Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  Sam smiled at him. “You know, I can go months without seeing somebody in this town, and then I’ll find myself sitting beside that person on the subway every day for the next week.”

  “Ain’t it the truth.” Stuart clucked his tongue.

  “The Village is the worst,” I said. “If I want never to see someone again, I can be sure I’ll run into them on Sixth Avenue.”

  “Gosh, Sam, I’m sure she didn’t mean you,” said Stuart.

  Sam rolled with it, still smiling. “So what convenes this meeting?”

  “Actually,” I said, “we were talking about Danny. Did you know she and I are going to Ithaca this weekend?”

  I’d guessed right: Danny had told him. He nodded. “Well,” I continued, “I was just telling Stuart I hope her expectations aren’t too high.”

  “She’ll be all right,” Sam responded. “I’m en route to meet her right now, as a matter of fact. We’re having a drink.”

  “Oh,” I said. It was Thursday—the day he’d said he’d be seeing her. She hadn’t mentioned their date to me. Did she know I knew about it?

  “Maybe we could have lunch tomorrow,” Sam added. “Because I don’t really have time to talk right now.”

  “Tomorrow would be fine,” I said after a moment. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “Good.” He waved both hands—one at me, one at Stuart—and turned away. Watching his retreat, Stuart sniffed loudly.

  “What’s your problem?” I said. “Because you do seem to have a problem.”

  He shrugged. “I would say I am having a trust issue. I have frequent trust issues where men and their dependents are concerned. Chalk it up to my father. You know, that nice fellow who dumped my mother and me when I was a lad?”

  “Danny’s not Sam’s—”

  “Cammie, this threatens to become one of those merry-go-round arguments, doesn’t it? So let’s drop it. I am, however, a bit concerned about you. This road trip? I’m not hugely in favor of it. Not that it’s any of my fucking business. But adventures like this can yield unpleasantness . . . You’ll call me if need be?”

  “Of course. Thank you ever so much for offering your counseling services,” I minced.

  “All right, then, off we go.” He reshouldered his bag. “Don’t talk to any more strangers on the street.”

  “Tell Carl to feel better,” I called after him.

  As I moved to the crosswalk, preparing to make my way back across Sixth Avenue, the light changed in my favor and a familiar-looking pickup truck honked at me. Pulling over, Nick opened the passenger-side door.

  “Oh good grief,” I said as I climbed in.

  He gave me a half-alarmed stare.

  “It’s just that in the space of ten minutes,” I explained, “you’re the third friend I’ve run into, right on this corner.”

  “Ah,” he said, easing the truck into a just-released parking spot. “So is this ‘three strikes and you’re out’ or ‘good things come in threes’?”

  “In your case,” I said, “the jury’s still out.”

  “You’re here, right? So I guess I’ve been—what’s the word?—acquitted.” He leaned over to kiss my cheek. “I’ve just finished for the day. My job site’s a couple of blocks from here.”

  I leaned back against the door and pointed at him. “You have some more repair work to do.”

  “That’s no surprise,” he said. “I do it for a living. People say I’m good at it, too.”

  “I’d like—”

  “You’re the boss, Camilla,” he said quietly. There was no suggestion of either sheepishness or defensiveness in his manner. If I was game, he was saying, we might forget last night. It was my call.

  “I’ll be away this weekend,” I said. “In Ithaca. When I get back . . .” I clambered out of the truck, glad for his inquiring gaze as I retreated, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  INTERLUDE

  TIME OUT. A brief break, in which I’ll do some necessary clarifying—and a bit of confessing as well.

  How did the paths of Jordan Archer and Vsevolod Meyerhold recross after their first serendipitous meeting in Paris? To answer, I must briefly sketch the ups and downs of Seva’s career during the Thirties—that parlous decade . . .

  TORN BY his multiple talents, Seva sometimes wondered whether he should have renounced acting altogether, in favor of his directing career. There was always the lure of music, too.

  He envied Dimitri Shostakovich’s ability to mess around on the piano as if it were a toy. Mitya, the theater’s in-house music man, led Seva’s actors through their warm-up exercises, spurring them on with witty renditions of Russian folk tunes. These he transposed from minor to major and back again, pounding them out at an incredible clip, like a carousel gone berserk.

  Seva liked to sketch, too. He undertook little studies in pencil for his own entertainment, and he drew Zina in all manner of poses and costumes—as well as naked, of course. He’d scribble zestily the dark thatch between her legs, the equally dense tufts under her arms, and the errant curls on her head. (The two of them shared a dislike of hairbrushes; Zina was well coiffed only onstage.)

  I began noticing that sketching was therapeutic for Seva after he and Zina returned from touring in Germany and France in 1928. Seva was vexed because Glaviskusstvo, the state arts authority, had demanded that Comrade Meyerhold come back to discuss the financing of his theater. Upon his return he gave them an earful. “Let me remind you,” he wrote in an acrimonious letter, “that fewer than half the seats of the Zon Theater are usable. Is it your wish that our patrons end up on their literal asses while watching our productions? If not, then get me some real seats and rehearsal space!”

  To relieve his stress, Seva took up drawing on a regular basis. Its physicality calmed him. Drawing helped him handle the news of Trotsky’s ouster in 1929, and it proved crucial in 1930, when two deaths rocked Seva: Volodya Mayakovsky’s and Sasha Golovin’s.

  BOTH MEN died that same April: a cruel month indeed.

  Volodya’s suicide devastated Seva. After receiving the dreadful news, Seva couldn’t speak about his friend. It was several days before he broke his silence, and then only with the tersest of comments.

  Sasha Golovin’s death was less shocking. A well-regarded painter, Golovin was also a gifted set and costume designer. Seva and Sasha’s last duet in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg was Lermontov’s Masquerade, a lush, dark drama about a doomed gambler. The two artists had an excellent time putting the production together.

  To stage it Seva had called on me for inspiration. I’d urged him to go to the wide mirror at the back of his studio and stare at himself in it. Multiply, I’d prompted him. He’d nodded slyly, then trotted to his personal prop kit and fished around in it for an old hand mirror. Returning to the larger mirror, he’d raised the small one to the side of his face—the glass turned outward—and watched himself smiling at himself smiling at himself smiling at himself, the mirrors’ regress continuing past the point of visibility.

  “Perfect,” he’d murmured. “We’ll make the audience and actors see each other and themselves.”

  The next day he’d ordered his stagehands to cover a big set of doors at the rear of the stage with mirrors. Sasha Golovin then created five layers of curtains that parted sequentially during the performance. The last was made of black netting, like a mourner’s veil—marvelously spooky!—and the audiences yelled their approval.

  Not everyone was pleased. One snide commentator remarked that Meyerhold had staged “a Babylon of absurd extravagance.” Seva was used to this sort of venom. A few years earlier, an influential critic had called another Meyerhold-Golovin spectacle at the Alexandrinsky Theater a mere fairground show. Now that, responded Seva, was the best compliment he could’ve received. Mimicking his detractors (“Meyerhold? He’s a lost cause; he’s obsessed with commedia dell’arte”), he’d retorted that he was indeed inspired by commedia characters such as Pantalone, the deceived and deceptive merchant, and his
daughter, Columbine. And clown figures like Pierrot, he said, were always blends of foolish and shrewd, hence excellent starting points for depictions of modern people.

  Elements of commedia personages exist in every character, Seva wrote in response to his critics: “It’s simply a matter of finding them.” True—and I had cause to remember those words when Seva was in prison.

  THE SUMMER following the deaths of Mayakovsky and Golovin, while in Paris, Seva became fixed on the idea of taking Volodya’s The Bedbug to New York. The biting humor of the play, a futuristic comedy, had made it a hit in Moscow, and Seva was convinced it could do well in revival—especially in a city whose tall buildings would inspire fresh ideas for staging.

  Seva wrote to Glaviskusstvo, requesting permission to take Mayakovsky’s play abroad “for the edification of the American masses.” Before long he received a reply: The Bedbug wasn’t going to the United States or anywhere else. This time, Seva wrote directly to Comrade Bubnov, Commissar for Enlightenment, who responded with a brief note in which he ordered Meyerhold to return home, pronto.

  Seva was furious: this was the second time he’d been told to leave Paris. Back in Moscow, he spent several sleepless nights at his theater, pacing and smoking and breaking into angry rants. Finally he stopped pacing, holed himself up with a pad and pencil, and began sketching.

  First he did a set of funny caricatures of bureaucrats with human heads and the bodies of insects. Starting with Comrade Bubnov as a bedbug, he moved on to theater critics, whom he depicted as lice and cockroaches. A few days later, after downing countless cups of black tea sweetened with jam, he started on a series of fantastical bugs, several of which were quite scary-looking. Casting around for sources of inspiration, he began pulling books and journals off his shelves. Someone had recently given him a copy of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which he’d read with admiration. Flipping through its pages once more, Seva decided it was hopeless to think about sketching a bug like that.

  SEVA RENOUNCED his insect fixation after a few days. It had served its purpose, releasing some of his pent-up rage and sadness. Moreover, sketching had allowed him to see himself as someone who could handle a pencil.

  Advertising and packaging had always intrigued Seva: they were cousins of set design. He admired the clever wrappers of the Nozhnitsky tobacco he purchased weekly, along with the slender boxes containing Epokha and Reklama cigarettes. Yet until his run-in with the Glaviskusstvo authorities, Seva had been unaware that he faced an opportunity at once amusing and potentially lucrative—the design of a perfume bottle.

  Indeed, he’d barely registered a request for creative assistance made by the young American perfumist he’d met in Paris. Seva’s memory of Jordan would have languished in the cellar of his consciousness had I not remembered that Mr. Archer’s business card lay somewhere in the jumble of papers on Seva’s desk. Responding to the American’s plea might, I decided, provide my partner with a good outlet for his inchoate feelings.

  SO I began jogging his memory.

  First I stirred up some relevant specifics. The American had described himself as a regular theatergoer. Jordan had chatted intelligently with Seva about his favorite plays, especially those of Shakespeare, and he’d been curious about Strindberg, Brecht, and Chekhov. (Upon hearing that Seva had worked with Anton Pavlovich, Jordan had asked, “What was he like?” To which Seva had replied, “He coughed all the time, and was one of the funniest men I’ve ever met.”)

  Now, helped by my promptings, Seva began remembering that the American had told a few tales of his own. Jordan had known a great deal about his perfume-making forerunners and peers, everyone from medieval alchemists and herbalists to present-day manufacturers. Gradually I guided Seva’s memory toward the chemist’s request for help. It had come at the end of a lovely dinner whose cost the American generously offered to cover. Over a concluding glass of wine, Jordan had pulled out a notebook containing photographs of perfume bottles. He and the Meyerholds had examined the pictures together.

  THE FIRST was of a bottle of Molinard’s lovely Xmas Bells fragrance. It was an extraordinary vessel: a black glass bell decorated in gold, like an exotic Christmas tree ornament. Molinard’s perfumes, Zina told Jordan, appealed strongly to wealthy Russian women. She knew a few (formerly aristocratic but now living in reduced circumstances) who still owned a bottle or two of Molinard—but nothing like that, she’d exclaimed, pointing at the photo.

  Another picture showed a Guerlain crystal flacon in the improbable shape of a turtle. A different Guerlain bottle, designed in collaboration with Baccarat, had a delicate hollow stopper shaped like a heart. Yet another (exotically named Djedi) was in the shape of a faceted crystal; it looked as though it had just emerged from a cave. A Baccarat-designed bottle resembling a glistening snail had been hand painted in eighteen-karat gold. The opulence of each design was astonishing.

  Seva had sat quietly, a polite but less than avid viewer, while Zina oohed and aahed at the photos. But one of Jordan’s pictures had grabbed Seva’s attention: that of a clear glass bottle created by René Lalique. The bottle’s stopper took the form of a woman. One of her arms crossed her breasts; the other covered her crotch. Her face, over which her hair fell loosely, was tilted to the right, and her expression, visible even in so small a photograph, was nearly despairing.

  This photo was the one I now led Seva to recall. That arresting mix of sensuality and desolation had struck him then, and I figured it would do so again.

  “Volodya,” he whispered.

  I was expecting this reaction. Mayakovsky’s eros, as Seva knew well, had been liberally spiked with Thanatos. Orgasm had been mordantly beautiful to Volodya, its shudders very like those of terror. (Love has inflicted on me a lasting wound—I can barely move: his poetry was full of such claims.)

  Seva was remembering; then he began imagining. His forehead creased the way it did when he started to get ideas.

  “Let’s play with this perfume-bottle thing,” he said finally, smiling a little. “I’ll send a few designs to that Archer fellow.”

  So I knew we were onto something, and it would be curious.

  RETROSPECT LENDS these droll, minor-seeming events—the Russians’ stay at a certain Parisian hotel, the American’s quirky offer of collaboration—their luster. For if these things hadn’t taken place, Meyerhold’s quintessence would never have found new lodgings in Camilla Archer.

  Yes, quintessence!—that’s my word for it. Call it spirit or esprit, whatever you’d like. I’m referring to those incorporeal energies dispersed at every human being’s death.

  Some people call this process the transmigration of the soul, or the unfolding of karma. Others think of it as the passing on of a legacy, or simply the procreative force of memory. Yet however it’s labeled, the phenomenon’s the same: at death, a person’s mental energies are dispersed like an invisible mist—a scent potently fragrant for certain receptors . . .

  Being an agent of this dispersal after Seva’s passing, I began by appearing occasionally in the dreams of various individuals with whom he’d worked. Over a period of many months, I infiltrated all manner of nocturnal dramas: dreams about St. Petersburg, socialism, sex, the muted sound of footsteps on heavy white snow . . . Although it was entertaining to see Seva’s mental ashes scattered in this way, I wasn’t satisfied. Remorse gnawed at me. I’d encouraged my late partner in his fidelity to the Revolution, that utopian sinkhole. Then I’d let him believe art could inoculate him against history. Hadn’t I effectively spurred him toward a brutal, needless death? What mea culpa could I now offer, what remediation?

  An answer took decades to arrive. For starters, the mental scent of someone as complex as Seva doesn’t disperse quickly. Moreover, I was seeking a particular receptor—someone with a deep love of theater, hence susceptible, though not an actual professional. An individual with conflicted emotional loyalties, adept at self-concealment. The person I had in mind needn’t be buffeted, like Seva, by political winds.
A family crisis would do as well. It would present similarly fierce challenges to this individual’s self-definition.

  Only this really mattered: once singled out, my collaborator would have to play his or her scenes without a script, and improvise without holding back. She would need to learn that the wearing of masks and costumes isn’t expedient but essential, a necessary risk. And would require a full reconnoitering of the human heart pounding beneath the disguise.

  IF THIS learning were to happen, perhaps at last I might feel I’d atoned for failing to help my Russian partner. But would Camilla prove herself worthy?

  As of our fourth co-production, I was feeling guardedly optimistic. Things were heating up nicely. It was time to insert the ex-husband into the next dream, along with Jordan—and Seva, too, of course. Before long, Camilla’s carapace of denial would start cracking, and she and I would both have a shot at some relief.

  FIVE

  SAM AND I are in bed. A silvery pool of moonlight spills on the floor beneath our open window. The night is mild, calm.

  The light looks like mercury, Sam says as he points to the floor. Like rain in an Atget photograph. Or like you.

  Me?

  I am at his side, one forefinger on his chest. Where his pectoral muscle and rib cage meet, the hair grows shorter, finer, sleeker, not curly and coarse as in the dark mat sheltering his breastbone. Following the slope of his chest, my finger runs a circle around one raised nipple, returning to the smooth side, where his ribs form a staircase that curves around to his back.

  Here, he says. His fingers descend; the middle one parts me. He presses gently, then begins slipping downward. His finger’s still in me. Now his chest is at my pubis; our hairs mingle. The soft bristle of his chin makes me pulse hard, and I tighten around his finger.