The Master's Muse, page 18
Nothing felt real after that for a long while. Blunted, filed down, slow-motioned, muffled, sounds muted so even music was barely audible. I couldn’t hear other people’s voices on the phone. I’m sorry? I’m sorry again, excuse me? Pardon me, I didn’t hear? The grief felt like fear. If Mother arrived five minutes late I was sure she’d been crushed in the street.
My body was overly tender, easily bruised, any sore spot a portent of disaster. One week I didn’t go out because I didn’t trust myself. I would miss something and die—miss a curb and spill onto the pavement and crack my head open. I could hear it, see it, and almost feel it: the knock on the skull and the warm fluid leaking like oil under the knees of a stranger who came to help.
I was a target, a vessel of some inexplicable aura or vulnerability that would draw the worst. Freak accidents, thieves, and the destruction of people I loved beyond George.
But it had been ending for years. Hadn’t I lost him in bits and pieces? Hadn’t I braced myself since Warm Springs to lose him?
I hated to look in a mirror; combing my hair, I averted my eyes. If I caught sight of myself in a public place, that woman I saw looked far away just like everything else, another stranger.
I couldn’t be rational, I was too unhappy for logic. My logic had fled with him, it seemed. I dropped the children’s book I’d started writing. The activity was too solitary. I didn’t want to go out and I didn’t want to be alone. Mother tried to teach me to knit but my fingers wouldn’t work, I was suffering neurological damage related somehow to the polio, a delayed symptom. This could not be, a doctor told me. There wasn’t anything wrong with my fingers. Then it was my brain. It explained why I couldn’t read new books. I could read books I had read before, as if the first readings had been rehearsals—and I could sleep. I slept twelve hours a day and didn’t dream. I’d nestle into the bed like warm snow, soothing, covering whiteness of bed and the soft insubstantiality of sleep.
The second: The divorce was final.
He came to me. You’ll be all right?
I’m fine.
I was Medea. I wanted to murder his unborn child. Had I been able to stir from the chair, I’d have prowled nighttime streets, taking it in—it was over. Feeling it, being it, myself alone. What the sky, what the buildings looked like, being alone. How things smelled and sounded and how other bodies I passed on the street related to mine. Perhaps I’d step into a bar and pick up a guy. People did that now more than before. Jerry did it all the time. Jerry claimed he wanted real love, true love that lasted, but he didn’t, and anyway even if he had he could not have coped with loving someone in my situation. Too bad, I knew he was sorry. Everyone was so very sorry. The black waters of Venice came up and engulfed me in waves.
Dip of the finger.
Fresh.
The third: He was in Hamburg and wouldn’t come back. She had married. I carefully put the receiver of my white kitchen phone into the wall cradle not far from my window post. Morning. I could see through the window a thin stretch of sky between the rooflines. Within it were silver-edged dusky white clouds of an indeterminate day, clouds swollen with rain or about to part, revealing soft light. But all in the moment was stillness, and for a long minute, from the shock of how it had played out and the full realization that the end of the story was here—I thought I’d black out. Without George, it seemed I would fundamentally cease to exist, because who would I be without him understanding me, loving and seeing me? And where would it go, all we had been to each other? I breathed deeply, steadied myself.
How could I ever have imagined that he hadn’t seen me? Saw the beautiful girl in Woods Hole in white gloves on the lawn near the glowing white sea of the Cape. Saw the child dancer as if he were viewing her from the wrong side of a telescope, already a ballerina, just small. Saw my power, my chic, my love of humor and wit, saw the jazzy Tanaquil in Ivesiana and the wild tender spirit I’d been in La Valse. Every dance he had made for me was seeing, was adoration and attention. He had given me Paris and the Wild West to dance. He had given me my first sight of La Scala filled on that day of our honeymoon with pink carnations, and Vienna before I got sick—how I had danced, so well it rained blown kisses and roses onto the stage until there was nowhere to step without trampling flowers. When in the hospital they let him into my room, pronouncing me out of danger, he said he had prayed night and day, but his prayers had confronted emptiness until the evening before: a vision of his mother had come and told him that she would look after us; he felt great peace, and next thing he knew they had removed the quarantine.
I didn’t die, but my dancer’s body was stolen so abruptly it had taken us years to adjust. We had managed a lot together. I could have gone on, he couldn’t. He tried. You could say he constructed a new life for me, created my possibility: brought me unreasonable hope when I couldn’t continue without it, built me a shelter of spacious rooms where I could heal; widened the doorways, built the ramps out in Weston, loved me again.
It had happened again for us, which made it better and very much harder. . . . Whom would I love now? The clouds outside held, with tremulous light.
You’re free, I thought. There wouldn’t be any more waiting, any more dreading that he might leave, would leave. God, could I not have been wrong?
I sat alone in my chair in the empty kitchen. I thought of the people who had come to my party, winging through the world. I thought of Jerry and George, their lives an array of possibilities that only the mobile and luckiest had.
What happy things could I do?
I missed Weston. In the spring I’d plant trees: a silver spruce and a Japanese maple. I’d watch them grow. So I would begin.
It took me ten years to decide not to die, but I decided.
Venice came up and over me in a black wave, and receded. I closed my eyes: in my mind I held on to him, afraid that if I let him go he would disappear, float away into the atmosphere. I gripped his beautiful forearms, held fast to his fine wrists, my fingers digging the turquoise and silver bracelet into his skin, that Russian skin.
Part Three
The Body
1972–1983
Nothing has changed.
Except the run of rivers,
the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers.
The little soul roams among those landscapes,
disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,
evasive and a stranger to itself,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
whereas the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.
—Wistawa Szymborska
1
Three years after the divorce, George phoned to blackmail me into teaching at Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem. Mitchell and cofounder Karel Shook had established the company in 1969 as a response to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was the first major ballet enterprise to ensure that all American dancers would have the opportunity Arthur did at New York City Ballet in the pre—civil rights era.
“I’m delighted to hear from you,” I said—tone: effervescent, I’m fine, I am fabulous—“but teaching’s a big commitment.”
“What else you’ve got to do?” He was just being George, and he was right. Relatively healed, relatively sanguine in the wake of our own shattering 1960s, I had put writing aside, happily. But life in the country and occasional coaching in the city didn’t take up enough time. He needed a teacher steeped in the neoclassical style. Arthur’s were good dancers, he told me, but he couldn’t feed them his repertory—he had promised dances in support of the new company—if they weren’t trained.
“You don’t do it,” he said, “what will I do? I give my pledge.”
“George, there are plenty of people you could ask.”
“No, I want you.”
Silence. “All right, but only if you show me how to do it. I request a private lesson.” He agreed to come to the apartment in two days.
It was April, the cruelest month, and on the appointed Wednesday the sky opened up with spatters and splats, raining and sleeting huge clots of gray mess. I cringed for the early plantings Carl and I had risked over the weekend. Carl was still my primary mode of transportation, but now he also took care of the grounds in Weston and worked with me on the gardens. The flowers and vegetables flourished, and with Carl I hung bird feeders everywhere, attracted all manner of feathery friends. Maintaining Weston—plunging my hands into soil, partnering with sun and rain—was my recovery from the ending of my marriage. But I couldn’t have done it alone. The spring of the divorce, I made good on a vow: I bought trees, small scruffy things that would only provide gratification in years. At the time, all of life had seemed scruffy and small. Carl, in his physical immensity, in his strength, tending to those tiny trees like a protective father, brought me a foretaste of renewal.
George arrived dripping wet in his trench coat; laughing at Mourka, who leaped, whirled, paced, slinked, rubbed, meowed until we didn’t think he would stop—little catch in my throat—but we couldn’t bring ourselves to confine him. He thankfully settled, an eye slit watching his long-lost love.
I gathered George’s coat, spread it across the bench by the front door, and went back to him standing beside the blue western couch, near the tea and molasses cookies on the oblong table.
He took my hand, said I looked lovely, what a beautiful blouse—my silk ice-blue, like his heart—and pressed my hand to his lips: so warm.
Over the last three years he had sent gifts for my birthday and Christmas. Sometimes he called, as he had to thank me for the olive oil I bought for him on my recent Italian trip. My coaching assignments came through assistants, but once in a while he showed up at a studio when I was working and watched. We collided twice on the street. He invited me to rehearsals of dances he thought I’d like, and I’d gone to one. But these public sightings and formal acknowledgments were scraps, thin gruel compared to agreeing to meet in the old homestead, scene of our strife. The dense air seemed extra private and the medium in which I could really look at him again: see how he’d aged.
He was grayer, his hairline farther receded and thinner on top, skin pinched and more lined around his eyes and mouth—but oh, the mouth, his hands, the iridescent black-brown of his mutable eyes. He wore different cologne, a touch floral, and that seemed wrong; or it was simply a whiff of estrangement.
He inspected Jerry’s tapestry draped on one of the pianos. “How was Italy?” he asked. Back at the couch, he surveyed the cookies. “Did you make them yourself, dear?”
“No. Babka’s.”
“Aha!” He approved. Nice Russian cookies.
I had also put out a decanter of whiskey. Oh, go ahead, be yourself, I thought, eat the whole plate of cookies, have a couple quick shots. He sipped tea and nibbled a sweet. I poured us both half inches of spirits, drank mine, watched his sit.
“Hairline fracture to my tibia,” I said.
“When?”
“That was the trip.”
“Oh.”
“Up and down we went over the cobbled streets and one day, not far from the Spanish Steps, we hit something, and boom, knocked me out of the chair.”
“Oh, Tanny.”
“Oh, yes. I was fine in the end. But Jerry thought he would faint at the hospital, he felt so guilty. Everyone made a fuss over him, the sensitive plant, and I nearly fell off the X-ray table.”
“Jerry,” said George. “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry,” and he giggled.
“Jerry, Jerry,” I said, a conspirator. Pause. “George? I’m sorry about Stravinsky. Did you get my card?”
“Yes. He isn’t gone.” He didn’t just mean the music. He believed in continual life, in contiguous planes. His mother’s death many years ago had also left him serene. One more for me up there, he’d said. For Stravinsky he would host a musical celebration, a triumphant week of premieres in June that would put to rest talk that he was finished, after the creative slump since Suzanne: that April day Balanchine was about to rise yet again.
“Number one,” I said, pouring myself another nipper of whiskey, “your credo: get up and show. I can’t, obviously.”
“Dear, it will be your own style. When you are coaching you don’t show. I’ve seen you and you’re fine with gesture and speech.”
“But teaching’s different, I’d think,” I said.
“No, the same. Don’t forget, neoclassical barre is conventional barre with intensity, that’s it.”
I had never seen him conduct a conventional barre; he drilled steps, one day tendu, another glissade. But he worked with dancers he extended and tested. My dancers would first need a basal understanding of the technique inside their bodies.
We talked about energy, attack, articulation, and the problem—for dancers who hadn’t come up in his school—of his minimal preparation between steps. We discussed how he wanted the weight on the ball of the foot, “Like pussycat,” he said; “and landing without heels; no bent knees, pas de cheval. Then try,” he said. “They must try. You watch. For teacher everything’s watching. I say show, but I watch.”
“Then there are the men,” I said wanly.
“You know men,” he insisted. “If you could stand up, you could partner me, easily.” His eyes flashed; the thought seemed to intrigue him. “But for company class it’s same for both.” The cookies were gone. He poured himself a fresh shot.
“I can’t give corrections,” I said despondently. Of course, I had, coaching, but I so loved the hands-on Russian style.
“You can with words! Sometimes, anyway, is better. I give images. I would give more if I thought of them!” Softly with the heel of his hand, he tapped his forehead: “Not much in here. But elephant trunk for the turnout they like, they understand. . . . Here’s one: I say present heel. Enough rotation, the heel could balance glass of champagne.”
Mourka stirred as if awakened by trace memories of George’s inflections. “You taking notes, cat? I’m famous man. Is funny. I don’t trust words and everyone wants them from me. You know, I can’t explain things,” he said seriously, in a shift. “Not with words.”
“You do pretty well.” I put down my glass. No more, or I’d get emotional.
“How is Mother?” he asked.
“A force of nature.”
“Oh, yes,” he said sagely. “Father?”
“The same, in his fashion.”
“I always liked him.”
“I know.”
“Tanny, bring Father to the Stravinsky Festival!” Discreetly he added, “You can bring Mother another day. It runs a week. We’re shutting down, to prepare, for ten whole days. Lincoln couldn’t believe. He’ll see. Big success, oh—so exciting. I have new danseur noble! A Danish boy with immense head, hands like sides of trucks, and I put big Danish pastry in pas de deux with skinny Kay.” He lifted a finger and sparkled. “You’ll see.”
At the door he said, “You have trouble at Arthur’s, dear, call me. I think you are going to love it.” We kissed cheeks. “They say I’ll be remembered as a choreographer, but I think as a teacher.”
Mourka dragged himself over to say good-bye, but he was an elderly cat now and as a result of his earlier exertions he would sleep for the rest of the day.
“My, my, my, my,” I said out loud to myself, observing the damp ghost of a coat on the bench. I should have hung it over a kitchen chair. How long since I’d seen him expansive and charming? How lovely—how awful, given that I had promised myself I would never be vulnerable to him again. Well, it was done. I would teach. We’d become friends. He could disarm anyone if he had a mind to. Not one of the ex-wives had succeeded in total estrangement. Just be mature, I counseled myself. A terrible bore about getting older was that at a certain age—I was forty-two—it seemed incumbent upon one to be mature.
But I couldn’t help feeling the excitement of change and new possibility.
“Energy’s endless,” George had told me long ago. “You think there isn’t any more, and then there is.”
At Arthur’s I confronted twenty bright souls in fresh, glowing skins the colors of rust, milky cocoa, dark peat—all of the mingled shades of gray, brown, yellow, tan, and red. They stared at me with mild curiosity only. On a trip to Paris in 1949, the dancer Betty Nichols and I had performed in an artist’s studio for Merce Cunningham. The audience sat on the floor and in a balcony above us, and sun through a skylight lit us. Alice B. Toklas and Giacometti were there—people said Betty and I were Giacomettis. But Betty had subsequently traveled an unfair, daunting road as an African American in classic ballet. Though I knew little of them, Arthur had faced his own battles.
So this studio and the dancers before me were eminently hopeful in an extraordinary way. I had prepared for today by writing down classes of George’s from memory. I began by talking about his approach, the differences and the emphasis. Dancers sat on the floor, others leaned up against the barre, and they danced questions: Like this? This? I demonstrated with a hand. My right arm had never regained much strength, but I was right-handed and the hand itself was my more expressive: so I propped up the right arm by the elbow with my left hand and, using my right hand, showed what they needed to do with their feet. It was a fortunate substitution, I told the class, since Balanchine wanted the feet to have the energy of hands. The talk evolved naturally into larger movements. Afterward people lingered, asking more questions. Soon Owen, the young man who had picked me up and brought me to the school, stuck his head in and told everyone to leave, as we had agreed. Out of sight of the dancers he carried me down the stairs while a secretary brought down the chair.
That first day, back at home, my head jumped with ideas and plans I wrote in my notebook. As inspiration, I wrote down what dancing had taught me and what I still believed: that chaos could be mastered, life and ourselves made capable of order, and that order and beauty could be one.
Then I called Carl and asked if he would come over. I wanted to share my enthusiasm. We had drinks and ordered Chinese and I yakked and he listened in our lovers’ microclimate of absorption, of freedom, and then we got into bed and watched TV while we ate.
