by Sigrid Nunez
Ballerina: beautiful, passive, mute. Doomed. The most poetical subject in the world, said Poe, is the death of a beautiful woman. He would have loved Serenade. Balletomanes use the word goddess—but what creature is more closely linked with powerlessness and mortality? Slave girl is more like it. (There was a time when the line between dancer and concubine was a thin one. The odalisques of art history were often ballerinas.) If the demands made on her body are outrageous, even sadistic, know that she wants it. For she is a woman who craves discipline and a master. (Said the sultan-choreographer of his favorite: “No matter what I asked her to do, she never said no.”) You can do whatever you like to her. Tie her in knots, cut out her tongue, starve her, break her feet, her heart. Of course her life is short. Her great enemy is the enemy of all beauty: time. That tall blond girl I used to imitate in class and who had gone on to become a star: I had followed her career and knew her history of injuries and other troubles. She was forced to retire at thirty-four. I would still give years of my life to have stood on her points.
Nineteen seventy-one. Marching down Broadway. Stop the War. All along the route people come to their windows to watch. I look up and see at one large window a bouquet of pretty, small round heads: We had interrupted a class. The girls’ faces are curious, mystified. All at once they vanish—pouf! Madame, no doubt, calling them back to the barre. The envy I felt then—and it was serious envy—was not just because they were dancing and I was not. What I envied more was that they didn’t have to concern themselves with the war. They had achieved that great goal of mine: the escape from real life. There was only one thing they had to think about. (When I first heard that there existed a book called Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, I thought it had to be about this: singleness of mind, of passion, of purpose; one love, one reason for being.) I have admired but never envied people who are good at many things. I have always wanted to do only one thing well.
As a dancer, for a brief time it was possible for me to believe that the world was a simple place, bare and clear as geometry. Balance, symmetry, motion, shape. Purity of heart. Will. Work as hard as you can. Make it beautiful.
But why don’t men go on point?
And why does the woman in Serenade have to die?
I knew a musician who went to medical school. In training, during surgery rotation, assisting through long operations, he would play the music he loved best over and over in his head—entire symphonies and concertos beginning to end: his invisible Walkman, he called it. I still have trouble concentrating on any work for a long time without going off and doing variations in my head.
Six-thirty on a winter evening, and I am on my way home from class. A very good class, it must have been—a class in which I must have been praised, or in which I finally got some step I thought I would never get. I peel off my wet tights, fold them into a towel, and stuff them into my dance bag. My hair I leave up, soaking wet as it is. My body is still warm and a little trembly from the bigjump combination. Out into the cold. During class, it had begun to snow. A sheet of white flannel on the ground, muffling footsteps, muffling traffic. I walk to the subway, delighting in the snow kisses that cool my flushed cheeks. Every pore of my skin has been sweated open, every cell tingles, I am aglow. A crowd has gathered outside Carnegie Hall. Two men coming from the other direction stop talking to each other and stare after me as I pass. A moment of complete magic; a sudden sense of weightlessness, of the world pulling back; the conviction that some great and wonderful thing was coming toward me. It was all I could do not to stretch out my hands.
Whatever that great and wonderful thing was, it didn’t come. But the memory of that radiant moment stayed with me, melted into my skin with the snow—and returned with full force some years later, on another gentle snowy night.
End of the semester. It is very late and I am alone in my room. A narrow desk by the window, overlooking the courtyard that is slowly filling up with snow. Books open on the desk, bright lamp, cigarettes, a boyfriend’s photograph. I will sit there all through the night, I will smoke all the cigarettes, and in the morning I will cross the courtyard to answer questions about literature and the tragic sense of life. The sound of a pen scratching in the night is a holy sound. I want to get down something T. S. Eliot said: Human beings are capable of passions that human experience can never live up to.
PART FOUR
IMMIGRANT LOVE
It seems to me that the room was full of smoke, or smoky light. Or maybe it’s the curtains I am remembering. It was summer—that I know. The windows were open, and there were thin curtains—pale but not very clean—slowly shifting in front of the windows, like smoke. Late afternoon of a very warm day. A house somewhere in a neighborhood I didn’t know, a house I was driven to and would not have been able to find my way back to. Damp and dark as a cellar when we entered. Who lives here? I do not know. A poor home, shabby, but not wretched. The bed I slipped into moments ago was unmade. My clothes lie on a chair. (For some reason it was important to me to take them off by myself) There is a big tree outside the window and it is full of birds, singing my disgrace, a song these birds will teach to their young and to other birds, around the world, so that now no matter where I am, in other rooms, in other beds, I sometimes wake to hear them, singing my disgrace.
The man is in the bathroom. I hear the sound of water running, a throat being cleared.
A breeze. Moving curtains. Birds.
He comes into the room and sees me lying in the bed. He unbuttons his shirt as he crosses the floor. His chest is white but his face and hands are brown. Blue eyes. Teeth. Big teeth, one eyetooth pointing out a little: sharp. Carnivore. Gold chain. Tattoo. Strong. He bends over me smiling, he opens his mouth wide, he covers my mouth with his mouth, my whole mouth. Is he going to swallow me?
Wild heart. Birds.
When he pulls back he is no longer smiling. He is looking the way he looked earlier, in the car, when he was driving us here and thought he had made a wrong turn. As he draws the sheet away from my body, I fight the impulse to curl up.
He says, “You’re just a kid, aren’t you?”
Sometimes, when you look back at your younger self, you feel as if you are looking not at yourself, but at another person, and that other person still exists somewhere. For many months now I have been living with the image of this girl, thinking about her, not as if she had grown up and become who I am now myself, but as if she were still to be found, just as she was, in that very bed, in that house that she could not have found her way back to.
If I could find my way to that house, I would ask her many questions: What is she doing there? Why did she go with this man? What was she looking for? Mostly I want to know how she of all people—she who is afraid of everything—is not afraid to do this.
An afternoon in June many years later. A brightly lit office in midtown Manhattan. Interview. How long have you been teaching English? What foreign languages do you know? What foreign countries have you visited? Have you ever lived abroad? Do you think you would become homesick, living abroad for two whole years?
The interviewer, a young- and earnest-looking man in his forties, watches my face carefully. The face I choose to show him is young, earnest, a little wonderstruck, unknowing. It is the face he wants to see, the face that will get me this job.
There is an application to fill out. Please use black or blue ink and write clearly. I am shown into another room where other interviewees are sitting at a long table, writing clearly in black or blue ink. A map of the world on the wall. All the same questions I just answered, now asked for in writing. I wish it were permitted to smoke.
On the way home from the interview, I stop and buy some peonies. Later that day I look up from my book and I feel a pang. For they have overbloomed, as peonies do. They have turned themselves practically inside out. All it means is a sooner death for them. There seems to me something almost generous about this. Straining beauty. The phrase sticks in my head.
The girl is lying in bed
with the man. The man is fast asleep. The girl is not asleep. She is wide awake, she could not be more wide awake, in her whole life she has never been so awake. This is no time to ask her questions. She has to get up, she has to get dressed, she has to get out of there.
Birds. Smoke.
Don’t make me say how old I was.
Many times the girl has been told: If a man looks at you, do not look back. Just ignore him. Pretend he’s not there.
Her father does not look at her. Her father does not know one daughter from another. But the world is full of fathers, and she can’t be invisible to all of them. She cannot remember a time when the temptation did not exist for her. She was forever looking back. Her eyes grew huge with looking back.
As in all things, the girl’s mother plays a prominent part. Set on distinguishing her child from the “icky little brats” of the projects, she dresses the girl like a dream of a little girl: white tights, short flared skirts with wide starched sashes. Even later, because the mother is the family dressmaker, the girl has little to say about what she wears. Much of what the mother chooses for her is attention-getting, revealing. The daughter quails. “I can’t wear that to school!” The mother pooh-poohs her. (“When you are young, you can get away with anything.”) Only much later does it occur to the girl to wonder whether her mother would have taken the same risks herself.
Do everything you can to get men to look at you, and when they do, pretend they don’t exist. Because only a slut looks back. Is that perfectly clear? Early lesson on the female condition.
Very young, still a child, the girl discovers that she is drawn to men in a way that other children are not. Whatever else there might be in their attention to her, there is also kindness—she is sure she is not mistaken in this. “I wish you were my little girl.” Reasonable, innocent desire. She is aware of delighting in her ability to make men smile. In general, she prefers the company of adults (women too, but especially men) to that of children. Adults are more appreciative, they are better listeners, and she has so much to say. Men like to touch, to take you on their knees and stroke you as if you were a kitten. She has watched kittens. Roll onto your back, turn up your stomach, tilt your head. As her eyes grew huge, now her face grows more triangular. She knows that there is something off, something unmentionable, that she cannot fathom. Over the whole picture, a wash of sadness. Again, it will occur to her only later: A lot of the men who paid so much attention to her were losers. But from those early days she takes the notion of a masculine love that was kind, furtive, melancholy. Hopeless.
Compared with her father other men are usually bigger, hairier. The neighborhood men are tough, hotheads ever ready with their fists. Some have done time. Often the smell of whiskey on them. Deep rough voices when they speak softly, large rough hands when they caress—this gets to the quick of her. A certain kind of story has a hold on her imagination during this time—the kind of story in which a child is befriended by a wild beast. A movie about a little girl and a lion. The lion is gentle only with the child; no grown-up can get anywhere near him. Another movie, seen many times on television and much loved, about a girl and a gorilla named Joe, supernaturally big and strong. Monstrous when riled, capable of immense destruction, but again, ever gentle with the girl. At the climax of the movie, he rescues children from a burning orphanage. “Joe! Joe! Help, Joe!”
(This is how it was born, I think. This is the root of that dream: He will be loving and tender. He will be strong, fierce, and brute enough to protect me from the world.)
The wish to please, to charm—the desire to provoke desire—runs deep in me and seems to have been there from the beginning. Where I learned how to flirt is a mystery to me. Certainly not from my mother, and not from my sisters, who do not share this trait with me. It was there from the beginning: more a compulsion than a trait. And the conviction—or fantasy—that I could please men, that I knew what men wanted, was always there too.
If a girl is too easy, men will not want her. I was grateful to learn early that this was a lie. But it is hard for a girl, always having to live with the threat of slut over her head. And cocktease. It was flung at me but it wasn’t really true. I almost never withheld.
I do not think it can be possible that I never dreamed of marriage. But if I did, that dream died early and left no trace. What stayed with me was a horror of marriage, and I don’t owe this to my parents alone. I saw no happy marriages when I was growing up—at least, not outside of television. (Once, when I complained to my mother about our family life, she shook her head and said, “You’ve been watching too much television.”) The peaceless households of the projects. Wives and husbands forever at each other’s throats, and children overwhelmed. Maybe they could fool themselves but they couldn’t fool the kids: Mom and Dad wanted to kill each other. I still get anxious when I am around couples. Almost always that tension, the little digs and huffs. A woman who survives being pushed onto the subway tracks by a man from behind says, “The first thing that flashed through my mind was that it was my husband. We’d had a fight that morning.”
In high school, a young woman named Miss Perce taught our all-girls’ hygiene class. When she showed off her engagement ring, one of the girls asked her how it felt to be getting married. Miss Perce said, “Everything will be different now, and I know I’ll have to change. I mean, I won’t ever spend five dollars on a lipstick again.” Maybe she said more. In fact, she must have said more. But all I remember is that bit about the lipstick and what an odd and disheartening remark it seemed. Twenty-four of the twenty-five girls in that class, I’d bet my ring finger, went on to marry. I often remember Miss Perce when I am buying a lipstick. A good one costs about twenty dollars now.
A big, cheerful family round a well-laid table. A roomy, well-kept house. A dog. A yard. Again, this dream must have been mine too, once upon a time, but it was soon replaced.
A single room. A chair, a table, a bed. Windows on a garden. Music. Books. A cat to teach me how to be alone with dignity. A room where men might come and go but never stay. I began dreaming of this room when I was still in my teens. I saw it waiting for me at the end of a long wavering corridor.
It is not just the heart that has its reasons. Surely in some language of the world there exists a word that means “for reasons of the body.” The body: Nothing makes you more aware of it—of its beauty and of its ideal ability to express feeling—than dance. And nothing ennobles the body like ballet. Ballet is all about opening up (turnout: the opening of the crotch and thighs), and the great ballerina roles are full of dancing that is about the opening up, not just of the body, but of the entire being, to love. Go to the ballet, watch Giselle, watch Odette and Juliet and Aurora, and see. The wish to be all body, the dream of a language of movement, pure in a way that speech (“the foe of mystery”—Mann) can never be pure—I would not have been the same lover if I had not danced. And it has been a real ambition of mine, thwarting other ambitions, coming between me and all other goals: to be a woman in love. In love lies the possibility not only of fulfillment but of adventure and risk, and for once I was not afraid—either to suffer or to make suffer. In more than one language the words for love and suffering are the same, and I have flung myself from cliffs, I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin.
But what will you do when you are old? A woman starts hearing this when she is nowhere near old. In the wink of an eye you go from slut to spinster. But was it so terrible to be an old maid? I saw myself traveling in foreign cities. Bright sun, ancient stones, the endless noon of the streets and the eternal dusk of the churches. Straw hat, sandals, a white blouse, and a skirt flaring gracefully below the knee. Dinner alone: bread, cheese, fruit. Long train rides, rocking, dreaming. No one knows me. The unfamiliar peace of a hotel room. The narrow bed with its iron bedstead. Faded wallpaper, original paintings touching in their crudeness. No one knows you, you can make yourself up anew every day. This evening you have written two letters and finished the guidebook. You t
ake a long bath, and when the stranger comes, you make love on the narrow bed, no English, speak with the body. And afterward the bed is too small, good night, my dear, never forget, goodbye, goodbye.
Are there really women like this or only women who write stories about women like this?
Someone has said: To be a woman is always to be hiding something.
A woman, a wife, a mother, sits in a café with me and talks about the man she calls the love of her life. Out of her life now, this love, as he must be, for he was wrong for her in all ways but one. When she left him for good she took one of his shirts, she wanted to have something with his smell in it. It was his smell, she says, that drove her beyond reason, drove her to risk everything that was most important to her. “I keep it in a plastic bag in the bottom drawer of my dresser, and from time to time when I cannot resist I take it out and I bury my face in it.”
During the time that I want to tell about now, I had a job teaching English to immigrants. (Broken English: Sometimes I think it is my fate.) Immigrants. Refugees. (“You look like a refugee,” my mother used to say, whenever I was not dressed to her liking.)
The students came from all over the world, and it was another teacher who once observed that, in most of their cultures, women who lived as we mostly young and single teachers did would be considered whores. Administrative warnings about provocative clothing and friendly behavior that might be misinterpreted by some of the men.