by Colum McCann
After the celebrations I excused myself below deck. The boy was at the end of the corridor, waiting, wearing only a T-shirt, cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve.
Check with Saul: Why pay taxes when my country is a suitcase?
At the interval at Porte-Saint-Martin, for Hair, she leaned across and asked quite casually if I’d heard what had happened to Gilbert.
He had used a pair of my old socks to stuff the exhaust and left the car running. His wife found him in the garage, Mozart at full blast, an empty bottle of sleeping pills at his side.
Jacques suggested he would much prefer a communist hell to a capitalist one—the communists would inevitably have a fuel shortage!
Later in the evening he came up with the idea of a ballet about the Berlin Wall. The wall was, he claims, built in a day (is this true?). A Russian mason who fell into the mortar was not pulled out and so his bones still shore up the wall.
He said the Russian mason’s lover (call her Katerina) will move along the wall, feeling from brick to brick, trying to recapture the spirit of her dead sweetheart. Against her better instincts, she will fall in love with an American soldier on the other side of the wall. But to cross to the soldier she will have to break through the remains of her Russian lover’s body. (To dance a wall and the terror on both sides.) In the end the young American will cross to her and will be shot dead while straddling the brickwork.
(No dying fall.)
A monstrous idea, but we were drunk.
There are rumors that Sasha has discovered a young genius in Leningrad. Erik said my face went pale. (What bullshit.) Anyway, if this genius ever comes west he will just fire me to even greater things.
Before Margot dies, she says she will ask for one perfect performance to repeat itself in her imagination, one perfect performance, one so astounding and beautiful that she can relive every step of it in her head.
She did not say which one it would be, maybe she has not even danced it yet. So far, she said, she could possibly choose from eight to ten.
For me, at least one would be at the Kirov. My legs still feel for the floor’s rake. In a dream I was barefoot in the resin box.
* * *
She is sitting in a darkened hotel room when a young girl enters, smiles and opens the curtains. Good afternoon, says the girl, your appointments are here. She places a bowl of cut flowers on the table and Margot waits for the procession to begin.
Out the window is another city, all sky and light and glass, although Margot can’t quite remember which city it is. Her ankle has recovered, although she wears it bandaged. Earlier, on the telephone, she talked to Tito, who said yet again that it was time for her to retire, it has been three and a half decades, she should have quiet now, come back to the ranch in Panama.
Tito, the runaround. Tito, the flirt. Tito, the man she adores, wheeled around their house these days, reduced to eye movements and hand waves.
She recalls standing at the foot of the stairs a week ago when he told her he still loved her. When she said the same thing in reply his face seemed to shed layers, and they played catch-up on their lives. In bed Margot positioned him so that he snuggled against her neck. She hadn’t been able to sleep and so she rose, stood for a while by the door listening to his raspy breath and found herself moved by the shape of his body. When she told Rudi about watching Tito sleep he understood, he was able to fathom how hushed and vulnerable she could become—it is at times like these, when Rudi is good to her, that he protects her and they dance well together.
The room begins to fill with promoters, publicists, a journalist. Sporadic conversation, elegant and well-meaning. But after an hour Margot declares she is tired—most of the morning was spent at class with Rudi—and when the room eventually empties, she pulls back the covers on the bed to take a nap. Her dreams are merciless and Tito-peppered, visions of pushing a wheelchair through a river but the current is too strong and the chair is fixed in one place.
A foghorn wakens her and she remembers now: Vancouver, late summer.
It is then, from the neighboring room, that she hears the sound of Rudi and another making love, the noises alarming, fierce, intimate. She is knocked off balance, they never normally share adjoining rooms, one of their rules, and so she turns the television loud.
Vietnam at first. Then a cartoon. She presses buttons, finds a soap opera—a woman strides lightly across a floor to slap another woman’s face.
There is a pause in the program and she hears a moan from next door, then the jingle of commercials. In the bathroom she runs hot water and adds herbal powders. Margot has worked her body hard in recent weeks, beyond previous extremes. The violence tells in her everyday gestures, the way she checks the time on her wrist or brings a fork to her mouth. She is aware of how extraordinary it is, what the body does to the mind, and what the mind does to the body, one convincing the other it is in control.
Some days she recognizes the private graveyard of her body, the callused toes, the headaches from pulling her hair back all these years, the mangle of her knees, yet had she known as a young woman how her life would be she wouldn’t have cared, she would have danced it anyway.
She slips into the bath, lays her head against the rear of the tub. The sounds from next door take on a new form, muffled yet amplified, more intense for their lack of clarity. She puts two pieces of cotton wool in her ears so the voices disappear. Years ago, with Tito, he would always open the windows when making love.
Later she wakes, someone shouting her name from behind the doorframe, Margot, Margot, Margot! She opens her eyes, sits up in the bath, and the water breaks in waves around her. She smells cigarette smoke, knows immediately who it is.
She takes the cotton balls from her ears and says: I was just back in my good years, Erik. I was dreaming.
But it is Rudi, not Erik, who steps forward with a bathrobe, holds it open. She rises from the bath as he places the robe around her shoulders and kisses her forehead. Behind Rudi stands Erik, smoking. She feels a flush of warmth, these two beautiful men spoiling her.
We phoned, says Erik, pulling hard on the cigarette, but nobody answered. Rudi was afraid you were drowning.
* * *
The clerk took one look, threw his arms wide and said he had a pair of red drainpipes that would suit me to perfection.
The disco lights spun. We took a booth, ordered a magnum of champagne, and how we laughed! Lara was funniest of all. She is aware of Erik but still she said my lips were sensuous to the point of irresponsibility! I told her I would marry her. Her joke about the French nurse: Roll over, Monsieur, I have to jab you. And then, when the others were dancing, she leaned across with her long hair in my lap and she tickled my balls in full view of everyone!
Her grandfather was from Moscow but emigrated before the Revolution, made his fortune, she said, selling paper clips. (This crazy country.) She now owns four houses and, bizarrely, six swimming pools. She whispered that she enjoyed nude bathing, as if I couldn’t have guessed. She was so drunk she said she had an idea for a nude ballet—Orpheus Descends (!)—curtain comes up, gentle cellos, soft moonlight, and then swinging penises everywhere. I told her I would dance it except I didn’t want to bruise my thighs. When I explained the joke (silly girl) she spilled her drink down the front of her dress.
She said being alive is the bread, yes, but sex is the yeast.
RosaMaria appeared at the door. I recognized her instantly. Red satin dress, white rose in her hair. Erik nudged my elbow as she ran across the room to me, arms open. I twirled her in the air and her foot briefly caught on a tablecloth, but she extricated it with perfect grace while still spinning, then kissed me.
Everyone watched, especially Erik, as we went out onto the veranda. The night warm with cicadas. Tell me everything, I said. But she wanted to talk about me, the success, the years gone by. I beseeched her and, after much cajoling, she told me that when she had returned to Chile in ’59 she had married a young journalist, a Communist, who had ascended
in politics until he was killed in a car accident. She had moved to Mexico City and that was it. She danced for six years until her ankles gave in. She said she would like to dance with me just one more time, and yet she was clever enough to know that it would be nothing more than sympathy on my part.
Erik came out holding three champagne glasses and we toasted. In the end RosaMaria was cornered by a handsome Mexican writer with gray hair who wrapped her up in his eyes. We bid good night and she wiped away a tear.
His raspy baritone, his tough face, the hair over his eyes. He woke and his name escaped me, though I remembered him saying he was amazed any man could live that hard. The whole day had been spent fucking, rehearsing, fucking, performing and then fucking again (once during intermission).
He got out of bed, jubilant, made me tea, five lumps of sugar, and prepared a scalding bath in a claw-footed tub with gleaming brass fixtures. He sat on the edge and sprinkled fragrant salts. Precision. I left immediately afterwards, still couldn’t remember his name.
Erik had left a message at the hotel front desk. You shit, in very shaky handwriting.
Do you regret anything, Monsieur Nureyev?
When everything is said and done I would not swap anything I have either said or done. If you look back you’ll only fall down the stairs.
That is very philosophical.
I can read.
On Fifth Avenue all the heads in the crowd turned like a field of sunflowers. Warhol shouted Goddamn! and hailed a car. He said that it was a gypsy cab and that the price was outrageous. He refused to tip. When we stopped, the driver spat out the window, almost hitting Warhol’s shoes. Andy is a pompous ass, although he said he will sketch me some day.
In his office there was a consignment of cakes from The Erotic Bakery. He handed me a doughnut and then tried to take a Polaroid. I had to rip it from his hands. He would probably sell it for thousands. He ran all around the office trying to evade me, screaming wildly in his bright green trousers.
He ended up in a back room where there were two sets of giant black-and-white dice on the ground. There were words written on each of the six sides. The first said: You Me They We Us Joker. The second said: Fuck Suck Kiss Finger Handjob Joker. The object is to roll the dice and come up with matching words. We Finger. You Suck. They Kiss. With the Joker one does whatever one wants. Warhol calls it human poker. He said the permutations are endless but that at least eight people are needed to play or it can be boring.
I said he should choreograph the game. He screamed: That’s it, that’s it! and scribbled something in his notebook. The asshole will probably put it in a movie (without a credit).
When I slapped her the sound rang through the gallery and out onto Fifth Avenue. She was, after all, pestering me for an autograph and I was trying to look at the painting. The owner came over but I refused to budge. My hand stung for a whole five minutes. In truth I wanted so much to apologize but couldn’t.
Gillian said I should get the totem pole out of my ass, that it was time for me to grow up. I fired her and she said: Yet again? She began painting her toenails bright red.
Thankfully the slapped girl was an aspiring ballerina and doesn’t want to press charges for the sake of her career, but Gillian is adamant that we do damage control in case it gets into the papers.
The suggested design:
Jumping through the lips I needed six stagehands to break my fall. The Post said it was the most astounding exit ever seen in ballet. (Bullshit, of course.) The photograph was taken by some moron who caught me, back bent, out of line. Still, it sent the audience into raptures and they roared. (Polanski, Tate, Hepburn, Hendrix were there.)
The reviews were good, except for Clint, who called it all a diseased contrivance. (Asshole.)
A story appeared in the gossip pages, with a photo of me and Hendrix. Rudi and Jimi pirouette. His fingernails were blackened (perhaps with old blood) from playing guitar so hard. At the club he disappeared in a cloud of marijuana smoke but showed up later on the dance floor. I was surrounded by a dozen gyrating women. A tall black boy joined us, leather shirt and motorcycle boots. We removed ourselves to the courtyard and the party began.
The birthday celebration took place only to be forgotten. Thirty-one years old. Margot bought a beautiful crystal goblet and Erik gave me a Gucci watch. All I wanted was to walk along the beach. The stars over St. Bart’s seemed almost as bright as those over Ufa when I went ice fishing, centuries ago.
Leopard skin boots! To the thighs! A là Twiggy! Backstage I was told they were deliciously wicked. At Le Bar I couldn’t move for the gauntlet of erections. I spied one boy, he seemed two different people in one, a Janus, so that from the right he was beautiful but from the left he had a hideous scar. In the morning the boy kept trying to show me the good side of his face, which bored me, so I kicked him out.
Mother said that the snow over Ufa had deadened all other sound. Tamara says she wants to understand me, my life, but she is so foolish, how can she understand me? Nobody does.
Erik complains that I talk more and more shit each day. As if he doesn’t. He says I should just do the one thing I know—that is, operate in my sacred space, onstage.
He detests my idea that dance makes the world a better place. It is sentimental, he says. I want to make a statement about beauty, but Erik (who spends his time watching the news from Vietnam and Cambodia) says that dance changes nothing for the monk who sets himself aflame and the photographer who watches through the lens.
Would you set yourself aflame for something you believe in? he said.
I asked if he would keep his finger on the shutter if I was burning. He would not answer at first but then he finally said: Of course not.
We fought until the alarm clock rang. I told him I had set myself aflame a long time ago, did he not realize this? He sighed and turned his back and said that he was sick and tired of it all, that he simply wanted a cottage by the sea in Denmark where he could sit and smoke and play the piano. I slammed the door and told him to go fuck himself.
He yelled after me: Yes, that might be preferable.
I said he certainly wouldn’t get an encore.
The ice packs were not frozen and the Epsom salts had disappeared. I wanted to throw the small fridge out the window. The only deterrent was a crowd of cheering fans below.
Margot keeps threatening retirement. She is well aware of Bettina’s power, for example, Joyce’s also, even Alessandra’s, perhaps even Eleanor’s. Yet every partner brings me inevitably back to Margot, her magnetism. On the phone she said she is torn. On the one hand, she says Tito needs her. On the other, she needs the money. (And she is afraid she will wither.)
Erik is correct although I screamed at him and hurled the flowerpot, just missing his head. I probably have, yes, been dancing terribly. Fuck!
The new masseur might well release me, however. He has suggested there are trigger points in the body where he can remove the tension. He manipulates it to other parts of the body where it dissipates. (Certainly on the beach I finally felt relaxed after six countries in just fourteen days.) Emilio has the strongest hands I have ever known.
I have grown to hate the standing ovations in restaurants, how infantile.
Victor is crazed and vulgar and lovely, a walking disaster (silk gown and ostrich feathers) and yet nobody makes me laugh more. The theme of the party he organized was Nureyev. He said the hairstylists all over New York were packed solid, that even Diana Ross had to bribe to get her hair done. (Later she told me that I was divine as myself.)
Quentin Crisp whispered drunkenly in my ear: I am much too much every man’s man to be the only man of any man. (I’m sure he stole the line from somewhere.)
I told her that if she continued her career she would, at the very least, get to kiss the toad. She could be heard weeping outside the rehearsal and someone ran to get her a cigarette. Gillian said a cigarette will stop anyone crying. A thought: packages should be unceremoniously shoved into any available hole
presented by hysterical women, dancers, lovers, accountants, stagehands, customs officers, etc.
The performance was full of error. Terrible. The movement is pure shit. He couldn’t choreograph a Latin orgy. For the entrance I should blaze onstage as if it is the absolute beginning of the world. Open the body’s windows and build the mystery from there.
Broadway, front row. The show was shit but Erik said we couldn’t leave, people would gossip. I pretended to have a toothache and left, but returned for the party later. The lead actor asked if my teeth were okay so I bit his arm and said yes, they seemed to have recovered.
He went around all night with a bandage on his arm and his sleeve rolled up.
Gillian asked me how can I dance after fucking, and I could only reply that I could not dance without fucking. (One only wishes the intermissions were longer!)
Patrick uses the needle between his toes so nobody can see the marks. Before he goes onstage he cuts his finger and sprinkles salt into the cut (excruciating agony) to wake himself from his stupor.
In the bar on the corner of Castro I suspended myself from the balcony while the boy unzipped me and performed his quiet miracle. He was the same height as Erik and blond also. I almost pulled a shoulder muscle, hanging from the balcony so long. I suggested we return to the hotel for a friendly nap.
The Canova statue: $47,000. (Mrs. Godstalk!)
Warhol says the run-up to my thirty-second birthday will be like the final days of the Roman empire. He has ordered a red vinyl jockstrap for the occasion, which he may well wear outside his trousers. I couldn’t help thinking that he will fade away into obscurity. His fashionability is waning. (Being around him is like inhaling one of those ridiculous poppers.)
At the post-party party the nude ice sculptures began to melt. There was a cake baked in the shape of an ass—marzipan dimples and creative icing. I blew out the thirty-three candles (one for luck) but then Truman Capote jumped up on the table in his frock coat, flung off his white hat, and planted his face into the cake, came up miming a pubic hair between his teeth.