Encore (44 page)

“It wasn't anybody's fault. How could you have held onto a man like that? A strong, willful individual? It's not the same as watching a man go to pieces in front of your eyes, without lifting a finger to help him. Natalia—may I call you Natalia?—you have to accept that he's gone. Then you can learn to mourn him.”

“But it wasn't only Boris!” she cried. “There was the baby first. Our baby died, Stuart—and I shall never learn to mourn for him because his life spanned too short a time! Who can grieve for an infant who could not speak, who could barely say, ‘Mamamama'?” She turned away and bent over, hugging her knees. Sobbing gasps escaped her. He touched the back of her neck, but she jerked up and confronted him. “Why are you doing this to me? You don't know me, and you're twisting a knife inside my heart. Why didn't you leave me alone by the window?”

Tilting her face up with his hand, he murmured: “I'm not sorry. You were killing yourself. No wonder you don't think you're dancing up to your usual standards! There's no soul left in you! A person has to let go of his dead, Natalia. Do you think you're helping your husband, or your child, by throwing yourself on their funeral pyres? If your husband loved you, this kind of death-in-life would make him lose respect for you.”

“But I hated him so,” she said. “For dying. For going to war. For wanting me and loving me and making this defective baby with me. I was glad he died—or I would have left him.”

Stuart Markham shook his head. “No, you wouldn't have. You loved him, and there's no reason to stop loving him because he's dead. You've forgiven him a lot—forgiven him for betrayals and God knows what else. Your husband didn't plan to die, Natalia. Forgive him and forgive yourself.”

He handed her a clean linen handkerchief, and she pressed it to her eyes, cheeks, and mouth. “I don't want to die with him,” she murmured.

“That would truly be cheating the public,” he said. Then he cupped her small, tear-streaked face in his two large hands and held it for several moments. He kissed her lips, softly, then more fully. “Do you want to stay alone tonight?” he asked her.

A shiver passing over her spine, Natalia simply shook her head no.

It isn't just the deaths, Natalia thought: It's the feeling of being part of a closed triangle, unable to break loose. She looked at Stuart Markham and was grateful. He had never known about the convoluted relationships in her life; he had not known Boris. Stuart Markham listened to her speak about her husband and accepted what she told him, without question. Natalia Oblonova had been married to a brilliant man, a complicated man, a patron of the arts throughout Europe—but beyond those facts he could add nothing to his own opinion. He could help her to begin the healing process because her past was not his past; none of his emotions was tied to her previous experience. I can be clean with him, she thought. Pierre is too involved, and so I could not bear him and had to run away. With Stuart, Boris and Arkady remain my own: I do not have to share my memories of them or edit my conceptions to conform with his outlook.

She was beginning to realize that her grief would not be exorcised until she allowed herself to truly explore its depths. There were so many hurts. To lose a man like Boris had brought to the surface myriad smaller pains. She could remember the good, the ineffably sweet, but also the insecurity, the lack of self-esteem that had characterized some of their earlier dealings. She said softly to Stuart: “The most difficult thing to accept is that I shall never learn whether he loved me most. If we had been able to continue to live together, perhaps I might have come to know. As it is, I think he loved me, but maybe he loved Pierre more. But I suppose it doesn't matter. The point is that he did love me, and our baby.”

She had been spending most of her free time with the American writer. Ten days before, at the end of January, the Ballets Russes had finished their engagement at the Century Theatre in New York. Natalia had looked at Stuart and thought: I can't leave again so soon; I can't be alone with the pain. Impulsively, she had asked: “Why don't you come with us on tour?”

“Is that what you want?” he had countered.

“Yes. I really do.” Natalia's eyes had met his, and she had felt the soft pressure of his fingers on her arm. He was a warm man who would give her complete freedom to be her own person but still be supportive next to her. He liked her and seemed to expect nothing in return. She was not ready to let him go, not well enough adjusted to stand her ground without his help.

“My editor isn't exactly pounding the pavement in front of my door,” he said with a light laugh. “I'll come. Why not? You need a guide to this strange country, Natalia. I'll bring along my manuscript and work while you rehearse.”

And so he had accompanied the Ballet on its tour. When they stopped to perform in Boston, he took her to Harvard Square in Cambridge to show her where he had studied for four years. They strolled arm in arm among the brick buildings, facing the statues of his early youth. “I'm glad you're here,” she murmured. “I've never had many friends, but you're my friend. I haven't known you long—why are you with me?”

“I like you, Natalia. You're not like the women here. You're solid and real. You have a goal, and you're not afraid to feel.”

“But I am. I've always built walls to protect me from myself. And you? What do you feel?”

“I'm neither happy nor unhappy. Maybe I'm too selfish. I never cared much what people thought of me—my family, my professors, my publisher. I never tried too hard, either. Not like you, with ballet. I write because there's something inside pushing its way out, and because I suppose I'm good. Apart from that, I live a fairly good life, but I'm rather restless. I don't inspire myself.”

He laughed then, but she was silent. He did as he pleased and apologized to no one. Did she not profess to do the same? She had read some of his work in New York: pages typed on onionskin, corrected in a sprawling hand. He liked himself, liked what he did. Stuart Markham, she had learned, was the youngest of three sons of a Philadelphia surgeon, and he had been reared in a traditional upper-middle-class manner. His father had give him an excellent education, first at the Andover preparatory school, then at Harvard. But there he had discovered, he had told her with amusement, that he was like a dandelion shooting up in a garden of well-tended roses: thoroughbred roses, to boot. “But then,” he had added, “there is no such thing as an American thoroughbred.”

He was right, she thought. America was a strange country, a conglomeration of immigrants and sons of immigrants who had sought refuge from famines and pogroms, or had been tempted to conquer new, raw lands. A land of rugged imperialists, of harsh industrialists with little culture, a land of children waiting to be shown new ways and softer manners—a land of modest, puritanical dreamers, of debutantes who danced in honky-tonk hideaways, of frightened followers as well as bold creative geniuses such as she felt sure Stuart was.

Natalia was still amazed by the audience for which she danced. Their jewels glittered and their mansions were enormous. Yet underneath that veneer of splendor lurked the virgin minds of children. They did not know how to judge a ballet, let alone a Diaghilev production. They possessed no background of general culture on which to fall back to form an artistic opinion. Now Natalia could understand why America had adopted Anna Pavlova without question. Brilliant though she was as a performer, Natalia's old rival from the Mariinsky had come to America as she had previously come to England, then equally unprepared for the complexity of Russian dance. Now Pavlova's little troupe was composed mainly of lesser dancers from Britain. She had not attempted any choreographic innovation, because all dance to the Americans was totally novel. She had distinguished herself in her individual performance, relying on her repertory of classical and romantic roles. Europe would have demanded bolder strides, new directions, and more virtuosity from the
corps.

“Diaghilev's productions are too complex for us,” Stuart explained to Natalia. “We love you because you are accessible: You're small, and lovely, and vulnerable. You're a good actress; Tahor makes the women weep. But dance is seen as recreation, like the movies.”

Natalia was amused. He had taken her to see a moving picture in New York, and she had been filled with wonder. How odd that Serge Pavlovitch, always so interested in new artistic media, had steadfastly refused to involve his ballet in film. “Perhaps,” she said, “the public would prefer to see us in a movie theatre. I wouldn't mind: If I missed a step, it wouldn't be the end of the world. I could redo it in as many takes as I needed to achieve perfection. I wish we could go to Hollywood and watch a film being made.”

He regarded her with his green-gold eyes and stopped walking. “I wouldn't mind at all if you stayed in this country,” he said, his voice low and melodic, like a trembling cello. He was like an oak, strong and brown with touches of color, she thought. His writing possessed that same male quality, punctuated with points of intuition. He never condescended, hardly ever passed judgments. He sometimes lived his life haphazardly, but he recognized his limitations without regret. Pierre had been forever embittered by his failures, forever envious of more successful artists. Boris, on the other hand, had turned his life into a work of art, fashioned with the easy grace of a Benois and the heightened vividness of a Bakst landscape; but he had dabbled at the venture without ever grasping its essential earthiness. Life, after all, belonged to the earth, just as, Natalia thought, did Stuart. This notion reassured her.

“But I would have no place here,” she countered gently, surprised at the unexpected tug that had pulled her closer to this man, this virtual stranger. “I need to dance.”

“Maybe someday you will merely
want
to,” he remarked, circling her shoulders with his arm and starting once more to walk. She nodded, wondering, and then dismissed the strange idea and put her head on his shoulder. The only way to assimilate the loss of a man was by allowing warmth, another man's warmth, to penetrate inside. This man seemed prepared to allow her privacy: the privacy of her past, the privacy of her professional needs. For the first time she did not stop to wonder about the future: Stuart Markham was part of today, comfortably entrenched in the present.

Beside them strolled the students, young men with blazers, straw hats and books; young men with crew cuts and no hats. Such young men! She was twenty-six already. Suddenly she sighed and felt old. “What did you mean, someday I shall merely want to dance?” she asked.

“You still use dance to make yourself feel whole,” Stuart answered. “But when I write, I'm trying to establish a line of contact between myself and the rest of the world. One day soon, Natalia, you'll dance because you have something to say and not merely something to prove.”

She was stunned and immediately angry. Tears came to her eyes. “I want to live,” she said, “and I'm only alive when I dance. That's just how I am.”

“But you don't really like yourself the way you are,” Stuart said.

Later, when he took her to a gentle hill overlooking the lazy Charles River, she said to him: “You can't set me down in your gracious Boston landscape, Stuart. I don't belong. When you studied here, there were New England debutantes in their pantalettes to court. Why didn't you marry one of them?”

“I almost did,” he replied, smiling slightly. His mouth was large and well shaped beneath the mustache. It was an unapologetic mouth, she thought, just as Pierre's was sensual and Boris's ironic. “She was the only daughter of one of my professors,” Stuart explained, “a very sweet, intelligent girl, who went to the Episcopalian church and attended meetings of the Junior League. A very proper girl. But there wasn't an artistic bone in her. She thought the word
create
had to be followed by
havoc.
I gave up on gracious Boston ladies after that.”

She laughed, but when he took her chin in his strong fingers, she shook her head. Below them the river wound its blue ribbon much as, three years before, the Mediterranean had unfurled its current over the rocks of the Bay of Monaco. She had promised Boris to make that year memorable. They had created Arkady. Stuart's girl was right: In some cases, the things that one created broke up one's world. “Let's get out of here,” she said.

She was bewildered by the newspapers. Reporters assailed her in hotel lobbies, in Cincinnati, in Chicago, in Kansas City. They printed terrible stories about “the Countess Kussova, so tragically widowed,” and pictured her, small and sad, “her arms bereft of her child.” At first she was dreadfully hurt, and Diaghilev upbraided the reporters for their crudity. But she knew he would never risk offending the press on behalf of any individual. Much as he had loved Boris and felt protective of her, one of his prized dancers, he realized that any publicity was good and would draw a crowd at the box office. He told her, gently: “Ignore them, my dear. They are adolescents at heart. This is a nation of adolescents, and, like most adolescents, they are fundamentally kind but impossible to handle.”

Actually, the bitterness of her loss was seeping out of her, little by little, town by town on this extensive tour. Now, when a baby was wheeled near to her, she no longer recoiled in agony but only trembled slightly on the inside. With Stuart she was careful to keep an emotional balance. When talk veered toward the future, she steered it at once back to the present. Unlike Pierre, Stuart did not insist. She did not know whether she would like to see him in Europe; this rough and energetic country was a part of him, and she could not imagine his attending a Diaghilev committee meeting. That was her other life.

In Chicago a story appeared about them, and Diaghilev burst into her hotel suite at the Ritz, brandishing the offending tabloid. His large bulldog's face was contorted with rage. “Where are you, Natalia?” he shouted, and then, noticing that the door to the bathroom stood ajar, he pushed it open without knocking. His single lock of white hair trembled over his forehead. She was in the tub and started to laugh, unselfconsciously: He was not, after all, a man to take notice of a woman's nudity.