When We Danced on Water (2 page)

Chapter 4

“A
little makeup,” Teo says on a windy morning three weeks later as Vivi approaches his table, the table that is always his first choice: not too close to the bar and the noise from the coffee machine, not in the farthest row of tables jutting into the shopping arcade.

“What?” she says, startled. Until now barely a word has passed between them.

“A little makeup wouldn't kill you,” he continues. “A light foundation. A touch of rouge. You have fine features, but who can see them?”

She finishes placing his order in front of him. The coffee cup clatters in its saucer.

Her chin rises slightly before she speaks, but her hand flutters nervously as she curls a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. “Save it for your ballerinas,” she says about to reel away from him.

“Wait … ah, I've forgotten your name—”

“Vivi.”

“Vivi? Unusual. What is it short for?”

With polite impatience she says, “I started life as Varda. Awful name. I've been Vivi since I was a kid.”

“But Varda is Rose. And what could be lovelier than that? My mother was Rosa.”

“That's nice,” she says, stifling a frown, “but I have to—”

“Your boss tells me you're an artist,” he says in a rush, as if his words were hands trying to encircle her.

She shifts her weight to one foot, no longer poised to run. “I'm a waitress,” she says flatly.

He ignores her response and her tone and asks cheerfully, “What sort of art do you do?”

“What sort of … ?” She sighs in exasperation, trapped. “I paint. I embroider. I make collages,” she says, bending back a finger as she lists each addition. “I whittle, I sculpt. I photograph. I sketch, I bead, I weave. I do video art. And right now I'm learning glassblowing. That's not the whole list, but you get the picture.”

“Well,” he says, leaning back in his chair as if having been blasted backward, “that's … how shall I put it? Impressive.”

She smiles for the first time, not sweetly. “Then why don't you seem impressed?” she asks.

“It's just that … I have spent my entire life in one art form: dance. Oh, dance certainly incorporates a lot of other arts, but really, when you come down to it, I've taken a very narrow path while yours is … as broad as can be imagined. In fact, I cannot imagine it.”

She glances around as if hoping to find customers needing her, but in fact, his is the only occupied table. She turns her full attention to their conversation. “From your tone I'd say you're not impressed, you're actually quite critical.”

He laughs like an old man, dry and doleful. “Am I truly that transparent?”

“To me, yes,” she says. “I'm pretty good at reading people.”

“Add that to the list of your arts,” he says.

“Let me guess: you believe that a person can only be good at one art, the one he throws himself into wholly. Which makes someone like me—”

“A dabbler.”

“Not serious. Someone who wastes time and potential.”

“Vivi,” he says as if affirming the fact of her name, “I never would have said this, but since you seem to crave honesty then yes, with that kind of breadth you can never really be sublimely good at anything.”

“Sublimely good,” she repeats. “That's beautiful. I wouldn't actually mind being sublimely good if it weren't for the downside.” She places one hand on the tabletop and leans closer in to his face. “With breadth you get variety. You get excitement. Fun. You never get bored.”

He purses his lips and gestures to the chair across from him, inviting her to sit. She glances at Yossi, who is reading a newspaper behind the bar, then pulls out the chair and sits.

“You know,” he says, “I studied with Balanchine in the early fifties, when he was just making his mark. Do you know who Balanchine was?”

“A great choreographer,” she says.

“The greatest. Beyond the dances, he created modern ballet itself. But he was not just looking to create the perfect dance or the perfect dancer, he was in search of no less than the truth. His quest seemed almost like a religion at times. Did you know that Mr. Balanchine frowned on his dancers marrying? He expected them to stay married to the ballet forever. I suppose that was a leftover from Imperial Russia, but still you would be surprised how many of his dancers did just that. He was profoundly disappointed when one of them let a romance get the best of her, and much worse when they got pregnant. Ballet is a way of life that leaves little room for anything else. But any art is like that, if you take it seriously enough.”

She is shaping a response, but he is suddenly eager to share something and so she remains silent, attentive.

“Those Russians!” he says with a smile of disarming charm. “They were peerless. I had an adagio class with Pierre Vladimiroff—he was a principal with Diaghilev and was the great Pavlova's last partner—and Madame Danilova's variations class, about dancing the classics. These were the classics, but she made them so fresh that everything seemed new. I had a class, too, with Mr. B. himself, a class in precision. We spent hours on the exact fifth position, on transition steps like the pas de bourrée. Those teachers demanded perfection, nothing less. It was glorious. But it was his choreography that defined his true greatness. He burned off all the lyric romanticism so that what remained was chunks of music and pure movement that he heaped one on top of the other. He used constantly changing rhythms, he pushed his dancers beyond the confines of the music. And this was all new, new, new! Can you imagine? He was changing the very way we look at the human body and how it moves! Do you see? These are not achievements that come from dabbling. Only from complete and utter devotion.”

He is nearly out of breath, and flushed with excitement. His eyes are shining.

Although she is fully aware that she is being upbraided, it feels to Vivi like a privilege of sorts to hear these stories firsthand. Still, she cannot resist asking what she needs to know. “What about the price?” she says.

He folds his hands over his heart and frowns, but he does not avert his gaze. “Which one?” he asks.

“Well, for starters, not raising a family. Losing contact with friends who are not part of your art. Shunning every other form of creativity in your life. I like to believe that what you call dabbling is enriching in a different way. Fuller maybe,” she says, not sure how far she can push this, but on a roll. “And don't different arts inform one another? There are lots of interdisciplinary artists these days, after all.”

“Bah!” he says, nearly spitting. “Excuses. Young people who don't know how to commit themselves to anything. ‘Interdisciplinary' is just another word for taking the easy way out.”

She glances sideways, into the shopping arcade. Slowly and without rancor she says, “It must be wonderful to be so sure of yourself. I've never been that sure about anything.”

He eyes her differently, really looking at her. He suddenly sees it, the scrim pulled over her lovely features. He had thought all she needed was makeup, but now he sees it is much, much more than that. Sometime, somewhere, a light inside her extinguished and altered her. Before he can fully formulate the thought he asks, “Was it a man? Was it a man who stole that from you?”

“Stole … ?” Her jaw drops and her eyes water as if she has been slapped. “Why did you ask me that?” she says, her voice shaky.

“Something about you does not add up,” he says. “I've been observing you these past few weeks. You act … as if you've experienced a great loss.”

She rises quickly from her chair, nearly toppling sideways. “You have no right—”

He grabs her wrist, pulls her in toward him, his firm and bony grip a surprise. His face is so close she can smell his old man's breath. “Use it,” he says sharply. “Exploit it for your own needs. As long as you let it fester without making use of it, he'll always have you under his power. I know.” He releases her hand and leans back in his chair.

Stunned, Vivi makes her way to the bar, wordless and tearful.

Chapter 5

O
n her next day off, a quiet Sabbath morning, Vivi sits down at the computer she rarely uses with a cup of tepid instant coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and crumbs from an aging croissant on her face. She looks up Teo on the Internet and finds him everywhere: in interviews, news items, quoted, critiqued, though much of the material is not new. She reads this on a Who's Who in Dance site:

Teodor (Teo) Levin, dancer and choreographer, b. Warsaw, Poland, 22 February 1922. Studied and performed under Harald Lander at the Royal Danish Ballet, and George Balanchine at the School of American Ballet. Founded the Israel Dance Theater (1948), later the Tel Aviv Ballet. Choreography includes
Point Blank
(1953),
The Wanderers
(1957, for the San Francisco Ballet),
Dolly Suite
(1960, for Ballet de Monte Carlo),
Pas de Deux sans Amour
(1964, San Francisco Ballet) and
Obsession
(1981). Awards and honors: RDB Excellence in Choreography (for
Dolly Suite
, 1961), Order of the White Eagle (Poland, 1980), IDA Outstanding Choreographer (1981), Israel Prime Minister's Award for Artistic Achievement (1991), Israel Prize for Life Achievement (1995).

Vivi does a quick calculation and is shocked to realize that he will turn eighty-five in just a few months. He still has a full head of white hair coiffed into a stiff mane, a flat stomach, muscled arms and legs. Only his sagging old man's bottom, the way it curves under and tilts his pelvis like the skeleton he will soon become, gives him away.

The worn, secondhand leather chair squeaks as she leans back and takes a final drag on her cigarette. She gazes up through the thin cloud of smoke hovering about her head and tries to imagine him younger, young. Was he as handsome as Pincho back then? Was he remote, a man devoted in his entirety to his art? Or, perhaps, could they have become friends?

Vivi chortles, breaking the silence in the apartment. Friends? One could not be friends with so self-absorbed a person! And yet, through her umbrage and anger at his prying question, she felt oddly satisfied. He had pushed his way through a door long since locked and the rush of fresh air was sobering.

Vivi tightens the sash on her bathrobe and plods noiselessly through the flat. She had heard Pincho come in just as the first fingers of light pulled back the fading night sky. More nights than not he returns from Indigo, the gay dance club where he works, with someone he has met. Often she hears them enter the flat, shushing each other, giggling. There are thuds and moans, splashes of water, the flushing of toilets, then all goes quiet. These men never seem to stay the night, or even the few hours into morning. So she assumes that Pincho pushes them out. After all, who wouldn't want to sleep curled up beside him?

Now he is sleeping behind the closed door at the end of the hallway. She is careful to tiptoe around the apartment, close cupboard doors softly, refrain from putting on music, even though she knows nothing will keep him from sleeping soundly. In the home of her childhood, quietly populated by two busy parents and a studious brother, there was never an uproar, but in his house, with six younger brothers and sisters and a mother who spearheaded efforts against the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and lives the Disengagement and the loss of the family home like a second skin, one learned to sleep anywhere and through anything.

Vivi washes her face, piles dishes in the sink, and dresses for the glassblowing workshop she will be taking part in in just an hour. This has become her latest passion, one in a long, long list that began with ballet and swimming when she was a little girl, and has metamorphosed through photography, pottery, embroidery, music (ukulele, cello, voice), poetry, painting, sculpting … she has art supplies and equipment in every drawer and cupboard, mostly crusted or broken, mostly long since abandoned. This will be her third glassblowing workshop and she feels she is beginning to find her way in this sleek, brittle art. She hopes it will enable her to express the pent-up feelings, the longing (for what?), the beautiful swirls of light and color that tease her and urge her to create.

She is slipping her feet into a scuffed pair of pink Crocs when the phone rings. This early in the day, on a Saturday no less, it can be only one person.

“This will have to be short, Mother, I'm on my way out the door,” Vivi says in a low voice somewhere between a whisper and a growl. Her lack of a greeting has nothing to do with the fact that she is in a hurry; their conversations are seamless, they pick up and leave off as if part of one, ongoing lifetime mother-daughter dialogue.

“Glassblowing, I know,” says Leah, her voice pitched low to match Vivi's even though her husband has been dead for years and there is no one in her home but she. “Any interesting people in the group?”

Vivi sidles up to the full-length mirror by the front door. She has pulled her hair into its usual top-head ponytail, a fountain of hair that leaves a spray of loose strands cascading in all directions. Over a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve coffee-colored camisole she has thrown a hand-knitted sweater she picked up in the Jaffa flea market, which she hopes will somehow pull together all the different hues in which she has carelessly wrapped herself. She stands sideways, trying to crush her belly and breasts inward while uncurling stooped shoulders. She gives up quickly and reverts to a slouch. “You mean men, don't you, Mother?”

“That would be nice, of course,” Leah says with a sigh. “But even a good new friend would be pleasant, don't you think?”

“Pleasant,” Vivi repeats.

“Vivi, you're not getting any younger—”

“I'm well aware of that, Mother.”

“Well it's time—”

“Time for what? And according to whom?”

“It's just time, that's all. To get started with your life.”

“Mother, I'm not doing this now,” she says, her voice rising. “My life started forty-two years ago. Okay, I don't have a degree and I don't have a family, but my life's pretty much in the middle and it's filled with all kinds of … stuff, whatever it looks like to you.”

“Vivi, don't get excited, I'm on your side.”

“Of course you are, Mother. Who could doubt it?”

“Why don't you take a day off and come up to Haifa? We'll go to the Mane-Katz Museum and then we'll have lunch down at the boardwalk, on the beach.”

Vivi cuts off the conversation with her mother when she sees Pincho stumble out of his room, shirtless and in boxer shorts. His beauty twists itself around her heart, as always, but when he flings his arms around her and rests his head on her shoulder he has the slightly stale smell of every man, any man, fresh out of bed.

“Hi, sweetie,” she says, patting his back. “Make you a cup of coffee?”

He nods into her neck.

She holds him for a minute longer, then parks him at the tiny kitchen table and busies herself with the electric kettle and his favorite mug. She puts two leftover pastries from the coffee bar on a plate and brings it all to the table, where she finds him sleeping, his curls spilling over the wooden tabletop.

She leans over, pecks his cheek. “Drink up, the coffee will do you good,” she says.

He pulls himself up, wraps his hands around the mug, takes a sip, opens his eyes.

“Rough night?” she asks.

He nods. “Huge crowd. Lots of requests. I was on my feet the whole time.” His voice is thick with slumber.

“And everybody was hitting on you,” she says, and as usual with this line of questioning he ignores her. She has seen him in his DJ booth, earphones on and off his head, messing with the equipment, happy to be above it all, literally, in the smoky, writhing, throbbing cave that is Indigo. She has also seen him—from her perch at the bar, where she can sit unnoticed—constantly approached, constantly discussed by the men around her. But despite her best efforts, she cannot get him to talk about this with her. She has a feeling it has something to do with his upbringing, and she wants to be the one he can confide in since he has told none of his family or friends about himself. But so far he remains silent.

His face is hanging over the mug now, enshrouded in curls, and she cannot get a read on his expression.

“I'm going off to glassblowing, remember?” she says.

He nods.

“Let's have dinner together, okay? I'll pick up some stuff on the way home.”

“I'll be here,” he says.

She is about to give him a hug from behind when something—the slope of his bare back, a mole she has never noticed, the thickness of his neck—reminds her of Martin, and she stops, steps away, and flees the apartment.