THE SNAPSHOT showed a man and woman standing far enough away from the camera that their full bodies were visible. I turned the picture over, looking for a date. There it was: October 31, 1973, written in ballpoint in Eve’s strong hand. Next to it were the words Danny’s father.
“Where’d you find this?” I asked.
“With a bunch of other photos,” Danny answered. “In Mom’s study. I’d seen the others before, but not this one.”
I returned to the picture. Eve was recognizable after a few moments of uncertainty; she was wearing a long, close-fitting skirt, a hip-length blouse (not tucked in but tight enough to reveal her curves), and flat, ballerina-style shoes. The man next to her was of indeterminate age, tall and slender. I noticed his clothing first. He wore a fedora hat that hid his hair. His trousers were a narrow cut, and the wide collar and placket of his pullover flattered his shoulders. Of his face I had little impression, for he was wearing one of those classic black eye-masks.
“Of course,” I said to Danny, pointing at the mask. “They must’ve been going to a Halloween party.”
“Yeah,” said Danny. “Recognize Billy?”
I peered again at the photograph, then lay it down on my desk. “No. But why would I? I never met him.”
Danny reached over and gave my forearm a shake. “Cam—there must have been someone who did. . . . Your father, maybe?”
The question surprised me. Danny rarely alluded to Jordan.
“I doubt it,” I said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter if my father did meet him. He’s gone.” Waiting a beat, I decided to state the obvious, to make her contend with it. “They’re all gone, Danny.”
WE SWITCHED gears at that point, talking about other things. A client had given me a pair of tickets for the latest Robert Wilson production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—was Danny free, did she want to go to BAM with me? She did, and seemed to brighten at the idea.
By this time it was nearly seven. I opened my shop’s front door while Danny wiggled her arms through the straps of her backpack. We stepped outside. Placing my hands on her shoulders, I rotated her gently so she was facing in the direction of the subway, then gave her a light shove.
“Fix yourself a decent dinner,” I said. “Have a bath and go straight to bed, okay?”
She rolled her eyes, blew me a kiss, and took off toward Sixth Avenue. Watching her stride gracefully off, I summoned an image of her with Sam and myself—the three of us holding hands, walking along Bedford Street. Sam and I used to spend a lot of time with Danny when she was young. Even then, she was already tall and wonderfully loose limbed. Distractible, too, the way kids are if they’re lucky.
After she’d rounded the corner, I went back inside. On the far wall of my office is a dartboard, which I conceal behind a puppet-theater curtain I found in a flea market in Los Angeles. The curtain is made of black linen; stenciled across its center is the French word cabotinage, which refers to theatrical barnstorming but also implies over-the-top self-advertising. It’s a funny word—I like it.
I pulled the curtain aside, then went to my desk. In its top drawer I keep a bunch of small photos—head shots—along with a set of brass darts. The darts are beautifully knurled, with glittery silver flights, those feathery bits at the end. I love their midair shimmer and the nice thud they make when they enter the board’s cork.
Choosing three photos of Eve, I affixed them to the board, slipping their edges under the wire rims demarcating the board’s score zones. Then I stood back, took aim, and threw. After missing the first couple of times, I hit my stride and struck all three targets regularly, including the one nearest the bull’s-eye. Yes, I hissed after each toss, just as Eve taught me to do when we played darts in the central hallway of the family apartment. Yesss!
After a while I took down the photos, replaced them and the darts in their drawer, and drew the curtain across the board. Glancing at my desk before pulling my office door shut, I saw Danny had left the picture of her mother and her man. Slipping it into my bag, I locked up and headed home.
INTERLUDE
ENLIGHTENING THOUGH it is, Camilla’s account thus far leaves certain questions unaddressed, and I’m not fond of loose ends. So I’ll pause her narration briefly—as I shall from time to time, in the interests of clarification.
Upon first encountering her, I saw that Camilla took the physical particulars of theater seriously. (Her storefront windows, for instance, were dressed with an exceptional pair of burgundy-colored velvet curtains salvaged from a defunct theater in Lucca, Italy.) People who collect memorabilia of any kind covet idiosyncrasy, and Camilla, keenly aware of this fact, offers her patrons all manner of objets that are extremely difficult to find or duplicate—items for which a true fan of the stage will pay plenty. Her taste in collectibles runs the gamut from the exquisite to the whimsical, even the grotesque.
My favorite example of the last sits in a corner of The Fourth Wall. It’s a prop from a regional theater’s production of Little Shop of Horrors: a small mahogany griffin, the usual half-lion, half-eagle creature, but with an odd twist. A carved bit of spittle drips from its mouth, as if it had just chomped down on something juicy. If you look closely, you can see a tiny set of toes, apparently human, sticking out at one side of the creature’s mouth. Such delightful perversity! It’s one of the few objects Camilla refuses to sell.
Observant she definitely was. I noticed this about Camilla right away. She’d have to be, in order to make her living—which is entirely respectable. But this trait hadn’t translated, I also saw, into anything close to clear self-perception. She wasn’t in the habit of examining the obstacles to her happiness and doing something to dismantle them. Basically, she was bumping into herself coming and going.
I USE the term “happiness” advisedly. Too often it sends people bounding in the wrong direction, like eager dogs with impaired snouts. All sorts of foolish schemes are devised for obtaining happiness, as if it could be procured like an item on a supermarket shelf, when in fact it’s merely a subjective climate. It arrives and departs, and the aleatory music of its coming and going is as strange as a loon’s cry.
This brings me to a related matter: fearfulness. Few people who utter the words “I know myself” say them with confidence. Like children trying to ascend the slick surface of a playground slide, adult human beings scrabble in vain for a purchase on their identities. They’re afraid of contradiction, the crisscrossing vectors of their desires, even the mixedness of their physical bodies, whose genes reflect such turbulent blending. This fearfulness explains why many people can’t see past their own noses, and why happiness keeps skipping away from them.
On top of which there’s a wild card in the game, love, which tends to subvert whatever humans assume is true about themselves. I’m this sort of person, I’m not at all like that: such statements go out the window when love shows up! I’m not speaking solely of romantic love, by the way. Family enmeshments can have similarly deranging effects—as they did with Camilla.
And then there’s love of country. Talk about upheaval! Ah, I’m in memory’s grip now. I’m revisiting Meyerhold in his prison cell, where he is contemplating his life’s work, Russia’s future, his own fate . . . Well, I suppose the time has come for a condensed version of his biography.
SEVA DIDN’T start out Russian. His father was a Silesian German whose forebears were in all likelihood Jewish, and his mother was from a German family in Riga, Latvia.
Seva was baptized a Lutheran and given the name Karl-Theodor Kasimir. At twenty-one he renounced his religion and changed his name. He ceased being German-Russian and Lutheran, and he no longer called himself Karl-Theodor Kasimir Meyergold but rather Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold. He was thus a man accustomed to changes in mask and costume. Moreover, though he could sometimes play the role of the imperious artist, he was a tolerant human being—much more so than most Russians. And he was drawn to talented outsiders.
Seva’s father owned a liquor distillery in Penza
, a small Russian city located four hundred or so miles from Moscow, where the Meyergolds lived a comfortably bourgeois life. Although Seva mistrusted everything his father stood for, he loved hanging around the distillery. The place had good sets—bright, noisy workrooms, a big cafeteria where everyone ate lunch—and the action there was always lively. The distillery was known for its own brand of vodka, called Meyergoldovka. It also produced delicious cordials made from fruits—red currants, black currants, strawberries—which were harvested locally and crushed in huge cisterns. All his life Seva could summon to memory the exhilarating odor of those fermenting berries.
THE FIRST time I beheld Seva, he struck me as such an interesting-looking man. Had I been asked, that’s how I would’ve described him. It was only after we began collaborating that he became, in my eyes, so terribly handsome. Ah, that sounds ridiculous! Where’s the word, the one right word?
Gorgeous: Seva became gorgeous.
He had a magnificent nose. In caricatures the St. Petersburg press portrayed Seva as a man with a pronouncedly hooked beak, but actually the curve of his nose was quite refined, like a straight line tugged ever so slightly downward at each end. Above his upper lip (that lip with its wanton cleft, the mouth’s voluptuous décolletage!), the flesh pitched steeply outward to meet the base of the nose. All the angles of Seva’s face aimed powerfully forward, suggesting the man’s strength of character. Seen straight on, his finely arched brows and lustrous brown eyes lent his face a warmth that both compelled and cautioned, like that of a banked fire that retains more than enough heat to leap alight and burn hard.
When I first met him, he was tall and slender, but as time passed he put on weight. His despair settled in his belly. He ate too much, and in this he had an accommodating mate. Where food and drink were concerned, his wife, Zina, tended toward excess. She adored her blini slathered with smetana, and she gradually grew plump as a city pigeon, which made her even more desirable in the eyes of many men.
She wasn’t the most faithful of wives, though she did love Seva—more than she liked to admit, in fact. He knew right from the start that she’d be unreliable as a sexual partner but forever fidele as an artistic one, and the second loyalty mattered more to him than the first. After all, he could have had other women whenever he wanted, though he wanted few. I’m not alluding here to what’s called “sexual preference,” one of those Americanisms that dispel any possibility of randiness or complication. The fact is that Seva always liked women and never sought men, though they certainly sought him. After his first marriage ended, he commenced a routine with Zina that continued throughout the course of their relationship. They made love a few times each week, with sufficient exuberance to satisfy him, if not her. Her ego had a prodigious need for stroking, and sometimes she confused one need with another. It’s a common enough mistake. Seva could tell when she was being unfaithful, and either humored her or simply ignored her. He knew she’d be back, and she knew he wouldn’t leave. It worked for them.
HOW DID Meyerhold and I become partners? Serendipitously.
Actually Seva wasn’t consciously seeking a double. It was Vladimir Telyakovsky, his boss at the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, who insisted that Seva find himself a pseudonym under which he could carry out his extracurricular activities.
By this time—the year was 1910—Seva had established a solid name for himself. He wasn’t content, however, designing and directing lavish productions of familiar dramas at the state playhouses. It was mostly hackwork, and who had time for that? St. Petersburg was ripe for a venue in which experimentation would be celebrated.
Thus was born the Interlude House. Seva overhauled the former Skazka Theater to create a lively cabaret atmosphere, installing old café tables and a set of stairs that connected the low, small stage with the auditorium. When its makeover was complete, the place exuded a shabby unpretentiousness that everybody liked. It was instantly popular.
The opening show, Columbine’s Scarf, was a pantomime full of strident music and outrageous, clownish costumes. The set evoked nastiness and excitement at the same time, and everyone was impressed, including Telyakovsky. Nonetheless, Seva’s boss insisted it was unseemly for Meyerhold to continue his directorial work at the Interlude House unless he could do so under an assumed name.
Telyakovsky had a point. Seva’s official job wasn’t terribly demanding; he was seldom required to undertake more than two big works in a season. Malicious eyes were on Meyerhold, waiting for him to get into trouble. Telyakovsky didn’t want all of St. Petersburg to know that his star director was moonlighting.
WHAT TO do? A writer friend of Seva’s suggested that perhaps a certain character in a short story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German author of fantasy tales, would provide a good cover for Seva’s unofficial activities.
Hearing this, Seva perked up. He was familiar with Hoffmann’s popular stories, whose grotesqueries made for memorable late-night reading. He wasn’t aware, however, of a tale entitled “Adventure on New Year’s Eve.” Seva’s friend gave him a copy and ordered him to read it, which he did. He was enchanted.
It’s a story about a married painter, Herr Spikher, who, while in Italy, temporarily loses his ability to cast a reflection in a mirror. This doesn’t happen by accident: it’s the nefarious work of a beautiful, enigmatic woman named Giulietta and a strange individual named Dr. Dapertutto. Giulietta convinces Spikher to surrender his reflection in return for her love—not a bad deal, according to Dapertutto (who slyly tells Spikher, “Your wife will have all the rest of you, while Giulietta will have only your shimmering dream-self!”). Spikher finally manages to pull himself together and fend off the evil pair, using the scriptural command for banishing the Tempter.
Who knew what any of it meant? But Seva was taken with the description of Dapertutto, “a tall, thin man with a pointed hawk’s nose, sparkling eyes, and a maliciously twisted mouth.” Seva didn’t mind that this fellow was the embodiment of the tale’s most sinister implications; he liked the man’s charm and boldness. Here, he decided, was a mask he could use.
“Dapertutto it is, then,” he told his friend. “Seems I actually resemble the man, too, except for that twisted mouth of his. He can direct my work at the Interlude House and write a couple of articles I’ve been meaning to publish. Maybe I’ll open an even bigger studio-theater, and he can run it.”
Thus, in a fun-loving spirit, was I called forth as the director’s double.
THE INTERLUDE House closed after an embarrassing rout in Moscow, to which it traveled. Far too refined for their own good, Seva’s Muscovite audiences failed to get the point of farces and pantomimes. He was frustrated by this reaction, but he also realized that the time had come to try something new.
He wasn’t prepared to give up being in St. Petersburg—not yet, anyway. Seva loved his adopted city. (It’s impossible to dislike a place so decrepitly beautiful! Could one ever hate the ravishing and malodorous Venice? The two locales elicit the same response, a kind of shock: here, love and death have merged seamlessly.) Seva responded strongly to St. Petersburg’s contradictions. The city’s canals are peaceful, but its river is another matter. The Neva is disturbingly animate. Even in the dead of winter, when the river’s surface freezes into a broad swath of white immobility, its waters continue their roiling below. In the springtime they smell of danger, and one fears falling into them. (Moscow’s waterways are less compelling, which is one of the reasons Seva liked to visit the capital from time to time. There he could focus on the city’s great wide sky, shape-shifting clouds, and magisterial light.)
So St. Petersburg was home—at least for a time. Seva started his days with a cup of tea fortified with a dollop of sweet gooseberry jam, which he bolted down at six in the morning. Most of his daily labor involved directing and set design. But he was a committed teacher, too, and because he sought to communicate his enthusiasms as widely as possible, he decided he needed a new atelier.
Thus was launched Dr. Dapertutto’s Studi
o, Seva’s private acting workshop, in 1913. On top of this came a new medium, film. In 1915 Seva oversaw the production of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it was splendid. He’d have made a wonderful filmmaker had he chosen to go that route, but he surrendered the screen to Seryozha Eisenstein—a born film director and a good friend. (It was Eisenstein who hid some of Seva’s papers in his own dacha in 1938, after Seva’s theater had been liquidated. Seryozha suspected, rightly, that things would start disappearing unless countervailing measures were taken. Of course plenty of things vanished anyway. People, too.)
UNTIL THE civil war got going and Seva went off to Yalta—where he was arrested by the Whites, escaped, and joined the Reds—he worked indefatigably as a director.
He liked artistic puzzles and difficulties. Whenever he was trying to work out a technical or aesthetic problem, I served as his audience. I’d lob into the air a variety of questions, ideas, and options that Seva would then juggle. Had someone entered Dr. Dapertutto’s Studio during such sessions, he or she would’ve found Seva’s behavior confusing, to say the least. It would have looked as if the director had drunk too much vodka, when in reality he was undertaking a much-needed refinement of theatrical principles.
How, wondered Seva one afternoon, might he make all the eager actors auditioning for places in his studio understand that he was sick of watching them try to portray merriment or sadness without ever stopping to consider that perhaps both emotions ought to be communicated at once? This he found very frustrating. In the large, bright room where his students undertook their physical exercises, he began experimenting with solutions to this pedagogical problem.
“Come on, come on, come on,” he intoned to himself, snapping his fingers noisily. “What should I get them to do? Pranks—I need some good pranks . . .”
Thirty-three Swoons Page 4