature was almost normal. Guillaume stood there perplexed. The stagehands brought me a bag of ice.
Pneumonia. Erik rubbed goose fat on my chest. A full recovery inside two days.
On the phone Mother’s voice was old and sad, even when I told her about the goose fat. She was coughing. I went walking afterwards in Mendocino along the cliff face. The seals were hacking into the air. (Later Saul called to say he had almost doubled my money on the gold market. He interpreted my silence as joy.)
At first Erik was dancing like three buckets of shit, but then he braided his feet back and forth in the air beautifully, without losing any definition, and I thought, We all keep certain secrets, don’t we? For the entrechat-huit (reversed, with the eight beats descending) he paused for a second midair. Glorious. One could feel the audience straining forward. (You can tell how good the work is from the way it shapes itself into the crowd.) I was first to my feet for the encore. The whole house followed. Erik smiled, took Violette’s hand, and they bowed together.
Backstage he was listening to Liszt’s Concerto number 1, Richter with Kondrashin and the LSO. We drank Château d’Yquem. It seemed like a perfect night but after taking off his shoes, he looked pained and began rubbing his feet ferociously, then said he thought he might have chipped a bone in his toe after a particularly big sauté. (Liszt once played piano with a slight fracture in his left hand and said he could literally feel the notes skipping from bone to bone.)
No breakages nor fractures, but at the hospital the doctor told Erik that his feet were ruined, he might not be able to walk properly as an old man. Erik shrugged and laughed. Ah well, I’ll just have to bourrée along instead.
Erik says that increasingly after performances he feels distanced from himself. He sits in his dressing room alone and exhausted, still in character. He changes clothes, faces the mirror, sees only a reflection. He must keep looking long enough until he finally recognizes an old friend—himself. Only then can he leave.
A series of rare Bashkirian woodcuts: 8,000 francs.
The thought of them sitting in Ufa, plain bread and borscht, a glass of vodka, Mother darning her blue smock, Tamara coming back from the market. My guilt is overwhelming but what is there to do?
When Elena (how beautiful she is) first arrived in France, she made a living sewing wedding dresses for the bourgeois families who had come before her. Then she told the story of her boat trip from Kiev to Constantinople—the boat was full of people fleeing with their most precious possessions, ridiculous things, lamps, letter openers, family crests. She stayed at the bow for most of the journey, which took many extra days in bad weather, and she said—quite wonderfully—that ever since, she has always felt there was water moving in everything, most especially history and violins.
He is fair, narrow, young, boyish. Such beauty sometimes makes me look at myself, though I fear nothing, he is shit, dances as if weighted with lead.
He broke down in fits when (as expected) he didn’t even make the corps. I thought of comforting him yet again, but I do not lead my entire life guided by my penis, whatever Claudette says. Well, not always! How to make him understand that he needs more ambition, that being in the corps is not enough, a molecule of air within a drum, condemned to make a small noise in a small space.
He sat with his hair over his eyes, in imitation no doubt. I promised to help him. In the rehearsal room he needed to be convinced of the importance of slow adagio to give enough control to land and still hold a clean position. And he still wouldn’t listen until I climbed to the windowsill and leaped, landed, frozen solid. (How I detest that linoleum floor.)
I watched him fail time and time again. What is there to do? He has no salt or pepper in his spirit. He finally said: I’m tired. I told him that if he left now he would be cutting the branch he was sitting on but he left anyway, his finger hooked under the shoe straps.
He wants to write a biography but what do I tell him, he is a shit, he reeks of garlic, he has too much bacon on his belt, his brain is stunted, and his entry into the Museum of Shitheads is undoubtedly assured. After explaining all this to him (!) he told me how much better I would be if I were shy and listened properly. I replied that yes indeed I look forward to being dead.
(Gillian says that my use of bad language, in English French Tatar Russian German etc. has become a virus.)
I carried Yulia’s letter to the Tuileries, sat on a bench. The letter had been folded and refolded many times and had taken many leaps, arriving first for Margot in London, forwarded to the Austrian embassy in Paris, and from there to Gillian.
Yulia’s writing is grand and looping. She had been meaning to write for a year but had postponed it for several reasons, none of which were important anymore. Her father had been found dead in the house in Ufa. Sergei must have known he was on his final journey, since he was wearing his hat, which he never did indoors. Pen in his hand, notebook on his chest. He had lef
t a letter for her: Whatever loneliness we have felt in this world will surely become understandable when we are no longer lonely. He said he was not at all scared of death, that nothing frightened him, why should it, he was about to join Anna, he had always loved her even in the terrible moments of darkness.
I sat on the bench, the sun beating down. Immeasurable remorse.
Ended the day with Richter’s interpretation of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata number 2, third movement—Andante, Prague. What mood could Richter have been in to offer this gift to humanity?
God, if he exists, is surely a visitor to the new farmhouse in Virginia. In the morning the air is cool and fresh enough to make everyone hungry. The horses gallop and neigh. The light is dense and yellow, the trees old and gnarled. (This is not the America I imagined when young.)
I went for a ride. The brown mare bucked me and stood, poising one hind leg behind the other, almost in arabesque, then she dipped her head down. Her mane touched the side of my face. For no particular reason I called her Yulia.
At the party, having drunk too much, I was struck by the idea that, as life goes on, there is a double for everyone, no matter whom. (Perhaps this is a result of the sudden spate of difficulty.) I looked across the room and saw that Sergei was standing by the buffet, minus his hat. He was talking to Tamara (only she never would’ve been so well dressed). Father sat in a corner. I searched for Mother and found someone vaguely similar—Lee’s old friend from Colorado, although Mother’s hair would be grayer by now. An older Polish woman reminded me of Anna. (An eerie trip back and forth across the Styx.)
When I saw Sergei’s double making his way towards Anna’s double it raised the hairs on my neck. He had his overcoat draped over his arm and even carried a hat.
On searching for myself I realized there was nobody.
In the dressing room: a full kilo of Black Sea caviar and twelve bouquets, including a dozen lilies. Sergei, old man, I thought of you.
Onassis had hired two young men to wash the white trousers, white shirts, white hats, white socks, white underwear, white vests, white everything. The Greek boy smiled at me from the deck, said he would like to give me something personal for my birthday, he could hardly believe it was my twenty-ninth.