Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  Kevin came over several times during the next few weeks and we continued to have more sessions. Sometimes Vassy was busy with outside meetings and would come home in the midst of a session I was either having alone or with other friends who were interested. We usually used a room which was out of the flow of traffic in the front of the house, and which was quiet. Vassy joined us when he had time, but sometimes he gave me the impression that he actually wanted me to feel that he was interfering. He would poke his head in the door to find out what was going on, then leave without coming in. I wanted him to participate and learn with the rest of us. I was too much involved then to realize that Vassy actually felt his relationship with me was threatened by the relationship I was having with the spiritual entities in my life. Meanwhile I didn’t know now to handle his behavior without provoking an argument—which I feared would be explosive.

  One evening Vassy came home while my friends and I were talking with Tom and John. I didn’t know he was back. The session continued until our guides said we were tiring Kevin’s body and should stop.

  Very casually we broke up our spiritual teaching session and I went into the kitchen. Vassy was cutting up beets and apples, making one of his blender specialties and cooking one of his superb soups on the stove. He had long since taken over the cooking because he was better at it than I—not only in his opinion but also in mine.

  “Hi, Honeybear,” I said, surprised. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “I am here,” he answered gruffly. “There is no dinner,” he went on. “I am preparing.”

  “Oh, great,” I said. “Just let me say good-bye to everyone.”

  I ushered everyone out, not wanting to burden Vassy with dinner for five. When I returned to the kitchen, he was staring into the vegetables with a face of stone. He didn’t look up. He stirred his soup grimly. I was confused.

  “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” I asked.

  “Don’t come near the stove, please,” he said as he fried some onions in olive oil and spices. It smelled delicious.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You shouldn’t act ignorant of what is wrong,” he said.

  I was really confused now. If I am confused enough, I usually get angry.

  “What do you mean?” I said with a shrill sharpness in my voice that hurt even my ears.

  “You are too busy with your spiritual guides. You have not prepared my dinner.”

  Astonishment vied with the anger flooding through me.

  “Prepared your dinner?” I said. “You must be kidding. We usually cook dinner together. I didn’t even know you were home.”

  “Yes, you knew it,” he insisted.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s a bunch of shit. You didn’t come in and let me know. How could I possibly tell you were home? What’s more, you know damn well you always do the cooking. Why are you saying all this?”

  “I aim saying nothing,” he said. “You are doing something.”

  That did it. I fell into an immediate and plummeting depression. His certainty was so outrageous that I actually found myself racking my brain for what I could possibly have done wrong. I was so confused by the unreasonableness of his hostility that my only recourse was rage. I wanted desperately to hang on to my own identity, to at least try to be reasonably adult, but I could feel myself losing control.

  “You are a real shit,” I screamed. “You are overbearing and totally self-centered and I don’t know what the fuck you expect from me!”

  “That is because you are not sensitive,” he said calmly.

  I slammed the soup spoon onto the kitchen floor, shocked at the violence he brought out in me. I ran from the kitchen into the bedroom. Vassy followed.

  “You drive me crazy,” I yelled. “I never know when you will go into one of those elitist expectations of yours and it always throws me off balance.”

  “You are elitist,” he said, his voice rising now. “You care only for what you are learning. You care nothing for what you promise me.”

  “What did I promise you?” I yelled.

  “You would have dinner waiting for me.”

  “Now that, by God, is a flat lie!”

  What he had just said was so totally alien to our habits and custom that I was doubly outraged. I wanted to leap from the balcony and run from him. I felt he would drive me completely crazy if I couldn’t somehow comprehend not only what was happening between us but specifically to me. He always seemed so certain of his point of view, without even a hint of acknowledging anyone else’s right to differ. I couldn’t deal with it. It didn’t matter to him that I might be confused, enraged, or just flatly opposed to his evaluation of the circumstances we were each responsible for.

  So I blew. I ran to the balcony and climbed onto the railing, feeling that I had to get away from him, but that I also wanted him to stop me…I wanted to force him to somehow equally engage himself in the responsibility for the turmoil that was occurring. I couldn’t seem to get him to a point of even exchange with me by talk or discussion. I felt I had to resort to dramatics. Yet, at the same time, I really was feeling desperate. Vassy rushed after me.

  “What you are doing, Nif-Nif!!” he screamed. He took my arm and wrenched me away from the balcony. I tore away from him and lurched to the other side.

  “You drive me nuts!!” I screamed back at him, aware that it had only taken a few moments for such an explosion to occur. “I don’t know how you come to the conclusions you reach that I am insensitive and unattentive!! You are so demanding without ever letting me know what it is you want. And I hate what you turn me into. I hate it when I’m like this! I just simply hate it!”

  Vassy seemed genuinely stunned, as though the possibility of my exploding had never occurred to him. His eyes had a bewildered look. “What you are doing?” he pleaded.

  “What do you mean, what am I doing?” I yelled. “Isn’t it obvious? You drive me bananas! I’m telling you I will run! I will leave. I can’t stand this stuff, and I’m afraid I will really leave you if you keep doing this, whether you do it by design or not.”

  “You will leave me?” he said as though that hadn’t occurred to him either.

  “Yes. Yes. Yes!” I said. “Because I can’t stand this tower of rage that you seem capable of turning me into.”

  “Nif-Nif,” he cajoled, “it is satanic forces again. Please recognize. It is not you.”

  I sat down abruptly, in tears. I was shaking, trying to get some measure of control. “It is not satanic forces, you stupid shit. This is me, Vassy. This is me allowing myself to become this. And you provoke it. But what I can’t take is that we somehow never talk about it. I’m not able to control it when you do this to me because we can’t talk. We cannot seem to ever come to terms. This Satan shit has nothing to do with it!”

  “Pray,” said Vassy. “Pray to God and you will release yourself.”

  Oh my, oh my, oh my, I thought. What have I got here? He was probably right that I should pray—but not to exorcise the Devil. I should pray to the best I could muster up in myself.

  I stood up and wiped my cheeks.

  “My Nif-Nif,” he chided gently.

  I looked up into his face. He was confused.

  “Vassy,” I said haltingly, “don’t you understand that we are two human beings involved with trying to work out a relationship here? The Devil doesn’t have anything to do with it. Please, take some responsibility for your role in it. Don’t blame it on satanic forces.”

  He sat down on a canvas chair. “My role and your role is to approach God and overcome negative forces when they seize us.”

  “But Vassy,” I tried again, “we are responsible for our actions. We are supposed to be mature adults who are aware of what we do to ourselves and each other. I believe that I am as spiritually evolved as you, but I can’t go around saying God and the Devil are having open conflict within my being. I live in there too.” I pounded my chest, visualizing that my real self was somehow within my solar plex
us.

  “No,” announced Vassy. “And how can you allow this satanic violence to overtake you? Is not good.”

  “You bet your ass is not good.” I heard the weariness in my voice. “That’s what I mean. If I was negotiating at SALT II, I think I’d throw in the towel.”

  “Towel?” asked Vassy.

  “Never mind. I’m gonna take a shower.”

  Vassy went to the freezer for vodka. I poured myself a glass of red wine and carried it away. Again, we hadn’t talked. I wondered why Russians drank so much vodka. Was it the system? The system that somehow repressed open discussion? From what I’d read, Russians had been drinking excessively for centuries. Why? Was it the weather? It was just as cold in many places. So was it confusion? Confusion about identity, about God, about reality. What was reality? It was relative. What he was experiencing was his truth, his reality. I couldn’t seem to cope with his demands, but maybe he was having the same problem with me.

  “If I am stubborn,” he had said once, “or how you call ‘obstinate,’ then you must hit me. Hit me hard. Russians need to be hit. We only understand to be hit. We need big fist, I can tell you.”

  I couldn’t hit. I needed to understand. I took a shower and we silently ate dinner and went to bed.

  For days after that I thought about our relationship. Something had shifted. He said he couldn’t respect my sense of equality. I said I couldn’t live without respect and equality. He said there was no such thing as equality in love … only possession, jealousy, passion, and total fidelity. I would argue for the equality of identity. He said in love equality was a fantasy. Democracy did not exist in the state of love, only possession and passion—true, direct, honest passion. And the love would last as long as the passion was there. When respect emerged, there was no longer love, no longer passion. When I accused him of believing in a blueprint for disaster, he said it was man’s destiny to suffer, that to suffer was to know God.

  At last it dawned on me that the differences between us were not really and simply because he was Russian and I American. Sure, we were having trouble with our cultural differences. But it was our versions of evil that really differed—evil in relation to God and man, not evil in relation to sociology or socialism. Russians and Americans couldn’t have been more diametrically opposed in relation to hope and the future. And the Bolshevik Revolution hadn’t that much to do with it. But it was just too easy to say the Russian soul was imprinted with the need to suffer. Nor was it true that the American soul was imprinted with an adolescent naïveté causing enthusiasm and optimism to spring eternal. Maybe Vassy was correct when he said we would never understand each other. Perhaps his objection to my so-called Freudian questioning was a valid position because the questions only related to a limited point of view anyway. He seemed to be saying that what might be true for him one day would not necessarily be true for him the next. And I couldn’t keep up because I was questioning too much. I should just accept.

  We declared a diplomatic truce for a time, trying to relate to each other on a surface level. For him it would have worked. For me and my nature, it didn’t. If I had been capable of continuing to laugh off his structured orders about the way I should eat, dress, work out, sing, dance, do yoga, and breathe, I suppose life would have gone more swimmingly. But I couldn’t, even though he was usually right. When he rejected my protests with the perfectly reasonable argument that he was only ordering me around for my own good, I often stopped and conjured up the validity of that point of view. But as I told him equally often, I had done okay without his orders up till now. He didn’t seem to think so.

  Weeks and months blended combustibly together. Sometimes the harmony took my breath away. Other times we were so discordant together I needed to cover my ears, eyes, and heart.

  I read many books on Russian artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians in an attempt to understand. I seemed to be concluding that the Russian himself was saying, “We are not to be understood.” It was maddeningly challenging to me. I didn’t like not understanding … at least to my satisfaction. Half savage, half saint. That seemed to be the consensus of opinion among the Russians themselves. The communist government appeared to be irrelevant, merely a continuation, in a different form, of a system which basically denied the importance of the individual. Vassy had told me in the beginning that the Russian people had the government they needed and understood, and in many respects he even claimed they would want Joe Stalin back because he would, in effect, protect them from themselves.

  “We would have anarchy without our severe rulers,” he would say. “I can tell you most Russians would agree with me.”

  So what did that really mean? I couldn’t help feeling this was simply the opinion of one Vassily Okhlopkhov-Medvedjatnikov. At the same time, I wondered if I was receiving a complicated education in what we might all have to learn if we were ever to co-exist with a superpower adversary. Nor could I help wondering too, if I, as an American trying to survive in the foreignness of Russia, would have attempted to overpower my lover with my point of view.

  Yet there were times when our joy and playfulness together left me astonished with happiness. To him our happiness was “like music that I am afraid will not last.” Our laughter was color and our physical harmony like a pastel Impressionist painting. Like a child, Vassy marveled at the prosperity of America and the tolerance the Americans had for each other, whether in traffic jams or the crush of a rock concert. He adored the fresh fruits and vegetables abounding in the markets and the “health” life of his “beloved Malibu.” We continued to walk strenuously in the Calabasas Mountains and Vassy swam in the Pacific. We continued to work on developing a picture together, and several of the great Hollywood screenwriters were anxious to meet and know Vassy—his talent was known already to many of them.-People teased us about the explosiveness of our relationship and looked on in amusement whenever we went at each other.

  Sometimes after-dinner conversation was heated and free flowing, with the Americans judging and evaluating Russian attitudes—although many of them had never even been there. And whenever Vassy launched into his now familiar Love-versus-Respect theories, he rendered the living rooms dumbstruck. They couldn’t understand, they said. We in America were working to harmonize the two. Vassy said they were fundamentally separate.

  Then there were the times when Vassy, compulsively yet touchingly, would get very drunk and break down in great heaving sobs when we got home. No one else could possibly understand what it meant to be a “fucking Russian in America,” he sobbed. “My fucking country, my beloved Russia,” he would cry. “No one here understands my country. You judge us, you condemn us, you believe we have swords in our teeth. You’re so conditioned, so brainwashed, even more than we are. At least Russians know about America, not only bad things. And you here imagine Russia as a concentration camp! You don’t like Commies! That’s your problem. Now I hear Americans think ‘Russian’ is the same as evil, stupidity, idleness. That’s dangerous! What about our culture, our music, our ingenuity, our patience, endurance—these are qualities, not drawbacks! Yes, we are fucking different, why not? Why should we all be the same? Instead of trying to change each other, why don’t we simply tolerate our differences and enjoy similarities?”

  His sobs would leave me speechless, useless and even more non-comprehending. I felt stranded on a bridge between two cultures. I knew only one thing. Here was a man I loved and was trying to understand who was genuinely pleading for comprehension—almost a plea to help him comprehend himself. I thought many times that if I had understood myself better I would have been able to understand Vassy.

  Often we made trips to Paris and New York. Vassy said he would never be able to see New York through anyone’s eyes but mine. Paris, of course, was different; he had had a great deal of previous experience there.

  Sometimes friends of Vassy’s would pass through either New York or California. One friend was an American who had lived in Russia for three years and still trave
led there three times a year for his company. In the privacy of a dinner just between the two of us, I asked him what he thought about Vassy’s traveling in and out of the Soviet Union. Vassy’s birthday was coming up and he wanted to celebrate it with his family in their dacha outside of Moscow. His papers were duly forthcoming, and after some hassle with the Soviet authorities in Paris, he had received permission. Jack said he knew the Medvedjatnikov family quite well. He said Vassy was known to have no political interests whatever, but that he would do anything to succeed in his ambition to freely travel the world outside of Russia, and to be a free artist in the West.

  “Would do anything?” I asked.

  “Well,” replied Jack. “You know. I can’t say for him specifically. But many Russians consider marriage to a foreigner a vehicle to get out of Russia. There used to be a saying after the revolution in the ’30s; ‘The car is not an object of luxury but a means of transportation.’ Now they say the foreign woman is not an object of luxury but a means of transportation. Many Russians do marry foreigners in order to freely travel. The system forces them to do many things to become free.”

  “Are you saying,” I asked, “that he married his French wire to get out?”

  Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. Many do.”

  “So, is he using me, too, then?” I asked.

  “Using you? I’m not sure I’d put it that way,” Jack replied. “I know how grateful he is to you. He’s told me you have made so much possible for him. But he also loves you. You really are the woman of his life, as he says, regardless of how long it will last.”

  “How long? What do you mean?”