The Complete Ballet Page 7

  He was speaking about me. Talking briefly about legal issues but mainly about how he’d like to make me feel the pain he was feeling. Which was natural. And it was natural, once he got dressed, that the feeling he was feeling became less acute. I didn’t say anything because I knew he was angry but when he opened the door, as a way to normalize our relationship, which shouldn’t have been jeopardized by an experience that might, in the end, turn out to be beneficial, I asked him if he wanted to make an appointment for the following week. He didn’t even say fuck you this time. He just walked out, limping slightly, and as I watched him limp down my driveway I noticed a car at the curb. I couldn’t see who was driving, but the man who was sitting in the passenger side opened the door and there was Seymour, smiling, pulling at his mustache. He waved when he saw me, walked up the driveway, and between each apartment was a narrow concrete patio, and I had a plastic table, two chairs, a succulent plant inherited from the former tenant, and I kept my motor scooter there. It was a Slovenian moped I kept locked to some pipes by the house, and Seymour sat on one of my plastic chairs. He was smoking a cigarette. The table was green, with two matching chairs, and when he finished his smoke he stood up, shorter than I was, and he said he’d like to see my place. Meaning the inside of my house. And why do you need to come inside? He didn’t say anything but I followed him around to my door, and it wasn’t necessary to invite him in because I was following him in. Nice place, he said, looking around. I had a desk and a sofa and the chairs were pushed aside to make the massage area, and he looked at the table and at a painting on my wall, and without looking at me he walked into the kitchen. He seemed to like the kitchen. Nice tile, he said, and he lit a burner on the stove to light another cigarette. And I might’ve accepted his offer of a cigarette except for the fact that he wasn’t asking me to take one, he was telling me. And even if I owed his boss some money, I thought of myself as an independent operator, and I told him I was fine. And he said, that’s good. Because we were wondering. If you’ve made any headway. And I knew what he was talking about and I told him, I’m working on it. He nodded, both suspicious and approving, and what I noticed about Seymour was his big smile. And the specific thing I noticed about his big smile was its falseness. Or seeming falseness. It seemed false to me because it seemed so easy. And maybe it was easy, maybe he’d been gifted with cheek muscles that easily slid his lips across his teeth in what they call a winning smile. Or maybe he worked at it. Maybe Seymour, like a weight lifter, had developed a set of smile muscles that let him, like a strongman pressing a barbell over his head, press his smile. It didn’t seem to grow out of amusement or mirth. It just appeared on his face, and like a weight lifter, once he’d lifted it, he dropped it. And I thought about offering him tea or coffee but then he’d have to stay, and I had nothing of value so I wasn’t worried about him stealing anything or breaking anything, but the fact that I was thinking about him breaking something got me worried. Like an appraiser he roamed from the kitchen into my bedroom, wiping his finger along the base of my lamp as if looking for dust, and when he patted the head of a happy-face–sad-face mask on my wall I felt an impulse to protect the face from what he was about to do. Which was nothing. He was friendly. He asked me about my day, about work, and I wasn’t thinking about Cosmo, but Cosmo would probably tell him a story, and I started talking about work, about Mike Conners, which wasn’t really a story but Mike Conners was the star of a television show called Mannix. He used the answering service, and sometimes I’d talk to him to give him his messages. And Seymour must have seen the show, a detective show, because he seemed slightly impressed that I got to talk to a television star. He didn’t spend much time in my bathroom which was connected to another room, a small bedroom that I used as both a closet and a place to keep my bicycle. He placed his hand on the saddle of the bike and asked me, You ride this? And I was trying to give him the impression that he was welcome, that he could stay in my house as long as he wanted, thinking that if he thought I wanted him to leave he wouldn’t leave, and I was hoping he would finish his tour of my house but he seemed interested in the bike. It wasn’t a great bike but the derailleurs were good and the brakes were good, and by now the cigarette he’d lit in the kitchen was down to the filter, and as he sucked on it he was looking at me and he must have seen some tension in my face because he told me to relax. You wear a helmet, right? But first of all, I didn’t want to relax, and second, I didn’t like people telling me how to be, or what I should do, and mainly I didn’t want him in my house. And it wasn’t his comment about a helmet that agitated me. It was the money I owed. My life was moving in a certain direction, a direction I admit might not have been the best direction, but it was my direction, a direction I’d chosen, and I didn’t want to give him the power to alter that direction or alter me, and why should I change direction for this guy? Then he took a last drag of his cigarette, stubbed it out on a plastic plate, a green and yellow plate that had been my daughter’s, pressing the still red ember into the green plastic, which melted enough to absorb the cigarette, and he left it sticking up like a cactus, or a tumor, and then he leaned over the handle-bars of the bike. He pretended to rev it up. How fast does it go? Not very, I told him, and he told me I didn’t look very fast, and then, gripping the brakes of the bike as if he was descending a steep alpine road he said, you need good brakes. And I agreed that brakes were crucial, and he said, no, I’m telling you. The brakes are what keep you from, if a car comes out of nowhere, boom! And I knew what he meant so I nodded. You know what I mean? Yes, I said, and he shook his head. The human body. It’s an amazing instrument, right? But imagine a bicycle coming one way and a car coming the other way, and with his hands moving in the air in front of his chest he demonstrated the slow-motion coming together of two moving objects. We’re fragile animals, he said. Without protection the bones of the body are like … and he winced, thinking of bones penetrating skin, and teeth shattering, and I was thinking the same thing and then he laughed. Not a real laugh. But that won’t happen to you, right? You’ve got good brakes. And I realized that Seymour’s attitude of friendliness was in direct proportion to the sense of threat he exuded. The nicer he was the scarier he was, and he was being extremely nice. His words were. But something was lurking behind his words, like his smile lurking behind his mustache, and I didn’t put my finger on what it was until he told me he liked me. You’re funny, he said. You’re a funny guy, and then with his hand he tousled my hair, as if tousling the hair of a child except I wasn’t a child and I found it demeaning. It was more like rubbing, what he did, rubbing his hand on my scalp a little harder than he needed to, and then he said, hasta la vista. And when he walked to the door I didn’t say it to his face, but I walked with him down the steps to the driveway, and when he told me he’d be seeing me later, that’s when I said it, loud enough to hear inside my head. Asshole. And although he didn’t break anything or take anything or hang around very long, once he was gone, instead of feeling relief, I felt the opposite of relief, not fear exactly, but I knew what these guys were capable of doing, and intimidation was only part of it. For intimidation to work they needed to back it up now and then with violence. I watched him walk down the driveway, open the large door of the gold Cadillac, and then I turned and walked back to my front-door steps. I knew I was being watched, and although I didn’t want to perform, and didn’t know what it was I was performing, when I opened my door and stepped inside my house, that’s what I was doing.

  There are two basic ways to change a situation. One is to change the situation, and the other is to change how you respond to the situation. Hilarion, the gamekeeper, was attempting the former. The wedding festivities are happening on the town square and Hilarion is inside Albrecht’s cottage. It’s supposedly Loys’s cottage, but Hilarion doesn’t believe that and now he finds the royal sword lying on the bed, the royal red cape is hanging on a hook, and he knows that Loys isn’t Loys, that he’s a duke who’s engaged to be married. Holding the sword in one han
d, the cape in the other, he walks out of the cottage and when he steps into the middle of the happy dancing he’s hard to ignore. He’s yelling, first of all. And it’s almost a yell of joy because now he has his proof. He throws the sword in front of Giselle and shows her the cape to show she’s about to make a big mistake but now she doesn’t have to. You see, he says, and he tells Giselle her lover is a liar. And what is that, she says. A word you made up? It means nothing to me because I don’t believe it. But here’s the proof, he says, and although the story happens at a time when objects had power, she refuses to accept that power. It could be anyone’s sword. And because words also had power then, the way to find the truth was to ask the person who might not be telling the truth. Ask him what his name is, find out if he’s really the person he pretends to be. Well that’s easy enough. She sweeps her leg in front of her, in a ballet move called développé, and she does it as if sweeping away all the confusion. She asks Albrecht if all this, meaning all this ridiculousness, is true. And because words had power, he didn’t dare lie. He didn’t even think of lying. Or if he did, it felt pointless. He says nothing, but the questions keep coming, and finally yes, he admits it, he’s not Loys. And did you love me, she wants to know. And he did, and does still. And he’s trying to explain how that might happen when Giselle starts to break down, her life on the one hand, and her reason for life on the same hand, suddenly not existing. He’s basically telling her the love they had, a love she felt and knew was real, wasn’t real, and you can say to someone, you’ll get over it, eventually, but Giselle can’t get over it. She doesn’t speak. And this is why Pavlova was so good in the role. She could inhabit the moment when the intimation of madness begins to flicker behind the eyes.

  A Woman Under the Influence is a movie made by John Cassavetes. It’s about a woman named Mabel, a wife and mother, and it’s clear from the film that her madness is not entirely self-induced. Gena Rowlands plays Mabel and Peter Falk is the husband, a man who doesn’t understand what’s happening to his wife. He sees her being inappropriate, talking nonsense and talking to strangers, and the reasons for her inappropriateness are the influences she’s under. The love she thought was permanent suddenly isn’t, and as her security falls away she becomes more and more desperate to connect with her husband and children, and that desperation pushes her, and pushes them, farther away. She thinks she’s acting in a sensible way, and in the movie you can see her trying to be as honest as she can, with herself and them, honestly acting out feelings that arise in her but people don’t want honesty. Her kids do. And we do. We see her madness as a reasonable response to a situation that has no reasonable response, and when she’s institutionalized in a hospital we feel an injustice has been done. But at the same time she is crazy. The movie is set in Los Angeles, and I can recognize some of the places she goes, one of the bars. She drinks too much, and that adds to her problems, and when she comes home from the hospital she’s very subdued. Her extended family is there, all of them urging her, and wanting her, to demonstrate her sanity. Her husband demands that she be herself but every time she tries to be herself he shuts her up. A numbness has swollen her once-expressive face, and in her effort to act out normality she holds on to that numbness, but the numbness starts breaking down. There’s a moment when she turns to her father. The family is sitting at a large table and he’s at the other end of the table and she looks up and quietly asks him to stand up for her. Her father hesitates, then literally stands, pushes back his chair, and what do you want me to do, he says. And we know what she wants him to do, and we would do it, and when he refuses to do it there’s nothing left but go crazy.

  George Balanchine is considered one of the greatest choreographers of the twentieth century. I remember seeing one of his abstract ballets, they were often abstract, and being mesmerized, not by any one dancer but by the form that was made when all of them danced together. Balanchine lived ballet and was the champion, during his reign as ballet master for the New York City Ballet, of a number of great ballerinas. But near the end of his life he had health problems. He was in his seventies when he started showing signs of a disease, some unknown disease that was later found to be Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It’s a neurological disorder, and one way to get it is to come in contact with animals, the spinal fluid of animals. And one of the symptoms is that you start to go crazy. Balanchine noticed, in the beginning, a slight unsteadiness, but anyone who gets old gets unsteady. And he adjusted. Instead of demonstrating what he wanted his dancers to do, instead of pirouetting or jumping or looking into the eyes of a ballerina, he had to tell them what he wanted. Later, his vision got blurry. It got difficult for him to see the stage. Even with glasses he couldn’t see the details in the dance, and because his art was about the details it worried him. He saw doctors, but they could find nothing wrong, high blood pressure maybe, or a bad heart— but it wasn’t his heart. And gradually, as the disease ate away at his neurological functioning he had less and less physical ability, and then less mental ability, and because making dances was his life he kept doing it, but since his balance was bad he had to use a cane, which was embarrassing for him, so he used to walk with an umbrella. It became part of his costume. Even on sunny days. And inside the ballet studio he would have to sit or lean against a wall, and people could see what was happening but no one mentioned it. When he took a curtain call he held the curtain to help himself stand, and it wasn’t just balance. After his eyesight began to fail, then his hearing did. Music, which was the pulse of his choreography, wasn’t his to enjoy anymore. And it kept getting worse, or he did, getting dizzier and less focused, feeling not just old, but dying, and he was dying, but he was still a young man in his mind, still virile, or at least virile in his way, but that’s not true. He wasn’t virile, and that was a fact that played on his vanity. He was a personality. People came to the ballet to see how he used ballet to say what he wanted to say and now, first of all, he couldn’t even see what he’d done, and second, he couldn’t do what he used to do. He couldn’t see colors so he couldn’t design the lights for his dances, and yes, he had eye operations and heart operations, and he believed in the power of medicine but now he was getting confused. He didn’t remember things. Obvious things. Who is that person talking to me, and how did I get this fork in my hand. It got harder and harder to hold the fork, and sometimes he fell down, but he could get back up because he didn’t want to give in. Getting old isn’t fun, and for him, an ex-dancer, with people watching him to learn his dances and seeing him deteriorate, it was intolerable. It was difficult, given his clumsiness, to be George Balanchine, and then his language started to go. He lost the use of English, his adopted language, and then, even in Russian he could no longer communicate with people. And gradually, he could no longer communicate with himself, which is a definition of madness, the inability to remember who you are and why you are, and gradually the emptiness of that gets filled, and we call them hallucinations but it’s the mind’s attempt, or the soul’s, no longer able to connect with itself, but trying, and in the end, in the hospital, he couldn’t even swallow. What he died of, officially, was pneumonia, but when an autopsy was finally performed on his brain, when they sliced his brain into thin layers, under a microscope they discovered the abnormalities of Creutzfeldt-Jakob.

  What finally breaks Giselle’s heart happens when Bathilde emerges from the cottage, refreshed from her nap, and seeing Albrecht, runs to him. Giselle watches, nearly catatonic, her friends at her side as this other girl embraces the man she loves. The man who loves her. And because Albrecht actually does love Giselle, he’s torn. He had intended merely to amuse himself with this country girl but love got out of hand, and now he’s looking at Giselle, kissing a woman he’s supposed to marry, and this isn’t the way it was meant to happen. She wasn’t supposed to be hurt. But he’s a duke. Marrying the daughter of a prince is the direction his life is meant to take, and he can’t tell Giselle he’s sorry because that would be so insufficient. But she’s young, she’ll fall
in love again, and he is sorry but now Bathilde is not just kissing him, she’s demanding that he give her his undivided attention. He tries to steer her away from the eyes of the crowd but the eyes, like spotlights, seem to follow him. And Giselle, in her own spotlight, can see that he’s made his choice, not that it ever was an actual choice, he was always going to be with Bathilde, that’s the way the world works, and this is when Giselle feels, in the center of her chest, right behind the sternum, not where her physical heart is but where her emotional heart is, a breaking. She can feel it, not breaking like an object might break but turning molten, becoming heavy and black and it’s rotting in her chest, exploding and imploding at the same time. And for her, and for anyone, the pain of that is terrible, and it’s impossible to run away from your own heart but that’s what she starts to do, running in circles at first, running between the cottages to the place where the village trash is thrown away and she lifts a trash can lid. Without looking at the garbage inside she steps in, her toes pointed, one leg then the other and then, still holding the trash can lid, she lowers her body and then covers the can with the lid. And there’s silence. The entire village and the wedding party, and Hilarion and Albrecht, they all stare, unspeaking, waiting to see if … they don’t know what to expect. By now she’s already gone mad. If you would try to talk with her she wouldn’t understand you. She’s lost her reason, literally, her reason for living, and when she does finally pop out, her face is a blank. She steps out, her dress soiled, and with every eye riveted to her she walks to where Hilarion left the sword. It’s on the hard-packed dirt, and the reason Albrecht and Hilarion don’t go to her and comfort her is because who she is has become another person. And because it’s a person they don’t know anymore they only stare. Giselle’s mother goes to her but Giselle has already begun the transformation, and Pavlova could do it night after night but Giselle doesn’t want to be who she is for another second. In some versions of the story what kills her is her broken heart, but in most versions it’s the sword, a long, thick sword that she positions diagonally in the dirt, the shiny metal pointing at her chest, and when she drops the weight of her body the point sinks in just below the rib cage. In the Nureyev version, even after he pulls out the sword, as if she’s unaware of her wound, she keeps dancing, her hair like her mind, unraveling, spinning around in tighter and tighter circles until finally she falls and there’s blood and people rush to her but now she’s dead.