The Stardance Trilogy (3 page)

She sat on the couch. Her hair was down, now, and I liked it better that way. I shut off the monitor and popped the tape, tossing it on a shelf.

“I came to apologize. I shouldn’t have blown up at you at lunch. You were trying to help me.”

“You had it coming. I imagine by now you’ve built up quite a head of steam.”

“Five years worth. I figured I’d start in the States instead of Canada. Go farther faster. Now I’m back in Toronto and I don’t think I m going to make it here either. You’re right, Mr. Armstead—I’m too damned big. Amazons don’t dance.”

“It’s still Charlie. Listen, something I want to ask you. That last gesture, at the end of Birthing—what was that? I thought it was a beckoning, Norrey says it was a farewell, and now that I’ve run the tape it looks like a yearning, a reaching out.”

“Then it worked.”

“Pardon?”

“It seemed to me that the birth of a galaxy called for all three. They’re so close together in spirit it seemed silly to give each a separate movement.”

“Mmm.” Worse and Worse. Suppose Einstein had had aphasia? “Why couldn’t you have been a rotten dancer? That’d just be irony. This”—I pointed to the tape—“is high tragedy.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me I can still dance for myself?”

“No. For you that’d be worse than not dancing at all.”

“My God, you’re perceptive. Or am I that easy to read?”

I shrugged.

“Oh Charlie,” she burst out, “what am I going to do?”

“You’d better not ask me that.” My voice sounded funny.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m already two-thirds in love with you. And because you’re not in love with me and never will be. And so that is the sort of question you shouldn’t ask me.”

It jolted her a little, but she recovered quickly. Her eyes softened, and she shook her head slowly. “You even know why I’m not, don’t you?”

“And why you won’t be.”

I was terribly afraid she was going to say, “Charlie, I’m sorry,” but she surprised me again. What she said was, “I can count on the fingers of one foot the number of grown-up men I’ve ever met. I’m grateful for you. I guess ironic tragedies come in pairs?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, now all I have to do is figure out what to do with my life. That should kill the weekend.”

“Will you continue your classes?”

“Might as well. It’s never a waste of time to study. Norrey’s teaching me things.”

All of a sudden my mind started to percolate. Man is a rational animal, right? Right? “What if I had a better idea?”

“If you’ve got another idea, it’s better. Speak.”

“Do you have to have an audience? I mean, does it have to be live?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe there’s a back way in. Look, they’re building video facilities into all the TVs nowadays, right? And by now everybody has collected all the old movies and Ernie Kovacs programs and such that they always wanted, and now they’re looking for new stuff. Exotic stuff, too esoteric for network or local broadcast, stuff that—”

“The independent video companies, you’re talking about.”

“Right. TDT is thinking of entering the market, and the Graham company already has.”

“So?”

“So suppose we go freelance? You and me? You dance it and I’ll tape it: a straight business deal. I’ve got a few connections, and I can get more. I could name you ten acts in the music business right now that never go on tour—just record and record. Why don’t you bypass the structure of the dance companies and take a chance on the public? Maybe word of mouth could—”

Her face was beginning to light up like a jack-o-lantern. “Charlie, do you think it could work? Do you really think so?”

“I don’t think it has a snowball’s chance.” I crossed the room, opened up the beer fridge, took out the snowball I keep there in the summer, and tossed it to her. She caught it, but just barely, and when she realized what it was, she burst out laughing. “I’ve got just enough faith in the idea to quit working for TDT and put my time into it. I’ll invest my time, my tape, my equipment and my savings. Ante up.”

She tried to get sober, but the snowball froze her fingers and she broke up again. “A snowball in July. You madman. Count me in. I’ve got a little money saved. And…and I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?”

“I guess not.”

The next three years were some of the most exciting years of my life, of both our lives. While I watched and taped, Shara transformed herself from a potentially great dancer into something truly awesome. She did something I’m not sure I can explain.

She became dance’s analogue of the jazzman.

Dance was, for Shara, self-expression, pure and simple, first, last, and always. Once she freed herself from the attempt to fit into the world of company dance, she came to regard choreography per se as an
obstacle
to her self-expression, as a preprogrammed rut, inexorable as a script and as limiting. And so she devalued it.

A jazzman may blow
Night in Tunisia
for a dozen consecutive nights, and each evening will be a different experience, as he interprets and reinterprets the melody according to his mood of the moment. Total unity of artist and his art: spontaneous creation. The melodic starting point distinguishes the result from pure anarchy.

In just this way Shara devalued preperformance choreography to a starting point, a framework on which to build whatever the moment demanded and then jammed around it. She learned in those three busy years to dismantle the interface between herself and her dance. Dancers have always tended to sneer at improv dancing, even while they practiced it, in the studio, for the looseness it gave. They failed to see that
planned
improv, improv around a theme fully thought out in advance, was the natural next step in dance. Shara took the step. You must be very, very good to get away with that much freedom. She was good enough.

There’s no point in detailing the professional fortunes of Drumstead Enterprises over those three years. We worked hard, we made some magnificent tapes, and we couldn’t sell them for paperweights. A home video-cassette industry indeed grew—and they knew as much about Modern dance as the record industry knew about the blues when
they
started. The big outfits wanted credentials, and the little outfits wanted cheap talent. Finally we even got desperate enough to try the schlock houses—and learned what we already knew. They didn’t have the distribution, the prestige, or the technical specs for the critics to pay any attention to them. Word-of-mouth advertising is like a gene pool—if it isn’t a certain minimum size to start with, it doesn’t get anywhere. “Spider” John Koerner is an incredibly talented musician and songwriter who has been making and selling his own records since 1972. How many of you have ever heard of him?

In May of 1992 I opened my mailbox in the lobby and found the letter from VisuEnt Inc., terminating our option with deepest sorrow and no severance. I went straight over to Shara’s apartment, and my leg felt like the bone marrow had been replaced with thermite and ignited. It was a very long walk.

She was working on
Weight Is A Verb
when I got there. Converting her big living room into a studio had cost time, energy, skullsweat, and a fat bribe to the landlord, but it was cheaper than renting time in a studio considering the sets we wanted. It looked like high mountain country that day, and I hung my hat on a fake alder when I entered.

She flashed me a smile and kept moving, building up to greater and greater leaps. She looked like the most beautiful mountain goat I ever saw. I was in a foul mood and I wanted to kill the music (McLaughlin and Miles together, leaping some themselves), but I never could interrupt Shara when she was dancing. She built it gradually, with directional counterpoint, until she seemed to hurl herself into the air, stay there until she was damned good and ready, and then hurl herself down again. Sometimes she rolled when she hit and sometimes she landed on her hands, and always the energy of falling was transmuted into some new movement instead of being absorbed. It was total energy output, and by the time she was done I had calmed down enough to be almost philosophical about our mutual professional ruin.

She ended up collapsed in upon herself, head bowed exquisitely humbled in attempt to defy gravity. I couldn’t help applauding. It felt corny, but I couldn’t help it.

“Thank you, Charlie.”

“I’ll be damned. Weight is a verb. I thought you were crazy when you told me the title.”

“It’s one of the strongest verbs in dance—the strongest, I guess—and you can make it do anything.”

“Almost anything.”

“Eh?”

“VisuEnt gave us our contract back.”

“Oh.” Nothing showed in her eyes, but I knew what was behind them. “Well, who’s next on the list?”

“There is no one left on the list.”

“Oh.”
This time it showed. “Oh.”

“We should have remembered. Great artists are never honored in their own lifetime. What we ought to do is drop dead—then we’d be all set.”

In my way I was trying to be strong for her, and she knew it and tried to be strong for me.

“Maybe what we should do is go into death insurance, for artists,” she said. “We pay the client premiums against a controlling interest in his estate, and we guarantee that he’ll die.”

“We can’t lose. And if he becomes famous in his lifetime he can buy out.”

“Terrific. Let’s stop this before I laugh myself to death.”

“Yeah.”

She was silent for a long time. My own mind was racing efficiently, but the transmission seemed to be blown—it wouldn’t
go
anywhere. Finally she got up and turned off the music machine, which had been whining softly ever since the tape ended. It made a loud
click
.

“Norrey’s got some land in Prince Edward Island,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “There’s a house.”

I tried to head her off with the punchline from the old joke about the kid shoveling out the elephant cage in the circus whose father offers to take him back and set him up with a decent job. “What? And leave show business?”

“Screw show business,” she said softly. “If I went to PEI now, maybe I could get the land cleared and plowed in time to get a garden in.” Her expression changed. “How about you?”

“Me? I’ll be okay. TDT asked me to come back.”

“That was six months ago.”

“They asked again. Last week.”

“And you said no. Moron.”

“Maybe so, maybe so.”

“The whole damn thing was a waste of time. All that time. All that energy. All that work. I might as well have been farming in PEI—by now the soil’d be starting to bear well. What a waste, Charlie. What a stinking waste.”

“No, I don’t think so, Shara. It sounds glib to say that ‘nothing is wasted,’ but—well, it’s like that dance you just did. Maybe you can’t beat gravity—but it surely is a beautiful thing to try.”

“Yeah, I know. Remember the Light Brigade. Remember the Alamo. They tried.” She laughed bitterly.

“Yes, and so did Jesus of Nazareth. Did you do it for material reward, or because it needed doing? If nothing else we now have several hundred thousand meters of the most magnificent dance recordings on tape, commercial value zero, real value incalculable, and by me that is no waste. It’s over now, and we’ll both go do the next thing, but it was not a waste.” I discovered that I was shouting, and stopped.

She closed her mouth. After a while she tried a smile. “You’re right, Charlie. It wasn’t a waste. I’m a better dancer than I ever was.”

“Damn right. You’ve transcended choreography.”

She smiled ruefully. “Yeah. Even Norrey thinks it’s a dead end.”

“It is not a dead end. There’s more to poetry that haiku and sonnets. Dancers don’t have to be robots, delivering memorized lines with their bodies.”

“They do if they want to make a living.”

“We’ll try it again in a few years. Maybe they’ll be ready then.”

“Sure. Let me get us some drinks.”

I slept with her that night, for the first and last time. In the morning I broke down the set in the living room while she packed. I promised to write. I promised to come and visit when I could. I carried her bags down to the car, and stowed them inside. I kissed her and waved goodbye. I went looking for a drink, and at four o’clock the next morning a mugger decided I looked drunk enough and I broke his jaw, his nose and two ribs, and then sat down on him and cried. On Monday morning I showed up at the studio with my hat in my hand and a mouth like a bus-station ashtray and crawled back into my old job. Norrey didn’t ask any questions. What with rising food prices, I gave up eating anything but bourbon, and in six months I was fired. It went like that for a long time.

I never did write to her. I kept getting bogged down after “Dear Shara…”

When I got to the point of selling my video equipment for booze, a relay clicked somewhere and I took stock of myself. The stuff was all the life I had left, and so I went to the local AA instead of the pawnshop and got sober. After a while my soul got numb, and I stopped flinching when I woke up. A hundred times I began to wipe the tapes I still had of Shara—she had copies of her own—but in the end I could not. From time to time I wondered how
she
was doing, and I could not bear to find out. If Norrey heard anything, she didn’t tell me about it. She even tried to get me my job back a third time, but it was hopeless. Reputation can be a terrible thing once you’ve blown it. I was lucky to land a job with an educational TV station in New Brunswick.

It was a long couple of years.

Vidphones were coming out by 1995, and I had bread-boarded one of my own without the knowledge or consent of the phone company, which I still hated more than anything. When the peanut bulb I had replaced the damned bell with started glowing softly off and on one evening in June, I put the receiver on the audio pickup and energized the tube, in case the caller was also equipped. “Hello?”

She was. When Shara’s face appeared, I got a cold cube of fear in the pit of my stomach, because I had quit seeing her face everywhere when I quit drinking, and I had been thinking lately of hitting the sauce again. When I blinked and she was still there, I felt a very little better and tried to speak. It didn’t work.