Isadora

by Amelia Gray

  Elizabeth recalls a memorable performance in London from Isadora, who was always memorable for one reason or another

  Elizabeth remembered with fondness the week she stopped speaking. The silence began as a subtle act against her sister, who herself tended to speak only on the subject of her own successful auditions or long lunches she had with men who might book this venue or that tour. Isadora didn’t even notice the silent protest until the third morning, when she looked up from a long one-sided conversation to find her sister stone-faced over her oatmeal.

  It might not have impressed her sister, but Elizabeth saw an immediate improvement in the attention she gave to the world around her, finding that within the quiet meals and long walks were hidden images and half-considered phrases, things she would have otherwise missed. She found old thoughts rising to the surface: one memory of a group of filthy children staring out a warehouse window at a dead horse, another of a lady gathering her skirts to drop from the Windsor’s seventh floor, and then later, after a long and quiet day, the image of her father, hollowing out half a grapefruit in the doorway, the light around him turning him to shadow, an outline of himself. These pictures came and proved to her that they had always been there. The world she had seen never left her but was etched onto a limitless plane.

  On that third morning of silence Isadora threw down her fork and declared that since Elizabeth was sick enough to lose her voice, she shouldn’t come too near the rest of them lest she infect them with whatever it was she had. Elizabeth responded by crumpling up a page of choreography, then wept and raged with such a rare passion that Isadora got up and left, flouncing down the stairs and slamming the door behind her without another word.

  The argument put them all on edge for the rest of the day. Elizabeth found herself worrying about Isadora: was she truly upset? Had this been some kind of last straw? She might be out there spreading evil gossip to their mutual friends. Perhaps she would leave the country and tour in Russia. Elizabeth spent the day walking up and down the streets until she was lost. Too embarrassed to ask for help, she walked on until she found she was coming up on a concert hall, where, as luck would have it, Isadora was performing that night.

  It was early still, but Elizabeth went in and sat to get out of the weather. Eventually the rest of the audience joined her, and the lights dimmed once and then twice. They were seated and waiting for an hour all told before they heard a stage door opening and slamming, followed by the sound of shoes being kicked off, then bare feet padding softly and then louder, and at last Isadora emerged, thrust into silence by her own halting momentum. She seemed surprised to see everyone, but recovered quickly enough and breathed out, her face and shoulders relaxing almost imperceptibly with every step. In the center of the stage she planted her feet, flung her head back, and stared at a point hovering five feet above the back hall.

  She began with the Tanagra figures. They were simple poses—in one she adjusted her sandal strap, in another she bent to pick a flower—but her confidence and grace in movement transformed them into a kind of living statuary. Elizabeth could hear the audience gasping, transfixed, as her sister’s body and bearing distilled and seemed illuminated in museum light.

  She chose a peasant mazurka next, a minute-long piece meant to evoke an ancient harvest, and moved through it with an elegant lightness, as if each act—of washing, crushing grapes under her feet, then fanning forward to greet the harvest—was being presented in its ideal form. There was something fundamental about her, something at once so beguiling and accessible, so tantalizingly human, which seemed to imply that her audience had this grace within all of them, just under their inarticulate skin. The audience forgot her late arrival, and tossed roses and sentimental items onto the stage.

  It was mastery in restraint, sublimity in action, and only Elizabeth knew from her sister’s slight tremor and sway that she had just come from a ripping drunken spree. During the second half of the mazurka, Elizabeth saw, she caught herself stumbling and just barely recovered, translating the forward lunge into a half curtsy, drawing her hand extemporaneously to a perfumed letter that just happened to have landed at the edge of the stage. She touched the page to the tip of her nose and tucked it into her tunic band. Nobody else could have known that Isadora had gone out and drunk heroically to soothe her sorrow over their argument. But Elizabeth knew, and she took a strange comfort in it. This was as close to an apology as she would ever get.

  At the Pera Palace, Isadora and Raoul languish in bed after a weeklong jag, there being no rest for the wicked and not much for the good

  We have lost the morning, talking of love. I ran my fingers through his hair while he spoke of Sylvio’s beauty and bravery, and he refilled our glasses while I told stories about the children. He had brought just one sad bottle of port from the house, so we were forced to order three cases of champagne and two fine crystal tumblers, a third when Raoul broke one in a fit. A telegram from Eleonora Duse was turned away unopened, the bellhop invited to return once he got his wits about him and lost the silly cap. We have been going on for days! With any luck we’ll go forever.

  Raoul’s head rests on my belly, and mine is nestled in a pile of embroidered pillows that we ordered at some point to make the whole thing feel more like a harem. The only thing missing is satisfying sexual congress, though we certainly tried. Raoul goes on and on about Sylvio.

  “The perfect face!” he says. “A miraculous face. A wrinkle between his eyes makes him look like a puppy focusing on a blade of grass. Oh God, he hated when I said it. I would laugh and laugh.”

  The headboard from my position half hanging off the bed resembles the trellis of a hanging garden. “Plato says there would be no philosophy at all if Athens had not known such beautiful youths.”

  “He nearly left me right there in the restaurant. For laughing! Nothing worse. But he was always so severe. I would have followed him anywhere!”

  “No philosophy at all, can you imagine?”

  “After dessert he was scolding me, demanding to be taken more seriously, but I just kept laughing. My God. I tried putting my face into my wineglass to mask the sound, but it only amplified it, you see! It only—here, I’ll show you—it made everything worse. He turned a bowl of ice cream onto my lap. Oh, it was worth it.”

  An entire lineage of Athenian youth, eyes aflame with that most dangerous brand of aimless vigor. “You know, I’d like to visit the cliffs of Manisa. Have you ever been to Manisa, by the sea? Eurydice threw herself from the stone. I mean Niobe. I’m only curious to see.”

  “One afternoon Sylvio and I were having a picnic by the strait. He stripped down to his shorts and swam for so long I lost sight of him. I finished our lunch and fell asleep waiting and he still hadn’t returned when I woke again. By the time he found his way back to shore, I was practicing his eulogy. Such a romantic end! The very spirit of the earth poured into no nobler frame! You can imagine my relief and annoyance both when he arrived asking for a towel.” He reaches to stroke my cheek and finds my stomach instead, amiably drawing his fingers across it. We removed our clothes hours ago, after a discussion about the physical ideal. Penelope left for tea with her aunt and is now almost certainly downstairs staring at a wall.

  “My cousin is pregnant,” I say. “My brother’s sister. My brother’s wife. With a child, you know.”

  “When we traveled together to see Sylvio’s sister, she was pregnant. We had a suite with a door that we unlocked at night. Can you imagine the tantalizing dimensions of that door?” He was crying again. “I tried to write about that weekend again and again, but it was never right, I burned it all.”

  He goes on some more about carrying the ashes of the poems to scatter in a garden and how that garden grew the most beautiful flowers, which would die if they were admired for too long. I think of the children in the wooden box. “My attention was a killing force,” he moans, the words echoing into his glass.

  “You know, I’ve long thought that anyone could alter the co
urse of another person’s entire life with only their thoughts. But you either have to be very powerful or you need your thinking to match that of a thousand others, a kind of amplification of sentiment.”

  “Surely not.”

  “But think of my premieres, my tours, every small success documented. Once I started being written up in the papers, I handed the literate population of the world the power to destroy my life.”

  He sputters incidentally—wine being difficult to drink from a supine position—and sits up, setting his glass to the side and wiping his mouth. “Ah, well then,” he says. Standing, he holds the quilt to steady himself. “We should find something to eat.”

  “It’s very simple. I’m saying that people I’ve never met or known may have injured me with their thoughts and affected my life as a punishment meted from a place of their own jealous desire.”

  “Can they bring us some bread? All I want is bread and a little butter. The butter they’ll bring you here, if you haven’t tried it yet, is a little sweet. People find it sweet. They’ll bring you clotted cream if you ask.” He drapes the quilt around his shoulders. “I’m a scholar of continental terms,” he declares.

  This morning he anointed me with the children’s ashes while I lay in the bath. He offered to dump the remainder into the water, but I couldn’t stand the thought, and from a practical standpoint, the larger bits might clog the pipes.

  “Penelope consulted the oracle your mother suggested. She was told that she wishes for a little lamb, but her wish will not come to pass, and that in an elevated place, her life will end after a final meditation.”

  He stops his preening at the mirror. “The oracle said all that?”

  “Come back to bed and let’s never leave.”

  “Tell me what she said.”

  “I already did. But you don’t really believe in all that, do you?”

  “An oracle once told me I would find everything I wanted and then lose it, and now look what’s happened,” he says, taking a long drink from a teacup on the windowsill. “They’re very accurate in this region—have you been ashing in this?”

  “She only made the appointment to learn her future child’s disposition. Now I think she’s very bothered.”

  “Mother has good taste in oracles. She relies on them because most of our family is in the other world. You’re right, we really should let her know that I’m safe; she’s probably spending all her money on them as we speak.”

  “Will you be very reasonable and come back to bed?”

  “Let’s see the oracle,” he calls out from the other room. “Maybe she will say something for us. What if she can commune with the dead?”

  I find that if I squint deeply into the shadows of the room, they are there, holding hands.

  “There’s no harm in it,” he says.

  “Come back to bed, you’re making me beg.”

  He finally acquiesces and crawls across the covers, kissing my cheek and weeping again. Raoul has more than enough tears for both of us. I have a deep love for him, a protective feeling. “Let’s have the oracle in,” he says.

  “Fine. She can speak to us generally and we can draw much from her malformed claims.”

  He cheers immediately, wiping his eyes on my hair. “Good then, it’s settled.”

  “Nothing is ever settled, my dear.” Reaching to ring the bell, I start thinking about the order for lunch, but before I can ask his preference for meat or fish, he’s already asleep.

  Max fantasizes about his movement but swiftly finds he cannot do it alone

  His lecture on termites had gone very well. The girls had made grand gestures of their boredom and rolled their eyes while he spoke, but the whole thing had been written to serve them in the world and he knew that, someday, they would wish they had paid attention. As adults they would see their every effort crushed by the whims of circumstance, and they would try to recall his conclusion—that patient mollification was effective against any barrier—but come up empty. They would flail and fail in short order, and years later he would read their obituaries listing them by their husband’s name and naming their children as well, one by one, with no hint as to any larger purpose to their little lives. Max knew with the certainty of his own strong heart that he would outlive each one of these girls, and some of their girls as well, and that some years in the future he would open the newspaper on a park bench and read the stories of their lives in past tense—more accurately, the stories of the lives they supported, the triumph of the living on the work of the dead—and he would remember with satisfaction how they had made such cruel fun of his speech about termites.

  Elizabeth at the very least should have been galvanized by his lecture. He was expecting more than her usual cold kiss on the cheek after he descended from the stage, a murmur that she would be in her room. The distance between them was growing, and though Max believed it was best not to force issues of the heart, he found himself made nervous by it. Trella brought her afternoon class to the lecture and gave him a small wave as she walked them out of the auditorium, and this slight attention thrilled him to the point of distraction through his usual post-lecture ritual of standing in the street behind the school and delivering a few feints and jabs to the late-morning air.

  He was working on a new theory in his spare moments, during the lunch hour and his free afternoons. It first occurred to him in conversation with a man of science, who impressed on him the idea that the truths of the world were made true only by observation and that supposed theories beyond that were only a mix of conjecture and superstition. This started Max thinking about ideas he had taken as fact, realizing that everything was riddled with assumptive constructs.

  Death, for example. Max knew something of death—his mother and father had passed away, and a classmate in an accident on holiday, also once a neighbor’s dog—but despite these observed events and the easy extrapolation possible, there was no definite proof that he, himself, would die. He began to fantasize about an eternal life, the first years of which would be spent attending the funerals of everyone he ever knew and then adapting to the comforts which awaited him in the future. His own persistent heartbeat would be his only companion, carrying him into a new age, where he could see his ideas manifested at last. Real change required time above all else, and it wouldn’t do at all to have a bus accident or a pandemic spoil his patient plans.

  He knew that Germany had the ability to rise and distinguish herself. She had the science and the talent and was building up the strength and reserve. The nation was shifting, he could feel it. Soon enough, there would be a World’s Fair on every corner, a cultural revolution every other weekend.

  And what’s more, he reasoned, the women would lead them. While the men were tasked with putting body and mind toward pursuing the empire abroad—peaceful missions, to be sure—it would be the women inventing the future in bedtime stories of worlds built to shelter their children and support their every effort, tales designed to inspire a sense of nationalist bravery, to pluck the little vanguards from their cribs and introduce them to power.

  He knew he was in the right place to make it happen. Before he even saw the worn copy of Zarathustra that Isadora carried around—the binding split as if she slept with it splayed open under her pillow, just as he did with his old copybook—he made the educated induction that she would have a similar idea of the future. It was strange that they had never had a proper conversation, given the position they no doubt shared. He had met her briefly in Vienna, with Elizabeth after a performance, but he was only a child then and eager to agree with everything she said. He never had a real opportunity to share his ideas with her, but perhaps that was for the best. When the time was right, he would get his chance.

  Still, Max couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed in himself for failing to take the famous dancer to bed. He had been looking forward to working alongside her, and truth be told, spent many happy nights planning their love affair. They had such similar notions and would flatter
each other. He had a particularly satisfying fantasy of holding her after a successful lovemaking session and speaking of his concept of the bodily ideal, and maintained this fantasy while pursuing Elizabeth, who would surely understand if there needed to be a change of plans.

  The last time Isadora visited Darmstadt would have been a good time, but he put it off again. She had just returned from tour and was distracted during their afternoon chat over his tea collection, staring at the wall as he worked to illustrate the irony of improving the individual through group training. She reached for a third cookie as he laid out his plan to remove nine or ten girls from the core programs to favor the most promising few. He had just begun to wonder at the use of appealing to the pedagogical logic of a woman trained by her mother, and had in fact begun to entertain the idea of traveling to Moscow to entreat Fokine at the Ballets Russes, when she heaved an intensely expressive shrug, the motion beginning at the collarbone and rolling through her shoulders and arms before it reached her hands, where she waved it off with such a conclusive bodily effort that he expected the thought to condense and drop to the floor at her feet. She told him to handle it, and when he asked her to clarify, she rolled her head in a slow circle and told him to find the most promising girls and make an experiment of it.

  And so he chose his six: Anna, Therese, Irma, Lisa, Margot, and Erica, all of them perfect in their proportion, gazing at the world with such a fearless variety of innocence that he found himself resisting the urge to fall to his knees before them and repent—though for what, he couldn’t figure. They were between four and seven years old at the time, their fathers largely ill or absent, and Max found himself spiritually moving into the role, arbitrating their little fights and dispensing advice. There were no other men among the instructors, which gave him an automatic ethos he enjoyed immensely. They all spent long evenings working over sacred arias, and then he watched over them with some satisfaction while they braided each other’s hair.