Dancer Page 21
Victor collapsed from exhaustion and was rushed to the hospital. Later he came into Studio 54 with the intravenous drip still in his arm. He guided the metal stand through the dance floor under the flashing lights. Soon everyone was cheering and applauding and whistling.
Victor bowed and took a booth in the far corner, readjusted the dripbag, and tried to buy everyone a drink before he collapsed once again. (He would have loved it if he could have seen himself being carried out by none other than Steve.)
Margot says, Slow down.
I told her that the countless small devils (sex, money, desire) mean nothing to me when stacked against the angel of dance.
Sasha fell in the park, it seems. Heart attack. Tonight I stayed late, sent everyone home, danced him alive.
Wandered into a courtyard where the last blacksmith in Paris was shoeing his first horse of the day. He allowed me to sit on the wall and watch him. The horse’s leg in his hand and sparks at his feet.
Telegram and flowers for Xenia.
Fuck! The ankle just seemed to go out from underneath me. (Sasha all those years ago: What, are you not friends with your body anymore, Rudi?) Three months recovery, Emilio said. In exactly four days I will throw the crutches into Central Park.
(three in fact!)
Two long weeks recovering on St. Bart’s. No phone calls, nothing. It was so hot that the rain over the sea evaporated before it hit the water. Clouds of yellow butterflies rose from the trees. The world was far away and small.
The locals get up with the early light to work on their flower beds. Erik said the old men have a better life than the flowers—they have even less to do and can move to the shade when they desire. (Such a strange thing to say.)
After dinner he vomited in the bath. Food poisoning, he said. The housemaid cleaned him up. In his bathroom kit there were bottles of painkillers. In bed we turned back to back. He ground his teeth and kicked. By dawn the sheets were damp with sweat.
Photo from Tamara. Her heavy breasts, her stocky trunk, her abbreviated legs, how Russian she has become.
Twenty-four repetitions instead of twelve. Emilio has increased the weights and each day he measures the muscle. We walk the streets with the weight strapped to my ankle. The convict walk. Soon to be back dancing. Never before has he seen anybody recover so quickly.
Whole mornings doing massage. Hip extension. Torso twist. Hamstrings. Most of all my thighs and calves. He hangs my feet off the end of the table to prevent cramping and grows angry if I try to read a book on the special stand.
He says he can tell the plot of whatever I’m reading just by running his hands along my spine.
Perhaps the leg is stronger than ever before. The crowd in Verona, under the stars, give a twenty-minute standing ovation, even through a late drizzle. No word from Erik. The Chicago Sun-Times said he looked pale and, when he withdrew, the announcement was intestinal flu.
Margot has figured that we have danced together, in total, almost five hundred nights and she says to hell with it, she will go on, she will try for seven hundred, a lucky number!
Emilio’s cure for insomnia: Pour water on your wrist, dab it gently with a towel, return to bed, warm your hands beneath your armpits.
Our final quarrel surely. Every piece of china was smashed except the teapot, which Erik cradled to his stomach. He lit a cigarette in the doorway, still holding the pot. When I turned away he dropped the teapot without even the hint of emotion. Good-bye. A stinging finality to it.
Gillian said it was inevitable. I slammed the phone down. I do not need to be told. Margot was with Tito in Panama. No answer. Victor came to listen, took a flight all the way. My head was reeling.
Tried getting through to Mother but all the lines were down.
2
It begins with scarves, dark ones bought at the Missoni store on rue du Bac; gradually, over the years, he gets to know the store owners so well that they open for him alone on a Sunday morning. The scarves become brighter, more patterned, until he is so famous they are an advertisement, unpaid for, some of them smuggled home to his sister and mother, who find them loud and gaudy. In London a Saville Row tailor makes him a high-collared tunic, a Nehru, not unlike the one he wore in school, except it is cashmere, and it is his joke to say that this is how he feels inside, cash-a-mear, spoken like three words accidentally met. In Vienna he buys a Rococo-style Murano glass chandelier with fifty-five lights and twenty replacement bulbs. In Cairo he finds a pair of antique Persian slippers. In Rabat he kneels on carpets made for him by a blind Morrocan man to whom he tells the story of the Leningrad choreographer who listened so intently to floorboards. The Moroccan loves the story so much that he repeats it to other customers, so the story shifts and changes as it makes its way through living rooms around the world, told and retold, the choreographer becoming a dancer from Moscow, or a Siberian musician, even a deaf-mute Hungarian ballerina, so that years later he hears the story, distorted, and he bangs on the dinner table and shocks everyone silent with the words: Horseshit! That’s horseshit! He was from Leningrad and his name was Dmitri Yachmennikov!
He buys antique English bookshelves and folding tables. Romanian glassware hundreds of years old. An imperial dinner set from Austria. An Argentinean folding desk. Stained glass from a church in Bavaria. Iron crosses smuggled out of Czechoslovakia. A series of crucifixes by an artist in Vatican City. An intricately carved mirror from Chile, which he gives as a present to a stagehand from Santiago. He acquires musical scores handwritten in the 1930s for Vera Nemtchinova, pores over them late at night, teaching himself how to read the scores, how to hum them into his occasional insomnia. He orders maps drawn by a Soviet émigré in Mexico City, with the Republic of Bashkir firmly seated at the center, the town of Ufa finally finding a place for itself in cartography. One map is created for each of his homes, so eventually he has seven, a lucky number to him. The maps hang in gilded frames with a special nonreflecting glass. In Athens he buys a first-century Roman marble torso after the Diadumenos of Polykleitos, the body slightly chipped at the rib cage. His Virginia farmhouse has cabinet shelves that display precious carvings from Ghana. He buys Olga Spessivtzeva’s slippers, shows them to his maker in Covent Garden, who learns a new stitch from them. On Madison Avenue in New York City he haggles over a Charles Meynier painting, Wisdom Defending Youth Against Love. He carries the painting back to his apartment in the Dakota rather than pay the extra hundred dollars for delivery.
Antique accordions, violins, cellos, balalaikas, flutes, fiddles, a mahogany grand piano from William Knabe and Co: he surrounds himself with music.
In Stockholm he buys a glass case of rare fossilized ammonites. In Oslo, a cabinet made by Georg Kofoed Mobelfabrikant. In Rome he unfolds Chinese wallpaper panels depicting military scenes against a backdrop of herons, trees, temples. They are shipped to his island home on Le Galli near Capri. He makes a special trip to Nice to buy a series of Nijinsky photographs so he can study the poses, reset the steps, for which there is no written record. From Prague he orders hand-blown light fixtures from a glass craftsman. An Australian woman who deals in books sends him a steady supply of first-edition masters, mostly Russians. He rescues a grandfather clock from a trader in Singapore. From New Zealand he acquires a series of tribal masks. In Germany he buys a full set of dinner plates once used by a kaiser, the bone china trimmed with gold. From Canada he requests a cedar chest, since he doesn’t like to use mothballs, he has heard there is a particular forest where the cedar is best. He has flowers flown from Hawaii to his London home. And in Wales, where there is a mastery and respect for the form, he has a train set built for him by Llewelyn Harris, a craftsman in Cardiff, the models so real that when he lays them out on the floor he can sometimes remember himself at six years of age sitting on the hill above Ufa station, waiting.
BOOK THREE
After the passing of irresistible
music you must learn to make
do with a dripping faucet.
—
JIM HARRISON, “DANCING”
1
NEW YORK • 1975
It is one of those heartless streets you find in parts of the city where the light is still tense with yesterday’s darkness and even in the late afternoon it already feels like curfew and the spent trash of the day goes skidding along and pigeons sit gray on chain-link fences and the traffic is stalled and fume-blowing and the storefronts are dark and shadowy with filth and grime, Eleventh Street and C, Lower East, all smack and suicide, but Victor breaks it simply by moving down the sidewalk, making walking a form of dancing, beginning in the shoulders with a symmetrical roll not even the blacks have perfected, one oblong shrug of a shoulder and then the other, as if connected by synaptical cogs, first the left and then the right, but not just the shoulders, the roll moves down into his chest, into his rib cage, through the rest of his body, down to his toes—god made me short so I can blow basketball players without ruining my knees!—then up again to rest for a moment in his hips, nothing flagrant, no need to bring attention, the walk alone pays homage to his crotch, so if you are sitting on a brownstone stoop, high or hungover or both, you look up through the shit and the grime and the thousand other everyday torments too deep to mention and you see Victor coming along—looking like he’s the first man ever to whistle—in his tight black pants and his neon orange shirt, his black hair swept back, his teeth white underneath his dark mustache and his body in a roll that isn’t jazz or funk or fox-trot or disco, it’s just pure Victor from head to toe, an art he must have managed since birth, laughing as he walks, a chuckle that rises high and ends low, a Victor laugh, on impulse, like his body just told him a little joke about himself, and the whole day slips away while you watch him, the clocks stop, the guitars tune themselves in unison, the air conditioners hum like violins, the garbage trucks sound like flutes, and you sit rooted to the steps as Victor waves to the other queens hanging out the windows, wigs and feathers and lust, while he crushes a cigarette or ties a shoelace or raps on a windowpane, using a silver dollar so it sounds out, and there are whistles and catcalls
Victor having become even more famous six years ago, after the ’69 riots in Sheridan Square when he was arrested for violence and nudity—nude violence!—but then managed a hand job from a tall blond cop in the Sixth Precinct station, so Victor was talked about, laughed about, cheered in the bars baths backrooms of the city
and he moves on, in the empire of himself, taking a bow in front of the windowsills, Victor having learned every inch of the bow from his good friend Rudi Never-Off, holding the bend, arching his back, sweeping his arm to the sky, frozen for a second, grinning, then walking again, in the sequence of sun and shadow, down to the corner smoke shop, where he hauls deep on a joint with the pretty Puerto Rican boys who polish Victor’s shoes with a white bandanna while he goes inside barefoot to tell the shop owner, Man they should arrest the mass murderer who gave you that haircut, his own hair so thick and slick that it shines under the shop neon, buying himself a packet of Lucky Strikes, his whole life a string of lucky strikes, from the streets of Caracas to the cockcrow of the new world, beginning as a carpenter, then a waiter, then a hustler, then a house painter, and, after Stonewall, an interior designer, Yes, I’ll design your interior!, taking only enough business to live the way he wants, knowing that the less a man works the more he is paid, one of the simple rules of New York City, and Victor has over the years proved many such simple rules to himself, his favorite being that if you live your life without falling in love you’ll be loved by everyone—one of the great laws of love and fuckery—you take what you get and you move swiftly away, no looking back, so that even the Puerto Rican boys on the stoop can’t hold him after sharing half their joint, he is gone once more, brightening the next street, and the next, hailed while shimmying along, the dealers reaching into their tight yellow trousers for a couple of quaaludes, free of charge, saying, Victor my man you tell those bluebloods where the real shit is at, all the dealers hoping for Victor business later that night, since Victor business is good business, Victor might well guide a large troupe to your stoop, so you can wake up tomorrow slung alongside your sweetheart with your heart singing and a fat roll of twenties under your pillow, and Victor smiles as he takes the pills, saying Gracias—one of the two Spanish words he uses, gracias and cojones, both of them pronounced in three long syllables—like he’s chewing for a moment on the childhood memory of Venezuela, the filth, the dogs, the soccer balls rolling towards the sewer pipes
when Victor was eight there was a statue said to have been sunk in the harbor at La Guaira near Caracas, a Virgin Mary, a story so vital to the townspeople that they brought pearl divers in, to no avail, they believed the Virgin would appear in a year of goodness and plenty, so when Victor was dragged out of the water, gasping for air, clutching the old and grimy statue, he was showered with money and gifts, and he took his mother and brothers to America, leaving a quarter of the money with the craftsman who had chiseled the statue for him, a perfect fake, so even then Victor knew that desire was just a stepping-stone to more desire
and he heads farther west through the Village, past a whore in hot pants wiggling her hips as if her body is on hinges, past the bums in bandannas selling the last of their Occidental Death! T-shirts, past the wheelchair beggars, past the black hipsters up against the railings on St. Mark’s Place, past the farm boys high on their first taste of amphetamines, all the flotsam and jetsam of America, and on Second Avenue Victor drops some money in the cup of a young addict, she looks up to tell him she has never seen a groovier shirt, her eyes two puddles of mascara, and he drops another dollar in her smack cup, then skips around the spray from a fire hydrant, crosses Third Avenue, down the stairs at Astor Place, no logic to his skipping, two steps one step two steps three, waving to the clerk in the booth then jumping the turnstile while the clerk shouts, Hey man, pay your goddamn fare! and Victor nods to the passengers when he gets on the train, smiling, winking, never a lonely part of the city for Victor, not even on the subway, which he rides without sitting, without touching the metal bars or hanging straps, his legs spread wide for balance, as if preparing for the night in advance, jumping off the 6 train at Grand Central for four cigarettes and a cocktail in the Oak Room, vodka and grapefruit juice, a two-dollar tip to the bartender, money is to roll that’s why they made it round, and then he weaves through the station against the rush of commuters, turning, zigging, zagging, down the litter-strewn steps to the Grand Central bathrooms—no place too nice for Victor and no place too nasty—already the rank smell of piss wafting through the t-room air, Victor announcing himself with the sort of composure that comes from a magazine, his lips pursed, his cigarette held high between his fingers, past the rectangular mirrors where a dozen men line up like a row of appetizers, Victor giving a nod to a pale-faced boy and a black man, tentative looks on their faces, unsure, he might be a cop or a queer-basher or a slicer, there’ve been some stabbings in recent years, but Victor reaches in his pockets, hands them each a quaalude, they relax and smile, down the pills, and all three dip into a stall, and soon they are laughing, touching, kissing, spooning, unspooning, until twenty minutes later Victor emerges to rinse his face and his neck and his armpits, other men watching, the rumor of Victor rippling among them, longing and jealousy in the row of mirrors since a blow job from Victor is currency in the city, a badge, an autograph, a nightclub rope suddenly lifted, hey I’m a friend of Victor Pareci’s, but if you look around for Victor he is always gone, the sort of man you need precisely because he isn’t there, always off somewhere else, his heart strung out on helium and all the valves have opened and he has been propelled elsewhere, out of your reach
to the underground room at the Anvil perhaps, or the Iranian consulate, where the great coke parties take place, or the rear basement in the Snake Pit, or a park-facing room at the Plaza, or the dark elevator to the Toilet, or the Algonquin for tea, or the pig parlor in the Triangle, or a table at Clyde’s, or the rotten piers off the W
est Side Highway, the city in all its squalor and opulence belongs to Victor, he knows its streets, its avenues, its doormen, its bartenders, its bouncers, the distance it takes to walk from one joint to the other, and when it should be done, Victor never wears a watch but he knows the time of day anyway, down to the minute, no matter where he is, who he’s fucking, what he’s drinking, however stoned, however tired, however famous the company, because it may be time to move on, the cobwebs grow on you, who knows what might be happening down the block, the center of the world shifts and changes, and it is Victor’s job to be there, I’m the Greenwich Mean Time of Queerdom!
and he is off on the express, the number 4, to Fifty-ninth and Lex, walking through the Upper East Side, the Jewish ladies with their poodles, or the poodles with their Jewish ladies, he can never tell which, Victor swinging his ass outrageously when he passes them on the sidewalk, hitting the leaves hanging from the curbside trees—how bucolic!—the light fading, streedamps flickering into life, and he smokes with furious rolls and pulls, sending out plumes above him, another cigarette behind his ear for immediate firing, he smiles at the doormen in their white gloves, thinking there might be a new fashion in their regalia—Victor the door-whore, Victor the foot-man, Victor the man who invites you in!—and he skips across a marbled hallway, rather gauche he thinks, takes the elevator to the penthouse where the first cocktail party of the evening is in swing, a preballet affair, not exactly Victor’s gig, he is seldom even out this early, but this is the house of a prospective client, he has been recommended by Rudi, and he has already given them a price, so he sashays into the mahoganied room where for an instant he stands beneath the giant chandelier and tries to announce himself with silence, but the room doesn’t ripple towards him, there’s no whispering over the rims of glasses, no awe, no clamor, how disappointing! so he pitches his bright shirt in among the dark dresses and the bow ties, leans over to deliver an exaggerated air-kiss, shakes a hand, picks a handful of hors d’oeuvres from a silver tray, the waiters slightly baffled by the sight of him, wondering if Victor is a gate-crasher or a celebrity—the sort of man who might pull the scaffold out from under the party or be the scaffold itself—but as Victor cruises the room a few heads turn in his direction, and, encouraged, he bounces on the soles of his feet towards the hostess, who surprises even herself by the size of her shriek, Darling! she snaps her fingers over the heads of three bow-tied men, the drink produced with startling speed, vodka and grapefruit, plenty of ice, and she takes his arm and brings him through the crowd, introducing him, the great Victor Pareci, a friend of Rudi’s, delighting everyone he meets, just in the way he catches their eye or shakes their hand or touches their shoulder, a greeting that is genuine but fleeting, so his friendliness has no responsibility, nobody is forced to talk to him, yet they do