Dancer (27 page)

Mother said that the snow over Ufa had deadened all other sound. Tamara says she wants to understand me, my life, but she is so foolish, how can she understand me? Nobody does.

Erik complains that I talk more and more shit each day. As if he doesn't. He says I should just do the one thing I know—that is, operate in my sacred space, onstage.

He detests my idea that dance makes the world a better place.
It is sentimental,
he says. I want to make a statement about beauty, but Erik (who spends his time watching the news from Vietnam and Cambodia) says that dance changes nothing for the monk who sets himself aflame and the photographer who watches through the lens.

Would you set yourself aflame for something you believe in?
he said.

I asked if he would keep his finger on the shutter if I was burning. He would not answer at first but then he finally said:
Of course not.

We fought until the alarm clock rang. I told him I had set myself aflame a long time ago, did he not realize this? He sighed and turned his back and said that he was sick and tired of it all, that he simply wanted a cottage by the sea in Denmark where he could sit and smoke and play the piano. I slammed the door and told him to go fuck himself.

He yelled after me:
Yes, that might be preferable.

I said he certainly wouldn't get an encore.

The ice packs were not frozen and the Epsom salts had disappeared. I wanted to throw the small fridge out the window. The only deterrent was a crowd of cheering fans below.

Margot keeps threatening retirement. She is well aware of Bettina's power, for example, Joyce's also, even Alessandra's, perhaps even Eleanor's. Yet every partner brings me inevitably back to Margot, her magnetism. On the phone she said she is torn. On the one hand, she says Tito needs her. On the other, she needs the money. (And she is afraid she will wither.)

Erik is correct although I screamed at him and hurled the flowerpot, just missing his head. I probably have, yes, been dancing terribly. Fuck!

The new masseur might well release me, however. He has suggested there are trigger points in the body where he can remove the tension. He manipulates it to other parts of the body where it dissipates. (Certainly on the beach I finally felt relaxed after six countries in just fourteen days.) Emilio has the strongest hands I have ever known.

I have grown to hate the standing ovations in restaurants, how infantile.

Victor is crazed and vulgar and lovely, a walking disaster (silk gown and ostrich feathers) and yet nobody makes me laugh more. The theme of the party he organized was Nureyev. He said the hairstylists all over New York were packed solid, that even Diana Ross had to bribe to get her hair done. (Later she told me that I was divine as myself.)

Quentin Crisp whispered drunkenly in my ear:
I am much too much every man's man to be the only man of any man.
(I'm sure he stole the line from somewhere.)

I told her that if she continued her career she would, at the very least, get to kiss the toad. She could be heard weeping outside the rehearsal and someone ran to get her a cigarette. Gillian said a cigarette will stop anyone crying. A thought: packages should be unceremoniously shoved into any available hole presented by hysterical women, dancers, lovers, accountants, stagehands, customs officers, etc.

The performance was full of error. Terrible. The movement is pure shit. He couldn't choreograph a Latin orgy. For the entrance I should blaze onstage as if it is the absolute beginning of the world. Open the body's windows and build the mystery from there.

Broadway, front row. The show was shit but Erik said we couldn't leave, people would gossip. I pretended to have a toothache and left, but returned for the party later. The lead actor asked if my teeth were okay so I bit his arm and said yes, they seemed to have recovered.

He went around all night with a bandage on his arm and his sleeve rolled up.

Gillian asked me how can I dance after fucking, and I could only reply that I could not dance without fucking. (One only wishes the intermissions were longer!)

Patrick uses the needle between his toes so nobody can see the marks. Before he goes onstage he cuts his finger and sprinkles salt into the cut (excruciating agony) to wake himself from his stupor.

In the bar on the corner of Castro I suspended myself from the balcony while the boy unzipped me and performed his quiet miracle. He was the same height as Erik and blond also. I almost pulled a shoulder muscle, hanging from the balcony so long. I suggested we return to the hotel for a friendly nap.

The Canova statue: $47,000. (Mrs. Godstalk!)

Warhol says the run-up to my thirty-second birthday will be like the final days of the Roman empire. He has ordered a red vinyl jockstrap for the occasion, which he may well wear outside his trousers. I couldn't help thinking that he will fade away into obscurity. His fashionability is waning. (Being around him is like inhaling one of those ridiculous poppers.)

At the post-party party the nude ice sculptures began to melt. There was a cake baked in the shape of an ass—marzipan dimples and creative icing. I blew out the thirty-three candles (one for luck) but then Truman Capote jumped up on the table in his frock coat, flung off his white hat, and planted his face into the cake, came up miming a pubic hair between his teeth.

Victor collapsed from exhaustion and was rushed to the hospital. Later he came into Studio 54 with the intravenous drip still in his arm. He guided the metal stand through the dance floor under the flashing lights. Soon everyone was cheering and applauding and whistling.

Victor bowed and took a booth in the far corner, readjusted the dripbag, and tried to buy everyone a drink before he collapsed once again. (He would have loved it if he could have seen himself being carried out by none other than Steve.)

Margot says,
Slow down.

I told her that the countless small devils (sex, money, desire) mean nothing to me when stacked against the angel of dance.

Sasha fell in the park, it seems. Heart attack. Tonight I stayed late, sent everyone home, danced him alive.

Wandered into a courtyard where the last blacksmith in Paris was shoeing his first horse of the day. He allowed me to sit on the wall and watch him. The horse's leg in his hand and sparks at his feet.

Telegram and flowers for Xenia.

Fuck! The ankle just seemed to go out from underneath me. (Sasha all those years ago:
What, are you not friends with your body anymore, Rudi?
) Three months recovery, Emilio said. In exactly four days I will throw the crutches into Central Park.

(three in fact!)

Two long weeks recovering on St. Bart's. No phone calls, nothing. It was so hot that the rain over the sea evaporated before it hit the water. Clouds of yellow butterflies rose from the trees. The world was far away and small.

The locals get up with the early light to work on their flower beds. Erik said the old men have a better life than the flowers—they have even less to do and can move to the shade when they desire. (Such a strange thing to say.)

After dinner he vomited in the bath. Food poisoning, he said. The housemaid cleaned him up. In his bathroom kit there were bottles of painkillers. In bed we turned back to back. He ground his teeth and kicked. By dawn the sheets were damp with sweat.

Photo from Tamara. Her heavy breasts, her stocky trunk, her abbreviated legs, how Russian she has become.

Twenty-four repetitions instead of twelve. Emilio has increased the weights and each day he measures the muscle. We walk the streets with the weight strapped to my ankle. The convict walk. Soon to be back dancing. Never before has he seen anybody recover so quickly.

Whole mornings doing massage. Hip extension. Torso twist. Hamstrings. Most of all my thighs and calves. He hangs my feet off the end of the table to prevent cramping and grows angry if I try to read a book on the special stand.

He says he can tell the plot of whatever I'm reading just by running his hands along my spine.

Perhaps the leg is stronger than ever before. The crowd in Verona, under the stars, give a twenty-minute standing ovation, even through a late drizzle. No word from Erik. The Chicago
Sun-Times
said he looked pale and, when he withdrew, the announcement was intestinal flu.

Margot has figured that we have danced together, in total, almost five hundred nights and she says to hell with it, she will go on, she will try for seven hundred, a lucky number!

Emilio's cure for insomnia: Pour water on your wrist, dab it gently with a towel, return to bed, warm your hands beneath your armpits.

Our final quarrel surely. Every piece of china was smashed except the teapot, which Erik cradled to his stomach. He lit a cigarette in the doorway, still holding the pot. When I turned away he dropped the teapot without even the hint of emotion.
Good-bye.
A stinging finality to it.

Gillian said it was inevitable. I slammed the phone down. I do not need to be told. Margot was with Tito in Panama. No answer. Victor came to listen, took a flight all the way. My head was reeling.

Tried getting through to Mother but all the lines were down.

2

It begins with scarves, dark ones bought at the Missoni store on rue du Bac; gradually, over the years, he gets to know the store owners so well that they open for him alone on a Sunday morning. The scarves become brighter, more patterned, until he is so famous they are an advertisement, unpaid for, some of them smuggled home to his sister and mother, who find them loud and gaudy. In London a Saville Row tailor makes him a high-collared tunic, a Nehru, not unlike the one he wore in school, except it is cashmere, and it is his joke to say that this is how he feels inside, cash-a-mear, spoken like three words accidentally met. In Vienna he buys a Rococo-style Murano glass chandelier with fifty-five lights and twenty replacement bulbs. In Cairo he finds a pair of antique Persian slippers. In Rabat he kneels on carpets made for him by a blind Morrocan man to whom he tells the story of the Leningrad choreographer who listened so intently to floorboards. The Moroccan loves the story so much that he repeats it to other customers, so the story shifts and changes as it makes its way through living rooms around the world, told and retold, the choreographer becoming a dancer from Moscow, or a Siberian musician, even a deaf-mute Hungarian ballerina, so that years later he hears the story, distorted, and he bangs on the dinner table and shocks everyone silent with the words: Horseshit! That's horseshit! He was from Leningrad and his name was Dmitri Yachmennikov!

He buys antique English bookshelves and folding tables. Romanian glassware hundreds of years old. An imperial dinner set from Austria. An Argentinean folding desk. Stained glass from a church in Bavaria. Iron crosses smuggled out of Czechoslovakia. A series of crucifixes by an artist in Vatican City. An intricately carved mirror from Chile, which he gives as a present to a stagehand from Santiago. He acquires musical scores handwritten in the 1930s for Vera Nemtchinova, pores over them late at night, teaching himself how to read the scores, how to hum them into his occasional insomnia. He orders maps drawn by a Soviet émigré in Mexico City, with the Republic of Bashkir firmly seated at the center, the town of Ufa finally finding a place for itself in cartography. One map is created for each of his homes, so eventually he has seven, a lucky number to him. The maps hang in gilded frames with a special nonreflecting glass. In Athens he buys a first-century Roman marble torso after the Diadumenos of Polykleitos, the body slightly chipped at the rib cage. His Virginia farmhouse has cabinet shelves that display precious carvings from Ghana. He buys Olga Spessivtzeva's slippers, shows them to his maker in Covent Garden, who learns a new stitch from them. On Madison Avenue in New York City he haggles over a Charles Meynier painting,
Wisdom Defending Youth Against Love.
He carries the painting back to his apartment in the Dakota rather than pay the extra hundred dollars for delivery.

Antique accordions, violins, cellos, balalaikas, flutes, fiddles, a mahogany grand piano from William Knabe and Co: he surrounds himself with music.

In Stockholm he buys a glass case of rare fossilized ammonites. In Oslo, a cabinet made by Georg Kofoed Mobelfabrikant. In Rome he unfolds Chinese wallpaper panels depicting military scenes against a backdrop of herons, trees, temples. They are shipped to his island home on Le Galli near Capri. He makes a special trip to Nice to buy a series of Nijinsky photographs so he can study the poses, reset the steps, for which there is no written record. From Prague he orders hand-blown light fixtures from a glass craftsman. An Australian woman who deals in books sends him a steady supply of first-edition masters, mostly Russians. He rescues a grandfather clock from a trader in Singapore. From New Zealand he acquires a series of tribal masks. In Germany he buys a full set of dinner plates once used by a kaiser, the bone china trimmed with gold. From Canada he requests a cedar chest, since he doesn't like to use mothballs, he has heard there is a particular forest where the cedar is best. He has flowers flown from Hawaii to his London home. And in Wales, where there is a mastery and respect for the form, he has a train set built for him by Llewelyn Harris, a craftsman in Cardiff, the models so real that when he lays them out on the floor he can sometimes remember himself at six years of age sitting on the hill above Ufa station, waiting.

BOOK THREE

After the passing of irresistible

music you must learn to make

do with a dripping faucet.

—J
IM
H
ARRISON
, “D
ANCING
”

1

NEW YORK • 1975

It is one of those heartless streets you find in parts of the city where the light is still tense with yesterday's darkness and even in the late afternoon it already feels like curfew and the spent trash of the day goes skidding along and pigeons sit gray on chain-link fences and the traffic is stalled and fume-blowing and the storefronts are dark and shadowy with filth and grime, Eleventh Street and C, Lower East, all smack and suicide, but Victor breaks it simply by moving down the sidewalk, making walking a form of dancing, beginning in the shoulders with a symmetrical roll not even the blacks have perfected, one oblong shrug of a shoulder and then the other, as if connected by synaptical cogs, first the left and then the right, but not just the shoulders, the roll moves down into his chest, into his rib cage, through the rest of his body, down to his toes—
god made me short so I can blow basketball players without ruining my knees!
—then up again to rest for a moment in his hips, nothing flagrant, no need to bring attention, the walk alone pays homage to his crotch, so if you are sitting on a brownstone stoop, high or hungover or both, you look up through the shit and the grime and the thousand other everyday torments too deep to mention and you see Victor coming along—looking like he's the first man ever to whistle—in his tight black pants and his neon orange shirt, his black hair swept back, his teeth white underneath his dark mustache and his body in a roll that isn't jazz or funk or fox-trot or disco, it's just pure Victor from head to toe, an art he must have managed since birth, laughing as he walks, a chuckle that rises high and ends low, a Victor laugh, on impulse, like his body just told him a little joke about himself, and the whole day slips away while you watch him, the clocks stop, the guitars tune themselves in unison, the air conditioners hum like violins, the garbage trucks sound like flutes, and you sit rooted to the steps as Victor waves to the other queens hanging out the windows, wigs and feathers and lust, while he crushes a cigarette or ties a shoelace or raps on a windowpane, using a silver dollar so it sounds out, and there are whistles and catcalls