The Complete Ballet Read online

  James at this point is totally in love. He’s wandering the forest looking for his vision. She’s a vision but she’s real, and he’s walking down a muddy logging road into a stand of old-growth oaks and then something happens I don’t quite understand. He finds a bird’s nest on the ground, with an egg inside. He carries it with him as he walks, walking along until at some point the Sylph appears, floating by his side. It’s you, he says, and she smiles, but when he reaches out she jumps back, out of his reach. It’s playful in a way, and when the ballet was staged in Paris they had wires attached to the ballerina and like magic, when she jumped she actually left the ground, hovering. And James, as a way to get her back to earth, offers her the bird’s nest as a gift. And the part I don’t understand is her reaction. When she sees the egg inside the nest she pantomimes fear, telling him with her hands, get that thing away from me. Is she afraid the egg might take his affection? Or is she sad, like Taglioni, thinking of the egg separated from its mother, as Taglioni must have been separated, spending every day with a father who forced her to practice, and I used to watch my own daughter in her ballet class, her little pink leotard, and even the beginner’s class is fraught with failure, and once a week is not so bad but every day, and with her own father, or maybe that’s what she wanted. Or does the egg represent procreation? The Sylph is partly human but she’s unable to have children, and maybe the egg reminds her of what she cannot have, and she must know that James is also something she cannot have but she can’t help it. She wants it, and the desire she has takes up so much room in her mind that it’s all she knows. She doesn’t say anything, but she lowers herself, or she gets lowered, and when she lands next to James, covered by the thin fabric of her dress, a tutu, a long tutu, she beckons him. She beckons him forward but when he takes a step forward she jumps away. His arms are still outspread, an invitation to hug, just a friendly hug, but she’s not allowing herself to be touched. And he wonders if he made a mistake, if she actually is an illusion, because if she isn’t an illusion, why would she be so difficult? She dances a solo for him, and a little dancing is fine, and yes, she performs her solo with brilliance, and people talk about line in ballet, meaning an imaginary line running from the tip of the ballerina’s toe, spiraling up her body, lifting her neck and head, and even in an arabesque, with her legs and her arms all stretched in separate directions, an inner perfection was revealed in her form. And James is entranced by that inner beauty, radiating outward, and that’s why he wants to hold her. He wants to kiss her again and feel her body next to his, and there’s no one around, no need for hiding their love but that’s what she does when she summons her fellow sylphs, all dressed in white, all young and fresh faced. They dance to entertain him, but also to distract him from the fact that the Sylph is unattainable. Longing for her is all you can have, and Cosmo dated a transvestite once. She also wouldn’t allow herself to be touched. Which drove him crazy. And James, knowing why the Sylph is afraid, tells her the difference between them, the fact that they’re two different species, doesn’t matter. He wants her. He declares his love for her. And she’s thrilled. And he’s thrilled that she’s thrilled because now his dream will finally come true, she’ll finally solidify and embrace him, and that’s when she and her fellow sylphs fly off.

  Erik Bruhn, who danced in La Sylphide, said of James: Nothing can actually get hold of him; not his mother, his fiancée, none of the real people understand him. But when he is alone with his dream he is quite himself. And he’s alone now, deep in the shadows of the forest when Madge appears. She steps out of a shadow and she’s friendly enough. Apparently she’s forgotten how he treated her, or she’s risen above it, and because he’s so wrapped up in his desire to unite with the Sylph he forgets he doesn’t like her. He tells her his problem, the problem of longing, and she feigns her good intentions. She talks compassionately and sympathetically, and by way of ending his dilemma she pulls out the magic scarf. With this, she says, you can capture her, and keep her, and she demonstrates how to use it by covering James where his wings would be. She describes the rapturous effect the scarf will have, and when she places the scarf in his hands she tells him to practice on her, and when he drapes the material over her bony scapula, palpable under the sackcloth, she turns to him, her mouth open, her tongue crouched inside, and this is when he remembers she’s a witch. She’s bringing her lips closer to his and, wait a minute, he says, but she’s holding the hair at the back of his skull, and she’s a man, so she’s strong, pulling him closer, telling him how, if he covers his lover’s wings with the scarf, the wings will fall off, and she tells him to kiss her lips.

  Even in the middle of Manhattan, walking down the crowded streets, Joseph Cornell was alone with his dream. And often the dream was a girl. He watched the girls he had crushes on, the girls he saw on the streets, salesgirls and coworkers, and one of these girls he met while he was punching his time card at work. He saw a quality in her that transcended her surroundings, a grace that induced him to start following her, like a spy, never getting close to her and rarely speaking with her but building up an imaginary world she inhabited. Many of these girls were given drawings or boxes, but his relationship with Tamara Toumanova, who had danced for Diaghilev, was different. Sharing secrets about their lives gave them a connection he’d never had before, and during one of their conversations, after or before a ballet, he invited her to visit his studio in Queens. And the day she arrived, before she arrived, he was agitated, nervous and worried that his meddle some mother might say something or do something to embarrass him. Tamara and his mother lived in separate worlds, but when Tamara arrived his mother was charmed. As was his brother. But Tamara was his, and he shooed his mother up the stairs so he could be alone with her, the two of them drinking tea at the kitchen table. He watched her arms. She’d taken off her coat and was talking about Russian tea and Russian dolls, and he was watching the fabric of her dress, and the folds of the fabric, watching her loose hair falling across her ears and down her long, delicate neck. Then he showed Tamara his workshop. They walked down the steep steps and he offered her a chair and he sat at his table and he wanted to see more of her. Not see her again, although he would like to do that, and he didn’t say more of her skin and flesh but he wanted more than a button or piece of earring. She was wearing woolen slacks, and it was warm down there and he asked her if she would be willing to pose for him. Certainly, she said, and she slipped off her shoe, set her foot on the seat of the chair and leaned back, striking a pose, her hands extending from her arms. He opened a sketchbook, but because he wasn’t a very good draftsman it took him a while to start drawing. It was a portrait of her, and he kept looking at her, not drawing but staring at her face and her collarbones, and how would you like me to be, she said, and her face was too perfect and she was too perfect and he looked at her face and loved her face, but he wanted more than her face. She was young and strong, and he was already an old man by then, old but in love with her, and he asked her if she would pose in the nude. She declined, politely, and he went on drawing, and when he finished the portrait he gave it to her but it was awkward, even he could sense that. On his next visit to her dressing room he saw the portrait, propped against her dressing room mirror. He was watching her from his usual chair, and when he presented her with another box she thanked him, as she always did, and she gave him in return an object for his collection, a green glass button from one of her costumes. She set the box with the other boxes he’d made for her, and she liked the boxes but she liked other things too. And other people. Joseph Cornell wasn’t the only one who wanted to keep her company. She was a famous ballerina, and ballet was big back then, and because of her fame, and because her dancing was known by people who wanted to be near that fame, other people were knocking on her door. She was receiving visitors, men wearing fur, and women too, but mainly men, and she invited them in. Before it had been just the two of them, but now her room was crowded with people, other people, and Cornell sat in his chair and these oth
er people, with their importance or self-importance, represented a world that didn’t include him. They stood, surrounding Tamara, and she was the sun and they were the planets, and if the scene was from a Romantic ballet then he wasn’t the hero, the James or the Prince or the Nureyev. He was the sylph who could never be loved. He was the creature that didn’t fit, and these men and women were part of a life he wasn’t part of, and would never be part of, and he didn’t want to be part of it but there he was, sitting in the corner and no one even noticed him. And at first he told himself he didn’t mind, but gradually he began to realize what it meant, and what he meant to her, and he realized their dressing room conversations had come to an end. She kissed his cheeks when he left, but she was kissing a lot of cheeks, and when he walked out of the dressing room, into the night, the love he’d felt for her, and the desire he’d felt to be near her, watching her and studying her, had already begun to fade.

  The way hunters walk through a forest, in parallel lines, beating the undergrowth to flush out their prey, that’s how the wedding guests are searching for James. And when Gurn finds a hat by a tree he thinks that James has been taken, or he’s gone, dead preferably, and when Madge appears behind him he asks her if in fact he is dead. She tells him to propose to Effie. But is he dead? Ask her now, she says, but Gurn believes that Effie can never be his, that she’s too beautiful. But the story of La Sylphide is full of self-deception. James, for his part, wants to believe his desire, because it’s forbidden, is unconscious, and because it’s unconscious it’s more powerful than he is. And the Sylph wants to believe the same thing, that by avoiding desire she’s fueling desire, including her own. And Gurn also wants to believe that he might be someone that Effie could love. But because Effie loves someone else he needs a spell. And Old Madge gives him one, a pill that she carefully places in the center of his palm. In some versions he kneels, and she places the pill under his tongue, and when he finally gets back to the lodge he finds Effie playing pool with her friends. They’re pretending to play but really they’re too sad. Effie’s swollen face is evidence that she’s been crying, and when Gurn speaks to her he doesn’t mention the hat he found. And he doesn’t know if the pill is doing it, or if he’s doing it, but he finds himself feeling the courage or confidence or whatever it is that allows him to say what another self would say, what he would say but has never been able to, and now he takes Effie’s hand. He takes the pool cue out of her hand, and it’s probably the pill because his genitals feel tingly. He’s surrounded by all her friends but he doesn’t notice them, it’s just the two of them, and when he asks her to marry him Effie, recalling the prophecy of the old witch, although this isn’t what she wanted to happen, accepts.

  The way to change an undesirable situation is to change the situation’s direction, and the secret of changing direction is to start early, preferably at the beginning, or if the beginning isn’t possible just start again. I guessed it had something to do with breathing. So I took a breath. Out with the old, in with the new. Out with my bad luck and in with the thick smoke of cigarettes. The air-conditioning was rumbling on a nearby wall but the room was still smoky. Rachel was still in her chair, still young, and the men at the table were mostly heavy, some with gray hair, three or four of them very tan. They kept their heads down, even Cosmo, so as not to accidentally reveal in their faces the contents of their cards. I was watching them and Rachel was too, and watching me, and although I wasn’t playing against Cosmo, and although she was going to work for Cosmo, I imagined she might be rooting for me. Lady Luck is a term from the movies, the Westerns, and we weren’t in a saloon but I felt her watching me as I sipped my drink and I laughed occasionally when a joke was told. The voices of the men when they spoke were deep, their hands thick, and they would have been intimidating in my normal life but now I wasn’t in my normal life. I was drunk first of all, and I was losing money, and I should have ordered a sandwich, that might have helped, but the cards kept coming, and it was exhausting, the concentration involved in hoping the cards would be the cards I wanted, the cards that would help me win, but I wasn’t winning. In fact I was losing so much that at one point, the dealer, a bald man with a double chin, asked me if I needed a loan. He called it a marker. A few thousand dollars. A man called Seymour appeared from behind a glass door. He had a bushy mustache and he glanced at me when he told the dealer to let me keep playing. And a few thousand dollars wasn’t so much, and Cosmo was doing it too, borrowing from something that seemed like a bank, and I played with the money until, when my chips ran out, I needed a new marker. I assured the dealer my credit was good. Cosmo can vouch for me, that’s what I said, and when Seymour appeared again, looking at me, although Cosmo didn’t speak up, my loan was approved. And with this money I would have to be careful. But not too careful because being too careful gets you nowhere. But careful enough. And I was. At a certain point I felt my luck returning, and thank god because playing and losing is not as much fun as playing and winning, and I started winning again, and betting more, and the game is simple. Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, and I was almost back to even when I made the mistake, or the miscalculation, of assuming that the cards in my hand were better than the cards of the man I was playing against. He never addressed me, which I didn’t like, and his carefully combed hair was too carefully combed. And maybe I let my dislike influence my decision to stay in the game, to borrow more money. My luck would return, that’s how it goes, not in circles exactly but it flits from one flower to the next, like a bee, and we were the flowers and I was due for a visitation. I definitely felt that my time was coming, and when the loan was approved I felt certain it was here, the confluence of money and luck, and I attempted a bluff, holding nothing but a pair of sixes, and because it’s psychology I acted, or tried to act, as if I was trying to act as if I had a terrible hand because I wanted the men at the table to think that I was trying to act like I had a good hand because I had a bad hand when really I did have a good hand, and it was confusing, even to me, the levels of subterfuge. Long story short, I lost. But because I’d gotten so close I was pretty sure luck was close. The next round was dealt, and I wasn’t praying because I wouldn’t know how to begin, something like, oh god, please let me have a good hand, or please smile on me, or please, if you give me this then I’ll do whatever you want, something like that. More effective would have been to relax, take a breath, look at my cards and remember the fun I’d had at the beginning of the game. That would have been good but I’d lost too much money now, and it wasn’t even my money. And why was I here, drinking these drinks? I asked the waiters to make them weak but I was feeling them, and I wanted to stop but I had to keep going, claw myself back, pull myself by my bootstraps, whatever that means. And I tried to be cunning, like a suitor, pretending I didn’t care about luck, letting luck take an interest in me if it wanted to, and if it wanted to it could sit on my lap. And when the cards were dealt mine were good, better than good, and bets were placed and I needed another loan if I was to stay in the game, and that’s when Seymour walked in, the glass doors closing behind him. He seemed to know exactly what was happening and he told the dealer my credit was cut off. Cut off? That’s impossible. I need to win my money back. I told Seymour, who was walking away, that I could pay them back, but how could I pay them back. I looked at Cosmo, his tapered fingers stroking his cards, and although he was also losing he had a smile, the faintest stretch of a smile across his lips and sure, he had collateral, I had nothing. I had no house, and my car was falling apart, and then the man named Freddie was standing behind me, pulling out my chair, helping me to stand, and when I did stand, that was the end of the game for me.

  La Sylphide is based, in part, on an opera, which was based on a legend, which is based on a person named Robert the Devil. In the story a young woman, unable to conceive a child, after nights of prayer, goes to the devil, asks for help, and he obliges her by giving her a son. And being the devil’s son he’s prone to acts of terror, to remorseles
s havoc and raping and murder and one day it dawns on him what he is, that he is bad, and he wants to change what he is. People tell him it’s impossible to change but something has to change and so he visits his mother and learns from her that he’s made of the devil. Instead of bemoaning his fate or cursing heaven, he works to banish the devilish part of who he is, cleansing himself of the evil in him. In the course of the opera he learns to subdue himself, to thwart the designs of that accursed fiend who created him, who has made of him an instrument of destruction and of sin, and in the end he becomes righteous. His goodness is rewarded. He’s offered a beautiful woman to be his wife, and although in some versions of the story he marries her, in most versions he becomes a hermit living in the wilderness.

  James is sitting on the gnarled root of an old tree, leaning against the tree’s trunk, his knees near his chest, looking at the dead leaves at his feet. Often he holds his head in his hands in a gesture of dejection. He’s told himself, and now he realizes, that he’s in love with the Sylph, and when she enters the clearing on the tips of her toes he can’t help but be happy. He’s happy until, when he holds his arm out, inviting an embrace or a pas de deux, instead of running to him or gliding to him, she keeps her distance. It’s as if an electrified fence surrounded him, and she’s flirting with him but she’s not getting close enough to touch him, or let him touch her, and it’s like the poker game, and she probably knows what will happen. He approaches her, very slowly, like approaching a frightened dog, and then he tells her, I have something for you. She sees the scarf in his hand and the magic must work because immediately she wants it, wants to hold it, to feel the fabric between her fingers. It’s a gift, he says. It’s my love for you. And she knows it’s a mistake but she’s mesmerized. She reaches out, and partly she reaches out because of the beauty of the scarf, but partly it’s her desire for transformation. She wants to transform herself into a human being. If she could be human, she thinks, she could be loved, and she dances a dance full of hope, which is human, and of fear, which is also human. The Sylph must know her love is doomed but like Taglioni, when she dances she forgets what she knows, and because she believes that love is possible, when James begins moving with her, the dance they dance is the consummation of their union. When the young Nureyev holds his partner, a Russian girl, over his head, enlèvement, she’s in heaven because every cell in his being is also in heaven, and after a deep arabesque, that’s when she settles on the forest floor in front of him. That’s when he asks her, and now she’s ready to allow him, to place the scarf around her trembling form. She’s nervous, and vulnerability, like nakedness, can be sexy. He slowly unfurls the scarf and drapes it over her small diaphanous wings, the wings that made her a being that couldn’t be loved, and that’s when the feathers of the wings, feather by feather, fall off. And there’s nothing she can do. When the last feather falls to the ground she dies. And there’s nothing James can do but watch the life as it fades from her face and her body, and when it’s gone he’s kneeling, holding her in his arms. And when the other sylphs arrive James can only watch as they lift the body of their fallen comrade and bear it up to heaven. Or the heavens. And James would normally make the gesture of grief but he’s beyond grief. He barely notices Madge, standing behind him, not quite laughing at him but happy in her victory, what she sees as a victory. Look, she says, directing his gaze to a clearing across the forest. See what you’ve lost. And when he looks up he sees a wedding party, led by Effie and her new husband, Gurn, and he sees what he’s lost and no one sees him. In some versions of the ballet he dies and in other versions he just collapses, but whether he’s dead or almost dead, Madge always kneels over him, stroking his back like a mother, or a lover. In a version by the Royal Ballet, Madge lifts her hem, revealing beneath the soiled black burlap a glimpse of white tutu, as if the old witch, once upon a time, had been a sylph herself.