The Master's Muse, page 16
I went ahead with my trip to Europe, traveling with Natalie, her two college-aged daughters, and Carl to England and France, bearing a long list from George of what to bring back, special condiments and tinned foodstuffs he couldn’t get in the States. The trip was rather a comedy of errors. Carl and I ended up sitting out lots of sights I couldn’t navigate in parking lots and restaurants. But I liked even the parking lots, with the foreign signs and people going the wrong way. I liked simply sitting on another continent, after the polio and without George’s orchestration.
When I got home it was June, and we drove to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York for the ballet’s summer season. The weather was perfect. We sat on the grass by our cottage in the afternoons and late nights with friends. Suzanne danced, but we didn’t see her outside of the theater. I felt light and vibrant.
One night an acquaintance of George’s named Jack Hooper and his wife, Mary, stopped by for nightcaps, and with animation partly induced by Calvados, I described the earliest costumes for The Four Temperaments. The ballet fused classical steps with an angular style and was one of my favorites. It was created out of the medieval belief that people are made up of four different humors that determine their personalities. I had originated the role of Choleric. They called me Le Choleric.
“Those costumes were miseries,” I said. “I had this immense nylon wig that came down to about my rear end. On top it had a pompadour with a white horn in the middle like a unicorn’s.” I turned to George sitting beside me, butted him in the shoulder, and said, “That’s my horn.” To the others I said, “And the horn made it nearly impossible to do most of what my sweetie over here had made for me to do. If I swung my arm too close to my head, there was this horn. I had these breastplates and when I crossed my arms they’d go clunk.” My wrist hit George’s chest.
“Then there were these miniature red wings all down my arms ending up in enclosed fingers. Not even gloves—no fingers at all, not a thumb! It made it very hard to give your hand. You’re doing arabesque promenade, they grab for something, and they don’t know what they’ve got—it’s just a big clomp of material.
“George finally cut the costumes, and I remember thinking he saved me.” Now he was smiling. “But the premiere . . .I was so young! And it felt impossibly claustrophobic in that getup and I started to cry.”
“Oh, yes, the tears,” George said.
“He told me a thousand times,” I said, “I could not be emotional if I wanted to dance.”
“But she was anyway,” George said, and shrugged like, what can you do?
“Well, you were trapped! If you got something in your eye or you wanted to unzip to get out, you couldn’t. And George came over, remember?” I asked him. He nodded. “He cut this slit on the inside palm so I could put my index finger out, and I felt much better.”
Jack, also loaded on Calvados, laughed, we all laughed, and then Jack made a bit of an inappropriate remark. I didn’t care because I felt good and people often inadvertently said things to me that were inappropriate. I was used to it.
Jack, this tall jovial fellow who adored socializing with dancers and had seen me in everything and was a fan, beamed and said, “You’re nothing like—forgive me, but—your energy and fun, it’s—oh, what a wonderful story. . . .” He trailed off.
“I’m nothing like a person in a wheelchair?” I said.
Jack’s wife, Mary, shot him a scathing glance and put her head down.
“No, I just meant—oh, why can’t I say it?” he said to Mary. “I admire your vivacity,” he said. “And I admire it more given your limitation.”
“Well, it is a limitation, that’s true.” I wasn’t upset, though I must say I enjoyed his squirming a little. But why not say it? Wasn’t it as bad to pretend the chair was unmentionable, invisible, didn’t sit blatantly in its undeniable mechanistic nature right in the room—or on the grass, in this instance?
“Yes!” George chimed in. “It is extraordinary, isn’t it? Isn’t she?” We looked at each other, the light in his eyes a balm—and I remember there was this unusual blue glass light fixture above our cottage door that tinted the grass, turned it to plastic excelsior in an Easter basket. “I’ve noticed it many times,” George said. “You stop seeing the chair.”
Those last five words, their weight and the meanings they implied.
Never mind; it was our Indian summer.
5
When I lived over the liquor store as a very young dancer, I was engaged to a composer named Richard, the nephew of a friend of Father’s, a few years older than I was, enough so he seemed a man and not childish as the others I’d gone out with had—good-looking too, with big white teeth and bosky, coppery hair smelling of cedar. He had his own apartment in the Village—wildly impressive. We’d neck and pet on his bachelor bed and drive each other mad, rolling away if we got too heated and lying apart so our hearts would stop pounding, and Richard would do multiplication tables in his head and calm down.
I’d watch a redbrick wall through the window. Closing my eyes, I can see it again and it’s sex, excitement, and that huge youthful sense of the most fundamental things being shadowy and mysterious. For me the mystery was especially so, since I’d been different from a young age, committed to dance, out of school a lot until I quit at thirteen. Near the ballet school on Madison Avenue in those days was a deli called Sammy’s. They had a Balanchine sandwich that was very expensive, and on occasions I splurged and split one with a girlfriend, I thought it the height of worldliness, eating the Balanchine sandwich at Sammy’s.
One night at Richard’s, we’d rolled away from each other and were hanging off our respective sides of the bed panting as if we had just run a marathon. I was nineteen, I’d begun seeing George, and it came into my head that my virginity was a liability I should dispense with, pronto. I rolled back to Richard and after the deed was done and I was thoroughly disappointed, because as usual the first time wasn’t swell, Richard tipped my face toward his and gazed at me with such powerful gratitude and joy that his eyes were searchlights, leveling on me their immensity and wattage. But he didn’t register my disappointment. He was too subjectively agog.
Women like sex, but what sex means to men and what they do with it, ideologically and sentimentally, goes way beyond how we perceive it.
I had a pretty good idea Richard and I were finished. My objective in losing my virginity that night was prompted by the notion that I couldn’t proceed with George if I was a virgin.
I suppose I used Richard. I didn’t intend to. I didn’t think I mattered that much to him as an individual, and I didn’t love him. Compared to what I felt for George there had been little there.
Funny, then, how George was surprised that I wasn’t a virgin our first time together, and I had only done it that once before George and brought no experience to it—and it didn’t matter of course because we were in love.
We had been working alone in the studio after rehearsal for hours, late into the evening, and in the hallway, I agreed to show him my apartment. We went outside to snow, unexpected and heavy, white rushing against a dark purple sky. He chattered gaily, and I was suddenly, thoroughly altered from how I had felt in the studio. I thought, Shut up, shut up—don’t be so happy! I couldn’t stop smelling myself. I’m sure he stank too, he had worked like an ox, but he didn’t care and I did, and anyway, in the studio sweat fit.
In the vestibule he brushed off a snow cape, and, shaking myself, I turned to him and saw, for an instant, snow on his eyelashes.
Two were too many going up the narrow stairs. He pushed behind me, past the door, and into my apartment: a wee shabby place, jejune, a word I’d just learned from some book, and intimate? God. We might as well have walked into a mouth. On the minuscule kitchen table in my one room reeked an open box of Loft’s Nut Butter Crunch, and for god’s sake Mother had put my Charles Boyer doll on the bed when she had last visited, thinking I’d like it, and I hadn’t buried him in a drawer, and there—on the stained counter beside dirty dishes I’d left my hairbrush, sprouting hair. Seeing it, I felt so sad.
He sat on my couch, the one adult impressive item but stupidly red like a tongue, in his wet trench coat it hadn’t occurred to me to take, but not before a quick conclusive scan of the premises, during which, I was sure, he’d seen everything, even my messy closet, and asked me, “Sit down?”
Loud, very loud, I sat miserably down about a foot away from him, still in my coat.
“Is your first apartment,” he said. “Very special.” Oh, sure—the thick rental apartment paint on the door hinges, the battered trunk I used as a coffee table. “You know?” he said. “I told you about the cold and being hungry after the war. Water froze pipes and they burst. Ice floated in sinks. Once, I was with boy who stole fish. He grabbed, we ran, fish started to flop in his shirt. Caught, we could have been shot. Other times, we had to walk close to buildings not to get hit from stray bullets. . . . But it wasn’t always too bad. When I joined Mariinsky, salaries were so low we formed concert troupes to make money for food. People sang, played violin, and we danced. We played resort Pavlovsk, in Tsarskoe Selo, Tsar’s Village, Soviet times, so we lived in abandoned mansion of Youssoupoff prince. We set up beds and lived together, like . . . playing house. There was ballroom with mirror where we practiced dancing, and grand falling-down garden. Boys and girls fell in love.
“Well, I’ll go.”
He got up and I found my manners. “May I take your coat?”
He caught my hand in both of his—and my body as liability and trap dissolved, the room faded away. In its place calm, then rightness, then bliss.
People wondered about us after the polio, which struck me as ignorant, and a mite offensive. I’m not saying anyone asked me outright if we had a love life, but I felt it, picked up on assumptions, and I’m sorry to say it wasn’t hard. People can’t see past their own tiny peripheral visions. I’ll just say this: there are cushions. We were dancers, flexible and acrobatic. We liked what bodies could do. Once George said to a male dancer who could not get the right approach to a lift, “Go down on her.” I will just say, as I don’t need to reiterate, that my husband was a man who loved women.
And then it crumbled and fell completely apart. I wonder if the year he came back to me was awful for Suzanne. If I think of it from her side I can imagine her confusion. More than their age difference, more than her inexperience, her religious beliefs, and his historical reputation with other women, was the fact, I can safely assume, that he didn’t indicate for a long time any intention of leaving his marriage. It was different from how it had been for me in relation to Maria. For all his public adoration of Suzanne, from the years 1963 to 1967, he seemed to want her without marriage.
I knew that during our last year together he still saw her outside of work, took her to dinner. But he went out with other colleagues after rehearsals and performances; work spilled over. I had to give him the benefit of the doubt, or what did our relationship mean?
So our summer in Saratoga ended, and throughout the autumn and into 1967 he worked on a major ballet called Jewels with parts for many of the dancers, including Suzanne.
But it was Jewels that finished us. At the time, I was coaching new girls in Apollo, and, hearing about Jewels, I knew we were through. We had a last year together, but Suzanne still ran in his blood.
The three sections of the new ballet were based on gemstones: emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. Suzanne’s was the Diamonds section, diamonds, of course, being symbolic of marriage. She would dance it in white, like a bride. And the Diamonds section represented Imperial Russia—the height of ballet in the nineteenth century, its magic the ecstasy of his youth and the origin of his art. Onstage, he would crown her the queen of his realm and his heart. I didn’t consider putting myself through the premiere, their public marriage, and by then I thoroughly wanted out of my private marriage, which had finally become a sham.
He saw how I felt. It could not have been any more obvious; we lived in this pall, but didn’t speak of it.
We skirted each other, not even polite. We occupied, as they say, the same cage, and one or the other snapped if our cellmate came too close.
“Move out,” I said, and at last it was easy to say, the harbinger, I hoped, of some relief.
He ignored me until I said it again, and then he answered that we needn’t be rash. I told him to sleep in the guest room.
One night I’d been asleep and woke up with him lying beside me. It felt momentarily comforting as it used to, and then I felt invaded. His getting in bed without my permission seemed somehow violent. I didn’t want him, his hands, his mouth—any of him, even as I could not have conceived myself capable of that degree of negative feeling about him. He tried to make love to me, tried to kiss this cold fury.
“Don’t,” I said, rigid. I lay on my back in the dim green glow of the Statue of Liberty night-light. I felt the authority of the bed frame and the furniture around us, the solidity of what had been, the inanimate charged with what I had felt for him, and he could have been a phantom. He kept lying there a little longer, and then he slowly got up and left.
I have to end this.
I wanted to stalk out and scream at him. I had to get in the goddamn chair. I couldn’t stalk out in a chair.
I lay hating the chair instead of him.
Will you ever get over it? Just get up and get in the chair, which is just a chair and helpful every second of your life, and go out and do what you need to.
Or lie here and die.
He had left the door to the guest room open. From the doorway I called, “George.” He didn’t answer. I went farther into the bedroom and spoke his name again. Close as I could get to him, I said, “Devils sleep sound.”
He sat up. I’d put on a light in the kitchen and I could pick out his outlines in its pale luminosity reaching the bed.
We were finally of the same mind. Neither one of us wanted more light; we sat in the dark. “Talk,” I said, and made myself wait for silence to bloat the room.
“I feel . . . someone is holding me underwater,” he said. “I can’t breathe.”
“It isn’t me,” I said.
“Tanny, if I go on with this marriage as it is, I think I won’t be able to work anymore. To create.”
“What did you think I would do with all this? Did you think I would just . . . absorb it?”
“Yes.”
I saw he was paralyzed, but I wasn’t anymore, at least not emotionally. He loved us both, wanted us both, or wanted her but couldn’t bear to appear bad to himself or me or to others.
“You can’t have everything,” I said. “You just can’t. Do you think I can breathe? Who is happy here, George? You’re not. I’m certainly not. I hope Suzanne is happy for all of us. . . .
“This is what you do,” I said. “You find an apartment. You take your things and we live separately, all right? Do as you wish and I won’t have to see it.”
Impossibly, still, too much remained submerged for understanding. But I felt that how he loved her, romantically, rapturously, freshly, as if he were young again and within the dynamic of creating dance for a beloved woman—he loved this more than what he loved in me; with me. He could stay with me until kingdom come, but the new love would tunnel up through the work, splash over the stage, and wing through the world—and he couldn’t stay with me anymore because I would not let him.
Do you want a divorce? I asked him the next day.
No, no divorce.
I could have insisted, I suppose. Maybe I should have insisted. Each step felt monumental, and I couldn’t take another.
He didn’t have much that was exclusively his, clothes, a few books and scores. He left me the furniture, the kitchen equipment, even the two pianos, since he hadn’t room in his apartment and I would need them when I entertained—oh, definitely, I was planning a season of parties.
Natalie and Diana came over the night after he and Eddie moved out his belongings, and helped me rearrange the closets and drawers. The gaps, I knew, would unhinge me.
We opened two bottles of wine and doggedly emptied them. Natalie rubbed my shoulders.
“You’re good,” I said. “Strong hands.” Not his hands anymore; girlfriend’s hands; hairdresser’s hands; Carl’s and Jerry’s platonic hands; Mother’s and Father’s hands.
“You’ll meet a perfect American man,” Natalie said. “Russian men are trouble. I was smart, I found an American man.”
“Don’t,” Diana said. “He just left. Anyway, they’re all trouble.”
I felt a cool draft from the window I’d cracked; felt dampness, smelled food we had cooked over the last weeks. I pushed Natalie off and checked the cupboards to see whether he’d taken his condiments; he hadn’t. I stared at a row of them over the stove: olive paste, brown mustard, evil-looking pimentos, and pickled mushrooms. “I still don’t understand,” I said to the room at large, “he still didn’t want to go.” He’d even cried, said please, and I had to look at that face I hated and loved and did not understand and say again, go.
“Diana,” and I turned to her sitting at the black-and-white Formica kitchen table, saw how she was beautiful, more fleshed since the baby, always elegant and timorous around the edges despite her sophistication; a foil to Natalie’s bluntness. “Why did you?” I asked her. “With George?”
A sharp quick inhalation: her initial response. Natalie, who had been standing beside me, sat down at the table exhaustedly, as if already there’d been a knock-down, drag-out—which didn’t come. Surely Diana had always expected the question and knew what I wanted was insight, not apology.
She drained the dregs of her glass. “He said the two of you were fine, and although that strikes me presently as absolute nonsense as a justification—well, I heard no guile in it. . . . Oh, how do they get away with, oh, god, the whole spectrum?” The future of Diana’s marriage also looked bleak. She didn’t feel up to generosity toward men. “They walk the earth as if it’s their backyard. They think: It’s mine. We say excuse me, and may I, and will this be all right? What chance do we have? How will our way of looking at anything ever get over? And it isn’t just Russians, Natalie.”
