I'm Trying to Reach You

by Barbara Browning

  The two of them were at odd angles, and as in the moth’s other dances, their eyes were downcast. The seated dancer made only three moves in the whole piece: when the piano came to a particular small motif, she extended her arm at an angle, and leaned out slightly – first right, then left, then right. Each time, her arm descended unnervingly slowly.

  The moth moved much more quickly, her arms alternating in angular movements like the ticking hands of a clock. Her feet shifted in and out in similarly mechanical motion. And each time the seated figure’s arms dropped to her side, the moth would lean in wistfully for a moment, and then resume her solitary focus before her.

  Their movement only coincided on the very last note of the Gnossienne. Skewed away from one another, their breath audible, they slowly raised both arms, simultaneously, to their sides, and slowly let them fall. With conviction and with a rigorous sadness.

  They were disjointed, and yet connected, out of sync, and yet together.

  I was aware I was projecting.

  Of course the rebel moth’s two subscribers had let their opinions be known immediately. The carper, as was his wont, was the first to jump in: “Okay, little lady, I see you called in the reinforcements! Nice one, but whats up with the rythm??? Batetment tendu meeds work. Also is taht a boy or a girl???”

  Good grief.

  I imagine that the moth hesitated before firing back: “Neither Patriarch nor Pussy.” She didn’t even bother to address the comment about her battement.

  Touché.

  And then, in a subsequent comment, she added, mysteriously: “You’ll know Her – by Her Voice.”

  And then that paragon of sincerity, GoFreeVassals, stepped into the fray, stating the obvious: “I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man.”

  Steeped as I was in academic irony, I found his earnestness something of a relief.

  quothballetcarper, however, seemed to feel they were both missing the point: “Hellooooo!!! So then WHO LEADS???”

  The moth wrote: “He was weak, and I was strong – then – So He let me lead him in – I was weak, and He was strong then – So I let him lead me – Home.”

  This rang weirdly religious to me. I was getting confused. But not as confused as the clueless carper, who sounded simultaneously exasperated and moralistic. He appeared to have taken the notion of “Home” entirely literally. “Ahem, little lady, who you go home with is none of anybodys beeswax but MAYBE YOUD LIKE TO CLEAN UP UR ACT A LITTLE BIT THIS IS YOUTUBE!!!”

  I thought her response gave a little more information than was really necessary (indeed, this was none of my beeswax, and certainly not the carper’s): “He strove – and I strove – too – We didn’t do it – tho’!”

  The sentimental libertarian just sighed: “Ah lover and perfect equal…”

  Then somebody called ihatenetnanny popped up, with this comment: “OMFG. I hate NetNanny. x_______________x” Like I_ would ever look at Porn! What kind of slut does my Dad think I am?! Slap? That’s it? I would FRICKIN MURDER HIM. I feel you’re aggrivation. I can barely even bare to go on the computer anymore.”

  I wondered if that should be tagged as spam.

  Then DJFartMeister78 added this little gem: “faggit fagit fagit bitch fagit bitch_ FUCK YOUUU fagit”

  I’m not sure if that was directed at the moth, the freer of vassals, or ihatenetnanny. Fortunately when I checked in a couple of hours later, the moth had removed these last two comments. Good call.

  I wrote that and then stared for a minute at my computer screen wondering if I should delete them from this novel as well. But as I already told you, I find it hard to lie.

  But I began telling you this whole story in order to explain my increasing paranoia regarding the serial deaths of three of the greatest dance innovators of the last century. Merce’s Septet, you see, was – unsurprisingly – positioned as a related video to falserebelmoth’s new addition. I say unsurprisingly because they both featured Satie compositions, and, if anybody at YouTube actually cared about such things, they displayed a certain similarity in spirit, if not precisely in choreographic style. Merce’s, admittedly, was more technically refined. Carolyn Brown’s arabesque is perfect, even by Vaganova’s standards. What the moth lacked in technique, I felt she made up for in straightforwardness. The figure in the chair was the picture of understated grace. You can take this with a grain of salt. I had obviously cathected.

  The point is, when I toggled over to Merce again, it was with a leaden sense of dread that I registered the most recent comment. quothballetcarper – of course: “Well Merce old man it took awhile but u got urs! You know this DANCE thing is not an easy ‘RACQUET’ (nudge nudge wink wink)!!! Hope it didnt hurt to much!!!”

  As if to add to the sinister tone of the message, I suddenly realized that the carper had added an icon to his moniker: a tiny keyhole figure of a creepy little gloved hand. It had spots on it. wtf?

  I have a confession. Bugs Bunny’s sister didn’t really show me a matchbook with a picture of Siegfried and Roy. I got the idea for that when I was investigating hotels in Las Vegas, because I remembered that cartoon in which Bugs was trying to get to Las Vegas and he made a wrong turn in Albuquerque and ended up in Nazi Germany (oops). I figured maybe his sister would also have wanted to spend some time in Las Vegas, so I started to look up the hotels where she might have stayed. As I went down the rabbit hole, no pun intended, of the Stardust Hotel Google search, I found myself staring at that image from an eBay auction. I got quite absorbed in the story of Siegfried and Roy. I almost ordered a book about their “secret life” from amazon.com, but made do with what was posted on Google books. While on eBay, I was sorely tempted to buy a limited edition Siegfried and Roy commemorative wristwatch originally sold at the Mirage Hotel (only $6.99 buy-it-now, plus shipping). There were also some commemorative white tiger Beanie Babies, but these were very pricey. I spent about three days on this wild goose chase. I told myself it was “research” and might come in handy if I ever wrote the novel I kept threatening to write. This one. While on eBay I did order a set of small plastic deer – the ones that Fang left in my planters. Ask me how much work I got done on my academic manuscript.

  Also, while I was Googling, I looked up the semaphoric alphabet, just to see if I could decipher anything from the moth’s dance. It didn’t make much sense – GFEDEFG, ABCDCBA… There was an H, and a Z.

  The only thing that made any sense was that last gesture, the raising and lowering of both arms together. This, evidently, means “error.” As in, disregard everything I just said.

  GAME CHANGE

  I decided to join the NYU gym. It was very close to my sublet and I thought I should probably be getting more of a cardiovascular workout. My slow-motion barre exercises were not giving me much of an endorphin charge. Also, I was 46. It seemed like it was time to start thinking about things like my heart, and my arteries.

  This was another small perk of my cheap-ass post-doc. Gyms in New York are generally very expensive, especially if they have a pool, but the university affiliation – even my tenuous one – qualified me for a very reasonably priced membership.

  I liked that this gym was so functional. I’ve never been a gym kind of guy. Here, however, most everyone seemed to be, like me, a nerdy academic of a certain age, trying to keep deterioration and depression at bay. We had a forlorn solidarity. It was a slightly different story in the weight room and on the basketball courts, where the undergraduate guys tended to congregate.

  The idea of cardiovascular equipment was somewhat off-putting to me. There were no windows in this room. It seemed like we were rodents on a treadmill. But after all, even hamsters surely realize they’re not getting anywhere, and yet there must be something to it, because they keep going. And indeed, once I started, I became a little obsessive about it. I started with the elliptical machines, and then moved on to the StairMaster. I liked to take my iPod and listen to music with complicated time signatures. I’d adjust the resistance of the machine
so I could maintain my HR (heart rate) at 120 BPM for 20 minutes while stepping in rhythm (5/4, 7/16) to my music. I tried to synchronize my breathing with the beat as well. I would count the rhythm inside my head, but somehow I was able simultaneously to ponder other aspects of my life – embarrassing or possibly insensitive things I’d written or said, the situation with Sven, possible scenarios for a scene in my novel, what I might prepare for dinner.

  There was an aging hippie who was there almost every day. His body was wiry and taut. He had a grizzled ponytail, and he would balance a water bottle on top of his head as he extended his arms to the side and pumped backwards on the elliptical trainer with great determination. I wondered what department he was in, and if his colleagues considered him eccentric.

  The hippie liked to look into the mirror as he worked out. I tended to keep my eyes shut.

  One day I was pumping up and down on the StairMaster, trying to maintain the equilibrium of my tempo, breath, HR, and questions relating to the meaning of my life. I was listening to Philip Glass’s Mad Rush (7/16). I was pretty sure I was nearing the end of my cardio session. My eyes fluttered open – quite right: the digital clock registered my time at 19:44. As I slowed my pace, my gaze wandered forward toward the row of StairMasters in front of me, and I glimpsed a strangely familiar pair of gleaming white tennis socks, pulled high. I raised my eyes and took in the twill plaid tennis shorts, the carefully tucked-in piqué tennis shirt, and the steely gray hair – holy shit. Just as I made the connection, his head turned, and from behind his browline eyeglass frames, he shot me a withering glance – but followed it with a slight smile. It was Jimmy Stewart – from Zagreb! Here in New York City!

  In other words, when I said he was lurking at the scene of the crime, I didn’t just mean on YouTube. He could have been in the city the day it happened. He LITERALLY could have BEANED MERCE. “Hope it didnt hurt to much!!!” The very thought made my blood run cold. And – to make matters worse – that ridiculous miniature tennis racquet was resting against the base of the StairMaster – as if warning me to “mind my own beeswax,” as he surely would have put it!

  Slack-jawed, I felt myself sinking down toward the ground. I watched as Jimmy took a jaunty hop from his machine, gathered up his axe and walked assuredly out the door. I didn’t need the sensors on the machine to tell me my heart. Was. Pounding.

  As soon as I got home, I checked in on that Merce video, Septet. There were no further comments from the carper, the moth, or the freer of vassals. A couple of people had typed in the obligatory “rip” or “bellissimo,” but I saw no clues.

  All was quiet on the moth’s channel as well. But it felt like the quiet before the storm.

  I hadn’t merely been looking at Merce on YouTube. I’d also been doing some good old-fashioned book reading. This was not for my own book revisions. Although I’d always found Cunningham interesting, he hadn’t figured prominently in my dissertation, which focused on ballet more narrowly construed. Roger Copeland’s book-length critical evaluation came out in 2004, and of course I read it then, but hadn’t looked at it in some time. I went back over his description of Cunningham’s aesthetic. He said that Merce’s dancers had “the aura of sangfroid.” That was pretty accurate. It rang strangely ominous, though, given the circumstances. Copeland took Moira Roth to task for lambasting Cunningham, Cage, and the visual artists with whom they collaborated as practicing an “aesthetic of indifference.” Roth seemed to think the “cool intelligence” of their work made it not only emotionally but also politically detached. Copeland argued that their way of refocusing your attention in fact did have profound political implications.

  As for the emotional implications of this aesthetic, I don’t think I need to tell you, I have a strong emotional response to understatement. Copeland seemed to have a similar reaction.

  It’s interesting, it seems Copeland’s not gay. He thanks his wife and son in the acknowledgements of the book.

  You’d think I’d know that for sure, given how small the field of dance scholarship is. But as I already told you, I generally try to avoid professional gossip.

  Copeland also really goes after Susan Foster in that book. He seems to enjoy provocation. When she criticizes the excessive “whiteness” of Cunningham’s “chaste” dances, Copeland muses, “Maybe she believes that all African American men have large penises.”

  Maybe you can see why I keep those see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys next to my computer.

  But speaking of sangfroid, as in cold-blooded murder, one afternoon that week when I got home from the gym there was a text on my phone from Sven: “got 2 watch woman n d window gr8 tmot.” I looked up Woman in the Window on the IMDB: Fritz Lang. I’d never seen it, so I popped it to the top of my Netflix queue. Two days later it arrived.

  Well, I could see why Sven thought I should watch it: it was about a nerdy, middle-aged New York City college professor named Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson). That would be me, I guess. Wanley’s family goes away on vacation, and while bumbling around the city alone, he glimpses a portrait of the beautiful Alice Reed (Joan Bennett) in a window next door to his “gentlemen’s club.” He’s staring at her picture when suddenly she shows up beside him on the sidewalk. You see her reflection superimposed on her painting. That’s a pretty interesting shot, from a psychoanalytic perspective.

  Anyway, improbably, Alice Reed invites the professor up to her place, and her jealous boyfriend shows up and practically strangles Wanley. Joan Bennett passes Edward G. Robinson a pair of scissors and he stabs the guy in self-defense. They spend the rest of the movie trying to cover up the murder, even though Wanley is strangely feeding clues to his close friend, who just happens to be the DA.

  Surely the professor’s wife and kids could never imagine him getting into this much trouble while they went off on their little family outing. Likewise, I’m sure Sven would have found it highly unlikely that I would end up inadvertently murdering the jealous boyfriend of some femme fatale. I also found that a little hard to imagine.

  Still, I suppose it could happen. There’s a little plot twist at the end of the film. I don’t want to spoil it for you. Let’s just say, things are not always as they seem, but sometimes things are actually more as they seem than they seem.

  The “gentlemen’s club” in this movie reminded me a little of the Torch Club, which is the faculty dining club at NYU. As a visiting scholar, I was also entitled to dine there if I wanted to. Every once in a while, I’d go there alone, just because it struck me funny. There was an ornate fireplace, and a big violet-colored rug with the NYU motto woven into it: Perstare et praestare – persist and excel. Dan Ferguson told me that the graduate students liked to say it meant “pay and pay.”

  The Torch Club was pretty swank, but it seemed a little incongruous in the context of NYU, a school more renowned for its entrepreneurial savvy and Manhattan real estate holdings than for its ivy-covered clubbishness. So imagine my surprise when just days after our encounter at the gym I spotted Jimmy Stewart in his spotless tennis whites, leaning against the mantle of the Torch Club fireplace, fondling an unlit cigar as he gamely chatted up the Russian hostess, Galina. She was laughing girlishly at something he’d said. Finally she noticed that I was waiting to be seated and she came over to greet me: “Khello, sir, velcome back to Torsh Cloob.” Jimmy looked at me and we both nodded. I was doing my best to conceal my utter panic. Galina led me to a banquette toward the back of the room. I pretended to be reading over the menu, but I looked up furtively to see him make what appeared to be another witticism and leave, Galina smiling and waving him out the door. She blew him a kiss.

  I tried to read a little bit of the new issue of Dance Chronicle (George Dorris had an article about the early “ballet wars” between the Met and the Manhattan Opera), but of course my mind was racing. First the gym and now my “gentleman’s club”… Was he following me? But he’d gotten there first…

  I asked for some tea and splurged on a pear tart
e tatin, despite my increasingly worrisome financial situation. I tried to maintain my cool.

  I spent about half an hour nibbling at my tart, sipping my tea, freaking out about Jimmy Stewart and pretending to read Dance Chronicle.

  On my way out, I asked Galina, as casually as I could, “Excuse me, that gentleman with the cigar and the tennis outfit, he looked very familiar… Is he a faculty member?”

  “Ah, sportsmen-professionál?” she asked, smiling broadly. “No, no, he is great atlét, working at NYU gymnasium. And player of – how you say? – . He is regular here, he is great friend of Duke.”

  Player of what? At Duke University? I was confused. It seemed that that would amount to something of an institutional disloyalty.

  A large party was arriving – it looked like a hiring committee – and Galina had to excuse herself before I could press for any more details.

  The next day I found myself staring at the potted plant near my window. It was a rubber tree that was left behind by the regular tenant. It had long woody branches scarred with the nubs where the leaves had fallen off, but then in unexpected places, there were fleshy, deep green clusters of young leaves, and pale-green baby shoots. It looked like a plant that had seen some rough times and come through to tell the tale. This was the plant where Fang had left the two apprehensive little deer standing in the dirt.

  I took a picture of one of them with my phone and sent it to Fang. I thought maybe she’d be wondering how they were doing. The deer, like the plant, seemed to be doing okay.

  Fang wrote me back a short text, in French: “ma biche.”