Don't Think, Dear, page 16
But it was never enough. In her final year at the school, when her dream of joining the company seemed to be finally within reach, Lily was told to “tone up.” One teacher suggested she add more Pilates to her routine—maybe the low-impact exercises would help her “lengthen.” Lily knew what that meant: lose weight. She had given everything to ballet, and she wouldn’t let her body hold her back now. She restricted her diet even more, and resigned herself to a life of feeling hungry and depleted all the time. When she brushed her teeth at night, she wondered if there were calories in toothpaste.
At seventeen, Lily’s sacrifices looked poised, at last, to pay off: she was cast in a featured role in the workshop performance of Balanchine’s Valse Fantaisie. (The graduation workshop is a crucial showcase for the students and an unofficial audition for the company.) For most of the ballet, Lily and three other girls were in constant motion, rising and falling, jumping and swirling like human confetti. Later, after the workshop, Lily learned that she was one of five in her class chosen for an apprenticeship with the New York City Ballet. It was the happiest day of her life. When I saw my old friend’s picture above the New York Times workshop review, which praised the students for their “innocent” enthusiasm and “unfettered joy,” I had no idea that she was secretly nursing a broken toe.
* * *
In 1995, a pair of British psychologists set out to explore how dancers experience pain. They invited fifty-three college students and fifty-two professional ballet dancers to their lab to take the “cold pressor test.” First, each subject would submerge her hand in a bucket of comfortably lukewarm water and hold it there for two minutes. Then she would transfer it to a bucket of ice water and tell the experimenter when her hand started to hurt (indicating her pain threshold) and when it became unbearable (pain tolerance).
At both points, the dancers responded differently: they had a higher pain threshold as well as higher pain tolerance. The nondancer female college students complained after sixteen seconds, on average, and withdrew their hands after thirty-seven. The ballerinas, meanwhile, didn’t admit they were in pain until forty-four seconds had passed, and kept their hands in the freezing water for a full ninety-five—more than twice as long as their nondancer peers.
Maybe, the researchers speculated, the dancers perceived pain differently; maybe they were somehow numb to it. But interviews revealed the opposite to be true: the dancers were actually more sensitive, consistently rating the pain as more intense. Ballet dancers are acutely in tune with their bodies, right down to the nerve receptors in their skin—but they are experts at pushing through.
If a masochistic streak might help ordinary women cope with pain, then imagine how useful such a streak would be for a dancer. It might even be a requirement. “In my experience, dancers tend to be masochists,” Leigh Cowart writes. Cowart, a science reporter (who uses “they” pronouns), would know: they grew up studying ballet, moving away from home as a teenager to train at the North Carolina School of the Arts, and danced professionally in their early twenties. Now in their thirties, Cowart identifies as a “high-sensation seeking masochist”: they often ask partners to hurt them in bed, and in their memoir recall episodes of sexual torture so gruesome I had to skim several pages. (Nonetheless, certain phrases jumped out: “wrought-iron stirrups,” “industrial rubber bands,” “I feel like I am dying.”) They had always been intense. The first time they stood up on pointe, in the dusty back room of their local dance-wear shop, twelve-year-old Cowart almost passed out from the pain. But they refused to cushion their toes with the gel strips or lambswool that most dancers rely on, instead using only a square of single-ply toilet paper for padding. (My feet hurt just reading that.) Cowart’s toenails turned purple and fell off, but they didn’t care: dancing on pointe was the milestone that made them a ballerina—a member of this “very niche, very beautiful pain cult.” Over the next decade, Cowart’s body was battered by broken bones, torn ligaments, tendinitis, and an eating disorder; they suffered a spinal fracture and head trauma from being kicked under the chin onstage.
Cowart sees a clear link between their experiences in the ballet world and their adult appetite for pain—which they satisfy with activities ranging from the apparently erotic (being Saran-Wrapped to another person and hung from the ceiling) to the nonsexual (eating a pepper so spicy it causes hours of cold sweats and cramps). Perhaps, Cowart speculates, these pursuits are therapeutic, giving them a chance to relive the trauma of ballet, but this time in a position of control. Or maybe they’re just wired to take pleasure in pain. “Did ballet make me a masochist?” they ask. “Or was I simply well suited to the grueling discipline of the art form because of something intrinsic to my core personality, the nebulous you-ness that becomes solid and nameable by kindergarten?” These are questions I’ve asked myself, too: when a man grabbed a fistful of my hair by the roots, triggering both a rush of blood and a vivid sense-memory of yanking my own hair into a bun.
And these are questions that I thought about as I read The Surrender, an erotic memoir by Toni Bentley, who made her name first as a dancer and then as a masochist.
Toni’s relationship with ballet started off casually, when her mother—hoping the exercise would stimulate her tiny daughter’s appetite—enrolled her in a weekly children’s class in Bristol, England. But when the family relocated to New York in 1969 and her mother took her to try out for SAB—which she had heard about “at the laundromat or from a friend of a friend”—ballet became the guiding force in her life. The auditioners immediately recognized Toni’s potential—her long limbs and preternatural flexibility—and they all gathered around as one lifted Toni’s leg “to the front, the side, the back, higher and higher it went,” she wrote in Winter Season, her first memoir. “The Russian eyebrows rose proportionately.”
Toni started at SAB the very next day, and soon became obsessed with fitting into the “extremely competitive environment of beautiful young women.” Her ambition grew as she climbed through the ranks—and so did her tolerance for pain. “Perhaps a certain tendency to masochism or at least the acceptance of both physical and emotional pain is a prerequisite for dancing,” she suggests, echoing Cowart. In between ballet classes, she read “voraciously” about the lives of saints, and was so impressed by the stories of women starving, beating themselves with branches, and licking the open sores of lepers that she toyed with the idea of becoming a nun. But the stage was too seductive, and her potential too great. Willowy, dark-haired, and utterly devoted, she was a natural Balanchine dancer, and in her final year, she was cast as the lead in the graduation workshop performance of The Sleeping Beauty. It was the opportunity she had been working for since she was ten, and she made a promise to herself: if she could only get into the company, she would never ask for anything else, and would in fact be happy for the rest of her life.
For six months, Toni devoted herself to mastering the part of Princess Aurora. In one of her final rehearsals, with the performance just a week away, she launched herself into a pas de chat—a catlike leap, all knees and air—and felt herself slip on the way down. When Toni recalls this scene in Winter Season, she switches into the third person, as though—even after several years have passed—the emotions accompanying her fall are too intense to claim as her own. “She saw her performance, her Princess and her career disappear before her eyes,” she wrote. “Her ankle turned black and blue and swelled. She sat for the last week of rehearsals in a chair, her foot packed in ice.” But on the morning of the show, she pulled herself up and danced. Her stoicism paid off: the New York Times praised her delicacy and balance, and Balanchine offered her a place in the corps.
She was seventeen, and her upward trajectory seemed to stretch out, limitless, in front of her. Right away, she was chosen to learn solo roles—“Big, grand ballerina things.” But when she looked at the world-class dancers around her, she felt intimidated, unworthy, and she committed the gravest sin, in Balanchine’s eyes: she held back. Her dancing, she realized later, was “too modest and fearful.” But at the time, she didn’t know why she stopped seeing her name alone, or why it started appearing with others. Still, her commitment to Balanchine, and her belief that he was right about everything, never wavered; New York City Ballet was the meaning of her life. Even as her career stalled, she took immense pride in being one of the seventy dancers in Balanchine’s company; in representing her hero and sharing a stage with his stars.
Toni, who is an avid reader and lifelong journal-keeper, channeled some of her thwarted ambition into writing, publishing her first book when she was just twenty-two. Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal shows a young woman consumed with the daily grind—fighting for Balanchine’s approval, analyzing the cast lists, maintaining her figure. “I went through years of neurotic eating when often each day began with the challenge to fast, to eat nothing,” she confided. Although she had recovered, sort of—“I eat every day”—she still seemed to enjoy depriving herself. She limited the contents of her refrigerator to “diet soda, juice, skim milk, seltzer water, and cat food.” Sometimes, when she was hungry, she took a perverted pleasure in skipping meals and feeding her cat instead.
Her main purpose in life was to please her ballet master. “Mr. Balanchine is our leader, our president, our mother, our father, our friend, our guide, our mentor, our destiny,” she wrote, without a trace of irony. She describes how, when he entered the studio each morning, “his” dancers would automatically strip, peeling off the leg warmers and sweaters that kept them warm; how, at a meeting about the terms of their contracts, they shuffled toward him to sit, “childlike,” at his feet. She asked Balanchine’s permission before publishing Winter Season and, as soon as the galleys came in, dropped one off for him and waited anxiously for the “one review that really mattered.” She recalls in a 2003 preface how she held her breath for a week, worrying what Balanchine would think of the book in which she says he “knows all, sees all, and controls all.” (He liked it.)
Toni never stopped pushing herself, and by the time she was in her midtwenties, her body was beginning to fight back. The company was on a European tour in Tivoli when she suddenly found herself unable to lift her right leg, let alone dance. X-rays revealed that she had developed arthritis in her right hip and calcium deposits in her left, leaving the socket “looking craggy as Mount Rushmore when it should be smooth as Michelangelo marble.”
Toni suffered through a “honey, it’s all over” talk from the company doctor, then ignored his advice, dulled the pain with drugs, and clawed her way back. She eked out another year before her hips gave out for good, forcing her to turn “from the stage to the page.” She published essays and reviews in Rolling Stone and the New York Times, wrote a coffee table book about the costume designer Karinska, and helped her idol, Suzanne Farrell, write her memoir. But her breakout didn’t come until twenty years after she retired from professional ballet. In 2004, Toni released The Surrender, which lays out, in diaristic detail, her passion for anal sex. Years before Fifty Shades of Grey became an international phenomenon, The Surrender was a bestseller in four countries, landing on Playboy’s list of “sexiest memoirs of all time” and inspiring an off-Broadway play—as well as a feminist campaign against the author. “I got a lot of hate mail,” Toni said at a conference called THiNK 2013. “One of them said I’d set back feminism a hundred years.” The book’s cover—a close-up of a woman’s lace-fringed lavender panties—was too provocative for Barnes & Noble; the publisher compromised by adding a black jacket with a keyhole cutout.
If most women are squeamish about admitting their masochistic fantasies—if they hide Fifty Shades of Grey on their Kindle—dancers have more license to indulge their masochistic side publicly. “The Act”—as Toni calls it—represents, to her, submission, surrender, “an emotional and anatomical miracle.” She writes rapturously of how her first experience of anal sex gave her “a profound sensation of freedom,” even though—or perhaps because—it hurt. She carefully documented each subsequent tryst, luxuriating in the memories of her pain: “He was pushing into the fist in my gut and rolfing me from the inside,” she wrote. “It hurt like hell but I didn’t say a word. I just maintained the pain level just past bearable . . .” She reflects on how her decades in ballet prepared her—physically and emotionally—for this relationship. “I learned early how to transcend pain, deny pain,” she wrote. “Learning to go past—way past—one’s physical comfort level, and to love that moment of going past, is intrinsic to a dancer’s training.” And her submissive, all-consuming relationship with her lover—to whom she gives the moniker “A-Man”—echoed her relationship with Balanchine. “Dancing is about being in service to the choreographer, to the steps, to the music,” she wrote. “Allowing this man into my ass reproduces this dynamic of service, of yielding to something greater than myself.”
Toni became so obsessed with A-Man that she would dig his used condoms out of her wastebasket and display them as “a trophy” until his next visit. Throughout her life, Toni hoarded the detritus of her painful exploits—her anal adventures, her dancing, her hip surgery—the better to remember them by. When, twenty years after the injury that ended her career, she finally scheduled a hip replacement, she told her doctor she wanted to keep the bone, then asked a taxidermist how to preserve it. (The recipe he gave her—which involved soaking the bone and boiling it on her stove—reminded her of making chicken broth. “I drained the pot into a colander observing, I’m proud to report, very little fat on the surface of the liquid,” she wrote in the New York Review of Books. “Less than with a chicken.”) She stashed the dried and bleached hip bone in a wooden box painted with delicate flowers, next to the last pair of pointe shoes she ever wore onstage—“my fetishistic ally, my crown of thorns, my bed of nails.”
* * *
“Crown of thorns,” “bed of nails”: pointe shoes. There is no better symbol of the pain endured by female dancers. Lily strapped her broken toe into her pointe shoe and tried to ignore the ache: there was no time to rest. She had pushed through workshop with a stress fracture, and she had been rewarded with the chance of a lifetime—to dance three seasons with the corps, in a year-long audition for a full-time job. Just five years after Lily and I had stood in the wings in our soldiers’ costumes, ogling the beautiful women warming up at the barre, she was one of them, dancing through the blue-gray snowstorm in The Nutcracker’s first act and the garden of enchanted flowers in Act II. I didn’t know, as I lustily clicked through Lily’s Facebook from my college dorm (that fuchsia tutu! that multitiered tiara!), that her ability to bask in the fulfillment of her childhood dream—our childhood dream—was hampered, somewhat, by the excruciating pain she had to conceal. I didn’t know that she danced eight Nutcrackers a week on a broken foot, or that when—sick and vomiting with a 104-degree fever—she confessed at intermission that she might not be able to finish the show, an older dancer pulled her into a dressing room and offered her cocaine.
Lily’s body, by this point, had been worn down not only by her grueling schedule—she often left the theater after eleven at night, only to return by ten the next morning—but by years of starvation: she fueled her dancing with fewer calories than a sedentary woman would burn. A few months into her apprenticeship, Lily reached a breaking point and ate a burger. She felt a surge of energy, and then of hope: maybe she wouldn’t have to live this way. She gained five pounds, bringing her weight slightly above the anorexic range, and even got her period. But after a couple of months of more normal eating, Lily was called in to the ballet mistress’s dark, cramped office. “You’re getting a bit round,” she told Lily, while Peter Martins nodded. Lily listened meekly and promised to do better. Afterward, she tried to make light of it. “I’m too fat, baby!” she told her boyfriend—a fellow dancer—when he asked her how the meeting had gone. That night, hungry and weeping in his arms, she bit his shoulder and pretended it was a burger. Over the next months, she starved herself back to her old, bony figure. She grew so malnourished that she passed out on the subway and woke to find a stranger spoon-feeding her grapefruit.
Once, an apprenticeship was practically a guarantee of a job. But in 2011, the New York City Ballet was facing a deficit. A dozen dancers had been let go, and the survivors faced a salary freeze and a reduction in sick leave. When it was time for Lily to find out whether she would be invited into the company, she and two other women were instead asked to spend another year apprenticing. (The two male apprentices, meanwhile, were offered full-time jobs on schedule.) Six months into her second year—her second year of treating every day like a trial; of acting like a company member but feeling second-class—Lily learned that she would not be joining the corps after all. She cried as Peter told her that he could not afford to keep her. “I was contemplating death when I heard those words,” she wrote on her blog. In an instant, the dream that she had been chasing for over a decade evaporated. “All I’ve ever wanted was to dance in this company . . . I feel lost, like my identity has been stripped from me.” She still had six months left in her apprentice contract: she would have to keep working for the boss who had fired her—as if she’d been dumped and had to keep living with her ex. Every day, she stood at the barre next to the men and women who had what she wanted, who were living the life that should have been hers. In between rehearsals, she looked up auditions and networked with directors, traveling to tryouts on her rare days off. Still, she couldn’t help but hope that Peter might reconsider: maybe, if she worked even harder, he would realize he’d made a mistake. This show is gonna change their minds! she thought, as she threw herself into Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3.
