Fall Love

by Anne Whitehouse

  The cycle culminated in a game where a woman, draped with roses, prepared to place a ring of blossoms on her lover's head, as he sat beside her, clasping her tightly corseted waist. Another young dandy sketched the scene. Above them, the statue of a winged putto appeared to be making a drawing, too.

  Althea walked before Fragonard's paintings, studying them, her hands clasped loosely behind her back. She caught a glimpse of herself in the antique mirror between two windows, and stopped.

  Her face looked back at her, pale and grave, with the paintings of light, mocking lovers behind her and around her, and she felt sad. In contrast, the painted lovers were facile, elegant, and artificial. They dwelled in an eternal summer and never knew pain like the grief she felt now for her summer's end.

  Standing before her reflection, she closed her eyes, and the recollections that she had tried to repress for the past two months came flooding back. Looking back from the dusks of November to moments in the summer's last weekend, she realized that, at the time, she had forced herself not to think; she had been swept up in the flow of sensation, without considering what it might lead to. She could understand, painful as it felt now, the self that had allowed herself to be seduced the evening of Jeanne's arrival. She comprehended the condescension of that self, how, in embracing Jeanne as she had, she had not truly considered her. She hadn't wanted to know what she couldn't help but observe, that in the steadiness of Jeanne's gaze on her was a depth of desire, and the desire was for her. Although in retrospect, she did not admire this self and felt shame for her, she recognized her. It was the woman who had walked out of the sea the next morning that Althea in mid-November found more troublesome to fathom.

  It seemed to her, looking back, that between the self who had slipped away in the morning and the self the morning had given back, a mysterious transformation had occurred. She had felt as if she were an emissary of the world outside in all its magnificence, clothed in its radiance, its force, its lustre, as she came to greet Paul and Jeanne.

  Where she had believed in her own superiority, now she had come to recognize that she had been sadly mistaken. She thought of Jeanne's eyes on her, and of the chasm between them now. She recalled Paul's fleeting enthusiasms, how his attentions were constantly distracted, while hers were constant. Standing in the Fragonard Room, with the paintings of the contrived, conventional lovers around her on the walls, she remembered their embraces, their ecstasy, and their entangled bodies, and she regretted that it all had ever happened. With a pang she relived the release of desire, of desire become anathema. This secret, so beautiful and terrible at the time, led her in November to remorse.

  She wondered if Paul had devised to put her completely out of his life, because he was now living contentedly with Bryce, or if there were other reasons for his silence. She wondered about Jeanne, who in the past could always be counted on to telephone her. What would Jeanne call her now, she wondered: lover, rival, friend?

  She didn't want to telephone Jeanne first, without hearing from Paul. If Jeanne called her, it would be a different matter, but the continuing fact of Jeanne's neglect combined with Paul's had its effect, and Althea couldn't stop her unpleasant, suspicious, nagging, unwelcome thoughts, the thoughts that women have about other women when a man is involved. These thoughts were corrupting to her. They made her memories cruel, they condemned her. They called into doubt the impressions which, combined with her feelings, had allowed her to make love with Jeanne and Paul.

  She had taken Jeanne's devotion for granted, if not Paul's. She wondered if she had misread Jeanne's shyness, her nervous awkwardness. Was Jeanne actually avid and putting on an act? These doubts were a painful wrench around her heart. They came back to accuse her: who, after all, had twisted intentions, if not she?

  It wasn't as if she could accuse her girlfriend of stealing her boyfriend. Paul had never been hers to begin with. Even as he had embraced her on that first, now distant evening, she had suspected that her love would bring her loss. Nonetheless, she had desired it. Although her loss appeared more precipitate than she had thought, the silence more sudden and more final, it didn't alter her conviction of her love. By November her hope seemed increasingly hopeless, yet she still longed to see him.

  It was Jeanne's involvement that Althea regretted. Back in New York, feeling like a penurious drudge, frustrated and depressed, she had considered that Jeanne's silence meant that her friend had become like one of those who pitied her or despised her. At these times, she had felt something close to hatred for Jeanne. Now she realized that her feelings were a sign of her own self-condemnation and an indication of how much between the two women had changed.

  It hurt her to remember that self who had felt immortal in her sex, who had walked out of the sea like a goddess, the morning brilliant around her. She was now utterly lost, Althea thought, just as if she were submerged like those statues of goddesses covered for centuries by ancient seas. She considered that the shame she felt now in retrospect might in fact mask something more awful, which was no less than her terror of her own destruction.

  Silence and separation had brought her pain, anguish, and doubt, but they had spared her from that destruction. Instead, she had been existing in a kind of limbo, and that was awful enough. She felt sober, chastened, and sad as she turned away from her image in the antique mirror and left the Fragonard Room's saccharine splendors behind. Quiet as a ghost, she slipped into the entrance hall just as the audience was being let out of the lecture. She recognized the ramrod-straight back of the British lady ahead of her, as she stood in line to retrieve her coat. Althea melded into the crowd as before, so pleased not to be noticed that she hadn't realized she was smiling, until the guard at the door caught her eye as she was leaving, and smiled back.

  "Did you enjoy the lecture?" he inquired.

  "Very much," she replied politely, and kept walking.

  She caught the crosstown bus on Fifth Avenue, near the Central Park Zoo, and got off across from Lincoln Center. She transferred to a bus that crossed Seventy-second Street and went up Riverside Drive. She sat in a seat by herself, looking out the window. The bus swayed and turned, and the river came into view, as she wondered again about Jeanne.

  At first, she had assumed that Jeanne was the weaker woman. Later, feeling weakened herself, she had mistrusted Jeanne. She was both angry at Jeanne and afraid of her, but she wondered now, where was the real Jeanne behind these feelings? She realized that she had neglected to consider Jeanne's motivations. If she granted Jeanne her independence, she wondered, would she then have to acknowledge her supremacy? Though she wasn't willing to telephone Jeanne yet, it occurred to her that, if she could accept Jeanne's self-sovereignty and all it implied, it might become a way, also, of freeing herself.

  Before she went home, Althea stopped at a deli to buy a turkey sandwich. After she entered her building, she picked up her mail. There was a phone bill, two solicitations from worthy causes, a brochure advertising a sale at an art supply store, and a plain white envelope addressed in a handwriting she didn't recognize. Inside her apartment, she unwrapped her sandwich and took a bite. She opened the envelope. As she pulled out a folded sheet of paper, something small and blue fell from it, which she retrieved. It was a single ticket to a performance at the Joyce Theater on Sunday, November 16. Two days hence. The performers were the Kurt Matthews Dancers. She unfolded the sheet of paper. Written on it were exactly six words, "Hope you can come! Love, Paul" in a hurried script.

  The paper fell out of her hand, covering the blue ticket on the table. Her sandwich remained untouched except for one sculptured bite. She shook the envelope. There was nothing else.

  Was this childish message a parody, a joke? she wondered. And the scrawl, the "Love, Paul"? With Paul, it was always hard to tell if the effect was studied or natural.

  This was what she had been waiting for, for weeks, for months, and had just about resigned herself that she wasn't going to get from Paul—a communication. She moved aside the p
aper and looked at the ticket again. It was for a seat in the twelfth row. Did Paul want to see her, or was he only inviting her to see him? She put her hand over her eyes and started to laugh, but instead she cried. No matter what Paul was asking, even if it was just to be a member of his audience while he danced, there was no doubt in Althea's mind. She would go.

  Chapter 14

  At the River's End Inn with Jeanne, in the depths of the October night, Paul had been roused from a dream to a dream-like reality. He had been making love to Jeanne while he was asleep, and he had not known it.

  His eyes opened, and he knew, this was no dream. In the feeble glow of a night light affixed to a baseboard socket, he realized that she was awake, alert. He could feel her glance on him, level and calm. Her body under his was finely drawn, her stomach slight but rounded. Her fingers felt thin in his, her neck was small in his palm, yet he sensed that she was stronger than she appeared. He lifted her hips to his. Her dark hair lay on the pillow. Never before had she seemed so quietly certain, her very being so lucid. Now there was no turbulence at all, but a deep rhythm, like water flowing in depressions of earth.

  How was he to understand how love might divide like this, or multiply? he wondered. As Jeanne's softness enveloped him, the image of his dream returned to him, like an image from a film in porous black-and-white, the familiar shape of Bryce's face forming from static or from falling snow. In the dream, as he had approached it, the face had threatened to dissolve.

  Just as it had seemed that he would lose it, he had waked and so had kept the impression of Bryce, though the dream was gone. He recognized the image as taken from life, Bryce as he had appeared long ago in the past, at the occasion of their first, delicate, portentous kiss.

  Ignoring Jeanne's entreaties, Paul had kept his dream a secret from her. Nor did he divulge his plans to her when she left to return to New York alone on Sunday afternoon.

  In fact, Paul was going on tour with one of the two companies he regularly danced with. Even back in New York he had not told Jeanne that, since the beginning of October, the Kurt Matthews Dancers had been rehearsing for performances scheduled in cities and towns in southern New England. First they were to appear in Northampton and then in the Boston area. After that, they would have a week's break before dancing in Hartford and New Haven. From there, they would return to New York for a week's engagement at the Joyce Theater.

  However, Paul didn't have to be in Northampton until the technical rehearsal, which was set for Wednesday, October 15. In the meantime, he planned to spend a few days by himself in the Connecticut countryside.

  Although he was a child of the Midwest, he felt a spiritual affinity with New England in the fall. He enjoyed the fact that New England was wilder now than it had been a century ago. He liked the woods that were young enough to feel familiar. He liked the old homes, so beautifully maintained, the village greens, the overgrown hills, and the fields where horses grazed. The crisp tang in the air, despite its sunny warmth, of the coming cold, and the scent of fires, burning leaves or burning wood, were like a tonic to his senses.

  At night the moon was a slender crescent. During the day, the sky was bright blue.

  How lovely it is, he thought, and how quiet, to walk on the old Indian trails. In one of his walks, he came upon a cave. Exploring its mouth, he realized that it was the shaft of an abandoned mine, now hidden in a woods as if it were natural. Nearby, he discovered a steep mound of earth and rock that had been left from the excavation so long ago. On a whim, he decided to climb up it, though the vines that had taken root made the going slippery.

  But he was agile and ascended easily. One side was sheerer than the other. He stood at the top and leaned out over the edge until a thrill passed through his body. He dared himself to lean farther and farther, tempted until he almost lost his balance and had to catch himself. Fantasies of falling entered his thought, irresistibly evoking images of release and terror that fascinated him, even while he dreaded them.

  As he scampered nimbly to the ground, he remembered a scene from a dance class years ago in Minnesota. A girl had fallen, and the teacher, a Russian ballet mistress, had told her, "Do again right away," and the girl had done so, and danced beautifully. "Something about falling," the teacher had said, "when you do next time, you do well."

  Alone in Connecticut in the days that followed, Paul kept company with his shadow, as he listened to crackling leaves underfoot and glimpsed the shiny eyes of wild creatures camouflaged in the brush. On the third and final evening of his stay alone, he witnessed a strange and mesmerizing sunset, as bright a gold at the horizon as those heavens of gold leaf ubiquitous in medieval paintings and illuminated manuscripts. He had never seen such a sky before in reality: above the looming clouds, an unearthly brilliance. Just to witness it was like an ascent.

  He felt ennobled and, at the same time, isolated, singled out—not only as a figure in a landscape, but as a spirit borne up and at one with this gold metallic splendor. He would look back on this moment as the symbolic genesis of his dance, for he perceived with a sudden illumination the role that he wished to create. It was of the wild child, the feral child.

  For years he had been fascinated by the myth, common to cultures all over the world, that tells of the child who, abandoned and exposed to the elements, miraculously survives and grows up in isolation from society. In all its variations the myth poses the same question: is such a child—without language, culture, history, or family—a human being? There are paradoxes: the founders of Rome were two such children as these. Mulling over the stories of wild children that had accumulated in his memory, Paul believed that he could make the myth his material.

  He arranged for a ride to Hartford on Wednesday morning with a couple who were returning there. He didn't think twice about charging his four nights at the River's End Inn on a credit card to be paid out of his joint account with Bryce, even though one of the nights was spent with Jeanne. He wasn't careless about money—he'd managed to survive as a dancer for many years—but he wasn't afraid of spending it either, even when it wasn't all his. He simply signed his name and walked out.

  In Hartford he caught a bus which deposited him in Northampton just after midday. From a payphone he dialed the number of the Smith College office which had been given to him, and was told that the company had gone out for lunch. Kurt had left instructions for him to join them at a health-food restaurant in the center of town. Following the directions, Paul located it easily.

  The door squeaked as he opened it. The interior was spacious and shabby, with walls of dark wood and rough-hewn rafters. The service was set up cafeteria-style near the entrance, the simple menu written in chalk on a blackboard—soups, a salad bar, and sandwiches. Scanning the room, Paul saw the company seated together at a long table in the back, with Kurt presiding at the head, his profile instantly recognizable by the neatly trimmed gray beard and helmet of silver-gray hair. He was wearing his trademark black turtleneck.

  "The prodigal at last!" exclaimed Kurt, waving Paul over, a silver bracelet flashing on his wrist.

  Paul blushed to hear him. "Have I ever let you down?" he asked.

  The other dancers looked up from their lunches, welcoming him. "We were just beginning the countdown." Kurt teased Paul, and then took pity on him. "Get yourself a tray and have a seat."

  Paul dumped his bag on a free chair at the opposite end of the table from Kurt and went back for his food. Carrying a tray loaded with salad, bread, and black bean soup, he joined the company. The other men were Eric Fuller, who was black, from South Carolina, as tall as Paul, with long, slender legs and a whittled waist swelling to a weightlifter's chest, and Hector Prado, short, stocky, and fast on his feet, from New Mexico. Jane Vaughan, willowy, with dark eyes and a severe air, was usually paired with Eric, and Pamela Katz, red-haired, vigorous, and small, was Hector's partner. Jane had grown up in New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge; Pam was from Seattle. Paul's partner was Michiko Kinoshita, a scientist's
daughter from Boston, in appearance as delicate as an ink-and-wash drawing on a Japanese scroll.

  Paul unloaded his tray on the table, its bare, varnished surface carved with the initials of former diners. He felt his sense of solitude evaporating.

  Kurt liked to call his company, "My slice of America." Unlike other artistic directors, he aimed for diversity. He didn't want his dancers to look alike. He took a fatherly attitude towards them, cultivating them, encouraging them, insisting on excellence, and paying them for it as well as he could. "I want to give you room to grow within the company," he often told them. "I want you to feel at home here." In turn, his dancers were devoted to him.

  Michiko moved to make room for Paul. She was shy, and she and Paul rarely spoke. A wordless sympathy had developed between them. Sometimes, when Paul lifted Michiko, he felt as if she were really lifting herself, so light did she seem, and he was only holding her steady.

  Now, as he ate his lunch and listened to the general conversation, he thought of the feeling between him and Michiko when he held her in Lovely Night, a romantic dance with music by Ravel, and of the exuberance when he caught her in a leap in Nostalgic Cloak, scored to a Bach concerto. Of the five pieces they were bringing to the public in this tour, he was in three. It was the third, Alchemy, that he wasn't quite sure of. This new dance, just now being premiered, was stark and rigorous, a dance without partnering, choreographed for four performers to a contemporary jazz score that managed to sound both sophisticated and primal, a blending of alto saxophone, tuba, guitar, cello, bass, and percussion. Paul thought of Alchemy as Kurt's nod to both cubism and Africa. It seemed to him an intellectual dance, and he wondered if this was why it gave him difficulty.

  The grueling technical rehearsal of Alchemy lasted all Wednesday afternoon and into the evening. The dancers marked the piece, walking through it several times under Kurt's painstaking direction. Benny Pensky, the company's lighting designer and technical director, sat behind the dimmer board in the little cubicle up in the balcony, setting the cues. Within his area of expertise, Benny was fastidious, though he always maintained his distance from the dancers, communicating with them through Kurt. While the company had been eating lunch, he had been learning the theater set-up with the resident technicians. Kurt explained the effects he wanted, and Benny made them happen. During this rehearsal, the dancers deliberately held themselves back. They were willing slaves going through the motions again and again until Kurt and Benny had gotten each dance to look the way they wanted.