Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  When we arrived, it was dark. But Honeybear had made reservations at a small hotel whose proprietor had waited up for us. With each new night and each new place, life was an adventure for us. An adventure maybe more real than the reality we would experience later.

  We unpacked our bags in the small hotel room. There was one tiny closet, two twin beds which we promptly pushed together, and a small shuttered window through which the wind howled.

  There was no shower in the cold bathroom, but the tub was sufficient. We each took a quick hot bath, because the heated water was scarce, and crawled into the quilt-covered beds. As we began to make love, I found myself relating to him in a maternal frame of mind. Words came to my mouth that expressed how I felt.

  “My honeybear, my baby honeybear,” I heard myself murmuring as I curled my fingers in his hair. “Yes, you are my baby, my baby, aren’t you?”

  Vassy sat up in bed, his face like stone. He took his arms away from me.

  “I am not your son,” he announced, and there was real anger in his voice.

  I sat up too. “My son?” I asked. “Of course you’re not my son. I was just fantasizing because I felt so maternal with you and I wanted to express myself and maybe make love with that expression. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Sometimes you are a radio in bed,” he said. “You talk too much.”

  I stared at him, stunned. His hostility was so total, so sudden, I couldn’t take it in.

  “A radio in bed?” I repeated.

  “Of course,” he answered.

  Oh my God, I thought, now feeling crushed with humiliation. Obviously I had said or done something that threatened him in a deep-seated way. My hand flew to my throat, where I wore the religious medal, blessed by the Russian archbishop, that had belonged to his mother.

  “Vassy, wait a minute,” I said. “What’s upsetting you so much? What is wrong with some maternal fantasy in bed? It’s not real incest, you know.”

  His eyes blazed. He got up and walked around the room.

  “Such a thing is not necessary to you, is it?” he demanded.

  “No,” I answered confusedly. “Not necessary. Of course not. It just occurred to me, that’s all. I was just feeling that way, so that’s what came out of my mouth.”

  He sat down on the bed. “You talk too much. Talk not necessary.”

  He was hurting me deeply. I felt completely humiliated. The trust implicit in my free expression of fantasy had been thrown in my teeth.

  “But all the games are play, Vassy. They’re not necessary or real either. You love to do that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he answered, “because you love it.”

  The roller coaster started.

  “Because I love it? What do you mean? You love those games, too, and you know it.”

  “I play them because you love them.”

  I began to cry. He had shattered our playful, fragile fantasies, apparently without a thought and clearly without caring at all.

  “You are really mean,” I heard myself say, tears choking my throat. “You are mean and uncaring and insensitive in hurting the feelings of others. How could you be so mean?”

  I was crying hard now.

  Vassy blanched slightly but I could see him decide to refuse to give any emotional ground.

  “I am not mean,” he answered finally. “You are being influenced by evil.”

  “Evil?” I choked on the word. It was from so farout in left field that it stopped my crying. “What the hell has evil got to do with this?”

  “That was evil thought you spoke of in bed. I cannot go along with that.”

  “Well, fuck you,” I shouted. “Who gives a fuck? I’m glad I’m not your goddamned mother. She’s really raised some cruel character in you, hasn’t she?”

  His eyes flashed. I thought I saw a hint of violence as he raised his hand to his hair and pulled his fingers through it.

  “You are the evil one,” I yelled and cried at the same time. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was only pretending. Why are you doing this?”

  He sat down on the side of the bed, flushed with anger. Then, very quietly, he said, “Stop it, Sheerlee. You are feeling satanic forces. They are evil.”

  I couldn’t seem to break through to him, and the frustration triggered something in me that was primitive and fundamental.

  “Vassy!!” I shouted. “There is no such thing as evil. Evil is fear and uncertainty. Evil is what you think it is. Listen to me, goddammit!”

  He leaned over me and with gentle strength held me by my shoulders.

  “Sheerlee, stop it,” he said strongly. “Stop the evil.”

  My brain tumbled over in confusion. What was he talking about? I had simply wanted to fantasize about being his mother while making love and to him this was some kind of fundamental evil? I cried and cried.

  Vassy put his arms around me. I didn’t resist. I wasn’t angry at him anymore, or even insulted. This business of “evil” and “satan” was a ridiculous concept to me. I couldn’t really understand why such images would be evoked by my simple fantasy, but what he had done was thoroughly snocking and sad to me.

  Something snapped shut in my head. I remembered the intuition I had had that he might be restrictively, conventionally Christian. Could that be the nerve I had just struck? Had I triggered some unconscious incestual fantasy that had actually attracted me to him in the first place? Was that what had been going on with him for twelve years? Or was Vassy, the boy-man, more involved with “Mummy” than he knew, to the point where the actual verbalization of such a fantasy was totally unacceptable to him?

  Then, as I was sorting out my tumbled confusion, I had another flash. If we really had had a past-life experience together, could it have been as mother and son? That thought, I knew, I shouldn’t raise with him.

  I stopped crying. “I’m sorry I said what I did about your mother,” I apologized.

  Vassy said nothing. He neither acknowledged my apology nor rejected it. He just crawled back into bed. He turned out the light. In the quiet darkness, punctuated only by my residual sniffles, he said, “Nif-Nif, there is evil in the world. I don’t like to see it touch you.”

  My mind went white-blank. There was nothing more for me to say. How could one argue good and evil where sexual fantasies that hurt no one were concerned? But I think I began to understand a little bit more about Vassy’s relationship to his own sexuality. And it was disturbing to me that his personal hang-ups could succeed in getting me so upset.

  When, oh when, I thought, will I ever learn to be mature enough not to allow the problems of others to become an even bigger problem for me? I rolled over toward Vassy and fell into an exhausted sleep. I wasn’t sure what had really happened. But one thing was certain. I would no longer be a “radio” in bed.

  Chapter 10

  I suppose when one is in the throes of a newly developing relationship, it is necessary to overlook accumulating obstacles, putting them on the back burner of the mind, until they can be examined in the clear, objective light of a later day. That, I believe, is what Vassy and I did. Or maybe he never felt those obstacles were necessarily serious. I couldn’t have either, not then, because after our “evil-incest” night, the subject never came up again. Why would it though? We had so many other areas to explore in one another.

  Vassy loved his wild island. He led me along the jagged cliffs overlooking the churning waters beneath. He took his camera everywhere. And I took my Polaroid. He instructed me in light exposures, framing, and attitudes to assume in front of the camera. He was alternately delighted and harsh depending on the moods that seemed to surge through him.

  Vassy jogged every morning. He seemed to need the insistent pain of runner’s strain in order to feel the reward of the rest of the day. Sometimes when he jogged, I would run with him so we could discuss whatever was interesting us at the moment. I would go as far as I could, then stop and walk fast, whereupon Vassy would jog in circles around me so we could continue
talking. For a while there I thought maybe he was training for some secret Olympics. But no, he really needed some kind of basic regimen to allow himself the reckless wonder of what he was feeling.

  We walked and ran and talked through island fields of wheat, barley, and flowers. He even jogged in the muddy rain one morning.

  Vassy was more and more certain that Doctor’s Wife would make a good film. I loved to watch him contemplate aloud the visual images he wished to achieve. His eyes were double cameras. They registered multidimensional images in one flash. And he never forgot a face. He never missed much of anything that went on around him. But he didn’t really perceive the subtleties and emotional depth in people around him unless it was a feeling he himself could identify with. Either that, or he couldn’t afford to heap more emotional entrées on his plate than were already there.

  Eventually Vassy and I returned to Paris and our small cell. He arranged for me to see more of his films. He tried to translate the French subtitles and give me a quick rundown on the Russian nuances, but I found myself becoming more and more frustrated because I was realizing that a great deal of his artistic motivation had to do with rather complex intellectual symbolism. He wrote and directed his pictures, and, given the Soviet restrictions, most of them made a deep spiritual point. I couldn’t decipher the difference, though, between what he regarded as spiritual and what he regarded as religious. I wondered if he saw any significant difference.

  As Vassy ran his films for me one after the other, I was struck by the purity of his romanticism. The relationships that he painted on the screen were storybook, yet etched with a tragedy that smacked of the old classics. The heroines were childishly playful and wistfully patient as they accepted the fate of adverse circumstances. The heroes were buffeted by events while gamely attempting to contribute to the personalization of their own lives. Vassy seemed to be allergic to happy endings—as though each of his artful depictions of life was to remind the observer that destiny is cruel.

  I didn’t really analyze his work in such a way as it unfolded before me, but I was conscious of two things. One, he had been deeply influenced by classic tragedies, and two, he seemed compelled to express a belief that, in the end, life was so romantically tragic that smiling through tears was not only attractively appealing to the audience, but because of that appeal, a positive workable solution to any given problem was not only not inspiring but could never be achieved. I wondered if Vassy’s “Russian” soul, which showed so clearly in his work, would be transmuted to his life. It bothered me, but I brushed it away from my mind because there was so much more to enjoy.

  Easter came on a sparkling Sunday morning in Paris, and for me it was a Russian Easter. Vassy took me to a Russian Orthodox church where we stood, mingling and respectful, with hundreds of others as they lit candles and said silent prayers to the altar of Mary and Jesus.

  As I stood in the midst of the reverent Russian throng, I saw eyes glance at me, then up at Vassy. What were they thinking to themselves? Some of them nodded to him, some smiled, some looked totally blank.

  Periodically Vassy would lean down and whisper in my ear that so-and-so was a famous gypsy singer or someone else the ringleader of the dissident writers in Paris. There were old women who were friends of his mother’s, and colleagues with whom he had developed screenplays which, not surprisingly, had never been made. It seemed that the entire Russian community in Paris had come to the Easter service, which was somehow not really a service but more of a religious observance.

  A boys’ choir sang continuously, accompanied by an organ. No one sat. There were no pews. We stood and milled and stood and milled, each of us holding a candle and directing our attention to a gigantic altar dripping with lit and quivering candles. There seemed to be no organization or planned program. Instead, individuals participated in prayerful reverence as they saw fit.

  I watched, fascinated by the uncontrolled yet peacefully milling throng. I remembered that Vassy had said the Russian people needed order, otherwise there would be chaos. Was this not true in a church? Was this the one place where all recognized the higher authority as God?

  The ceremony continued. Vassy took my hand. Very tenderly he held it, gently entwining his fingers through mine. The choir and organ music reached a crescendo. I looked up at him. His moist eyes closed as though he were making a deep promise to himself. Somehow, that promise included me in the presence of what he called God. His eyes remained closed for a long while. When they opened, he leaned to my ear and said, “I have never taken a woman to church before.”

  After a while, Vassy guided us out. His smile dazzling, he spoke in Russian to those who came to pay subtle homage to him on the steps of the church. He introduced me casually, as though the world should already know we were together. He stood tall with his hands in his pockets as he enjoyed the attention, until finally he said, “Now we nave Russian meal in place near here.”

  When we entered the small restaurant, a blast of emotional Russian voices flooded my ears … just casual conversation over piroshkis, caviar, and vodka. The smell of pickles hung pungently in the air. Waiters shouted in French and Russian across tables packed with people and laughing children.

  Vassy asked for a table for two. The waiter shouted something in Russian which obviously meant, “Can’t you see there are no tables?” The waiter then recognized me and with a great flurry escorted us to a quickly evacuated table while Vassy straightened his shoulders into a preen again.

  We sat down. Vassy surveyed the position of the table. Satisfied, he ordered half the menu. Immediately we were served iced vodka as the chef came out to pay his respects to me. Three waiters produced menus for me to autograph, which I cheerfully proceeded to do, asking Vassy how to write certain words in Russian. When I looked up into his face, his smile seemed a little forced. He became quiet while the flurry of activity continued and food arrived.

  “You like Russian Easter?” said Vassy finally, stuffing his face as usual, which seemed always to be a cure for his woes.

  “Yes, my honeybear,” I answered. “It was beautiful. I was marveling at how everybody seemed to know what to do in that church, how to obey, a kind of respectful order with each other.”

  “It is real democracy,” he said with a certitude that he wanted me to be sure not to miss.

  “And were there many dissidents there? All those writers and people, are they dissidents or defectors or what?”

  “They are friends and they spend their lives discussing what to do about everything. No Russian wants to be defector or dissident. Sometimes they are forced.”

  I sipped on my vodka while he chugalugged his.

  “And you? Will you be a defector one day?”

  “Myself? Never!” he said spiritedly. “It would be stupid thing for them to force me to defect. But I don’t believe that would happen. I try my best to stay as I am. I will work in West and prove that Soviet can be recognized everywhere in world. You will see.”

  “Yes, Honeybear,” I said, feeling my heart turn over at the impossible task Vassy had set for himself. Did he realize how hard-nosed and competitive movie making was in the West, whether it was Europe or America? Was he as hard-nosed and competitive himself?

  That he was a brilliant filmmaker, there was no doubt. But there were brilliant Western filmmakers who couldn’t get work, much less an unknown Russian. I admired his undaunted courage even though I was very well aware of his probably unbridled ambition.

  I suppose it was sometime during that Easter day that I felt myself decide to support the idea of working and living with Vassy in California. I liked the challenge of helping a Russian who I knew was a fine artist and with whom I also enjoyed loving and learning. As with most of my life, it was to be another adventure, and more—there was still the matter of our previous lives to explore.

  So, sometime after the gargantuan meal had been consumed, I said, “Well, Honeybear, I’ll be leaving to return to California in a few days. Why don’t you come w
ith me and stay in Malibu for a while? Maybe we can get something going with Doctor’s Wife and we could work together.”

  He straightened up in his chair. “You are proposing that I live in your place in Malibu?”

  “Why not?” I said. “See how you like it. You like the ocean?”

  His sun-lit smile flooded his face. “Nif-Nif,” he said, “you are my sunshine. You are crazy. I am crazy. The world is crazy. I returned to Paris to live and find work here. Now I will return to States and find work there. I will fulfill my dream, God’s willing, with your help. You will see.”

  The thing about Vassy was he told you exactly what he was doing, ambition and all. I began to wonder then what the difference was between hard ambition and glorified, intense dreaming. Weren’t all of us propelled and motivated by visions and desires that best fulfilled avenues for our own self-expression? If he was using me, so what? Didn’t each of us use the people in our lives to insure, through friendship, our own personal growth?

  Vassy proceeded to get very drunk, drunker by far than the first night we had had dinner. I poured him into the front seat of his Mercedes and, through the complicated Parisian streets, somehow navigated us back to the cell. The Easter rabbits were waiting up for us, and I fell asleep wondering if the spiritual dimension we shared was the glue that actually held us together despite our obviously glaring differences.

  Vassy woke with liver trouble, a bad headache, congested lungs, and a fierce determination to jog in the gardens despite it all. If the Russian army was built of men like him, it would be better to settle SALT II.

  I jogged with him while he gave me a rundown of the paperwork involved in arranging for his U.S. visa and settling his affairs in Paris. He would have to see his lawyer and he wanted us to visit his Yugoslav friend Milanka, who had traced him to my house in Malibu the day after I met him.