The Master's Muse, page 13
The bathwater was cold. George came to the door and called through it that he was going to work and was I alive?
“Yeah! Nice day!” I drained the water and turned on the hot again.
Get out of the iron lung. Get out of the bed. Walk, and if you can’t, sit in the chair and don’t die.
Know what I hold in reserve, darling? Death. I can still get out of this. But I wouldn’t do it over you. I already didn’t do it over you, and for what?
I got in the bath and thought about people he’d hurt. Women—lots of them. Men—who were in his way or were growing older. Sure, facts were facts, but compassion would have been more appropriate than disdain and dismissal in the name of his vision, his needs. Needs. Didn’t everyone break apart with desires that couldn’t be? And I didn’t buy the cult of the genius. I had known good geniuses. One. Maybe two.
George’s treatment of Lincoln had always disturbed me. Tall, brilliant, rich, young Lincoln Kirstein wanted ballet for America. In 1933, the year he brought George from Europe, there were only two companies in the entire United States. Lincoln supported his choreographer through box-office deficits and canceled tours over the fifteen long years that passed from Balanchine’s arrival to the establishment of New York City Ballet. Lincoln took George to the doctor, did budgets, publicity, and drained his own trust fund. In the late forties his mother kept the company alive, and as late as 1952 Lincoln had personally raised money to keep it going through the following year.
All the while Lincoln wished to create. With his literary gifts, he wanted to write librettos. With his erudition in visual art, he hoped to coordinate scenery. But Balanchine needed only his dancers and music, and what he wanted was just to continue, basically alone. Lincoln was no impresario like Diaghilev, and his efforts and passions were cordoned off into administration and fund-raising. He was too sensitive not to feel the underside of Balanchine’s gratitude—a slight contempt. Lincoln said there were no disagreements between them because they never talked about anything.
Lincoln pursued his artistic interests on the side, but he had breakdowns, getting worse through the years. Lincoln and his wife, Fidelma, lived in a town house near Gramercy Park. The living room looked like a miniature ballroom, its gold-draped walls hung with paintings and drawings. Fidelma, a gifted painter herself, also had breakdowns. Lincoln’s parade of young men were houseguests; Lincoln abandoned Fidelma in foreign countries, pursuing flings; Lincoln escorted a young boy to the opening of New York City Ballet’s first summer season in Saratoga Springs. I did not at all appreciate seeing this type of commonality between Fidelma and me. I looked up at my beautiful pink roses on the ceiling above the bath, wallpaper George had laughed at because with the steam it would peel and fall off. But it hadn’t, not in over six years. It irked me that certain people dismissed the length of my marriage—twelve years. If it weren’t for the polio he wouldn’t have stayed, it was over before she got sick. But to stay when I first got sick was one thing, to remain was another. If he had remained with me since 1956 out of nothing but duty and noblesse oblige, I was out of my mind.
That night he came home late and sat reading the paper. Mourka lay at his feet like a slave.
He’d already read the reviews in the morning, and for him the ballet seemed old news.
“I think I’ll move out,” I said.
“Hmn?”
“I’m moving out.”
“Oh, to where?”
“Europe. Paris. I’ve always wanted to live in Paris.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Why is it ridiculous?”
He lowered the paper. “You have no friends there, and I cannot come.”
“No? You wouldn’t transfer the theater for me?”
“Not the State Theater, no. You should have asked me four years ago. I like Paris myself.”
He went back to reading and I left it alone. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do or feel.
Mother, however, weighed in vociferously on the subject. She had her own ring of spies for information, ballet mothers she’d known forever. They’d been on the phones discussing Suzanne.
Mother called shortly and gave me a full report of how she had dealt with the gossip.
“Oh, no, I said, nothing about this is wrenching for Tanny. Ballet dancing is for the young. Mr. Balanchine is a ballet master and he must bring on the young. Tanaquil, as a former prima ballerina”—she’d get in the dig for the mothers of the corps dancers—“understands this implicitly. She approves of Suzanne. If she didn’t, he would find someone else. It’s a marvelous marriage, they talk about everything, and he depends on my daughter’s opinions.”
The tactic was to deflect the possibility that anything other than dancing could possibly be going on with Suzanne.
“They are so happy,” said Mother. “Would that we all could be as happy as they are. The secret is they are compatible. As a former star, she knows what is important to him. She has wit and insight. But she no longer dances so she also has the time and energy for him. Truly, he is the centerpiece of her life. Men need that. They want that. Don’t kid yourself, men need it much more than we do and you can multiply it in the case of a man of stature. You can believe me, I know. I have been close to Mr. Balanchine for twenty years and I know.
“Of course, many men of stature desire young girls. Once, Mr. Balanchine did. But even powerful men get older, life moves along. With Tanaquil Mr. Balanchine has the best of both worlds. My daughter is still young and beautiful, and yet she isn’t a naïf. He is a man of vast culture, a grand seigneur, and he has found his perfect partner.”
“The centerpiece of my life. . . .” I said into the phone. Unbelievable.
“Isn’t he?” Mother said.
“Is my life a table?” Interesting that I got mostly Mother’s side of the conversations. I deduced the pride she took in sending new gossip out on the airwaves.
“There have been other ballerinas and this girl won’t be the last,” she said in a more genuine tone, one that penetrated the clichés, if not the shrewdness. “But he is your husband, and if the two of you are going on, you have to allow for his eccentricities.”
“Tell me I didn’t just sniff a euphemism.”
“You didn’t. It was only a dance.”
“I’m bored,” I said. “Why are we talking?”
“You aren’t bored, you’re worried. You needn’t be. Everyone’s shocked. Throughout your career people loved and admired you. The audience took to you with warmth and they haven’t forgotten. People still feel this for you. Even these catty women were pulling their punches. You are admired and George knows it.”
“What are you saying?”
“Since the Ford Foundation grant, George has a new gravitas. He is aware of it. He wouldn’t jeopardize his reputation.”
Would I scream? “I have to go,” I said. “I can’t stand scheming and gossip. My head hurts. I’m getting out of New York. I’m moving permanently to Weston.”
“No, don’t!” she cried.
“God! I’m not serious! Good-bye!”
Christ! I’d had it. George was a choreographer. He’d made a dance. He had a crush, if you could use the word crush for a fifty-nine-year-old without laughing. The object of his crush could dance, and that hurt. But I liked my life. I happened to love this particular fifty-nine-year-old, daft as it was.
I decided I’d go ahead and use Suzanne’s cat, Bottom, as Mourka’s love interest. What the hell, it even struck me as funny. In the book’s large cast of feline characters, Diana’s Phink also played a part. The photographer shot Mourka’s tricks and adventures in the apartment on our homemade sets. Suzanne had adopted Bottom at George’s request. Directing her as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he was bewildered by Suzanne’s inability to caress and sweet-talk Bottom, the donkey Titania falls in love with. “Haven’t you cooed to a baby?” he asked her. “A dog? A cat?” Evidently she hadn’t, and Bottom the cat was a research project.
Suzanne didn’t dance the opening of the New York State Theater in April 1964, Maria did. Life settled down. I stayed the summer in Weston and George came out weekends. He arrived late one Friday night in a foul temper, denouncing a ballerina he had promoted to soloist who didn’t listen, fretting over a score. He threw up his hands, telling me that Allegra was pregnant again.
“Any woman can have baby, I make her Brigitte Bardot!”
At two o’clock in the morning, knocking back vodka, he slathered an English muffin with an inch of butter and caviar he’d brought from the city, saying he hadn’t eaten since dawn.
I suggested that he was working too hard and should stay at the house all week some week.
No, no, must teach. These girls, they ran out of breath, they weren’t filling the stage Russian-style, and he had to get up early and go into town for a new lawn mower. He didn’t trust Eddie to do it alone.
I went to bed, leaving him roiling in the kitchen. In the morning getting my slothful self into motion, I saw that he and Eddie were already gone. They’d watered the flowers and herbs by the house, so I went back inside and chained myself to the desk. It was a small kid’s desk I’d set in the corner of our blue bedroom under a calendar marked with black Xs. Each day, to verify my requisite three hours, I slashed off a square with an X. Mourka: The Autobiography of a Cat was complete, though it would not be published for several months. I had begun a ballet cookbook. I solicited dancers for recipes and embarked on writing contributor profiles. The yeses kept rolling in and the book had ballooned.
I couldn’t focus. I stared out the window at trees, watching the light intensify, dissolving shadowy clots of leaves and bringing forth detail; I considered lunch. The front door sounded and clatter chopped up the silence and in a few minutes turned into Eddie’s heavy steps.
He stood in the bedroom doorway paled, the red of his Irish complexion gone. His long arms hung puppetlike, drooping. He pushed at his crew cut with the back of a hand.
“What?”
“I’m taking George to the hospital. He hurt his finger with the new lawn mower. I read the directions, I told him be careful, don’t touch anywhere by this hole. We started her up and he put his finger right in.”
I found splatters of blood all over the kitchen. I cleaned the counters and floor, frustrated that I hadn’t insisted Eddie take me along.
Three hours later they came back. George’s whole left pointer finger was bandaged. He had cut off the first joint. His beautiful pianist hands, what had he been thinking?
He wouldn’t talk. He sat on the lawn wrapped in a cotton blanket in the summer sun and refused to take any pain pills. He didn’t want water or anything else. He didn’t want dinner.
“Why don’t you come inside and lie down?” I said as the light faded. “It’s buggy out here, you’ll be eaten alive.”
Implacable, he didn’t move, alone with his pain and sealed off from me.
At one a.m. he still hadn’t come in. Under no circumstances for as long as I had known him had he ever apologized or said he was wrong. His behavior might show he was sorry, but he wouldn’t surrender the words. Today felt similar in how he spoke with his silence that he refused to explain, if an explanation existed, refused to share his grief, and the grief was so palpable in the yard that it cast a vibration. The humming thickness declared there would be no discussion, no regret or worries expressed, no comfort received.
My opinion was that he hurt himself because he’d been driving himself, but equally because of guilt, being divided between Suzanne and me and therefore careless—he hadn’t listened to Eddie. If he had once told me that he knew exactly what he wanted to do in his life, he didn’t anymore. And back at home from the hospital he may have felt he didn’t deserve my comfort, or I wasn’t the one who could soothe him.
I couldn’t sleep. I concentrated on the soughing trees I loved, trying to take my mind off the whole awful situation. It wasn’t a still night, but they didn’t sound the same or I couldn’t hear, couldn’t concentrate.
He had gathered my trees, stuffed them deep into duffel bags, and carried them off.
In fall, the release of Mourka necessitated that I emerge from obscurity and give interviews. Dance magazine published an article, “Bright Victory,” accompanied by a photo of me in the garden, admiring the daisies. I talked to the New York Post and the Herald Tribune. Usually I invited the reporters to the apartment. I’d give a tour and serve snacks in the kitchen while I answered questions.
Mourka sat, as he liked to do, in one of the kitchen chairs with the posture of a person, legs splayed, paws resting on his big exposed belly. I would tell how he came to us scrawny but developed a taste for asparagus, potatoes, peas, and sour cream.
As we discussed the polio, since that was what they’d come to hear, I’d get the big question: How had I arrived at my acceptance of no longer dancing?
It’s because I was lazy, I said, dancing got harder as you got older. I acknowledged that I wished I’d been left with a limp instead of a wheelchair, described how I exercised daily; if I didn’t, my brain didn’t work and I felt like a sofa. I said I liked fashion. Before, I couldn’t wear anything nice. Going from fittings to rehearsal to performance had been an all-day striptease.
But apart from my effortful levity, what should have been the happy time of Mourka’s release was marred by a sense of foreboding. My dread, of course, had begun when I first became aware of George’s infatuation with Suzanne at the Meditation premiere. That marker in my life had occurred just weeks after President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.
The day of his death was cold and gray in New York. George had called home and said to have Carl bring me to the Empire Hotel coffee shop. A group from the office had agreed to commiserate over drinks, and I should be there.
The tenor of the decade, which was up to then in American daily life indecipherable and had seemed a continuation of the fifties, was with Kennedy’s murder writ bold: ahead lay years of upheaval and pain. Every American alive at the time was imprinted by the drama of those years. I’ve thought that George, who was so sensitive to environs—this despite his singular vocation—was not only imprinted by the events of the sixties but was impelled by them.
George felt that when Bottom the Weaver is transformed into an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he experiences a revelation. Bottom reports upon his awakening into our world:
The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.
He had experienced a reality he could no longer grasp, it was as if he had seen the kingdom of God.
Reality is not here on earth, George liked to say, and yet the earthly entranced him and he hungered hugely for it. It is difficult to describe such a complicated man.
4
With the genesis of the cookbook the apartment grew festive. A college student I hired tested recipes in the kitchen and I played scullery maid. Dancers brought samples of their concoctions. Others insisted on supervising while I attempted to follow their “easy” instructions for masterpieces that had been in their family since the Mayflower. We entertained more because of the excess of edibles, and people who came in the day stayed on through the night. Friends of ours, Arthur Gold and Bobby Fizdale, the piano duo, would play, George was convinced to do one last trick with the cat, and, with our stomachs bursting, we discussed food to our hearts’ content.
Dancers are always hungry. Especially the women, who are usually on diets. Laughing uproariously, Maria described a sour Pippin apple she ate once while George ate a plate of spaghetti. Diet or no, the physical nature of our art gives us appetite, and most of us think about food a lot.
Diana usually came afternoons, the winter and spring of 1965, with little Georgina. She was a quietly gurgling baby sporting a shock of exotic blue-black hair. It pained Diana to put Georgina down, but at last the baby slept wedged between pillows and her mother did prep at my side. We discussed the company. Diana was dancing again, although infrequently. All was not well. In company class, George tailored exercises to Suzanne. He’d have Suzanne demonstrate combinations and say to the others, “Do like Suzanne.” He took the jumps out of ballets Suzanne danced because she couldn’t do them. Natalie had reported that George and Suzanne were often spotted together at Tip Toe Inn—how appropriate—a deli at Seventy-Fourth and Broadway, or at Dunkin’ Donuts, wherever that was. Dunkin’ Donuts? To my knowledge, until now George had never set foot in the place, hadn’t ever eaten a doughnut. For a week it was all I could do not to say to him mornings, “Cruller or glazed?” I was punch-drunk from cooking. Helpful Eddie chaperoned George and Suzanne to keep up appearances.
What did they talk about? Cats, maybe. The Bible. I had heard she was religious. George didn’t mention her to me unless she came up in the context of Don Quixote, his latest three-act ballet. I’d known of Don Quixote since George began working on his version with the composer Nicolas Nabokov the previous summer. I knew Suzanne would dance Dulcinea. I accustomed myself to the idea. What else could I do? George was obsessed. Let him stare at her, I thought, let him listen to her teenaged musings over doughnuts. He had always been interested in the lives of young girls, in their problems, hair, clothes, the aches and pains of their young bodies from what he asked them to do. They were his material. If I felt bothered I parked myself at the typewriter and spun out the biography and culinary background of Alicia Alonso. I’d get on the phone and discuss borscht with Rudolf Nureyev. I revised for my preface the anecdotes illustrating dancers’ appetites:
“I took such and such a ballerina out for a late-night snack and it emptied my wallet.”
“All I invited were a few of the principals and, my dear, they descended upon the food like a plague of locusts.”
