Dancer (23 page)

(Nijinsky declined to come down at all. Perhaps every madman prefers it in the air.)

Walked up and down by the newsstand, watched people pick up their copies of
The New York Times,
thinking, I am
en l'air
in a million arms. The photograph caught me in perfect line.

Sasha! Tamara! Mother! Father! Ufa! Leningrad! Do you hear me? I am hailing you from the Avenue of the Americas!

Snow and not too much traffic. The fur coat drew laughter and a few smiles. Outside the Apollo a woman recognized me and a crowd gathered. Someone said:
Do a Sammy Davis!
I stood on a fire hydrant, pirouetted and they roared.

Back down St. Nicholas Avenue in the car. (Nobody believes me when I say there are no beggars in Russia.)

On
The Ed Sullivan Show
he simply couldn't pronounce my name.

He had no interest in ballet and he said as much. But he was a pure gentleman with perfect manners. Each hair combed into place. He said that dance was Jacqueline's joy, so for years he had been trying to develop an honest interest. He claimed that watching Margot and me on television had changed his perspective completely (a brazen lie of course and quite stupid).

He ushered us into the Oval Office. His suit was cut beautifully and his tie was slightly loose. He swung in his chair the whole five minutes. Towards the end of the pleasantries he looked at my feet, said I was a symbol of pure political courage.

Outside, on the lawn, the secret service agents were hovering. Later Jacqueline came in carrying tea and he had to excuse himself.

Walking Margot and me to the helicopter, Jacqueline hooked her arm in mine, said she hoped we would return, that she and her husband hold us both in the highest artistic esteem. In the helicopter we sat in an awed silence while the figures on the lawn grew smaller. (I was momentarily climbing a staircase in Leningrad and the police were chasing me.)

Newsweek:
You seem to plow your soul under in order to seed your very own Albrecht.

(a sudden panic imagining Father at the garden plot.)

Pardon me?

For Albrecht you successfully create a new persona.

I am an actor.

But surely you are more than—

Oh no more stupid questions please.

In the room next door I could hear her, already awake. I went to greet her. She smiled and began stretching—neckrolls and leg stretches in a carefully timed sequence. Without thinking, Margot was able to put both her feet behind her head and carry on a conversation. The irony is she claims to be afraid of growing old.

(Lesson: continue to work always for mobility.)

The cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
—in the very same week. Gillian was ecstatic.

November 22, 1963. The weeping started outside the windows in the late afternoon, but nobody told us until six o'clock. Margot turned to the pianist, asked her to play Bach, but she was too overcome by grief, her fingers shaking above the keys. We sat in silence, then sent a telegram to Jacqueline. Our performance was canceled. In the streets people carried candles.

In the Russian Tea Room the maître d' asked for a minute of silence, disturbed only by some fool who knocked his fork from the table.

A letter came through from Yulia to say she is divorced. She has nowhere to live. Our shithole country.

Another twelve hours in preparation for
Raymonda.
It is strange that the corps is so surprised when they come to watch me rehearse or when I give class. They sit in the corridor, smoking foul cigarettes, which makes me want to kick them in the ass down to the Ministry of Labor, if there is such a thing. They are lazy shits, their weak legs, unworked turnout, careless feet, they need to be transformed, one and all. The trombones sound like sick cattle, the pianist even worse. Not to mention the stagehands, who threatened yet another strike because the parrots are real and their shit falls from the cages in the wings. The poor bastards complain because they have to mop up.

Margot could hardly talk, her voice quivered uncontrollably. She said the bullet entered Tito's chest and came out the other side.

In Stoke Mandeville Hospital, after the visit with Tito (lying in bed, saying nothing), we were guided around the wards. The fourteen-year-old girl paralyzed from the neck down said she often imagines being Margot and then her legs can move.

A beautiful eight-year-old had drawn a crayon picture, using her teeth. It was a picture of me dancing in a field, and the little girl had drawn herself watching from the perch of a flowering tree. There was a loveheart on the flip side, both our names in the middle, Oona and Rudolf.

I told her I would hang it in my dressing room. The child could barely move her head and there was spit on her lips, but her eyes were bright blue and she almost was able to turn her mouth into a smile. She said she didn't wish for much but if she ever got to heaven the first thing she would want to do is dance.

(Some asshole photographer caught me weeping in the corridor.)

Tito will never walk again so Margot must go on performing to pay the hospital bills. Of course she is so very English, she doesn't see the irony of this. (I am loathe to tell her that Tito deserves what he got.) Outside, she switched her handbag from side to side, dabbed a handkerchief at her eyes, then rushed back in to see him once more.

The telegram from Princess Grace for the opening night. Quite daring:
Merde! With love, G.
Other greetings, the King of Norway, Princess Margaret, etc. Twenty different bouquets in the room. Out the window the rain seemed to shine in a dozen colors. The hotel doorbell rang—a bouquet from Margot to say everything is all right, she wished she were dancing.

All Italy was there. Yet the presence of fame does not compensate for the absences in my performances. The
Raymonda
pas de deux was, of course, abysmal without her, but even the solo was a bucket of shit. Afterwards Spoleto seemed to have lost its magic, and the thought of the hotel room was depressing. I canceled dinner, dismissed everyone, remained all night to repair the evening's mistakes.

The stagehands found me in the morning, sleeping on their tarps. They brought me cappuccino and a corneto. I rehearsed again, found the temperament. On the second evening I danced with a fire in my hair.

Margot was waiting in the lobby. She held an envelope. Her face contained the story. The concierge lowered his eyes and pretended he was busy. The news had obviously arrived earlier in a telegram. I was convinced at first it was Tito. But with tears streaking her face, she said:
It's your father.

On the phone with Mother, she was too saddened for words. Later: Rachmaninov's Piano Concerti 1 and 2, Sanderling and the Leningrad Philharmonic, taking me back to other days. Father's shoes being polished and his face being shaved, his coat on a wire hanger, his dirty nails.

Erik canceled New York.

The only sadness: Father never once saw me dance.

I told Gillian and Erik there will be no rain or grief. We popped a bottle of champagne and toasted.

Reading the translation of Solzhenitsyn, there was a brief flicker of light on the page. The desire to resurrect Father was suddenly overwhelming. (Tamara's letter sat in my pocket like a wound.)

Outside Café Filo in Milan a boy was singing an aria I had never heard before. Erik asked for the aria's name, but the boy shrugged, said he didn't know, kept unloading the bread. Then the boy caught a glimpse of my face and ran up the street after me, shouting my name. He handed me a fresh loaf. Erik fed the bread to the pigeons in the square, kicking at the birds as they crowded around his feet.

Margot's generosity with everyone but herself is stunning. This of course is the ultimate in kindness. Given all the fuss with Tito she is terribly tired. Still she managed to arrange a parcel for Mother and Tamara. (The realization that there would be nothing anymore for Father was a shock.) She asked which color scarves would suit. I had forgotten for a moment how they looked in my mind, especially Mother. All my photographs are ancient.

Margot packed the box herself, to be carefully sent through the Finnish embassy.

*   *   *

On the table, between the window and the four-poster bed, stands a vase of white lilacs. The sea outside is a rare blue. Through the window, the wind is a cold fresh slap. Rudi has anticipated her desires: a view to the ocean, sheets laundered in lavender water, hot tea early in the morning, wildflowers on the tray. He has given Margot the east-facing room on the island since she is inclined to enjoy the dawn.

Yesterday afternoon, just for her, he flew a piano in all the way from the mainland. The helicopter broke the expanse of blue and circled the island twice, gauging the winds. Suspended by ropes and cables, the piano seemed to have a flight of its own. Soft padding was put on the tennis court so the piano would land gently. Seven islanders were hired to navigate it into place. Rudi himself took hold of one of the legs and Margot smiled momentarily at the thought of herself as the piano, held aloft. It was a crazed venture, the piano could have been brought by boat, but he wanted it instantly, wouldn't listen to her. At first she had felt a thinness of emotion, such a waste, but then she was surprised by an acute wedge of ecstasy.

Rudi wore a sleeveless shirt. He was stronger even than the islanders. Their caps blew off in the wind from the helicopter rotors. Later he paid the men and dismissed them with a wave of his hand. He tuned the piano himself and sat to play until late in the night. Even when she had gone to bed Margot could hear the notes floating, high, sirenic. She thought that a life like this would be intolerable if constant and yet, precisely because it was unusual it was precious.

It frightens her to think that she is forty-five and he is just twenty-six, his life occurring so soon. Sometimes, in the way he moves, she thinks she can discern a whole history of Tatar arrogance. Other times—walking along the beach, choreographing a move, adjusting a lift—he is bent into submission, her experience towering over him.

Through the window she sees the piano in the middle of the tennis court, covered with a sheet of plastic that is coated with dew-drops. She will scold him later, mother him into bringing the piano indoors, but for now the view strikes her as fabulous, unresolved, the tennis net lying flaccid beneath the varnished legs.

Margot moves to the edge of the bed, where she stretches, gently at first, until her palms touch her feet, and then she reaches further with her fingers, to the soles, noting the calluses. She runs a tub of hot water. In the bath she sands her feet with a pumice stone, easily working with circular sweeps. She examines a mosquito bite on her instep, touches the small red welt, and then, out of the bath, she rubs herbal cream over her feet. They have been rehearsing together for a run in Paris and her toes ache from the temporary floor he has installed in the basement. She feels the gradual warmth of the lotion as she massages it from ankle to toe, repeating the stroke.

The rise and fall of the waves outside is barely perceptible, a fine corduroy of foam lines turned red by the dawn. A few seabirds ricochet on the air currents and in the distance Margot sees a yacht, its yellow sails unfurling.

Her eyes stop suddenly on a rip in the landscape as an arm lunges from the sea. A flash of dryness in her throat. She holds her breath, but then another arm rises, complementing the first, and she exhales—it is simply Rudi swimming, his hair turned dark by the sea. She sits down on the bed, relaxes, begins to pull her right ankle high in the air, placing her foot behind her neck in a stretch, a morning ritual. She releases the foot, wiggles her toes, and pulls her left leg behind, adjusts herself on the bed and then brings both legs back simultaneously, her long hair over her ankles feeling cool.

Releasing the grip, she reaches across the bed to call Tito at the hospital, to tell him she misses him, she will soon return to take care of him, but the phone rings on, unanswered.

Loose from the stretch, Margot moves closer to the window.

She watches Rudi's slow rise from the water, head first, then shoulders, then chest, his tiny waist, his penis large even after the chill of the water, his giant thighs, the tough calves, the michelangelo of him. She has seen him naked many times before, in his dressing room, unperturbed as a child getting ready for a bath, and she could make a map of his body if she desired. She has, in dancing, touched every part of him. His clavicle, his elbow, the lobe of his ear, his groin, the small of his back, his feet. Still, she raises her hand formally to her lips, as if to compensate for her lack of surprise.

His skin is glaringly white, almost translucent. The lines of his body are sharp, a scissored cutout, as far removed from Tito as she can imagine.

With a pang of pleasure she watches him walk from the beach towards the long grasses beyond the rocks, stepping through the growth barefoot. She hears the piano's plastic cover tear against the wind and the quick run of Rudi's fingers across the keys. Beneath the sheets, she feigns sleep as he comes in to wake her, carrying hot tea upon a tray, saying:
You slept in, Margot, get up, it's time for rehearsal.
After he leaves, she smiles, not her stage smile, nothing regal or controlled, and then looks out to the sea once more, thinking that even if there was nothing else there will always be the memory.

*   *   *

Cosmopolitan:
The world's most beautiful man.
One must confront the fact that the face will change and the body is vulnerable. But so what? Enjoy the moment. The
world's
most beautiful man! When I'm seventy and sitting by the fire, I will take the photos out and weep, ha!

Somebody stuck the cover on my mirror and added devil's horns. I wouldn't mind but the bastards ruined my eyeliner pen—it is probably the fat cleaning bitch who left in tears yesterday.

The fans slept all night outside in the cold in Floral Street. Gillian made several flasks of hot soup and convinced me to go along with her—she said it was good publicity.