The Master's Muse, page 14
It wasn’t as if I had nothing to do. It wasn’t as if George and I didn’t seem to have a good life together, we did. Of course, much of his life he lived with his dancers. But the key word here is dancers, plural. His exclusive obsession with Suzanne seemed increasingly mad, yet I told myself that if their relationship stayed as it was, I could wait it out.
I was deluded, fixated on making the best of my own life and coping each day with my paralysis and life in a chair—which takes an abundance of hard, cold energy minute by minute only those who endure it can know.
I couldn’t control what was happening and I didn’t want to believe there was anything near me I couldn’t control. Since losing my legs, I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t conceive that my life might contain other grief of a comparable magnitude.
The truth was I had not gotten over the polio, even as I worked to simply “be me.” I could not leave behind what had happened to me, as George preached in all his behavior that people should, and I was sometimes convinced that this was why he didn’t love me.
Even when his finger had been heavily bandaged, he went about his life as if the accident had been nothing. For him, I think, the bandage was sort of a badge of honor. For me, it was a constant reminder of his duplicity.
My mind couldn’t grasp what might come. If I entertained the thought that there existed a real possibility he would cast me aside, that I’d be an abandoned woman, me and the chair—well, that made it worse, so pathetic—I became furious. I did not want to play another role I hadn’t chosen. I hated his power, that he could do this to me if he wanted to.
In my mind’s eye I was still the beautiful girl on the Cape in the summers. Mother gave tea parties and the girls wore white gloves and all of the boys in the neighborhood were in love with me.
I’d wonder searchingly why George could not see this too. Such was my arrogance and my hubris.
He announced that for the gala premiere of Don Quixote he would himself play the Don. I was about to show him the dress I bought for the premiere, a swirl of white silk I alighted on in the pages of Elle, when he said nonchalantly, “You know, Mayor Lindsay will be there tomorrow. Suzanne and I will sit with him at his table.” He took the box out of the bag.
“Give me the dress,” I said.
“I didn’t see it yet,” he answered as if the earth hadn’t tilted and fallen off its axis. The solid room heaved. That was the nature of the experience, coming to me like labor, like birth.
“Give me the dress.” He handed it over. I wheeled back into the bedroom closet and put the box on a shelf.
He did his version of babbling. “This is what he will like, the mayor, to sit with the stars.”
That was not how it worked. I quietly shut the closet and said, “George, if I am not there at your table tomorrow, I won’t be here.”
“Here? In the apartment?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Well, we are sitting with the mayor at his table. Suzanne and I,” and he left the room and went to work.
He thought I was bluffing. Eddie called later to tell me that I would sit at a table with Mother, Jerry, Diana, and Natalie.
“No, Eddie, I won’t.”
George and I didn’t speak that night and continued cold war the next morning. After he huffed off, I loitered around the apartment, finally made plans, and packed a small suitcase. I called Carl, giving him the bare facts, but by the time he came for me at six he must have heard more, because he looked crestfallen. Carl was considerate; Carl cared for me.
We silently rode to the threadbare midtown hotel I had located, one with wide doorways for the chair. I had so hoped for an upper room in the Empire Hotel, where I could gaze haughtily down at the theater out of my righteousness.
My midtown refuge stank of old carpet and bleach. I’d stayed in worse.
“Go ahead,” I said to Carl. “I’m fine.” With calls to make, I was anxious for him to leave.
Carl had unusual down-sloping blue eyes, and they were moist. “Do you know we took adagio class together?” he said. “Do you remember?”
“Sure.” I picked up the room service menu, wanting to concentrate on what was tangible, dinner.
“It was a long time ago,” Carl said. “We were teenagers.”
I put down the menu. This seemed important to him. “Why don’t you sit down, Carl.”
He sat, mournfully. His whole bulk said mournful. For god’s sake, he wasn’t cheering me up. Carl hadn’t danced long. I realized I knew very little about him. He had told me he lived with his mother in Germantown on the Upper East Side. His hair was always carefully combed, I thought. Such thick blond hair—why did he live with his mother?
“You were already performing,” he continued. “I wasn’t that good. But I was strong and they praised me for that. We got paired for a couple sessions and I thought you were great. I mean, a great dancer and a nice person.”
“Thank you, Carl.” I was a self-involved person. I’d seen him practically every day for years and it hadn’t occurred to me to ask him a thing about his dancing. “Know what I remember?” I said. “Your striped jersey. It was nice, violet and blue.”
“Yeah,” and he laughed. “I didn’t wear it every day, but it was my favorite.”
“You weren’t so . . . big then. What got you started on weight lifting?”
“I was sick as a kid. They thought I’d die. The dancing was therapy too, intended to build me up. I’ve still got. . . a heart. A small problem.”
“And you carry me?”
“Oh, it’s beneficial. I’ve been assured.”
“Well, I’m glad.”
He stood. “I’ll go. Call me.” I watched his broad back go to the door.
I didn’t make any calls. Let my absence linger in everyone’s mind and leave my whereabouts a mystery. I had warned Carl to keep this to himself.
Not that George would care tonight. He might tomorrow. I took a bath and drank too much wine and ate my terrible dinner.
In the morning I decided to go stay with Mother. This flophouse might be dramatic but I couldn’t take it and maintain any measure of equanimity for more than a night. Mother’s apartment on Riverside Drive had fairly wide doorways and a decent elevator to travel up on.
“Tanaquil,” she said when I called, “where have you been?”
“On the lam. I’ll be over in a while.”
“I tried to give him a piece of my mind, but Natalie wouldn’t let me.”
“We’ll talk,” and I hung up the phone.
Natalie said Mother had been about to march up to George at the head table with Suzanne and the mayor and say, “Mr. Balanchine, where is your wife?” On top of the ballet itself and my empty seat in the audience, the gala was the last straw for my ma. Natalie and Diana took her home.
“Did my seat at the theater stay empty?” I asked Natalie.
“Yes, being right next to Jerry’s, it glared.”
“Oh, goody,” I said. High drama. “Did you go back to the party?” I asked, imagining George and Suzanne on the dance floor. But Natalie said they didn’t want to. Nor would she say much about the ballet. Suzanne was all right; George was all right; it was a long dark ballet. The balletomanes were thrilled George was dancing.
It wasn’t real dancing, it was more acting and mime, but he was almost always onstage and the part was demanding.
Diana said she wished she had sat farther back. His chest heaved at the end of his scenes. Suzanne washed his feet with her hair and he crawled on his knees to her. Like Natalie, Diana could not be objective. Nobody, including Jerry, who barely said anything, wanted to see it again.
Man of La Mancha was on Broadway that year and people associated “The Impossible Dream” with the assassination of the young president, the death of his Camelot. Emotion was blatant, full-blown throughout the culture, things bigger than life were going on in life—life was opera. Nothing seemed to be left of the fifties “cool,” of abstraction, of hip. And here was the neoclassical master with his long, maudlin, grasping ballet. Well, that was a definite aspect of him too. I could just hear the reviews, but thinking of them didn’t offer much solace.
Mother was in bed getting over a migraine. Why hadn’t I warned her? Why hadn’t I said I was leaving him? There were instances, and that morning was one, when I thought the Suzanne debacle threw Mother more than it did me. I made us hot chocolate, and the scent of it mingling with Mother’s orange-blossom soap filled the darkened bedroom with sweetness and calm. As comforting was her shredding bed jacket, the yellowing thinning lace dropping away, the maroon satin ground of the jacket remaining intact and brilliant. She was always there. People needed continuity. I loved her so. Sitting by Mother’s bedside, I experienced gusts of sentimental Victorian longing. Ordinarily I didn’t like coming to Mother’s apartment. It bulged with shrines to my career: grouped portraits and framed reviews, scrapbooks, a trunk of old costumes. But I was able to get around here more easily than at the hotel. After the polio, Mother got rid of the rugs.
“She isn’t a cultural companion for him,” Mother said on a groan.
I didn’t say I hardly thought that mattered.
“Whatever you do, don’t give him a divorce. You have a position, and you’ll have a position when he dies.”
“George isn’t dying, Mother.”
“No, but he will.” I looked daggers at her, less upset by the thought of his death than by her self-interest. Then I softened: she was trying to protect me. Oh, god, I had begun to understand Mother’s reasoning. I opened the drapes and told her I wanted to look at the water and listen to music; I’d unpack later. Sighing, shaking and nodding her head as if to a continuing voice of displeasure and counsel inside, Mother took out her knitting. I switched on WQXR and pushed myself out of the wheelchair and into the floral easy chair by the marble-topped table at the window.
One of those cold spring days: the river was gray. The trees had begun to dress in their spring clothes, but the cool light darkened the greenery, made it muddy-toned prematurely, as it would be in August from heat and exhaust. Baroque choral music, a solo countertenor; that rare kind of voice thrilled me, the sound of such high purity and still a man’s, it vaulted nature. I didn’t know how I had borne my self-imposed lack of music in Copenhagen. I’d listened to drips from the faucet, a distant plane, the buzzing of a lamp. Sounds of the world I had never been quiet enough to hear. They tormented me. On other days they were their own kind of music. Tiny tap-tap of a pigeon’s beak outside my window and the answering tap of my fingernail on the metal bed when nothing else but my finger could move—the shift of my eyes when they were all that was left to me of kinetic expression. How nice it had been, I thought, to dance to music I’d especially loved—the Chausson violin piece Poème that Antony Tudor used for Lilac Garden was like cut glass, or Shalimar perfume.
She’s been through nothing and that’s why he wants her. But that couldn’t be true, I thought. Nobody had been through nothing.
He called as Mother and I started lunch. Mother conveyed that he would like to see me. I closed my eyes—go away. But I relented, finished lunch, laboriously made a trip to the bathroom—it was more difficult here. My eyes leaped out of my face, they shone so brightly in the bathroom mirror. Red patches lit up my cheeks. I looked spectacular, as if in queenly defiance I were about to go to the block. I brushed my hair and went out to the living room.
He wore the tweed jacket and brown slacks we had picked out together. These days he liked string ties and snap-button shirts, but how attractive he looked in a jacket. I felt my entirety reaching for him, almost as I had at the beginning of our relationship, and, infuriated, I compressed myself, watching him sternly.
He glanced at the living room view, the gray continuing river, and sat, turning the chair, a Queen Anne, to face me in my chair, the wheeled.
“Come home,” he said.
I had been nearly convinced it was finished, that this was the point at which we would part. He suffered, was torn, but one didn’t do what he had and request compassion. His dark eyes glistened with the excitement of staying out with her until midnight celebrating their performance—I knew.
“You belong home,” he said.
“Why?” My eyes said, you betray me in private, in public—tell me you’re not in love with Suzanne. Yet I didn’t say the words, hoping the truth would still go away.
He rubbed his chin; the finger still seeped under the Band-Aids. “Tanny, we’ve been through too much,” he said. “You married a man who makes dances, but I’m not going anywhere.”
I didn’t want to go home with him; I did. I wanted to be in my own apartment. I was confused.
The station wagon and Carl were downstairs on the street. Obviously my agreement was a foregone conclusion.
Five dozen yellow roses glittered the lobby at home. Second time, same note, and a note from the theater saying they’d been delivered the night before. George glanced over my shoulder and saw, To Tanaquil, the sublime, ballerina assoluta forever.
It seemed to annoy him; I intuited that it wasn’t at all how he wished to see me.
I spent the summer and well into the following autumn in Weston. George came out when he could, for a few weekends. He was in Europe on tour; he was staging his ballets for other companies; he needed to be in New York; he was on fire with ambition for the enterprise. He was in love with Suzanne. The first stop on tour was Paris, and I imagined her receiving the Continental education, walks along the Seine, lessons in food and wine. If she wasn’t a cultural companion for him he could make her one. He’d buy her perfume, jewelry, clothing, and shoes.
They were in Paris dancing while I was in the country writing about dance. The recipe part of the cookbook was done, but the contributor portraits and other connective tissue were taking forever. Father came out for a visit and I told him that masochists wrote books, now I at last understood him. Still, I worked at my kid’s desk in the blue bedroom and Father worked on his Rabelais at the table outside, since the weather was fine—I didn’t have Father’s powers of concentration and would have been endlessly distracted.
I thought it sad that Father hadn’t remarried, nor did he have any lady friend I had heard of. “I’m too selfish,” he said. “I have my habits and routines, I like to work. I like my wine.” He was not doing badly, didn’t start before late afternoon. He had quit drinking for several years. I thought the wine had to do with the melancholy of his aloneness, chosen or not.
“Your mother was born forty,” he told me. “Inside, I’m a lad. My expectations are unrealistic, so I live in books.”
“Books don’t hurt other people,” I said.
“Don’t be so sure.”
Try as I might to stay off the subject of George, he colored my conversation, my point of view. George was on Father’s mind too, but he only spoke out at the end of the visit, as we waited for a taxi to take him to the train.
On lawn chairs, my lovely father in his beige linen suit, leather bag and typewriter case in the driveway, Panama hat in his lap. He was born in 1899, and men of his generation dressed to travel. “I’m not taking it well,” he said. “It isn’t what I wanted for you, a troubled marriage. I feared it in the beginning. I hope your mother’s more optimistic outlook wins out in the end, if that is what you want.”
“Thank you, Papa.”
“It shouldn’t have been like this, it really shouldn’t.” I saw him correct himself, an emotional man, but one who also employed a good deal of control.
“I’d already had enough,” I said, “with the polio.”
He turned fully to me. “That wasn’t my meaning. The polio hasn’t anything to do with it!” He sat back, thinking. “How shall I say it? When I saw you, from the first day, I wanted everything for you—just an astonishment of joy. You’d be the finest, the most exemplary dancer, had I been able to know your abilities then.” He looked at me: “And so it was. But I would have wanted you fleet into deep old age, a sprightly old lady jumping higher than. . . trees.” He waved his hand at them and I laughed. “Your beauty wouldn’t wane, how could it? But—it was your soul men would love. They would cleave to you.” He smiled. “I should write a poem about it, extemporaneous speech is useless.
“You’ve been a blessing to me,” he said. “You taught me to love someone more than myself. All men should have children. It’s an unrecorded fact that men need to have children more than women do.”
After Father, others came in George’s absence. I liked the diversion, but I preferred being alone, in the eye of the storm. The parts of days I wasn’t toiling away on the damn book, I enjoyed the peace of summer and Weston. I’d fervently wish that I were in Europe again, not to be with my husband or out of a dancing fantasy, but to be again in the beautiful places I’d thought, at twenty-seven, I would return to repeatedly. Then the simplicity of my house and yard would strike me, strike out the wish, and I’d be in Weston totally, calm and alert. I felt as I had mornings alone in the studio as a young dancer: fresh, quietly purposeful, flush with the light streaming in. A good neighbor brought me the Times in the morning and groceries if I asked. I could tell hours by the scent of the garden. Each month had its character, which I’d never noticed as fully before. With September came commotions of birds. First a blast of crows that could have been shot out of a cannon funneled over and into a copse of trees, cawing. One group scattered off from the flapping black core but got quickly pulled back, as if on a string. They were a tumult trying to arrange itself, maybe within the trees to rest. Then came the loud honking Vs of geese, and one day late in the month as I sat at my desk the sky shouted with such congregations I felt for a moment frightened—I had seen Hitchcock’s The Birds—and I sneaked cautiously outside. Beyond our driveway at the crest of a rise stood a long line of trees, and the thousand-member chorus of birds cried from inside the leafy tops: flashes of wings and tails hovered and flapped with the flickering busyness of a silent movie, heralding autumn.
