The Complete Ballet Page 9

  The story begins with a bayadère named Nikiya, a professional dancer who’s taken a job at the court of the Rajah. She’s still new, unsure about counting the steps, and she’s rehearsing those steps on what looks like a nightclub stage. She’s wearing a sheer, Scheherazade-style costume, as are the other dancers, some of them helping her by adjusting her attitude, a ballet position in which the bent leg is lifted behind her. After the rehearsal, when the other dancers have left, Nikiya, thinking she’s alone, keeps practicing. She’s unaware of the nightclub owner, watching her from behind a fluted column, and the two things that happen in Romantic ballet are about to happen. One is eavesdropping. Because characters in ballet can’t talk, the way they gather information is to spy on or listen in, and the other thing is the instantaneity with which ballet characters fall in love. The minute the nightclub owner sees Nikiya he desires her. He surprises her, stepping onto the stage and offering to help her career. He’s willing to take her under his wing in exchange for a little affection, which means a little dancing, and when she rejects him, although he walks away, he doesn’t completely walk away. He knows the reason Nikiya refuses to love him is because she’s in love someone else. Solor, the famous warrior. And when Nikiya goes backstage, Solor, accompanied by orchestral trumpets, makes his entrance. He leaps across the nightclub stage in a series of grandes cabrioles, one leg thrust out, beating the air, his other leg and both his arms radiating out from the center of his torso. This move, like any movement in ballet, when danced by an average dancer, can seem like a stunt or an acrobatic routine. I walked out of a performance of La Bayadère one time because the dancer had forgotten the reason for dancing, which is life. A dancer like Nureyev, on the other hand, in the films of him dancing the part, because there was so much joy in his body, his dancing seemed like the natural expression of human elation. And when, after a final leap, Solor finishes his dance, Nikiya appears from behind the curtains. It’s not clear if she’s been watching him, but it’s obvious they’re in love with each other. And the way they express their love, and pledge their devotion, is by dancing a passionate dance that pulls them together, leaving them, at the end of it, sweating, sitting together on the lip of the stage, drinking water, unaware that the nightclub owner has been spying on them.

  Cosmo’s club, the Crazy Horse West, was a strip club. Blinking red letters above the entrance announced the fact of LIVE NUDE GIRLS, and it was true, the girls inside were more or less naked. But unlike other go-go clubs in the neighborhood, Cosmo’s shows were all scripted, set in exotic locales, and they were given a touch of tragedy by the master of ceremonies, a character called Mr. Sophistication. He was played by Teddy, created by Teddy, and although he wasn’t the star of the show he was the nucleus around which the electrons orbited, the electrons being the live nude girls. His costume for the show was a too-small tuxedo coat, usually a top hat, and on his T-shirt there was a bow tie printed at the neck. He had a puffy face and puffy sideburns, and his stomach protruded, as did his bulbous eyes. It was all part of the Mr. Sophistication persona, which was part Teddy and part made up. He drew an elaborate curlicue mustache on his white-painted cheeks, and when he looked in the mirror before a show he probably didn’t see a pathetic clown. He probably saw himself as a highly intelligent human being forced to degrade himself for a living, forced to adopt a personality, which is what we all do, look at the world and be what we have to be. And this made his act ambiguous. He wasn’t quite Teddy and he wasn’t quite Mr. Sophistication, and when I walked into the Crazy Horse they were rehearsing a new show, the Vienna number. Teddy was perched on his stool, center stage, and Cosmo was sitting at a table in front of the stage, leading the rehearsal. Rachel, dressed in a Viennese chambermaid costume, parted the curtains, and followed by Sherri, another dancer, walked to a mark beneath a red spotlight. And although Teddy’s microphone wasn’t turned on, I could hear the song he started singing. Falling in love again. Never wanted to. What was I to do. It was more speaking the words than singing them. Helpless. And I felt sorry for Teddy, not because he was fat, or because he was helpless, but he was helpless, and then he stood up. The girls were standing on various pieces of colored tape, letting the lights shine on their skin, and Teddy, holding a cane, was supposed to walk behind them and spank them. Instead, he pointed with his cane to the lights, which were too blue for him, or too bright, or not shining on the right spot, which was him, and that’s when Cosmo stood up, walked onto the stage, took the cane from Teddy’s hand and demonstrated what he wanted to happen. He walked up to Rachel, looked into her eyes, mumbled something about mein Fräulein, and he raised the cane as if he was going to punish her and then he laughed. And then Rachel laughed, and he was passing the cane back to Teddy when he noticed me standing by the bar. He lit another cigarette, stepped off the stage, and he must’ve known I was there to talk about money, and I didn’t have to tell him I was scared because who wouldn’t be scared, and maybe he wasn’t scared because he could pay them back. But I had no experience dealing with men like the men we played cards with. He asked me if I’d heard from our friends, and I told him about Seymour’s visit, and about my idea of escaping to Mexico and he told me not to worry. The worst thing to do is panic. His arm was around my neck. As long as I owed them money I was a resource, and as long as you’re a resource they won’t hurt you.

  In the next scene of La Bayadère, the Rajah has summoned Solor to his house. Gamzatti, his daughter, has fallen in love with a portrait of Solor, like a movie star poster hanging in a girl’s bedroom. It’s a large oil painting, and she dances in front of it, practicing her extension and practicing her flirtation, imagining the portrait coming to life and turning its gaze on her. The Rajah, knowing about his daughter’s infatuation, and wanting to make his daughter happy, has chosen Solor to be her husband, and normally this would be an honor, not something you refuse, but Solor has pledged himself to Nikiya, and when he arrives at the royal mansion he arrives in the middle of a party. People surround a table of food, and musicians are there, crossed-legged on a carpet, and dancers, and although he’s cordial to Gamzatti, he keeps his distance. It’s tricky because she is the Rajah’s daughter, and his plan is to be honest, get to know the girl and then honestly tell her that he loves someone else, that she’s a beautiful girl and she’ll find someone else to love, someone better, but when he and Gamzatti, who is officially his fiancée, sit together on the patterned carpet, although he says these things she doesn’t really hear them. His love, he says, has already been given. But don’t you like me? And telling her he likes her, even as a friend, is a mistake. She wants to dance, and when she pulls him off the rug and they begin to dance he wants to be sure she understands. You do understand? I can’t love you because … but she doesn’t care. If anything, his lack of interest makes her more determined to spark that interest, and the music she has the musicians play is not quite a striptease song but like Albrecht in Giselle, who couldn’t not dance with the Wilis, Solor feels compelled. Very rarely in ballet will a person be asked to dance and not dance, and when she places his hand on her waist, then moves it up to the side of her chest, he can’t not feel the heat of her body, his fingers between the undulations of her rib cage, and possibly because he doesn’t want to react, when he smells the perfume she’s wearing, he does react. He senses how she wants to be held and he pulls her hip against his hip, not thinking about Nikiya until after the dance is over. But by then he’s already made his impression. He mingles with the party guests, and although she keeps flirting with him, and she is beautiful, he leaves the party before anything happens.

  I was at a party in college. It was a house party outside Santa Cruz, in an old farmhouse with a local band and at one point, with the singer still on break, the band started playing, not warming up but actually starting into a song. I could hear the progression of notes leading up to a moment when someone would start singing, but because the singer wasn’t there, and because I seemed to be the only person aware of this, and hearing
what sounded like a standard blues progression, I thought maybe I should step up, that I should follow my impulse, take the micro phone, lean into the silver mesh that covered the microphone, and I was smart enough, I thought, to make up a blues song lyric. So I did. I stepped up to a space in front of the drummer, head down, listening for the music to indicate my cue, waiting for the moment when the introduction ended and my voice, together with the two guitars, would begin the song, and while I was waiting for that moment to happen the music changed and the song began without me. The singer returned, took the mic off its stand, and the moment was over. And it wasn’t that I was going to become a rock star, but I was about to do something I never normally would have done.

  The club was deserted. Cosmo and Teddy and Sherri had left, and since I was alone I stepped up onto the stage. I walked up to Teddy’s stool, a spotlight shining on the seat of the stool, and when I sat down and looked out, all I could see was the spotlight shining on me. And because it was on me I was thinking that this is when my solo would happen, my soliloquy. And what would that soliloquy be? Or not be? I was facing out into what they call the house, the audience area, and even with my eyes closed I could still see the red lights, green and pulsating, and I heard footsteps upstairs, Rachel’s footsteps in the dressing room. The dressing room was private, and normally I didn’t go upstairs but I climbed the steep stairway, like a ladder, and when I got to the top, to the plywood floor of the dressing room, I would like to say I felt at ease but Rachel was Cosmo’s girlfriend. She was a stripper, and I was aware enough to know that I was attracted to her, and also that what I was attracted to was my idea of who she was, what I saw not just with my eyes but my mind. When I took a seat she started talking to me, about dancing and her practice of dancing, and about her desire to be seen as something other than a desirable object. And although I was trying to do that, it was hard to separate who she was from what she looked like, which was attractive and tall and dark skinned, her shoulders broad, and when she smiled I found myself going back and forth, thinking about her beautiful teeth and then trying to see past that beauty or beyond that beauty or beneath her teeth to what she was. I was sitting in Teddy’s chair, knowing that I didn’t know Rachel, knowing that a human being is full of contradictions and complications but still, looking at her I wanted to see something more than what I usually saw, which was usually me, or the world colored by me. And they’d told us in massage class, let your eyeballs fall into their sockets, and when I did I started to notice the halo over Rachel’s head, the light reflecting off the mirror behind her, illuminating the outline of the back of her head. And I suppose she thought I wasn’t listening because she said my name, a name I hated, although hate is too strong a word, but my name was not who I wanted to be. It was innocuous and normal and safe and I wanted to be another name, a Derek, or Alex, or Lex would’ve been better than the name I was, and her eyes were dark so the whites were very white. Hello? she said, and I said, yes, I’m here. And she was also here, or there, sitting at her table, half turned, and a word can’t put its finger on who she was, the person in front of me, a person I was trying to see without disguises, hers or mine, and when I was able, now and then, to see her as simply another human being, not only did I see her more clearly, I saw everything around her more clearly. Black curtains covering the windows, cigarette butts on the splintering floor. The world outside my awareness expanded, or my awareness itself expanded, and there were my own two hands, one of them on Teddy’s table, next to a jar of white lotion, and could someone look at the mirror in front of me, or could I look, and see someone in there I wanted to be? That was the question. And still is. And when Rachel told me she had to go home I let her walk down the stairs ahead of me, watching her blue jeans and red shirt, and her round head, disappear down the hole in the floor as she stepped down the steep steps and then she disappeared out the back entrance.

  Nikiya, the bayadère, is sitting with Solor, the man she loves, at a sidewalk café. She’s questioning him about this wedding, his wedding, and she can’t quite believe it. How can you marry someone else if you’re in love with me? Nikiya knows about the wedding because she’s been hired to dance at the ceremony and she wants an explanation. Has all his affection been a lie? How can you even think of marrying someone you … She’s rich, is that it? He answers her by standing, taking her hand, pulling her out of her chair, and although she’s reluctant at first, or feigns reluctance, eventually, as if she’s helpless to stop herself, she starts dancing with him, a dance of misunderstanding that gradually, as her distrust starts to fade away, turns into a dance of reconciliation. He spins her around like a top, as if a top had a mind and he’s spinning the thoughts out of its mind, and when she seems to be more receptive he sits her down on his lap and he looks into her eyes, watching her pupils expand. He looks into them and tells her he loves her, and he does, and he doesn’t say only her but Nikiya isn’t thinking anymore about what might come between them. They start touching each other, casually at first, caressing the hairs on each other’s arms, and then shoulders and faces and then kissing each other. And when I worked at the answering service what I was essentially doing was eavesdropping, getting paid to pass on what I’d heard. And the nightclub owner was eavesdropping too. Or voyeuring, if that’s a word. He was sitting inside the café, at a table near the window, watching the two of them, partly aroused and partly jealous. When Solor offers to show Nikiya his house, to have some tea, she knows what that means, and we watch her agree, and then they walk off hand in hand.

  Joseph Cornell would be, according to Haskell’s definition, a balletomane. But his mania extended beyond ballet. There are stories about his domineering mother, about his infatuations with young girls, about his collection of pornographic magazines, and they’re all about the tension between his sexuality and his disavowal of that sexuality. Cornell, apparently, was in his sixties before he actually kissed a girl on her lips, and disavowal isn’t the right word because, although his sexual desires were furtive, having been thwarted his whole life, by the time he was in his sixties they were becoming overt. He began spending less time with his mother and more time discovering a world he’d previously shied away from. He started out with ads in the local newspaper, requesting the services of a girl, sixteen or older, to help him sort papers and clip photos, and many of the girls who worked for him reported feeling, as he gazed at them, an erotic tinge to his gaze. Some thought it creepy, some thought it sweet. By this time he was already a famous artist, reclusive but famous, and he was introduced to girls and scouted for girls, and if all went well he would invite them to his house. In his diary he noted their coming into, and then leaving, his life. But not all his crushes were fleeting. He was beginning to work up the courage to find the need to almost want to have a relationship. One woman, an artist in her twenties, posed for him in the nude, and what was it like, at sixty, seeing a naked version of what he’d only dreamed about? It was all real, the skin of her stomach where it curved around the hip to her buttock, the tiny follicles swelling if she was cold, his covering her with a scarf and maybe not by accident brushing an arm against the swelling of a breast. One story has him at a photo shoot for a magazine, hidden in the back of the dressing room while the girls changed clothes, someone hearing his muffled moans behind the curtains, and was he masturbating? It’s not that hard to reconcile the man who worshipped ballerinas of the past, who idealized the virginal aspect of girls on the street, with a man who wanted to know these girls physically. The intimacy he was looking for was an intimacy with himself, with the part of himself he’d denied but now, as if waking up from a hundred-year sleep, it was making itself more obvious. He met one girl at the Strand, a coffee shop in Manhattan. He’d wandered in, spotted her, a waitress, and by all accounts she wasn’t beautiful, but he imagined in her a purity that was fighting with an impure world and at a certain point, when his interest had grown into something like need, he spoke to her. She was clearing off his teacup and he said something innoc
uous, the tea was delicious, and she could see that he liked her. She was a runaway, attuned to who might mistreat her or treat her well, and Cornell began a series of meetings. He’d go to the coffee shop, watch her work, make notations in the books he was looking at, and she started coming to his table. They talked, not about art because she knew nothing, but about her life, her difficulties and aspirations, and maybe they were fictitious aspirations because she knew that Cornell, if he was as famous as he said, was probably rich. And inspired by her, Cornell made a group of boxes, the Penny Arcade series, with cut-out cherubs, and pennies, and maps of the constellations. He gave her some of the boxes, his garage was filled with them, and she was the one who gave him the kiss he wrote about in his diary. To her, the arrangement was probably simple. He got a little affection and she got something she could exchange for money. And although Cornell must have known she was selling the boxes, his infatuation with her was worth it. He was tired of dreaming about sylphs and imaginary angels, and now this girl was giving him a chance to step out of his dream, into what seemed like life, and the problem was, the girl started stealing his boxes. He was advised to press charges, which he did, and the girl was put in jail, and that would have been the end of it except Cornell, who saw her through the filter of what he wanted to see, still adored her. He paid her bail and, although he didn’t give her any boxes, he forgave her, because he had to, he loved her. He was loyal, to her and his imaginary version of connection with her, and when she died, murdered in a lover’s quarrel, he paid for her burial.