“Is that what you want?” he had countered.
“Yes. I really do.” Natalia’s eyes had met his, and she had felt the soft pressure of his fingers on her arm. He was a warm man who would give her complete freedom to be her own person but still be supportive next to her. He liked her and seemed to expect nothing in return. She was not ready to let him go, not well enough adjusted to stand her ground without his help.
“My editor isn’t exactly pounding the pavement in front of my door,” he said with a light laugh. “I’ll come. Why not? You need a guide to this strange country, Natalia. I’ll bring along my manuscript and work while you rehearse.”
And so he had accompanied the Ballet on its tour. When they stopped to perform in Boston, he took her to Harvard Square in Cambridge to show her where he had studied for four years. They strolled arm in arm among the brick buildings, facing the statues of his early youth. “I’m glad you’re here,” she murmured. “I’ve never had many friends, but you’re my friend. I haven’t known you long—why are you with me?”
“I like you, Natalia. You’re not like the women here. You’re solid and real. You have a goal, and you’re not afraid to feel.”
“But I am. I’ve always built walls to protect me from myself. And you? What do you feel?”
“I’m neither happy nor unhappy. Maybe I’m too selfish. I never cared much what people thought of me—my family, my professors, my publisher. I never tried too hard, either. Not like you, with ballet. I write because there’s something inside pushing its way out, and because I suppose I’m good. Apart from that, I live a fairly good life, but I’m rather restless. I don’t inspire myself.”
He laughed then, but she was silent. He did as he pleased and apologized to no one. Did she not profess to do the same? She had read some of his work in New York: pages typed on onionskin, corrected in a sprawling hand. He liked himself, liked what he did. Stuart Markham, she had learned, was the youngest of three sons of a Philadelphia surgeon, and he had been reared in a traditional upper-middle-class manner. His father had give him an excellent education, first at the Andover preparatory school, then at Harvard. But there he had discovered, he had told her with amusement, that he was like a dandelion shooting up in a garden of well-tended roses: thoroughbred roses, to boot. “But then,” he had added, “there is no such thing as an American thoroughbred.”
He was right, she thought. America was a strange country, a conglomeration of immigrants and sons of immigrants who had sought refuge from famines and pogroms, or had been tempted to conquer new, raw lands. A land of rugged imperialists, of harsh industrialists with little culture, a land of children waiting to be shown new ways and softer manners—a land of modest, puritanical dreamers, of debutantes who danced in honky-tonk hideaways, of frightened followers as well as bold creative geniuses such as she felt sure Stuart was.
Natalia was still amazed by the audience for which she danced. Their jewels glittered and their mansions were enormous. Yet underneath that veneer of splendor lurked the virgin minds of children. They did not know how to judge a ballet, let alone a Diaghilev production. They possessed no background of general culture on which to fall back to form an artistic opinion. Now Natalia could understand why America had adopted Anna Pavlova without question. Brilliant though she was as a performer, Natalia’s old rival from the Mariinsky had come to America as she had previously come to England, then equally unprepared for the complexity of Russian dance. Now Pavlova’s little troupe was composed mainly of lesser dancers from Britain. She had not attempted any choreographic innovation, because all dance to the Americans was totally novel. She had distinguished herself in her individual performance, relying on her repertory of classical and romantic roles. Europe would have demanded bolder strides, new directions, and more virtuosity from the corps.
“Diaghilev’s productions are too complex for us,” Stuart explained to Natalia. “We love you because you are accessible: You’re small, and lovely, and vulnerable. You’re a good actress; Tahor makes the women weep. But dance is seen as recreation, like the movies.”
Natalia was amused. He had taken her to see a moving picture in New York, and she had been filled with wonder. How odd that Serge Pavlovitch, always so interested in new artistic media, had steadfastly refused to involve his ballet in film. “Perhaps,” she said, “the public would prefer to see us in a movie theatre. I wouldn’t mind: If I missed a step, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I could redo it in as many takes as I needed to achieve perfection. I wish we could go to Hollywood and watch a film being made.”
He regarded her with his green-gold eyes and stopped walking. “I wouldn’t mind at all if you stayed in this country,” he said, his voice low and melodic, like a trembling cello. He was like an oak, strong and brown with touches of color, she thought. His writing possessed that same male quality, punctuated with points of intuition. He never condescended, hardly ever passed judgments. He sometimes lived his life haphazardly, but he recognized his limitations without regret. Pierre had been forever embittered by his failures, forever envious of more successful artists. Boris, on the other hand, had turned his life into a work of art, fashioned with the easy grace of a Benois and the heightened vividness of a Bakst landscape; but he had dabbled at the venture without ever grasping its essential earthiness. Life, after all, belonged to the earth, just as, Natalia thought, did Stuart. This notion reassured her.
“But I would have no place here,” she countered gently, surprised at the unexpected tug that had pulled her closer to this man, this virtual stranger. “I need to dance.”
“Maybe someday you will merely want to,” he remarked, circling her shoulders with his arm and starting once more to walk. She nodded, wondering, and then dismissed the strange idea and put her head on his shoulder. The only way to assimilate the loss of a man was by allowing warmth, another man’s warmth, to penetrate inside. This man seemed prepared to allow her privacy: the privacy of her past, the privacy of her professional needs. For the first time she did not stop to wonder about the future: Stuart Markham was part of today, comfortably entrenched in the present.
Beside them strolled the students, young men with blazers, straw hats and books; young men with crew cuts and no hats. Such young men! She was twenty-six already. Suddenly she sighed and felt old. “What did you mean, someday I shall merely want to dance?” she asked.
“You still use dance to make yourself feel whole,” Stuart answered. “But when I write, I’m trying to establish a line of contact between myself and the rest of the world. One day soon, Natalia, you’ll dance because you have something to say and not merely something to prove.”
She was stunned and immediately angry. Tears came to her eyes. “I want to live,” she said, “and I’m only alive when I dance. That’s just how I am.”
“But you don’t really like yourself the way you are,” Stuart said.
Later, when he took her to a gentle hill overlooking the lazy Charles River, she said to him: “You can’t set me down in your gracious Boston landscape, Stuart. I don’t belong. When you studied here, there were New England debutantes in their pantalettes to court. Why didn’t you marry one of them?”
“I almost did,” he replied, smiling slightly. His mouth was large and well shaped beneath the mustache. It was an unapologetic mouth, she thought, just as Pierre’s was sensual and Boris’s ironic. “She was the only daughter of one of my professors,” Stuart explained, “a very sweet, intelligent girl, who went to the Episcopalian church and attended meetings of the Junior League. A very proper girl. But there wasn’t an artistic bone in her. She thought the word create had to be followed by havoc. I gave up on gracious Boston ladies after that.”
She laughed, but when he took her chin in his strong fingers, she shook her head. Below them the river wound its blue ribbon much as, three years before, the Mediterranean had unfurled its current over the rocks of the Bay of Monaco. She had promised Boris to make that year memorable. They had created Arkady. Stuar
t’s girl was right: In some cases, the things that one created broke up one’s world. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
She was bewildered by the newspapers. Reporters assailed her in hotel lobbies, in Cincinnati, in Chicago, in Kansas City. They printed terrible stories about “the Countess Kussova, so tragically widowed,” and pictured her, small and sad, “her arms bereft of her child.” At first she was dreadfully hurt, and Diaghilev upbraided the reporters for their crudity. But she knew he would never risk offending the press on behalf of any individual. Much as he had loved Boris and felt protective of her, one of his prized dancers, he realized that any publicity was good and would draw a crowd at the box office. He told her, gently: “Ignore them, my dear. They are adolescents at heart. This is a nation of adolescents, and, like most adolescents, they are fundamentally kind but impossible to handle.”
Actually, the bitterness of her loss was seeping out of her, little by little, town by town on this extensive tour. Now, when a baby was wheeled near to her, she no longer recoiled in agony but only trembled slightly on the inside. With Stuart she was careful to keep an emotional balance. When talk veered toward the future, she steered it at once back to the present. Unlike Pierre, Stuart did not insist. She did not know whether she would like to see him in Europe; this rough and energetic country was a part of him, and she could not imagine his attending a Diaghilev committee meeting. That was her other life.
In Chicago a story appeared about them, and Diaghilev burst into her hotel suite at the Ritz, brandishing the offending tabloid. His large bulldog’s face was contorted with rage. “Where are you, Natalia?” he shouted, and then, noticing that the door to the bathroom stood ajar, he pushed it open without knocking. His single lock of white hair trembled over his forehead. She was in the tub and started to laugh, unselfconsciously: He was not, after all, a man to take notice of a woman’s nudity.
“You and this man are not discreet!” he cried. “Look at this: ‘Natalia Oblonova, America’s darling, is being escorted through sixteen cities by a somewhat controversial writer, Stuart Markham, best known for his novel of suicide, Tomorrow’s Girl. Does this mean that, for him, Natalia, the diminutive Russian Countess, has become the girl of today?’ That is vulgar, Natalia! One does not flaunt one’s bedside partners in a country like this!”
“Balletomanes have followed their favorite dancers for centuries!” she retorted angrily. “And I flaunt nothing. We don’t live together openly, and you know that. I am discreet, as you say. What I choose to do in private is my business, isn’t it?”
“We are not in Italy, or even in France. What is all this about, Natalia? Are you infatuated with this man? I’ve checked on him—his book is fairly good, but hardly the penstroke of a genius. He drinks too much, on occasion. His family doesn’t think very highly of him. He dresses carelessly, and his manuscripts are always behind schedule.”
“And you, of course, are today’s innocent, Serge Pavlovitch?”
She met his furious stare with an equally angry glare of her own. “You mix yourself so easily into my business,” she said. “But for you I am only a commodity. Why, then, will you not make the best use of me that you can? When will you let me do what Massine does—create a ballet for you?”
“When the gossip columnists cease to make you an object of scandal,” he replied evenly.
Abruptly, she rose and stepped lightly out of the tub, her naked body dripping over the bathmat at his feet. “You’re intruding, Serge Pavlovitch,” she announced coldly. “Please leave.”
Before returning for its engagement at the Metropolitan in New York, Diaghilev’s company stopped in Washington, D.C., to give a special performance attended by President Wilson. Natalia was enchanted with the capital, arranged as it was in the French architectural style. But at the start of April she and her colleagues came back to their starting point, completing the tour of America. New York’s elite was in a fever: Nijinsky was to meet his old company, having at last been released from internment in Hungary.
Pierre had written to Natalia about the Nijinskys, after seeing them when they had passed through Switzerland: “He is very nervous, and she most resentful of Serge Pavlovitch for having dismissed Vaslav.” Now Natalia did not know whether she should first call upon her onetime partner, or whether she should let him come to her. They had all suffered, but now, she said to herself, I am healing. She went to see the Nijinskys at Claridge’s.
His Mongol’s face appeared tightly drawn, and there were circles under his eyes. But: “Serge Pavlovitch met us at the ship,” Nijinsky said brightly. “He brought flowers for Romola.” Apparently, he was still hopeful of reconciliation—a naïve child, like the Americans. They would adore him. Natalia wondered how long the truce would last between Vaslav and his former protector and felt ill at ease.
“We could not contact you when we learned,” Romola murmured. “We—”
“Thank you, Romola Karlovna. It’s over now.” But it would never be over, never. Too brightly Natalia said: “Where is your little girl, Kyra?”
An embarrassed silence fell over the room. Romola called out, and a governess entered, holding the hand of a small, chubby, pretty girl with large, shining eyes. Arkady’s eyes had shined like that. Arkady would be walking now, too. Arkasha, I shall never heal, I shall never forget. She held her hands out to the child, who smiled and came running. It can’t continue this way, Natalia thought, and this time tears rolled down her face and fell heedlessly over the small girl’s fingers. “Why was the nice lady crying?” Kyra asked when Natalia had made a hasty retreat.
“Her little boy is gone,” her mother answered gently.
The night of April 12 the most elegant New Yorkers came by the dozens to witness the true wedding they had been expecting: Nijinsky partnering Oblonova on stage. The two stars danced Petrouchka, and Le Spectre de la Rose. But Natalia noted Nijinsky’s anxiety, his irritability, which had not been evident before the voyage on the S.S. Avon. As she danced with her old partner, as she watched his face and made her own familiar movements, drawing the same tumultuous applause as they always had in Europe, a sadness enveloped her that did not match the brittle excitement of the audience. She knew then that she needed to confront Diaghilev one more time, because the past was not enough, dancing itself was no longer enough. After the celebration supper, she went to see him in his suite at the Ritz.
“Too excited to sleep, Natashenka?” Diaghilev asked her pleasantly. Since their confrontation in the bathroom in Chicago, they had not bridged the gap of coolness between them. “Sit down. What’s on your mind?”
“It’s very simple,” she said. “I want to know once and for all whether you plan to give me the chance to choreograph a ballet of my own.”
His brows shot upward. “But you are a great ballerina. An interpreter, not a choreographer.”
“Choreographers aren’t born that way. They dance and then they develop their own ideas and methods after much experience. I’m twenty-six, not twenty, like Leonid Massine. If he can do it, so can I. You can have more than one choreographer in the same company. It’s my turn, too.”
He noticed the stubborn tilt of her chin, the hardness in her brown eyes. Then, gently, he laughed. “No, my Natalia. They have not made choreography a woman’s profession. Not yet. Perhaps one day soon, though.”
She wet her lips and stood up. “Very well, Serge Pavlovitch. I’ve asked you three times. We have only a verbal contract. I am breaking it, as of this minute. I am returning to Switzerland.”
Outraged, he rose with a single swift motion and took her by the shoulders. “You can’t be serious!” he exclaimed. “For God’s sweet sake, Natalia! Over this? Over this silly issue?”
“Over this and over things that do not concern you. Lopokhova is here, and now Vatza. You don’t need me. I need to live my own life, Serge Pavlovitch. Good-bye now.”
Calmly she looked at his face, contorted with fury. “I need my freedom,” she added clearly. “I’ve never had it
before, but now I want it. I want to dance, and I want to compose ballets, and if not with you, then with another company—my own company. If Pavlova can do it, why shouldn’t I?”
She turned away from him, avoiding the expression in his eyes, an expression of murderous hatred that shook her deeply.
Natalia sat down softly on the bed, her eyes enormous in the pale oval of her face, and took Stuart’s hand gently, almost absently, stroking the fingers rhythmically. “It isn’t you,” she murmured. “You’re the best of all men, too good to be true. Too good for me, in fact.” She turned to look at him, and shook her head. “It’s my own life that’s made us impossible. I wasn’t being fair—I never really loved you in the way you deserved. You’re the dearest friend I’ve ever had.”
“Why?” he asked. His large face crested by the brown, vital hair, was marked by lines of anxiety and the beginning of despair.
“I wanted to escape from my past, from the pain of Boris, and from my confused feelings about Pierre Riazhin. But I can’t escape, Stu. I find America wonderful—but I can’t forget that there’s something to deal with in Switzerland. If I stayed with you, then you would never know how much was really forgotten—or how much was lying, festering, beneath the surface of my emotions. I have to talk to Pierre.”
Her mouth was beginning to quiver, and she said: “Stu—please don’t hate me. I tried not to be dishonest with you—I never pretended—I really did care, do care!”
“Yes, yes, I know. You’re a good girl, Natalia, and I was starting to fall in love with you. It hurts—of course, it hurts. But I’m not going to forget you, and we’ll try to be friends, won’t we? Come on, don’t cry. In any case, Diaghilev and I share a common disaster: We’ll both be left behind by the most interesting little countess that ever stepped on a stage.” He put a finger beneath her chin and added: “Laugh a little now, darling, for the camera!”
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