The Complete Ballet Page 6

  I was older than my wife but it didn’t seem to matter. Desire doesn’t really care about the object of desire, it cares about itself. She didn’t know what love was any more than I did, but we believed it could be trained, almost like a muscle, developed in each other to focus on each other, and because we were young and we thought we could be anything we wanted, we thought of ourselves as happy. I pretended to be who I was, and she appeared to be who she was, and in the beginning there were some adjustments but the more I gave her my desire, in the form of attention, which was sincere because I did desire her, the more the desire was kindled in her, and who knows, we thought, maybe this is love. And those thoughts of love began to connect us, to bind our bodies and the cells that lived and died and made our bodies, and because we were skeptics, we dismissed it, but because we were human we believed that our happiness would go on forever.

  Carlotta Grisi originated the role of Giselle in 1841, and since then every great ballerina, as a way to measure her greatness, has taken it on. It’s a role that requires acting, but what the great ballerinas have is not just an ability to act the part of a girl in love but to be a girl in love and let those feelings express themselves in dance. Crossing the line between acting love and feeling the actual surge of that love in the body was something Grisi must have done because she fell in love with the man who created, in the story he wrote, the role of Albrecht. And the great Anna Pavlova must have felt it as strongly as anyone. Haskell tells us: With Pavlova there can be no other word than genius. To have seen her in nothing [other than in Giselle] is to have seen every facet of her art. Haskell is dead, as is anyone who saw Pavlova dance, but we assume that when she danced Giselle she became the innocent young girl who, in her first experience of love, believes that love and life are synonymous. What struck me, Haskell says, was not just the fact that her dancing seemed entirely spontaneous, but that it seemed a natural phenomenon, like the ripple of a pond, the opening of the flower, or the leaves being whisked and whirled by the wind. I’ve seen videos of Pavlova dancing and I’m not as impressed as Haskell. Partly it’s the quality of the video, but partly it’s the style of her dancing, as if she’s doing an impression of a ballerina, waving her arms in the delicate arc we expect to see from a ballerina. So it must have been her physical presence. Being in front of a living human being who radiated heat, I know what that’s like, and passion is a word, but what she felt, and therefore what she expressed, transcended words and even images. Which is why Haskell sounds like a man in love when, describing her, he says her long, perfectly proportioned arms accentuated the large noble movements of the Russian school, while her well-modeled legs, her strong slender ankles, and her highly developed instep gave her pointes a unique beauty. Her face was not beautiful; it was more than that. It could assume beauty at will, so that there was not one Pavlova, but many.

  Pavlova was born into poverty in 1881, and her rise into the ranks of the great ballerinas had as much to do with tenacity as natural ability. She studied with Petipa in St. Petersburg and danced for Diaghilev in Paris, and her history is the history of Romantic ballet. But her fame, the reason Haskell fell in love with her, was because she wanted to dance for herself. Like Dickens on tour with his novels, she went on tour with her ballet, in Europe and America, anywhere she was asked to go. She performed sections of the great ballets for people who had never seen ballet, and because she was romantic, she believed the world could be perfect, and because she was a dancer she tried to express that perfect world. Balanchine said that to be romantic about something is to see what you are and to wish for something entirely different. It’s a kind of magical thinking that let Pavlova believe she could feel, not just what Giselle was feeling because most people can do that, most people have a memory of some version of love, but calling that up, night after night, and her version must have been intense. She must have wanted love and also feared love, and because of that fear it was easy for her to believe in the curse of the Wilis, those spirits that rise at night and terrorize men. They’re led by Myrtha, the so-called queen of the Wilis, but more on her later.

  Now it’s grape harvest time in the village. The peasants gather around Giselle and everyone dances with her. Albrecht does, his arms around her thin waist, and when the couples split apart and new couples join together, that’s when Hilarion takes Giselle by the hand, and when he dances with her, supporting her arabesque, what he’s doing is the same thing I did when I tried to imitate Cosmo. Hilarion is imitating Albrecht, trying to be someone who can partner Giselle by attracting her attention and keeping her attention. If you lack a trait, assume it, that’s what Shakespeare said, and Hilarion is trying to generate the same heat that Albrecht generates, a heat that Giselle will feel and be attracted to, but like me trying to be Cosmo, it doesn’t work. And when the couples pair off again, this time with Albrecht partnering Giselle, it’s obvious where the love is because Albrecht, an experienced lover, knows how to make a space for love. He’s danced with enough girls to be confident, and his confidence becomes part of his charm, and he knows how to lift Giselle and balance her, and the other dancers stand back to watch. Hilarion watches too, until he can’t stand it anymore. His attempt to be Albrecht didn’t work, he thinks, because Albrecht is false, and I’m not false and I won’t be. He steps into the middle of the pas de deux, breaking it up and pulling Giselle in a way that almost trips her, and he warns her again not to trust that man, but that man is the man she loves, and if there’s any feeling of competition, Albrecht doesn’t show it. He invites Hilarion to hop on the wagon he commandeers, a wagon filled with the harvest of grapes and there’s wine, and no one questions why he passes out glasses of wine because belief is blinding. Giselle is blinded by what seems to her the inevitability of her love. They drop Hilarion off at his cottage, a ramshackle cottage at the edge of the village, and as he watches them drive away he knows the next part of the story is undanced, the part when they make love. It’s undanced because when the two of them, on a picnic blanket, take off their tights, it isn’t necessarily graceful. Giselle lets him pull the stretchy material down over her thin ankles, getting caught on her thin white shoes, and they laugh as their naked bodies entwine.

  One cannot and should not rule out sex from ballet. For some types of mind the sex appeal of the dancers may be an inducement to visit the ballet. Haskell, in his own way, is talking about the sexuality that exists, and has to exist, when watching nearly naked people, beautiful nearly naked people, perform. It’s possible to sit so far away that the bodies of the dancers, the thighs and breasts and buttocks all flatten out. I’ve had seats up there, in the upper balconies, and I know ballet isn’t a strip show, but I know the closer you sit the more you feel the intimacy, or the more I feel it, and that intimacy is part of the sexuality, which is part of what keeps pulling me back to the dancing. Human beings, on display, in their tights and leotards. And in the old days the material wasn’t as clingy as it is now but even then you would’ve seen, very clearly, what the muscles of the bodies of the dancers were doing. One time Nijinsky, dancing for some royalty in Russia, had to stop dancing because whatever he was wearing to cover his penis didn’t cover enough. That’s the story anyway, and it’s believable because the whole reason for wearing tights is to show the muscles, and sometimes they’re bulging muscles. The quadriceps, in male dancers, are especially developed. And the gluteus. And the girls. And for some types of mind it’s the ballerinas, their ribs rising and falling with the exertion of dancing, an exertion that makes them hot, and if you sit close enough, you can see the sweat on their brows, and their armpits are wet, and the gluteus muscle is one of the largest muscles in the body. Margot Fonteyn, although she was no longer a girl, when she danced with Rudolph Nureyev, by presenting herself in the role of someone young and pliable, excited desire in a lot of people. Youth is beautiful, and a dancer’s body is trained to be flexible and strong, and even if it’s not actually naked, it’s possible to fall in love with a naked dancer’s body because
the nakedness exists in the imagination, where it has its power.

  The actual job I had when I first met Cosmo, the one that paid me, was at a telephone answering service in Hollywood. It was located in a small office on Ivar Street, and people would call, leave messages for people, and those people would call to find out what the messages were. Most of our clients were in the industry, that’s what people called it, actors usually, struggling probably, and my job was to relay information about meetings and casting calls. Businesses like that don’t exist anymore, and even back then it was sometimes slow. I had time to read books, look at magazines, and mainly I just stared into space. The pay wasn’t terrible but I would never even get close to saving up twenty-three thousand dollars. And my friends didn’t have that kind of money. My ex-wife, my relatives, they were all distant or dead. I could probably have scraped together a thousand dollars, maybe two, and one idea I had, in lieu of paying back my debt, was to make myself scarce. Out of sight is out of mind, that’s what they say, but even if that were true, which I don’t think it is, the men I borrowed the money from were not the kind of people to forget about me. I know I hadn’t forgotten about them. I could feel them, like a band of tension extending down from the back of my skull, knotting up my trapezius, and whatever tension was causing the knot, I didn’t want it stuck in me because I didn’t want to stick it in my clients. The people I massaged. For free. A man named Daryl had answered one of my ads, and as I drove home, down Rowena, I was trying to mentally prepare myself, imagining the fibers in the back of my neck elongating and softening, and when I pulled into my driveway, parked in the space where Juan let me park, I thought I felt a little more relaxed. It was in this state of relative relaxation that I performed the ritual, inside my house, of opening my massage table, laying out the sheets, putting the pillow in a pillowcase, and it was important, when my doorbell rang, that my money troubles become a thing of the past. If I was thinking about ways to come up with twenty-three thousand dollars I couldn’t concentrate on Daryl, who arrived, took off his shoes, and his eyes reminded me of a squirrel. He was about thirty, his hair in a ponytail, and he presented, as they say, with a problem in his hip, a lack of mobility that was obvious. Once he got down to his underwear I had him stretch out on the table, on his back, and because he was skinny I could see his musculature and through that to his skeleton and I saw that one leg, his right, was shorter than the other. This shorter leg would need to be released, and I intended to do that by loosening the tendons that held the femur into the hip. But because those tendons are small, and because they’re buried under larger tendons and protected by larger muscles, the first step was to wake them up. Once they woke up I could start relaxing them. Muscles need to be relaxed to do their jobs, and so starting at the surface, I began working in from the superficial muscles, softening them until the fluids began to flow, and by fluids I mean not just blood. The Chinese have several names for the current that runs through the body and that’s what I planned to set free. Set free is probably too ambitious, but creating a little space in the hip socket, that I could do. Starting with his foot, I worked my way up his calf, following the contour of muscle as it winds its way around the bone, spiraling up around the knee. The quadriceps and hamstrings and the tender adductors are all connected to the pelvis, and to understand the muscle I needed, in a way, to become the muscle. And I thought I was doing a pretty good job until the image of the men at the gambling parlor, and the one with the mustache especially, Seymour, entered my brain. And the minute it did I could feel Daryl’s body stiffen, which meant that I’d stiffened, and when I dove back into his body, into the current moving through his flesh, my hands extending out of my body, I was listening to his body telling me where the current was dammed, like a beaver dam, and it wasn’t easy, but by imagining the muscle fibers and even the cells inside those fibers, I would break the dam and get rid of the image of Seymour.

  The village is empty except for Hilarion. He’s peeping into the window of Albrecht’s cottage, stepping inside the unlocked door as the wedding party comes into view. Bathilde, the bride-to-be, and her father, the prince, drive up to the town square. Gradually the entire village begins to assemble and the prince, who’s thirsty, calls for refreshments. Where’s Albrecht, he wants to know. Wilfrid steps out from the crowd to explain that the groom-to-be has been detained, that he’s still at the church, praying. Giselle’s mother has been hired to cater the wedding and Giselle is the one who brings out the wine and everyone drinks. Giselle, because she’s the best dancer in the village, dances for the royal guests, and because her performance impresses Bathilde, after it’s over the two girls sit together, talking. Giselle admires the fabric of Bathilde’s dress and Bathilde admires Giselle’s beauty. They sit on a bench talking about dancing and jewelry, and Giselle tells Bathilde she’s in love with a man. And since they’re both in love, although they don’t know it’s the same man, they talk and laugh, and Bathilde, feeling generous, gives Giselle a necklace. As a way to thank her, Giselle executes a brief pirouette, whirling around on the point of one foot, an invitation for everyone to join in a dance, which they do. Bathilde dances with her father, an oddly intimate dance in which the father seems more lover than father, and at the end of it the father and daughter are offered one of the cottages, so that they can take a nap. Wilfrid signals with his horn that it’s safe for Albrecht, and when he arrives Giselle performs a series of demi-pliés and relevés leading up to a large jeté, a jump into Albrecht’s arms. Because it’s a ballet, the wedding guests, who temporarily stopped dancing, start again, and it’s like a scene out of Breughel. The whole village has joined in the celebration, everyone dancing or drinking wine, and Giselle’s mother is trying to catch her daughter to slow her down. She’s worried about the Wilis, about what might happen if her delicate daughter exerts herself too much, and what if she dies before her wedding day? And although Giselle is high strung, or because she is, she pushes herself, enjoying Albrecht and enjoying the enjoyment of him, and her mother begs her to stop but she refuses to believe there’s a price to pay.

  Every muscle has learned to express itself, and the problem is, in some cases, they’ve learned the wrong lesson. Imagine if you were born on a hillside and spent your entire life walking on the hillside. If all you knew was the incline of the hill, your sense of level would be corrupted. Your muscles would become so accustomed to the angle of the hill that retraining those muscles would require retraining your memories, and because memories, like people, want to be comfortable, and since it took time for them to learn what comfortable was, to change the idea of comfortable takes time. And attention. Which is why I had Daryl, my client, turn onto his stomach. His muscles were working in the way they’d been taught, and I began by trying to unteach the ones that connected the femur to the pelvis, not coercing them but coaxing them into length. Just a little at a time, hoping not to attract attention to what I was doing because, although awareness is usually good, in this case I wanted to circumvent awareness, distracting both his muscle and his mind, and let the muscle adjust itself. I found a bony protuberance near his sitting bone, and I didn’t know the names of the tendons down there but I felt them with my thumb, and using my thumb I pressed in, and my hand had gotten strong, and I pressed in hard. I could feel him respond, first with tension, which I told him to let go of, then with his attempt at letting go, and although I was telling him to relax, at the same time I wanted him to feel what I was doing because while he was feeling that, which probably felt like pain, I was doing other things. I was using my knuckle to dig in through the sheath of muscle, to the fascia holding those muscles in place, urging them to expand and extend. And I could hear his shallow breathing. I was listening to his body, and his body was leading me to this one particular tendon, attached to the bone like a limpet attached to a rock, and I was following the guidance of his body, and just about when I was ready to apply the pressure I’d been waiting to apply, that’s when Seymour appeared again. In my image of him h
e had his hand out, and I told Daryl to take a deep breath. I dismissed the idea of money from my mind, and all my ideas, turning my focus to a point inside the sacrum where nerve and skeleton come together, and Seymour’s mustache was thick and blond, and I was seeing the variegated hairs of that mustache as I pressed the spot I’d searched for and found, and the spot was the right spot, and because it was right Daryl screamed. And because pain can be part of the process I kept pressing. And it wasn’t the screaming that stopped me, it was his arm, reaching back, smacking at the side of my head. Daryl rolled off the table and landed in a crouch. The table was about four feet off the floor and he was bent over, holding his sacrum, looking back at his butt and then at me, and when I asked him if he felt any pain he told me I was a fucking idiot. You fucking shit. Fuck you, fuck you, and obviously he was in pain. Which I didn’t intend. Although I did. And I told him I was sorry. When I offered to massage the area to ease the pain he called me a fucking asshole. He was able to stand, and he was on one side of the table and I was on the other, and I could tell he didn’t want me anywhere near him. His right leg, the one I’d been working on, was bent, but he was able to limp to the chair, get his pants over his legs, and he was speaking, but not to me.