The Master's Muse, page 8
The central pas de deux danced by Diana and Arthur presented partnering less suggestive of romance and more of the precariousness of relationships. It contained breathtaking balances, watchfulness, and called up questions about identity, separation, and recombination. Diana’s very white hand against Arthur’s dark one as they danced was in itself a brilliant enactment of the racial tension going on in the culture at large.
Stravinsky talked that day about the struggle between music and choreography. George responded, “Absolutely! Struggle means to be together.”
When I finally saw the ballet, years later, I thought it was perfect for Diana. I wouldn’t have danced it so cautiously, and caution and care were the elements here that set off the feats of balance and threw into prominence the sculptural shapes.
I didn’t have to see it to glean that another aspect of the “living relations” was autobiography, George’s and mine.
He hadn’t chosen me over the dancers or vice versa. He had chosen to do it all. Not that I’d seriously entertained the notion that he would quit New York City Ballet for good. Decades had gone into getting the company and expanding the enterprise. George himself was that line in the Yeats poem, How do you tell the dancer from the dance?
He claimed he didn’t know himself except as a dancer. Trouble was, I didn’t know myself much outside of that context either.
We struggled ahead, he at a manic pace, I in a deliberate, seemingly poised fashion during the days and then breaking in two with dreams at night.
The holidays passed. It got cold. I hated winter and my legs were extra sensitive in the cold.
“So put on more clothes,” George said.
“More clothes? You know how long it takes for me to put on the usual? Christ’s sake, it’s like dressing a corpse.”
His face shut. “Please, dear, don’t say that.”
“You know what I mean!” He was unmoved. “I’m sorry,” I said.
Atrophy. My muscles could not maintain warmth, and circulation was another problem. Busy with the company and chores at home, George didn’t work with me on therapy anymore. I dutifully exercised on a mat, but maintenance rather than improvement had become the goal. My right hand had continued to improve and I could write easily again, but the arm remained weak and the legs did nothing. A massage therapist came once a week and did not touch my legs, focusing on my upper body.
“I don’t know what we’re saving,” I said to George, referring to the cautious treatment prescribed for my legs by the Warm Springs doctors. “I don’t know what we’re waiting for. I want to get really aggressive so the muscles, such as they are, don’t shrink entirely away. If I hurt something, this elusive something that might someday assert itself, so what? How much more could I be hurt?”
George said to wait for the New York doctors’ opinions, the ones I had contacted from Warm Springs and saw after the holidays.
The evening of the third expert, the third to examine me, question me, and tell me that we should expect nothing further, I sat at one of my window posts, the one behind the pianos overlooking Broadway—the view of the street and the sidewalks and the island where Igor had appeared, pausing to check our address. There was no snow, just iron cold. The trees were stiff with it, witchlike. The trusty streetlamps were beacons in the dark and the headlights of cars and traffic lights valiantly fought the winter, cutting open the night. The commercial signs across the way always looked comical to me, and they did now: “Oh, people, come buy our wares before we’re all dead.” Commerce wasn’t valued in our family, the Le Clercqs were never practical types. We honored beauty. George too.
This doctor today, a gruff and old though not grandfatherly man, had said, “What did you do in the leg braces?”
“I stood.”
“Did you walk?”
“No.”
“Never? A step?”
“I stood a bit longer each day.”
“How many days?”
“A month.”
He put down his pen, aligned it beside the desk blotter, and said, “Mrs. Balanchine, there is nothing for you to walk with. My opinion is that the braces were brought out for moral support, but I don’t see any reason to continue with the charade. You’re an adult. We adults”—so confidential—“prefer to know the score, don’t we?”
“Which for me is zero to zero?” I asked.
Gramps laughed, mistakenly admiring my sense of humor.
You should have seen his face when I refused to shake his hand goodbye.
I couldn’t predict what George would say. His response to the first two doctors was to draw up a one-year plan to replace the six-month plan of last April. My therapy in the one-year plan, however, had yet to be determined.
Why did he build the ramps out in Weston? Building ramps in the autumn at a place I probably wouldn’t go near until the following summer? I might have been walking by then. It occurred to me that he knew long ago, and that I knew too. His key turned in the latch. I had left the hall light on for him but I sat in the dark. He hung up his coat and, pulling a chair to the window, he joined me.
“Nada,” I said.
“I see.”
“George? Are they right?” He could inspect a child’s arch and know if she had a chance at a career. He observed a little girl’s proportions and, with a glance at the mother, gauged the mature length of young legs. “George. Please.”
“Look at them,” he said, staring down at the sidewalks, at the people with hung heads, hands shoved in pockets, a man slashing the air as a cab passed him by. “They are walking and they’re miserable.”
Hurrying home from a rehearsal for dinner prior to a performance one evening, George slipped on ice, banging his hip up and spraining his ankle. Mother moved in to take up the slack. The housekeeper, hired to clean twice a week, came for a couple of hours every day. I thought I would scream from the crowd and the absolute evidence that George was exhausted and could not do it all.
“Listen, I wasn’t careful,” he said.
“You’re always careful.”
“Whatever you do, don’t romanticize me.”
“Fine.” I thought maybe his falling was an unconscious wish for a vacation.
He lay on the couch, face in a book, oblivious to the activities in the apartment. “No big deal,” he said, “I catch up on my reading.” He started with a volume about the Basque region. I found it amusing that he liked to read about travel since, except for good restaurants, he stayed at the theater working wherever he went.
“I’ve already been everywhere,” he would say.
And he told me, “Don’t worry about my energy. I don’t get tired anymore. Young people wear themselves out from confusion. I know exactly what I want to do.”
Other books in his stack concerned polio and physical therapy, but I didn’t ask about them.
Some nights I didn’t sleep a wink because I couldn’t relax, I hadn’t done anything except sit in a chair. I would always sit all day in a chair. In the fall I was buoyed by the novelty of my return, decent weather, and the conviction that I would get out of the chair if only I worked, kept the faith, and did not become foolish about the dancing, because there were other things I could do, and could not do now.
George had learned speeches from Chekhov in school as a boy and he still recited them for comfort. He did one for me in a wakeful dawn, the speech of a girl, an orphaned governess in The Cherry Orchard. She’s nebulous, a figure in the background of the frenzy playing out between aristocrats fighting for their estate and a cunning peasant who wins. But she gets her little solo onstage to tell her story. She recalls her parents and for a few lines she is almost with them again. Then she speaks the fact: I am alone. I have no one. The language is stripped—in Russian too, not just in English, George said—it is not sentimental, and its starkness actualizes the girl’s real but largely invisible pain, a pain she must somehow live with and hold. I memorized the speech and recited it too.
Mother left. George returned to work. The calendar turned over to March. People asked to visit. I said yes to Jerry and Diana and Natalie and my parents, but I was subdued. George hired an ex-student from the school, Carl, a muscleman and health food fanatic, to take me wherever I wanted to go. Carl was a mannerly person with shoulders like sides of beef, hulking enough they appeared—and felt—as if he could put one against any opposition and smash it. Seeing Carl was to regain belief in the physical, and he cheered me.
I announced to George that I would cook.
“Oh, yeah?” he said doubtfully.
“I’ve ordered five cookbooks from Brentano’s,” I told him. “I’ll get my ingredients delivered. You’re good at Russian, but I’m doing French. I may let you assist.”
This pleased him. He spoke brightly about this year’s plans for the traditional Russian feast he always prepared at Easter. He was quite an accomplished cook, though our everyday fare was simple.
Not anymore. I did sauces especially well. George called afternoons to check on the dinner menu.
We ate my cuisine on trays—watching westerns or science fiction on TV, the highlight of the day.
The press dubbed George a phoenix and but for the cooking I was idle, silently watchful of a decision that started to rise.
I made it through Easter, an actress still. I reassured George on the outside that I was adjusting, while inside the bleakness I felt just got worse. People had always praised my dramatic flair as a dancer, and in 1952 I did A Candle for St. Jude, a television play. My role was a dancer but I had to speak too—sweet love scenes and scenes full of tension. Such fun, telling Madame, “No, the solo is wrong! It should be sharp, like anguish.” And we had to dance straight up, given no room to travel in the small space of the TV studio. I loved the challenge.
Now I took sleeping pills and stopped remembering dreams—dead to the world. Then the pills stopped working. I went out in my chair with Father and looked at the crocuses peeking up from the ground. Another year.
Father said we would go to the Cape this summer, he’d carry me down to the water and waves would wash over my feet and legs.
I waited for an appropriate gap in George’s flurry to broach my decision to him. At last one weekend waiting as he flew around the apartment from the kitchen to the hall closet, about to go out, I said, “I need to talk to you. Tell me when you’re available today for half an hour?”
He laughed. “Tonight! After dinner.” Tonight was dark at the theater.
“Well,” I said, “it won’t be relaxing.”
Poor husband. It hit him that I wanted to talk, directly and seriously, on a complex and personal subject. No one, even Mother and Father, shied away as George did from confrontation. It was why he depended on his assistants and why, gentle and mild-mannered as he intrinsically was, he could be abrupt.
As a kid I was a dreadful gabber, and in class I went through a period of gabbing nonstop to a girlfriend. We didn’t listen to our teacher’s corrections and made fun of her if she turned her back. She sent us to George, who was so pained to have to interpret for us what we had done, to impress on us that it was terrible. He sounded grieved, not angry, and we cried buckets.
“Talk now, then,” and he sat down on the bench by the umbrella stand.
I was in my chair; he acted patient and appeared composed. But his position right by the front door—through which he could easily bolt—undid me.
“Damn you,” I said. “Why do you have to add to the difficulty of this?” I was crying and I felt incredibly guilty, but what could I do? How could I bolt? Only one way, baby, as Jerry might put it.
“Tanny, Tanitschka, dear, come,” and George knelt, grasping my hands and pressing them fast against his cheeks. “There is time, I have plenty of time.” But how could I? I’d intended to present it calmly, show him that I had arrived at it rationally, thoughtfully.
Oh, to hell. I had tried not to involve him, considered all manner of harebrained schemes. Getting Jerry to take me to the top of the Empire State Building, wheel to the edge for the view, say I have a yen for a hot dog. Jerry would vanish and I would go over, boom, the chair and me, only what about the pedestrians on the street? How many innocents would a hurtling chair murder? And in that scenario, Jerry would spend the rest of his days in a straitjacket raving.
“Talk to me,” George said.
I smelled his cologne and my eyes traced the line of his aquiline nose. Only George had the steel and the understanding to help me.
“I want to go, George.” I stopped crying, rinsed by the cool of decision. “I could have continued without dancing, but not without walking. I’m sorry. I’ve tried. You’ve been honorable and devoted . . .” and now he would have to assist me in this?
He dropped my hands and eased back to sit against the wall, drawing his legs up. He lowered his forehead down onto his arms resting across his knees.
“Dr. Wilson gives me weak pills,” I said, “intentionally. I’d have to store up for ages. You could go to your doctor for something strong. You could find out what it would take. You wouldn’t be implicated. Mad wife consumes husband’s prescription—”
“Stop,” he said.
“I’ll just go to sleep,” I said quietly.
He looked up, not at me, he couldn’t. He spoke to the edge of the gilt mirror on the opposite wall. “You are young. You are strong. In six months, you will be stronger.”
“I can’t wait six months.”
He breathed heavily from his one good lung, and said, “I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you the many things in life you will still be able to see and do. Not dancing. Not acting—” I hadn’t mentioned acting, he knew. “It will get better,” he said.
And us? That was part of it. Who he was and who I had become. As often as I saw improvement ahead, I saw wasting away, bitterness, and abandonment. He couldn’t sustain it.
“If you were me, what would you do?” I asked.
“If I were you I wouldn’t have made it this far.”
“Why not?”
“You’re stronger than me.”
“Don’t say that, don’t tell somebody in my position how strong they are, it’s burdensome and dismissive—it doesn’t become you.”
“I’m spent,” he said.
“I know.”
“I mean of words,” he clarified. “Energy’s endless, as long as there’s life. You think there isn’t any more and there isn’t. And then there is.”
I gave up. But in the morning I asked him again and he said yes. Give him a week.
For Christmas 1952, just five years earlier, George’s gifts to me were a camera, a designer handbag, a Steuben vase, and a proposal of marriage. Yes! He was a good deal older than I was, didn’t I want to think about it? There was nothing to think about. He chose the date of our wedding, the thirty-first, New Year’s Eve. He wanted to start the New Year married. Two books contained all you needed to know about life, George said, War and Peace and the Bible. I skipped the Bible, but I devoured Tolstoy. I read it twice back-to-back when George and I were first in love.
The seven days I waited to die were strung like glass beads catching light in a window about to be flung up. I watched the free, endless air, and phrases and scenes from the book reopened. Like Prince Andrei flat on his back dying in battle when, for the first time, he sees with his entire self the blue and white of the sky, the open dome over this scrap of earth.
Two characters speak of preexistence and eternity. If they are immortal spirits, they also existed before they were born. All is one, past, present, future, and good.
That I was young didn’t matter. I’d had what I wanted, dancing and George. My dreams healed. Each night I danced beautifully again, I was the leader of the Bacchantes, killing Orpheus with my powerful legs once more.
In that week George, understandably, though reserved and courteous, grew distracted, and his expression was stern. We went about our normal activities. Mother asked me at lunch the fifth day what was wrong.
“Wrong? Don’t I seem well?” We sat at my post in the kitchen, at the table by the window overlooking the courtyard and the gurgling fountain, just filled.
Mother shrugged. She’d aged. Her hair seemed thinner, bosom flatter, the lines by her mouth more harshly etched. This I observed but I didn’t allow it to penetrate, to destroy my resolve.
I talked to Papa on the telephone.
One night I cooked George an elaborate dinner. He came in and saw what I had done and said he couldn’t eat it and went out for a hamburger.
How he possibly worked every day I didn’t think of.
Saturday came again, the week finished.
“Do you have it?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“Tonight.”
“No,” he said. “Tomorrow. You sleep on it. If you feel the same in the morning then we’ll go ahead.”
I slept restlessly and awoke to birdsong. From the bed I turned to George, dressed, sitting in sunshine at our white-painted oak table, pen and notebook before him, puffs under his bloodshot eyes. He had opened the curtains. Our bedroom was huge and feminine, French country, masses of pillows and flowery fabrics, all of it, and also in the rooms beyond, intended to bring me a measure of peace.
“Hello,” he said, this man who sheltered me, as much as he could, from what had so hurt me. In his mouth, his eyes, in the tiny tremor that shivered over his expressive hands, I saw the boy who had lost his mother twice—first when he went to the Imperial School and missed her to despair, then when the family moved far away and he never saw her again. I saw the young man who had left his beloved Russia. Who had endured the loss of one of his Russian dancers, his dear Lidia Ivanovna, who was found drowned in St. Petersburg under mysterious circumstances. Lidia of the mischievous eyes, stout for a dancer, could jump like a flea. After all his misfortune it had to be topped off by mine.
